10
votes
Gay man who protested against Drag Queen Story Time dies by suicide
Wilson Gavin was the President of the University of Queensland’s Liberal National Club. He was also gay.
Earlier this week, he led a protest against a Drag Queen Story Time event.
The following day, he was found dead at a local railway station, having committed suicide.
He has formerly campaigned against same-sex marriage.
His family have released a statement.
The statement released by his family seems to shed more light on the situation.
While the specific details of what happened that caused him to become suicidal are still unclear, my reading of this is that the Liberal National Club used the fact that he was gay as a token cover for their anti-LGBT actions, then cast him aside when the drag queen storytime confrontation became a major news story and he turned into a liability for them. Unfortunately, tragedies like this reflect the truth that many conservatives' tolerance of gay people is a political tool rather than a principle of human worth.
It happened too quickly for that to be the cause. One day, he's protesting at a library; the next morning, he's dead. In between, he got a lot of flak on social media. I think that's more likely to have pushed him over the edge.
I agree that the social media backlash clearly played a major role, but it's also very likely that the club didn't provide any kind of support for him when it happened, or maybe even blamed him for it snowballing into a major issue. The family's statement points heavily to the club being at fault in some way.
The two are likely related, yeah. The speed at which it happened kind of also makes it hard for me the social media backlash as the primary cause. A tipping point, sure I could believe that, though with the caveat that I don't know and there might have been other, more private factors contributing as well.