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Wednesday, Oct 08, 2008
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Not Thinking Straight by Madelyn Arnold |
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| Fact checking | ||
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by Madelyn Arnold -
SGN Contributing Writer It's a little peculiar writing for the Seattle Gay News -for the Gay community of the world's biggest small town. For one thing, I almost never get feedback on what I write. And, then, suddenly I will, such as someone starts screaming at me in the supermarket. Occasionally, a voice - with or without identifying itself - calls me up to tell me... oh, various things. I get very nice letters sometimes. But, my favorite reaction came several months after a column I wrote on suicide.... Fun With Death and Dying There were statistics, perfectly grim ones, although written about modern Gay life. I quote myself: "Questioning a number of 'self-identified' Gay males, the American Journal of Public Health [2000] found that one in five had attempted suicide.... later studies correlate well with this and with each other. A Minnesota study ... 28 percent [;] a Massachusetts survey ... 27.5 percent. A 1998 study of male teens ... Gay/bi kids have suicidal ideation at three times the rate of straight kids. "Only one study included girls or women, but ... women in general attempt suicide at many times the rate of men, although men succeed more often .... apparently, Lesbian/bi women are also more likely [to suicide] than... straight[s]." Fun Without Laughter Citing an individual case: .... I was reminded of... back when a woman freshly [returned to] Seattle ... was living in a car by the Ship Canal [who] .... the Thursday before Labor Day ... had had an interview for a teaching position [and was] hired.... She had shaken all appropriate hands, and in fact was genuinely grateful. The salary would certainly beat what she had been earning, but at the moment she couldn't afford a place to live, or appropriate clothing for college teaching. And friends weren't very friendly. [She] had been traveling cross country trying for jobs doing almost anything almost anywhere her old Dodge chose to die, which it did often. In Omaha, she'd been relieved of $1000.... which wasn't her only debacle. She had discovered that Whitefish, South Dakota, was host every year to a biker convention [and had had no] trouble at all attracting attention from unpleasant men [, which ...] had been bad. But now she was in for at least a year; but unfortunately she wouldn't be paid until the end of a full month of work, which didn't start until the next month. That is, during the interim coming up with clothes, laundry and dry-cleaning, food, dog food, paper and supplies while living in her car, since she had no money - was a problem. So she sliced the veins in her arms from the wrist to the inner aspect of the elbow, and across her throat, interfering with her voice. It was amazing how painful it was to cut the throat, but [it made her very] happy. Psychologists say one thing to watch out for in preventing suicide is sudden happiness -- relief -- in a person who has been depressed. And she was happy enough to be downright giddy.... it was finally time to stop struggling so hard. She had decided to slip into the black oily water [of the Ship Canal] but it was hard to keep her footing in all the blood. And suddenly there were five or six policeman [who] ... grabbed her, pinn[ing her]... wrists, knees and ankles. Laughing uproariously in the ambulance, still pinning her.... Laughter Without Fun At Harborview, she was strapped down, and a young student was told to sew her up, and not too gently; but he was callow, if not kind: he made to give her a nerve block for the stitches. His boss saw this and screamed -- "don't waste that on that bitch!" But the block had already taken. The Boss heard her thank the student for his care, and simply flipped; thrusting his face at her and screeching: "you want to die? I'll tell you how to die. Go jump off the Aurora Bridge. Tie one end of a rope around your neck and the other to the bridge and jump. Your head will split off your neck and you can't fuck that up!" His name was something like Compass. "Gee, you're cute when you're angry," she said. He screamed like a woman. It was the Thursday before Labor Day, which meant that the customary post-suicide Commitment would last at least four days. Friends who had not let her stay with them came to tell her how much they hated her. (The less concerned just called and left a message.) This was about "not enabling" her to something. Maybe succeed. The psychiatric lockup had many patients and few workers, so the workers locked themselves in the nurse's station with the TV. Dangerous patients preyed on all the others. When court convened, Joanne's court-appointed lawyer told her what to say, so the judge let her go. I Ended The Column: "Well, living in a car by the Ship Canal didn't bind me very close to The Community...." In other words, at the end, I acknowledged that I was the woman who had cut her throat. After a few months, I had shoved that March '05 column to the back of my mind, and was at first mystified to get a phone call about "that unfair column-" a call tending me to think the fuss was about something recent. It took five minutes or more to figure out just what the caller meant. {It had not been fair, and certainly not good journalism, to take that woman's word for what had happened and the WAY it had happened.} Had she read the whole article? {That was beside the point. She had not found any similar incident -} So, she had not read the entire article. The column made clear that this had happened in the past. Twenty years, actually. {A moment's silence... Then: it was unfair, and poor journalism, to take that woman's word without asking for Harborview's side of things. Certainly no one at HMC could be so unprofessional as to -- } I didn't have to check this woman's facts. I WAS the woman. You didn't read it all the way through. And that column appeared several months ago. How come you're just calling about it? {Hem, haw, um. Something about the thing just being handed to her - } Then I asked something less fair: what was the article about? {Well that was beside the point.} No, that was the point. Did you read any of the article? {Well, not really....} The subject was suicide. Not just my suicide, but how a suicide once was handled. That Queers commit suicide a lot. Journalism one: vanity nothing. Or maybe not. |
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