Seth and The Emotional Roller Coaster Of Life

In case it hasn't been clear, I am a huge supporter of the LGBT community, but when I started this story and - at the last possible minute - decided to change Seth's character from a creepy stalker to an innocent teen who is gay, I knew where I was taking his character.

In the year 2011 (the year I set this story in) there was a lot of dispute over the rights of gays. I can remember my own father in 2010 talking with our family priest about how he thought all gays and lesbians should be locked up in Guantanamo and the key thrown away, and the priest laughing about it in response. To put this into an even sicker context, this was after my little brother came out as being gay.

In 2015, the United States legalized same-sex marriage, but it by no means means that such prejudism is over. As most people remember, the Pulse Orlando Nighclub (an LGBT nightclub) shooting occurred in 2016 and cost 49 people their lives on top of injuring another 53.

A sad reality is that, while I hope in the years and decades to come, it'll be significantly different than it still is, there is a huge hatred toward being anything other than plain vanilla heterosexual. And that hatred is often times passed from parent to child with no thought whatsoever of the consequences behind spewing such hate.

I wasn't able to find a current statistic on the suicide rate for gays and lesbians, but I did find a statistic that suggests almost 40% of all transgender eventually kill themselves. That's a flooring statistic, and not in a good way. I also remember as a young teen reading an article in a major magazine, possibly times, though it could have been another one, which showed a statistic of one in every five homosexuals who are teens or young adults to commit suicide. That would have been in the late nineties or the very early two thousands.

Unfortunately, I suspect that statistic isn't much less now. As a child, if you're raised to believe that loving someone other than the opposite sex is wrong because that's what the bible says or the Quran says or because that's what your parents have told you it can cause major depression. And often times that depression, fear, and self-disgust will go untreated.

More often than not, the end result can and will be death, suicide specifically. Personally I have lost two cousins and a very close friend who were all LGBT.

With Seth, I tried to casually show that depression without actually spelling it out. The truth of the matter is that he was one push away from the very beginning of the story. He did make a cry for help to his sister, but I'm sure he know what the response would be. The sad thing is that more often than not there is no one to hear such a plea.