I also think its understandable that people want to know why…well, kind of…I’m actually not totally sure why so many people who hadn’t thought twice about Young since his Jett Jackson Disney Channel days seemed so angry and frustrated that they didn’t know why he committed suicide. This is not a position that I wholly agree with given that I know so many broke, unemployed and uneducated men and women who are absolutely beautiful. The better looking you are, the more opportunities, favors and courtesies you are seemingly afforded. Wait, why is the fact that he was attractive matter? Well there’s clearly a perception of privilege in this country when it comes to good looking people. Gays kill themselves every day, right? It all makes sense now. Yes, that totally explains it, right? I mean, why else would a young, masculine, attractive, successful celebrity with so much future potential choose to end his own life? What could be so unbearable that would make this black man say there was no other way out? Homosexuality. No, what bothered me was the insinuation that the ONLY reason Young would have committed suicide was because he was gay. That would imply that I thought there was something “wrong” with the mere idea. What rubbed me the wrong way was not that people were falsely labeling Young of being gay. This is me whenever I see MediaTakeOut or Bossip spreading more thin rumors and details about yet another black man’s private sexuality: Besides being an attractive private person, Lee Thompson Young gave no reason for us to think that he killed himself because he was gay. Was the pressure of this “we’re gonna Out you” environment too much for Young, leading him to committing suicide? The problem with this is to even speculate is to fall in to the same trap that that is in: Disregarding facts for rumor. I would argue that is just as bad as The Rolling Stone, Uganda’s infamous newspaper that Outs African men: listing their photos, names and addresses. We live in a gay witch-hunt society full of TMZ and black gossip sites full of women and gay men working hard to Out celebrity after celebrity. Even in death he has to face gay rumors and gay whispers. This is the current state of the Black American man. Having said that, the other sites on the list were FULL of speculation. But the mere fact that we were a gay/bisexual themed website dropped us into the Google search results. The only other time we had mentioned Young was when we named him the second most talented and attractive actor of color to make the transition from child star to adult performer. Mind you, we have never even slightly speculated this notion in these pages in the past. In the hours after the news of actor Lee Thompson Young’s suicide, Cypher Avenue received a slight bump in site visits based off of one Google search string: Was Lee Thompson Young Gay?
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