Tag: suicide

The U.S. bank Capital One was recently hacked, exposing personal information from over 100 million credit applications. And the alleged person behind the hack is a 33-year-old trans woman and software engineer named Paige A. Thompson. Thompson was charged in federal court on Monday with a single count of computer fraud and abuse. If convicted, she’ll face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. According to The New York Post, a ‘firewall misconfiguration’ in Capital One’s cloud computing...

The figures were also condemned by the commission’s gender and sexuality commissioner, Ro Allen. They were speaking to an inquiry on the matter. ‘We have very, very bad data collection around this,” Ro said. “I remember going to funerals of young LGBTI people and families didn’t know they were queer; it certainly wasn’t recorded.” Speaking about possible causes, Ro added: “The constant living with the fear of being discriminated against — I mean, my own personal experience of physical harm and...

The historic and successful Apollo 11 mission could have gone very differently. As the world remembers mankind's first steps on the moon on the 50th anniversary of the mission, the incredulity of it is hard to overlook as it could have ended in disaster. US President Richard Nixon's speechwriter William Safire had prepared a speech in the event that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never made it back from the moon. The speech that Nixon thankfully never had to give was...

The Los Angeles LGBT Center participated in a roundtable discussion hosted by U.S. Congressman Ted W. Lieu (D-Los Angeles County), who is introducing legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives to federally ban conversion therapy. “If we are truly, as a community, going to thrive as healthy, equal, and complete, conversion therapy needs to stop—and it needs to stop now,” the Center’s Terra Russell-Slavin said at the roundtable, held at UCLA School of Law on June 6. Russell-Slavin, director of policy...

An Alabama deputy who resigned after making homophobic comments in response to the suicide of an Alabama teen has been hired in the next town over. Deputy Jeff Graves stepped down as a sheriff’s deputy from the Madison County Sheriff’s Office after posting comments in an article about 15-year-old Nigel Shelby, who died by suicide after being bullied about his sexual orientation. “Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump, BBQ. That’s my kind of LGBTQ movement,” Graves wrote in a now-deleted post on a...

(stock photo via Depositphotos)The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, has released the results of its first-ever National LGBTQ Youth Mental Health Survey, and the results are deeply concerning. Conducted between February 2018 through September 2018, the massive survey includes responses from 34,808 LGBTQ young people. The results show a staggering 39 percent of respondents had seriously considered attempting suicide in the previous 12 months....

A third of LGBTQ people say they’ve experienced suicidal thoughts over their body image. The worrying statistics come as part of a new survey commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation and conducted by YouGov, which examines the way people think and feel about their bodies. Among adults who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or other, 53% said they felt anxious and 56% said they felt depressed because of their body image, compared to one third (33%) of the adults who identify...

15-year-old Nigel Shelby was laid to rest in a casket that was decorated with rainbows. Shelby, a high school student in Huntsville, Alabama, died by suicide last month after he was allegedly bullied for being gay. The community rallied to raise funds for his funeral, organizing a GoFundMe page and a Drag Brunch to raise over $15,000. People who attended the funeral wore rainbow clothing and clothes that denounced bullying, local media reported, and the casket had a picture of Shelby wearing...

Rest in power, Nigel. A gay teen from Huntsville, Alabama, has died by suicide after enduring anti-gay bullying. Nigel Shelby, a 15-year-old freshman at Huntsville High School, was bullied at school by classmates because of his sexuality. He reportedly died last week. https://www.facebook.com/RocketCityPrideAL/posts/2201450500171312 Tennessee Valley Rocket City Pride, a local LGBTQ advocacy group, shared the news of Shelby’s death on Facebook with links to resources for queer youth in the region. “There are no words that can be said to make sense of...

Thankfully, emergency services got to him in time A young gay man tried to attempt suicide after learning his boyfriend’s parents beat him up for coming out. The unnamed man, believed to be around 19 years old, was found at the top of a bridge in Puebla, Mexico. A passer-by called the emergency number at 5.46pm on 23 March. They saw a young man, on the ledge, about to throw himself off into incoming traffic. Emergency services raced to the bridge located between 14...

Nicholas Breiner hadn’t even told his family on April 7, 2017, when he came out on Instagram and told the world — more particularly, his students — that he was bisexual. He spoke up because one of his students, struggling with her own sexuality, had told a friend that she was going to kill herself. “I couldn’t help but wonder how many students I had that were in a similar situation to that student; feeling completely alone and nearing that...

Bisexual people are more likely to be politically liberal than other groups, according to a new study. The study was conducted by University of Oklahoma sociologist Meredith Worthen and was published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy. It looked at political perspectives among lesbian, gay, bisexual and heterosexual students. The study divided heterosexual people into “mostly heterosexual” and “exclusively heterosexual” and looked at the attitudes of students in the southern United States. How liberal are bisexual people? The study found that there was...

In April of 2017, former NFL player Aaron Hernandez committed suicide while incarcerated at Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in Massachusetts. The 27-year-old was serving time after having been found guilty of the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013. In the aftermath of his death, scores of news stories explored possible reasons why the former New England Patriots player would take his own life. In march of this year, a documentary titled Aaron Hernandez Uncovered on Oxygen featured his former lawyer saying, “This...

This past Saturday, in a lengthy Twitter thread, Peter Delacroix shared the story of a gay 17-year-old who had committed suicide as a result of bullying and ridicule. Delacroix woke up to an email from a teen he referred to as “Max” that was clearly a suicide note. Max was one of a group of queer teenagers that Delacroix counsels as a Youth Pastor at his church. He immediately rushed to Max’s house, but it was too late. Max had hanged...