â€¢ An 11-year-old sixth grader in Ohio had his arm broken by teenagers who called him a queer and a sissy because he wanted to be a cheerleader. One of the teenagers who beat him up was suspended! Another was not!

â€¢ There’s the suicide, by hanging, of 13-year-old Seth Walsh, in California. There will be no charges filed against the students who bullied him for years. A memorial service will be held this Friday. His siblings, 11, 17 and 18, will attend.

â€¢ The suicide, by means of his father’s Beretta, of 13-year-old Asher Brown, in Texas. School officials deny that the parents complained about bullying; the parents are outraged about being called liars and they’re being backed up pretty well by other parents and students, including a student who was beaten with a pipe by other students after his complaints were ignored by administrators.

â€¢ It’s only been a month since 15-year-old Billy Lucas hanged himself: “On Billy’s Facebook web memorial, he’s remembered with comments like, ‘Everyone made fun of him.’”

â€¢ In related news, there’s the really weird Michigan ADA Andrew Shirvell, who runs a blog devoted to harassing a “radical homosexual activist” (AKA the current University of Michigan student council president) because in part the student is a proponent of… gender-neutral dorms. Something the school’s paper recently editorialized in favor of! (There’s the already infamous Anderson Cooper interview.) This has actually been a “good” event overall, because pretty much it’s exposed the entire student body of the campus to the real face of homophobic crazy.

â€¢ And now the suicide of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi. Here’s the very odd story from the Rutgers paper, the Targum. It interviews lots of very defensive friends of the victim’s roommates and the administration, who all suggest that the media may have “misconstrued” or “distorted” the story. That is very odd! Here’s how the Star Ledger described the gist of the matter: “A Rutgers University freshman appears to have killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate broadcast live images of the 18-year-old having a sexual encounter with another man on the internet, according to campus and law enforcement sources.” That doesn’t seem very distortable; one event did indeed follow the other.