The Death of Tyler Clementi and What Used to Be Trust

L: Tyler Clementi; C: roommate, Dharun Ravi; R: another classmate, Molly Wei

“Roommate asked for room until midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” Dharun Ravi’s Twitter message on 19 September says it all: behind the nonchalant air, there’s the whiff of perversion, of callousness and of the blatant disregard for the privacy of another individual (his rommate) who had specifically requested it.

Three days later the roommate, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, jumped to his death from New Jersey’s George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. Though the development of events in the few days leading up to Clementi’s death still remain unclear, media reports speculate that the invasion of privacy by Ravi and fellow classmate Molly Wei in distributing webcam footage of Clementi having sex, and the fallout in the immediate aftermath, was the cause of Clementi’s suicide. So far, Ravi and Wei have been charged for the violation of privacy and face up to 5 years in prison under NJ law.

Fellow students’ accounts of Clementi say that he was a shy and reserved young man (apparently only 3 students out of 50 in his dorm knew him), yet active in music circles as an accomplished violinist. In the hours immediately prior to his death he was at a Rutger Symphony Orchestra rehearsal where Thomas Jung, who shared a desk with Clementi in the violin section, did not notice anything wrong. ABC News and the Star-Ledger of Neward also reported Clementi posting a message on his Facebook on the day of his death: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry”.

Clementi’s reaction to the broadcasting of his sex life would seem, under the logic of a heteronormative community, rather histrionic if it wasn’t for the main fact upon which Ravi’s Twitter and all media reports that I’ve read so far pivot. That is, Tyler Clementi’s sexuality. Let’s pretend that sexual preference really mattered for a minute. If Clementi had been having sex with a girl, and Ravi and Wei had broadcast that across the Internet, I’d bet you the scandal would on a whole be less to the chagrin of Clementi. Heteronormative behaviour relishes the chance for display and affirmation of its perceived dominance. Just think back to that movie American Pie and Jim streaming a live feed of the exchange student, Nadia, undressing in his room. I found this poor quality clip (you get the idea):
It’s OK! It’s a hot girl being watched by guys. Chill. But does that make the violation of two straight people having sex any better? The media fetishizes and commodifies celebrity sex tapes into glorified, albeit salacious, publicity stunts. But at least we can trust the law to preserve our civil rights, or so we hope.

But this hasn’t stopped the gay rights group Garden State Equality making a martyr out of Clementi, whose death they consider to be a hate crime. At the end of the inaugural event of Rutgers’ “Project Civility” program, protesters gathered outside the student centre chanting “Civility without safety – over our queer bodies!” But I thought Clementi’s sexual orientation of “unclear”, NY Times? Not that it matters or anything. You can’t stop people, especially 18-year-old freshers, being speculative about others and also of themselves.

The worst justice done here is the appropriation of Tyler Clementi’s unfortunate death by political groups for a particular end, as a martyr for hate crimes against the gay community. Tyler Clementi’s death shouldn’t be about the death of a man speculated (key word here)to be gay. It’s the tragic death of a young man whose basic right to privacy was violated to the extent that it was intolerable.

But I’m taking the right of all individuals to civil liberties (in this case, sexual freedom) for granted in saying that because Clementi’s demons demonstrate that invisible barriers in familial, societal and cultural spheres can remain strongly ingrained, and that their risidual effects can remain as pervasive as ever in the mind of the individual.

Our law has the responsibility of protecting the civil rights of any individual whether they are female, male, intersex, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc. And the crime perpetrated by Ravi and Wei, of blatant disregard of Tyler Clementi’s rights, is one that cannot be drawn upon lines of sex, gender and sexuality. This was a crime that shows the violent results of the abuse of privilege and power by actors, and the tragic results of such coercive forces on an individual who was denied any power to mitigate the actions – in this case, death. This is also about something even more fundamental to human civil society and morality: trust. What ever happened to it?

Yi