>>Suicide has always appeared to me to be a rather elegant way nature has developed to correct some of it's more obvious mistakes.<<

What, like Ludwig Boltzmann? Brilliant physicists don't strike me as an obvious mistake of nature.

Cheers,

Tony

The LGBTIQ rates of suicide, violent death, incarceration, mental illness, drug use, smoking, alchohol use and other risky behaviours are many times higher across the age spectrum than in the general population.
Being in a stable relationship helps curb the negative effects of being homosexual, being in an unstable one would tend to make things worse, all the information I've seen indicates that rates of dysfunction and partner abuse are about the same in same sex and opposite sex relationships.
I think like a lot of heterosexual people I've come to the conclusion that homosexuality is a physical "condition', if you will, so it's therefore natural in the sense that autism is natural but like autism it's not something we'd wish upon anyone, yet we do our best to make sure such people have equal opportunity insofar as they can make use of the help offered.

Rob I see your essay as also "Tad Distastful", using the LGBTI community as appearing to be lacking in awareness of youth suicide.
Self harm and suicide is not a new phenomenon or recent occurrence in the GLBTI community, by your age you would not have experienced the days, when GLBTI people where seen in law as criminals.
Where self harm, Depression, isolation and suicide was prevalent, and if ones sexuality became known, bullying was commonplace and often abandonment by ones family and "straight" friends.
You can read the anti gay responses to your essay here, and it is those sort of comments that seriously harm gay youths, who are coming to terms with their sexuality.
There are things happening to support young GLBTI people in Australia, and social study education should be at the fore. Though you and your partner and your mates find marriage "Tad Distasteful",to those same sex couples who have enjoyed many happy years together, marriage is a crowning option for them, and should be applauded.

Hasbeen, that comment is a new low, even for you. Shame on you.

I very much agree with the author of this article in that same-sex marriage will not necessarily decrease gay youth suicide numbers.

The only way these terrible tragedies can be averted is by encouraging more acceptance of diversity in our society, and stamping out old-fashioned anti-homosexuality bigotry.

I suspect that a lot more young boys and girls commit suicide after their boyfriend/girlfriends have cheated on them. That is certianly the case with deaths in custody. The less morals in our scoiety, the more suicide. An inconvenient truth.

Suseonline,
Maybe encouraging Gay marriage and monogamy could be part of an overall harm minimisation strategy for homosexuals, the state runs special harm reduction programs for other groups such as Aboriginals, IV drug users and prostitutes so protecting LGBTIQ people from their own poor impulse control might be the way to go.
Then again, Gay marriage is a "Can't beat 'em, join 'em" admission of defeat by the Gay lobby, if Gays are converting to the current Orthodoxy they need to get used to people preaching to them, we straight married folk get told what to do and how to think 24/7.