Arts & Entertainment
Gone too soon
Teen suicide has received renewed awareness but the issue can affect gays well into adulthood
David Chung, a former Nellie’s bartender, committed suicide July 8. (Blade file photo by Pete Exis)
When David Chung took his own life a few weeks ago, his death sent shockwaves through a community that knew him as the smiling Nellie’s bartender. As hundreds gathered at his funeral service, many only wanted to remember the happiness he brought to those around him.
But Chung’s death is a reminder of a serious and often silent illness that has long plagued the LGBT community. According to a 2008 study from the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, lesbian, gay and bisexual youths and young adults are three times more likely to report suicidal ideation (thoughts about suicide) and as high as seven times more likely to have reported attempting suicide. Research in these areas is still limited since mortality data does not report sexual orientation.
And while LGBT teen suicide has gotten a lot of attention in the last two years since a spate of bullying and suicide cases have been reported around the country leading to gay columnist Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign and renewed awareness of the Trevor Project (thetrevorproject.org), an LGBT youth suicide prevention non-profit, depression and suicide disproportionately affect LGBT people at various ages.
Randy Pumphrey, manager of behavioral health at Whitman-Walker Health, says part of suicide prevention is being able to tell the warning signs. He admits, however, that it is not easy for people not trained in the medical field to differentiate between normal ups and downs and full-blown depression.
“I think it is going to be hard, unless you know the person really well,” he says. “You need to watch for extreme changes in behavior.”
Some of these behavioral changes include not acting the same at work or in social groups, withdrawing from social situations, engaging in more risky activities and verbalizing a death threat or wish.
“A lot of people will make outright allusions to suicide like, ‘I won’t be here anymore,’” says Tamara Pincus, a clinical social worker and therapist. “They may even start to give their possessions away to people, indicating that they are making plans to take their lives.”
Both Pumphrey and Pincus cite the stigma LGBT people face as a big stressor on those already predisposed to depression.
“It might be internalized homophobia,” Pumphrey says. “People who are having trouble identifying as gay or lesbian when they are in a heterosexual marriage or not being able to come out at their job, they might attempt suicide. This feeling of rejection, that can be a really huge thing.”
Mary Lou Wallner, minister at T.E.A.C.H. Ministries, directly understands how rejection can affect a person. Her daughter, Anna, committed suicide in 1997. Wallner says her daughter came out to her in a letter in 1988.
“At the time I was deeply entrenched in a conservative church,” she says. “When she came out, I thought that it was an abomination. I told her so in a letter.”
In the letter, she wrote, “I will never accept that in you. I feel it’s a terrible waste, besides being spiritually and morally wrong … I do and will continue to love you, but I will always hate that.”
Waller says she did not understand that her sexual orientation was not a choice. Nine years went by during which they continued contact but then in 1996, Anna began seeing a therapist who encouraged her to cut off contact with her family. Wallner began collecting cards and money she wanted to give her daughter in a shoebox so when they began speaking she could give them to her. Wallner never got the chance.
“There were probably a ton of warning signs,” she says. “I feel there were clues she was trying to give me. I have many, many regrets.”
Before Anna came out to her mother, she tried slitting her wrists and in another incident, took a whole bottle of aspirin. In hindsight, Wallner says she would have, “gotten in her car and driven to her right away” once she had cut off communication.
Pumphrey says the challenge is not only identifying the warning signs of depression, but also taking action. He says it might be a challenge to speak with someone who is going through this, but in the end it would be worth it.
“What happens in our culture is people are afraid to ask the questions about how a person is thinking and feeling,” he says. “If a person is having suicidal thoughts, they are usually thinking about how they are going to do it. Getting their plan helps you intervene and it may buy you some time.”
If a person seems to be posing an immediate threat to themselves or others, Pumphrey says the person should be taken to an emergency room or 911 should be called. This way he/she can be evaluated and possibly get treatment.
“My prerogative at this time is going to be their safety,” he says. “They may be angry upfront because it feels like a violation, but this is really serious and they might need help.”
Pincus says there are still several challenges facing the LGBT community, especially teenagers and young adults who are really connected to their family. She suggests if families are not supportive of their child’s sexual orientation, that person should seek support outside of their family.
“I think we would like to say that our society is getting past the stigma of LGBT, but we are really not,” she says. Pincus, who came out as bi when she was 16, says that the continual harassment and bullying that occurs in schools and other social venues to LGBT people is a major reason why the suicide rate is higher than for other groups.
“People are still getting beat up for holding hands with their partners and transgender people are getting shot because of their gender identity,” she says.
Since her daughter’s death, Wallner has shared her story with other groups around the country and was featured in the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So.” She began T.E.A.C.H. Ministries, which stands for “To Educate About the Consequences of Homophobia.” She tries to spread the message of tolerance, not only for the LGBT community, but also for those who may not understand completely.
While she does not discuss scripture with others, she does have a message for other believers.
“It’s not a choice, if it is not a choice it can’t be a sin,” she says.
Movies
Quest for fame becomes an obsession in entertaining ‘Lurker’
Psychological thriller explores the dynamics of power and control
It was nearly 60 years ago when über-queer icon Andy Warhol pronounced to the world his prediction that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” While it may have been an overstatement, we’re now experiencing the future he was talking about; and though it remains statistically impossible for “everybody” to achieve fame, that doesn’t mean that we can’t all “feel” like we’re famous. If social media has delivered any gift to the human race, that might just be it.
In the real-life dystopia that is 2026, Warhol’s 1967 quip has become a kind of cultural mantra: influencers are more famous than movie stars, podcasters can shape political policy, and anybody with a “hot take” can change the way we perceive even the most fundamentally held opinions. Whether or not this is progress is probably a moot point; it’s the reality we live in, and we have a government full of “cosplaying” charlatans to prove it.
That’s why Alex Russell’s “Lurker” – a 2025 Sundance favorite that’s now streaming on HBO Max after a limited theatrical run last summer – cuts so close to the quick. A psychological thriller exploring the dynamics of power and control within the entourage of a rock star, it strikes some uncomfortably familiar chords for an era when “bootlicking” seems to have become a national pastime.
It centers on Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), a young Angeleno who lives in his grandmother’s apartment and works in a trendy designer boutique on Melrose Avenue. When rising pop musician Oliver (Archie Madekwe) brings his entourage to the store one afternoon, Matthew sees a chance to make an impression; plugging his phone into the shop’s sound system, he plays a song that he knows the pop star admires – and minutes later, he’s been given a backstage pass to Oliver’s next concert and invited to hang out with the star himself.
Their relationship continues to develop quickly at the show. Though he’s met at first with some discomfortable hazing from members of the entourage, by the end of the evening he’s on his way to becoming part of the inner circle. Chosen by Oliver to become his “official documentarian,” he’s soon a fixture in the entourage himself, sparking jealousy from members higher in the “pecking order” than he is; but Matthew is better at the game than they suspect, and despite their attempts to keep him in his place, he uses his proximity to Oliver – and a few surgically precise acts of sabotage – to rise quickly to the top.
Staying there, however, is not so easy. Within the volatile social politics of the entourage, he must always be on guard, and his efforts to thwart others from displacing him become increasingly ruthless. Eventually, he crosses a line, resulting in a fall from Oliver’s grace and his ejection from the group; but being close to fame leads to its own kind of fame, and Matthew has worked too hard to give it up so easily – even if it means using his Machiavellian powers to go after Oliver himself.
Slick, stylish, and as hypervisual as any viral pop music video you can imagine, Russell’s sardonically amoral exploration of fame – or rather, the desire for it – is as much a satire as it is a psychological drama, but it plays like a horror movie. Matthew is a protagonist cut from the same cloth as the title character of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” a schemer whose endearingly awkward appearance masks a devious purpose and a diabolical mind. Oliver, whose creativity seems more about his “vibe” than his actual music, is charismatic but aloof, beneficent but mercurial, and seemingly blind to the massive ego that hides beneath his “chill” persona. There’s a kind of tension between these two characters that feels distinctly romantic, even homoerotic, and though it’s expressed only through subtext, it provides a palpable edge that makes their relationship feel dangerous – as if this were a love story in which anyone who tries to come between them is likely to get hurt.
As to what they actually feel about each other, “Lurker” keeps quiet about it. Matthew “reads” like a queer character, but his inner life is never revealed to us save through the conclusions we can draw from his behavior, and Oliver seems so much in love with himself that nobody else can compare; even so, there’s something between them that plays as much more intimate than the enthusiastic “bro”-ish affection that they exhibit together.
In the end, however, the “love story” here is not about romance, nor even sex; it’s about fame. Matthew, even if his own creative talents may be more solid than Oliver’s, is enamored primarily with fame; perhaps he longs for importance, for a life of more excitement and opportunity than his thankless existence as a low-level retail employee, and as the movie proceeds it becomes clear that he is willing to go as far as he has to go in order to achieve it. For Oliver, maybe it’s about the longing of the famous for something more than sycophantic lip-service, for finding the adulation of his fans personified in an authentic, tangible, and individual form. Whatever it is, there’s very little love involved.
Of course, there’s an unavoidable comparison to be made between the mentality on display in “Lurker” with the prevailing trend in our American consciousness, in which performative loyalty and opportunistic friendship feel like the order of the day; from the fickleness of “fan culture” to the escalation of outrage-baiting on social media to the barely-concealed cutthroat narcissism on daily display in our very government, the message that comes through loud and clear is a chilling throwback to the Reagan-era “greed is good” philosophy: loyalty, feelings, and friendship are for suckers, and the most vicious player is the winner who takes it all.
As usual in a character-driven piece like this one, it’s ultimately the actors who make it work; Pellerin (a Canadian actor who won his country’s equivalent of an Oscar for “Family First” in 2018) is the lynch pin, and he delivers an endlessly fascinating portrait of obsessively determined duplicity that we find ourselves rooting for him even as we recoil from the coldness of his tactics; Madekwe captures the vapid pretension of a pop artist who has faked his way to success, but infuses Oliver with enough well-meaning sincerity that we can still feel a little bit sorry for him. In a smaller role, Hannah Rose Liu (“Bottoms”) makes an impression as the manager who keeps Oliver’s life running, offering an anchor of relative sanity in a sea of madness.
Russell’s taut and tantalizingly opaque screenplay manages to capture all these things and more into a compact narrative that keeps us engaged while weaving its observations seamlessly into the plot, and his direction – which somehow yields an expansive scope through an intimate and sometimes frenetic focus – reinforces the unpredictable instability of fame, status, power, and the social hierarchy that governs them all. There are occasionally twists that feel a bit too convenient to be believable, but all in all, it’s a solid piece of cinematic workmanship.
Katrina Campbell-Frazier will host “Black Queer Joy: Brunch and Day Party” on Saturday, May 23 at 12 p.m. at Mixxed Food and Drinks.
This event will bring together beautiful energy, music, games, and unforgettable moments — because joy like this deserves to be shared.
Guests can expect unlimited rainbow mimosa flights, a “Build Your Pride” cocktail bar, full food menu and music by DJ Kei-Note K69, among other things.
This event is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Friday, May 22
Center Aging Monthly Luncheon With Yoga will be at 12 p.m. at the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center. Email Mac at [email protected] if you require ASL interpreter assistance, have any dietary restrictions, or questions about this event.
Trans Discussion Group will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This event is intended to provide an emotionally and physically safe space for trans people and those who may be questioning their gender identity/expression to join together in community and learn from one another. For more details, email [email protected].
Saturday, May 23
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Black Lesbian Support Group will be at 1 p.m. on Zoom. This is a peer-led support group devoted to the joys and challenges of being a Black Lesbian. For more details, email [email protected].
Sunday, May 24
Mobilizing Our Brothers Initiative will host “Sundae Tea: Legendary Community Talk-Back” at 6 p.m. at the Howard Theatre. This is a laid-back gathering where community vibes meet lively conversations. This legendary talk-back is your chance to share thoughts, hear stories, and connect with awesome people. Admission is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Monday, May 25
Queer Book Club will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. The Queer Book Club meets on the fourth Monday of the month to discuss books by queer authors. This month’s reading is “To Shape a Dragon’s Breath” by Moniquill Blackgoose For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Tuesday, May 26
Genderqueer DC will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is a support group for people who identify outside of the gender binary, whether you’re bigender, agender, genderfluid, or just know that you’re not 100% cis. For more details, visit genderqueerdc.org or Facebook.
Wednesday, May 27
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, May 28
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5 p.m. if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breath work and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
