How a gay student’s suicide after being outed is helping Japan’s LGBT community speak up

The name of a gay student who died after being outed may remain known to only a small number of people – his immediate family, friends, classmates, and the university where he studied – because even in death, his privacy is considered important in Japan.

The lawyer representing the family said they would appeal the decision to a higher court on the grounds that the university had failed to perceive the matter as a human rights issue, and had not created an environment that prevented the harassment of individuals by educating students that mocking sexual minorities constitutes sexual harassment.

Insensitivity and being gay may seem ‘funny’ and unusual in a society that is, for the large part, quite homogenous“Outing is not very common here and is not usually done maliciously, but more as a joke because the joker does not always appreciate the significance of outing to the LGBT person,” said Alexander Dmitrenko, a lawyer in the Tokyo office of the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer law firm and a member of the Lawyers for LGBT Alliance Network.

“Coming out is never easy,” he added. “It is deeply personal and most LGBT individuals go through multiple stages of coming out – first to themselves, then to close friends and family and only then broader groups. “Japan is still lagging behind most of its Western peers in basic LGBT education,” he said. “There are also no LGBT community centres, the types we are used to seeing in major Western cities. Therefore, Japanese LGBT individuals can struggle with coming out alone.

Given the sheer number of calls that the centre’s operators were not able to take, the number of people struggling with being outed was likely to be about 20 times higher, officials told the Mainichi newspaper.

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