Colin Farrell has a gay brother. His name is Eamon (above), and Eamon is his older brother, and he recently married his long-time boyfriend Steven in Canada – because Ireland doesn‘t let gay couples marry (although Eamon and Steven had some kind of wedding celebration in Ireland). Colin was Eamon’s best man! Which is really cool, I think. Anyway, Colin has always been pretty vocal about his love of his gay brother, and his support of gay rights and LGBT tolerance and acceptance in general. Now Colin is working with an Irish LGBT rights group called BeLonG To (BLGT – I guess in Ireland they mix up the acronym from the American “lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgendered”). Colin is working with a special campaign, the Belong To Young Service’s STAND UP! Campaign, which is about teaching tolerance and acceptance of LGBT kids, and to help stop the bullying of LGBT kids. Colin wrote an open letter for the Belong To website, and I just love Colin even more now – he talks a lot about being a kid and seeing his brother bullied and beaten for simply being honest about who he was:

“I can’t remember much about the years of physical and emotional abuse my brother Eamon suffered. I was very small. The thing I do remember though, quite literally, is blood on his school shirt when he came home in the afternoon. The beatings and taunting were very frequent for my him and a constant part of his school years. I didn’t understand at that time the concept of ‘difference’. Back then, as now, he was just my big brother. If I did understand what difference was I understood it in the most pure and unaffected childlike way. To me then, as a child, difference meant being left out. Joy and laughter came with being included, being embraced , and BELONGING to.

People are often afraid of difference. They feel that anything that causes fear, should be turned away from. My brother represented fear for so many people, but caused joy in my life. From a very young age he made me laugh with his intelligence and wit, made me aspire to his strength and goodness. He was to be embraced. To many of the students of his school however he was to be feared. He was to be turned away from. I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t know.

As a race we humans are united and divided by emotions. The mother and father of all emotions, the queen and king are love and fear. Love unites, it brings us closer to an understanding of the possibility of beauty amidst all the confusion and pain that life can bring. Hate is a disease. It is fear’s messenger and it makes us do terrible things in a shadow of our better selves, of what we could be.

Intolerance is not genetically encoded – it is taught. It is learned at home. It is learned in the classrooms and it is learned anywhere else we gather as a group. But it is usually learned early and added onto from there. If there is nothing to feared, there is nothing to hate. If there is nothing to hate there is no pain.

My brother was so forceful in standing up for who he was, and for the good that he knew was inside of him. Many people missed out on an opportunity, not only to enjoy him, but to enjoy themselves by embracing his “difference”. They missed out because they saw him as a threat – not as a testament to the kaleidoscope and diversity of this beautiful world.

Bullying is torture, it is another betrayal of basic human decency and its scars reach way into the future of its survivors. But the saddest truth is that not all children survive it. It is a potentially fatal societal illness and must be respected and not feared. Respected and dealt with as a very real problem and as an adversary of a potentially harmonious world, that should have no place for bullies or bullying.”

– From Colin Farrell

[Colin Farrell’s open letter, courtesy of the Belong To website]

I am of the generation who remembers the Matthew Shepard murder, and the national coverage it received, vividly – Shepard was only a few years older than me, and he was murdered when he was in college, and when I was in college too. I really believe that one incident shaped a lot of people’s perspectives on violence against the LGBT community, although crimes against LGBT kids and adults still occur with startling frequency in this country and abroad. The statistics I found indicate that violence against LGBT kids and adults has been on the rise over the past decade, and as gay rights becomes an even more hot-button issue in the political landscape, more hate crimes will likely be committed in the coming decades. So…it’s great to see Colin do his part to speak out and draw attention to such an important cause, and one that he’s so personally involved with.

Thanks to LaineyGossip for the link!