Despite the media's dangerous -- and false -- suggestion that a suicide epidemic is striking young gay men who have been bullied, a Cornell sexuality expert believes there has never been a better time to grow up as a sexual minority.

Ritch Savin-Williams, professor of developmental psychology in human development, director of Cornell's Sex and Gender Lab and author of "The New Gay Teenager," spoke with reporters Nov. 9 at an Inside Cornell media luncheon at the ILR Conference Center in Manhattan.

Savin-Williams studies the similarities among sexual-minority youth and all teens, as well as the ways in which sexual-minority adolescents vary among themselves and the sexual development of heterosexual youth.

"All of these young men dying in a short period of time led a lot of people to believe there was a suicide epidemic among gay youth. We don't know that all these youths were gay or that they died because of the bullying. What bothers me most is that these young lives were being portrayed as being extremely problematic, and almost as if all gay youth were about trying to kill themselves or were an unhappy, fragile group of kids." Read the full story