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(11 votes, average 4.36 out of 5)
Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Nov 17, 2010
Cody Barker – Photo: Facebook
Among the questions surrounding the suicide of her son, there’s one that torments Darla Barker the most: If she’d come home earlier on Sept. 13, would Cody still be alive today?
Cody, 17, was nine days into his senior year of high school when he hung himself in the barn on his family’s farm northwest of Appleton, adding his name to the list of gay youth who took their lives in September – a list that continues to grow. It was Barker who discovered Cody’s body.
“Cody was passionate,” Barker said, her pale-blue irises swimming in tears. “He was involved. He could have been anything, done anything. He was like a bright light that was extinguished. These September sons that died, the world will never know what it lost.”
Cody is buried in a cemetery just down the road from the farm. Barker said she visits his gravesite daily and leaves behind a red rose, his favorite flower.
Another question that haunts Barker is: What happened to Cody that drove him to commit such a desperate act that day?
When news of the suicide became public, the Shiocton School District superintendent quickly issued a blanket denial that any bullying had occurred at Cody’s school.
“Right now everybody’s looking for someone to be the poster child for this issue,” Supt. Chris VanderHeyden told the Post Crescent. “As soon as it was announced that this young man was gay and that he killed himself, everyone immediately started connecting dots that weren’t there.”
But Barker contends the statement was made without any investigation, and she’s convinced that something did indeed happen to him, especially on the afternoon he died.
He had come home from school that day for lunch, and he “was happy, normal Cody,” Barker said her husband told her. Barker was at work.
Cody ate some leftover pasta, then put his dishes in the sink and told his father, “This shit is amazing,” Barker said.
Besides being upbeat that day, Cody was in a good place in life generally. He had a supportive family, including both of his parents and his 21-year-old sister. Barker, who has a beloved openly gay brother, said her family accepted Cody’s sexual orientation very easily.
“I’m so tired of hearing it’s a choice,” she said. “They were born that way. I just wish the world would accept people for who they are.”
Cody also had a support network outside his home. He attended a weekly group for LGBT youth at Harmony Café in Appleton and was out at Shiocton High School, where he was trying to start a gay-straight alliance group. A school publication, The Chief Gazette, ran a positive item about Cody’s plans for the GSA in its June issue.
“Cody Barker is going to a leadership workshop” over the summer, the publication noted. “He is very excited about going to this; the workshop will help him start his Gay/Straight Alliance group here at the school.”
Cody had a wide range of interests. He was a fan of Lady Gaga and James Bond. He was also a World War II aficionado. “He could have taught the history class” on WWII, his mother said.
But despite the support, there were troubling signs that Cody faced challenges at school. Barker witnessed one of them herself over the summer. She was sitting with some of Cody’s friends at the fire pit outside their home, she said, when a car stopped in front of the house and a kid yelled “queer” out the window.
There were other disturbing signs. Cody told his mother that he never went to the bathroom between classes, presumably out of fear. “How pathetic is it that a kid has to worry about something like that?” Barker asked.
Barker said name-calling and whispering about Cody were common in the halls at school. After his death, Barker learned that kids were going around behind him at school and tearing down the posters he was putting up announcing the GSA.
Maria Peeples, 17, told the Post Crescent that Cody had complained to her about the pushback he received from the school and the community over the GSA.
“I honestly believe something happened to him that day,” Barker said. “If there was someone who said something to him, I hope they’re feeling the guilt over what happened. People have to realize what words can do to a person.”
Cody’s death derailed his father, who fell into a depression so deep that he was unable to work for nearly two months. But like Judy Shepard, Barker decided to turn her grief into activism. “I feel like I have to fight for Cody,” she said. “I have to finish what he started.”
Barker has become involved with the GSA her son was trying to start at Shiocton High School. It’s moving forward, she said, but Barker is dismayed that it was renamed “Paradigm 21,” instead of the usual “gay-straight alliance.”
“That kind of upset me,” she said. “I thought, ‘Why are you doing that?’”
Barker, a petite, quiet woman, also is speaking out publicly. Her voice trembling with emotion and tears streaming down her face, Barker helped to introduce a screening of the documentary “Bullied” at the Appleton Public Library on Nov. 9.
“My son was an amazing person,” Barker told the audience. “He had so much talent. He was a friend to everyone, and he was always fighting for others who were in the minority or oppressed. … I feel like I have to be here to fight for him. Everyone has a right to be happy, and no one has a right to judge.”
On the Web: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Septembers-Sons/159299040764359
