Gay Teen Captures Bullies on Viral Video: ‘I’m Sick of Being Silent’
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A TikTok video recorded by a gay teen of bullies who have continued to harass him has gone viral.
In the video a young man can be seen and heard approaching the gay teen’s house and yelling a homophobic slur after the teen’s dad opened the door.
California high school senior Landon Jones, 18, said he’s been bullied by his classmates since the fifth grade. But Jones, who is openly gay, said he’s no longer looking the other way.
“I have been called ‘faggot’ countless times at school, and it literally doesn’t bother me at all,” Jones said in a TikTok video he shared Oct. 1 that has gone viral. “The fact that they came to my house does.”
@allclearforlandon #lgbt #fyp #hatecrime ♬ original sound – Landon Jones
The video, which has 1.3 million views, appears to show two separate instances of Jones’ being subjected to anti-gay bullying. In the more recent incident, which occurred Sept. 29 and was caught on a home surveillance camera, a young man walks up to Jones’ home and starts to knock before Jones’ father opens the door.
“Does Landon live here?” the young man can be heard saying.
His dad responds, “Yes, why?”
“Someone said to come up here,” the young man mumbles before loudly yelling, “because he’s a faggot!” and running off the property.
Jones’ dad said the young man ran off and got in on the passenger side of a black Lincoln Navigator, which drove off.
“I remember being up in my room, hearing it, and I heard what he said. I immediately jumped out of bed and walked outside to see what was happening,” said Jones, who came out as gay in 2020. “I had no sleep that night. I was honestly really upset. I was crying.”
Jones recorded the other incident in his viral TikTok video in August. It shows a group of young men surrounding Jones’ car as he and his sister sit in a Starbucks parking lot. One of the men looks inside Jones’ car and says, “This f—— faggot.”
Jones said he decided to share both incidents on TikTok, where he has nearly 700,000 followers, because “I’m sick of being silent about it,” adding, “So I finally spoke up.”
Jones said the young man who’s visible in the Starbucks video and the person who was driving the black Lincoln Navigator both attend his high school, El Toro High School in Lake Forest, which is part of the Saddleback Valley Unified School District. He said he had heard from others that the young man who came up to his front door attends a nearby high school, although he doesn’t know which one and couldn’t confirm the accuracy of that information.
A spokesperson for the school district said the “unconscionable acts committed against Landon Jones do not reflect the feelings or values of Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) and El Toro High School (ETHS).”
Jones isn’t alone when it comes to anti-gay bullying: A report published last year by The Trevor Project, a nonprofit LGBTQ youth crisis intervention and suicide prevention group, found the majority of LGBTQ youths (52%) enrolled in middle or high school reported having been bullied either in person or electronically in the year before they participated in the survey. LGBTQ middle school students reported higher instances of bullying (65%) than those in high school (49%).
