Both historically and epidemiologically, queer youth suicide has frequently been framed through a concept of shame. According to Eric Rofes, the two subjects of homosexuality and suicide ‘share a parallel history of shame’ (Rofes 1983: 1). In its more simplistic depictions, shame is understood as a reaction to the cultural representation of non-heterosexuality as wrongful, sinful, criminal, pathological or disturbed – a conception combining religious perspectives on sexual diversity (sin) and older medical and psychiatric understandings of non-heterosexuality (deviance) within the figure of the homosexual personage (Foucault 1990). Under this view, it is said to peak at a moment of insult (Eribon 2004: 15), ridicule (Saulnier 1998: 53), physical violence (Hunter 1994: 103), blackmail (Rofes 1983: 29), rejection (Schneider, Farberow and Kruks 1994: 119-120), or to be produced through the pressures of closetedness (Rofes 1983: 66) or self-repression of desire (Scheff and Retzinger 1991: xix). Often it is connected to a long-term loss of self-esteem and the production of an internalised self-hatred (Fullager 2003: 299) and longer-term psychological consequences leading to self-destructive behaviours (McDermott, Roen and Scourfield 2008: 817).