Carlo Allegri / Reuters
From seventh grade through 12th grade, I was tortured nearly every
day I went to school. The common term for this is bullying, but that’s
not what it is. It is torture. Just as John McCain suffered indecencies
and physical abuses as a prisoner of war, so did I in my youth. If you
hate me for making that comparison, you hate me for saying what is true.
I was a happy, popular and active kid. When I reached puberty, my
life changed. Before I knew myself that I was gay, others picked up on
my mannerisms. My peers harassed me, demanding to know if I was gay. I
didn’t know.
My childhood
best friend Nick McKinney stopped being a friend; he, along with a pack
of neighborhood kids rode their bikes into me, threw things at me,
called me faggot as I walked home pretending that this was not
happening. If there was no empty seat on the schoolbus, I had to squat
in the aisles. No one would let me sit next to them, and Betty, the
blue-shadowed bus driver, would not drive until I squatted.
At school, I
sat near the teacher hoping for some kind of protection as fellow
students called me faggot, flicked my ears and kicked my legs under the
desk. I allowed the ringleader of the abuses, Ian Kelly, who went on to
found a multi-million dollar clothing company, to cheat from my tests in
biology and chemistry classes. All of this in front of teachers. I
gravitated in hallways toward any adult who I hoped would be a port in
the storm. From seventh grade until I graduated from high school, only
one single adult ever intervened on my behalf: a business teacher who
held me after following a particularly brutal class in which several of
my peers relentlessly called me an ugly zitfaced faggot. She told me
that I will grow into my appearance and myself, and that life will
change after high school for the better. I will never forget her
kindness—even recognizing that her response was inadequate, as the abuse
carried on until I graduated from high school in 1996.
My own
grandmother, who always had been a doting, loving, spoiling figure
suddenly didn’t seem to love me anymore. Nothing made sense anymore.
Throughout my teen years, I felt unworthy of living. I was smart;
science, English and art came easily to me. My mother let me stay home
from school when I couldn’t bear to go—and thank God for her, because
she saved my life.
After high
school, I found out that the world is kinder outside of those
cinder-blocked walls. And in the late ‘90s, the world coincidentally
began a major revolution. Thanks to the influence of Will and Grace,
Queer as Folk and all that followed, average people realized that LGBT
people are just...people who deserve to be treated with decency.
I discovered
later in life that my grandmother resented post-puberty me because she
had a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her first husband, who
moved her from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. just
before World War II, turned out to be gay. She grew up in the Catholic
church. The church refused to annul the marriage because it refused to
accept homosexuality—and so my grandmother had no choice other than to
divorce her first husband. As a result, she was excommunicated. She lost
it all: church (not faith), husband, her reputation. She married my
grandfather, a brilliant man haunted by his own demons and alcoholism,
and her life took a direction she never planned it to take.
Witnessing me
grow into a gay man triggered my grandmother’s trauma, and she resented
me—until we got to know one another again in the years leading up to her
death. On her death bed, literally the evening she died as I was
leaving the room, she asked me to embrace her and she told me that she
always has been proud of me and always will be.
I never
expected that relationship to mend, and it did because my grandmother
and I came to know one another as people—but also because the public
attitude toward homosexuality changed. She couldn’t pretend to herself
that LGBT people are evil anymore because it had become commonly
accepted that we are not.
Now what?
Our vice
president-elect, Mike Pence, is the same kind of person who populated my
middle school and high school. I can’t say whether he is one of the
abusers who called me a faggot, who kicked me, flicked my ears, pinched
and punched me in the locker room, and who ultimately caused me to read
the suicide textbook “The Final Exit” and stockpile pills throughout my
youth as an emergency escape hatch. I can say that he is now the vice
principal of the school: he is the authority who not only ignores but
who actively encourages abuses against people because of their
sexuality.
I am not
afraid, exactly, but I do have trepidation about speaking out about this
publicly. But I have been through this and I know how it goes.
Mike Pence advocates conversion therapy. Make no mistake: Conversion therapy is torture.
It involves electrocuting and drugging LGBT people to make them suffer
while looking at homosexual pornography in order to “convert” them to
heterosexuality. Not only has it been proven not to convert people, but
it causes severe physical and psychological trauma and potentially can
result in serious mental disorders. Teenagers have committed suicide in
desperate moves to avoid ongoing conversion therapy. In the event a gay
man, as an example, were coerced into either believing or pretending
that he had been “converted” in order to stop the torture, the best-case
scenario would be his entering into a marriage under false pretenses
with a woman who otherwise could have found a loving partner.
It is a crime against humanity. Science has proven conclusively that it does not work.
Yet, under the
influence of Vice President-Elect Pence and a fully Republican Congress
and likely Republican-leaning U.S. Supreme Court, conversion therapy
could become mainstream and supported by law if not codified in law.
How did this
happen? How did we get here? Conversion therapy is a blatant
human-rights violation and a sheer demonstration of hatred. It is a hate
crime.
I survived six
years of psychological terror and physical abuses, sanctioned by my
peers and by authorities, throughout my youth. At that time, I had been
convinced that something about me was “bad” and that I deserved it. I
know better now, and I will not abide by it.
LGBT people and
our allies must be vigilant as a new regime takes over our country.
This is not a joke, and there is no evidence at this time that suggests
fearing the worst—that our government would commit inhumane crimes
against its own law-abiding people—is unreasonable.
I have lost
more faith in the decency of the American people this week than I knew I
had. Because of what I went through when I was young, and because I
have seen how quickly attitudes changed toward acceptance, I know how
quickly those attitudes can revert with a little peer pressure. I know
how cruel people can be without a second thought.
LGBT people and
our allies must not give a millimeter or else this administration may
take 666 miles. We also must ally ourselves with all other marginalized
populations because, from a practical standpoint, greater numbers equals
greater security—but more importantly because all of us are human
beings and all of us are at a very real risk of being confronted by
overt state-supported hate crimes, and these things usually happen in
waves, one targeted population at a time. We are all in this together,
and we have to be ready to fight for our souls
No comments:
Post a Comment