{ it does get better
*Note: this is a draft essay
Ever since the first news story surfaced about bullying and gay teen suicide became headline news a few weeks ago, I have been angry and in tears. I understand what it is like to be harassed and bullied. I have experienced physical harm because I am gay. I too tried to kill myself. And I consider myself blessed to be alive today.
So when Ellen so eloquently implored everyone to take notice, an even deeper watershed drowned my entire life. Strange enough it wasn’t more sadness, but a feeling of happiness and mixed anger.
See I’ve sternly stewed for years, and even more so during the March on Washington in 2000, that gay youth have been vastly ignored. With Marriage Equality and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell always the banner herald, gay teens have suffered from such bullying and hatred that bear similitude to the torture during World War II and all in the name of God and societal normalcy. From school bullies, parents, churches, down to the horrific conversion camps, the stories are always short, sporadic, and seldom cover or cause worthy.
One nation where we stand
As Americans we are making great strides towards exposing injustices still rampant around us. Our founding fathers clever admonishments have grown to embrace child labor, race, gender, and now sexuality. They were wise intellectuals who knew that it didn’t stop with them, but new generations will have new challenges and from those ashes a new enlightened sense of the meaning of equality.
As citizen’s under this constitution none of us should disregard a life just because we disagree or hold a religious contrast and objection of that life. Every person deserves acknowledgement by others, not slander, not hurtful words which only serves any enemy to our very freedoms.
But that exact indifference and hate fuels us now more than ever. In this media-now world, we segment messages so we only hear what is specialized. The days of balance now gives to the WeNetwork, Logo, or HGTV, and it started years ago with the Christian Broadcasting Network, BET, CNN, and other local cable shows.
Divided, unequal, and too deaf
As we tuned in to ensure we heard our own messages, our ears deafened to people we once engaged in jovial disagreements at barbeques or little league games. Then, just as we ceased communicating, where we lived segregated our schools, our churches, our beauty parlors, our grocery stores. We no longer know our neighbors; we no longer know the parent’s of our children’s classmates.
As we divided so we lost an accountable society of compassionate citizens who cared enough to act when bad things happened around them. Of course I am being over dramatic; we never actually were all like that. As well, in someways, we still find a great responsibility between us, but it too is often found only amongst the like minded, segregated, and more and more intolerant spaces.
We’ve grown so far apart as a nation as to allow the foreclosure crisis to overwhelm us. One would assume such burdens felt by so many would bond us together. Alas, though, the messiness of it all only made us more insular in striving for self-survival.
My disgust at what I see as the decline, not only of America, but the fabric of the teachings of Jesus Christ:
I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.
Matthew 25:45
In someways I comprehend the ideals of those who use dismissive speech because I too feel abandoned, marginalized. However whatever solidarity I have disappears as the “us against them” mentality gains its focus. This too is nothing new under the sun; it happened in Germany, Russia, and in France way before. So one bully becomes a bully to another and so on and so on.
To our children in pain
And so on to now, to the focus on bullying and gay teen suicide. It is nothing new for me, but suddenly, it is the cause celeb.
For me the facts were evident as I grew up in the South being ridiculed and bullied as a fag from the time I was 13. For me it was evident that I was gay so I came out at 16 in high school. For me there is truth that three guys from my school chased me home because someone pretending to be me kept calling them. For me the fact was that I attempted suicide and alluded to wanting to a few times, because I felt alone, and everyday going to school meant seeing my classmates bond and date. For me it is fact that because I felt that way, I missed a lot of school. For me the fact I wasn’t alone saved my life.
For me, in the 1980′s, the only truths I witnessed were between images of the evangelical ravings of super-preachers and the angered protests of gay men raging against a disease brought upon from a wrathful maker. For me, looking forward to that did make me think it gets better. For me, the fact that I found slivers of tolerance in friends, my mother, my brother, and that rare TV episode were enough to make things better. For me, I am lucky I survived and still survive.
But for quite awhile now the facts that a number of other boys like myself actually succeeded in taking their own lives angers me. Their stories too are nothing new and because that is so, this has always been, for me, the most crucial problem facing not only gays and lesbians, but everyone who at one time were made to feel less equal by another.
Yes all this is depressing and I am quite more angry at every new story appears through Facebook or the RSS feeds I follow. And it is the kind of angry where I could be just as guilty of being a pulpit bully. What saves me though, is not that I arrest it within myself but I accept that hate, take from it, and bare my witness through as much compassionate council as I can muster in hope that others will learn.
Those nine years of classmates bulling and calls of “hey faggot” and “fucking homo” never leave me to this day, but it wasn’t until after I had gone off to college that I noticed its heaviness in my soul. It was the 1990s and what I held true about gay men when I was younger, was becoming more or less true. I was reading novels, stories, and poems that did not paint the same image gay men as I was once exposed. And I felt it was better.
from the back cover: Finding himself stranded out of town in Laguna Beach, Tim finds he has no option but to beg Pete, his ex, for a ride back into LA. The road leads them into LA's dark-side through South Central and West Hollywood and to a host of colatile urbanites: an occult-obsesed film-maker, leather-clad dykes, a Southern bell drag queen and finally a gang of anarchistic gays heading over to Bel Air with a car boot full of explosives and assassination in mind!
From hatred, fear, and intolerance
One day browsing around the gay bookstore, in North Carolina, I found a story so far from what I ever had read before. From the moment I started reading those first few pages of Tim and Pete by James Robert Baker, I was taken in by its fierce LA faggot dialogue and narrative; the language often exposing that bridge back to the 80′s diatribes intent on consuming the very hatred from which it was born—the judgmental wrath of Christians that spewed God’s AIDS punishment upon the gays was returned with equal thrust. It wasn’t the stories I encountered as a teen, always stuck in the gay political machine, but a personalized exodus through that same wasteland not covenant to anyone or any ideal. I felt just angry and along for the ride.
The characters of Tim and Pete “travel through an increasingly hostile environment meeting a bizarre and queer cast of supporting characters who fuel undercurrent rage at society’s homophobia and the LGBT community’s apathy.”[Source] Both Tim and Pete could care less; both are more angry and dismissive of their past. They seek distraction and release from “those times,” all the while reliving it over the course of two days. Tim and Pete’s apathy leads them to eventually acquire the companionship of some anarchist AIDS queers hell bent on assassination, but eventually convince them of a more suitable responsible target.
It is both this rage and apathy from the main characters’ perspective on their past that I identified with. The novel’s exploration became an outlet to all those feelings from my teens. At 23, at last, in this insane tale, I emerged with a personal revelation that I could despair over my not so fabulous high school experience in retreat or coast along memories that defined me good or bad. Or even sometimes I can do either. The trick is not to become absorbed by it so much so that nothing, not even the past means anything anymore.
After that I read James Robert Baker’s Adrenaline, which came out during the 80′s. I was greatly concerned about that fact. Luckily I found a story which didn’t mire down into the whole political gay angry at AIDS genre, but a story of personalized anger towards the very fertilization that cultivated the need for being quite pissed-off. Baker’s Adrenaline insisted that I really revisit the years of my teens but from another person’s eyes, all they way across the country. When I was finished I thought what if I had read this when I was fifteen? No doubt it would have engaged me, but how would I have received its characters and its story? Would it have made my life better? I honestly don’t think so.
James Robert Baker in both books wrote both against and within the same discourse about gay men that pervaded my teens. The tensions between a personal story which contextualizes the stereotype of gay men as being bullied, as in Adrenaline, and a story that explores two lovers on the same battlefield years later after that first battle, as in Tim and Pete, reveal an angry author that struggled for years with bullying and identity. I find it sad to note here that James Robert Baker committed suicide as well years later in 1997. According to the information on Wikipedia, the negative reaction to Tim and Pete as well as downward financial spiral further aided the emotional turmoil of Baker’s life. The Gay Times in the United Kingdom wrote, “Baker’s suicide is particularly tragic because it robs American gay writing of a refreshingly distinctive voice quite unlike the po-faced prose of so many of his contemporaries.”[20]
And to my experience
Looking back now, from this perspective, I can definitively say it does get better.
I have gone from being thirteen and up until the day I turned seventeen, I was always personally filled with emotional polarization. I was gay and okay with it myself; I embraced it. The day to day existence always aware that others thought I was unworthy, living a life on the outside, and being harassed because it, was not so tasteful.
As an escape, I wrote poetry and studied gay poetry. I immersed myself in popular music; of course I gravitated to Madonna. I satiated need to feel connected to the gay culture by reading The Advocate where I found news articles and interviews which often focused on the fight against perception of the sickly AIDS tropes which almost defined the modern gay man into the mid-1990s.
I sneaked gay porn mags home from a country store. Magazines like Playguy or Mandate offered me another view of gay men, albeit a skewed unrealistic view, but one that served its purpose to a horny gay boy. Often I imagined sometimes that when I grew up this would define myself as I emerged from my teens into a gay man.
All this was done as if under the cloak of darkness. Everyone knew I was gay, but no one needed to know what I did when I was not a school. I kept it very secret that I went seeking those edges where dark undercurrents of sexual hedonism gave way to the outlandish pride of self.
To say that I was fearful of a backlash could only underscore my loneliness. I was well aware of gay men from a much earlier age, as I noticed the comments from my aunt and my mother about gay-ray, or from television’s fay limp wrist single uncle who always became the butt of a Fred Sanford-like character’s jokes. But however from those perspectives I found a lively person who found his own humor and self-worth.
How it gets better, really
Eventually, after all my self-internalizing, I headed down that path. For four years suicide was an option. My first real attempt was at 13, which lead me to the psych ward at the local hospital for about 1 hour. I knew after that that I had only one choice and that was to accept myself as gay.
Then when there were allusions that worried guidance councilors, I had several meetings, until one day I flat out told one of them. Her response was simply, that I hope I was aware that I was choosing a hard life. I knew it better than she would ever have let herself know. The daily harassment and loneliness was enough to know that. At my disappointment in our meeting, I realized that she and I both were wrong. It did not have to be a hard life. I couldn’t stop the name calling, but the loneliness is something I had control over.
All my friends knew I was gay and most accepted me without hesitation and often with tons of questions. But none of them knew what I was going through on the inside. Only one person knew me so well. On the way home that afternoon riding across the bridge, I told my mother. Not a good time to reveal it. At first she fought it, then denied it, and eventually that evening she and I talked. It had helped that I told her. I was never afraid she would disown me as that was not how she was raised. I just always wanted to protect her, so I never was honest.
After that things started to change. I was more secure so I started to take chances. Chances that made me feel less lonely as I jumped from being a marginalized person trying to disappear in the crowd to something resembling a punkfag. Following after Madonna and a few other artist I wore dog choke chains, handcuffs, and added costume jewelry. If I were going to be taunted and demeaned, then what the heck? Give ‘em more reason and put in their faces! It worked kinda, now only the metal head taunted me. Even so, no matter now, I was who I wanted to be 100%.
Still it wasn’t a picnic, I was ever mindful that I was on the outside, just now I spooked them a bit.
It gets better with help
Then one day getting better started. I convinced my mother to let me bleach and color my hair. My original hairdresser wouldn’t do it, more out of fear of upsetting my mom. So I was given an appointment with someone over at the mall, some guy she went to school with. I arrived a bit early as I was nervous since I knew a bit about him; number one, I knew he was gay and that he had said hi to me one night.
Over the next few months, Carlton became my hair dresser and friend. We added a purple streak at one of my temples, then blue, then a disastrous style where it was two toned. Then that summer we fully bleached my hair, eventually making it white blonde. By summer I had changed looks to something more preppy, but still provocative with over-sized dress shirts I tied at the ends and Ocean Pacific shorts that from behind could not be seen. It was a comfortable look in my hometown’s humidity.
I also starting bicycling with Carlton sometimes, spending entire Sundays cycling from one end of town to the other. He listened, offered me advice, encouraged me as much as possible to express myself, and to my surprise even asked for my opinion. I can say that without a doubt my friendship with Carlton made it all easier to cope.
Yeah my teens were hard, especially from 13 to 16, but the one thing I realize now that as with suicide, living is too a choice and how you go about it makes all the difference.
But still sometimes it is not enough
Even though now I can say I made it out. There were some who didn’t. I remember a young man, much like myself, who was very outward with his sexuality. He worked at a record store and I can still see his display of albums by Bronksi Beat, Erasure, and Until December. His mother was a hairdresser that was quite open and was close friends with many gay and lesbians. One day I learned that he took his life because he could not bare to tell her about himself. Sadly, she knew and accepted him. But he never knew.
Even in my mid-twenties, I knew someone who I saw quite often at the bar. He was out as far as you could get, took his life because he felt that he was never going to find the love he so wanted because he was gay. Then there was another older gentleman I was made aware of who took his life for the same reason. In both cases these men were not teenager, but adults who circulated in gay life.
Sadder, though, is that it even comes from gays to gays. For instance, I knew a young man when I first moved to DC. He was quite heavy set but a wonderful loving person. Everyone was his friend and everyone loved to be around him at parties and social events. To say that he was never alone would be a lie because one day, he killed himself. He was still very much a virgin and never dated. No one ever tried to set him up on date, or take time to see beyond his weight.
Where do we go?
I would say it is nearly impossible to combat low self worth with just narratives and supportive words. Especially when it comes from a feeling of insecurity because we are bullied or because words or names make us feel less worthy of life. I can say, hey it gets better to someone a billion times. A parent can support their son unconditionally. A friend can listen for hours on end. An rock star can offer his experience. A president can address the troublesome nature of it all. And yes all that does help. It helps immeasurably.
But we must learn respect. And I mean not expect it, but give it freely without reason or burden. There should be no cause to believe we are superior. No pedestal to which we attempt to ascend. No book by which we claim entry into the kingdom of heaven. No moral belief that we speak for God. Once we respect one another then bullying, harassment, and intolerance will have to finally surrender.
Is that a pipe dream? If so, then all each of us has to offer is that it only gets better.
Related Links:
James Robert Baker’s Wikipedia biography
Gay suicide: Dan Savage, Ellen DeGeneres and what to do about bullying
