This was powerful. I wasn’t subjected to as much direct cruelty as him, but I see much of my own childhood in his story. I grew up around the same time as him, in a similar area to him. The threat...
Exemplary
This was powerful.
I wasn’t subjected to as much direct cruelty as him, but I see much of my own childhood in his story. I grew up around the same time as him, in a similar area to him. The threat of masculine cruelty was like a suffocating weight on my chest for my entire childhood. I was “lucky” enough to be able to hide the things that made me different, mostly, but that didn’t really bring any actual relief. Instead, I was just nervous all the time that I was going to be “found out” and immediately become fair game. Running parallel to my own actual thoughts was a persistent, continual meta-thought line that constantly regulated my behavior: who I talked to, how I said something, how expressive my hands were when I talked, what I showed interest in.
There was a right and wrong way to do all of those things, and the wrong way invited a cruelty that was mostly accepted. Boys will be boys, and don’t make yourself a target and all that.
I avoided most of the cruelty, for which I'm grateful, but it never felt like a relief, even at the time, because the threat of it was still always present -- my vigilance was still always required.
My brother used to call me gay all the time. He was right, of course, but he didn’t know he was right and he wasn’t doing it because he knew or even suspected. He was doing it to be cruel, because calling someone gay was the worst thing you could call them, because being gay was the worst thing you could be as a man.
He also did it because cruelty was what guys did to one another for fun, and as a guy you were supposed to accept that cruelty, because disrupting another guy’s fun (provided it was masculine fun) went against the rules. Masculinity commanded you to take joy in wounding others while also commanding you to be unwounded, which you could only do by pretending to be undamaged by others' harms. It wasn't just name-calling. Dares, towel snapping, having feelings -- anything could be and was weaponized against other guys, and seemingly the only winning move was to pretend that whatever was hurting you wasn't even a weapon in the first place.
When my brother would call me gay, my father would step in and try to put a stop to it. Only, he didn’t say to him “don’t make fun of your brother”, he said things like “don’t say such horrible things about your brother”. Similar statements with vastly different impacts. The former would have affirmed my right to not be bullied -- armor against the cruelty. But instead, the latter only deepened the sense that being gay was, in fact, the worst thing you could be. What was supposed to be my shield instead dealt double damage to me. It was hard to deal with.
But even harder was to do the masculine thing and pretend like it didn't hurt at all.
I'm much older now. More healed, and living in a vastly different world. In the current world, I'm a teacher, well into my career, and I get to work with kids every year who are increasingly aware of and comfortable with who they are. I get to watch young LGBT children have opportunities that were never offered to me, because being queer is no longer the worst thing you can be, and because there's an increasing consensus that cruelty is neither fun nor fundamental to developing manhood. It warms my heart to see them growing up without the crushing weight I experienced that was very nearly genuinely fatal to me.
There's also a broader awareness of and acceptance of difference in general. It's not just limited to queer kids. My students with disabilities, or my students on the autism spectrum, or my male students who are sensitive and artsy -- all of them face a base level of acceptance and understanding that would be completely foreign to child-me.
It doesn't mean there aren't issues and that kids still aren't mean to each other. That definitely still happens. It also doesn't mean that everyone is fully understood. Lots of people still have a lot to learn, myself included.
What it does mean though is that if "people are different and that's okay" and "live and let live" were societal dials measuring a sort of widespread attitudinal baseline, they were tuned to nearly 0 when I was a kid. There was a clear lane to be in, and clear punishments for anyone who couldn't or wouldn't stay inside of it.
In the time since then, though, those dials have been slowly but surely turned up. Considerably. I don't know what numbers they're at now, and I don't know how high the dials can go, but I do know that they're well above zero, and my students are much better off because of that.
I felt a lot of this. It's important to note that homophobia isn't the only harmful thing you can teach children. I was bullied a lot when I was a kid, but thankfully I was fairly infrequently...
I felt a lot of this. It's important to note that homophobia isn't the only harmful thing you can teach children. I was bullied a lot when I was a kid, but thankfully I was fairly infrequently called Gay. That's not to say I wasn't affected by homophobia; I grew up religious, so the most homophobic person I had to deal with was me.
I was bullied for so many different things that I can't even remember most of them anymore. Most of the time it was because I was fat. I really understand what he meant when he said that the teachers had learned to stop putting the bullies in detention because there would be nobody left. But unlike his story, I think the staff at the schools I went to figured out that lesson long before I arrived at most of the many schools I went to. I was also in school right when "zero tolerance" policies had become popular, so I would often find myself being punished for the crime of being bullied. When I couldn't take it anymore I would get into fights and that would lead to me taking most of my middle school years in alternative schools, where my peers would quite literally be criminals - and much more aggressive, to boot.
I really don't want to go too dark in this comment, especially because I have talked about this here a few years ago, but I also felt strongly after hearing him talk about how important that one lesbian woman was in his life - how her gentle, quiet support made him choose to not go through with his plans. Grace is a powerful thing; you never know when a simple act of compassion from you could be an act of providence to the person you're doing it for. For all of it's faults, kindness is the only thing that keeps the world from completely falling apart. That's an important thing to keep in mind.
I love this so much, unfortunately relatable. I hope that the nasty rhetoric around the LGBTQ+ community dies off and we are able to just live as we are and not suffer the hatred that is slowly on...
I love this so much, unfortunately relatable. I hope that the nasty rhetoric around the LGBTQ+ community dies off and we are able to just live as we are and not suffer the hatred that is slowly on the rise.
This was powerful.
I wasn’t subjected to as much direct cruelty as him, but I see much of my own childhood in his story. I grew up around the same time as him, in a similar area to him. The threat of masculine cruelty was like a suffocating weight on my chest for my entire childhood. I was “lucky” enough to be able to hide the things that made me different, mostly, but that didn’t really bring any actual relief. Instead, I was just nervous all the time that I was going to be “found out” and immediately become fair game. Running parallel to my own actual thoughts was a persistent, continual meta-thought line that constantly regulated my behavior: who I talked to, how I said something, how expressive my hands were when I talked, what I showed interest in.
There was a right and wrong way to do all of those things, and the wrong way invited a cruelty that was mostly accepted. Boys will be boys, and don’t make yourself a target and all that.
I avoided most of the cruelty, for which I'm grateful, but it never felt like a relief, even at the time, because the threat of it was still always present -- my vigilance was still always required.
My brother used to call me gay all the time. He was right, of course, but he didn’t know he was right and he wasn’t doing it because he knew or even suspected. He was doing it to be cruel, because calling someone gay was the worst thing you could call them, because being gay was the worst thing you could be as a man.
He also did it because cruelty was what guys did to one another for fun, and as a guy you were supposed to accept that cruelty, because disrupting another guy’s fun (provided it was masculine fun) went against the rules. Masculinity commanded you to take joy in wounding others while also commanding you to be unwounded, which you could only do by pretending to be undamaged by others' harms. It wasn't just name-calling. Dares, towel snapping, having feelings -- anything could be and was weaponized against other guys, and seemingly the only winning move was to pretend that whatever was hurting you wasn't even a weapon in the first place.
When my brother would call me gay, my father would step in and try to put a stop to it. Only, he didn’t say to him “don’t make fun of your brother”, he said things like “don’t say such horrible things about your brother”. Similar statements with vastly different impacts. The former would have affirmed my right to not be bullied -- armor against the cruelty. But instead, the latter only deepened the sense that being gay was, in fact, the worst thing you could be. What was supposed to be my shield instead dealt double damage to me. It was hard to deal with.
But even harder was to do the masculine thing and pretend like it didn't hurt at all.
I'm much older now. More healed, and living in a vastly different world. In the current world, I'm a teacher, well into my career, and I get to work with kids every year who are increasingly aware of and comfortable with who they are. I get to watch young LGBT children have opportunities that were never offered to me, because being queer is no longer the worst thing you can be, and because there's an increasing consensus that cruelty is neither fun nor fundamental to developing manhood. It warms my heart to see them growing up without the crushing weight I experienced that was very nearly genuinely fatal to me.
There's also a broader awareness of and acceptance of difference in general. It's not just limited to queer kids. My students with disabilities, or my students on the autism spectrum, or my male students who are sensitive and artsy -- all of them face a base level of acceptance and understanding that would be completely foreign to child-me.
It doesn't mean there aren't issues and that kids still aren't mean to each other. That definitely still happens. It also doesn't mean that everyone is fully understood. Lots of people still have a lot to learn, myself included.
What it does mean though is that if "people are different and that's okay" and "live and let live" were societal dials measuring a sort of widespread attitudinal baseline, they were tuned to nearly 0 when I was a kid. There was a clear lane to be in, and clear punishments for anyone who couldn't or wouldn't stay inside of it.
In the time since then, though, those dials have been slowly but surely turned up. Considerably. I don't know what numbers they're at now, and I don't know how high the dials can go, but I do know that they're well above zero, and my students are much better off because of that.
I felt a lot of this. It's important to note that homophobia isn't the only harmful thing you can teach children. I was bullied a lot when I was a kid, but thankfully I was fairly infrequently called Gay. That's not to say I wasn't affected by homophobia; I grew up religious, so the most homophobic person I had to deal with was me.
I was bullied for so many different things that I can't even remember most of them anymore. Most of the time it was because I was fat. I really understand what he meant when he said that the teachers had learned to stop putting the bullies in detention because there would be nobody left. But unlike his story, I think the staff at the schools I went to figured out that lesson long before I arrived at most of the many schools I went to. I was also in school right when "zero tolerance" policies had become popular, so I would often find myself being punished for the crime of being bullied. When I couldn't take it anymore I would get into fights and that would lead to me taking most of my middle school years in alternative schools, where my peers would quite literally be criminals - and much more aggressive, to boot.
I really don't want to go too dark in this comment, especially because I have talked about this here a few years ago, but I also felt strongly after hearing him talk about how important that one lesbian woman was in his life - how her gentle, quiet support made him choose to not go through with his plans. Grace is a powerful thing; you never know when a simple act of compassion from you could be an act of providence to the person you're doing it for. For all of it's faults, kindness is the only thing that keeps the world from completely falling apart. That's an important thing to keep in mind.
Unfortunately relatable. I didn't even realize I was queer and I was harassed for it.
Beautiful speech. Sad it had to be made.
I love this so much, unfortunately relatable. I hope that the nasty rhetoric around the LGBTQ+ community dies off and we are able to just live as we are and not suffer the hatred that is slowly on the rise.
LGBTQ+ Rights are Human Rights.