It Gets Better (30 page)

I love you, guys. Stay strong.

DELAWARE, OH

 

 

 

I
grew up in Delaware, Ohio, a small rural town just outside of Columbus, and I was picked on mercilessly in junior high and high school for acting “feminine.” I was called a faggot on a regular basis. I was called a lot of things on a regular basis. Every derogatory name used for gays was at some point directed at me. My parents are also extremely religious; my father's a Pentecostal minister, so I had to deal with bigotry at home, as well.

All of this, of course, made coming out extremely difficult. I was in church every week hearing the pastor preach that gays are going to hell. There was even a rumor started that I was fornicating with another member of the church and we were infecting each other, and those around us, with AIDS. It was pretty bad. I dealt with a lot of inner turmoil and self-hatred for a very long time.

Even though things were pretty bad growing up, the great thing about high school is it doesn't last forever. After I graduated I went to Ohio University, a school that's extremely open and accepting of everybody and anyone. I met a remarkable group of friends who I still keep in touch with. I came out in college and was even a part of starting an amazing support group for LGBT people of color there called SHADES—the first of its kind at OU.

When I told my family I was gay, there was some resistance but they all said the same thing, that they loved me no matter what. My friends were also extremely supportive, and most of them said they had already known. Altogether, coming out wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be.

When I came out to my extremely religious mother she said that she didn't agree with my lifestyle but that she loved me just the same. My father echoed this sentiment. My parent's initial reaction was one of avoidance. My sexuality was just something we didn't talk about. Biblically, I knew their stance and they knew mine. But they are slowly coming around. When I first came out, my mother didn't want to hear anything about my love life. Now she actually wants to meet my boyfriends. And my father has even started inviting my boyfriends to family functions. So it gets better.

I moved back to Delaware recently and it has dawned on me how important leaving was. I was able to discover people who were just like me, and live a life that was void of any hatred. That experience made me a much stronger person and gave me the ability to confront the stereotypes and bigotry that used to go on here all the time. And Delaware has changed some, too. There are LGBT groups now where that never could have existed when I was growing up here. So, sometimes it just takes time.

If you're a teen in a city like Delaware, Ohio, seek out the gay community where you live. There are groups and organizations that can help you. One great organization in Columbus is the Kaleidoscope Youth Center. It's an organization specifically designed to be a safe space for LGBT youth in junior high and high school. So find a center like that near you. And if there isn't a gay community near you, go to the biggest city around you. Or find an older gay person or an ally that you can trust, that you can talk to.

Suicide is never the only option. Please, please, please do not let the bullies win. High school is only four years of your life. There is so much more out there that you need to experience. There's a whole world out there waiting for you that is much better than the one you're living in. It does get better.

TALLAHASSEE, FL

 

 

 

I
walk into a rehearsal of my theater company, The Mickee Faust Academy for the REALLY Dramatic Arts, and I see about thirty people—all of them the oddest of odd ducks—milling around, laughing, poring over the scripts, swapping jokes. And I think to myself, “I'm actually happy. How in God's name did that happen?”

It almost didn't.

I've been queer since I was born, suspected it by age five, and was happy to discover its sexual component at age seven with a blonde my age named Sunny during a game we called—and to this day I'm embarrassed to remember—“milking the cow.” You can well imagine. Around age twelve, I was finally able to put a name to my inner roilings when I looked up the word
homosexuality
in a dictionary. I had heard my older sister use the word with some vehemence when describing to my parents how she'd stumbled upon her female college roommate in bed with a woman, and the fact that I found the context intriguing made me suspect the word had particular relevance to me. The definition in the dictionary, “sexual desire directed at a person of one's own sex,” thrilled me to death. But I wanted further clarification. I thought I was being immensely discreet when I off-handedly mentioned at dinner that I'd looked up the word “
homosex
—” I didn't even have time to finish the word. It was like I'd shot off a gun and stampeded cattle. The commotion it caused left me with the strong impression that
homosexual
was the wrong side of the sheets to be on.

Right then and there I went underground. I didn't want to be outted as any more queer than I already was.

When my mother was six months pregnant with me she developed a kidney infection. My family was living on an American military base in Germany at the time. The doctors gave her an antibiotic that they knew could do harm to the fetus, but it was the only drug they had in their arsenal that might save her life so they crossed their fingers and gave it to her anyway.

After I was born everything seemed hunky-dory until my ninth year, when I started having visions. I'd be sitting on the back of our old Chevy looking up at the stars and then all of a sudden I'd be six feet away looking over at myself looking up at the stars. That's when they discovered that a chemical imbalance caused by the introduction of drugs to the fetal nervous system had left me not quite blind as a bat but definitely deaf as a doornail.

So by the time I was twelve I was a freak. I'd already been feeling out of sorts with my body, and the hallucinations had been the least of it. I'd put on weight and turned chubby as a hamster, had a Moe-like bowl haircut, and my two front teeth were fangs because I'd whacked myself in the mouth with the vacuum cleaner handle I'd used as a bazooka during a game of war. Add to that a pair of Coke-bottle glasses and a box-sized hearing aid that fit between my budding breasts like a third one and the picture you get isn't pretty.

I'd look in the mirror and what I saw filled me with self-loathing and anger. It seemed as if all my secret desires had been turned inside out to expose me as the queer little freak that I was.

The bullying I was to undergo for the next long years of my life wasn't so much from other people as from myself. I hated myself. Hated the picture I made, even when that picture changed as I grew older and I became a pretty girl—exchanging the glasses for contacts, the box hearing aid for a clever little one that could be hidden behind my ears. The image of my body as ridiculous and shameful was permanently burned into my brain.

But what I hated even more was loving girls while pretending to love boys.

I liked the boys, considered them my friends, even liked the sexual games we played together, but I could never really reciprocate their more tender emotions. If they ever got moony, I'd turn brusque or standoffish or just plain curt and cruel. I sometimes deeply hurt the boys I liked the most. As for the girls, I felt as if I was constantly tricking them—trying to trip them up into making admissions of longing for me that I could never dare make to them. All of which added more layers of self-loathing.

I grew up admiring certain principles, “to thine own self be true” primary among them. And there was no way I could honor that principle, lying the way I did. But I was also a child who wanted to be loved. Always the kid in the family who needed to be told, “I love you,” over and over again. I was convinced that if I ever admitted any of my queer longing, no one on earth would ever love me again.

So, as I grew older, I started drinking and drugging myself into oblivion and twice ended up in a mental hospital after trying to kill myself. I was being made sick from all the lying; made sick from the fear of losing love.

And then one day, who knows why, I got tired of making myself suffer. I knew in my heart that my self-loathing was misguided—that what I ought to hate wasn't myself but the forces in the world that made me hate myself; the people who were so unimaginative that they couldn't see me for the sweetheart that I was. And I knew, too, that being true to myself, loving myself, would be one of the strongest political statements I could ever make. It was then, in my early twenties, after I'd simply changed my mind, that I came out of the closet, and began to look around for people in the world who would love me for who I was.

I was surprised to find those people everywhere—they were my teachers, my coworkers, my doctors, my childhood friends. And those people included my family.

My parents and older sister, who had once had such vehement reactions to the word
homosexual
had over the years learned new ways of thinking themselves. And when I came out to them they were nothing but loving.

Even to this day my queer friends and I have to face idiots who, with sorrowful fury, warn us of the hellfires that await us for being true to ourselves. When I was younger, those idiots filled me with fear and anger. But as I grew older and happier, that anger and fear evaporated and turned into . . . well, a kind of laughter. The ones who would judge me as harshly as I once judged myself have themselves become the ridiculous ones. Because I have the irrefutable evidence that belies their savage and silly condemnation of queerness: my own happy life.

RICHMOND, VA

 

 

 

 

W
hen I was in middle school I didn't know about the whole negative stigma about being gay. I certainly didn't know I was any different from any other kid. When I came out to my best friend in middle school, he told everybody. As a result I lost every single friend I'd ever made since childhood, including him. From then on most of the guys at the school started mistreating me. I was called fag, had things thrown at me, was singled out and humiliated daily.

High school was hardly any better. I was a really anxious kid and loathed interacting with other people. I remember having to give a report in front of my whole ninth-grade English class. The entire time I was trying to give this speech, a group of boys in the back were heckling me, trying to make me mess up, which, of course, I did. I was shaking. I was so upset and nervous and couldn't go on. And the teacher just sat at her desk doing nothing about it. But another girl slammed her hands on her desk and shouted, “What's your problem? Why are you doing this to him?”

One of the boys in the group spat back, “Because he's a fag.”

Finally I just went back to my seat, crying, and slumped out of sight.

The only way I managed to keep my sanity was in art and theater class. None of my bullies took any of those classes and it was full of weirdos so it became my sanctuary. I later attended an art college a comfortable distance away, where I met some of the most amazingly open people you can imagine, the kind of friendships that last a lifetime. But even in college I struggled with crippling anxiety, depression, and internalized homophobia. It took two years of counseling and therapy to overcome those dark years of being harassed and made to feel ashamed for simply being who I am. But I got through to the other side.

I came out to my parents shortly after graduating college. My mom said some of the most beautiful things I've ever heard from anybody, things I wished I'd been told when I was growing up and being bullied. She said, “You are beautiful because of who you are. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with who you are.” Those words really stick with me.

Life for gay kids gets infinitely better after high school. You learn who you are and realize that actually
because
you are gay you're going to have a much more exciting and interesting life than the assholes who tried to make you feel bad about it in the first place. If you kill yourself in high school, you can't have the rewarding experience of reclaiming your life. You deny yourself the chance to meet and fall in love with someone. Worst of all, you deny yourself the best revenge possible on your bullies: living your life to the absolute fullest.