Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Link to original post: [drupal=5017]Making the Rainbow Connection: How I Haphazardly Became a Friend of the LGBTQ Community [/drupal]
*I wrote this essay a few weeks ago and it has gotten a lot of acclaim where I live so I wanted to share it. A professor has recently approached me and has asked me to lead a lecture on this essay and I couldn't be happier to share my world on a larger scale. If you guys remember my essay "For Black History Month: Thoughts From a Former Racist" from last year, this is pretty much a spiritual sequel to it.*
About a year ago I wrote an essay about how I used to be a racist in commemoration of Black History month. Near the end of the essay I mentioned that I had lapsed into prejudice behavior again during my high school and early college years and that the story would be for another day. Well, that day has come and, once again, I’ll be sharing some stories about the person I used to be. As you may have guessed from the title of this essay, I used to be prejudice against gay people. Unlike my phase with being racist against blacks, this phase in my life lasted significantly longer (about six years) and my beliefs were largely supported by the people that I was commonly around. Now I suppose that this essay could also be entitled “I Was a Teenage Bigot” but as time has marched on I have found myself being more forgiving towards my past beliefs and actions. I have learned to forgive myself because I have learned from these experiences, despite how ugly they were in hindsight. I am a different person now than I was back then but I’d still like to take this time to present the person I used to be.
I distinctly remember when I learned what “gay” meant. It was in the sixth grade and I was in my world history class working on a group project with some of my classmates. Back then I liked to look up new words and try to implement them into my vocabulary. The word of the day for that particular day was “queer” as in “strange or unusual.” I used the word to describe myself and one of my classmates looked at me cockeyed and laughed “you’re queer?” Another classmate laughed but I didn’t understand why at the time. This seemingly forgettable event started about three months of daily ridicule. It was during that time span that I learned what “being gay” was from the seemingly endless harassment. Apparently I “liked to have sex with guys” but being as naïve as I was at the time I didn’t even know how that was physically possible. It seemed that everything about me was labeled as “gay.” I was suddenly “gay” because I was shy and because I wasn’t all too good at that many sports. My clothes were “gay” and the way I walked was “gay.” It went on and on and there were days where I tried to fake being sick to stay home. I was angry, depressed, and confused and I just wanted to curl up into a ball and die. Aside from my suicidal episode in late 2008, this was the darkest time in my life.
It wasn’t until I approached the principal about the bullying that people started to back off. The people who made sure they knew I was “gay” from the time I got on the bus in the morning to the time that I jumped back off in the afternoon suddenly started to say that they felt persecuted. They were just “messing around” and one of the parents of the bullies insisted that “I was being too sensitive and overreacting.” Sensitive. Overreacting. Little did I know at the time that these two words would largely define how I viewed gay people for the next six years.
A lot of great things happened during my eighth grade year. I stopped most of my racist behavior and compulsive lying and I dropped swearing cold turkey. I initially did a lot of these things to impress my first girlfriend, whom I started dating at the end of that school year, but they ended up becoming permanent parts of my personality. The teasing came to a screeching halt simply based on the fact that I had a girlfriend and, for a time, I was on cloud nine. Our relationship lasted until early my sophomore year of high school. Things started to boil underneath the surface but I didn’t realize it until it was far too late. She broke up with me but people didn’t understand why because we never fought. With my pride wounded and my struggle to deal with the reason for why it happened (religious expectations, basically), I didn’t want to talk about it and people began to make assumptions. “Is he secretly gay? Is that why they never had sex?” I dealt with this for about a month and little did I know that a megaton event was about to happen in my family that would ultimately push me over the edge to becoming hostile towards the LGBTQ community.
Early during my junior year of high school, my older cousin came out of the closet and, needless to say, my family didn’t take the news well. There was a lot of denial and blame being tossed around. There were talks of how it was probably a phase and that there was “too much evidence that he was into girls.” Suddenly his best friend, a girl who later came out as a lesbian herself, was a prospective wife for the future. The leaders in their church suddenly didn’t want anything to do with him despite the fact that he was in seminary school learning how to become a missionary. Derogatory terms and jokes started to slip into conversations when he wasn’t around. The situation was largely treated by the adults like a dirty little secret but, like all secrets, it started to leak out little by little. My cousin was gay and, being largely Christian conservative, my family was beside themselves with grief, anger and confusion over it.
I didn’t know what to think of the situation at first. In actuality I didn’t know very much about gay people aside from what I had seen on TV and in movies. “How did he become gay,” I thought. This was around the time when I was introduced to the “Vampire Effect Theory” that’s still fairly common amongst the religious right in America. The idea is that being around gay people or even having gay thoughts “turned” you gay and this what my family largely concluded about my cousin. Being molested or ***** could turn you gay too and, given my past, this was when I started to worry. I looked up to my cousin and this chain of events left me disillusioned. I had based a lot of my own interests and hobbies after his. I remember how as far back as 1998 he’d download episodes of Dragonball Z in Japanese off the internet (this was back when a 30 minute episode took all day to download) and how he played in online Starcraft tournaments years before online gaming caught on. To me this was beyond cool. My cousin was basically who I wanted to become when I grew up and I felt like my ideal image of him was coming apart at the seams but little did I know at the time that things would soon go from bad to worse.
My cousin left Christianity about half a year after he came out and, unlike me when I did it, he was very open and in my family’s face about it. He dropped out of seminary school and started to live a devil-may-care lifestyle. My cousin started smoking, binge drinking, and doing whatever drugs he could find at parties and raves. Naturally, my family was devastated. My family kept insisting that being gay was making him change like this and for years I believed them. To me, the way that he lived was “the gay lifestyle” and I started to hate him for it. He started showing up at family gatherings less and less until Thanksgiving was the only day I ever saw him each year. It was obvious that he couldn’t stand being around us and he usually left within an hour of showing up. To his face my family tried to wear masks of sincerity but the lines ran and the disguises were transparent. They did the same for his boyfriends who they usually referred to as “boy toys” and “boy things” as opposed to their actual names when they weren’t around. I noticed that a lot of the feelings of anger, disgust, and disappointment that my family felt towards my cousin were usually put on my cousins’ boyfriends because they were convinced that it was his boyfriends that were keeping him in the lifestyle. Reality eventually gave my cousin the swift kick that he needed and he dropped the alcoholism and drug abuse but the criticism stayed about the same. My cousin was seen as a sort of “recovering homosexual” and that overcoming his personal problems was his way of “fighting the sickness.”
I had a lot of my own personal problems during this time period. Friends and family saw me as a sort of oddity for remaining single. There were a few times where my parents both pressed me both jokingly and seriously about whether I was gay or not because of how long I had been single. It became a daily issue as people seemingly forced me to reevaluate my personality and behavior. Even adults seemed to jump in on the idea that because I wasn’t the most masculine of teenage boys, I might have been gay. With all this pressure, I was absolutely terrified of waking up one morning and coming to the conclusion that I liked guys because I thought that’s how it happened. I didn’t want to be like my cousin and I didn’t want to be like the guys on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” I didn’t know of anyone who was openly gay in my high school so I had no point of reference aside from stereotypes. My high school tried to establish a GSA but it was forced underground within a week because so many parents were “outraged” that the school would promote the “gay agenda.” Gay people remained a mystery to me as if they were people who unknowingly lurked in the shadows, waiting for their chance to pounce, and turn people gay. I grew more and more paranoid as time went on as I saw what coming out had done to my cousin’s connections with our family. I was afraid of being alone. I was afraid of being persecuted. I was afraid of turning into someone who was “innately immoral” and lived a hedonistic lifestyle. There were days where I was so ashamed of even the possibility of having a gay thought that I’d go all day without talking to anyone.
As time moved on I found myself becoming more and more hostile towards people I even thought might have been gay. I remember shouting at one of my teachers (who has since become a lifelong mentor) because she presented her ideas on the issues surrounding the persecution of the LGBTQ community. I remember targeting guys with high voices and those that wore bright colors. I used words like ****** often and nobody seemed to mind. I saw gay people as people who wore leotards and farted glitter as they walked because I feel that this made me slightly more comfortable with my lack of masculinity. “Well, I might not be the manliest man but at least I’m not some ***.” These thoughts and behaviors continued onto my early college years when I had a fateful encounter in England in the summer of 2007.
I had a gay roommate for my first trip to England. He was essentially a walking stereotype and as soon as I saw him I knew that there would be problems. He had a high pitched voice and a lisp, he wore glitter, lip gloss, and Britney Spears perfume, he wore women’s shoes (slip ons, not heels), he sang show tunes out loud (Wicked was his favorite musical), he flapped his wrists and hopped when he was excited, he ran up to random women on the street and complimented their clothes, he used words like “honey” and “delicious” every other sentence, and he went out clubbing every night and usually didn’t come back until 4-5 because he’d “hunt down a guy”, as he put it. We pretty much hated each other from the get-go. Our back and forth usually consisted of me jabbing him for being gay and him jabbing me for being a republican. He’d tell explicit stories of his sexual encounters and I’d lambast him for using his dead father’s insurance money to go to clubs and have casual sex with strangers. He’d try to hit on me and I’d try to embarrass him in front of the group. He’d talk about how he liked seducing drunken straight guys and I’d openly talk about how annoying everyone thought he was and how embarrassing it was to be around him. We had to share a room at each of the hotels we went to and he took the king sized bed while I took the couch that my feet hung off of. We were every bit an odd couple and no matter how much we begged the group leader to let us change roommates, he refused to budge and insisted that we could learn things from each other.
There was one night when we were in a small motel in Stanford-Upon-Avon in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t a nightclub for miles and my roommate felt stir crazy. He started hitting on me again and I continued to brush him off in my usual fashion. We became increasing agitated with each other as we sat in that small hotel room with nothing to do. “Have you ever had sex with man,” he asked. “No and I don’t want to,” I said trying to force myself to sleep. “Why not,” he pressed. “I just don’t,” I retorted. “How do you know that you wouldn’t like it,” he asked crawling closer to me. I didn’t want to tell him about being molested because I figured he’d use that as ammo so I simply replied, “I just know I wouldn’t like it.” That answer wasn’t good enough for him and he pressed further. What followed was nearly two hours of us going back and forth trying to psychoanalyze each other. He ended up pointing out that I was very insecure about my sexuality and gender identity and I ended up pointing out that he lived the way that he did because he was scared to death of dying and the idea of being thought of as ordinary/boring. It was clear that we both hit raw nerves but he took the initiative in exploiting my weakness. He started hitting on me even harder than he had before. He explained what he liked done to him and what he’d do to me if he had the chance. I started shaking because of how angry and terrified I was. Was he going to try to “turn me gay?” I threatened I’d hit him if he even touched me and then he started poking me and trying to touch my face. Not able to stand my ground, I took my travel journal, left and pounded on the group leader’s door. He let me in and I sat in the bathroom the rest of the night writing about how embarrassed and angry I was and how, if it took me the rest of my life, I’d get my revenge.
Despite my personal vendetta, the trip ended quietly. We went our separate ways and I never saw him again. I walked away feeling morally superior to him and felt that everything that I had believed about gay people had been confirmed. “My parents were right, gay people were essentially irresponsible, attention mongering, hedonists.” I carried these ideas for a little less than two years. I came to SEMO in the fall of 2008 and this was when I started to run into openly gay people on a fairly regular basis. I slowly started to notice that a vast majority weren’t that different from all the straight people I knew. They shared a lot of the same interests, dressed the same, talked the same, and carried out their lives the same. At first I had a hard time grappling with the idea of most gay people not being all the distinguishable from straight people and that there were some that were just like me except gay. “OH MY GOD, THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!” In time though I started to settle down and, bit by bit, I became more accepting and more tolerant.
One of the first major steps that I took towards becoming more tolerant and accepting was changing how I viewed myself. I was a slightly effeminate, metrosexual who tried way too hard to cover it up and I noticed that I had being doing this since middle school. I went through various phases of trying to fake machismo that always failed because I didn’t fool anybody. I still did things like blushed and cried when I was pressed too hard and I was ashamed of this. I tried to cover up this side of my personality because I was afraid that if I let it out that it’d “turn me gay.” When I almost entirely replaced my wardrobe for dress clothes in early 2009, it was largely my way of saying “I’m okay with myself; I can be straight and look this way too.” I was finally dressing the way that I had been afraid for years to dress and it was very liberating.
From that point forward a lot of things happened that brought me closer to the LGBTQ community. I soon had gay, bi, and even transgendered friends. I acted as support to an online friend who got a sex change operation and was trying to adjust to the world afterwards. I joined the GSA shortly after attending the Masquerade Ball in the spring of 2009 with a girl I was interested in at the time. Going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show became a thing I excitedly attended multiple times a year. I went to seminars about issues in the gay community. I openly defended gay rights and addressed stereotypes other classmates believed in Dr. Clark’s Human Sexuality class in the fall of 2010. I even went to gay bays with friends and laughed on the inside when I saw people in John Deer hats, work boots, and hunting jackets amongst transvestites. I saw the fears and insecurities I once had dwindle away and I felt that I was becoming a better person for it.
Although I have changed a lot in the past couple of years, there are some things that haven’t all too much. I still don’t like being hit on by other guys but it no longer causes me to almost completely freak out like it used to. A few times a year there will always be a few people who question my sexuality based on my friends and how I dress. My family still largely has the same attitudes and beliefs about gay people and I do find myself fighting with them when the subject gets brought up. I still only see my cousin about once a year but things have gotten slightly better for him.
Sometimes things and people never change but it’s a small comfort to know that they can for the better and that change can be profound. A person can be born a homosexual but nobody is born a homophobe. Everyone has the potential to change and everyone has the potential to learn. I feel as though I have learned a lot in the past couple of years and, amongst a group I once feared, I feel that I am accepted despite my past transgressions. I feel as though I have made the rainbow connection and, in doing so, have established foundations of friendship that will extend far into the future.
*In dedication to my high school friends who have come out since graduation as well as my aforementioned cousin. I am truly sorry for the support and understanding that I didn’t give in the years that I was closest to you all. I can only relate a little bit to the obstacles that you all have overcome since and, despite how late to the rally I was, I am here to say that I stand with you now.
Fatmanonice, January 26th, 2012
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”- Oscar Wilde
“The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball -- the further I am rolled the more I gain.”- Susan B. Anthony
“A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.”- Michelangelo
*I wrote this essay a few weeks ago and it has gotten a lot of acclaim where I live so I wanted to share it. A professor has recently approached me and has asked me to lead a lecture on this essay and I couldn't be happier to share my world on a larger scale. If you guys remember my essay "For Black History Month: Thoughts From a Former Racist" from last year, this is pretty much a spiritual sequel to it.*
About a year ago I wrote an essay about how I used to be a racist in commemoration of Black History month. Near the end of the essay I mentioned that I had lapsed into prejudice behavior again during my high school and early college years and that the story would be for another day. Well, that day has come and, once again, I’ll be sharing some stories about the person I used to be. As you may have guessed from the title of this essay, I used to be prejudice against gay people. Unlike my phase with being racist against blacks, this phase in my life lasted significantly longer (about six years) and my beliefs were largely supported by the people that I was commonly around. Now I suppose that this essay could also be entitled “I Was a Teenage Bigot” but as time has marched on I have found myself being more forgiving towards my past beliefs and actions. I have learned to forgive myself because I have learned from these experiences, despite how ugly they were in hindsight. I am a different person now than I was back then but I’d still like to take this time to present the person I used to be.
I distinctly remember when I learned what “gay” meant. It was in the sixth grade and I was in my world history class working on a group project with some of my classmates. Back then I liked to look up new words and try to implement them into my vocabulary. The word of the day for that particular day was “queer” as in “strange or unusual.” I used the word to describe myself and one of my classmates looked at me cockeyed and laughed “you’re queer?” Another classmate laughed but I didn’t understand why at the time. This seemingly forgettable event started about three months of daily ridicule. It was during that time span that I learned what “being gay” was from the seemingly endless harassment. Apparently I “liked to have sex with guys” but being as naïve as I was at the time I didn’t even know how that was physically possible. It seemed that everything about me was labeled as “gay.” I was suddenly “gay” because I was shy and because I wasn’t all too good at that many sports. My clothes were “gay” and the way I walked was “gay.” It went on and on and there were days where I tried to fake being sick to stay home. I was angry, depressed, and confused and I just wanted to curl up into a ball and die. Aside from my suicidal episode in late 2008, this was the darkest time in my life.
It wasn’t until I approached the principal about the bullying that people started to back off. The people who made sure they knew I was “gay” from the time I got on the bus in the morning to the time that I jumped back off in the afternoon suddenly started to say that they felt persecuted. They were just “messing around” and one of the parents of the bullies insisted that “I was being too sensitive and overreacting.” Sensitive. Overreacting. Little did I know at the time that these two words would largely define how I viewed gay people for the next six years.
A lot of great things happened during my eighth grade year. I stopped most of my racist behavior and compulsive lying and I dropped swearing cold turkey. I initially did a lot of these things to impress my first girlfriend, whom I started dating at the end of that school year, but they ended up becoming permanent parts of my personality. The teasing came to a screeching halt simply based on the fact that I had a girlfriend and, for a time, I was on cloud nine. Our relationship lasted until early my sophomore year of high school. Things started to boil underneath the surface but I didn’t realize it until it was far too late. She broke up with me but people didn’t understand why because we never fought. With my pride wounded and my struggle to deal with the reason for why it happened (religious expectations, basically), I didn’t want to talk about it and people began to make assumptions. “Is he secretly gay? Is that why they never had sex?” I dealt with this for about a month and little did I know that a megaton event was about to happen in my family that would ultimately push me over the edge to becoming hostile towards the LGBTQ community.
Early during my junior year of high school, my older cousin came out of the closet and, needless to say, my family didn’t take the news well. There was a lot of denial and blame being tossed around. There were talks of how it was probably a phase and that there was “too much evidence that he was into girls.” Suddenly his best friend, a girl who later came out as a lesbian herself, was a prospective wife for the future. The leaders in their church suddenly didn’t want anything to do with him despite the fact that he was in seminary school learning how to become a missionary. Derogatory terms and jokes started to slip into conversations when he wasn’t around. The situation was largely treated by the adults like a dirty little secret but, like all secrets, it started to leak out little by little. My cousin was gay and, being largely Christian conservative, my family was beside themselves with grief, anger and confusion over it.
I didn’t know what to think of the situation at first. In actuality I didn’t know very much about gay people aside from what I had seen on TV and in movies. “How did he become gay,” I thought. This was around the time when I was introduced to the “Vampire Effect Theory” that’s still fairly common amongst the religious right in America. The idea is that being around gay people or even having gay thoughts “turned” you gay and this what my family largely concluded about my cousin. Being molested or ***** could turn you gay too and, given my past, this was when I started to worry. I looked up to my cousin and this chain of events left me disillusioned. I had based a lot of my own interests and hobbies after his. I remember how as far back as 1998 he’d download episodes of Dragonball Z in Japanese off the internet (this was back when a 30 minute episode took all day to download) and how he played in online Starcraft tournaments years before online gaming caught on. To me this was beyond cool. My cousin was basically who I wanted to become when I grew up and I felt like my ideal image of him was coming apart at the seams but little did I know at the time that things would soon go from bad to worse.
My cousin left Christianity about half a year after he came out and, unlike me when I did it, he was very open and in my family’s face about it. He dropped out of seminary school and started to live a devil-may-care lifestyle. My cousin started smoking, binge drinking, and doing whatever drugs he could find at parties and raves. Naturally, my family was devastated. My family kept insisting that being gay was making him change like this and for years I believed them. To me, the way that he lived was “the gay lifestyle” and I started to hate him for it. He started showing up at family gatherings less and less until Thanksgiving was the only day I ever saw him each year. It was obvious that he couldn’t stand being around us and he usually left within an hour of showing up. To his face my family tried to wear masks of sincerity but the lines ran and the disguises were transparent. They did the same for his boyfriends who they usually referred to as “boy toys” and “boy things” as opposed to their actual names when they weren’t around. I noticed that a lot of the feelings of anger, disgust, and disappointment that my family felt towards my cousin were usually put on my cousins’ boyfriends because they were convinced that it was his boyfriends that were keeping him in the lifestyle. Reality eventually gave my cousin the swift kick that he needed and he dropped the alcoholism and drug abuse but the criticism stayed about the same. My cousin was seen as a sort of “recovering homosexual” and that overcoming his personal problems was his way of “fighting the sickness.”
I had a lot of my own personal problems during this time period. Friends and family saw me as a sort of oddity for remaining single. There were a few times where my parents both pressed me both jokingly and seriously about whether I was gay or not because of how long I had been single. It became a daily issue as people seemingly forced me to reevaluate my personality and behavior. Even adults seemed to jump in on the idea that because I wasn’t the most masculine of teenage boys, I might have been gay. With all this pressure, I was absolutely terrified of waking up one morning and coming to the conclusion that I liked guys because I thought that’s how it happened. I didn’t want to be like my cousin and I didn’t want to be like the guys on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” I didn’t know of anyone who was openly gay in my high school so I had no point of reference aside from stereotypes. My high school tried to establish a GSA but it was forced underground within a week because so many parents were “outraged” that the school would promote the “gay agenda.” Gay people remained a mystery to me as if they were people who unknowingly lurked in the shadows, waiting for their chance to pounce, and turn people gay. I grew more and more paranoid as time went on as I saw what coming out had done to my cousin’s connections with our family. I was afraid of being alone. I was afraid of being persecuted. I was afraid of turning into someone who was “innately immoral” and lived a hedonistic lifestyle. There were days where I was so ashamed of even the possibility of having a gay thought that I’d go all day without talking to anyone.
As time moved on I found myself becoming more and more hostile towards people I even thought might have been gay. I remember shouting at one of my teachers (who has since become a lifelong mentor) because she presented her ideas on the issues surrounding the persecution of the LGBTQ community. I remember targeting guys with high voices and those that wore bright colors. I used words like ****** often and nobody seemed to mind. I saw gay people as people who wore leotards and farted glitter as they walked because I feel that this made me slightly more comfortable with my lack of masculinity. “Well, I might not be the manliest man but at least I’m not some ***.” These thoughts and behaviors continued onto my early college years when I had a fateful encounter in England in the summer of 2007.
I had a gay roommate for my first trip to England. He was essentially a walking stereotype and as soon as I saw him I knew that there would be problems. He had a high pitched voice and a lisp, he wore glitter, lip gloss, and Britney Spears perfume, he wore women’s shoes (slip ons, not heels), he sang show tunes out loud (Wicked was his favorite musical), he flapped his wrists and hopped when he was excited, he ran up to random women on the street and complimented their clothes, he used words like “honey” and “delicious” every other sentence, and he went out clubbing every night and usually didn’t come back until 4-5 because he’d “hunt down a guy”, as he put it. We pretty much hated each other from the get-go. Our back and forth usually consisted of me jabbing him for being gay and him jabbing me for being a republican. He’d tell explicit stories of his sexual encounters and I’d lambast him for using his dead father’s insurance money to go to clubs and have casual sex with strangers. He’d try to hit on me and I’d try to embarrass him in front of the group. He’d talk about how he liked seducing drunken straight guys and I’d openly talk about how annoying everyone thought he was and how embarrassing it was to be around him. We had to share a room at each of the hotels we went to and he took the king sized bed while I took the couch that my feet hung off of. We were every bit an odd couple and no matter how much we begged the group leader to let us change roommates, he refused to budge and insisted that we could learn things from each other.
There was one night when we were in a small motel in Stanford-Upon-Avon in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t a nightclub for miles and my roommate felt stir crazy. He started hitting on me again and I continued to brush him off in my usual fashion. We became increasing agitated with each other as we sat in that small hotel room with nothing to do. “Have you ever had sex with man,” he asked. “No and I don’t want to,” I said trying to force myself to sleep. “Why not,” he pressed. “I just don’t,” I retorted. “How do you know that you wouldn’t like it,” he asked crawling closer to me. I didn’t want to tell him about being molested because I figured he’d use that as ammo so I simply replied, “I just know I wouldn’t like it.” That answer wasn’t good enough for him and he pressed further. What followed was nearly two hours of us going back and forth trying to psychoanalyze each other. He ended up pointing out that I was very insecure about my sexuality and gender identity and I ended up pointing out that he lived the way that he did because he was scared to death of dying and the idea of being thought of as ordinary/boring. It was clear that we both hit raw nerves but he took the initiative in exploiting my weakness. He started hitting on me even harder than he had before. He explained what he liked done to him and what he’d do to me if he had the chance. I started shaking because of how angry and terrified I was. Was he going to try to “turn me gay?” I threatened I’d hit him if he even touched me and then he started poking me and trying to touch my face. Not able to stand my ground, I took my travel journal, left and pounded on the group leader’s door. He let me in and I sat in the bathroom the rest of the night writing about how embarrassed and angry I was and how, if it took me the rest of my life, I’d get my revenge.
Despite my personal vendetta, the trip ended quietly. We went our separate ways and I never saw him again. I walked away feeling morally superior to him and felt that everything that I had believed about gay people had been confirmed. “My parents were right, gay people were essentially irresponsible, attention mongering, hedonists.” I carried these ideas for a little less than two years. I came to SEMO in the fall of 2008 and this was when I started to run into openly gay people on a fairly regular basis. I slowly started to notice that a vast majority weren’t that different from all the straight people I knew. They shared a lot of the same interests, dressed the same, talked the same, and carried out their lives the same. At first I had a hard time grappling with the idea of most gay people not being all the distinguishable from straight people and that there were some that were just like me except gay. “OH MY GOD, THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!” In time though I started to settle down and, bit by bit, I became more accepting and more tolerant.
One of the first major steps that I took towards becoming more tolerant and accepting was changing how I viewed myself. I was a slightly effeminate, metrosexual who tried way too hard to cover it up and I noticed that I had being doing this since middle school. I went through various phases of trying to fake machismo that always failed because I didn’t fool anybody. I still did things like blushed and cried when I was pressed too hard and I was ashamed of this. I tried to cover up this side of my personality because I was afraid that if I let it out that it’d “turn me gay.” When I almost entirely replaced my wardrobe for dress clothes in early 2009, it was largely my way of saying “I’m okay with myself; I can be straight and look this way too.” I was finally dressing the way that I had been afraid for years to dress and it was very liberating.
From that point forward a lot of things happened that brought me closer to the LGBTQ community. I soon had gay, bi, and even transgendered friends. I acted as support to an online friend who got a sex change operation and was trying to adjust to the world afterwards. I joined the GSA shortly after attending the Masquerade Ball in the spring of 2009 with a girl I was interested in at the time. Going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show became a thing I excitedly attended multiple times a year. I went to seminars about issues in the gay community. I openly defended gay rights and addressed stereotypes other classmates believed in Dr. Clark’s Human Sexuality class in the fall of 2010. I even went to gay bays with friends and laughed on the inside when I saw people in John Deer hats, work boots, and hunting jackets amongst transvestites. I saw the fears and insecurities I once had dwindle away and I felt that I was becoming a better person for it.
Although I have changed a lot in the past couple of years, there are some things that haven’t all too much. I still don’t like being hit on by other guys but it no longer causes me to almost completely freak out like it used to. A few times a year there will always be a few people who question my sexuality based on my friends and how I dress. My family still largely has the same attitudes and beliefs about gay people and I do find myself fighting with them when the subject gets brought up. I still only see my cousin about once a year but things have gotten slightly better for him.
Sometimes things and people never change but it’s a small comfort to know that they can for the better and that change can be profound. A person can be born a homosexual but nobody is born a homophobe. Everyone has the potential to change and everyone has the potential to learn. I feel as though I have learned a lot in the past couple of years and, amongst a group I once feared, I feel that I am accepted despite my past transgressions. I feel as though I have made the rainbow connection and, in doing so, have established foundations of friendship that will extend far into the future.
*In dedication to my high school friends who have come out since graduation as well as my aforementioned cousin. I am truly sorry for the support and understanding that I didn’t give in the years that I was closest to you all. I can only relate a little bit to the obstacles that you all have overcome since and, despite how late to the rally I was, I am here to say that I stand with you now.
Fatmanonice, January 26th, 2012
“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.”- Oscar Wilde
“The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball -- the further I am rolled the more I gain.”- Susan B. Anthony
“A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.”- Michelangelo
