After being called a poofter the year before, I had gone to the library and read EVERYTHING that referenced homosexuality, so I knew what a queer was. I knew boys were turned queer because they spent too much time in baths of warm water or that their mothers were too domineering or that their fathers didn't love them enough. You can imagine my devastation. I had to find a cure.
Over the next two years I continued to read all I could from curative manifestos by self loathing homosexuals to the entire compiled notebooks of Sigmund Freud. I was counselled by priests and ministers. I couldn't tell many of my friends, and to tell anyone in my family would have been certain death.Through all my efforts I found no cure nor solace: I was condemned to this aberrant existence, certain to die lonely and reviled in some hovel in New York City or San Francisco. For someone of that age to have to deal with an issue of such magnitude with no kind of redemption nor relief it is , I think understandable, that my psyche vacillated between a deep depression and a highly developed fantasy life where I never had to be me until the fantasy could no longer hold the harsh reality that was me at bay.
The summer I turned thirteen I realised I had to tell someone I loved and trusted so I looked up the address of my favorite teacher, hopped on my bicycle and rode twelve miles one way to her home. Surprised but seemingly glad to see me she offered me glass after glass of weak but much needed lemonade. As we chatted about our summer break she became aware of the fact that something was deeply troubling me but before I could confide in her she said a friend had given he a video tape that we should watch. It was Anita Bryant spewing her vitriolic views on homosexuality and this beloved teacher was in full agreement with her. I have no idea how I made it back home after such a crushing blow.
Over the next year I began to be harassed more and more. At band camp the following summer one morning I couldn't get my baritone horn to play, it was gurgling. I opened the spit valves and a yellow liquid poured out. As it kept coming out the guys from my dorm began to laugh. The night before they had all urinated into my horn. The first week of school there were awful notes slipped into my locker every day. I was truly on the verge of suicide by the end of my first month of high school.
On the morning of October 4th, 1977, at the end of gym class I was shooting hoops to pass the few minutes left in class when a girl in my class, whom I had known since the first grade came up and took the basketball from me. I grabbed it back only to have her shove me aside and have the word "FAG" come out of her mouth. A rage came out of me that I honestly had no experience with. I lost all control and went chasing after her with murder, I am sure, on my face. She managed to keep a few strides ahead of me so as I swung my fists at her they simply flew through her long blonde hair, but the damage had been done: I had tried to hit a girl.
My rage just as quickly turned inward as I began to have a complete emotional breakdown. I fell onto the floor, crying and inconsolate. I was taken to the guidance counsellor's office where I sobbed, unable to speak for three hours. When finally able to communicate I struggled to tell my guidance counsellor all that I had been through hoping that as a gay man he might be able to help me through this hell. Unfortunately, as a gay man working in a small town school he was not ready to help me and lose his job.
There is only so much time that one has to convalesce from a mental breakdown when the place one has been taken is the Guidance Councellor's office, so at the end of that day, whatever traumas and psychic schism I may have been experiencing were an inconvienence that impeded my Councellor's timely departure from work and frankly, a threat to his career. Besides, I had finally stopped crying, so I could go home and life could go back to normal. The problem was that normal was being abused with impunity for something intrinsic to my being by those for whom the Christian churches they attended (or didn't) told them made me an abomination that God told them must be destroyed.
My high school had around 400 students and word of such happenings usually spread quickly, so as I walked to my locker and then to the doors, it felt as if everyone was looking at me; whispering to each other as I made my way through the throng. Someone told me that one of the older brothers of the girl who had set all this into motion that morning was coming after me to beat me up. He was scary. He was a "bad kid" who did drugs, what we colloquially referred to as a grit, so, once again my adrenalin began to surge.
As I approached the back door to the school he was standing with a crowd and not about to let me leave without a fight. I was a troubled kid, but that morning's events were not anything that I had ever done before: I hated to fight. I tried to talk my way out of it but reason had always been at a dearth in the hormone drenched environs of high schools, so we fought. Luckily for me having brothers and friends on the wrestling team had taught me a thing or two, and I was able to get him down to where he couldn't hit me until a teacher came through the crowd, stopping us.
The tears began to flow from my eyes, still red from earlier. The brother ran out with his friends and from the crowd came the only hero I recall in all of this, Bill Marsh. He walked me home and calmed me so that when I got there, all I did was wrap myself in a blanket, lie down on the floor over a heating vent in my room, then I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
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