Damage Runs Deep

  I missed high school. Not to say that I didn't attend or learn a thing or two, but I spent so much time having to figure out what I was; intrinsically; fundamentally; irrevocably. I had such a clear vision of what I wanted to be, but that was consistantly undermined by that thing I had come to know that I was. As it was, at least for me, an open secret, I had any number of people eager in their need to demonstrate (until now I didn't realize that word began with "demon") their social and/or moral and/or basic human superiority to the horrible, wretched and depraved thing that I am that I was well informed in the milieu of small town America that I was; a fag; a queer; a poofter well before I had any understanding let alone intellectual grasp as to what that was.
  Poofter: I was called that only once. I was 11 years old when a slightly older boy from my neighborhood and I were caught  exploring our sexuality under the bleachers at the high school. We thought we were well hidden having crawled into a space where the Track and Field equipment was stored for the summer, so we did what our heterosexual peers were also doing at the time: touching, grinding, giving into the impulses of the flood of hormones that had begun flowing through our bodies (I would like to add, that at this point we had no explanation of what puberty was or what its effects on our bodies and minds it would be.) To our shock and horror we suddenly heard  another kid from the neighborhood say "I'm tellin' my Dad! You're not supposed to be doin' that!" In an absolute panic we pulled our clothing back on and tried desperately to hide erections that paid no attention to the dire situation we were facing and furtively planned our escape but we didn't get out in time. As we emerged from underneath the bleachers we were confronted by a cadre of neighborhood children with three of their fathers, one of which was the father of the kid who had found us out: a police officer.
  "What were you boys doin' under there?" he asked.
  "Nothing." I said, my voice barely audible as I felt the remnants of my soul pouring out of my body and being sucked down to the depths of Hell. My friend was silent, the three and a half years of age he had on me soundly informing him that his life might well be ending.
  "Well my son told me what you two were up to, and I have to tell you, we can put  you poofters in the pokey for that!"
  "Poofters in the pokey", the words are so comical now, but then, without knowing their actual meaning I understood the gravity of our situation: we were bad. The police officer told us if he caught us together again, even just walking down the street he'd arrest us, and indeed after years of winter sled riding, exploring the creeks and woods surrounding our neighborhood in the summers and jumping into mountainous piles of  leaves every fall we never spent another minute together.
  The next summer I had made a friend in the next neighborhood over. He was so different than me. I was thin and shy, he was muscular and outgoing. I spent most of my free time in the library or riding my ten-speed around the neighborhood;  he was athletic and rode a motor bike through the woods between our subdivisions. There was nothing overtly sexual about our friendship, but I did have such a mad crush on him that anyone who saw us together had to know.
  One evening after I'd had dinner with him, his sister and single father, his father and I got into a minor debate over the existence of ghosts but I felt  a more than subtle hostility coming from Dad. The next day my friend informed me that he could no longer hang out with me because his father said I was a queer.