Rantdom

From Wednesday, January 14, 2009

I dreamt last night of all the boys I’ve ever desired. I say boys because they were young as they were then. And I was young too. 

Going all the way back to kindergarden, a hundred secret crushes. Beginning with Ryan. He was bigger than I was, but not fat like I was. I once leaned too far back while we were all seated on the floor to watch a movie.  The gentle caresses with which he responded to the head he found suddenly in his lap are something I’ve sought all my life. Unabashed kindness that is all too uncommon in this world. I don’t imagine he’s queer. It was just a simple act, human to human in a non-sexualized way, one being comforting another in the cold linoleum universe. 

An endless line of Davids and Jefferys and Erics and Michaels, boys who are now men. Men who are now married with two smiling children the age we were when I knew these boys. I don’t know them now. 

I wouldn’t want to know them now. We grew up with messages, with inalienable truths. That homosexuality is a sin, an abomination. They accepted this truth and dance their days in the light of salvation. I accepted this truth and bend under the screaming shadow of torment. This message was so prevalent, so common that we learned it without knowing it in words. We were told without ever being taught outright that abominations are met with stones and clubs. Kindness is not afforded to them. 

And as we grew older, these Davids and Jefferys and Erics and I, their behavior toward me changed. They sensed within me the very thing they had been taught to hate. They sensed it in me before I knew it in myself. And they hated me. I was object to their cruelties. Simple, mindless, and small cruelties perhaps but cruelties nonetheless. 

At the apex, they stole my belongings, vandalized them, or hung them in public places to mark the shame I had not yet acted out. They subjected me to quiet violence: a jab to the ribs behind the school bus seat, a flick to the ear on a numb cold day. And every day, every single day of my life they littered me with insults. All of those apparent harmless phrases of childhood, that on closer inspection are in reality specifically homophobic: fart-knocker, fudge-packer, queer-bait, gay-tard, and the queen holy mother of boyhood insults, faggot. These were my monikers. These were my emblems long before I ever sucked cock. 

By high school my super secret crushes were always bent toward the most violent abusers. The most flagrant homophobic assholes. Why, I don’t know. Did it give me hope when I heard the rumor that this one liked to, “do it up the butt” with his girlfriend or a secret thrill when I heard that this one got drunk and showed his penis to everyone at parties? Yes. But by then my sexuality was so buried in me, I had plausible deniability. By then it had practically been beaten out of me. Like all these young men who go to ex-gay camps to unlearn their preferences, I was able to suppress it. But my homosexuality is part of who I am, part of who I always was even when I didn’t know it was there. Even when I had hidden it so deeply in myself that I could honestly deny it. It was always there. And yes, I successfully hid it. But the misery, the deep down soul-damaging misery that was self-denial was never worth the loss of respect from a few queer-hating assholes.