We had a little dog named Bozo when I was a kid. He was a small mutt with short, light brown fur and a fan tail. He wasn’t tiny. I don’t remember picking him up and carrying him around as I did our cat, but he wasn’t very big. Bozo was a friendly, happy dog for the most part, and I loved him. But sudden, loud noises terrified Bozo--a rifle blast, a clap of thunder. One 4th of July when I was 9 or 10, I was out in the backyard with Bozo. I was sitting on the ground Indian style, and I was petting and loving on him while he graciously accepted my attention. Out of the blue, I heard a loud pop. It turned out my father and sister decided to let off a few firecrackers in the front yard. The sound, of course, startled Bozo, and his reaction was typically extreme. He didn’t just jump, he leapt into the air. It seems he meant to fly over top of me in his intense desire to get away, but he didn’t quite make it. He ended up headbutting me. That little dog nearly knocked me out cold. Almost 40 years have passed, and I can still feel the impact of his forehead bashing against mine. It was intensely painful, and I fell backwards. Bozo was long gone by the time I stopped writhing in pain and figured out what had happened. He was such a gentle little dog, but he had to get away from that sound even if it meant killing me. The following New Year’s Eve, Bozo ran away when everyone started letting off their fireworks at the stroke of midnight, and we never saw him again. We looked for him, and we told everyone that he was missing, but it was as if he had vanished. Maybe in his terror, he ran so far away from home that he got lost. Maybe he lived as a stray for a few years after that. Maybe another family adopted him. Maybe he ran out in front of a car and got run over. I suppose I’ll never know what exactly happened to him, but I greatly missed him for a long time. Now and then I used to dream of him returning home. I continued to have that dream occasionally until I was in my twenties.
Dogs like Bozo are said to be gun-shy. I don’t know what caused Bozo to be this way. Was it just in his nature? Or was he exposed to a loud blast when he was a pup? I can’t say, but even as a kid, I realized that Bozo couldn’t help it. I readily forgave him when he almost murdered me and when he ran away and broke my heart. He was easily scared and this made him act out in irrational ways. Human beings can be like that, too, of course, except we don’t usually use the term “gun-shy” when talking about humans. There was a time when the term “shell shocked” was common. And that was followed by “battle fatigue.” I like “shell shocked” because it’s descriptive like “gun-shy” but more visceral. You can feel something of the torment of the person who suffers from shell shock just by using the term. But I suppose it was inevitable that we would settle on something much more clinical like "post traumatic stress disorder" because human beings aren’t just traumatized by loud sounds, and it’s not only the stress of war that can cause the condition.
Maybe I understood Bozo so well because on some level I related to him. I, too, was shell shocked. Loud noises didn’t unduly frighten me, but I was generally nervous and lived in a state of near panic a good deal of the time. When I was young, people said I was shy. I was scared, confused, quiet and withdrawn. Most of the time, people ignored me, but once in a while someone would became curious and ask me what I liked. I couldn’t answer. Not only did I avoid talking to people, but my inner dialogue was also stunted in a way. Looking back on it, I realize that I liked a great many things, my dog for instance, and animals in general. I loved movies. I had a love for houses, especially old, grand houses. I loved paintings and photographs. And I loved camping and being in the woods. But I couldn’t talk about these things. Not only was I reluctant to reveal myself, I didn’t even know how to put my feelings and thoughts into words. Sometimes I felt like I might be missing something crucial. I worried that I was boring, dull, that I had nothing to share. But now I realize I just hadn’t found my voice, and that’s probably because I was terrified of using it.
My parents were good people, but they lacked the skills to nurture someone like me, and they were so caught up in their own problems that they didn’t have it in them to focus on mine. My mother was seriously mentally ill, and my father lived in denial. This undoubtedly exacerbated my condition. One of the reasons I felt unsafe was because I didn’t know what to expect from my parents, and they didn’t spend a lot of time comforting or encouraging me. But there is another reason that shouldn’t be downplayed. From a very early age, I recognized I was different from most boys. And I realized that this difference wasn’t appreciated or understood by other kids or adults. So I retreated into myself. Maybe I overreacted. But like Bozo, I just can’t help it. I have spent my life trying to find someplace safe, even at the expense of forming lasting relationships and finding a home.
I’m not sure I’ll ever find that sense of safety and security that I desperately want. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a family or a place that is truly mine. Maybe at this point, I should resign myself to being a stray because as much as I want to be loved and petted, my instincts tell me not to let anyone get too close, and my instincts always win.
I hope that it will one day get better for kids who are different. I don’t want them growing up so afraid of their own voice they’re middle aged before they find it. I don’t want them so frightened of rejection that they try to be invisible. I want it generally acknowledged that some boys don’t like baseball and some girls don’t like Barbie dolls, and I want that to be okay. I want it to be okay that some girls have crushes on other girls and some boys have crushes on other boys. I get so sick and tired of hearing how trying to bring about this change is an attack on the religious liberty of Christians. We live in a world of diversity. If some think gender nonconformity and homosexuality are wrong, so what? LGBT kids are real. They exist. And they deserve to grow up feeling wanted and safe.
I also want those kids to grow up knowing that they can get married and start a family with someone they love. I want them to have that option, that dream. I want them to be able to sit in their bedrooms some rainy Saturday afternoon when they’re twelve or thirteen and think about one day having someone to come home to and kids who will ask them for the latest gadget or toy.
But of course some don’t want them to have that dream. Some want kids like the kind of kid I was to continue growing up believing that the best they can hope for is to survive in the shadows, out of sight of “real” people. They don’t want them imagining bringing their husbands and wives home for Thanksgiving dinner. They don’t want them to imagine telling the kids at school about their boyfriends or girlfriends. They don’t want them to imagine telling their friends and parents what’s in their hearts. They want them to continue to be shell shocked, afraid, ashamed.
I can only imagine what life would be like for me now if I had grown up in a nurturing environment, if I had felt wanted and protected, if I hadn’t felt the need to hide. What if my mother hadn’t held up the old purse I adopted at Sunday school when I was four or five and told everyone to look at my purse just so all the kids would laugh, and I would realize that boys aren’t supposed to carry purses? What if teachers had told me that it was okay for me to play with the girls when they saw I was intimidated by the boys? What if someone had told me that it’s okay if I didn’t like baseball, basketball or football? What if my father had shown compassion and understanding rather than scorn and disgust when he caught me naked with another boy when I was twelve? What if I had felt confident enough to tell the young man I fell for in college that I loved him?
It’s such a simple thing, accepting someone as they are. It’s hard for me to believe that, knowing there are LGBT kids out there, some want them to continue to feel like outcasts. But there are people like that. And they offer the dumbest excuses for their unkindness. One of the dumbest is the idea that same-sex relationships can’t be held up as equal to opposite-sex relationships because straight people would no longer take commitment and marriage seriously. I just don’t believe that straight people are generally so shallow that they would stop loving their spouses and children just because they know some gay couple out there might be happily married. If someone like Brian Brown really has this problem, then he should deal with it the best way he knows how. I don’t think we should sacrifice the millions of LGBT kids in this country just because the Brian Browns of the world are insecure about their own ability and/or the ability of other straight people to remain faithful.
Another dumb reason to continue to deny LGBT kids, perhaps the dumbest of them all, is the idea that we can’t let LGBTs have equal rights because if we did, those who hold them in contempt for supposedly religious reasons would be thought of as bigots. Well, if you want to believe you’re better than someone else, and if you want to deny them basic human rights, then you are a bigot. It doesn’t matter if you’re thought of as one or not. That’s what you are.
I hope that by the time I close my eyes on this world things will be different.
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