Getting As Good As One Gives

Thirty years ago, I was a teenager in high school, Oak Hill High School in Oak Hill, West Virginia. It doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but I guess three decades is quite a stretch of time. Back then homophobia was virtually ubiquitous, especially in rural America. Just as you would expect, my high school was stalked by homophobic bullies, and there weren’t very many understanding allies willing to stand up to them. Some kids were victimized daily. I don’t know how they survived it.  They were teased, mocked and intimidated all the time. Thankfully, I escaped the harshest treatment. I was only an occasional victim. But the shoving I received in the crowded halls by anonymous hands, the nasty little notes sometimes taped to my locker and even on the back of my shirt, the threats of physical assault, the names I was sometimes called--faggot, pussy, queer--and the snide insinuations that I would never have sex with a girl, never go down on a girl, and how this meant I wasn’t really a man or even fully human worthy of respect… There was enough of it for me to fear that the hostility would escalate. I had my small circle of friends, but even many of them made homophobic comments from time to time. I knew where I stood with them; as long as I didn’t confirm the rumors that I liked boys and so long as I didn’t act or dress too “gay”, then they would “risk” being my friend.

Even thirty years ago, things were starting to change. The medical establishment no longer classified homosexuality as a disease. Police intimidation and raids on gay bars were, for the most part, a thing of the past. Many states had dropped their anti-sodomy laws. And there were a few gays on TV and in the movies. Phil Donahue had a gay person on his program at least once a month, and Phil was very supportive even though most in his audience seemed shocked just as my parents seemed shocked when they caught one of his Homo Of The Month shows. I knew that there were a few places--San Francisco, New York--where gays lived openly. But I don’t remember anyone that I personally knew, not anyone, saying anything positive about gay people while I was growing up. I can only remember one girl who said something that might be considered neutral. One day in biology class when the teacher was out of the room, she proclaimed that she didn’t understand why gay people didn’t simply admit to being gay. She was an unusual girl who was remarkably frank about her own personal life. She freely talked about getting drunk, getting high, and having sex with boys. I guess she thought that gays should be just as open as she was. She embarrassed the hell out of me when she asked me in front of everyone if I was gay. I turned away and didn’t say anything. The bullies assumed I was gay, and my friends never asked. They either thought the question would be rude--and it was rude back then to even suggest someone might be gay--or they didn’t want to know the answer. So I wasn’t used to being put on the spot like that, and I never liked lying. I didn’t go around telling people I was gay, but I also didn’t pretend to be straight either. I simply avoided the topics of sex, romance and crushes. A couple of kids seemed confused by my unwillingness to say I wasn’t gay. A couple came up to me after class and told me that I should have stood up to the girl who bluntly asked me if I was gay. In my own way, I think I did stand up to her. I didn’t lie. And I didn’t answer her. My sexuality was none of her business. I felt so alone, and I feared being singled out for abuse…at school, at home and in the streets. I never got close to anyone, and I graduated high school feeling like not even my friends really knew me.

I finally found some support when I moved to Morgantown to attend WVU. There was a mostly underground gay community in town. There was a small local gay bar and a gay student organization with a handful of official members. The student organization arranged to show the film Liana (1983) at WVU’s student union, The Mountainlair, during my freshman year, and I went to see it. I was one of the first to arrive, so I had to wait out in the hall as various students came and went. I hoped no one would notice me. I hoped no one from my dorm would see me and ask what I was doing. I hoped no one would realize I was waiting to see "that queer movie". I was so self-conscious that it took me quite a while to realize that the boy who was standing on the other side of the hall was also waiting to see the film. From the looks of him, you would have thought he was some kind of shy, exotic creature that only ventured outside once every seven years or so. I had never seen him at the bar, never had a class with him, and he certainly wasn’t one of the few people who attended the gay club on campus. His skin was very pale, his clothes were rumpled and nondescript, and his mussed light brown hair was shaggy and hid most of his face. He stared down at the floor. He fidgeted. He even turned away when people walked by. I almost expected him to stand in the corner and face the wall. This kid was terrified and I could tell that he had been terrified for a very long time. I immediately felt his pain because his pain was mine. I knew that we were very much alike. I knew that in a way, I was getting a glimpse of myself. And seeing him was actually more informative than the movie. I knew this kid had been so regularly and consistently browbeaten by homophobia and rejection that he had almost ceased to exist. I knew he was only barely hanging on. And I knew he needed a friend more than anything else in the world. God, how I wish I had had the strength to cross that hall and introduce myself. I wish I could have told him that he wasn’t the only one who was nervous. I wish I had had enough social grace and charm to have been able to get him to laugh at how silly we were for getting so worked up. It was only a movie, for crying out loud. We were only going to see a movie. Sadly, I never saw that boy again. He never showed up at the gay bar, and I never crossed his path again in town or on campus. But he has haunted my memory ever since that night I noticed him.
 
No one deserves to suffer like that kid suffered. No one. No one should be made to feel that ashamed. No one should feel that friendless, that alone. I hope that he survived. I hope that he found people who accepted him for who he is. I hope that a sweet and adoring man made love to him the very night we saw Liana. I hope he found love and romance. I hope he has a home now and hardly ever thinks about the scared, scruffy little bunny rabbit he used to be. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he went home from the movie that night and hung himself. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
 
A lot of kids are still being bullied. And some end up as battered and bruised as the kid I saw at the screening of Liana. But things have changed. They’ve changed a lot. And they’re going to change even more. It’s only a matter of time. But of course many of the bullies and homophobes are going to slow things down as much as possible.

They have been trashing us and running us into the ground forever. But the thing that infuriates me the most is that some of them, many of them actually, now claim to be the victims. They want to convince as many as possible that every advance of LGBT rights comes at the expense of their religious liberty, as if our society has some kind of moral obligation to not only accept what they did to that boy I saw waiting to see Liana but to condone it as well, to celebrate that boy’s tormentors as the righteous ones, the upstanding ones. They even go so far as to claim that we’re the ones who want to see them punished, ostracized, bullied and imprisoned. They have such little sense of irony, they’ll make these claims while they wax nostalgic for the days when LGBT people were closeted, fearful, considered diseased and treated as criminals.
 
The roots of homophobia are complex of course, but I think one of the reasons some tenaciously hold onto their bigotry is because on some level they know what they’ve done. They know that there’s no real justification for it. And they know that if they admit their arguments and moral posturing are groundless, they’ll have to face what they’ve done. They’ll have to look at their victims, look at those tormented souls who have been so hurt they want to disappear. They’ll have to accept that no one who thinks of him or herself as a good person would make anyone feel like that. We don’t do that to anybody, not anybody, not even killers and rapists. They would have to accept how extreme their condemnation was. They would have to accept their guilt. And I’m sure that they fear the abuse they gladly meted out will be inflicted on them in turn.