In the summer of 1983, I went to work for McDonald’s. By the end of summer, management considered letting me go. They said I wasn’t working well with the team and that I seemed uncomfortable. Basically I was scared and terribly shy. They told me that I had a week to come out of my shell or they’d give me the boot. The truth is, I didn’t really like being there, but I didn’t want to face the humiliation of telling people I got fired, so I tried harder. I found out later that only one of the assistant managers thought I had tried hard enough, but they gave into him and let me keep my job.
Coincidentally, he is the same man who used to come up to me in the kitchen and in a hushed tone give me instructions on how to please a girl using my fingers and tongue. I was a seventeen-year-old, pathologically shy gay schoolboy, and he was a man in his forties pressuring me to have sex with girls, and he regularly forced me to listen to graphic descriptions of hetero sex at work in front of other people. It was deeply humiliating to say the least.
I felt like an outsider, and I was afraid of getting hurt, so it was hard for me to blend in with the crew. I almost got canned as a result. How ironic that the person who saved my job was one of the people who made the environment so threatening to me.
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