Tag: bullying

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Misshapppen Identities, by Ricky

Many people relate to gay men via stereotypes and pejoratives. Among those epithets are the words “twisted,” “bent,” “weird,” “queer,” “pervert,” “homo,” and so forth. Straight males relate to lesbian women mostly using the words “hot” or “I want to see some action;” a typical male double standard. I don’t know much about the type of problems lesbians face in the post WW2 world except from what the female members of our story group have revealed. However, I do know what damage those pejoratives did to me and other gay boys, teens, and young men.

Called by those names and bullied, some boys, teens, and young men chose to end their lives rather than continue living with the abuse and hopelessness. Unloving parents threw others out of their homes but they survived into adulthood only to face abuse by other adults who did not love or provide them with security. HIV and AIDS claimed many who escaped or lived through the bad times.

I consider myself fortunate. I was very naïve about same sex attraction and its portent for my future. Like many gay adolescents, I was confused as to why I was not interested in girls as puberty began. All my friends were finding girls very desirable. I desired to play sex games with boys more than girls.

My home life was not idyllic but neither was it oppressive. My parents were simply not around most of the time. We never talked about sex at my home although my mother and I exchanged “dirty” jokes once. (Her’s was funnier.) I did not act gay. I like to play sports for fun and not just to win at all costs. In high school, I mostly hung out with two smart friends and I was the oldest boy in my scout troop. I even wore my scout uniform to school one day of each Scout Week while in high school. Nonetheless, no one ever teased me or called me any gay related pejoratives.

My mother must have either known or suspected I was gay. I never brought up the subject of girls or spoke of dating a girl or taking a girl to a school dance. I did have bi-weekly sleep-overs with one or two of my neighborhood peers. I believe she suspected me because twice, without my knowledge or permission, she “arranged” for me to take the daughters of some family friends to school dances I was not planning on attending. Another reason I think she suspected is because she was so surprised when she received our wedding announcement six years after I graduated from high school. The point of all this is that I survived into adulthood and even survived marriage.

However, I did not survive without emotional and mental scars. Very few people survive unscathed from growing up closeted knowingly or unknowingly. At the time, no gay could serve openly in the military. I served 16-years, 9-months, and 11-days while closeted. The stress of exposure within marriage or military service takes a toll on one’s psyche. Whether in the military or not, whether married or not, projecting a false identity warps a person’s real identity into something unnatural. It is like forcing a square peg into a round hole or damming and diverting a river into a constricting canal.

The only way to insert a square peg smoothly into a round hole is to trim the corners of the peg. This can be done with care and concern using something like sandpaper or it can be forcibly hammered. Either method damages the peg and/or the hole alike. While damming a river and forcing it into a new channel or canal can bring benefits, when the levy or canal overflows or breaks, havoc results. It is the same with people. When a person forced to bend or squeeze their identity into someone else’s mold or lock-box, confusion, resentment, anger, death, or a broken “spirit,” can occur. Even one of the foregoing conditions could result in a broken person.

People allowed to have their real identity publicly on display without ridicule, will grow, undamaged, and flower into the person they were born to become.

© 23 February 2013

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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GLBT Hopes, by Nicholas

According to my records, with this piece, I am starting my seventh year of coming to tell and listen to stories on Monday afternoon.
It seems odd to think about hope in this grim start to what may be a long and grim year of frustration, setbacks and bad news. This is not a very hopeful time we live in. But maybe this is when we most need to remind ourselves that hope is possible, hope is what keeps us going, hope is what gets us out of bed each morning. And hope, no matter how irrational, is good to have.
So, my hope for the lesbian, gay and trans community is that we learn to turn to each other more for joy and less out of necessity. I know that fearsome problems still haunt our world and community. Violence and bullying is a daily fact for many of our youth. Discrimination still runs rampant in many areas. Determined gay-haters, like the soon to be vice-president of the United States, persist in their work to undo the dignity and security of LGBT lives and generate hostility toward us. There is still plenty of inequality and prejudice out there.
But in many ways, our world is getting less frightening and our grasp on basic rights is growing more secure. It is no longer acceptable to openly degrade gay people—which is why our enemies have to resort to ever greater subterfuges to try to harass us. They’ve lost the sanctity of marriage so now they are reduced to fighting for the sanctity of toilets and who shall be allowed to do their business in which ones.
We still have battles to fight, but my hope is that we will seek out each other’s company less out of a sense of a need for protection, less out of desperation, and more because we just want to be around other L, G, B and T people. We come together not so much because we need to seek shelter in a hostile world but more because we can best express ourselves with each other.
I have many non-gay friends and love them dearly. It’s not that I sense any barriers between us. Yet, there is still more I sense in sharing with queer folk. We share experiences that we’ve all known and don’t have to explain. We share a humor derived from being outsiders. We share spiritualities, arts and a sharp sense of just what community is—or is not. We have been forced to make up our own culture and so we have. We are different and we should relish opportunities to engage those differences.
Most of us come out of a time when lesbians and gays could never take anything for granted. And we shouldn’t. Above all, we shouldn’t take each other for granted. You can find very fulfilling relationships with non-gay people but I do believe that there is one thing we can find only with our own kind—happiness. I do hope that organizations such as the community center we are in continue to thrive—not out of fear and self-defense but from joy. We still need to find each other. I hope that we continue to come here because we want to, not because we have to.
Even in a world more tolerant and open, there is still that special depth of connection that we get to see only in each other. Call it love or desire or a magical ability to coordinate colors and a flare for decorating, you won’t find it outside. You may be welcome to watch football games with legions of Broncos fans, but you won’t get much of a response by commenting that Eli Manning is so much better looking than his brother Peyton. They just don’t get it.
© 8 Jan 2017 

[Editor’s note: This was first published last year. It still seems so pertinent. Enjoy and be moved.]

About the Author 

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.
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LGBT Hopes, by Nicholas

According to my records, with this piece, I am starting my
seventh year of coming to tell and listen to stories on Monday afternoon.
It seems odd to think about hope in this grim start to what
may be a long and grim year of frustration, setbacks and bad news. This is not
a very hopeful time we live in. But maybe this is when we most need to remind
ourselves that hope is possible, hope is what keeps us going, hope is what gets
us out of bed each morning. And hope, no matter how irrational, is good to
have.
So, my hope for the lesbian, gay and trans community is that
we learn to turn to each other more for joy and less out of necessity. I know
that fearsome problems still haunt our world and community. Violence and
bullying is a daily fact for many of our youth. Discrimination still runs
rampant in many areas. Determined gay-haters, like the soon to be
vice-president of the United States, persist in their work to undo the dignity
and security of LGBT lives and generate hostility toward us. There is still
plenty of inequality and prejudice out there.
But in many ways, our world is getting less frightening and
our grasp on basic rights is growing more secure. It is no longer acceptable to
openly degrade gay people—which is why our enemies have to resort to ever
greater subterfuges to try to harass us. They’ve lost the sanctity of marriage
so now they are reduced to fighting for the sanctity of toilets and who shall
be allowed to do their business in which ones.
We still have battles to fight, but my hope is that we will seek
out each other’s company less out of a sense of a need for protection, less out
of desperation, and more because we just want to be around other L, G, B and T
people. We come together not so much because we need to seek shelter in a
hostile world but more because we can best express ourselves with each other.
I have many non-gay friends and love them dearly. It’s not
that I sense any barriers between us. Yet, there is still more I sense in sharing
with queer folk. We share experiences that we’ve all known and don’t have to
explain. We share a humor derived from being outsiders. We share
spiritualities, arts and a sharp sense of just what community is—or is not. We
have been forced to make up our own culture and so we have. We are different
and we should relish opportunities to engage those differences.
Most of us come out of a time when lesbians and gays could
never take anything for granted. And we shouldn’t. Above all, we shouldn’t take
each other for granted. You can find very fulfilling relationships with non-gay
people but I do believe that there is one thing we can find only with our own
kind—happiness. I do hope that organizations such as the community center we
are in continue to thrive—not out of fear and self-defense but from joy. We
still need to find each other. I hope that we continue to come here because we
want to, not because we have to.
Even in a world more tolerant and open, there is still that
special depth of connection that we get to see only in each other. Call it love
or desire or a magical ability to coordinate colors and a flare for decorating,
you won’t find it outside. You may be welcome to watch football games with
legions of Broncos fans, but you won’t get much of a response by commenting
that Eli Manning is so much better looking than his brother Peyton. They just
don’t get it.
© 8 Jan 2017 
About the Author 

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland,
then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from
work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga,
writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.
Posted on

Meaningful Vacation — Massachusetts, by Louis

I cannot remember the
lady’s first name, although her last name must have been Inman, but, sometime
in the 1970’s, she invited me to stay a week in Bridgewater and North
Chathamsport, Massachusetts. Her house was in Bridgewater and her summer house
was in North Chathamsport. I remember it was early October because we went
swimming in Massachusetts Bay, and the water was still warm. After the swim I
would return to her summer cottage and take an outdoor shower to wash off the
saltwater. The main event of the vacation was the Inman family reunion, which
was very well attended. Whoever these people were, they were my distant
cousins.
We then visited several
17th Century graveyards and found Inman’s, Aldrich, Jenks and
Winthrop gravestones. As time went by, I used to think about the original pilgrims
— what was in their minds? What made them tick? There is the version of their
first arrival in 1620 that we all heard in school, which was presented as a
patriotic story.
Much has been written
about the pilgrims, but the two books that I think best describe what the original
pilgrims believed in are Pilgrim’s
Progress by John Bunyan and The
Protestant Ethic by Max Weber, sociologist.
17th Century
Puritan society of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had its drawbacks. Gay people
were unmentionable. Most Jews and Quakers went to live in Providence, Rhode
Island where tolerance for different people was the order of the day. The
strength of the Puritan society depended largely on killing the native American
population. Religious non-conformity and political dissent were not tolerated. And
then the Salem witch trials came along in 1690. The Puritan neighbors were
constantly going to court and suing each other over small and large plots of
land, and water rights. The plentiful court records indicate why we have such
good genealogical records for that period.
It is true that the
modern version of Puritan society is a world-wide empire called the United
States of America, but does this world-wide empire live up to the standards of
the original Pilgrims? Do its moral drawbacks outweigh its so-called moral
superiority?
Bernie Sanders claims the
U. S. government has been corrupted by Wall Street. I would say that this is
one example of immorality that modern-day Puritans should disapprove of. The U.
S. empire tends to bully third world countries and has not solved the problem
of white people in the U. S. bullying black people and rich people bullying
poor people. Our foreign policy seems much too bellicose. Our whole capitalist
system seems to be based on greed rather than on sincere Judeo-Christian
moral precepts.
Protestant Work Ethic
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Cover of the
original German edition of The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

The Protestant work ethic (or the Puritan work
ethic) is a concept in theology, sociology, economics and history which
emphasizes that hard work, discipline and frugality[1] are a result of a person’s salvation in the Protestant faith, particularly in Calvinism, in contrast
to the focus upon religious attendance, confession, and ceremonial sacrament in the Catholic tradition.
The Protestant work ethic is often credited with helping to
define the societies of Northern Europe, such as in Britain, Scandinavia, Latvia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. British colonists and later Germanic immigrants brought their work ethic to British North
America and later the United States of America. As such a
person does not need to be religious in order to follow the Protestant work
ethic, as it is a part of certain cultures.
The phrase was initially coined in 1904–05 by Max
Weber in his book The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.[2]
The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is
to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of
religious English
literature,[1][2][3][4] has been translated into more than 200 languages, and
has never been out of print.[5][6]
When I read The
Pilgrim’s Progress, I found it extremely entertaining; the bad aspect
of the book was its apparent emphasis on being narrow-minded and humility
meaning self-deprecation. It trivialized many aspects of Christianity such as
the sacraments. But it did explain how 17th century Puritans
thought.
© 21 Apr 2016 
About the Author 

I was born in 1944, I lived most of
my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for
many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration,
dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor
dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired
in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in
New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.