What A Faggot!

More news this week about gay boys in high school. Still not a lot of tolerance out there, no surprise. Another persecuted fourteen year old, with a school administration tacitly approving of his persecution.

Back in the day, if anyone were actually gay, we didn’t know about it. It didn’t matter, though, because if you were “different” from the rough and tumble, sports obsessed, fight at the drop of a hat boys of the town, you were considered a faggot, and there was a price to pay. Semantically, faggot was not equivalent to gay. If you were gay, you were certainly a faggot, but not all faggots were gay. I’m sure that the same boys who bully the new crop of gay high-schoolers bully the mere faggots as well.

I took a lot of this kind of negativity in grammar school. I was younger than everybody in my class, and it was a big disadvantage. Other than that, I was quite normal. I was always out and about, I enjoyed baseball and stickball, I climbed trees and fences fearlessly, I expressed myself in the popular wise-guy mode. But I was younger, and I was mild-mannered and dreamy, polite and conciliatory, and I didn’t fight back when push came to shove. There was a lot of teasing involved, lots of rough joking around, and a certain number of beatings. I wasn’t exactly a faggot, but I was borderline.

I finally got sick of it. I got that hormonal rush when I was eleven or twelve and I took steps to improve my situation. My older cousin volunteered to “teach me to fight,” and it turned out to be very easy. Just keep your wits about you and hurt the other boy as much, and as fast, as possible, without regard to any pain inflicted on yourself. It can be reduced to a few simple slogans: first punch wins; balls and eyes; blood equals victory. I fought my way around the town for a year or two, very selectively, and managed to change my peers’ perception of me. I never picked on the helpless, what good would that do? I chose targets who were slightly tough, but manageable. I feel bad now, I hurt and embarrassed some boys who had not really provoked me. I just used them for demonstration purposes. I engaged in limited bullying myself.

That was the faggot thing. At least in school no one actually thought that I was gay.

In my twenties, I was thin, and neat, and I dressed semi-stylishly, and it happened sometimes that someone who didn’t actually know me wondered if I were gay. This curiosity could be casual or malicious. I didn’t mind, it was pretty funny really. There were quite a few gay guys who thought that I was one of them too. I was flattered by their attentions, but I politely declined their advances.

Childhood bullying is a big problem for the victims. There’s a continuing price to pay for carrying all that fear around, not to mention the relationship and trust issues that may persist into adulthood. And who should care what other people’s kissing fantasies are? Nothing better to worry about?

But, that’s life! “. . . at least until man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high—some billions of years hence, say.” (Quoting Mark Twain in a closely related context.)