Our Own Private Homophobia

In doing my early hours scan of favorite blogs I came across a post on Pams's House Blend by a write using the name "QScribe" that describes what many of us have experienced in our lives, either as the constant victim or as the one too terrified to do the right thing. For my own part, I experienced both roles at differing times in my life and for me it is something that no child or youth should have to ever experience. Of course, one of the main forces that helps maintain such abuse is the snake oil peddled by Pharisee like Christians like Rick Warren and Benedct XVI. The fact that these people peddle such poison without any regard to the harm they cause - or perhaps even enjoying the harm they do to others - sickens me and makes me angry and resolved to try to expose such "Christians" and others of their ilk for the foul individuals they are in reality. It is why I cannot let the Rick Warren issue pass without doing my best to have his hypocrisy and hate exposed. I recommend a full read of the post and here are some highlights:

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When I was five years old I had a boyfriend. Yes, that’s right, five. He was the kid across the street, and his name was Davy. He was just about exactly my age, and he had flame red hair and the bluest eyes you can imagine. (The red hair got imprinted on me. To this day I’m a sucker for a guy who’s a redhead.)We were “best friends,” the way kids that age often are. Inseparable. Constantly together. On alternate nights, we’d sleep over at each other’s houses, in each other’s beds. In each other’s arms. I’m sure it was terribly naive of me, but Davy seemed the only one I’d ever want to share my life with. To the extent two kids that age can be in love, we were. . . . But it ended when I was eight and my family moved to another neighborhood. That was that. No more boyfriend love for this kid. It took me ages to get over the loss.

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Fast forward to high school. . . . my parents put me into a Catholic high school. . . . Davy was there. His hair had darkened a bit, but I knew him the moment I saw him. It took me awhile to get over the shock of seeing him again (I can be pretty slow on the uptake). Then the truth sank in, a truth I was hardly prepared to deal with.Davy had turned out queeny. He was the school faggot, the one who got beaten up and spit on just for walking down the hall. The ultimate outsider. And since this was a good, loving, Catholic school, the abuse was vicious, frequent and unrelenting.

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Much too terrified to bond with him again, to let anyone suspect I was “one of them.” I forced myself to be polite but aloof to him. And it killed me. Almost literally. That awful mixture of desire for him and fear of being like him paralyzed me in more ways than I could begin to list here . . . I even remember him approaching me once and asking me, almost in tears, if we could be friends again. I was too terrified to do anything but stare at him and then walk away.Since high school I have never seen him again. I’d give anything to be able to find him again—and apologize for what I did to him and for what I had let myself become.
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A part of me—and only a part—hates straight society for what it does to us. It wasn’t Davy’s queeniness that kept me away from him . . . ; it was blind terror of what would happen to me, and to us. Every time I saw him punched in the school hallway, I died a little. But I was too crippled by fear to do a thing about it.

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When I see “men of God” attacking us on TV; when I hear clowns like Rick Warren quoting ancient texts to prove there was something wrong with the uncomplicated love these two boys felt for each other; when I hear of families being torn apart by bigoted churches and their ballot initiatives; the blend of sorrow and rage I feel an hardly be expressed. We must keep fighting, all of us, not only for ourselves and our relationships but for all the gay kids yet to come.