I'm From Driftwood

(TRIGGER WARNING: Racist slurs, Homophobic slurs; Violence; Bullying)

by Tirrell Thomas

The rocks flew alongside forced laughter.

“You can’t hit me.” It was a declaration and prayer.

What began as a daily “game” during recess sometimes got scary. I would stand on one side of the haphazard concrete area that was also known as the basketball court and a group of my “friends” would stand on the other side holding rocks, but only for a little bit. It was imperative for me to dodge flung rocks and hurtful slurs with laughter and jeering. If I slipped up and was hit it was my fault. What other choice was there but to brush it off? It builds character, builds a thick skin—builds that wall that you need to survive in a rural town in the Arctic. It wasn’t like I could run away either, unless my goal was the other side of town. There are no roads in or out of Kotzebue. The only ways in or out are jets and planes, which sometimes couldn’t land due to weather and boats in the summer or snow machines in the winter. Isolation at it’s finest.

But it was fun. I had fun. I had a lot of fun. I played a lot of… games… growing up. When I wasn’t dodging rocks, I was racing friends home. The objective: not to get caught. It was turned into an adult version of tag, with more extreme consequences. So you might see me running on dusty roads, laughing, hanging on to the only element I had control over, my delusions. Outrunning my pursuers, I was hyped up on adrenaline, the sugar from the soda I just drank and a dash of fear. Those were the spurs and I had foam in my mouth, which was smiling.

And when it wasn’t a physical battle there were verbal matches of slurs and insults. That’s where my book smarts rescued me. I made it hard for those calling me “fag” or “nigger” to continue insulting me when I was throwing words they hadn’t even heard of into their ears. Because on top of hanging out with too many girls, not wanting to hunt and fish with the guys, and the plain fact that I liked guys, I was not full Inupiaq Eskimo. Or even half, so most people felt the need to remind me that I didn’t look like them. I wasn’t physically strong enough to stand up against them, so I used my words, and not my best ones to fight back. It wasn’t noble, it wasn’t brave, but it was all I had at the time. So I used the looks of confusion I received as leeway to scurry home while they scratched their stone heads. My verbal prowess reached the point to where my cousin was like a boxing manager for me, a really bad one. He would bring me over to a group of people who had been talking bad about me, he’d then tell me what they said and then just step back to watch and laugh while I raged. I was just that good.

After, I’d trudge home from school, down the one paved road to the three-story, egg yolk-yellow apartment building I lived in, spent. Mentally exhausted. I’d then continue trudging down the hallway, go into my room, pick up a book and reenter the comforting world of my delusions.

Everything will be better tomorrow. It was promised.

-(Share your story with us!)

transqueery:

by Logan Lynn.

A recent study led by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health has found that one in 10 children faces an elevated risk of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse due to gender nonconformity (meaning kids whose interests, pretend play, and activity choices before the age of 11 fall outside the bounds of those typically expressed by their assigned sex). As a result of the abuse, many will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by young adulthood, which can lead to a smörgåsbord of risky behaviors such as drug abuse, promiscuity, and self-harm, as well as producing physical symptoms such as chronic pain and cardiovascular problems.

Having been born one of these gender-nonconforming kids many years ago, I know firsthand the experience described in the study. These new findings suggest that even if I had not been birthed into a fundamentalist Christian cult, my parents would still have had their work cut out for them with regard to keeping me safe. (I plan to add this new info to my ever-growing parental forgiveness file as soon as I finish writing this.) Sad as it may be, from the moment I took my first breath, I was something of a moving target in this world.

Though I have identified as a cisgender male my whole life, as a kid I always enjoyed playing with dolls, making jewelry, singing, acting, and dancing — all things considered “girly” by society and, at the very least, by the mean kids I grew up around in rural Nebraska. I gravitated toward girls my own age back then, not because I wanted to be one of them but because they were nice to me, and we had the most in common. The other boys took note of these similarities, and they teased me relentlessly.

I was a sweet, sensitive kid who didn’t like sports, which made me the target of much bullying and harassment from kids my own age all the way until college… but this isn’t breaking news. Everybody already knows that we faggy kids get our asses kicked as we are growing up, and most of us don’t need a Harvard study to tell us what the long-term effects of that abuse are, because we are still living them out to this day. But hey, it gets better, right?

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have heard the argument that people turn gay as a result of being sexually abused as children. As a survivor of extensive early-childhood sexual abuse myself, I have always found this to be the most disturbing of all attempts by others to pathologize and discredit my adult sexuality. This theory basically states that the man who raped me when I was a child has now somehow programmed my sexuality for the rest of my life, that the violence I repeatedly endured as a young boy is now the filter for all the love I have received since, or will ever receive. This is just simply not the case. I rejected this archaic notion long ago, and I am always surprised when otherwise thinking people haven’t already done so as well.

What I find most interesting about this new study is their assessment that boys who acted outside gender norms faced three times the risk of sexual abuse over their conforming counterparts, and that both nonconforming men and women showed rates of PTSD almost double those considered “normal.” This means that not only was I three times as likely to get assaulted as a “girly” 7-year-old than if I had been a “butch” kid, but also that I have had the pleasure of being twice as likely to feel traumatized in the years since. Instead of assuming I am gay because I was abused, doesn’t it seem at least three times more likely that I was abused because I was gay? To me, this is a no-brainer, but it’s relieving to have this new science back up what I have been saying for years.

If you are the parent of a gender-nonconforming child, please understand how important your role is in your child’s survival. You will need to be three times as alert, three times as cautious, and three times as accepting to counteract what you (and they) are up against. Love them into overtime. They are going to need it.

For the rest of you who feel compelled to take action, I suggest that you consider mentoring and/or fostering LGBT and gender-nonconforming children and young adults who are being bounced around in the local system where you live. You have the power to change someone’s life simply by being that safe space for them, whether it’s in your classroom or your living room. If you can’t commit time to a foster care or mentorship program, find a queer youth program and write a check.

We can no longer just sit around and tell these kids that “it gets better,” cross our fingers, and hope that it does. We have to find ways of actually making it better now. The time has come for us to demand better from our schools, from our community leaders, and from each other. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is quoted as having said, “The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children,” and I, for one, agree with him.

(via transawareness)

by Sam Paxton

Not a lot of people go to the grocery store on weekday nights. A few people duck in after work, grab some bread or a gallon of milk, and zip out of there as fast as possible. Tonight, my lane is one of two still open, not counting the self-checkout machines which are, as always, more popular than we are. I stand under the fluorescent lights and listen to the blandly inoffensive pop music they’re piping in. All the songs are about romance. My depression helpfully reminds me that I’m a 23-year-old virgin who’s kissed neither boy nor beard. I tell my depression to shut up, and fiddle with the cash register. My job is a brainless job, but it’s not so bad. It gives me time to daydream, and think about where my life is headed, and where I want it to go.

If you’d asked any of my elementary school teachers where they thought I’d be in fifteen years or so, I doubt any of them would guess “high school dropout working as a checkout boy.” Up to about sixth grade, I was the star pupil of every class. Straight A-pluses, except when I just got A’s. I didn’t just want to be an astronaut, I went to Space Camp and memorized whole episodes of Cosmosand shocked adults with my in-depth understanding of black holes. I was Hermione Granger on crack.

I’d always dealt with some amount of bullying, but for some reason, it seemed to get worse in middle school. Maybe it was because the school was bigger, so there were more bullies. Maybe it was because I started to realize, deep down inside, that when they called me a fag, they were right. I came out to myself in seventh grade, and told no one, but somehow they seemed to sense it. I don’t know if I subconsciously sent out gay signals, or if their gaydar was so trigger-happy that they got a few lucky guesses along with a whole slew of false positives (that’s a distinct possibility; middle-schoolers call everyone gay), but it felt like suddenly every bully in the school was drawn to me like sharks to blood.

About that time, I started sinking into depression. I dreaded going to school. I’d go into greater detail regarding the bullying, but you all probably know the story by now. The name-calling, the beatings, the teachers’ total lack of concern – you know, the classics. My grades dropped like a stone until I was barely passing anything. By the time I got to high school, I’d completely given up on doing well in school, making friends, or being happy. (Just in case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t go to that Littleton, CO, high school. And for the record, it’s not even technically located in Littleton, so quit blaming my admittedly crappy town for the sins of Columbine Valley.)

Maybe if I’d known then that I could have graduated in three years, or gone to Bard College at Simon’s Rock after sophomore year, or transferred to the hippie alternative school half an hour away, or just hung in there until I could escape to some east coast liberal arts college where everyone is gay or wants to be, I’d have kept going. But at the time, I didn’t know about any of those options. My teachers and guidance counselors told us all, “College will be just like this, only harder” – repeating that exact sentence again and again like it was a mantra. I guess they wanted to scare us into working hard, but it just made me lose all hope in ever escaping the cycle of harassment. It probably didn’t help that my image of college life came from movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, giving me the impression that the only difference between college and high school was that the bullies would be wearing togas instead of letter jackets. I ended up dropping out and getting a G.E.D. True to form, I got a perfect score on my G.E.D. test. My parents hung my results up on the fridge and left them there for months. I didn’t exactly give them anything else to be proud of me for.

Even though I was now free of the bullies, dropping out didn’t make me any happier. I found I didn’t need jocks to beat me up; they’d obliterated my self-esteem to the point where I’d happily do the job for them. Loathing myself for every perceived fault became like an addiction. Depression is sneaky like that. It’ll convince you to hate yourself for being gay, and when you get over that, it’ll convince you to hate yourself for being too closeted (You’re lying to the people you love!) or too out (You’re making people uncomfortable!) or not perfect enough (You’re making gays look bad!). And when you start to wake up and see the wreckage it’s made of your life, it’ll convince you to hate yourself for hating yourself. (If you were stronger, you wouldn’t be so sad all the time.) But the most sadistic trick it pulls is convincing you it doesn’t exist. I was clinically depressed for years before I sought any treatment, because I listened as it told me, You’re not depressed. You’re just lazy, and you’re using depression as an excuse to not do anything. You just want people to feel sorry for you. You just love feeling sorry for yourself. You don’t need a therapist or drugs; you just need to grow up and be a man.

I drifted apart from the few friends I had in school. I came to fear summers and holidays, when they’d come home and I’d run into them, hear about their happy lives at college or their volunteer work or their internships or their exciting jobs, and face the dreaded question, “So what are you doing with yourself?” I didn’t even have a dramatic, Oprah-worthy tale of surviving on the mean streets of Denver by selling my body for meth. I just hung around the suburbs and hated myself for the better part of a decade. I got lousy minimum wage jobs and lost lousy minimum wage jobs. I got on antidepressants and got off, and got on other antidepressants, and switched therapists a few times. Some days I woke up and the first thing that popped into my head was “I hate myself,” and I’d be contemplating suicide by breakfast. (Incidentally, Suicide by Breakfast would make a good name for an emo band.) I never did attempt, though, partly because I was afraid of how much it would hurt, and partly because I knew it would destroy my parents. I considered admitting myself to a mental health facility, but I didn’t do that, either. My six-word memoir: “I thought about it, but didn’t.”

A few months back, I enrolled in community college, which everyone around me applauded as a major step forward. (I’m just embarrassed their standards for me are so low.) I’m almost one semester in, and even though I still don’t know what to major in or what career path I’m working towards, I’m starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I’m getting good grades in my math class, which I never thought I’d be able to do. I could transfer to a four-year college, get a real bachelor’s degree. I just might end up going to one of those quirky east coast liberal arts colleges after all.

An African-American guy about my age comes up to my lane and unloads a handful of groceries on the belt. He is a walking greatest hits compilation of everything I find attractive in a man. Tall and slender, with broad shoulders. A dark red scarf tucked into his perfectly-fitting black pea coat. His movements are smooth, gentle. He’s slightly effeminate (not the loud and bitchy kind, more the graceful and sophisticated kind). Rectangular glasses compliment his square jaw and high cheekbones. I’m afraid to look directly at him lest I turn bright red and stammer like an idiot. So my eyes bore holes in his groceries as I scan them and mumble out my script.

“How are you doing tonight?”

“Well. And you?”

I have no idea what to say. He said “well” instead of “good.” No one does that. He asked me how I was doing. No one does that either.

“Great,” I lie, because when you ask your friendly neighborhood register biscuit how he is, you’re generally not looking to hear, “Crippled by clinical depression! And you?”

I continue my mumble-script. Does he have a membership card? No. Does he want one? Of course not, no one does.

SAM: I should flirt with him.

DEPRESSION: He’s probably not even gay.

SAM: Are you kidding? He has to be gay. Look at the way he walks. Listen to his voice. And for God’s sake, I’m ringing up his appletini mix! I should work that in somehow. Cheekily ask him if he needs someone to help him drink those appletinis.

DEPRESSION: Great idea! Then he can stare blankly at you and say he’s making them for a party. Or drinking them with his boyfriend. Or just with someone who isn’t a tangled knot of neuroses.

SAM: I’m getting better.

DEPRESSION: I wonder how many dates it would take for him to figure out what a loser you are? Are you even emotionally stable enough for a relationship right now?

His groceries all fit into one bag. I wonder if it means something that he didn’t go to the self-checkout lane like all the other evening customers? Or is that just wishful thinking? I take a chance, work up all my courage, and smile at him as I hand him his bag. He actually smiles back. I might have a heart attack.

I watch him as he leaves. He strides out of the store like he’s on a catwalk, poised, elegant, confident.

DEPRESSION: He probably thinks you’re racist because you were so unfriendly.

SAM: I smiled at him!

DEPRESSION: After acting really nervous and uncomfortable around him the whole rest of the time.

SAM: He smiled back at me! Maybe he thinks I’m cute. Maybe he’ll come back sometime soon.

DEPRESSION: Yeah, with his boyfriend. And he’ll tell him, “Let’s not go to that cashier. That’s the racist one.”

SAM: Oh, go fuck yourself. You ruined my life. I’m not listening to you anymore.

My depression tells me that this story is too long, too self-indulgent, too self-pitying. No one will want to read it. The dark humor is too dark to amuse anyone. The other stories on this website are way better. A story that is literally about folding laundry is more interesting than this story.

I keep writing.

Bit by bit, I’m learning that I’m not as worthless as I thought I was. I know that someday, I want a husband, and a house, and a cat. Maybe two cats. I’m starting to grasp that I could make that happen. I could have that, and even deserve it. I just have to go one step at a time. One semester at a community college. One smile at a cute boy. One story on a website.

Someday, somehow, I’ll be more than this.

-(Share your story with us!)

by Sam L.

As I sat on my bed gazing at the television screen watching BBC Parliament for the first time, it occurred to me that I will always remember this day, February 5, 2013, for this was the day in the United Kingdom where the gay marriage bill was either to be declined or accepted by the British parliament. I am just 19 years old and this is the first major change in gay rights I have witnessed or can remember in my entire life. As the news broke that the bill had been accepted I suddenly felt overwhelmed with emotion and joy. I am not the emotional type, in fact quite the opposite but I finally felt as if gay rights were moving on instead of moving back.

I live in a tiny village in Bristol, United Kingdom. We have seven shops and a high school, it’s the type of place where everyone knows everyone’s business and everyone has to air their opinion because there is nothing better to do. High school for me never felt like a school, it felt like a prison. I was held captive from 9 to 3:30 every day, all the time just counting down the seconds. I wasn’t openly gay but being somewhat effeminate I didn’t need to be, I didn’t get to come out of the closet, I was thrown out. There wasn’t a day that went by where I wasn’t knocked down or beaten or taunted, and in the end it became part of daily life.

By the time I was able to leave my high school the confident outgoing personality I once was had completely diminished. What remained was an empty, tired and unstable mess. I had numerous breakdowns including several years suffering from Anorexia Nervosa. Even as a young child I was teased and taunted and what childhood I did have was almost destroyed by the isolation I felt.

But turning 17 changed my life; I got accepted into a prestigious performing college which changed me forever. I met all manner of people, all races, all religions, and all sexualities and suddenly I didn’t feel so isolated. I started to develop a personality, I started to find my feet and become a person. When I turned 18 I hit the gay clubs in the city and met my boyfriend who I have been with for over a year and I started to recover as a person.

So last week it finally felt as if everything was beginning to fall into place, I felt as if my life was moving in the right direction and so was my country and I felt proud. I have never made any announcement of my sexuality to my family members other than my parents, partly due to the initial reaction my parents had as they banned me from telling anyone else. So on 5th February I updated my Facebook status (something I do rarely) to say:

“Today the gay marriage bill was accepted. I cannot help but think in a decade we’ll look back and think that this was a long time coming. Love is not gender, love is not something you control, love is love. Everyone is born to love who they love, we cannot change nor must we. Today something spectacular happened and love triumphed prejudice.”

The status was liked by over 60 people, and within those 60 people were family but more importantly several people that had previously bullied me during my time at high school, and I even received an apology via Facebook message from one individual. I felt as if I were in a daze, a moment of bliss, as my parents had accepted my boyfriend the world was accepting me.

But the very next night as I was stood at a bus stop, a man under the influence of drugs who identified that I was gay after attempting to start a conversation with me proceeded to attack me. Telling me that he ends his nights “slashing people’s throats” I feared for my life as he held me up against the screens of the bus shelter. He threw me into the road in front of oncoming track, and as I got back onto the pavement he once again grabbed hold of me and told me how easy it would be for him to kill me.

With dozens of people walking by I didn’t understand why not a single person intervened, he was just one man and I needed help. Then just as I had given up hope a gentleman appeared and took hold of my attacker to set me free, he urged me to walk away but just as I did my bus appeared and on it I went, the gentleman who had effectively saved me followed me on the bus to see how I was feeling, and he softly smiled at me and said nothing.

To many this event would replay in their minds as a negative, but to me I look back and think of it as a positive. It has restored my faith in humanity, although just one man stood forward, it was still one man, one man who saved another life. Those two days are amongst the most extraordinary of my short life, I don’t think I will ever forget what happened in those 48 hours, and I hope I won’t.

-(Share your story with us!)

by Clint Thomson

Dallas Texas, where I currently live, has one of the largest GLBT communities in the United States. This is a far cry from where I grew up. I was born in Germiston, South Africa and since South Africa has year round school and my mother could afford it, I was sent away to an all boys private boarding school in King William’s Town.

King William’s Town is tiny compared to Johannesburg, Cape Town or Dallas with only about one hundred thousand residents and living at the private boarding school made my world even smaller. I felt like I was the only gay person in the world and was constantly bombarded with negative information about gay people and the link between gay sex and AIDS.

Due to my effeminate manner and high pitched voice, I was tormented at the boarding school constantly by students and teachers alike. There was no hiding my orientation, there never has been and so this was my life for six years from Standard 2 (4th grade) to Standard 8 (10th grade).

When you live in an environment like that, you adapt and learn defense mechanisms that help you to survive and I am still living with these today. That being said, the mind is a wonderful thing and when I look back now it is with fondness. I barely remember the torments I endured, yet I remember fond memories of secret sexual relationships with other closeted and sometimes straight peers and teachers as well as strong friendships with other gay men who were also struggling with their sexuality.

It gets better and I am living a wonderful life in Dallas surrounded by openly gay friends in a loving and progressive city. Looking back at my birth country I can also point to South Africa as a leader in GLBT rights with legalized gay marriage and strong GLBT protections in their constitution.

As time passes, the world improves. Our lives as GLBT individuals improve as we take control of our destiny and I’m glad that I have endured. Living and adapting to life’s challenges makes us stronger and more resilient. It has made me who I am today and I would not trade anything in the world for those experiences.

-(Share your story with us!)