Promotion or Education?

CNN recently did a news report on bullying in schools and how some christian groups believe that the govenment’s attempts to address this issue are just a ploy by the big bad gays to promote the "gay agenda".

Insert tired sigh here.

The reporter was actually very good, he asked the questions that we all want to ask, to a panel of three people, a representative of the christian group, a representative of an LGBT group and an author of a guide for parents on helping their kids through their teenage years. He asked the difficult questions to the christian rep, and like any slimey politician, she dodged them, never actually answered the questions, just kept repeating the same thing. The other panel members highlighted in excellent clarity the pitfalls of the christian group’s alternative. It’s just a shame that the presenter didn’t push the christian group’s representative to explain just exactly how this planned action would promote the gay agenda.

I have some experience in this area. My father is a baptist minister, now the Scottish baptist is different to the American baptist, they’re not quite so extreme but alot of the beliefs are the same. I was raised in the baptist church, I am a christian although I have alot of issues with the way the church and many christians act in God’s name, that isn’t someting I want to talk about right now. Right now I want to talk about my experience of being bullied, being gay, being a christian and being a kid, all at the same time.

In 1994 we moved to a new home, it came with my dad’s work, every few years he would move to a new church. I was kinda shy as a kid, I was only around 11 or 12 at the time we moved and having moved from the west coast to the east coast of Scotland was kind of a big deal for me. I didn’t like it there, I remember clinging to my mother the first day I was shown around my new primary school, I didn’t want to be there.

The first year wasn’t great, I didn’t really make many friends, I wasn’t popular and the teachers I had for my final year in primary school were really quite unprofessional, they liked the popular kids, those of us who werent popular weren’t high on their priority list. Thinking back now, I was so naive then, all the backhanded compliments and jibes I didn’t know what they really meant.

So after about a year, a new kid moved to my street, he lived 2 doors down from me, we interacted a little socially at first, but as he settled in he became friendly with a group I wasn’t part of and then began the us and them feeling. Well, it was really just me and them. This kid tormented me endlessly, I became the outcast in school, he was in my class, I couldn’t get away from him. I had 1 year in primary school and then 5 years in high school. I actually left school at 15, my birthday was in Januray and I just didnt go back after the christmas holidays. The legal age for leaving school in the UK is 16.

I was bullied for being gay, I wasn’t actually out at school, but I was masculine enough for people to assume that about me. From there, it became anything they could pick up on, physical characteristics, anything. And this kid was the ring leader, he got me going to school, in school, coming home from school, after school, I literally couldn’t get away from him. In the winter, when it snowed, the house would be pelted with snowballs, I would be pelted with snowballs. It was humiliating.

Lunch time was the hardest. That was a whole hour. A whole hour with nowhere I specifically had to be. A whole hour to try and avoid being targeted. I remember wandering the streets around the school trying to find somewhere to be, someone I knew who was an outcast like me, who wouldn’t pick on me that I could spend the time with. I hated lunch time.

The school did very little, I remember being offered to move to another class. I declined as this would mean leave the one friend I did have. They didn’t move him out of the class. The teachers didn’t address it, no one stopped it, no one did anything. I know my father wrote some letters of complaint, the police were advised of the harassment at the house, they didn’t do anything either. So I just kept on, I did poorly in school, I didn’t get any qualifications to speak of, I wasn’t offered any extra help or tutoring, no one seemed to really care. I was just another kid being processed by the system, to be spat out afterwards and make my way through life in dead end jobs.

This all utterly destroyed my confidence, I couldn’t maintain eye contact with anyone, I couldn’t handle simple tasks, it was crippling. I remember my mother trying to take me shopping, I would be having panic attacks in the middle of shops, I would be freaking out, ready to vomit, collapse, it was horrible. She didn’t understand. Recently she told me that when, as a child, I was having what I now know were asthma attacks, when the clothes dryer was on (seriously, this thing would just steam up the whole house), she thought I was just being a brat. I suspect she also thought the same when I was having the panic attacks.

Around age 13 I figured out that I must be gay. An older child, a neighbour, told me and my brother what it meant, I remember her being surprised that we didn’t know what it was. That night after bed time, I crept down stairs and asked my mother if it was true. She used to do the ironing in the evening, I often asked her about things I’d heard at this time of night. She asked me where I’d heard it and I told her, she was annoyed and I asked her why, she said she didn’t want us to know about that kind of thing. She wanted to protect us from these things.

I remember lying in my bed and saying to myself “I’m gay…”. I was happy that I now knew why I liked girls, why I felt the way I did, why I was having these thoughts. My parents not telling us about homosexuality was a double edged sword, on one hand I was confused about how I felt, I didn’t know what it meant, why I didn’t like boys but on the other hand I didn’t have any negative connotations about homosexuality, it was brand new to me.

You have to remember, this was all in the days before the internet, I was really very isolated. We lived in a small town and my access to the outside world was limited, I was too young to visit the cities and too much an outcast to have much social interaction with my peers. That isolation may well have saved me. I was in the depths of depression, if I had any knowledge how, I probably would have ended my life then.

I was an avid swimmer before I came to this town, I loved it, absolutely loved it. I used to go to a swimming club a couple nights a week, and I was pretty good at it too. I tried to keep that up when we moved, but a combination of the bullying and puberty quickly put a stop to it. I briefly got involved with a local rugy club, they were starting classes for girls to introduce them to the sport. I loved it! I was having fun, away from the scumbags that hounded me at home, it was a welcome escape. Only problem was it was apparently full of lesbians (so in reality, they were just trying to recuit us youngsters to the gay lifestyle, not actually get us interested in rugby). My parents talked me out of going back, I wasn’t really given a reason at the time, just that I shouldn’t go any more. The same was true of the army cadets, I loved that too, but it was the same again, I was talked out of going back. The army’s pushing the gay agenda too you see.

So that was pretty much it. No social outlet, no self confidence, no friends, no chance to develop social skills, I was a 15 year old hermit.

It wasn’t untill we moved again, 6 years later that the internet started to become available to people in their homes. We got online. My goodness, what a difference that made. I remember reading about butch and femme, what it meant to be ‘stone’. I remember thinking to myself that I must be weird if I don’t want to be touched, why would anyone be like that? Yet online I found so many other people who told me it was normal. What a fucking relief, from years of being told I was a freak to being told I was normal!

I learned so much online, I read and read and read. This is also back when the internet was new, there wasn’t the same kind of information available relating to sexuality and gender then as there is now. But I took what I could find and I educated myself. I found all these labels, I was able to put a name to my feelings, I was able to identify myself, I figured what I was. I was about 21 when someone suggested to me that I might be trans…

This is what happens when you don’t educate children about the realities of the world. When you don’t explain to them that sometimes people are gay, sometimes people are gender varient, sometimes people are different. A child will be gay or gender varient regardless of what they learn in school. This is not promoting a homosexual lifestyle, this is not telling children that they should lead a homosexual lifestyle over a heterosexual one. The only difference this education will make is that that child will not grow up confused and hated for something they don’t understand.

If you really want to protect children, don’t send them out into the world uneducated.



Keltik