So Out With Dad is calling for submissions, if you haven't watched the web series, go do so. Anyway, I submitted before, and I wanted to tell a happy story, so I sent an edited version of Arms of an Angel. But they're looking for something that really shows the challenges of what gay people go through in coming out, so they're asking for submissions again. So I decided to write something with a bit more of a serious tone.
There's a lot of things that I'm touching on here, and I could go into a lot more depth on a lot of them. But it's for a monologue in a web series and I'm sure they don't have the time to read a novel. So I cut a lot out and just tried to touch on some major point.
Anyway, here's the unedited version of what I wrote. I'm in the process of editing my story now and going to submit it today.
There’s a PFLAG mom in Oshawa, she gets up almost every month and tell her story of her son, and how she’s the bravest person she knows. Most of the times she says it with tears in her eyes, knowing what he’s gone through, and truly and honestly admiring him for coming out on the other side of it.
That PFLAG mom is my mom. I’ve gone to meetings with her a few times, and to be honest her story makes me uncomfortable. Because I don’t feel brave or strong most of the time, in fact, a lot of the time I feel pretty much the exact opposite.
I’m the poster child for every case study out there that says that gay men are the product of absent fathers. My parents divorced when I was very young, but even when they were together my father had made it quite clear to me that he had no use for his younger son. He already had my older brother to teach baseball to, and take camping, I wasn’t necessary. I was an accident. He made that abundantly clear.
But I never stopped trying, I tried to take interest in my family history, if I can’t be the rough and tumble boy he wants, then I can make myself an academic. Finding out things like when our family farm was founded, and that it was actually named “Fernhill”, looking at old family trees and such.
But nothing I did was good enough.
As a teenager I started to come into my own, I started discovering who I was, and stopped trying to impress the people around me, who would never be impressed no matter what I did. A lot of the compassion I had as a child started turning off, because I just didn’t have the energy to care about people, when I never felt cared for back.
Then I discovered what gay was. I discovered that it was okay for boys to like boys. Or at least, some people thought that was okay.
Apparently my dad didn’t think so. Because after I came out to him, the next weekend I spent at his place, he came home absolutely plastered and decided that he would try to beat it out of me.
I got away after that, I got myself back to my mom’s and step dad’s and I ran off. I ended up on my own at 17, or rather I found myself adopted by the queer community at the University of Guelph. I ended up living with a bunch of students, who opened my eyes to so many things. Who tried and succeeded in a lot of ways of created a family for me when I never really had the sense of one. Having my first birthday party thrown for me when I turned 18, to having sedars on Passover, even though I wasn’t Jewish. For the first time feeling a sense of togetherness, to quote RENT, “to being an us for once”
I wish I could tell you that that was my happy ending, but it wasn’t, things got good for a while, but they didn’t stay that way. I started cutting and had even attempted suicide. You’d probably ask why I’d do that? And there’s a whole list of psycho babble I could give you here, but in the end it boils down to, I didn’t know how to be happy.
I suppose I still don’t. I feel like I’m constantly running away from things, living pay cheque to pay cheque. Being happy, it’s something that a lot of people take for granted, because to those of us, that never learned how, getting out of bed each morning can be a struggle. I mean, a lot more happened to me then just that, I wish I could say it was my one and only time that I was beaten for being gay. But, it’s not. It happened again about two years ago, when I was trying to forgive my father and have a relationship with him again.
But in the end, I survived, or rather, I’m surviving. Most days I feel like my head is hardly above water. I try to throw myself in the community, to make sure that no one ever has to feel like I did, or like I do. To educate people that us queer folk are not sub human, in hopes that some one else can benefit.
Most days the idea of having to come out to one more person makes me want to scream. To have to tip toe around people that I meet at work, or wherever else until I know that they can accept it. Well I don’t do that anymore, again, I stopped caring, maybe that’s a bad thing, and maybe it’s burned bridges for me, or makes me seem weird, but if I’m going to make this work. If I’m going to ever be happy. I need to live my live unapologetically. I am not going to stand idly by and let people dictate how I should behave or live my life. There’s a learning curve to this I suppose, but I hope I’ll get it eventually.
So back to my mom, I guess she is right. I guess I am brave. I suppose I am strong. And I hate to end this on a quote, because really that seems a bit ostentatious, but it sort of sums it up. “I find my greatest strength in wanting to be strong. I find my greatest bravery in deciding to be brave.” So I suppose I find my greatest hope, is hoping it get’s better. I guess I find is that the only way to do any of this, is to make it better, for myself and for my community.
((Quote is from Boy Meets Boy – by David Levithan.))
