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Okay, so I lay down and I'm almost drifting off to sleep when all of a sudden, I start getting about a thousand ideas for my book. And then I realized that I have not actually posted the beginning stages of it, the paper that I wrote for Bradshaw. Which I shall do now. Please, feel free to comment on it. I really want to get feedback on this. This is a rough scetch of the book I want to write.
I was saved by God. My mother told me about it when I was eight years old. To hear her recount the tale gives me goose bumps, because it makes me feel like my life has meaning. When you grow up way ahead of your time and therefore alone, such a story gives you hope that what you are doing here, alive, on Earth has a purpose:
“When you were only a few months old, you almost died in a fire in the trailer we were living in at the time. It was on a Saturday morning, and I was doing some cleaning before I had to go to work. You were taking a nap in the bedroom, and your brother was in the living room watching cartoons. Not thinking about it, I laid a bag of chips on the toaster so that I could clean off the counter. I went ahead and started cleaning up the living room, when someone started knocking on the door. I thought it would be your grandpa, so I opened the door without seeing who it was first. I wasn’t happily surprised when I found, standing there, a Bible salesman. I was nice and all about it; I let him go on talking about the ‘good book’ and blah blah blah, when suddenly he shouts at me ‘Get out of there, quick!’ I turned around, and saw that the trailer was full of smoke. Without thinking about it, I ran in and grabbed Brian off the couch – evidently he had fallen asleep or something – and rushed outside. Then I remembered that you were sleeping in the crib, which was past the kitchen, where the smoke was coming from. Before I could do or say anything, the Bible salesman ran inside the trailer – by now there were flames coming out the windows – without me even saying anything about you. The fire department got there a couple minutes later, but they couldn’t get inside. They finally put the fire out, but the man hadn’t come out with you. I thought you were dead. But when the firemen went inside to check to make sure it really was out, they hollered from the bedroom for me to come. I didn’t want to, afraid of what I’d see. But when I got there, there you were, smiling up at me, reaching out for me. You were fine, but the crib and the room had been scorched. When I went to pick you up, I found in the crib, also untouched by the fire or water, a new, white Bible. That’s the Bible that’s downstairs in the curio cabinet next to the rat Dad killed. See, Bradley, you were saved by an angel, which means that God wants you here – you have a purpose.”
The first time I heard that story, I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t really understand what any of it meant. Than again, I’m not sure I ever took much of what my mother said to heart. Later that same year, she told me:
“I never really wanted you; you were an accident. I don’t really know if I had to do it all over again, that I would still have you. Don’t get me wrong, I love you, but sometimes I hate you!”
It’s not that my mother wasn’t a good mother; she was actually a very good mother – she’d do anything for her kids, and has. She just wasn’t meant to be a mother, I think. She doesn’t really like kids, and I don’t remember a time that she ever did. I think it has to do with how she was raised.
She was given by her real mother to her aunt and uncle to raise as their own. Her uncle sexually abused her and at the age of 14 got her pregnant. She wanted to have an abortion, but her “parents” wouldn’t let her. After she delivered the baby, they forced her to give her first son to them to raise as their own. As soon as she could, she ran away from them and her home in
Because of the fact that my mother never knew her real parents, and I’ve never known my real father, I have no family. I come from no where. Sometimes I like the fact that I come out of nothing – I can start over without thinking about what’s happened in the past with family members. But other times, I get very angry that I have no history, no genealogy. I don’t know if I’m going to go bald early or late in life, if ever at all. I don’t know if heart attacks or cancer runs in my family. I don’t know what it’s like to be able to trace my family back into practically ancient history. I am alone among strangers, the last of a species that has been killed off, one by one.
* * *
When I was six years old, at the end of kindergarten year, my mother started to worry that something was wrong with me. I wasn’t listening to anything anyone said, and usually when someone was talking to me, I just got a dazed look on my face and stared off into space. She took me to the doctor and I was diagnosed with nerve deafness of the inner ear. They gave me hearing aids, which I was made to wear all the time. They also told my mother that my hearing would only deteriorate until I eventually went deaf.
When I went to school the next day, I was tortured and teased by all the kids in my class. No one had ever seen hearing aids before. No one really understood what they were for. Even I didn’t fully understand what they were; I just knew that I had to wear them. The teasing never stopped, all the way through junior high school. Finally, in seventh grade, I just stopped wearing them. No matter how much my mother tried to make me, I just wouldn’t. I sometimes, to make her happy, put them in before school, and took them out when I got on the bus. But in high school, I stopped wearing them all together, and haven’t worn them since. It didn’t matter though, because by that time, there were a million things my classmates knew to tease me about.
* * *
I’ve always been independent. I can’t remember a single day that I haven’t felt as if the only person I could depend on was myself. My mother likes to tell the story of my being the ring-bearer in her wedding, and the first day of kindergarten.
My mother and step-father got married when I was three years old. They decided that I should be the ring-bearer, especially since my older brother was one of the groomsmen. When it came time to walk down the aisle, I was supposed to hold my cousin-to-be-made-flower-girl’s hand. I did at first, but when we started walking down the long aisle, she was walking too slowly for my taste. So I pushed her down, took the flowers in one hand, the pillow with the ring in the other, and ran down the aisle, waving flowers all around. As soon as the service began though, I fell asleep in my grandmother’s lap.
When my brother started kindergarten, my mother had to drag him kicking and screaming all the way there. So when it came to be my turn, she was prepared. Only, when she came to wake me up for school, I was no where to be found in the house. After searching frantically for twenty minutes, she found me outside at the edge of the driveway, dressed for school with my backpack on my back. She came out and asked me if she wanted her to hold my hand the whole way there. I told her no, and that I was going by myself (the school was only a block away). After trying for a few minutes to get me in the car for her to drive me, she finally let me go alone. Before I left though, I hugged her and kissed her and I told her, “Don’t worry Mommy, I’m a big boy. I can do it by myself. Don’t cry.”
When I was in second grade, my mother started working third shift, taking care of an elderly lady. She tried finding a babysitter for me for the time after school and before my step-father got home, but couldn’t find one anywhere. Finally, she let me stay by myself one afternoon instead of taking me to my grandmother’s house. I plopped down in front of the TV with a can of Pepsi and a bag of Lays potato chips. My mother still jokes that Pepsi, Nickelodeon, and potato chips were my babysitters.
* * *
Because my parents worked so much, they were constantly trying to find things for me to do with other kids. They enrolled me in Cub Scouts when I was in third grade. I belonged to Cub Scout Pack 118. I would have enjoyed it more, had I been able to share it with my step-father. Because he worked, he would only just drop me off at the den meetings. So, while all the other boys were laughing and wrestling around with their fathers, I sat alone in the corner and worked on whatever craft we were doing that night. Some of the other dad’s tried to make it better by helping me with my stuff like they did their own sons, but in the end, it only hurt worse. I stopped being in Boys Scouts when I reached 8th grade.
Third grade was also the year that I started in the Moline Boys Choir. My whole family was happy and proud of me. My grandmother’s oldest son had been in Boys Choir when he was kid, so she was overjoyed at the prospect of having another one in it. For a long time, I really enjoyed it. The boys that were in the choir didn’t tease me very much, though by this time I was one of the chubbiest boys there. But after a while, my parents started to lose interest and just dropped me off at the concerts. I felt like I was singing to no one. I dropped out of Boys Choir at the same time that I stopped going to Boy Scouts.
By this time in my life, I was getting beat up or picked on every day all day long because of my weight and my hearing aids. I could hardly get through a day without being pushed down or punched or humiliated in front of everyone. I didn’t have any friends to stick up for me. Because my step-father was worried that once I got to high school the bullies would be bigger and meaner, he enrolled me in a karate class. Or rather, he tried to enroll me in a karate class. The first night, I went and the instructor tried to teach me different moves. I couldn’t do them, or wouldn’t do them – I’m not sure which. If one of the other kids would come at me, I would fall down to the ground and start crying. At the end of the night, the instructor asked my step-father to not bring me back. From the look on his face, I knew that he was disappointed in me. Another mistake on my tally.
* * *
Growing up, I didn’t have many friends. The one friend that I did have though was Shawna. I met her when we first moved into our house in
The summer after sixth grade, when I was twelve, I went with her and her grandparents to
* * *
I remember, while growing up, I always felt like I was different from the other kids, especially the boys. I didn’t really know what it was. I thought it might be because they always picked on me, and it seemed like no one else ever got picked on or teased or beat up. But in junior high, when everyone started to hit puberty, I knew it wasn’t because I was teased that I felt different.
When most of the boys started taking an interest in the girls, I didn’t. I could not understand why I didn’t, but I didn’t. It just never crossed my mind that I should find the girl with the biggest breasts pretty. It never occurred to me that I should have been thinking about kissing Suzy, and not thinking about hugging John. Finally, I started hearing the word “faggot” used a lot in teasing kids. For some odd reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about that word. One day, I looked it up in the dictionary. All it said was that a faggot was a bundle of sticks, among other things. Soon after, I started hearing people talk about it though, using crude comments to explain what exactly a “fag” does. Then, suddenly, everything clicked. I finally had a word and a definition for the difference I felt – homosexual.
The oddest thing of it all is that I just accepted it. There was no moral battle for decency in me. I didn’t need a transition stage. I was just gay – no more, no less. I literally didn’t think about what it meant; I just knew. But, hearing the way people talked about gay people made me not want anyone to know that I was one of them. So I kept it a secret – not because I wasn’t okay with being gay, but because I knew that no one else would be.
* * *
When I arrived at
Though our school was large in number, it was small in community. Word spread like wild-fire through the school that I was gay. That one day in April of my freshman year would be the day that started three years of living hell. Because, even though my friends were cool with it, 2,000 other students and quite a lot of the faculty at MHS were not.
In the three and a half years (I graduated a semester early) I spent at MHS, I was beat up at least twelve times severely, had my tires slashed twice, spit on, pushed down stairs, tripped, hit with tennis balls, baseballs, basketballs, volley balls, and footballs. I was tripped by my PE teacher, Mr. Clark. Because of the injury inflicted upon me, almost all the cartilage in my right knee is gone, causing arthritis. Playing volleyball in PE, I was tripped again by a fellow student, spraining my ankle badly and causing me to miss school for a week. Also in PE, during the swimming session, I was held under water by one of the other guys until I passed out and had to be resuscitated. I had my locker stuffed with condoms twice, my clothes stolen out of my gym locker on multiple occasions, and once, in January of my junior year someone threw bloody tampons onto my car and they froze there.
For two years I was dealing with all this alone. I didn’t want to bother anyone with my problems. I still hadn’t told my parents that I was gay, but I felt as if I had to. So one day, I wrote a letter to my mother explaining everything, not the stuff that happened in the school, but that I loved her and wasn’t trying to hurt her, but I needed her to know that I was gay; I needed to be honest with her. Not being brave enough to give it to her myself, I hid it in my room. A few months later, she found it while going through my things and read it.
When I got home from school that afternoon, we had a long conversation. The gist of it was that she loved me no matter what. She didn’t like that I was gay, and she didn’t want me to bring boys to the house, but she more or less accepted it. That night, she told my step-father. His only words were “You’re my son, and I love you.” Even though I know they love me, I’ve never been comfortable enough, nor do I think they would be, to talk openly about my sexual orientation with them.
However, my mother surprised me the year I came out to her. It was Thanksgiving at my step-father’s mother’s house. His family doesn’t really like my mother or us kids very much because we are the excess baggage that came with a marriage they didn’t approve of to begin with. But, I remember sitting at the kiddies’ table digging into my dinner, listening to the adults’ conversation. All of a sudden, I hear my mother’s voice, rather loudly, “Aileen, could you pass the mashed potatoes? Oh, and Bradley’s gay.”
With one clean swoop, I could hear everyone’s silver drop on their plates, and even a glass drop somewhere in the room. Then, as one, everyone in the room turned and stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at me. All I could do was sit there. What could I say? I’ve never been so embarrassed yet so utterly important in my life.
The worst thing I’ve ever suffered through was the humiliation of one single act, something few people know of. One day, during the swimming session of PE, after the period was over, I was in the locker room changing my clothes. Three of the football players, came up behind and pinned me to the wall, on my knees. One by one they took turns beating me, keeping my head facing the floor, so I couldn’t see who it was. When they grew tired of that, they began forcing me to perform oral sex on them until each one was spent. When I finally got to look up, the face I saw was that of a person who I had thought was a friend. He was smiling while he cursed at me, spit on me, and gave me one final kick in the stomach, causing me to vomit. They left me in the locker room alone, cold, nearly unconscious with only a dirty, bloody towel to cover myself with.
I’ll never forget this event. It was at that time that I decided that I wouldn’t put up with it anymore. I would not let people treat me like dirt because of something I couldn’t change. I knew then that I would have to do something to change not only my school, but everywhere. I knew that I wasn’t alone and that others like me had experienced similar events. When I sought help, I couldn’t find it. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to make sure that it would never happen to anyone again.
I made it my mission to start a GSA at my high school. During the two-year uphill battle with my classmates, the school board, the city council, and finally lawyers, I sometimes felt like giving up. But I knew that I couldn’t. I owed it, if not to myself, than to others like me who were in similar situations. Finally, after two years of fighting, I achieved my goal. I developed STONEWALL – Struggling Teens on New Errands Wanting All Lives Liberated. The group was founded to provide a support and information network to the school and its students. It has grown since its creation as the first diversity club in the Quad Cities into something truly amazing. They now have a teen hotline, networks with other GSA’s and diversity groups across the country, STONEWALL chapters at four high schools in the Quad Cities, and provide some funding for a new gay teen shelter that is being opened up in the near future. STONEWALL has created hundreds of Safe Spaces in all of the
I was awarded by the ACLU a plaque in commemoration of my part in creating Safe Spaces and establishing a diversity club. My only regret is that my family knows nothing of this, which I consider one of my greatest accomplishments. I never told them because I wasn’t comfortable with them being a part of it. Now I look back and I wish I had told them everything that had happened to me and everything I was going through; maybe my fight would have been a little easier if I had had someone on my side.
* * *
In all my nineteen years of existence, I’ve been through hell and back it seems. Sometimes, my only solace has been what I believe to be my one true talent: writing. I began writing in my eighth grade English class. I started with short stories, showing them only to my English teacher, Ms. Young. She encouraged me to continue writing, and so I did. I eventually began writing poetry. I now have six years of my life written in over two hundred poems. Once upon a time, I dreamed of having them published and becoming a writer. I still sometimes have that dream, though not as often or as strong-willed as I once did
In high school, I wrote a short one-act play, entitled “Always and Forever” for a scholarship program at a local college one year. My speech teacher, Mrs. Wignall, had encouraged me to do so. She said that I wrote beautifully, and that I would be a shoe-in. So, I wrote the play and submitted it. I was heartbroken to learn that my submission was too late and that the winners had already been picked. Eventually I just forgot about the contest.
The following year, however, my mother received a phone call for me from the playwright committee. It seems that one of my English teachers had re-submitted my play, it had been picked to win first prize: a four thousand dollar scholarship, a check for one-hundred dollars, and my play would be acted out at the festival that spring. My mother knew nothing about it, but told them that I would call them back. When I returned home from work that evening, my mother told me all about it. I thought maybe she was playing some joke on me. But when I called them back, they told me that yes, indeed, “Always and Forever” had one first place.
Naturally, my mother insisted on attending and bringing all her friends and the entire family to see it. Yet I had my doubts. The play that I had written was about two boys in love, a subject that I was uncomfortable dealing with around my family. When my mother asked me why I did not want them to attend, I told her the reason. She agreed that the rest of the family shouldn’t see it, but she still insisted upon it. I was still uncomfortable, but I was happy that my mother was interested in embracing this part of my life.
* * *
Even at nineteen, I feel as if I’ve lived a full life. I’ve seen and experienced things most people can only dream of. However, I feel as if I’ve grown old before my time. Because my parents both had to work so much to make ends meet, I was forced to grow up before my peers did. The result is that I can be over-expectant of people, too mature for my good, and sometimes just generally uptight.
I now have a few close friends that have really become my family, which I have never had but have always longed for. I feel like I belong. I’m a strong person who believes in working hard; I always have been. Without strength or tenacity, I never would have made it to where I am. And I think that where I am is a good place to be. Finally, I’m at a place in my life where I’m happy just to be happy. I’ve struggled along the way, but it’s only made me stronger.
Not knowing where I come from has led to some problems, but it’s also given me a lot of hope. I never had a real father to show me how to do manly things like shave or camp or chop firewood. I’ve had to make it up as I go along. I’ve had to be my family. I’ve had to be the one I can turn to when all else fails. But it’s because, not despite, of this that I am who I am today.
A lot of people have asked me since I first came out if I could take a pill that would make me straight, would I? When I was 14, I didn’t say yes. My answer is still no. Without the experiences that I’ve been involved in, I would be a wholly different person. I’m finally beginning to grow into my skin and like the person I’m becoming. I’m not all that sure that I would like the person I would be if I hadn’t lived this life.
Sometimes I think I’ve discovered the meaning of life, but other times I feel like it’s all just a tawdry joke. I think that the meaning of life is only to live, to experience, to know what it is to know and breath and love and hate. Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but I wouldn’t trade my experiences, good or bad, for anything in this world or the next.
