Bryan 🏳️‍🌈 Mastodon 🦣 on Nostr: ✨️Reposting from previous instance✨️ #ComingOutStories It is important for ...

✨️Reposting from previous instance✨️

#ComingOutStories

It is important for coming out stories and LGBTQIA+ History to be told. I am reposting this from my previous instance, not for sympathy, but so others know what my generation endured, so others will know they aren't alone, and to bring light to situations not all that different, 40+ years later.

My Coming Out Story

Up until late last year, I had only told a few people my coming out story. I now understand how important it is to share our experiences. Anyone reading these will realize they aren’t alone.

I’ve always been smaller than others my age. Add red hair, freckles, and glasses, I was a bully’s favorite target.

My bullying was extreme, often physical and much more than unkind teasing or simply being stuffed in a locker.

My home life was equally troubled. My father was abusive to my mother and us kids. There was no support system for me at such a young age. Seeking help from adults always made retaliation even worse.

Early on, I sensed I was different. Clearly, my classmates did as well.

In my freshman year of high school, some football players grabbed me, took me into a bathroom, and beat me to the point that an ambulance was needed.

Their excuse was “he’s a faggot.”

My family home was on a hill, in front of our High School.

The weekend after I was hospitalized, someone burned the word “FAG” into the grass on the back of the hill behind our house - facing directly into the front of the high school.

The humiliation I endured from the entire community, seeing that word burnt onto our property every day, was worse than the broken bones, stitches and bruises.

And so I was outed, believing that something was horribly wrong with me.

This was during the Reagan-Thatcher years. During my four years of high school the country was in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

The "adults" all around me mocked and ridiculed the activists seen on TV. Society seemed convinced that AIDS was a punishment for being gay.

The anxiety and stress, 24 hours a day, at school, at home, everywhere, was unbearable.

I frequently considered running away over the years. But I had three younger siblings who relied on me, especially when our father went into a rage.

After one too many times, I tried to intervene, and stand up for my mother. He did stop striking her, but with one hand around my neck, lifted me from the floor and tossed me against a wall, like a rag doll. We never spoke again.

Sadly my mother is one of the worst bigots I know. MAGA-style bigotry. To this day, she does not understand why it is racist to have a "plantation" motif in her kitchen, complete with "lawn jockey" and Aunt Jemima style figurines everywhere.
She thinks "religion can fix the sin of homosexuality."

I left that town after graduation, joined the Navy and rarely go back.

My support and love now come from friends and "found family" met along the way in the years since. My life is all the better for it.