“i wish i could do something 😔 / i wish the wga had a kickstarter or a gofundme, i would throw money at it” good news! it’s amazing how you can literally go onto the wga strike website or the wgawest linktree from their twitter and find links to support writers and other workers affected by the strike
Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.
Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn’t even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.
The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.
Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.
He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.
Wayne’s lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.
So… no.
No one in my school talked about being trans.
Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.
Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because… he liked wearing eyeliner. That’s it. he had a girlfriend. He’s still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.
And later learned that a number of people I’d known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.
Kids started calling me a “lesbo” on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became “boy crazy” as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn’t a dyke.
It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for “girls.” Ha ha, it’s funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.
That’s my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.
Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn’t.
If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss “homosexually” (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn’t an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).
Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.
Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as “a lesbian with a man’s body” and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female “transvestites” didn’t exist, so I guess I couldn’t feel like that? Painfully.
So why didn’t you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren’t getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.
dating and relationships are the ultimate “you cringe you lose” compilation
sounds like a joke post but unironically one of the first hurdles to forming healthy happy relationships is to learn to suppress the impulse to go “eww lame” about stuff that partners or potential partners are into.
the chances of meeting someone who isn’t into at least a few things you think are really really lame is very slim, and instead of chasing after the dream of meeting somebody who only, exclusively, likes stuff you also like, it’s better to just like. learn to be more chill about people liking stuff you don’t, and hope that they’ll return the favor and be chill about you liking stuff they don’t.
