I was a twelve-year-old boy when I found myself laying on the ground outside my middle school, crying and screaming because my arm had just snapped like a twig, loudly enough that I knew it was broken by the sound before I'd even begun to feel it.
This wasn't an accident. I'd been shoved into that wall by a gang of knuckleheads just as I was stepping out of school for the day, heading towards my bike and a wonderful reprieve from the torment I suffered through every day.
And I hadn't done anything to deserve it.
This wasn't, of course, the first such bit of fun I'd received at the hands of these people- a week prior to this, they'd attempted (unsuccessfully) to throw me in a dumpster behind a grocery store. Prior to that, I'd been body-checked into lockers, had my chocolate milk dumped on me, and, of course, simply mocked until I wanted to just leave and never come back.
I had virtually no friends, save one, and I spent all my time at home. I'd never done anything to hurt anyone. Why the cruelty?
Because I was delicately thin, maybe. Or my predilection for really big words (like "predilection.") Or my admittedly high, effeminate voice. Or the way I sucked up to teachers, my fondness for art, or the way that I used to cry- yes, cry- if I was teased or pushed around enough.
Predictably, they called me "faggot." It was practically a form of punctuation for them.
I wasn't, however, gay- actually, I was crazy in love with this girl named Abby... but that's neither here nor there.
It wouldn't have been right to tease me, beat me up, follow me home from school, even if I HAD been gay. But to kids, there's a difference. Children live in a world of simple logic, good guys and bad guys, people who are okay to make fun of, and people who aren't. And "gay" people, whether they're actually gay, or just Trekkies who never really understood football, are okay to be the target of such boys-will-be-boys posturing.
And they learn this from their parents. They glean subtle cues, they listen when you're talking, and they extrapolate on it. And since every middle school is fucking Lord of the Flies with passing periods, they're not content to keep their contempt seething behind composed faces and platitudes. Instead, they belt you in the nose and make your life a living hell that parents seem completely incapable of remembering by the time they're 30.
But being a kid- being a geeky kid- is hell. The kind of hell where you're always walking fast, shoulders hunched, head down, trying not to be seen or caught. The kind where a momentary daydream about saving Abby from a group of terrorists by crawling through air vents gets interrupted with an outstretched leg and a helpful shove to send your chin into the carpet. The kind of hell where you can't even change clothes for gym class, not because you're ashamed of your body, but because you're terrified of the vulnerability that will result from having your shirt over your face for even the briefest of seconds.
As long as society keeps implying that some people are less than other people, as long as we can rationalize some things away as being "choices" or "moral weakness" or simple oddity, people will keep passing that on to their children. And those snarling terrors with clenched fists in the hallways are nothing but the physical embodiment of their parents' souls, doing in person what mommy and daddy do at the ballot box, or with their wallets.
Kids don't have to be bastards, not like this. Kids don't have to grow up knowing that it's okay to pick on people if they're a certain way.
And I'm lucky- my only real crime was being sensitive and slight of frame. I'm well over six feet tall now, and my sarcasm can eat through bone. But if you're a homosexual adult, every day is junior high. Every day is a new opportunity for someone to trip you up or knock you down or strip your rights or treat you unfairly, not because of what you've done, but because of who you are.
Our children see the hypocrisy of our message when we say "all men are created equal" and act differently. And until we really join hands and acknowledge that we're all the same, all deserving, all equal, gym class is going to be Thunderdome for little kids with a fondness for Spock.
Saying "fag" should be grounds for suspension, just like it would be if they called someone a "nigger." And our society needs to tell people that stuff like this IS NOT OKAY.
People who remember childhood as an idyllic time were obviously never children. And people who think that they're letting gays slide with some hedonistic life of fun and sex are forgetting what it's like to be the one getting picked on.