Please allow me to take a moment to bare my soul to all of you.
I don't diary often- in fact, i think I've only posted three or four during my time here- mostly because others are saying all the important things that need to be said. Very often, I honestly (and rightly!) feel I have nothing of value to contribute, not because of any failing on my part, but because I simply don't have anything new to add.
But the current pie fight over the Warren invocation forces me to, very reluctantly, chip in my two bits. So, today, I'm going to put my neck out and add some perspective that, I think, is badly needed.
When I was growing up, gays, homosexuality, AIDS, and how gay people are treated were absent topics in my home. It was the mid-'80s, Reagan was in office, and a new and very scary disease had been identified. Stories about GRID- and, later, HIV and AIDS- were passingly occasional topics on the nightly news.
I, in my pre-teen innocence, knew little to nothing of these things. However, I did know I was "different". I got picked on by the other kids on my street and at my schools constantly; my parents' response was "if you're going to insist on being different, you should expect to get picked on." In other words, they were of no help.
To put it short and sweet, everyone knew before I did that I was gay. This meant, in essence, that i spent my whole childhood getting picked on, put down, belittled, and generally scorned without ever knowing why. This led to bouts of nearly suicidal depression that follow me to this very day.
In the midst of all of this, once I reached middle school (sixth grade), I discovered I was a talented musician. For the very first time ever, I had worth. For the very first time ever, I could accomplish things nobody around me could. For the very first time, I had self-respect and self-esteem. I took to it like a duck to water, learning oboe and singing in choir, and later teaching myself piano and percussion. I was composing and arranging- albeit crudely- by the age of fourteen or so.
High school came and went, and I earned more music honors than I care to mention here. I was, as my directors put it, the most talented musician to go through the school system during their time there. I eventually started college as a music education major at Western Michigan University.
But on October 19, 1994, all of that came to a sudden and catastrophic end, when I admitted to my mom that I was gay.
She had been hounding me with the question for about a year or so. It wasn't "nice", either. There's a certain tone of voice people can take when asking a question which tells you that telling the truth will get you in deeper trouble than lying will. She took that tone every time she asked if I was gay.
I had, of course, figured myself out by that point in my life. I had heard all the horror stories about getting kicked out of the house, people living on the streets because their families didn't want them anymore, but honestly... I didn't think that would happen to me. I really, truly thought with all my heart that my parents weren't like that, that they loved me no matter what, that my heart was safe in their care, and that they would never, ever, under any circumstances, do anything to me that would result in lasting harm.
I was wrong.
That night, my mom gave me a wet ditch to sleep in. I had to leave home, with nothing more than two changes of clothes, my oboe, and my bike. I wasn't even allowed my car. School was twenty miles away, and I could no more bike that every day than I could fly to the moon.
Over the course of the following year, my grades tanked a full point, perhaps more. I was in danger of losing my oboe scholarship, and ended up sobbing almost every day. I was completely inconsolable. I couldn't concentrate on anything, and my self-respect and self-esteem were completely gone.
Then my parents dropped the other shoe: since I obviously no longer cared about my education, they were going to stop helping me pay for school. They timed this decision such that the ability to drop classes without penalty had already come and gone, along with the possibility of receiving financial aid. I was forced to leave school, my education- no, my dream- less than half-finished.
I haven't performed in front of a crowd since. When they did that, all my hopes and dreams coughed once and died.
All this came from parents who were not religious, who never went to church, and who didn't read the Bible. Nonetheless, they were of the same mind as Rick Warren and his ilk. Even today, my mom isn't comfortable at all with me and my "choices". My father never mentioned any of the above from the day it happened to the day he died.
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For me, the inclusion of Rick Warren in Obama's inauguration, in any respect, brings it all back. His inclusion is the clearest of signals to me, just as my mom's incessant questioning of whether I was gay in that angry, hateful tone was so many years ago. I knew what it meant then. I know what it means now. I can't ignore what it means, because I've been there.
Once, my "nagging feeling" turned out to be 100% true, and my life was destroyed as a result. I'm not a musician anymore, I'm a postal worker; I don't have the opportunity, or even the desire, to go back to music. Those dreams are dead... and people like my mom, like Rick Warren- they see such sad results as their goal.
It isn't that they don't like us- they despise us. It isn't that they want us to fail- they want us to have no opportunity in the first place. It isn't that they wants us to "tone it down"- they want to cover the closet with plate steel.
Unless you've actually been there, you can't possibly know how demeaning, how disheartening, how soul-rending the Warren invocation can be. Additionally, it's nearly impossible to say it in words that anyone can really understand. I can only hope I've approached that here.
I'm not going to ask Obama to disinvite Warren, because it would be futile to do so. I can only hope his inclusion in Obama's inaugural isn't a harbinger of things to come. I can only hope that Obama will repeal DADT. I can only hope Obama will confront DOMA. I can only hope I, and many others here and elsewhere, are wrong about what the Warren invocation could mean.
But hope, at this point, is all I have, and from personal experience, I know that that particular hope is a fragile thing.
Update: This is an important point, from a comment by Lost and Found:
but the diary isn't about "policy implications" (2+ / 0-)
I could care less about this because I don't see the policy implications at all.
The diarist is talking about the real human cost of homophobia, and how it rips families apart and destroys people's lives. There was not one single word about policy.
Exactly.