Imagine that you’re a twelve year old boy.
Imagine that you’re a twelve year old boy and that there’s nothing you’ve ever wanted more in your entire life than to join the Boy Scout troop sponsored by your local Catholic parish.
Imagine that you’re a twelve year old boy on your very first overnight camping trip with the church sponsored Scout troop you've dreamed of joining for years, and that in the middle of the night you’re suddenly woken up, yanked from your sleeping bag, marched deep into a dark forest, stripped naked, tied to a tree, surrounded by a crowd of young men who force you to watch as they expose their genitals, and then leave you there—frightened, screaming, and alone.
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I don’t have to imagine any of it. All I have to do is close my eyes.
45 years have passed since that night. None of us who were boys back then are anywhere close to young now. Some are no longer alive; others have scattered to the corners of the wind. At least one went on to college and law school, became an attorney, married, had children of his own, and was elected mayor of the little New Jersey town where we both grew up.
For more than four decades, I refused to acknowledge what happened to me that night, convinced it took place because I was somehow defective or deficient—short, skinny, non-athletic, bookish, musically-inclined—and that these qualities had naturally rendered me deserving of what happened. It was my due, my just desserts, I thought.
Because it occurred less than a month after my own sexual awakening, an awakening whose form was deeply proscribed by the religious dogma in which I was raised (e.g., masturbation was a mortal sin that sent you straight to hell if you died before confessing it), I was equally certain that God had not merely allowed me to be left stripped naked and tied to a tree in the middle of the forest in the dark of night, but that he had deliberately arranged for events to transpire precisely as they did. I was a sinner who deserved to be punished, after all, and God obliged by delivering that punishment in no uncertain terms, swiftly and unequivocally. He knew what I had done; he had seen it all. There was no point complaining about the consequences or attempting to seek redress. It was my fault, really. Who was I to argue with an omnipotent, omnipresent, all-just God?
And because I unwittingly subscribed to the code of shame and silence that so many young men do, I came early to the conclusion that my experience was not only deserved and just, but unique and anomalous. I was an exception to normal, decent behavior: my religious training was crystal clear about that. Why shouldn’t the consequences of my actions be equally exceptional? So I swallowed the pain and stuffed the story. I sealed it up tight, put it in a box and did my best to bury the box deep inside my soul. I decided that if I didn’t acknowledge what had happened—if I couldn’t see it or didn’t look at it—it wasn’t real, and what wasn’t real couldn’t hurt me, right? Practiced denial led to habitual dissociation. In the end I became like the speaker in the well-known rhyme:
Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today. Oh how I wish he’d go away.
(William Hughes Mearns, "Antigonish," 1899, verse 1)
I quit the troop long before I left the church that sponsored it, left town with jetpacks strapped to my sneakers (and ultimately moved 600 miles away), went to college and two graduate schools, got married and had five kids, got sober and divorced, found work in my profession (conducting choirs, teaching music at a local university, composing for chorus and instruments), and against all odds learned how to fall (and stay) in love. All things considered, I’ve had a good life, as things turned out.
But the little boy was still with me. He couldn’t go away, no matter how much I wished it, because he was still tied to that tree, a wholly-owned subsidiary of my own memory. I came to realize that I would have to open the box, hear him re-tell his story, and re-live it with him one more time, if the two of us were ever going to be free. I won’t pretend it was an easy process or a quick one. It wasn’t. Nor am I convinced that it’s over. It may never be over. Ask me at my funeral.
So why am I writing about it? Given recent revelations about similar events in both Boy Scouting and the Catholic Church (Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, as well as here at home) it occurred to me that I might have standing to offer a few observations in the light of my own experience. I’m neither a social scientist nor a professional therapist. I’m a musician. I don't pretend to understand the cultural pathology that fuels this kind of cruelty, although I am intimately familiar with the powerful dynamic of shame that clings to the organized long-term cover-ups surrounding it. I don't have any definitive or conclusive answers. I can only bear witness. But perhaps that's sufficient if it helps illuminate matters somewhat.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
It’s not about individuals. What occurred to me had nothing to do with who I was personally. It didn’t happen because I was asking for it or somehow merited it. It didn’t take place because I was short or skinny or smart or "artistic." It happened simply because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was the latest dose of fresh meat for an incredibly sick system. I was likely not the first person to have had this done to him by that particular troop. Neither was I likely the last: a realization that continues to make me angry to this day. Nor was my troop the only one to engage in such practices, if present therapeutic literature on such events is to be believed. I didn’t call this misery down on myself, and I didn’t deserve it. No one who experiences this does.
It’s not about sex. For the record, what happened to me didn’t involve penetration or gang rape. I was never physically assaulted in a sexual fashion. This makes me incredibly fortunate, as such things go, and I am exceedingly grateful for that. What took place was a vicious assault and an act of violence—sexualized assault and sexualized violence, to be sure—but in the final analysis it was really about institutionalized domination and unwilling submission, about the will of the many being forced on the isolated individual to perpetuate the power of the group and to maintain its control over the individual. The fact that I was told, "Don’t bother telling anyone—they won’t believe you anyway," suggests to me that the event was really motivated by power and domination, not sex. Such acts usually are, in my experience. They just aren’t always expressed that explicitly.
It’s not accidental. Not all crimes of domination and power are matters of opportunistic passion. Some at least require deliberate collusion, conscious communication and prior planning to succeed. The level of overall organization, careful timing, and ruthless efficiency with which my abduction and subsequent humiliation were carried out suggest a degree of coordination and intentionality that didn’t just happen on a whim. What happened to me happened because someone, or a group of someones, decided in advance that it was going to happen—and took the steps necessary to make sure that it did. And it happened likely because at some level it was felt necessary for the good of the many that it had to happen. There is an appeal to history that gets articulated as a group conscience in such instances: "It’s just what we do here." "It’s how we’ve always done things." "It’s tradition." A sick system will do whatever it believes it needs to do to maintain its sickness, and will justify it by such appeals. That doesn’t mean that they’re true.
It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In re-living my own experience, this was the hardest thing to accept: that there were adult leaders in the camp with the troop, including a parish priest who served as its chaplain (the same one who told me to forget my hopes of becoming a priest, once I shared my sexual awakening with him in the confessional; he left to get married a few years later). Not one of them was present when these events took place. To think it was possible for 30+ scouts to get up in the middle of the night, take me from my tent and carry me away into the forest without generating any noise or attracting some kind of adult notice, strains the limits of credulity. The leaders knew what was going on. The same thing had probably happened before. They knew—and they did nothing to prevent it. They knew—and they didn’t lift a finger to stop it from happening. They knew.
Sick structures have a vested interest in self-preservation. They punish those who oppose the sickness by pushing back. They do whatever is required to perpetuate their sickness and protect their hold on the power to dominate others. That’s how they survive.
And secrecy is what fuels them.
Brief Update: My thanks to all (well, nearly all) who read and commented. Since I'm new to writing diaries, it's likely that some of my responses didn't end up under the comments I was responding to. Caveat scriptor, caveat lector, I guess.