The Tyranny of Hate

So, I read this article by The Rolling Stone today.  It's very long, but it is very worth a read.  It's pretty fucked up.  That's about the extent to which I can describe it.  I can't spend enough time urging people to read it.  Didn't know the Rolling Stone still did shit like this.  I'm pretty impressed.

It isn't any real secret that I'm into the ladies.  Like, really into the ladies.  There are points I feel like a testosterone-infused 16-year-old, vagina obsessed high school boy again.  Those episodes don't last long enough for concern, however, and I'm fairly certain they're a byproduct of my self-imposed abstinence.  Or society-imposed abstinence.  This section here is definitely derailed from the article I told you to read, but you know how I go.  Humor to break tension.

I consider myself heterosexual.  That wasn't always necessarily the case, however.  There was a point where I was fairly certain I was just as into men as I was into women.  Bicurious looking back on it, but I considered myself bisexual then.  I'm not ashamed of it, necessarily, but I tend not to mention it; it's not who I am.  It may have been who I thought I was, but that faded.  During high school, I engaged in a sexual relationship with a male friend who was going through a similar phase.  Now, I'm not saying that every teenage boy who decides he's homosexual or bisexual is simply going through a phase: only that I was.  I feel like I should distinguish that.

So, We were engaged in a sexual relationship.  And somehow word got around, due to a friend revealing 'sensitive' information to people who cannot shut the fuck up.  And suddenly, because I live in a small town where everyone is all up in everyone else's business, it got around school.  I found myself being called faggot in the hallways, and in the lunch room.  It fucking sucked.  Because I as already in a pretty dark place as an teenager, that place got darker.  Cutting, suicidal thoughts, depression, it got pretty bad.  But I persevered.  And survived high school.  Luckily for me, the bullying didn't last through the rest of high school.  But for many kids who are finding their sexual identities, it lasts.  And it can have disastrous results.

I'm not going to go into the details.  They're plain to see in the Rolling Stone article.  It's a worst case scenario, absolute worst case scenario.  Tragedy in the highest order.

I've got me another Story up.  Ironically, it kind of touches on this whole thing, even though it wasn't on my mind when I wrote it.  But hey, relevant.