For the benefits of those who have not read it, this is a public repost of my reflective essay for Advanced English. It's angsty, it's teenaged, it's full of teenage angst.
And I mean every word.
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Sometimes I wonder to myself – when I’m sitting quietly in my bedroom, that little saintly chapel in which I barricade myself – what the fuck I was thinking. Was I expecting praise or recognition for an action so flippant and mistimed in perhaps the worst of places to do so? Perhaps looking for an outlet for my personal feelings and confused thoughts that had torn me from my place of happiness? Was I just completely and utterly mad, and this was just another stunt in a series of unfortunate events surrounding my school life? And what exactly had I expected from those others caught in the event, except exactly what I had feared.
“Yeah, I’m bi. So what?”
The world stopped. A heavy-handed slap hurled the Neanderthal that was Robert Cuthbert back into his seat. He hadn’t expected the attack, but dear God it felt good. A year and a half of treading on eggshells around him seemed erased from my mind. My vision clouded. My body tensed. Stiff-legged, I made my way to the classroom door in as composed a manner as I could. He’d looked completely stunned. Blind fury consumed me as the male’s pet - Nathan Swales - poked his head around the door I had just turned from in my rage. I dared him to follow me. I dared him a thousand times. Lord knows I would have loved to have the set. Had I seen tears in Robert’s eyes? I turned left, the polished eyes of Christ following me, and kept on walking, back up the road I’d been on for far too long.
I’d stepped down my spiralling path at the tender age of 13. Some point before my brother’s birthday, but after Easter, my father made the weighty decision to provide me and my sibling with that most esteemed of privileges: “The Internet”. It was a truly wonderful event. Simply marvellous the moment when the man himself emerged from the ‘hole in the floor’, just in front of the bathroom, and announced in a frustrated tone of voice, lips thin and quivering “It’s done. Happy now?”
Oh yes I was. Heaven had opened and let me in the ‘pearly gates’ early. The internet had fascinated me for a number of years previous, and to this day it still does. Millions of people a day enter an online world and talk to each other instantly, regardless of how ridiculous the time difference - or differences - may be. Entire sections of the web devoted to fan pages, trafficked by thousands on an hourly basis. Games galore laid bare for continents to toy with. News upon news spread hour by hour, minute by minute, keeping those idly perusing informed of all the most important events, and a greater amount of lesser happenings. It is a place populated with informative wonders, agglomerated sources, and most importantly: Porn.
I will deceive nobody if asked what my favourite thing about the internet was in those days. 13 years old, hormones raging, and in an increasingly sexualised year group exploring themselves and indeed each other on what seemed like a daily basis, regardless of the schools Catholic background. I wanted some of that action. Barely hours after setting foot on that most lofty of peaks, I threw myself from my ‘Tower of Babylon’ and went plunging into Sin, swallowed by the three circles of Internet Hell. I flew straight past the circle of “Soul-sucking Message Boards”, bypassed “Social Networking and Online Videos”, and landed safely in “Sexual Depravity”. My feet felt the path, and I began to walk.
The problem with Wilson’s ‘Online Inferno’ is that the ‘levels’ worked less like an office block with separate, self-contained departments, and more like a Venn diagram of devilish proportions. Not soon after my fall from grace, I was soon a participant of a number of – somewhat childish – forums and interest groups. It didn’t take long to discover YouTube either, and some of those most early of videos can still be found, for those trawling individuals that drudge up such rubbish. But so it was that I found myself in the central vortex of corruption, and I moved with a great haste.
It so happened that at this particular time, an old and now forgotten friend showed me a website I could not have dreamed of: FanFiction.net. I marvelled. I gazed. Then I grinned. Here, at last, was an outlet for all my devious fantasies concerning favourite literary heroes. Non-canonical romantic dribble about novels and trilogies and sagas I’d carried with me from my youth, but not only that. The ever-expanding horizons showed fiction involving video game characters, cartoons, even popular bands like ‘Gorillaz’ had something written about them. My mind was reopened, and in poured poison.
A few weeks later I discovered one story that peaked my interests. Not because of the characters or the subject, but the topic. “A gay love story” was the only blurb provided. I began to read. Then I couldn’t stop. Then I caught myself thinking strange thoughts. ‘But it’s… gay!’ was the only comeback I could think of. And perhaps it was. Perhaps I was? Perhaps I’m over-thinking. Time to close the page and look, once more, to the path.
Three months into self-destruction. I had read probably every piece of homosexual fiction about Pokemon. My degradation was most likely at its height. Previously frequented message boards had been abandoned. All, but one. A community based around a videogame saga, though the amount of deep discussion a group of 13 year olds can have about such a topic is, one must admit, minimal. There, I befriended many of the main ‘ringleaders’ of the forum. Most of them were moderators, and the administrator himself. Time zones away, and always I desired their input, their conversation. Their friendship. Their love?
Only one stood out to me. His name was Lea, a boy my age. He had a great love for fiction, for video games. And he was bisexual. Many a night I would stay up just to talk to my Filipino friend. At Christmas time, he asked me a simple question. I gave the response we both wanted. The sun rose. Hell was Heaven. I was no longer alone.
Many are sceptics about long-distance relationships. I sought to disprove them. I still do, as it is. Lea and I were perfect for each other. His interests and mine were linked so closely, our lives wonderfully united in love. He was my inspiration to improve my musical skills, the new guitar already worn with blood and sweat and tears of joy. When I wasn’t talking to him, I was practicing. My calluses showed the labour of my love, my skills ever increasing as our harmony continued. I felt I could do anything. I started playing guitar in public with a new-found charisma and joy, whereas before I could have remained indoors lonely, and brooding, and wondering who I was. I had grown.
But those around me hadn’t. School was still a second judgement on my soul, and every morning felt like I was trudging to the gallows again and again. Tormented by those folk around me, immature and unafraid to show their true revulsion. I had never been well-liked. But this was something different. Something more powerful and spiteful. They’d seen something beneath the surface. They dropped their nets.
I told but one person of my new discovery. A boy named Adam Campbell, ridiculously bright, and always a hard-working individual. I trusted him, more than others I considered best friends at the time. But he was holy, and a fermentation of his Catholic upbringing, and the religious body around us, lead to his confession of that deepest of secrets. Rumours spread around the school like fire. Damnation knocked again.
Initially I denounced the rumours. What else was there to do except save face? That self-same face that every night would crawl back to the computer, and hope to see my salvation’s screen name ping. Long weeks passed before I saw him next, and every day was lifelong, and fraught with punishment for my sins. Conversations brief. Begun and then forgotten. One year on, secured in the knowledge of my homosexuality, and I was truly damned.
My proclamation was, to put it simply, bittersweet. I felt freed knowing that my secret was no more. I slept peacefully that night. But then the questions began.
“How can you be gay? When did you turn queer? Who’s your boyfriend, faggot?”
Then the rumours.
“I heard he wanted to pump you. I heard he wanted to pump me. Does he actually have a boyfriend in Australia, the poof?
More questions.
“Were you lookin’ at my ass, homo? You ‘hink you’re sexy, batty-boy? Who’d ever love your fuckin’ ugly puss?”
Comments thrown at me like I was naught but dirt. My spirit plummeted to earth. I was torn down further from my starting place. They piled on top of me, and crushed me with their weight. Lea was gone. I was alone.
Hell is no place for the damned. Hell is a place for the fallen. Not for those who have sinned, but for those that hold their arms up high, with a smile on their face, and proclaim their non-conformity. It is populated with those who have shed the shackles of convention, and tread their own path which society can never understand. An individual, long, and winding road that never seems to end, and always seems to plunge them into darkness. Now I understood my road. Now I perceived my fate.
Pride. What was there for me to be proud about? My rainbow card was hidden in my wallet, and I dared not remove it once more in the religious prison of a Catholic high school. Some say that being homosexual is nothing to be scared, or frightened of. It’s something you should let others be aware of. Show them that not all gay people are strange, over-weight, glasses-wearing nerds sitting in front of their computer all night, wishing they had someone of their own, and crying themselves to sleep. I want to meet these people and give them something to be proud about. I want them to feel the pain I went through, the anguish, the total heartache of being out, and alone. Stuck in a world of isolation, while the ivy grows over the door. So I opened my door to my enemies, and I asked could we wipe the slate clean. But they told me to please “Go fuck yourself.” You know, you just can’t win.
Over the next year, I gathered friends from perhaps every corner of the globe. One of them was a college student in California: Aaron. He was, and still is, one of the most down to earth, honest, and loving people I know, and he was one of the few people that managed to pull me from my ever deepening hell-hole. It was he that brought me to some of my now dearest friends, some of which on my two trips to the states I have now met, and my boyfriend is included in that list.
Over time, as I climbed the rocky crags of hell desperate to see that light once more, mentalities began to change. People no longer saw it as an issue. The constant stream of insults became much less emphatic, only those least mature of all persisted in their goading.
“Shut it, ya poof.”
“Hey, that’s no’ cool, leave the kid alone, eh?”
Of course the information somehow always got passed on to the newest year group, but as I was bigger than them, they chose not to make that large a show of it. Hell grew smaller. I began to glimpse salvation.
One thing troubled me though. Was I damned for all time? The Bible, that most sacred of texts, bandied about by those least holy of people has a fairly straight forward standpoint on the issue. “Homosexuality is wrong.” But is it? One of my greatest friends, the woman who at that time was my registration teacher – Yvonne Lynch – was the principal teacher of religious studies at my high school. I sought her guidance. She welcomed me to her flock. Finally, I began to understand.
No matter what anyone said, I knew. They could drag their knuckles, and continue to stomp around in their caves; I knew something they could not comprehend. I was normal. It didn’t matter what they thought of me, I cannot change what I am. We do not decide one morning over our tea and toast that we want to like men for a day. We are who we are. It’s a cliché that cannot be stressed enough, and one which I will always stand firmly by, one which has been repeatedly proven to me by the people that I’ve met. Standing at the gates of paradise, I both see and understand. I should not be ashamed to be an over-weight, glasses-wearing, self-confessed nerd that sits in front of his computer and talks to people. I’m just one of a number, one which is truly happy and proud to be in that number, an angel in my representation of Heaven, with all my friends beside me.
And perhaps, one very special person.
