Personal mythology

[fpb]

Everything I find written about practicing homosexuals intimates that they were aware of their "difference" from an early age, and certainly from their teens. But in my own experience, the two homosexual men I knew best only turned to their own sex in their mid-twenties, after considerable experience with women. And I would like to be sure that this business of young teens being already gay is not a matter of retrojection and personal mythology. After all, there has hardly ever been a teen-ager who did not feel "different".

Comments

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

It doesn't matter whether a kid is gay or not--they're often bullied because of perceived homosexuality. I was bullied for being gay in junior high, and I'm straight as an arrow. To say that bullying isn't an issue is ridiculous.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I was bullied for other things than being gay, and I guess some teachers thought I was the bully. Psychological and physical pushing and shoving between kids is inevitable, and, in the bad sense of the world, natural - meaning that it is part of fallen human nature (and one of the millions of ways in which children prove that they are anything but innocent of evil). To single out one of the squijillions of excuses that kids will come up with to prod and boss other kids and make it something special is a very, very dangerous error. And not only because it pushes the issue of sex where it is almost irrelevant, but because it makes the real issue - the instinct of children to bully each other - vanish. I saw it within a few minutes of being put in charge of my first class, when I was a trainee teacher: children, unless kept under control, WILL bully each other. That is the issue. if it wasn't about homosexuality, it would be about hebraism - as a child I was called a Jew, more than once - or something else. There was a situation once when a particular pop song would start a fight. Are you going to ban pop songs?

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

My point wasn't that one should single out homophobic bullying for particular censure, but that children will be bullied on the grounds that they're gay regardless of whether they are or not. Noncomformist children are always at a higher risk of being bullied, and this should be unconscionable no matter what the basis. I personally would be happiest seeing anti-bullying initiatives that made it clear that there are no "acceptable" targets for bullying, but the parents of a white, middle-class, thin, male child who is bullied for being "gay" are of course going to focus on that aspect.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think anti-bullying initiatives are a waste of time. What has to happen is to empower teachers to enforce discipline in and out of class. To make it a special problem instead of a part of the socialization issues of pretty much all children means to fail to understand what you are dealing with.

[stahlhelm.livejournal.com]

Pretty much my thoughts on anti-bullying legislation/policy. Making an "anti-" campaign is a recipe for disaster. No amount of awareness seminars, benefit concerts and guest speakers will fix what is ultimately a symptom of the American public's disgusting lack of self control and discipline.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

children will be bullied on the grounds that they're gay regardless of whether they are or not
If this is your point, this means that your whole strand has nothing to do with what I was trying to say in the original post.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you really want to know what children's bullying is really about, read Lord of the Flies, in which a gang of bullies left to their own devices in an island practically re-invent satan-worship from their own imaginations and collective brutality. That is what it is about. Homosexuality is an excuse.

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

I have read it, multiple times, and have no quarrel with your assessment. If they'd known the words, Piggy would have been just as dead for being a faggot as for being fat and slow.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So why do you insist on treating the symptom as though it were the disease?

[stahlhelm.livejournal.com]

Lord of the Flies pretty much illustrates youth problems today.

"If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man."

- Tom Waits, "Misery Is The River of the World"