Something to think
about here. Nothing scientific. I don’t come armed with the latest data or
statistics. It’s just based on my own
observations. But it has stuck out time
and time again. When I first started teaching middle school, there was
something I noticed right away about the boys.
It was immediate. Most of the
boys spent a lot of their energy each day doing one of two things. First, they were usually accusing some other
boy of being gay. If they weren’t, it
was only because they were too busy vehemently denying that they were gay based
on a recent accusation. Used to. It is no longer the trend.
In a fairly short
span of time, the climate has changed. The general public has become far more
accepting of the gay community. Schools
call out kids that use the word as a slur.
As it should. And, it’s
worked. Stories of gay adolescents
tragically taking their own lives have been broadcasted in a big way. As horrific as these stories have been, the impact
has been profound. Things have
changed. And maybe the tortured broken
parents of these dead children might find some small solace in the fact that
they did not die in vain. The cause was
heard. It resonated and many chose to
pick up the torch. Civil rights workers
lost for greater good.
So
“you're-gay-no-you're-gay” scenarios almost rarely play out anymore. Good.
Great, right? Of course. But, in some ways, nothing has changed. The same gay-haters still torment other
boys. Actually, they torment the same
boys. It’s just no longer about the
sexuality. Maybe they were never really
after sexuality in the first place. All
the punching and taunting and teasing and public humiliations perhaps did not
have sexual preference as their prime objective. Maybe gay just made for the
easiest targets. For generations, “gay”
and all of its stereotypes was the acceptable target for funneling and fueling
hatred.
Maybe the real
target was something else. Maybe the
real target was our emotions; the ability to live an emotional life. The ability to cry. The ability to empathize. The ability to love. The tear-less and the heartless have been
looking down, circling the emotional and those frail beautiful hearts; frail
beautiful hearts like rainforests or anything else precious that we tend to
destroy.
All of us with a
good heart, with a deep sense of empathy, and an eye for that one detail in a
work of art that enables the heart to flourish, should watch our backs. We owe the gay community a vast debt of
gratitude. They have been carrying the
burden of our hearts for far too long.
They were our shields of sorts.
“I did not speak up when they came for the ____________, because I was
not a __________________.” Fill in the
blank. Fill in the blank and turn an
ignorant eye until your world becomes uncomfortably small with fewer and fewer
ideas and choices and preferences and opportunities to be uniquely human. Maybe the blank has already been filled. Maybe the Tin Man and the forlorn poet in all
of us is up next.
If you're enjoying the blog, here's a book I recommend. "Our Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom," is available at Amazon.
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