Connect with us

Out October: “I Can Remember Thinking About Men As Early As Kindergarten”

Published

on

Today’s Out October Project story comes from Chris Atwood. It is one of hope, courage, and yes, rejection too, but the ability to see beyond rejection to creating a life of love and acceptance of oneself.

Catch up on all the other stories of hope, courage and love here.

I can remember thinking about men as early as kindergarten.

Minus the stint at age four where I was convinced I had to have a suit to marry the little girl next door, I never thought of marrying or loving women. In regard to my childhood stunt, I think I was trying to operate on the fact that most grownups get married, and if you’re a little boy you HAVE to pick a little girl.

I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. In my neighborhood, there was one black couple and the occasional Samoan or Hispanic doing odd jobs around the neighborhood. There really weren’t even many children, which is surprising considering the high volume of Mormons in my neighborhood. I wasn’t raised Mormon, though my grandparents and Uncle were devout followers, because my mother is an ex-Catholic and my father is an ex-Mormon. Odd combination, I know. As a child we rarely went to church, though we have family bonds most of my friends think of as strange or very dependent. To me, it’s just family. I spent time with all four sets of grandparents as a child, and enjoyed everything I could learn from farming to first aid.

I suppose you could say I had a typical upbringing; I had a best friend, Dan for purposes of his anonymity, and we were inseparable. We spent almost every day together for almost five years, starting in kindergarten. We rode bikes, went sledding, watched movies and played video games. To this day I really can’t describe how I felt in regard to our friendship except that it was one of the most important things in my childhood. I’m an only child and never had a brother, except for Dan, and even then only for a time. We even, as young boys are apt to do, examined each other as we grew up, noting changes in our bodies that we weren’t familiar with and only had a vague understanding of.

When we were ten-years old and in the fifth grade, we both entered Boy Scouts. For whatever reason, I was elected to be the Patrol Leader for our “newboys” patrol. The only person who ran against me was Dan. He was also the only person who didn’t vote for me, not that I hold that against him. After that fateful election, everything in our friendship changed. I didn’t understand why at the time, and still don’t, but he became cruel — like something in his soul changed as he spurned me for beating him. (He was a great athlete, but I was always the model student and citizen it seemed).

As we entered sixth grade, changes became apparent to not just me, but to everybody as Dan began to terrorize me. It started with just simple bullying, which being chubby for most of my life, I was honestly equipped to deal with. Both in school and at Boy Scouts, the snide comments about what I was wearing, doing or being involved in became steadily more common. He even divulged my biggest fear to anybody who would listen — that I was really gay — though I am still thankful nobody took him seriously or really understood what he was trying to tell them.

I remember coming home at night and sitting in the bathtub and thinking of what it would take to keep my head under water long enough to make it all stopped. I even, in vain, tried a few times. Luckily the body has built-in mechanisms to protect itself against attempted drowning without weights. It’s crazy the different ways you can contemplate killing yourself, though I was never very creative at coming up with ideas. Going to school and hearing comments from him and his friends used to feel like a rope around my neck or a vice around my chest. It was hard to breathe. It was so difficult to understand how somebody I thought was my best friend could turn so suddenly and wish me such ill.

I felt like I couldn’t tell my parents what he was saying that hurt me so badly because I didn’t know what gay was. I didn’t think it was good, however. Nobody I knew, except girls, liked boys or wanted to know what they looked like. Gay was an insult thrown around on the playground. Whatever it was, it was bad.

Luckily, I had an opportunity that very few had to leave it all behind and start over again. My dad got a job in Texas and asked if we wanted to go there. I knew the capital was some place called Austin, and was told we’d be moving to Houston. I had no perception about what it would be like, whom I would meet, or what would happen to me. I just figured, “whatever it is, how can it be worse than here?”

I moved at age twelve. I thought it was the best thing in my life. Nobody knew my secret, not that I really understood it myself. My second year of middle school I even managed to score a girlfriend, though that lasted for about six weeks and I was just about as much of the “girl” in the relationship as she was. After her, I never really dated a girl again. I really didn’t think of anybody I knew except for my best friend at the time, Joe.

I held out for years, knowing I was at least physically attracted to men, but not really sure if I was attracted to women on any level. I’d never tried after my one girlfriend, but it never seemed right. Now, I can honestly say I loved my straight-best-friend Joe, but I knew it couldn’t be so I tried to bury those feelings as deep as I could. I knew he didn’t feel like I did, he wasn’t different. After trying to deal with my emotions, Joe moved, which helped, and I resigned myself to a life of solitude. I knew I didn’t like women, and didn’t have any idea what to do about men. Life alone was better than life spurned, right? I never let anybody know my secret because I was scared of encountering a Dan-like response of unbridled hate.

When I was seventeen-years old, I was pretty sure I knew who I was. I was able to say the words, “I am gay,” out loud. I made a last-ditch effort to date a girl who I thought was really cool, but she never really seemed interested. Maybe she knew? It was still a really expensive mistake for a seventeen-year old on a budget. It was silly. I knew that even if I got her into bed, I wasn’t sure I could perform. I’d avoided it successfully with a few other girls who were interested in the nerdy, cubbish types. Then I met Ben. He was the kid in high school everybody whispered about. They all thought or perceived him as gay. It turned out they were right, but it’s still sad he was talk of the town. We briefly dated, and through that experience my parents found an e-mail exchange between me and him. So now I was out to my parents, who turned out to be the most loving and accepting parents I could ask for, and their comfort level grew as time went on.

I’m not lying when I say it gets better, because their acceptance gave me the confidence to help restart the Gay Straight Alliance at Texas Tech University, I was the “token gay” columnist for the Daily Toreador, and the only one to write about gay issues plaguing the city of Lubbock, state and country. I went on to have a successful, albeit young, career and own a business. Those are big accomplishments for a kid who thought of drowning himself in the bathtub as a child.

When I came out, it got better. I decided after living so much of my life in fear, that I never wanted to be scared of who I was again. And since then, except on one or two rare occasions, I haven’t.

Life lived in fear isn’t healthy, and it is a curable condition. You have to be brave, even when you are so low you don’t have any idea how you’ll bring yourself up. Just think of what your life can be, and do what you have to do in order to stay safe, sane and alive. You’ll thank yourself for it later, I know I do.

Know it gets better guys and dolls. It’s hard — believe me. I don’t even have the worst stories to tell about the things that have happened to me, and I won’t pretend to. I had a privileged upbringing, was mostly off the radar from physical abuses all but once, and was able to get the acceptance of my immediate family and become a student leader. Regardless of your situation, don’t end it all. Take the time to help others get through their struggles, because if what I went through was hard, I can only begin to imagine what they are going through.

Remember, there are always options.
The Trevor Project: a 24-hour hotline for gay and questioning youth: 866-4-U-TREVOR (488-7386)
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-TALK (8255)

Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Click to comment
 
 

Enjoy this piece?

… then let us make a small request. The New Civil Rights Movement depends on readers like you to meet our ongoing expenses and continue producing quality progressive journalism. Three Silicon Valley giants consume 70 percent of all online advertising dollars, so we need your help to continue doing what we do.

NCRM is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. From unflinching coverage of religious extremism, to spotlighting efforts to roll back our rights, NCRM continues to speak truth to power. America needs independent voices like NCRM to be sure no one is forgotten.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure NCRM remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to NCRM, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

News

Trump Defends His TikTok Flip Flop: America Has ‘Bigger Problems’ Than Young Kids’ Privacy

Published

2 hours ago

on

January 21, 2025

By

President Donald Trump has taken varied stances on TikTok, the wildly popular social media app that experts — including members of Congress and the FBI — warn poses risks to U.S. national security and raises significant privacy concerns for American users. Now, Trump is now disregarding those issues and leveraging his presidential authority to intervene in favor of the Chinese-owned platform, which, under federal law, was to be sold to a U.S. company or banned in the United States by January 19.

“Every rich person has called me about TikTok,” Trump declared to reporters Monday evening, highlighting his newfound relationships with tech billionaires, some of whom were noticeably on stage near him during the inauguration.

About a dozen countries, including the U.S., have banned, fined, or restricted the use of TikTok in various ways, including by children or on government devices, according to a Washington Post report.

Calling it a “national emergency,” Trump in 2020, during his first term as president, signed an executive order aiming to ban TikTok, citing a wide range of issues, including “information and communications technology and services supply chain.”

READ MORE: Cannon Blocks Classified Docs Report as Trump Targets Ex-Officials Over ‘Sensitive’ Info

“Specifically, the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok,” his executive order read.

“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories,” the order stated. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

Trump’s order also cited the risk of censorship by the Chinese Communist Party, and said the app “may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.”

Now, Trump is dismissing all those privacy and national security concerns, going so far as to apparently minimize concerns raised about how TikTok reportedly affects children.

In October, NPR reported that “internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.”

“As TikTok’s 170 million U.S. users can attest, the platform’s hyper-personalized algorithm can be so engaging it becomes difficult to close the app. TikTok determined the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos. After that, according to state investigators, a user ‘is likely to become addicted to the platform.'”

According to NPR, 14 state attorneys general conducted an investigation into TikTok, spanning more than two years.

Investigators in Kentucky wrote that while 260 videos “may seem substantial, TikTok videos can be as short as 8 seconds and are played for viewers in rapid-fire succession, automatically.”

READ MORE: Skipping Hand on Bible, Trump Declares ‘We Will Not Forget Our God’ at Inauguration

“Thus, in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform,” they alleged.

NPR also reported that “TikTok’s own research states that ‘compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,’ according to the suit.”

“In addition, the documents show that TikTok was aware that ‘compulsive usage also interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.'”

Those concerns did not appear to be on display Monday during Trump’s inauguration.

“TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was seated next to Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s nominee to be the director of national intelligence, at the Capitol as Trump was sworn-in,” The Wall Street Journal reported, noting that “the seating of Chew and Gabbard together comes as TikTok is under scrutiny for national security concerns.”

Later on Monday, reporters asked Trump why he flipped his position on TikTok and now supports it.

“Because I’ve got to use it. And remember, TikTok is largely about kids, young kids.”

“If China’s gonna get information about young kids, I don’t know,” he said appearing to shrug off the implications. “I think to be honest with you, I think we have bigger problems than that.”

“But, you know, when you take a look at telephones that are made in China and all the other things that are made in China, military equipment made in China. TikTok, I think TikTok is not their biggest problem.”

Trump went on to make the case for why he says the federal government should own half of TikTok.

“But there’s big value in TikTok if it gets approved. If it doesn’t get approved, there’s no value. So if we create that value, why aren’t we entitled to like half?”

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, responding to Trump’s remarks, noted, “Members of the House Energy and Commerce committee saw the intelligence on this and quickly voted 50-0 in favor of the ban.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump Expected to Target Citizenship of Children With Undocumented Parents

Image via Reuters

Continue Reading

News

Cannon Blocks Classified Docs Report as Trump Targets Ex-Officials Over ‘Sensitive’ Info

Published

3 hours ago

on

January 21, 2025

By

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has denied the Department of Justice’s request to share Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents with Congress. Her order came just hours after now-President Trump signed an executive order to hold former government officials accountable for “unauthorized disclosure” of “sensitive” information, and “for election interference.”

Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee whose rulings have been highly criticized, refused to allow members of Congress to review Smith’s final report. Trump was investigated for alleged unlawful removal, retention, and refusal to return sensitive, classified, and top secret documents, reportedly including nuclear and defense secrets. The FBI executed a lawful search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence to retrieve some of the documents.

Part of her reasoning, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports, is that Congress “hasn’t asked for it and it’s not clear they need it, she says.”

“The ruling will make it easier for Trump to bury the report on the special counsel’s criminal probe,” Politico adds.

Late Monday night, one of the reportedly dozens of executive orders President Trump signed also addressed sensitive and classified information.

READ MORE: Skipping Hand on Bible, Trump Declares ‘We Will Not Forget Our God’ at Inauguration

In it, he revoked the security clearances of dozens of former federal government officials, including some who had worked in his first administration, like former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, whom he criticized.

The list includes the 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who signed a letter reportedly stating that the disclosure of emails purportedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

“Many of the former officials are long retired and no longer hold active clearances — meaning that the move may have limited practical impact on their careers — but the order nevertheless suggests that Trump intends to act on threats he’s made to penalize national security and intelligence professionals whom he deems to be his enemies,” CNN reported.

“They should be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump had said.

“National security is … damaged by the publication of classified information,” the executive order reads. “Former National Security Advisor John R. Bolton published a memoir for monetary gain after he was terminated from his White House position in 2019. The book was rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government. The memoir’s reckless treatment of sensitive information undermined the ability of future presidents to request and obtain candid advice on matters of national security from their staff. Publication also created a grave risk that classified material was publicly exposed.”

In 2023, Bolton commented on the classified documents criminal case against Trump, at the time 37 felony charges, most of which were under the Espionage Act.

“Trump appeared to have a ‘pattern’ of wanting to collect materials ‘of interest to him,’ including classified documents,” Bolton said, as The Hill reported. He also “knocked Trump’s behavior as ‘very disturbing.'”

Bolton told MSNBC, “there were some [documents] that we did get back. Others, the most famous, to me, it demonstrates why I don’t need to read the indictment or believe its allegations are true, although I’m pretty confident they are — was the famous tweet that he did after getting an overhead picture of a failed Iranian missile launch, which he was shown during an intelligence briefing. [He] didn’t give [it] back, and it was tweeted before the intelligence officials got back to their office.”

Bolton was “referring to a 2019 tweet from the then-president.”

READ MORE: Trump Expected to Target Citizenship of Children With Undocumented Parents

Trump’s order on Monday also stated: “It is the policy of the United States that individuals who hold government-issued security clearances should not use their clearance status to influence U.S. elections.”

Among the intelligence professionals the order revokes security clearance from are well-known cable news commentators, and political and national security experts.

In addition to Bolton, some on the list include: James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Jeremy Bash, and Nada Bakos.

Margaret Brennan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and “Face the Nation” moderator noted that Trump revoking “the security clearances of a long list of former intelligence officials … makes it hard for his own team to seek informed counsel from them.”

Mark Zaid, an attorney who specializes in national security issues, including security clearances, noted, “no President has ever done this before.”

Watch video of Trump below or at this link.

READ MORE: Elon Musk’s DOGE About to Be Sued: Report

 

Image via Reuters

Continue Reading

News

Trump Expected to Grant Clemency to Almost All J6 Criminals, Including Violent Felons

Published

21 hours ago

on

January 20, 2025

By

President Donald Trump is expected to grant “sweeping” pardons and sentence commutations to all or nearly all the approximately 1600 people convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and assault on the U.S. Capitol — including those convicted of some of the most violent acts against law enforcement. Trump, who was also charged with crimes related to the insurrection and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has called those serving prison time “hostages” and “political prisoners.”

Those convicted of violent crimes are expected to receive sentence commutations, which could mean lesser sentences or even release from prison.

ABC News’ Katherine Faulders also reports the actions would include “commuting the prison sentences of hundreds of his supporters who have been convicted of violent attacks against law enforcement, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.”

READ MORE: Skipping Hand on Bible, Trump Declares ‘We Will Not Forget Our God’ at Inauguration

Rather than look at each person on a case-by-case basis, Trump, according to The Washington Post, “would grant some form of clemency to virtually everyone prosecuted by the Justice Department, from the plotters imprisoned for seditious conspiracy and felons convicted of assaulting police officers to those who merely trespassed on the restricted grounds on Jan. 6, 2021.”

The U.S. Department of Justice “would also dismiss about 300 cases that have not yet gone to trial, including people charged with violent assaults, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss pending plans,” the Post added.

After the 2024 election, Trump had told TIME magazine, “I’m going to do case-by-case, and if they were nonviolent, I think they’ve been greatly punished.”

READ MORE: Trump Expected to Target Citizenship of Children With Undocumented Parents

He also told NBC News’ Kristen Welker, and supporters at his rallies, he would act “on day one.”

According to the Post, 14 of the January 6 defendants have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. At least 379 were charged with assaulting police or the media — the vast majority of them have also been sentenced. 287 were charged with “less violent or nonviolent felonies.” Most of them have already been convicted. And 869 were charged with “misdemeanor counts such as trespassing or disorderly conduct.” The vast majority of them have also been sentenced.

Contrary to claims by many of Trump’s supporters, including lawmakers and those in the media, the January 6 attack was not “peaceful,” or nonviolent, and weapons were used in the attack.

“Participants carried weapons including firearms, chemical sprays, stun guns, axes, baseball bats, a sword and a hockey stick. A female rioter was shot and killed by police inside the Capitol, and one officer succumbed to two strokes that were partly attributed to the stress of the attack. Three people died as a result of medical emergencies suffered during the riot. Four police officers later died by suicide,” the Post reports.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: Elon Musk’s DOGE About to Be Sued: Report

 

Image by Tyler Merbler via Flickr and a CC license

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2020 AlterNet Media.