Out October: “I Can Remember Thinking About Men As Early As Kindergarten”
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?â€
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)
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Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a top potential Trump vice presidential running mate pick, revealed in a forthcoming book she “hated” her 14-month old puppy and shot it to death. Massive online outrage ensued, including accusations of “animal cruelty” and “cold-blooded murder,” but the pro-life former member of Congress is defending her actions and bragging she had the media “gasping.”
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem writes in her soon-to-be released book, according to The Guardian which reports “the dog, a female, had an ‘aggressive personality’ and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.”
“By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going ‘out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life’.”
“Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, ‘grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another’.”
READ MORE: President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
“Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like ‘a trained assassin’.”
Except Cricket wasn’t trained. Online several people with experience training dogs have said Noem did everything wrong.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling the young girl pup “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”
“It was not a pleasant job,” she added, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
The Guardian reports Noem went on that day to slaughter a goat that “smelled ‘disgusting, musky, rancid’ and ‘loved to chase’ Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.”
She dragged both animals separately into a gravel pit and shot them one at a time. The puppy died after one shell, but the goat took two.
On social media Noem expressed no regret, no sadness, no empathy for the animals others say did not need to die, and certainly did not need to die so cruelly.
READ MORE: ‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
But she did use the opportunity to promote her book.
We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.
If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,… pic.twitter.com/bKhpUkchHV
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 26, 2024
Attorney and legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold says Governor Noem’s actions might have violated state law.
“You slaughtered a 14-month-old puppy because it wasn’t good at the ‘job’ you chose for it?” he asked. “SD § 40-1-2.3. ‘No person owning or responsible for the care of an animal may neglect, abandon, or mistreat the animal.'”
The Democratic National Committee released a statement saying, “Kristi Noem’s extreme record goes beyond bizarre rants about killing her pets – she also previously said a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to carry out her pregnancy, does not support exceptions for rape or incest, and has threatened to throw pharmacists in jail for providing medication abortions.”
Former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a co-host on “The View” wrote, “There are countless organizations that re-home dogs from owners who are incapable of properly training and caring for them.”
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson blasted the South Dakota governor.
“Kristi Noem is trash,” he began. “Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO. Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent.”
“She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog,” he added. “Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable. We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch. You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit. Unsporting and deliberately cruel…but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”
Melissa Jo Peltier, a writer and producer of the “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan” series, also heaped strong criticism on Noem.
“After 10+ years working with Cesar Millan & other highly specialized trainers, I believe NO dog should be put down just because they can’t or won’t do what we decide WE want them to,” Peltier said in a lengthy statement. “Dogs MUST be who they are. Sadly, that’s often who WE teach them to be. And our species is a hot mess. I would have happily taken Kristi Noem’s puppy & rehomed it. What she did is animal cruelty & cold blooded murder in my book.”
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President Joe Biden gave an nearly-unannounced, last-minute, live exclusive interview Friday morning to Howard Stern, the SiriusXM radio host who for decades, from the mid-1990s to about 2015, was a top Trump friend, fan, and aficionado. But the impetus behind the President’s move appears to be a rare and unsigned statement from the The New York Times Company, defending the “paper of record” after months of anger from the public over what some say is its biased negative coverage of the Biden presidency and, especially, a Thursday report by Politico claiming Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is furious the President has refused to give the “Grey Lady” an in-person interview.
“The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau,” Politico reported. “Getting the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview.”
“In Sulzberger’s view,” Politico explained, “only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
But it was this statement that made Politico’s scoop go viral.
READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
“’All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,’ one Times journalist said. ‘It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.'”
Popular Information founder Judd Legum in March documented The New York Times’ (and other top papers’) obsession with Biden’s age after the Hur Report.
1. The media turned Robert Hur’s amateur assessment of Biden’s memory into a political crisis.
Collectively, the @washingtonpost, @nytimes, and @WSJ have run 66 articles quoting Hur: a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”
But when the transcript of the Biden interview… pic.twitter.com/cExzjuKeYz
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 14, 2024
Thursday evening the Times put out a “scorching” statement, as Politico later reported, not on the newspaper’s website but on the company’s corporate website, not addressing the Politico piece directly but calling it “troubling” that President Biden “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”
Media watchers and critics pushed back on the Times’ statement.
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“NYT issues an unprecedented statement slamming Biden for ‘actively and effectively avoid[ing] questions from independent journalists during his term’ and claiming it’s their ‘independence’ that Biden dislikes, when it’s actually that they’re dying to trip him up,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch.
Froomkin also pointed to a 2017 report from Poynter, a top journalism site published by The Poynter Institute, that pointed out the poor job the Times did of interviewing then-President Trump.
Incidentally, when the NYT got a chance to interview Trump, they went belly up. https://t.co/fW5kx5868d pic.twitter.com/LbrhfYMtqf
— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) April 25, 2024
Others, including former Biden Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, debunked the Times’ claim President Biden hasn’t given interviews to independent journalists by pointing to Biden’s interviews with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and a 20-minute sit-down interview with veteran journalist John Harwood for ProPublica.
Former Chicago Sun-Times editor Mark Jacob, now a media critic who publishes Stop the Presses, offered a more colorful take of Biden’s decision to go on Howard Stern.
This is the equivalent of putting a bag of dog poop on the New York Times’ doorstep and setting it on fire. https://t.co/RhGbHH9pU2
— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) April 26, 2024
The Times itself just last month reported on a “wide-ranging interview” President Biden gave to The New Yorker.
Watch the video and read the social media posts above or at this link.
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Donald Trump’s Friday morning claim Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is “heavily guarded” so his supporters cannot attend his trial was torched by a top CNN anchor. The ex-president, facing 34 felony charges in New York, had been urging his followers to show up and protest on the courthouse steps, but few have.
“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! Getting ready to do my Courthouse presser. Two minutes!” Trump wrote Friday morning on his Truth Social account.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins supplied a different view.
“Again, the courthouse is open the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on trials days, is easily accessible,” she wrote minutes after his post.
READ MORE: ‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
Trump has tried to rile up his followers to come out and make a strong showing.
On Monday Trump urged his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, while complaining that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”
On Wednesday Trump claimed, “The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present. If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”
After detailing several of his false claims about security measures prohibiting his followers from being able to show their support and protest, CNN published a fact-check on Wednesday:
“Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away ‘thousands of people’ from the courthouse during his trial; only a handful of Trump supporters have shown up to demonstrate near the building,” CNN reported.
“And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that ‘for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.’ In reality, the designated protest zone for the trial is at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and, in addition, people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings.”
READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
Noem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
CNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial
‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
OPINION3 days agoPresident Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
OPINION3 days agoNoem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
News3 days agoCNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial