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redneckgaijinOne quote from this article sends my blood pressure skyrocketing:
Yeah. Let me tell you my experience in this regard.
I never took sex education, thanks to two factors. First, after my parents' divorce my father dated a nursing student for a time, and I got a couple of her used textbooks, including complete anatomical diagrams of human anatomy, from her. Since I began reading when I was three and could pronounce "denoxyribonucleic acid" by five, this was considered to be sufficient "birds and bees" until and unless I asked- which, thanks to my mother's stern forbidding of any reference whatever to anything remotely sexual (the whole female anatomy from collarbone to knees, excepting the belly, did NOT EXIST in my household, for example), I never asked those questions.
The other factor was timing. I went to fifth grade in a school system that taught sex ed in sixth grade. The following summer my mother and stepfather, and thus myself, moved. The new school system, where I began sixth grade, taught sex ed... in fifth grade. Oh well. As my mother said, I wasn't missing anything, right?
My mother never, ever, EVER said word one about homosexuality- good, bad, indifferent. It simply did not exist in the world of our household. My father said very little- really only boiling down to the word "faggot" as a mild epithet for an effeminate man, without any regard for the actual sexuality of said person. Hell, once he referred to Tom Selleck as a faggot because he couldn't believe a beach bum private eye could be as well-dressed as Selleck was as Thomas Magnum IV.
That meant everything- and I do mean EVERYTHING- I ever heard about homosexuality came from the pulpit- the hard-core fundamentalist Southern pulpit, mind- or from other students also brought up in the same culture.
And here is what was taught:
(1) Lesbians are twisted and sick and selfish for not giving it up to guys, but harmless, because they're women. Oh, and all female coaches are lesbians, even if they're married.
(2) Gay men will have sex with anything. They are obsessed with sex. Their whole existence centers on finding something to bugger, or something to get buggered by.
(3) All gay men are pedophiles who love to kidnap young boys to rape.
(4) Gay men have no moral code: they will steal, murder, lie, rape, break promises, anything. They aren't capable of knowing right from wrong; if they were capable, they wouldn't be gay.
(5) Gayness is contagious: if you're around a gay person long enough, you too will become gay.
(6) Anyone sufficiently not like "us" is probably gay.
And yes, I went through several years of hell being accused, often to my face, of being gay. Because I was different. First and foremost, I had (in retrospect) severe mental issues which probably included undiagnosed borderline autism. (I still have a lot of problems, and no money for therapy to be diagnosed or treated.) Second, since my mother refused to admit that we were perpetually cash-strapped, I had to wear clothes until I could no longer get them on my body -and- only got two haircuts per year- which meant I spent a lot of time wearing "high-water" pants and with a massive head of curly, matted, often unwashed hair. (Unwashed because my self-esteem was nonexistent, and thus I saw no need to take any care of my appearance in the first place.)
So both in appearance and behavior I was strange- very outside the norm- and with a high-pitched, nasal speaking voice. My being one of the most intelligent (or at least book-smart) students in the school did NOT help.
Two incidents lightened, but did not entirely stop, the pressure. My freshman year in high school, after one particularly noxious student accused me of allowing the family dog to butt-rape me- in class, with the teacher out of the room- I lost my shit and tried to crush his neck. I was pulled off him, the teacher saw nothing, and nothing was said. Then. A year later, after putting up with upperclassmen greeting my arrival to geometry with gay cracks and accusations, I deliberately decided to coldcock the next person who did that. I carried out the plan and got three days detention- but I also got those voices silenced for the rest of the year.
And the hell of it is: I'm straight. I'm VERY straight. For several years after I left public school, I was downright homophobic- not politically so but clinically so, as in unreasoning fear when in close proximity to openly gay men, despite the certain factual knowledge that almost nothing I'd "learned" about gay men was true. (I'm considerably better now in this regard.) A couple of years back I looked at the adult comics WLP has done and realized there's very, VERY little lesbian sex in them- because I'd rather see two naked girls posing for pictures than two naked girls having sex. This was NOT a choice: this was a combination of factors producing strong preferences in my psyche that I have to work around with my conscious mind.
Again: I'm straight. I caught the shit I did because I was different, and because there was no such thing as an openly gay person in the Warren, TX school system from 1985 to 1992.
How much worse would it have been for anyone who admitted to being gay, at that time, in that place?
Yet this is the "system" Steve Cookson, and the vast majority of Republicans, want to preserve. This is the "education" they want their children to receive- ignorance, hatred and bully tactics instead of facts, understanding, and tolerance.
This is the hell people like him put me through, and which people like him now want to enshrine into law.
You may say it's just bigotry begetting bigotry. My thought is this: if they're peddling ignorance in this case, how many other subjects are they working to keep people ignorant in?
But Rep. Steve Cookson said he won't do that. Cookson, a Republican from the rural southern Missouri town of Fairdealing, said he believes parents and family members, not schools, should teach children about different kinds of sexuality.
"Those are personal issues that probably should be taught by people outside the school system," he said. "We need to be focusing on what is going to provide students with the skills they need to be productive citizens in our society."
Yeah. Let me tell you my experience in this regard.
I never took sex education, thanks to two factors. First, after my parents' divorce my father dated a nursing student for a time, and I got a couple of her used textbooks, including complete anatomical diagrams of human anatomy, from her. Since I began reading when I was three and could pronounce "denoxyribonucleic acid" by five, this was considered to be sufficient "birds and bees" until and unless I asked- which, thanks to my mother's stern forbidding of any reference whatever to anything remotely sexual (the whole female anatomy from collarbone to knees, excepting the belly, did NOT EXIST in my household, for example), I never asked those questions.
The other factor was timing. I went to fifth grade in a school system that taught sex ed in sixth grade. The following summer my mother and stepfather, and thus myself, moved. The new school system, where I began sixth grade, taught sex ed... in fifth grade. Oh well. As my mother said, I wasn't missing anything, right?
My mother never, ever, EVER said word one about homosexuality- good, bad, indifferent. It simply did not exist in the world of our household. My father said very little- really only boiling down to the word "faggot" as a mild epithet for an effeminate man, without any regard for the actual sexuality of said person. Hell, once he referred to Tom Selleck as a faggot because he couldn't believe a beach bum private eye could be as well-dressed as Selleck was as Thomas Magnum IV.
That meant everything- and I do mean EVERYTHING- I ever heard about homosexuality came from the pulpit- the hard-core fundamentalist Southern pulpit, mind- or from other students also brought up in the same culture.
And here is what was taught:
(1) Lesbians are twisted and sick and selfish for not giving it up to guys, but harmless, because they're women. Oh, and all female coaches are lesbians, even if they're married.
(2) Gay men will have sex with anything. They are obsessed with sex. Their whole existence centers on finding something to bugger, or something to get buggered by.
(3) All gay men are pedophiles who love to kidnap young boys to rape.
(4) Gay men have no moral code: they will steal, murder, lie, rape, break promises, anything. They aren't capable of knowing right from wrong; if they were capable, they wouldn't be gay.
(5) Gayness is contagious: if you're around a gay person long enough, you too will become gay.
(6) Anyone sufficiently not like "us" is probably gay.
And yes, I went through several years of hell being accused, often to my face, of being gay. Because I was different. First and foremost, I had (in retrospect) severe mental issues which probably included undiagnosed borderline autism. (I still have a lot of problems, and no money for therapy to be diagnosed or treated.) Second, since my mother refused to admit that we were perpetually cash-strapped, I had to wear clothes until I could no longer get them on my body -and- only got two haircuts per year- which meant I spent a lot of time wearing "high-water" pants and with a massive head of curly, matted, often unwashed hair. (Unwashed because my self-esteem was nonexistent, and thus I saw no need to take any care of my appearance in the first place.)
So both in appearance and behavior I was strange- very outside the norm- and with a high-pitched, nasal speaking voice. My being one of the most intelligent (or at least book-smart) students in the school did NOT help.
Two incidents lightened, but did not entirely stop, the pressure. My freshman year in high school, after one particularly noxious student accused me of allowing the family dog to butt-rape me- in class, with the teacher out of the room- I lost my shit and tried to crush his neck. I was pulled off him, the teacher saw nothing, and nothing was said. Then. A year later, after putting up with upperclassmen greeting my arrival to geometry with gay cracks and accusations, I deliberately decided to coldcock the next person who did that. I carried out the plan and got three days detention- but I also got those voices silenced for the rest of the year.
And the hell of it is: I'm straight. I'm VERY straight. For several years after I left public school, I was downright homophobic- not politically so but clinically so, as in unreasoning fear when in close proximity to openly gay men, despite the certain factual knowledge that almost nothing I'd "learned" about gay men was true. (I'm considerably better now in this regard.) A couple of years back I looked at the adult comics WLP has done and realized there's very, VERY little lesbian sex in them- because I'd rather see two naked girls posing for pictures than two naked girls having sex. This was NOT a choice: this was a combination of factors producing strong preferences in my psyche that I have to work around with my conscious mind.
Again: I'm straight. I caught the shit I did because I was different, and because there was no such thing as an openly gay person in the Warren, TX school system from 1985 to 1992.
How much worse would it have been for anyone who admitted to being gay, at that time, in that place?
Yet this is the "system" Steve Cookson, and the vast majority of Republicans, want to preserve. This is the "education" they want their children to receive- ignorance, hatred and bully tactics instead of facts, understanding, and tolerance.
This is the hell people like him put me through, and which people like him now want to enshrine into law.
You may say it's just bigotry begetting bigotry. My thought is this: if they're peddling ignorance in this case, how many other subjects are they working to keep people ignorant in?
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-04 01:00 am (UTC)Having discovered my own occasional same-sex lusts at age 12, you can imagine how upsetting this was for me - if I don't have the words for it, I can't think about it coherently. Fortunately, I never got a 'slut' reputation, and the one person who accused me of lesbianism in high school acted like it wasn't a particularly big deal - more a social faux pas along the lines of ridiculous hair or having the wrong accent, rather than sins against God and Nature. If anything, she probably did me a favor in the long run. But I suspect that if I'd been male, it'd have been far, far worse.