Bully For You

‘For years on end I was mocked, made to feel worthless and beaten up. It had a long-term effect on me, making me very insecure about friendships and relationships and afraid to show the real me – I thought I would be told I was ugly, stupid or a freak,’ says David Hodge, better known as scene figure Dusty O.

‘I think that is why I embraced the transformation opportunities my career gave me with so much enthusiasm, it was only under the armour of drag that I could grow as ‘David’ and learn to be strong. It took forty-five years to get to this point though, which is a lifetime wasted, almost. I still remember the fear of going in to school and having to make the walk home. A group of boys playing ‘chase the poof’. It haunts me to this day, the feeling of being powerless and having no dignity left.’

These words first appeared in a longer version on David’s Facebook page in November of 2013. Whilst the comments made below the post were explicit both in their sympathy for his experience and admiration for his confessional honesty, they were also full of other gay people’s experiences of homophobic bullying. These admissions came from the old and the young, entire different generations of gay men – illustrating a worry that, whilst adult society liberalises and legalises same-sex marriage, the education system where the next generation is forming still contains a deep-seated, gnarled homophobia at its root. For some young people at school in the UK right now, it seems it’s still not quite okay to be gay.

Bullying manifests itself in all shapes and formats, its insidiousness very much in its constantly changing nature, for there is no single way of identifying it. Not all victims experience the hard physical bullying of David or the other testimonials upon this page. Verbal taunts and relentless degradation of the victim’s self-esteem may be far more common, or concurrent. But what all victims agree upon are the lasting psychological scars bullying can inflict upon the mentality. In every aspect of life from the leaving of school onward, the insults and jeers experienced in their formative years, as their own sexualities were developing, can laugh and linger. As Jonathan Walmsley observes in his comment, perhaps it’s not surprising that some gay men end up ‘a bit disco damaged’ or the gay scene appears at times suspicious or unfriendly.

I managed to largely, and mercifully, miss out on this suffering. But not from any stance of being out and proud as a gay adolescent – rather from an elaborate performance of red-blooded heterosexuality that had to be constantly monitored, fleshed out and reinforced. In a less savagely destructive way than active bullying, it still creates a demolishment of your self-esteem, and pride, to every day pretend you are something you are not. Yet from the indoctrinated viewpoint of my patriarchal schooling, Irish Catholic upbringing and still, in part, how our society is shaped, there was no other choice. Gay was wrong, and more than wrong, unknown. There was no one (openly) gay at my school and this was the mid-2000s, just under a decade ago.

“Attempted suicide rates amongst young gay males are at 6%, a number that seems low unless you consider that amongst adolescent males in general it is 0.4%”

The very word ‘gay’ became loaded with such fear and anxiety for me that even now, working in as explicitly as gay an office as QX, I can still feel a jolt of faint paranoia when I hear someone say ‘he’s gay’, before reminding myself where I am. And it is in the word ‘gay’ where the most prevalent and ingrained form of indirect bullying occurs in modern schools. ‘Using the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘crap’ is a form of bullying against gay people,’ said Will Young in a recent comment piece for The Guardian.

Gay meaning ‘rubbish’ is such an ingrained linguistic trope of youth culture that both Stonewall and Shaun Dellenty of the ‘Inclusion for All’ project have launched campaigns to rectify its usage. Stonewall’s ‘Gay. Let’s get the meaning straight’ campaign found a voice of dissent in Telegraph commentator Brendan O’Neill, who wrote an astoundingly ill-thought out piece, full of lines such as: ‘Most young people who say “that’s gay” are no more being homophobic than a person who uses the word “black” to mean depressing (“it was a black period in my life”) is being racist.’

Language is our primary tool of communication, and the meaning of its words can weave deep resonance in our psyches. When a gay teenager hears ‘gay’ repeatedly used in a negative connotation – ‘that’s so gay’, ‘you’re so gay’ – it will inevitably colour and distress their thinking of themselves. Whether you believe these uses of the word to be distinct, separate phenomena or not, it still carries an intertwined bond to the statement ‘I’m gay’. Underneath the declaration of being attracted to the same sex, there lies a secondary notion in saying these words. You are saying ‘I am rubbish. I am inferior. I am lame and laughable.’ You have to have tough armour to withstand any psychological effects from such a subliminal association and it is likely that most of us don’t.

Perhaps this does, in part, attribute for the higher rate of suicide amongst LGBT youth than in their straight counterparts. Aside from naturally feeling like outsiders and made to feel invisible from a state and popular culture that essentially refused to acknowledge their existence at a school level, the most frequent situation in which they will hear the word ‘gay’ is as something bad. Combine this with a delicate mindset that vulnerable teenagers may suffer from, indoctrinated religious dogma and/or a fear that their parents will hate them for who they truly are and you have an extremely fragile person attempting to make their way in the world.

Should a group of bullies pick up upon this and use a presumed/admitted sexuality as grounds for abuse, that fragile person may not quite be strong enough to cope on their own. Attempted suicide rates amongst young gay males are at 6%, a number that seems low unless you consider that amongst adolescent males in general it is 0.4%.

Section 28, the 1988 law installed by Margaret Thatcher banning the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools, was repealed in 2003 meaning that schools can now talk about homosexuality in the classroom. The only trouble is that many don’t. When I interviewed a twenty-year-old boy living with HIV recently, he said that after he had been diagnosed his family approached the school he had attended, trying to raise awareness about the disease. They asked if the school could do more to talk about gay sex and its attendant STIs. ‘They didn’t want to know,’ he said. For the generation that currently are in positions of power, who essentially grew up with Section 28, those sanctions against speaking about homosexuality seem harder to lift. This was highlighted in a worrying report from August last year where many new academies in the UK, being introduced under self-governing autonomy via Michael Gove’s controversial ‘free schools’ policy, are including anti-gay rhetoric in their charters.

Perhaps this is ultimately a question of visibility? At a teenage stage there are very few people brave enough to come out as gay in the emphatically straight world that their parents have created. No one ostensibly knows anyone gay, although almost everyone knows at least one. Sexuality is something that can be hidden if one is scared or psychologically damaged enough. Hence, why Gay Prides are full of colour, the gay adoption of the rainbow flag and the championing of a colour as bright and unmissable as pink – it is not just flamboyance and effeminacy, it is a demand to be acknowledged.
And why the current situation in Russia has touched so many nerves; through cause of their virulent homophobia yes, but also by their forced instigation of invisibility upon a section of the population where it takes guts to come out as visible at all. And people fear the invisible and unknown; in David’s case when he was so virulently bullied, virtually nothing was known about homosexuality amongst school children, only that it was different and ‘wrong’. At a very innate part of the psyche there also may lie a deep misunderstanding of how sexuality works, that because it can’t be seen like race, homosexuality could in fact be part of you and the way to fight this is to fight homosexuals. Only through progressive education and empathy for others will we challenge such viewpoints.

There are signs of vibrant hope in modern UK. Popular culture seems to be running a gauntlet way ahead of the state. Tom Daley’s touching and simple admission to having a boyfriend, the Eastenders storyline with Danny Dyer and even the election of a gay seventeen-year-old as Head Boy in a public school in Sussex are visible subjects that may send tremors through youth culture, that gay does not always mean bad. Both Daley and Dyer were trolled by a small minority on Twitter, but the trolling was infinitesimal to the messages of support. And in the US right now the most popular TV show amongst the coveted 12-34 year old age demographic is ‘Teen Wolf’, set in a world realistically full of both gay and straight characters, but where, fictionally, sexual orientation is simply not an issue. It seems a far-off dreamed utopia, but then all utopias have some basis in the world from which they are spawned, and provide a goal to work towards. Bullying itself may never be fully eradicated, but perhaps one day, as gay people’s visibility and their positive nature increases, sooner than you think boys won’t be bullied for being gay.

 


Julie Ruggiero (pictured with her son Edward): ‘As a mother who witnessed her wonderful son go through a similar experience I do feel very sorry… His school days were horrendous at times and he never told me how bad it was until he left. I felt and do still feel physical pain when I think of what he went through.’

 


Jonathan Walmsley: ‘What’s childhood messing around for the people who do it leaves lasting scars on those of us who have to live every day of our lives for years with the expectation of an insult, a comment or a sneering, judgemental look. Rebelling against that, I am not surprised many go too far and end up a bit disco damaged…’

 


Jercinder Shes’ere: ‘I’ve been stabbed. Spat at. Had my home attacked and had bricks thrown at me. The library was my salvation at school. In a really strange way I’m humble as it taught me to get on with it, I enjoy being nice to people and very rarely get anything in return but who cares. Give, give, give.’

 


Johnny Hollywood: ‘Every day for as long as I have memories. Kids, adults, friends, teachers, pupils at school. Every day until I left home for London at 21. Name calling, beaten up, objects thrown and humiliated on a daily basis. Bullying is horrific. Affects me to this day.’

 


• If you’ve been affected by homophobic bullying you can find help and information at the following contacts: 

It Gets Better itgetsbetter.org

Stop Bullying stopbullying.gov/at-risk/groups/lgbt

Stonewall stonewall.org.uk/at_school/education_for_all

Inclusion for All www.shaundellenty.com

London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard 0300 330 0630 (Open from 10am – 11pm, 365 days a year)

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