Bullied

Front matter

Jonathan Alexander.

axe

The Story of an Abuse

Part Three: Overgrowth Works Cited

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Vincent WJ. van Gerven Oei, co-directors of punctum books, for their support and enthusiasm for this second book. After the publication of Creep, I knew that I wanted Eileen and Vincent to shepherd this new effort to publication. I am forever in their debt.

And Pm in the debt of many others, friends and colleagues, fellow writers, those who have thought and fought with me over the years about abuse, sexuality, autofiction, autotheory, and other related, relevant, and random topics: Karen Yescavage, Jackie Rhodes, Sherryl Vint, David Lumb, David Wallace, Michelle Latiolais, Dillon Sefic, Jack Miles, Julietta Singh, Richard Godden, Rhian Hughes, Nasrin Rahimieh, George Lang, and Susan C. Jarratt. At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tom Lutz, Boris Dralyuk, Medaya Ocher, and Eric Newman have been invaluable editors and co-conspirators; I thank LARB in particular for publishing earlier versions of some passages in this book.

And finally, always, Mack and Mother, my most immediate family, who with our cat, Cooper, heal so much that has been wrong. I can only hope that I heal something in them too, and, if I don't, then I will always be grateful for what they so generously give, what they so blessedly make possible in my life.

Preface

In 2017, I published Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology, a book I called a “critical memoir, mixing personal narrative, textual analysis, and theoretical speculation to describe how, as a young queer person growing up in the Deep South in the 1970s and "80s, I had come to understand myself as, essentially, a “creep,” as someone whose desires and interests, whose very being was creepy. I had been hailed, in the Althusserian sense, as a “creep,” and I heeded the call, internalizing homophobia — from people and from institutions, such as schools and religions, as well as the mass media response to the arps epidemic — as a deeply felt sense of personal creepiness, and a creepiness easily detectable by others around me.

Past generations of queer folks might have been interpellated as “criminal” or “pathological? psychologically diseased. Edmund White's autofictional account of growing up queerly in the "sos and ’60s, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, features a narrator whose self-descriptions, whose very personal language of self, is laced with dual discourses of the criminal and the pathological. I didn't quite feel criminal and pathological. Not quite. But how did I feel? I wanted to write a book that spoke to the shift in discourses of subjective interpellation that accounted for concomitant shifts in how our culture understands and talks about queerness — shifts that were slowly shedding the criminal and the pathological but that were still not accepting or even tolerant, and that, especially with the onset of the arps epidemic, retained a sense of deep dis-ease. Discourses of creepiness — that which still lurks in the shadows, full of hidden intention and vaguely menacing — were the ones I grow up with, that circulated liberally whenever queerness was spoken about. They are the discourses that seemed to “fit”

Of course, Pm talking about a specific time and place, and I also wanted to try to account for the different temporal and spatial distributions of these discourses. While some urban centers on the coasts were moving from pathology to creepiness to even a kind of acceptance of the “alternative” when talking about queerness, my experience of the Deep South under Ronald Regan was stuck somewhere between criminality (quite literally in the last days of the “Crimes against Nature” laws) and the still partially unspeakable, or that which could only be spoken of with great discomfort.

Creep, as such, is a very personal book, focusing on interior experience. This book is quite personal too. But the valence in Bullied is different. In this book, I have attempted to turn from the personal to the institutional, moving the center of gravity of my writing toward a description and analysis of the kinds of structures that interpellate queer subjects, and to the domains that generate and disseminate the kinds of discourses that make queer lives unsustainable, that damage them, and that even kill them. So, in Bullied, I talk more explicitly about experiences of Church and State, but also the media through which I learned — and through which queers continue to learn — about their social positioning, their status, their desirability (or lack thereof) in our culture. Indeed, the position of queerness in the larger culture, despite gay marriage and the repeal of “Dont Ask, Dont Tell? remains uneven, contested, vexed, and damaging, still, in many quarters. As I write this, in the social isolation mandated by the spread of the novel coronavirus, I read reports of elected officials, church leaders, and others who blame the spread of the virus on queer people. So, while continuing to tell my own story of being bullied and abused, I offer reflections on

PREFACE contemporary subjects as varied as Jussie Smollett, drug abuse, MAGA-capped boys, sadomasochism, Larry Nassar, Catholic priests, and gay cruising. Throughout, I consider how my interpellation of “creepiness” was achieved in large part through bullying, sometimes directed at me personally but more often than not just a set of discourses and practices that formed part of the general anti-queer landscape through which I found — and nearly lost — myself. That kind of interpellation — that kind of bullying — continues for many, many people.

In the process, I also recount — and confront — a painful dimension of my own self-narration. I describe how, as a young man, I struggled with the realization that the story I had been telling myself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” — a story I told myself and others to justify both my lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain my attraction to other men — that is, to understand my creepiness, and even to battle my queerness. Now, a man in middle age, having largely accepted my queerness, I ask myself some difficult questions: What happens when what you thought was the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination? How do you understand — and live with — definitive feelings of having been abused, when the origin of those feelings wont adhere to a singular event but are rather diffused across years of experience, years of being bullied?

To approach such questions, I generally eschew psychologizing discourses because those were not ones I had much access to, except in one particular case which I recount. Instead, I try to answer these questions by telling my story and by listening carefully to the stories that are told about queerness in the world around me — then and now. I turn a critical eye on the story that I told myself when I was a young man, the story of my abuse. “Story” though it was, I maintain that some form of abuse did occur. Ultimately, then, Bullied is about what it means to suffer abuse when such is spread across multiple actors and locales, implicating a family, a school, a culture, and a politics —as opposed to a singular individual who just happened to be the only openly gay man in my young life.

Part One

Pm in my mid-twenties, talking on the phone with the woman I will soon be marrying. Pm finishing up my PhD and am what we used to call in the Deep South “dirt poor” Well, for the last four years, not quite dirt poor —P've been on a teaching assistantship, which pays better than many jobs back home. I’ve been reading and writing double-time because my funding only lasts four years, and I need to finish the degree. We don't take out loans where I come from, not for things like a degree in the humanities. I finish the PhD in four years — rather than the normal eight or more — not because I’m particularly intelligent; Pm just dogged and afraid. I am driven. Demons at the door, demons inside. It was time to move on.

Already Pm not talking about what I want to talk about. Work obsesses me. For decades, it’s practically all I can talk about. But now I want to write about my it. Not talk about it, but write. A therapist or two has heard me say something about this. But otherwise I’ve never used the word “abuse” to talk about my first sexual experiences. Now I will.

REE

Pm talking to the woman who will soon be my wife, right after we both finish our graduate degrees, on the single pay phone in my apartment complex. It’s the 1980s so no one I know has a cell phone. I wait till late in the evening when I hope there will be fewer people around. She’s in Boston and we talk every week, usually on a Thursday night. Pll head from Baton Rouge to New Orleans on Friday to work over the weekend, playing piano for a small Baptist church.

As I talk to my soon-to-be wife, the movie of my abuse plays in the back of my mind. Pm not talking about it with her. Pm thinking about it. I see a murky blue background, movement obscured, maybe bodies writhing, bodies moving around. Something is happening. I hear a piano playing over the pulsating or palpitating blue field. Something vaguely classical. Chopin? No, I heard Chopin during the opening credits of some art film that I went to see with the older woman that I was in love with a few years back. I don't remember the name of the film but the idea of painfully yearning piano music playing over a films credits has stayed with me for decades now as the height of indie film scoring.

But this isn’t an indie film. Its the story of my abuse. That's what this film, this story, is supposedly about. My uncle, when I was a child, sexually abused me. I was the victim of childhood sexual abuse. He was in his thirties. He died when I was twelve and he was forty-one. Cancer. Though some of his siblings, god-fearing Cajun folk (or at least neighbor-fearing — definitely neighbor-fearing), thought he might have contracted Arps in the French Quarter. He was gay.

(I do not have Arps, but I will worry about it — about it and many, many other things, for some time. I have been tested for it a few times, but I only ever worried once. Years ago, actually probably not long after this phone conversation, right before I was about to be married.)

The movie of what is not yet my abuse is starting again in my head. Only ever starting. I never imagine further than the opening, with the yearning romantic piano and the shifting blue field obscuring the bodies beneath. And I never see beyond these credits, which I cant even quite read. Or even the title.

Years from this moment, literally decades, I'll wake up from a dream in which an academic colleague and I (work obsessed) will be waiting outside the doors of a theater. Perhaps I’m getting popcorn, I don't know who's waiting for whom, but we are about to go see a film called wE ARE ONLY. Just like that. ALL CAPS. WE ARE ONLY. I want to see this film. I have no idea what it’s about. Actually, I think I might want to write this film, or make the poster for it. The title of the film, WE ARE ONLY, in very visible letters, runs along the bottom. There's other script but it’s indistinct, maybe indecipherable, so we don’t know who made the film, who wrote the screenplay, who directed it, what company made it, what art house distributed it. This is an indie film after all. Very independent. I want to write this film, but I don't make films. I want to write a book called WE ARE ONLY.

No, not quite right. We Are Only. I think I like that better.

REE

Here’s a reality. Pm sitting with my mother and father, just days before I’m to be married. I’m 25. I have finished work on my PhD in comparative literature. Part of me is looking forward to starting my life, starting a life, a kind of life that I think I should have, that I think I should want. I’m sitting with my mother and father, talking about the upcoming ceremony, and I start crying, then sobbing. Pm sobbing. They want to know whats wrong. It isn't a question anymore, but a statement. They are not asking what’s wrong. They are saying something is wrong.

And I can identify what, actually, is wrong.

But my father beats me to the punch. My father, who otherwise took next to no interest in me, the man who likely didn't even want me to be born, or who actually suspected that I might not be his own child because he didn’t want me that much, thinks he knows what’s wrong.

“T think I know what it is. You’re a homosexual.”

Pm writing this sitting in a coffeeshop, tapping away on my laptop, writing, writing, and looking up to check out the cute barista, the boy who doesn't mind flirting a little bit, the college kid at the school down the road, today wearing cute little densely patterned socks sneaking out beneath the rolled ankle cuffs of his jeans. I’ve never seen him without his jaunty baseball cap. I wonder what his hair is like, his black hair.

My uncle had black hair.

I return to my father, the man who didn't want me, offering me one of the truths of my life. You are a homosexual.

“Well, you're close, I said. “I think I was molested by Uncle Glen, and it’s given me these thoughts, these feelings...I dont know what to do”

That was as close as I could get to the truth at the time.

My parents don't seem that surprised. I was always a weird child, introverted, bookish. Bullied. A target. Called fag, faggot, gay, queer, homo — constantly, incessantly. How can so many people be wrong? I was otherwise good, a churchgoer, a good boy, a good boy. But quiet, shy, bookish, more comfortable with my books, my classical music, than other people, other boys, other men my own age.

I desperately did not want to be gay.

That became the organizing truth of my twenties, in south Louisiana, in the early ’9os. How do you deal with such a truth at such a time, in such a place? You find a backstory. In my case, I knew the backstory. I was convinced of it. I was molested by my uncle as a child, the only uncle I really knew, my mother’s brother, who had moved to New Orleans with her when they were just children. He was gay. He had a partner. We grew up knowing him and Michael, before he died of cancer when I was just a kid, 12 or so, as I was entering puberty myself, just on the verge of having my first thoughts, my first sexual thoughts, bad thoughts, about other boys. Right when the bullying became intense, severe, terrifying. Terror. Bullying is terror. Some kids protect themselves from their own thoughts by torturing others. Some other kids are the terrorized, the tortured.

Sitting with my mother and the father who didn't want me, I talk about a night I barely remember, so many years ago, a night when Uncle Glen had taken me to see Fantasia. He loved classical music. He was a big man, burly, strong. He took me to this film. I was maybe six, or seven. Young. Maybe younger. My mother and my father start talking about how I had called them that night, wanting to be picked up, pick me up please, that I wanted to go home, but they didn’t come get me, they were having a night out, whatever, their own private time. I dont remember any of that, but I remember the film, bits and pieces of the film, something blue, but immediately, in that moment, sitting with my parents, sobbing, Pm wondering, why didn't you get me, why didn't you get me? He was molesting me. I was being molested.

I don't know what my parents were thinking, except likely what I was thinking: that this explains so much. This explains everything. This is why I'm having the feelings about other boys that I’ve had, this is what people can read in my presence so clearly, this is why I am called out as a fag, faggot, gay, queer, homo. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. We are confident, even relieved. My sobbing calms us all. I can go through with this. I can go through with getting married. It’s all going to be ok.

I was confident I had been molested. I don’t remember being molested.

When Alice Sebold writes about her rape in Lucky, she offers us the horror up front, in her first chapter. She was clearly violated, raped. But wait— the passive voice doesn't do justice to her description. Someone raped her. Her description merits the active voice: “When I came to, I knew I was staring up into the eyes of the man who would kill me. At that moment I signed myself over to him. I was convinced that I would not live” But then, given the momentousness of the experience, the near totality that it comes to assume in ones life — “My life was over; my life had just begun” — the passive creeps back in to signal the fait accompli, the grounding incident against which all subsequent experiences, thoughts, feelings, and actions are measured: “When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.”

My question in this book, the one I'm writing, is simple: what happens if the totalizing event, the traumatic occurrence, is one you think might have happened, but maybe didn't? This question has structured my life. I experienced a trauma. I believed for a long time it was a childhood sexual abuse. It may not have occurred. But I still am left with the experience of having been abused. I believe I was abused.

Again, the passive voice, a diffusion of agency. And that might be the most appropriate way to characterize my experience of abuse, a diffusion of agency and more: a saturation of the world around me with threat, threat manifest at times, then slithering back into ambience, a background of hostility, a ceaseless potential for the inflicting of pain, an ever-present potential, now deeply internalized as fear.

REE

1 Alice Sebold’s Lucky, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1999, is well worth the read, even if I differentiate what Pm doing in this book from what Sebold is doing in hers.

I had been raised (the passive voice again) in a culture heavily influenced by catholicism, in south Louisiana, my teachers priests and nuns, and then brothers running the all-boys high school I was sent to in order to escape the sketchy public schools, my family part of white flight and the reinforcement of racialized economic lines even in the 1980s, long after the supposed “integration” of schools. One could choose not to integrate, if you could afford it, and while my parents weren't rich, having clawed their way from the working class into the lower middle class, they still set aside money for what we called “parochial” education — private and religious. Since I was never baptized catholic, I never took communion, much less went to confession (what would that have been like?), but I went to many, many masses, even played the piano to accompany the off-key singing of some of the brothers. And he will raise you up on eagle’ wings, bear you on the breath of life... 1 may be misremembering these lines. What does it mean to be borne aloft on a breath of life, that breath, the breath of God apparently, supporting the wings of the eagle, the animal to which you are compared, the animal soaring higher and higher? Here the metaphor breaks down for me, the eagle circling, circling, high in the air, anticipating the dive down to slaughter. I am borne up to slaughter? I don't understand, I don't understand the metaphor. I am not catholic.

REE

Pm writing this when the news is flooded with images and reports of a group of teen boys from Covington Catholic High School in a standoff with an Indigenous elder, steadily banging his drum during the 2019 Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC.” The boys were on a trip to the capital to participate in a March for Life rally and were visiting the Lincoln Memorial. The encounter wasn't planned, but the images and videos, which went viral as we say, infecting how we perceive the world around us, show the boys, one in particular wearing a MAGA cap, seeming to mimic and attempting to stare down an Indigenous man in his sixties. It's a creepy video. What are these kids thinking? And the one face-to-face with the elder, not backing down, not moving out of the way, seemingly in a staring contest — what's going through his mind?

As more of the story came out, we learned that the catholic schoolboys had just been accosted by a group of Black men, Hebrew Israelites, who were apparently casting aspersions on pretty much everyone around them, calling the boys bigots and faggots. The boys kept their cool. When the Indigenous elder, a man named Nathan Phillips, started beating his drum, he was trying to intervene, sending out a prayer, stepping in to avert potential conflict. The boy he stands toe-to-toe with was, as the boy reported, also trying to keep his cool, thinking the best thing to do was not react but smile calmly in the face of an escalating situation. That larger story slowly came out, but not before the initial video — of the MAGA-capped boy and the Indigenous Philips in a standoff— circulated everywhere, epitomizing for many the kinds of white, privileged, and racist contempt for minorities that has come to characterize the white far right.

I can't know the full—and certainly complex — story here, what actually happened on that day outside the Lincoln Memorial. But I found those initial videos of the standoff, as we say these days, triggering. I immediately felt cast back to my own catholic all-boys high school days, surrounded by other white, middle-class boys, full of their straight privilege, and knowing

2 There are many accounts of this incident, readily available online.

exactly what that is, even if they couldn't articulate their dominance as privilege. But they knew they were dominant. They could stand face-to-face and stare down anyone. Or at least that’s what they wanted you to believe.

They had no problem staring me down. I was one of their most likely and available targets.

To be bullied is to be subjected to prolonged harassment, day in, day out, a steady regime of terror and torment. The ceaseless taunting and verbal abuse became the thousand paper cuts that nearly bled me dry, that tore into my psyche in ways that will be with me until I die. Faggot, queer, pussy, fag, fudge-packer, cocksucker: these were the taunts of choice for teen boys in the 1980s. I don’t ever recall —not once —a teacher hearing such verbal abuse and calling it out, chastising a student, marking their name-calling as wrong. Back then, in the late ’7os and early 80s, it wasn't understood as abuse. It was just what boys did. Some teachers probably believed that such taunting would toughen me up. I was a bit shy, even aloof, soft. Easily penetrable. I needed to be harder. Verbal assault would help, or so they thought. I would “man up. Perhaps Id even fight back. Be a man, not a pussy.

Dont be a pussy. That is, don't be the penetrable male. Dont let us rape you. Real men stand up for themselves. They don’t let themselves be penetrated.

But I didn’t know how. I knew deep in my heart that I really was, very likely, a faggot, queer, pussy, fag, fudge-packer, cocksucker. I was being called out. I was being interpellated. Hail, faggot. Yeah, you. You're looking this way when I called so you must be a faggot.

A male friend my age, asked me later in mid-life if it had been that bad. After all, weren't most of us in the ’8os called such names? Even he, a straight man, was called faggot at times. You lived with it, he said. You tossed it back.

No, it’s not the same, my dear straight friend, my age mate, you werent really grappling with your sexuality in quite the same way. You didnt identify with the term “faggot” because you were already enjoying the comfortable privilege of normalcy. The insult wasn’t aimed at you, not really, or if it was, it was a misfire. Indeed, the taunt likely straightened you out even further. It stiffened your back, squared your shoulders a bit. But that’s the point; you didn't bow, you didn't bend beneath it, flinch under it.

I did.

The psychic damage of being called out — every single day, every single fucking day — by terms of not just derision but hatred, terms that identify the desires that you’re grappling with, the very sensibilities and proclivities that interest you and, in fact, actually draw your interest to other boys—when those desires and proclivities are, on a daily basis, treated with scorn and contempt and hatred, then you are damaged on a daily basis, the damage accumulating over time, over years, becoming self-hatred, internalized shame, interpolated rage. How could I not grow up to hate myself when I was so constantly told, so ceaselessly reminded, that I was to be hated. And when no adult around you stops it, when in fact the message is clear: you deserve this— then how could I not feel that my self-hatred was justified, when the hatred of others was confirmed by the absence of a restraining hand, a merciful reprieve?

A hole opened up in me, and these boys, these catholic schoolboys, fucked it every day, over and over again, sometimes slowly, lingeringly, often quickly, jabbing — fag, fag, fag, fag, fag.

REE

One of the most harrowing experiences I had as a teenager was actually not on the campus of my high school but on the phone. Boys would call my parents’ house, prank calling frequently, sometimes hurling taunts before hanging up. Remember that this is before the time of caller 1D. We couldn't know who these boys were, who was calling, but they were so obviously from my high school, which made available phone numbers of all students in some misguided attempt to cultivate community. Instead, it cultivated abuse.

A boy called up one afternoon and actually stayed on the line for a good long time, Faggot, you're a motherfucking faggot. We're going to beat your ass. Were going to send your faggot ass to the hospital. Your mother won't be able to buy groceries because your hospital bills are going to be so high. Fucking faggot. You deserve to die.

I note that he stayed on the line for a good long time. I guess I did too. I didn’t hang up. What battle was I choosing in that moment? What fight did I think I could win? Or did I feel that, by this point, I just deserved this abuse? Perhaps I needed to hear this, even wanted to hear this, confirming my worst fears about myself. I deserved to die.

Or was something else happening here, something else operating? Fear turned to freeze? Even today, I feel stunned by the specificity of the threat: your mother won't be able to buy groceries. I come back again and again to this threat — your mother wont be able to buy groceries — because it is so particular, so pointed, even so oddly poignant in the horror that it attempts to deliver. I wonder, I have to wonder: What was going through this boy's mind? How did he remotely think that it was OK not just to threaten someone's life, to state explicitly that he and his compatriots wanted to inflict bodily harm, but then to go the extra-added step to imagine a domestic scene, to picture my mother, overwhelmed with the mounting hospital bills from their assault on my body, unable to buy food for her family?

I try to imagine what they must've been imagining, what they depicted to themselves as they— for surely it’s a “they” a collective of hatred that scripted this phone call— sought to deliver the maximum sense of fear. One would think that, once they got to the mother in this, once they might have imagined their own mothers reacting to such a threat, that they would’ve pulled back. We're going too far, it’s just too much. Yeah, lets tease the faggot, but leave the mother out of it. But no. They didn't hold back. They stood their ground like the MAGA-capped boys. And then proceeded further.

I do not know what the boy on the phone was thinking or imagining or feeling. Maybe I don't really want to know. I’ve never felt that I could call someone else up and threaten them in such a way. I don't think of myself as a particularly good person, and I’ve certainly been angry and hurt and have wished others ill. But I dont believe I've consciously or intentionally visited horror on someone else.