A Saving Grace

“A Saving Grace”

Published by The Ladder: Storytelling Across The Curriclum (Fall 2012)

By Tim’m T. West

I encounter them more and more these days as a college admissions evaluator—heartfelt, brave stories by high school seniors who “come out” in their personal statements. The frequency of “coming  out” essays or Gay/Straight Alliance mentions in extracurricular profiles, are a promising indicator that schools are creating environments in which LGBT youth are nurtured and thrive. Still, these are perhaps the fortunate students. As an educator and youth advocate still very much attuned to challenges to serving LGBT students, I am aware that many environments still choose to relegate the topic to silence or worse seek to “ban” same-sex attraction or social activity. While I celebrate the trends of more tolerance and affirmation in the United States, I don’t wish to undermine the critical work that school districts and teachers are still doing to create “safe spaces” for LGBT youth. There is empathetic value in offering an experience-based testimony of my own struggles as a young student in Public Schools; and the various saviors who prevented the kind of hopeless, down-spiraling dejection that can lead to LGBT teen suicide. Sharing stories is one way to broach a difficult topic with complex solutions-in-the-making.

I had a very early awareness of my sexuality—a point that is no doubt disputed by adults and some professionals who negate the emergence of “sexuality” for kids under the age of consent. It is double-standard “awareness” when it’s common for teachers and staff to make reference to kid-crushes between opposite-sex children, without being able to imagine the viability that some young people experience same-sex attraction as early as elementary or middle school. There is the “heteronormative” assumption that “playing house” is innocent modeling of a healthy sexuality; while any same-sex “play” is resulting, not from any difference in orientation, but some perversion of normal sexuality. In elementary school, I had crushes on boys and girls—imagined a future where love with either could result in a life together. However, I was quickly and frequently informed that there was only one way to make family; and that my perceived liberty to think otherwise would surely lead me to hell or a miserable existence of silence and torment. It is no wonder that I turned to school as an obsessive attachment to avoid discomfort with a natural option denied me.

I grew up a very masculine-identified boy. Little league football quarterbacking and being a kid-boxer were among the ways I avoided some of the bullying and taunting subject to more effeminate males my age. I enjoyed sports. I did not however enjoy the notion that reading books or enjoying arts made me less of a boy. I did not enjoy the peer to peer gay bullying I witnessed; and was disturbed even more by the all too frequent cases of teachers and faculty reinforcing the gender and sexuality norms that tormented many of my peers who presented as different. Some of the most insidious, homophobic bullying I witnessed in school came from adults charged with making school a safe space, not other students.

Each time I saw someone thought to be gay or lesbian bullied, I felt an enormous sense of guilt for being able to “pass”. This guilt turned into bouts of anger that seemed to come from nowhere, but that were an emotional response to a life where I reprimanded myself for my silence. While I avoided some of the ridicule by being gender normative, the feelings of dejection and confusion were all the more buried. There was no language to discuss how masculine-identified boy could reconcile feelings of homosexuality; especially in a home where a minister, coach, and former military man was the head of household who defined hypermasculinity as the only way. Images in the media then only depicted gays as frivolous spectacles of ridicule or carriers of AIDS who deserved to die. With so few positive images to identify with, I poured myself into books and became an exemplary student, a good athlete, and the ultimate student leader—thinking perhaps that if I were “perfect”, and my being gay was discovered, I would have already overcompensated for the “weakness”. I graduated a popular and promising honor student … with severe ulcer issues, clinical depression, and a failed suicide attempt. Interviewing at West Point, they asked, I told; not of any sexual relations with men, for I hadn’t had any; but I did admit to the mere thoughts about attraction to men. In the military of 1989, so a man thinketh…so is he. But I was proud of my integrity. It was the honesty befitting of a soldier. This marked the beginning of a life walking in the light of my truth. I believed as my grandmother taught that the truth will set you free.

Today it is said that “it gets better” for LGBT teens. I am grateful for many saving graces who offered hope and understanding amidst such painful and confusing years. There was an instance when a biology teacher reprimanded a student for making jokes about “nasty people with AIDS”. There was an insightful English teacher who asked if I’d read Walt Whitman and James Baldwin—men who I came to understand were gay also famous and writers. I came to believe that I didn’t have to die and that there might be something to live for. Twenty some-odd years later, I’ve become a beacon of light for others through the books I’ve published, songs I’ve written and performed, and speeches and lectures I’ve given. The climate is a bit more promising today—but not without conversation between educators, not on how to compromise morals or religious beliefs, but how to remain committed to ensuring that ALL children feel safe, loved, and affirmed in our schools. An educator myself, I’m happy to have been that saving grace for students who are sorting through a range of issues, around sexuality and beyond. There’s so much our young people can accomplish when they are, first, certain that they are cared for and loved.

(photo of Anthology "For Colored Boys". I am fortunate to be a contributor)