Aguilas Off Pine

Tag: childhood trauma

Coming to Terms with my Father’s Role in my Childhood

Aguilar

I read “One Family’s Struggle to Make Sense of 9/11” by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic’s September 2021 issue. The author describes one trait of a victim’s mother’s grief, how for years she couldn’t bear to hear someone else talk about their child, she just couldn’t. The article itself focuses on the author’s personal experience and connection to the family of a specific young man, but I forced myself to sit with the discomfort of the mother’s aversion to other’s happiness and set aside the magazine for later. Last Wednesday, I went out with coworkers for a goodbye lunch and, as often happens with my coworkers, the conversation turned to their children. My manager mentioned that he really was only into rock climbing because it was the only thing his teenaged son would let them enjoy together and I sat quietly in that, not sure how to say that it was really nice of him to think that way. I had noted that for the first time in a while, a father expressing his love for his children finally did not bring tears to my eyes.

I immediately empathized with the mother who could not listen to others talk about their children. From a young age on, I have burst into tears when I see children being cared for by their parents and more so when it’s the father in the picture. I don’t think I was ever caught crying… but there’s also the insidious thought that perhaps my parents did notice me crying and just figured it was best to leave me alone. It was not the only time, but I recall one family outing specifically that resulted in me sobbing in the front passenger’s seat, both struggling to suppress the body tremors that come with deep sobbing and deathly afraid that I would have to explain the intensity of this emotion. I had seen a family friend, the closest I had to a friendly parental figure, bring out a swing similar to, if not the same one, that he had swung me in before when I was much younger. If it was the same swing, he had kept it for almost a decade and was now bringing it out to play with his son, the youngest of his children and the only boy. I watched them play and felt pangs of jealousy and longing. I hadn’t personally kept a close relationship to this man, but seeing him swing his son brought up memories of when he had also played with me that way and in the great wasteland and deprivation of parental warmth, that memory had bite to it.

That memory of that car ride home, begging my body to hold still but also unable to contain the tears, is now about a decade old itself. But the pain of having grown up without a father has only recently subsided. It was only three years ago that I almost broke down in my then supervisor’s car. We had been working together for near a year at that point and finally had a moment to sit down and have a long lunch and open up a bit more. I shared some of my background with him and he did as well. We were both Mexican-Americans, born to working class Mexican parents that had managed to get us a decent education. The key differences in our upbringing were that he had grown up with his father, who had gone on to teach him soccer and other such things that fathers do, and that I grew up relatively pampered in Orange County to his experiences in inner city Los Angeles schools. I told him how I had a difficult relationship with my father and that he had once tried to teach me soccer, but that he was quick to point out that I would have been a better soccer player if he had raised me. I mention that anecdote to people often to highlight my father’s cruelty, after all, he could have stuck around to raise me had he wanted to. My mother partially named me after him, in a misguided effort to have him acknowledge me as his son. My supervisor said one of the only things people with healthy relationships to their parents know how to say, “Sorry.”

My issues with my father specifically have eroded some of the pain from his abandonment and from generally growing up without a father. However, that pain still shows up from time to time, especially when talking to my coworkers and the relationships they’re trying to foster with their children. That same day we had lunch, my then supervisor explained the rationale behind his and his wife’s decision to home school their children and, in the way that engineers speak to each other, explained the benefits they sought to maximize, while addressing the possible issues that might arise. His careful explanation, his well thought out rationale for his children’s upbringing, felt in that moment almost like a slight against my own upbringing. Had I not been opening up all afternoon over that two-hour lunch, had we just been talking about work, I may have remained more composed. But for a moment in that car, I felt suffocated by what I did not have in my own life, what I so desperately wanted. I had to excuse myself to the bathroom once we got back to the office, to let myself cry and then wash my face, dry it off and compose myself to continue working.

I don’t know how or why the intensity of those feelings has faded. Perhaps it is as simple as acknowledging them and crying about it, over and over again until their intensity fades. The English language has its limits for naming certain things, but I would surmise that the feelings I was feeling can be described as follows: a general feeling of parental abandonment, both physical and emotional; whiplash or post-traumatic stress from experiencing the emotional intensity of my parents, juxtaposed by the careful and thought out planning of my coworker’s parenting styles; for the family friend, a feeling that nothing I had was for myself and myself alone, everything had to be shared and therefore my needs would have to be second hand, second to my younger siblings but also to my parents’ emotional needs; a longing to be loved and cared for as my coworker’s children are.

I told my therapist that at this next session we could talk about my dad and I already mentioned that there are specific things he did that left me longing for his absence in my life. I didn’t meet him until I was around 10 or 11, even though his sister, my godmother, had plenty of times babysat me while my mom worked. He very quickly proceeded to molest me, as he explained later, to satisfy some curiosity he had over my body. What I have gathered in the decades since is that my grandfather may have molested at least the youngest three of his children, my father the eldest of that trio; that the ranch my dad and his siblings grew up in was sexually permissive with the animals; and that my father seems to be, unsuccessfully, suppressing homosexual desires that contributed to his lack of respect for my body. For his family, his bipolar diagnosis complicates matters, as they treat him as if he is never truly sound of mind. I am not a therapist, and I am biased, but I don’t buy that for a minute. He didn’t appear manic at the time, and he didn’t disappear from my life again after it happened, as he would later on following other episodes, so I believe he was within his ill reasoning when he molested me. On top of the molestation, he was generally an under educated, arrogant and mean person. He actively campaigned against me attending any after school or extracurricular activities that were too focused on science and not enough on sports, was disappointed I would go on to attend college instead of getting to work right away, and was fond of saying that things would have been different had he raised me. I agree they would have, and I assume I would have grown up more homophobic, more traditionally masculine and interested in sports, likely less well educated, and unfortunately even more scarred as I assume my father would have molested me more frequently and more often.

Whenever I think back to that day, I get an ache of discomfort. I know there’s a part of me that still wishes I had done XYZ thing to have changed what happened. Unfortunately, so much of my behavior then was molded by both parents and so I was a good victim. After all, my mom had taught me already to suppress my emotional needs, to make them secondary to the whims of my parents and authority figures in life and she had taught me that she would not tolerate any emotional vulnerability in me, would lash out at it even… So after it happened, I had no one to turn to. I recall how much I fought with my mom to stop planning weekends for me with my dad, telling her that I didn’t want to see him. She would argue back with me that I should continue to see him, that we needed the money he was providing. In retrospect, it’s not clear why she didn’t just ask the courts for child support from him. It is true she was often too scared to do these types of things, wanting to minimize her interactions with the court given that they were connected to immigration services and could deport her. But she had already taken legal action against her second baby daddy, was already receiving child support from him. My grandmother would often step in too, the likely source for the argument that I should continue seeing my dad for the money. I will say, I was back then often tempted by the fact that he could afford to buy me things my mother couldn’t and things I wouldn’t necessarily have to share with my siblings, since that wasn’t their dad. When I finally told them, a little over a decade after the fact, I put blame on them for never listening to me, for never letting me not go over to his house, for not picking up on how I was trying to advocate for me to not be left alone with him.

Although my body had started to undergo puberty at the time, I would say my mind was still pre-pubescent. I hadn’t so much as masturbated and, although I had experienced the fresh pangs of desire, I would not say that I had started lusting after peers. Before, there was just a general sense of wanting to feel warmth from my peers, physical warmth yes, but chaste. My father may have given me my first erection. The only ambiguity is that I don’t remember if my body had done that on its own before. Either way, my sexual awakening was at the hands of an overweight construction worker whom my mother trusted, loved so much as to let him take her only son. I recall that we were laying down together, essentially him spooning me. I don’t recall exactly how it happened that his hands were on my flesh beneath my clothes, I remember feeling how he traced the whisps of hair on my stomach. I didn’t move, but enjoyed the feeling and continued staring at the television on the ground above us. His hands traced the elastic of my boxers before he pushed further down, blood had already been rushing to my penis. He firmly squeezed my erection, played with it for a while and I think rested with it in his palm for several minutes. I started to move around a bit once he had slowed down, excited by the touch and wanting it to continue. Perhaps he thought I was asleep.

I believe that was a Saturday afternoon and this was an overnight stay but besides the pants I was wearing, I don’t remember much else after that. He didn’t explicitly tell me not to say anything. My mother wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. I began to masturbate soon thereafter and for a couple years until I started cruising in gyms, I didn’t have an appropriate outlet for the sexual longings I felt. I recall humping a lot of pillows and being more willing to participate in games with friends and other cousins that were sexual in nature. I didn’t know how to initiate that back then, would often find it happening to me, but I wanted to have my penis played with.

Exploring at the gyms, cruising, was certainly an outlet, but I wouldn’t say it was the healthy outlet I needed. For one, I started young, when I was probably fifteen if not a little older. Because my parents did not want to pick me up from school and because I had joined the football team, which made my schedule different than my siblings, I was given a car and license very young. By fifteen and a half, I was able to drive myself to the gym, one of the only acceptable places I could be out at besides school. I had forgotten this, but remembered it in writing, but I believe I was even younger when I started cruising, because I used to ride my bike to the gym too, before I could start driving. In some small defense to the grown men I began to have casual encounters with, my body hair and thicker facial hair aged me up some. This is not an attempt to victimize myself, but I believe it’s true that the body hair enabled me, as it made my body and face look older than I was. However, now as an older adult than they were, I think it would still have been very clear that I was, at best, borderline legal and at worst, a risk for statutory rape if we were caught. There are men who were clearly gay but that seemed incredibly disinterested and, in some cases, even annoyed at me. I recall one in particular that I couldn’t tell if he was gay, that I had seen once masturbating in the showers and had wanted to join but he quickly left; I ran into him years later at a pride event in Santa Ana. I had made a game back then of detecting other queer men and had been excited to have been right about him. We had chatted, I had initiated a conversation in the steam room, and he had told me he had kids only a little younger than me. Perhaps that is why he was able to acknowledge how young I was.

Not everyone was so scrupulous. My MO back then was to lift weights, run, all the while observing the other gym patrons and then go wait in the steam room. It was good for my acne and gave me a way to prolong my gym visit, to extend the time away from home. I think because the steam room was in the locker room, not co-ed, I recognized that men were not wearing undergarments below their towels and I adopted the behavior. It was not long before one of these men undid their towel, showed me their erection and we would begin to mess around. It felt liberating, a secret thing that my mother couldn’t know about and also exciting, the release of endorphins and the touching of my body in ways that I didn’t know how to ask for. But, because I didn’t verbalize these desires and because these were men that were preying on young men, some likely excited at the possibility that I was not of legal age, I often found that these encounters went further than I was comfortable with or with men that I actually was not interested in. Some of those men downright disgusted me, but I hadn’t learned how to say no.

That legacy belongs to both my parents. Each one contributed to my inability to voice my own desires and boundaries. Again the English language shows its limits, but, for my mother’s part, she pulled me into her emotional messes, exposing me to adult conflict that I was not ready to help process and punishing me when I gave unwise, youthful counsel. My father literally introduced me to sexual desire, primed my body for it long before I had even learned sexuality and thus I had no vocabulary with which to act upon it. I quickly picked up the language of cruising, itself primarily non-verbal, but did not have the necessary defenses to be able to insist on rejecting people, verbally and clearly, nor even to listen to my body when it was saying it wasn’t interested. I learned very quickly to dissociate, to leave my body while things were done to it and let men finish. Most of these guys did not have condoms and this was before the preventative, anti-HIV pills were readily available, so this was mostly non-penetrative. I recall at least once that one did have a condom and did want to insert himself, but at least there I acknowledged my discomfort (or was it that my internalized homophobia flared up) and said “No.”

I have already written about how my being in the closet exacerbated the situation after an acquaintance sexually assaulted me, which is linked to the above because I was still learning how to say no to unwanted sexual advances. Unfortunately, beyond just the cruising, I did lose my virginity to a man who had catfished me and who I was not interested in. Because my father had taught me to just quiet up and let him finish, I had that in my ill fashioned repertoire of sexual tools. It was not long after I started cruising at the gym that I started lying about my age and meeting people off Craigslist and Adam4Adam. I was so drawn to sexual desire that I was risking being kicked out of my home, because my mother later did do that when I came out. In college, as a freshman, I figured I was finally old enough to lose my virginity and had even found the perfect candidate, a grad student with a toned, hairy body and also in the closet. The person who turned up at my doorstep had no relation to the pictures and was much heavier, smooth, and not the least bit hygienic. To my every no he had a negotiation and finally, to get him to leave, I let him ride me to his completion. After he came, I asked him to leave again, and that was my first time.

So it is that I recognize the pain in movies when they show children who have been molested or forced upon by older relatives. Even to those who were later taken advantage of there is an intense feeling of sharing their trauma. I don’t know if that feeling has a word, but certainly, I am “triggered” when I see sexual assault portrayed in the media. There is an intense feeling of dissociation, perhaps because I have not fully reckoned with the pain of the molestation. I can attribute behavioral patterns to it, I can acknowledge that I will experience intense discomfort when I hear stories of sexual assault or see them in television, but perhaps I still keep the pain at arm’s length and so have not fully healed from it. I don’t know how to process it any better. Let me name the feelings as I did above: there is the discomfort in knowing that my body experienced pleasure as well as the memory of my mind drifting away; there are shades of guilt, of wishing that I had been bigger or stronger enough to overpower my father and remove him from my side; there is resentment that my mother would not have believed me and seemed intent to ignore the complaints I had to be around my father; there is that I will never get to experience a first time like in the movies, awkward and messy but with a peer; there was the confusion in the years between when I was molested and when my mind finally caught up with my body and I began to explore my sexuality in a way that I could verbalize; there’s the danger now that I get too unconscious, that I let myself get into a scenario where my mind could leave my body and I could let something happen to me, something that would remain in my flesh’s memory even as my mind tries its hardest to not feel it; there’s rage at other parents who do this, other predators who do this, the absolute wrath to grow stronger that I might destroy these people… I picture myself hulking out essentially and wiping my father off this planet but not stopping there, somehow finding all these pedophiles and destroying them too; there is too, sadly, some measure of compassion for my father. Be it his illness or repressed homosexuality, there is something that is driving him to express sexuality in such an unhealthy manner. I do not wish to know what it is, but I feel bad for him. In essence, that is wrapped into my desire to kill him, that he may do no further harm, given that he is weaker than his base impulses.

I sign off with this as a declaration of where I would like to go from here. The idea of someone hurting children in front of me still drives me to anger, which remains proper. If I see something in front of me, I want to be so in my feelings that I will overcome social mores to speak out, to tell the parent I think they’re wrong to raise their child that way, to report what is so evidently wrong. But what I am tired of is reacting to even movie and television portrayals of this. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing that it led me back to therapy, but I recall several moments in Netflix’s Feel Good that I had to legitimately walk away from my television, barely holding in vomit and a desire to have my body torn apart that I may no longer feel that disgust. There is the fact that I can’t watch Michaela Coel’s HBO show, I May Destroy You, because from the very beginning it is clear this show will be about sexual assault. This sensitivity to these topics, I don’t know that it serves me, I don’t even necessarily need it gone. I just think of how I used to cry at the examples of good parenting… Will something similar happen as I process the pain of sexual assault?

A Documentary of a Suicidal Creative: A Stream of Consciousness Response to Roadrunner

Aguilar

I watched Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain this weekend. Spoilers about all that from here on, but in the back of my mind was the fragment of a memory, a friend telling me about him after he’d read Kitchen Confidential that Bourdain had committed suicide. I wanted to watch this film over everything else that was currently out. I’d watched Zola days earlier and The Green Knight hadn’t come out yet. So I picked Roadrunner, at least aware that I’d be watching something with emotional weight to it without really stopping to think about it.

The first two thirds of the documentary are fairly standard as far as profiles of brilliant creatives go. This is not to minimize Bourdain, but to say that I recognized in him the common traits of his peers, these brilliant creatives: a storm mind, wandering eyes and heart, the seeming inability to be still, obsessive focus and passions. Again, this is not to minimize him, I absolutely loved hearing this in the first two thirds. So there I was, absolutely giddy for this creative madman, when they started in on his negative traits.

It’s around this time in the documentary, when he’s on his third marriage, that they really got into the negatives of his personality with his friends and family. Hints had been there in the documentary throughout, there had been the first divorce, him rejecting that stability despite a claim that he once desired to be normal. Did he really? I wonder now if that desire didn’t only rear its head when he was feeling down on himself, unsure of his work or life choices. Again, when one of his friends said that nothing could last for him, I realized I would need to get out my phone and start jotting down thoughts.

Before I continue, I want to be clear that I wasn’t nothing his accolades and brilliance in an attempt to elevate myself to his stature. Rather, it’s to give myself the permission to be honest about the ways in which his mental illness resonated with mine and to give myself the space to pity him, to hope for a better outcome for myself. It was at first only a mild not of similarity, the hints of his sexual infidelities, perhaps they were just unrealized desires, but the way he joked about his first wife’s divorce lawyer only needing to subpoena the film suggested more. In that grimace as he turned to the camera, for it was no joyous smirk, I saw a man aware that his desires and passions could lead him astray, they greater in fervor than his spousal obligations. I had my phone out already when a friend of his admitted that it felt like nothing could last for Bourdain.

I bristled at the though, at that character note. I had earlier in the day been noting my annoyance with my college friends, their way of upgrading any passing reference to something more serious. At a recent get together, I had thrice separately had to correct the record, as the guy who I had been seeing and somewhat interested in had received the label of boyfriend. I explained to them that we actually did not know each other all that well, hadn’t even gotten to a point where we could talk about a future together. I had then, in the back of my mind, thought of Jose Esteban Munoz’s description of queer time and straight time in Cruising Utopia. My friends, married and straight, only had this timeline in their heads of dating for a relationship, a pressure I had thought I’d felt from my therapist in our last session as well. Not all straight people subscribe to this notion of course, but these beloved friends have married in their 20s and thus could not understand, not immediately, just dating for intimacy without concern for it lasting.

Going back to the documentary, either the man himself or one of his friends, somehow the idea was raised that life goes on for a long time and asks whether it’s possible to escape our younger self’s anger or cynicism. It could have been his friend, but, funny enough, there was a scene with a therapist. His therapist asks him to reflect on his life, his resources, and whether he really wanted to change anything. Bourdain responds that it’s too late for him. When I recounted this scene in particular to my therapist, she seemed annoyed that I was comparing myself to him. “Sweetie, it is never too late to change!”

“I know, I understand, it was just an emotion that came up during the documentary,” I realized as I was telling her some of this that I would need to moderate what and how I said things to her. It was relieving to hear someone finally say that it was never too late to change, but I didn’t note that till just now. I think it may be prudent to explain to her that I have often used external media to help me process my own emotions, to face up to them.

After all, at our last session, we had been discussing my anger and bitterness. Her response, then and now, was to recommend that I work out more, more gym time and specifically to get into boxing. Bourdain’s friends felt that him getting into jiu-jitsu, courtesy of his last wife, did a lot for him. I haven’t told her that I am hesitant to learn how to actually fight, although we’ll see where I’m at several lessons in. Perhaps it will make me more committed to pacifism. Asia Argento said, of her own practice, that she wanted to be able to hurt anyone who had tried to hurt her. Again, for myself, the concern is that I would do exactly that, violently lash out and hurt anyone who had once hurt me. On that again, the resonance was with the negatives, as Bourdain himself also said he wished to inflict violence on people and dreamt of one day being happy.

Of his suicide, one of his friends discussed what seemed like an explosive anger, a need to lash out. “Had there been someone in the room with him, it would have been a homicide, not a suicide.” I wondered about that sickly feeling, when my thoughts and feelings crescendo into a desire to maim myself, to burst at the seams, to feel the release of anger by destroying a limb. On this subject of violence, I recalled the statement, the likely claim in Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (ACEIP) that men tend to be more successful in both suicide and homicide attempts. She doesn’t elaborate, or hasn’t yet at the point in my reread. I brought this up to my therapist and she agreed and circled again, back to boxing, to help get the anger out. I agree with her wisdom and note with sadness that Bourdain’s friend thought either murder or suicide were equally likely.

Finally, the obsessiveness as an alternative to deadlier addictions. I am not surprised by this. It often feels like I’m in that boating, weening off alcohol but not sex, not video games, exercise, weed, fishing for attention on the apps. Perhaps these are less destructive than addiction to hard drugs and alcohol, but this desire to chase something, someone, anything new that could give a dopamine rush, that was familiar. What was new to see linked to this type of behavior though, was that Bourdain would cut off people regularly at the smallest slights. Again, behavior that I have seen in my life, but I was surprised to see it mentioned with these other bad habits. I thought again of what I’d recently read in ACEIP, that the emotionally immature parent will engage in black and white thinking. However, as I had been reflecting on my own behavior, my own black and white thinking and my own ability to cut off people, I wondered too if that book wasn’t written to help the reader engage in their own bad habits, to help unlearn the emotionally immature lessons we’ve carried with us into adulthood. I wondered how much the manifestations of my childhood trauma had helped to hide other nefarious characteristics of mine, how the fed into each other. Am I an asshole, I wondered. After all, Bourdain stated his parents only committed the sin of loving him, otherwise gave him a nice childhood. That is not true in my case, but the resonance with his shitty behaviors was hard to ignore. I thought they shouldn’t be ignored, not if I wanted to heal. Again, my therapist didn’t seem to care for this style of emotional analysis… She was quick to point out what she knew of Bourdain, of his drug addictions, of a relatively stable childhood versus what she knows so far of mine.

To end on a more hopeful note though and riding the idea that you don’t escape the emotional tones of your childhood: if we don’t truly break free of the pain and anger, perhaps I’ll be able to replicate some of the successes from my early life. I had strived in my youth to be myself, regardless of and often to spite societal pressures. So it was that I started to come out young, in middle school, as bisexual. I had, with a child’s understanding of sexuality, stared my pubescent desires in the face and acknowledged their truth. Perhaps, the reality is that I’m pansexual, but these are labels that ebb and flow into each other. What mattered then wasn’t getting it 100 percent right, but the feeling of relief when I could finally speak my truth, find love for myself in being seen and no longer hiding. It is true that I had to hide to survive my parents, to fit in, but do I care anymore to fit in at work? Isn’t it better to be myself than to fit in where I am now? I do acknowledge though, before I came out to my parents I had a plan for what to do if things went south, a plan I needed in the end. So it is that I have begun to seek out a new section, for this and other reasons. Still, in spending so much time worrying about the past, I need to also, if I’m going to be dragged back to then, spend time acknowledging what worked, what steps I took to improve my situation, and repeat those with the greater experience and resources that I have available to me now.

The Burden of the Closet and of Secrecy Being the Default

Aguilar

It is in retrospect that I have begun to see the painfully obvious ways in which being in the closet, in which defaulting to secrecy, has hurt me. After all, being in the closet is an active effort and required picking up habits that don’t go away just because you come out. Unfortunately, the more painful memories require a trigger warning as they involve child abuse, sexual assault, efforts to cover the aforementioned up, and my reactions to it, which includes recreating trauma.

I don’t remember when I learned to keep myself secret. When I told my mom that a male family member had molested me, I blamed her when she asked why I hadn’t told her sooner. I wasn’t able to talk to her about it until after I had been through a lot of therapy and a lot of that time focused on the dysfunctional relationship we had. Plus, there wasn’t anyone else around involved in raising me. Generally, she had taught me that I should be seen but not heard, that I was around to help her process her feelings, sometimes that included being her punching bag, and that the person who had molested me could do no wrong and was forgiven, usually, for any of his past transgressions. This person is no longer in our lives, because my mom finally was able to stop letting him in, but I digress.

When it happened, I was eleven or twelve years old, well before I had started to have real sexual urges, although I had started puberty and had already noticed that I was also attracted to boys. I don’t even remember being told not to tell anyone; it was as if he knew that I just wasn’t the type of person to talk. I was painfully quiet back then and perhaps that was obvious to the adults in my life and doubly so to the predators looking for an easy mark. Indeed, it was only after therapy lessened the impact that I could begin to talk about being molested. I wrote about it often, but it took me close to ten years to tell anyone other than two therapists about it.

I’ve reviewed my journals from back then. Although I noted what happened, near as I can gather or remember, I only didn’t tell anyone because I was worried that they would take that as the thing that “turned” me gay. That the pride and assuredness of my own sexuality blinded me to the hurtful impact of continuing to keep his secret is an irony that I think anyone with more experience could have seen. And really, that is the undercurrent to the ways in which I have hurt myself by being so secretive; if I had had a trusted adult and been able to be honest with them, the self-destructive behaviors that came after may have been curtailed. I don’t blame myself though. In retrospect, I can see the parts when I let shame control the narrative, but in large part it was about survival: as I’ve said prior, I knew that coming out would see me homeless, I thought I was controlling the narrative about me, and it also true is that you need a sense of pride in your sexuality to survive in a heteronormative hegemony. Yet, again, that trusted adult may have been able to point out to me the link between the childhood molestation and all the cruising I was doing as a young person.

I used to go to the gym a lot in high school and college, work out, then cruise in the steam room and locker room showers. As I wrote about it back then, I was excited to be sexually active and also saw it as my obligation, a way of sticking it to society by having lots of gay sex when, at least in California, the right to marry was being voted on and being taken away. It wasn’t just about sexual freedom, but revolution, after all, no amount of shaming could take away how good the good times felt. The issue was the bad times. Stone cold sober, I would lose agency over my body, freezing in place and letting people I was not attracted to touch me and pleasure me. I remember explicitly telling myself to just close my eyes and let it happen, it would all be over soon. I didn’t understand what was going on then, that I was recreating the earlier childhood trauma by letting these older men use me. Apparently, I also didn’t understand that I could just say no and conceptualized what was happening as an obligation, although I’m not sure why I felt obligated to do anything.

In the gyms, this cruising consisted of mutual masturbation and oral. I don’t know why it never went further than that. Perhaps, from up close, some of these men realized how young I was and never invited me anywhere else. In the post-orgasmic clarity, they realized the hairy chest couldn’t hide how young my face looked and the fact that my voice still cracked. I apologize as this may be too much for some people, but I do have some sympathy for these pederasts. Attracted as they were to younger men, they were playing a dangerous game, as they never bothered to confirm my age and would certainly have gotten themselves in trouble if we had ever been caught. See I never lied about my age, one or two did bother to ask and I would always respond honestly, “Seventeen!” And perhaps it was that I rode my bike to the gym and would not have wanted to bike anywhere else but home, or be driven anywhere else as I wanted to stay in control.

Whatever it was, I managed to hold onto my virginity until my freshman year of college. The one close friend I had back had their own unhealthy sexual patterns and encouraged me to get rid of it. I deeply regret that I didn’t have someone else to talk to about that and that the culture in general led me to think I wasn’t a man until I did. I chatted with a grad student on the hook up apps who was fairly attractive. He sent over a couple pics of his body and I was ready to go. Unfortunately, when I opened the door, the person before me in no way resembled his pics. An older me would have angrily confronted him about this and sent him on his way. But instead I walked him back to my room and I tried to ask him about his pictures. To every question he had an answer and to every hesitation he had a negotiation. We did get some of our clothes off and at some point, I rationalized to myself that if I just went along with it, he’d finally leave. I remember he rode me until he came and then I asked him again if he would leave. He finally did. I thankfully insisted on wearing a condom. I remember taking a long hot shower and then logging onto some forums, probably a reddit forum, to brag that I had finally gone all the way. I didn’t even bother writing about it in my journal though, although I do remember feeling as if something was not right.

My freshman year of college, I decided to go back into the closet. In a truly hare-brained move, I thought I would stay in the closet, not make friends, get my degree as fast as possible and then move on with my life. I think, without having written it down, I can admit that I wanted as much financial independence as soon as possible because I knew my parents would not support me. Second, I certainly did not fit neatly into the gay identity and was scared because of that. Although I knew that I was some sort of bisexual, my then favorite author spoke often how he knew many gay men who started off as bisexual and were just kidding themselves. I wasn’t sure about my own sexuality and didn’t want the scrutiny, so I just didn’t bring it up and kept my online and gym cruising to myself. Per my journal, I then went on to feel tremendously guilty when I did make friends who I wanted to come out to, but was scared they’d feel bad about me lying. Still, I wish I had come out, not just to help me reflect on the above behavior, but also to have warned me about the only other gay person in our cohort.

By the end of my freshman year, I had managed by and large to avoid scrutiny because I was really into two of my friends. Really a third if I’m being honest, although he was a guy so I’m not sure how I kept that crush a secret. It isn’t as if I went around telling anyone who asked that I was into my friends, but with one specifically people could tell I liked her. At the end of the year, I had started considering how I would come out and was even wearing subtle rainbows and yet was not being recognized. The one time it happened at a party that an older guy asked in code if I was family, I happily said “Yes! We’re all one big engineering family!” He kept insisting that no, he wanted to know if I was family, familia, which truly confused me because the minority engineering program at this school painted itself as a family and I could not tell the difference. The upperclassmen interceded and told him to leave me alone. As I later learned, he had a habit of getting his classmates drunk and sleeping with them, clearing out the closeted men in his generation and they didn’t want him wasting his time with me, so obvious was my crush on my female friend.

We had a guy my year that was following in his footsteps, regrettably. One of our friends told me later that he had a list of all the guys he wanted to get drunk and sexually assault. I know for young gay men and for a certain type of older gay man, the fantasy persists of getting a straight man drunk and “turning” him. Having been on the receiving antics, I can say that it’s awful and that no means no. As I later found out, this guy had made a list of all the guys our year that he wanted to get drunk and sleep with, his go to MO as he remains a total slime bag. Still, it was another end of the year party and apparently it was my turn for him to try something.

The party was fairly non-eventful. At the time, I recall him being persistent in handing me booze and me telling him many, many times, that I needed to be careful with how much I drank. If needed I can elaborate on it later, but I had broken my leg and was on crutches at the time, so I knew I needed to stay sober enough to walk on crutches. I made it home safely and I wish I had ended the night there. However, I had made it a habit after any party where booze was involved, to stay up late playing video games until I was completely sober, as I get the spins when I try to sleep while inebriated and inevitably end up puking. I don’t remember who messaged who first, but I do recall him pointing out that if I wasn’t going to sleep yet that I should come over and hang out. Even though my gut was telling me not to, I figured I’d go up and see what happened.

We got there and it was fine, until it wasn’t. We made out, I did get hard, and we fooled around a bit but then I said no. I told him I didn’t feel comfortable proceeding with more but wouldn’t mind staying to sleep together. He said ok and let me doze off. I awoke some time later to him stroking me awake and I got mad, told him no, and went back to sleep. This kept going for a while, because while I was wanting to leave, I was scared at the thought of having to hobble my way down from his dorm room and back to mine, so late at night and so desiring to just be asleep.

That was the last party of the school year and I pushed it out of mind that summer. When I returned that year, I noticed that some of the freshmen seemed to already know something about me and that the gay ones were particularly stand offish. I didn’t know what it was at the time, I figured that having recently come out (again) I was still a bit awkward and, having joined the officer positions in the minority engineering group, I did not want to come off improperly toward them. What I didn’t learn until later was that the guy above had participated in a summer program and had told all the incoming minority engineers that he and I had issues because I was homophobic.

I didn’t learn this until well after college and in retrospect, I applaud the sociopathy of this man. He figured since I showed such discomfort being openly out that I wouldn’t effectively counter the narrative that I had a lot of internalized homophobia. And in a way, he was right. But the reason I went on to dislike him was because he had forced himself onto me. After all, I had given him several clear and precise nos. What could have been drunken mistakes then turned into sober cover ups. Also, to be clear, by the time he had locked his eyes upon me, I had started to come out to our friends anyways and either way, had already come out to my parents, something he hadn’t done. There was no way to cast him as a man trying to help someone struggling to come out. And truly, if he had not tried to turn people against me, I might have continued to have said that he and I just didn’t get along. See, it wasn’t for another year that I bothered to tell anyone about what had transpired against us and it was only because he insisted on trying to make me a bad guy.

I am happy that I finally stopped trying to keep things secretive or private and, in the end, came forward with my story. It didn’t undo all of the issues I had with the younger gay men in our group, after all, I am still a huge dork and at the time was still very socially awkward. But it no longer made them afraid of me and thankfully, it minimized the amount of times I had to be around this rather unpleasant individual. I only wish I had seen sooner what it was costing me to keep secret the ways in which other people had hurt me. Our peers did turn against him and helped me keep him out of my life, which was the other side of secret keeping. Not only was I holding onto this pain by myself, but managing the scenario fell on me alone, when I could have been getting help the entire time.

Because I have already written so much and because I still want to go hit the gym, I will stop here. I want to follow up to make clear what else hiding all of this caused as well as elaborate on the relief I felt in telling my story and some of the help I received.