I can barely make out the words on the screen through my tears as I am typing this. I’ve hit a wall with being able to push down my anger about the cruelty and hatred that’s directed at me and my friends just for being ourselves. Last night a group of my friends got jumped by a bunch of gay bashing Rose Festival hill people. Everyone is alive today with much to be thankful for, but I’m fed up. This is not a political post. It’s not about fucking politics at all, actually. These are the words that are going to turn to cancer in my body if I don’t let them out, so I have decided to do it now. FUCK IT.

As you can see from the photo above, I’ve always been different. There has never been a time in my life where I walked into a room and instantly felt like I belonged there. I’m just not wired that way or something. I grew up in a very conservative home in a very conservative part of the Midwest. Other kids started calling me “girly” at an early age. This morphed into “sissy” which morphed into “gay” and sort-of spiraled out into violence from there. At the time, I didn’t really know what any of those words actually meant. I just knew that the other kids (and sometimes adults) didn’t like ME. I got beaten up for the 1st time for being a sissy when I was 8. I ran all the way from downtown York, Nebraska to my Mom’s friend’s house, crying, scared out of my mind. This would be the 1st of many encounters with mean boys to come.

(This is a photo of me getting my very first Barbie & Ken dolls. My parents did the best they could with me at the time. Looking back, I think it is very sweet that they loved me enough to let me play with dolls in the privacy of our home. Most boys like me without sisters back then weren’t that lucky. Have you EVER seen a face so happy?)

Things went terribly wrong in my life around that same time and I went inward. It became clear to me what I was soon after…that what they had all been talking about that whole time was true. I was a sissy. I knew this by the time I was 10 years old and had already begun to seek out ways of taking the edge off chemically, making myself feel better through lies, and protecting myself by being totally fucking fake. By the time I got to high school the torment had moved to torture. I was constantly ridiculed by the guys in my class and had to be removed from gym during Sophomore year at York High because they were harassing me. Eventually, I was removed from the school all together when we moved to Kansas. I decided to come out of the closet in 1994. It was a very unpopular decision. I could probably go on and on forever about how horrible it was to be an out teenager Pre-Will & Grace and how I couldn’t get from class to my locker without having my books knocked out of my hands for a full year my last year of high school, but tiny violins are not really the point of this post.

My message to all of you homophobic gay bashing pricks is this: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU??? Why has it always been such a huge problem for me to be myself? Why do you care whether my male friends are wearing wigs and dresses to a gay bar? What’s it to YOU? I feel like I have been fighting you my whole life because I HAVE BEEN. You have never once let me be myself without the fear of being attacked or made fun of and I’m just fucking sick of it.

LEAVE US ALONE. IT’S ONE THING TO NOT ALLOW US THE SAME BASIC RIGHTS AS YOU, BUT IT’S ANOTHER WHEN YOU WANT TO SEE US BLEED. IF IT’S BLOOD YOU WANT, IT’S BLOOD YOU SHALL GET…BUT IT WON’T BE OURS. FUCK OFF, NAZI PIGS. BITE YOUR TONGUE OR WE’LL BITE IT OFF FOR YOU.

…and to my brothers and sisters who’ve been fighting back their whole lives, too:

KEEP FIGHTING. WE ARE GOING TO WIN THIS EVENTUALLY. THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER. STAY STRONG, KEEP YOURSELVES SAFE, BE WHO YOU ARE, AND KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU. I’M HERE WITH YOU. WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

-Logan