remembering Kurt

There have been several suicides of gay teens recently, some the result of years of anti-gay bullying. Is there anything sadder than that? It's very discouraging that as we are making progress toward equality young gay men are still driven to suicide. But I look at all the progress that has occurred since I was a teen and usually feel better.

The recent suicides have made me think about Kurt, one of my classmates in school. Kurt moved to town at the start of fifth grade, and we became friends. We went to school together through high school. We were somewhat close in fifth and sixth grades but drifted apart after that. Then in junior year of high school I noticed a change in Kurt. He became quiet and quit talking to people except when someone spoke directly to him. He also stopped doing his homework and seemed to be in trouble with teachers for that all the time. What I noticed most was his smell. It was obvious to me that he quit bathing and he smelled pretty bad. Being the naive 16 year old that I was, I just wondered why he wouldn't take a shower. In retrospect it is obvious that he was very depressed and didn't care any more. But neither I nor anyone else seemed to realize what Kurt's problem was. One day he got a ride home with a classmate and seemed to be OK. I think that he had made his decision by then. He went home and hung himself, and his twelve year old sister found him later. Looking back I am pretty sure that Kurt was gay - maybe I had a little gaydar even back then. He didn't seem to like sports but played baseball when he was younger because his father wanted him to. Bullying was part of the problem - we went to an all-male Catholic high school, and the in crowd and bullies were merciless toward those that they considered weak. I wish that I had some of the experience that I have now to spot depression - I'm a primary care physician, so I see it nearly every day. Another preventable death, another victim of homophobia.

why am I anonymous?

I was thinking about why I am anonymous on this blog. I'm totally out, am part of a visible gay couple and family, all of my friends, family and coworkers know that I'm gay. So why use a pseudonym here? I have nothing to lose by being out, unlike others whose blogs I read - Poppy, Jeremy, John, Mikey and others. But I guess a blog is somewhat like the journal that I've kept since 1991 - personal, not something that I would share with others. Then why publish this for the world to see? Perhaps an anonymous blog is a way to have personal thoughts that can be shared with others without embarrassing myself or those that I write about. And I quickly learned how much support there is out there, both receiving and giving.

I took my son to his swim lesson today at a local indoor pool. He had a male instructor who looked to be in his early 20s. That's an advantage of living in a college town - lots of mostly attractive young people. Swimmers tend to be fit as well. I was admiring one part of this guy's anatomy that I have found sexy since I was in 7th grade - his underarm hair. It's not a kink for me, I don't obsess about it, but it is an attractive body part that is often ignored. I can remember exactly when I became attracted to underarm hair, and the person that triggered it in me. It was at the beginning of 7th grade, when some of the boys were playing a form of baseball using a tennis ball and their hands for bats. A basketball hoop was first base, and one of the boys raised his arm to lean on it. I was standing on the sideline watching and was shocked to see that he had hair under his arm. I was one of the youngest and smallest guys in my class, and I had not started to develop at all, so I was surprised to see that one of my classmates was. From then I looked around and saw underarm hair on some other guys too. I thought of them as more mature, better than me. I also realized that my attraction to their bodies was wrong in the moral universe in which I was raised, which made me feel more inferior. That lasted for many years, and to be honest I'm not sure that even now I've completely eliminated those feelings.

That makes me realize how successful straight society is in instilling homophobia into us. And our families, who should be our greatest support, can instead be the source of hatred and mistrust. There has been much talk here in the United States about similarities and differences between gay rights now and African American rights in the past. Conservative African Americans object to those comparisons, claiming among other things that there isn't lynching of gays as there were African Americans. But they are wrong, the lynchings occur, they are just now called suicides,and instead of angry white mobs doing the killings, young gays and lesbians do it themselves, many times because their families offer no support or offer violence and hatred instead.

Wow, how did a post on being anonymous turn into one on underarm hair and gay suicides?