Small Town Boy

(Based on the song by Bronski Beat as well as my own experiences)

Small Town Boy

Living in a small, conservative town doesn’t exactly have its pros, and from the very start, I’ve known something was different about me, but I just didn’t know the word for it. In the third grade, I overheard Larry Callaghan calling everyone “gay”. And since everyone was more popular than I was, I wanted to be gay too. So I went around the schoolyard, shouting, “I’m gay! I’m gay!” until at nearby supervisor heard me and lectured me about how being gay meant being happy, and nothing else.

My parents were the traditional kind; they just wanted me to marry some girl and make babies for them. My dad was never really there in my childhood or even my life, and my mom wasn’t much better. So when I came out to them, they couldn’t understand why I was doing it. They couldn’t understand that it was a part of me, I didn’t choose anything. They couldn’t understand me. They thought I was trying to hurt them in some way. Both of them gave me talks until I cried from slowly realizing that my parents never really loved me, and even less now.

My father would continually tell me he was disappointed in me and, eventually became slightly ill afterwards, and my mother blamed it on me. She told me I never should have mentioned it to him because of his beliefs regarding the taboo subject of sexuality. She also wanted me to apologize to him, to tell him that it was something I would eventually overcome and I would be “normal” soon. I couldn’t do it because it was just wrong and I would be lying. Was it so wrong that I told them who I really was?

In a small town, word gets around really quickly. Soon, everyone at school knew, and that’s when I started getting harassed by people; I would be lucky if I got through the day with just a punch in the face. I dreaded the sound of the school bell because it signalled the start of another hour of beatings. The teachers blindly overlooked anything they saw directed at me, even if it was right in front of their eyes. I lost what little of my friends I had, but two of my closest still stuck by, and even dared to hang out with me. The three of us then vowed to finally leave this town we called “home”.

The weather man called for sunny skies, but it was overcast, and it looked like it was going to rain any second. A little black suitcase in my right hand in and a watch on my left that read 8:28, I had only two more minutes to wait till I started my new life. As I heard the clanging of the engines as the train nears the platform, I took one last look around, expecting to see my parents there; telling me to come back; that they loved me, but all I saw were empty seats.

Goodbye… to everything.