Thrown into yet another locker...

I'm pretty tired of being spoken to like I'm a piece of shit simply because I'm gay.
Twenty seven years and people still can't accept I'm never going to have feelings like "that" for a woman, regardless of their opinions.

My entire life has been an attempt to go under the straight guy's radar, hoping to catch him on a good day when the need to throw me into a locker was an afterthought. In H.S. I learned that even the Honors Program couldn't save me from the torture that ensued throughout my four years held prisoner in an all-boys Catholic high school. I initially thought the concept of travelling from classroom to classroom with the same group of kids all day would allow me to blend in with the crowd, but alas, as I discovered, I'm the poor man's "Where's Waldo?"

As an impressionable frosh struggling to identify why I felt different, reluctant to grasp the thought of "my feet not touching the ground" for the rest of my life, as my father would say. A remedy?: I followed my instincts and auditioned for the Spring musical, for some reason thinking it would renew the confidence that had been violently stripped from me by innumerable shouts of "fag", "queer", and "homo" in between classes. Well, you can imagine the rest.

Now at 27, an employee of the Department of Ed., having somewhat recovered from the years of incessant name-calling, I once again feel bullied every now and then! In reality, not much has changed besides my age; schoolkids are still shitty, and I'm still just as gay as I was when I pranced across my H.S. stage proclaiming my love for "Rosemary" in "How to Succeed in Business...".

On any given day, a possible conversation with a kid goes something like this:

~"Excuse me, can you please pick that paper up and put it in the trash?"
~"Why?"
~"Because you threw it on the floor and it doesn't belong there."
~"You pick it up. Faggot."

Lovely.

This year, the mayor has begun a school wide anti-bullying program that protects kids like me from being harassed, assaulted, and threatened. Where was Bloomberg the Monday after the talent show after strutting my stuff for the herds of oblivious mothers who thought I was being "cute" and the disgusted blue-collared fathers who went for a bathroom break as I started shuffling off to Buffalo? Each time I walk down the hall of my school I notice the newly posted "Respect for All" initiative posters adorning the walls; I hope and pray, for gay students and teachers alike, that we will someday truly be safeguarded against those nasty, most likely closeted, bullies. Until then, I must do as I learned in Catholic school, to turn the other cheek and dance like no one's watching.