Generalizations and Race Shaming Hurts the Wrong People

Excuse my whiteness while I individuate

I am isolated.

I am isolated. I always have been. An only child born to a teenage couple who separated two years later. I watched my single mother struggle with sexism through the 1970s, unsuccessfully, taking her own life.

I was taken in by her Mormon parents for my formative teenage years, taught masturbation is a sin, then I was on my own. I was a first generation college graduate from both my mother’s and father’s family. My isolation continued into my college years.

I didn’t fit in with the upper-middle class kids I went to school with. They had parents. They had stability. They had friends in the neighborhood. I had my mother’s life insurance which paid for most of my college education.

My deadbeat dad, absolved of 10 years of back child support payments by my grandmother when my mother died, resurfaced in my life just in time to begin criticizing my life choices, like getting a college education. He was against it. A waste of money. A trick by rich people to take the money of working class people while offering them nothing in return.

Not to mention, knowledge leads you away from Jesus and towards the devil. I graduated, much to his dismay and embarrassment. I would go on to shame and embarrass him further by earning a master’s degree.

Don’t paint your opinions over my facts

I didn’t come here to rehash my life story, but to point out that what people look at is not what they assume. I struggled to keep a roof over my head in my twenties in the gay streets of California. I turned to the gay community, ironically, for safety, security, and community as many unwanted young boys did.

As you can predict, they didn’t help me self-actualize, instill me with a sense of dignity and confidence, or offer me unconditional love. Their love was very conditional on me remaining gay. I was manipulated by self-serving narcissists into situations where I could be ogled at, seen and not heard, to be put back on the shelf with the other toys at the end of the weekend when they were through with me.

As lovely as that sounds, I was apparently in an enviable position, sparking the jealousy of those who wanted that type of attention. A whole backstory of who I was, where I came from, and what my interests were developed without my input.

It was a story that made me envy myself. I wish I had had the life many people thought I did. I came from a loving upper-middle class family who encouraged and supported me no matter what I did. My social awkwardness and introverted thinking nature were assumed to be my snobbish “attitude.” To them, I was someone who thought I was better than everyone else and not the nervous, insecure, unloved person I was.

I was thrust in with the “popular” gays, the ones that people are too intimidated to approach. I wasn’t very welcome by the “normal gays” as flirting with them allowed them to let loose all their pent up animosity towards those in “my crowd” with scathing, bitter remarks and cruelty.

I didn’t develop many friendships, although there was always plenty of sex and drugs. I was in the fantasy life that the Grndr generation would seek to emulate in another 15 years: lots of meaningless sex, no friendships, and no depth of any kind. I am intimately familiar with why so many gay and bisexual men take their lives.

15 years of marching

I marched in my first Gay Pride parade in 1987. Back then, the Westboro Baptist Church with their “God Hates Fags” signs had a much larger presence. I was spat upon and yelled at by neanderthal looking people who knew they were better than me.

It was in the 1980s that Saint Ronald Reagan took away my mother’s social security from me. He made the decision for me to go full time into the workforce instead of pursuing graduate studies. My funding to further my education was cut-off when the Republican Party decided that increased military spending was more important than intelligent American kids getting a decent education.

I marched against both Gulf Wars in 1991 and 2003. Both times there were counter protestors with rabid looks of anger and hate screaming insulting slurs at the top of their lungs towards me and the others who were marching for peace.

As I mentioned, except for guys who wanted to get into my pants, I didn’t have many friends. I often marched alone. In retrospect, I guess no one could approach me because there were usually gay men approaching me, erecting an effective barricade for an insecure introvert. To any casual observers, it would look like I was stuck up, brushing off anyone’s advances, giving the appearance that I didn’t want to be approached.

Too old in my thirties, America throws me away

In my early 30s, I went through layoffs. I soon discovered that I was too old to work at many of companies I applied to. I was in a client-facing position, in much the same way pharmaceutical sales reps were. For those who don’t know, in the 1990s it was common to have young attractive women (mostly women, but some men) in their twenties make sales pitches to doctors which were barely short of flirtatious sexual advances.

It was a tradition which didn’t break until sometime later. As an attractive man in my thirties, I was already too old. (Ironically, I am now, years later, working in the same position I was deemed “too old” for in the 1990s. Now that many of the activities that client-facing employees used to engage in are illegal, it seems that the age barrier has at least partially fallen.)

Being judged too old to continue my career at 33, I left the USA. I’d had enough of a country which spat on me, hurled insults at me, didn’t pay me a living wage, drove me into debt, then gaslighting me calling me a loser and “too old” while still looking at me like I was a piece of meat. The insanity and the insults were too much for me to take any more.

I lived a normal life for 15 years — Without America

I spent two years in China, six years in Saudi Arabia, and six more years at various locations around the globe. I had what most people would call a normal life. I had stability for the first time in my life. I had friendships with real people who were being nice to me just to be friendly and not because they wanted to get in my pants. I had a comfortable, livable wage, and there wasn’t anyone trying to stab me in the back, getting me fired.

The very few friends I have from my previous gay California life (all two of them) still look at me and can’t understand how I thrived in China and Saudi Arabia. Their image of me is incompatible with the person I was allowed to grow into while abroad.

Fifteen years later, I returned to the States. It was just as mindless, reactionary, and melodramatic as I remembered, but worse. Whatever had infected American culture has metastasized, spreading through the country’s vital organs.

The gay scene had become unrecognizable to me. The sexual liberation movement which it was tied to in the 1970s and 80s had been successfully overcome and shoved back into a place of shame. Gay people had sacrificed the cornerstone of the gay rights movement for mainstream acceptance. They yearned for acceptance more than anything. That selling out to “traditional American values” was enough to earn them the right to “get married.”

Once more, into the insanity

Upon my return, beating the confidence out of me, psychologically terrorizing me, and raising my insecurities, isolation, loneliness, and blood pressure became goal # 1 for America. America had to undo all the “damage” done to me by those foreigners and break me, putting me back together the way they were used to me, the way they had engineered me to begin with: insecure, isolated, frustrated, financially on edge, and most importantly, dependent on them for survival.

The gaslighting, invalidation, manipulation, destabilization, lying, word salads, denying, projection, triangulation, shaming, blaming, threats, generalizations and misrepresentations were turned up full force to make me “normal” again.

There were a couple days I doubted I had ever been overseas. I thought I must be delusional. I wondered if I was really in a mental ward in the States the whole time making up these delusional fantasies about having dignity, comfort, confidence, friendships, and respect.

America, as it turns out, still has the same old problems with me. They had just been put on a backburner for 15 years. No one will tell me what those problems are, they just give me that incredulous look, shake their heads and walk away.

I am still in isolation. I’ve been the subject of ridicule a few times trying to make friends in this country, so I stopped trying. I know there must be good and decent people out there somewhere, just usually not within my physical vicinity. It seems that I am imprisoned, loosely, by a wall of narcissists.

In Trump’s America, friendliness is weakness, and no one needs nobody

Soon after returning to America, they closed the borders, shutting down all my previous escape routes to a normal life, ensnaring me in this backwards country while they proceeded in their mission to open up the gates to Hell, letting the rest of the demons in to possess more Americans.

Here is the part of my story which angers my conservative Republican family.

I often reflect on my delusional fantasy life from overseas and wonder why I can’t recreate that here. I have eaten nearly every meal alone for two years. That is unconscionable. It is extremely rude, according to the Chinese. My Chinese friends would never let another living human being be lonely. They would certainly never let someone eat alone. That’s just unthinkably cruel.

In some ways, I’m glad they will soon match and probably surpass the United States as a superpower. The way we treat people, including each other, shows that we don’t deserve to be world leaders. Forcing people into financial insecurity, victim blaming, scapegoating, and underhandedly pushing people out of productive society into loneliness and often to the brink of suicide and beyond is heinously sinful. Go ahead and get me fired for thinking so.

This is, apparently, what passes for “hating America.” Wanting a better world where people feel included and valued.

I write this today to remind my fellow countrymen and city-women that loneliness is on the list of crises’ we are facing in this country. Everything we have done as a country for the last 50 years has advanced the hellish cause of isolating and separating each of us into our own individual world where we barely interact with each other and are easier to manipulate and control.

This isolation breeds mistrust and resentment. We project outwards that other people must have more friends, money, and happiness than we do making us resentful due to these false assumptions. We are taught by our news and other TV shows to be mistrustful. The more isolated we are, the more that mistrust can grow as we have no contradictory experiences to fight that with.

I saw several posts today trying to further divide us along racial lines. Many people saying that half of white America voted for Trump, implying that we need to shame white Americans, isolating them from the rest of decent society.

At first look, you’d probably assume that I am one of those white Americans. You would probably assume that I am one of those people who shamed me, rejected me, scapegoated me, gaslighted me, and drove me into my own private isolated Hell.

I don’t like those people. In fact, I probably carry more bitterness and resentment towards them than you. After all, I’m related to them, and they threw me out with the trash, calling me useless, saying I was bound for Hell, and much worse. I have many personal reasons I carry a deep animosity towards Republicans.

This election season, I gave up my family, for the final time, to do what I know is right.

Please don’t brush me aside in the remaining years of my life, making me suffer in isolation from the assumptions and bigotry that exist on both sides. America has been cruel enough and I deserve a reprieve.

All I wanted over the past 30 years was stability, a roof over my head, and the feeling that I was useful to someone somewhere.

I don’t think that is too much to ask. That’s been denied me for over 30 years because people don’t ask, make false assumptions about my character, my values, and what I want from life. No one has ever asked me, at least, not in America.

I was relieved when Trump lost. I’ve been hurt enough by narcissists from all walks of life to know the damage they can do. Now, you are at least partially aware of that. Don’t ignore my warnings. They don’t come without merit.

In your vengeance, don’t throw me in with the assholes I’ve been fighting against my whole life. I’m worried you will because the first thing you see is my aging white skin and my fat bald white head. I’ve fought long and hard to get this far. I too would like a taste of freedom before I die.