I had this weird thing for a couple of the bullies I encountered growing up. In junior high and high school there were these two boys, Manitoba-style white-boy gangsters who sold weed and thought that made them 50 Cent. They would call me a fag every time they laid eyes on me. Even though (okay, because) they were total assholes, I had crushes on them. Maybe I was just a sub in the making, or maybe I realized that there was some kind of connection between me and my bullies. There was a reason why they called me out every time I walked into a room and brought attention to my sexuality: I made them feel sexual.
The old cliché holds true: most homophobes really are gay. Take Ricky Martin’s revelation to GQ Australia:
“I look back now and realize I would bully people who I knew were gay,” the singer, who came out in 2010, said. “I had internalized homophobia. To realize that was confronting to me. I wanted to get away from that. I didn’t want [my twin sons] growing up in a house of lies or thinking that there was something wrong with being gay.”
After some Facebook stalking, I discovered that one of the bullies of my youth gives seriously fabulous gay-face in many of his recent pictures, and the other, well, he has a girlfriend and a baby, but hey, most of my boyfriends do!
Why you can trust Xtra
