Sex, Drugs, and Barry Manilow
My psychiatrist has just diagnosed me as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and I think that a major reason for it is that I spent a good part of my adolescence listening to The Carpenters and Barry Manilow. OK. I’m probably exaggerating a little, but I was slightly different from the others kids and always had been. I knew as early as kindergarten that there was something different about me. I was perfectly happy playing by myself or reading. I never liked sports and physical games. I was smarter than the other kids. Oh, and I really liked looking at pictures of other guys in Boys’ Life magazine.
It was when I was ten that the abuse started. First, it was sexual. Some of it was cruel, some of it was quite loving and, (to my naive mind at the time), beautiful. Then the emotional and physical abuse began. Every day in junior high school was a terror followed by humiliations and ridicule when I returned home.
I had three escapes at this time. The first was reading. I became a voracious reader, devouring everything I could find. The second was music, mostly classical and seventies bubblegum. Everyone else my age was listening to Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller, and The Stones. I would not listen to their music. I was listening to The Carpenters and Barry Manilow. The third was sex. I became, at the age of twelve, a compulsive masturbator, indulging sometimes four or five times a day.
In college, my academic over-achieving ended when I discovered my fourth escape- drugs, and how much they improved my third escape, sex. I discovered the gay subculture of the late seventies and ran screaming from the closet.
Today, I realize that the indefinable thing I knew was different about me when I was young is that I am gay. If my first abuser had not known that I would probably grow up to be gay, I doubt he would have chosen me as an easy victim. If everyone at school and in my family had not assumed I was “queer” merely because I was smart and bad at sports, I would not have PTSD today and would probably be a college professor instead of a clerk. And, if I hadn’t been taught that sex is evil and immoral, I might not have needed drugs to overcome my southern Protestant guilt and inhibitions.
But, that’s all in the past. Now, I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
