The struggle is not over

I came out so young I was never in the closet. So I never had the lousy coming-out experiences that you read about so often these days. Maybe that explains why I can’t understand why customer after customer sits down on a stool in the bar where I work and describes their life as a miserable secret charade.

Bartenders like me in trashy old gay bars are worse than the NSA for eavesdropping on customers. Mostly what I hear is so painfully banal I can barely stand it. (I won’t allow discussions of Donald Trump.) But what does interest me is trying to find out why all these men seem so bloody messed up.

I mostly get older guys, but occasionally, unsuspecting younger men come in. The stories are almost always the same. They are all pretending to be heterosexual in one way or another. Whether it is the mandatory fake relationship with a woman or an exaggerated masculinity or a loathing for anything slightly effeminate, they all want to be “straight acting.” And what an act it is, because these guys are anything but straight. Why are they doing this?

I had begun to put it all together from bits and pieces of conversations here and there, but what really drove it home was an encounter in a second-hand store. I just wanted some nice clothes on the cheap, but what I got instead was a painful lesson about how the world really works in 2017.

Walking in the door, I saw all the staff standing around the glass from a large broken mirror. I didn’t think much of it and went to the suit section. I looked down the row and saw a teenage boy sitting on the floor. He was sobbing uncontrollably and texting on his phone. A pool of blood in front of him, streaming from his hand.

I went up to a staff member and asked if she knew there was a boy crying and bleeding on the floor. She put her finger over her lips to hush me. Another woman wondered why he was still crying. It turned out to be his mother. She told me a group of about 10 male youths had followed him from school trying to catch him and beat him up. They called him “faggot.” The employee said being called that didn’t mean anything.

“It means something to my son,” his mother said.

The boy’s mother had confronted the group and one of the youths threatened her. That’s when her son went after the kid. She restrained him and brought him into the store for safety. He was so upset he punched the mirror and cut his hand.

The mother told me the boys had been tormenting her son for months. “He’s having a mental-health breakdown,” she said. I told her I was sorry to see this happening to them. The store had called the police and the first officer arrived quickly. He was a big, older man. He spoke to the boy in a calm voice and asked the kid to tell him about it. A staff member provided first aid to the boy’s bleeding hand and then the officer left with the mother and son.

I know it sounds naive, but I found it hard to believe what I was seeing. This actually still happens? Gangs of kids beat up other kids because they think they are “fags?” Really? This couldn’t be true. But it most certainly was.

In talking to my many closeted customers at the bar as they get more and more liquored up and loose lipped, I’m told that a lot of things still happen. Families reject men because their religion tells them it’s wrong. Mothers cry because they think they will never have grandchildren. Fathers turn their backs on their sons because they don’t consider them real men. On and on it goes.

The true founder of the gay rights movement in Canada is Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who, as justice minister, first proposed decriminalizing homosexuality in 1967, something that actually came to pass in 1969. His son is now Prime Minister and marches in Gay Pride parades. All the work done by activists between then and now is buried in history books no one reads or cares about and is essentially forgotten.

Listening to the men at my bar, it’s as if none of it ever actually happened. These guys are still at square one. Oblivious to what came before them, all they know is what they experience today, and it still isn’t much fun, no matter what you might see on television.

No wonder these men are a train wreck. It doesn’t matter if the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms says we are equal; lots within society disagrees, and it’s this whispered message that resonates with the men struggling to find out who they really are. The official story is that they are equal, but that’s not how they are treated.

Don’t be fooled by all the gay pride parades and friendly politicians. The struggle for acceptance, both externally and internally, is not over. It may be hidden from most people, but it’s on full display for me at the bar, and it’s heartbreaking.

Jean-Baptiste Bellamy lives in London, Ont.