There was a girl on our high school cross country team who repeatedly asserted that “You probably didn’t know what gay meant until you were thirteen,” just because that was the age she learned. I always tried to correct her, that I learned when I was 11. Not everyone learns the term at the same age.
The day I learned what gay meant was a troublesome day with an overcast sky. I was suspended from school for fighting. “You are not in trouble, Caroline!” my mom said surprisingly after we got in the car. I was bullied every day in fifth grade, and the morally backwards teacher always coddled my cruel peers, especially the bullying ringleader. I’m not using his real name. Let’s call him, “Oscar.”
That day after a game of tag, Oscar kept slapping my back, yelling tag. After months of abuse, I finally snapped. I jumped on his back, pulling his hair. Oscar screamed like a girl. The teacher, who never intervened when I was harmed, immediately came to his rescue. The teacher refused to hear my side of the story, and Oscar was not reprimanded at all for hitting me.
My mother and I were on I-95 South, going home. At least my mom listened, and let me tell her what happened. One lane over to the right was a truck stocked with red oxygen tanks labeled, “Oscar’s Oxygen.” My mom laughed and joked, “Look! That’s all of Oscar’s oxygen being sent to him, because he doesn’t have enough oxygen going to his brain!” I chuckled a bit, but I still felt down.
We discussed various incidents of bullying at this overpriced private school, and a three-lettered word stood out, Fag. One day, while waiting for the art teacher to arrive, Oscar was spewing insults, one of which was, “Your brother is a fag!” I went home and told my family that, and my brother responded with, “Whoa! That’s really nasty! Oscar has gone too far!” I didn’t know what the term meant. I thought it probably meant stupid-head or something childish.
When we were nearing the Scudder Falls Bridge, my mother told me. A fag was a gay man, and gay men were “men who try to have sex.” This was March 1994. I know these words would not be acceptable today, but it’s what I heard and how I learned. Continuing, my mom told me that women who are gay are called, lesbians. The trisyllabic word wiggled out of my auditory memory quickly, while I tried to conceptualize what they did. I thought their legs scissored, and this was before South Park.
This was why the term, fag, was so offensive, because Oscar was claiming my brother had sex with other boys. I didn’t get a happy introduction to LGBTQ with rainbow flags and love stories in a health class setting. I learned through insults and one rotten day at school when I was treated with injustice.
Later on, Oscar organized a group of his Slytherinesque friends to tell the head of the upper school that my brother called Oscar a “Jewish Jackass.” My brother never uttered that term, which Oscar concocted. My brother was nearly expelled over a slur he never said, but Oscar was not punished for saying “fag!”
* * *
Three months afterward……
Oscar was eventually expelled at the end of the year, for his constant bullying. He was “not invited to come back to the school next year.” One member of the board of directors begged me to give the school another chance. I stood my ground, said no, and willfully returned to public school.
