The Bully / Being Wrong

In the last few years, bullying seems to have come to the fore of people's attention more than before, the effect that relentless teasing can have on a kid when endured every motherlovin' day. But maybe we have to go back earlier. Maybe we go back to Columbine, to Matthew Shepard. What are the effects of being both seen and not seen? Of being told you are something and it not being what you are? Is it a fate worse than invisibility? Or what if you are a person who has not been seen, but has watched other people terrorized in this way? What if you are terrorized at home by a father who is larger than you, who maybe you don't have the strength to act against, so you decide to act against someone closer to your size?

Last week on the plane to to Chicago, my friend Marysa and I were talking about the fact that the documentary Bully recently received an R rating by the MPAA, which means that it will not be allowed to be shown in public schools to the very kids it is about, who need to see it most.

We talked about people we knew, boys especially, and their experiences with bullying. Girls tend to be cruel in different ways to each other, less physical ways: shaming ways. Which is not to say that there is not shame in what happens between boys, but for boys and from boys, it can be relentless. I told Marysa about this guy I knew, Kevin. He was a huge geek. In elementary school, he and I weren't friends. We both went to this gifted program two days a week from 4th through 6th grade. He was teased a lot. Probably the only thing that kept him from being bullied was that he was tall. But that didn't save him from being made fun of. Everyone hated him. He was awkward, gangly, had a gross sense of humor, bad glasses (not that mine were any better), and few friends. I guess you could say that he was on the fringe of our group of friends. And we were on the fringe of everyone else. My friends were lucky to have each other, as no one else really wanted to claim us. We were the uncool fringe but not the nerdiest. Kevin was at the edge of it all. Kevin had no one. He ate lunch with us every now and then and we talked to him on occasion. We weren't cruel to him, but we weren't nice either.

When we moved into junior high, we all got split apart, as this gifted program had brought kids together from all different parts of the city, and many of us were never to be in the same school again. Two years passed and when 9th grade came around, there was Kevin in my 9th grade choir class, and on my swim team. Raging. Ripped. And like a fucking bomb waiting to go off. It turned out that in the years that had passed, his father had committed suicide. Kevin was always not showing up to things, or showing up late, and in spite of it all, we forged a tenuous friendship. Something in him had shifted. I sensed that Kevin was making choices that would determine the course of his life. That seems strange looking back at it now, since I was only 14 then. But I saw this smart boy, with so much potential, punching holes in walls, not caring about classes. He was the first person who I recognized cared for others but not himself. I knew that he wasn't going to go off, even when he was on the bus late at night on the way home from a choir trip singing too loudly "Rape me, Rape me, my friend." He was on the edge. But if he went over, it was just going to be him. He wasn't going to take anyone else with him.

And he did go over, in a way. He had to repeat 11th grade. And then didn't move forward that year. And then dropped out completely. I never saw him again. I heard he got a girl pregnant, got married, like so many of the guys I knew in high school. But what is it that kept Kevin from becoming the bully? Is it that he became tall before he was able to receive those terrible beatings? Before he knew what it was like to be shamed physically? Was it that he took out his physical aggression by putting his fists through walls at home? Listening to Nirvana, Primus, and Rage against the Machine? Did it help that every day he got up onto a 25-foot diving board and jumped? That he had a fear he had long ago learned to control?

Years later, my college boyfriend would tell me how he experienced serious problems of aggression as a child, that a kid who was screwing with him in class once was shuffling the papers around on Travis's desk and he got so annoyed with him that when the kid kept at it, he simply stopped him by stabbing the kid in the hand with his pencil. Afterward, Travis realized how serious his aggression was and started cutting himself at home so he wouldn't take it out on other people.

All of this has been on my mind a lot lately with Tennessee pushing for the passage of the horrific Don't Say Gay bill. I can't imagine anything worse than forbidding teachers from being able to speak and support kids who are dealing with one of the most difficult experiences they could possibly have while growing up. Just growing up is hard enough. Because here's the thing: it all fucking accrues, accretes. In places where this is allowed to go on, kids take matters into their own hands, and they get out of their own lives, or someone takes their lives from them. So what happens when teachers are silent? This is what happened in Minnesota:

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, "I would hear people calling people 'fags' all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn't respond." In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a "faggot," he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a "lesbo" and a "sinner" – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to "lay low"; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys' bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, "It was probably water." Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, "Get out of this town, fag"; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.

Nine kids have committed suicide in the school district where that policy has been implemented: the "No Homo Promo," they call it. Five very brave students are currently suing the school district for its complicity in the deaths of these kids, many of whom were LGBT, all of whom lacked support and a sense of belonging.

I don't know what the solution is, but I know it isn't silence. I know that there has to be acknowledgment. I was talking to another friend the other day about how I basically see nothing redeeming about Lady Gaga. That many people I respect think she pushes the envelope in her creative choices and videos and such, but that I've not been much impressed. Because I felt like she had all this fame that she hadn't really been doing anything useful with. I mean really what's the point in showing up to an award show in an egg? And then Sunday night, I read this. And you know what? I changed my mind. I can be a pretty stubborn person, but when it comes to people, to finding out that someone is using their public image to do good things, then let me be wrong. Let me be wrong all the time. Because to me there is nothing better that a person can do than help someone else. Watch this video, watch me be wrong. Good god damn.

From Kelly Forsythe's poem series about Columbine:

SUBURBAN ANXIETY

“She remembers, after being shot, her right arm floating up in the air and then coming back down.”

4/20 and warm feelings. Warm, floating,
it takes a slow landing on her
stomach, but what’ve the bone? What’ve
the tendon, the soft connection
between skin and the solid so
far beneath?


give me your hand

here

I had a moment in a grocery store
I never explained to my parents

When I read you were tired of being scared
no longer cared if you died

I opened my red-blonde chest, led it up
to a hill and followed you

everywhere—your every move trailed
by something of myself beating
in a warm rhythm. I would be

so devoted, yes I would be
so deeply that way. I had this moment
in a makeup aisle with a man,
saw my hair float up in the air

away from my body, take
its slow landing. But what’ve
the shooting? What’ve the feelings
and the distance? One shooter
followed the other’s every move,
barely shot to kill. He was so devoted
he was so deeply that way.

NO, EVERYTHING

Down the hall, through
doors, exploring rooms

cloud-made chairs
sabotage the way
I rest.

I think a lot. How

my friends
are collapsing
under each other. I have

questions about
bridges,
who lie constantly
straight across and down,

good and bad movies
how everything
connects but in a
separate curiosity;
everyone trying
to get higher and stable.


Today is a cycle: the
physical boundaries
of my body are cruel
against the shell of school—

if this is a cliff theory, I
am clinging onto
the smallest rocks.