The truth is usually ugly…

This is the longest non-fiction post I’ve ever written, and as the title warns, this is going to be hard to read. It’s an online confession, and I’m putting under its own category, TMI. I’m sure most of you know McKenzie Phillips’ story by now. If you don’t, you can look her up first, or read it after you read this.

Her coming out about such a sensitive topic got me thinking about how often I hid my past. People don’t like to think about some kids growing up too fast, and they don’t like to talk about how queer kids are treated by society. So when someone brings the subjects up, the standard response is ridicule. Because if they do it enough, they can shame people back into silence. (Thus allowing the cycles of abuse to continue unchecked.)

I’ve had more than enough of being ridiculed, so just the fear of rejection has kept me gagged for a while. Oh sure, I hint at being bad, but a full confession is difficult to write without the silent editor reminding me that people will judge me based on my confession. They’ll dismiss me, because I’m no longer a real human being. Then I’m just “one of those people.”

But having your approval without full disclosure is a hollow, bitter feeling. It’s a lie by way of omission, and I never feel comfortable with that. That’s why I’ve decided to write about parts of my past to try and explain why I see myself as a broken person. If you prefer to remain ignorant about my lousy childhood, I’d advise skipping this post.

Let’s start with my introduction into the world of sex. I was 7. My mother had taken me and my little brother from my great-grandmother’s home and moved us to San Antonio to live in the projects with her and her drug dealer boyfriend. We were abused by the other kids, neglected by our mother, and ignored by the school system. I got treated even worse than my brother, because I wasn’t just a white kid. I was a queer white boy who walked and talked like a girl.

I reacted to the constant abuse by shoplifting porn mags, using them as bribes to keep the older kids from beating me up. Sometimes the guys gave me pages to keep for myself, and I usually requested the letters and erotic fiction. I was interested in sex, and these stories were always much more intense than the pictures of “nekkid old ladies.” I kept my stash of text porn and favorite images under my mattress, like most kids who think they’re being clever.

The magazines didn’t stop all of the kids, and after I got beaten really bad one time, Mom decided that we needed babysitters. So we got two, a pair of sisters named Sandy and Andy. The girls found my porn stash and made an offer to “play games” with me. I was living out a fantasy from some of the same letters I’d read. The difference was, no one in the letters started off so young. I thought of this as a major accomplishment.

A few days after I started playing around with my babysitters, the sisters asked if I thought it was okay for them to play with my little brother too, who was 5. He was already being beaten and receiving heaps of emotional abuse from our mom, but I’m relatively sure that was the point he snapped.

After six months, the relationships soured. The girls decided to mess around with some of the older boys in the complex, including a guy who I’d slashed with a knife a few months prior. I planned to scare one of the sisters as revenge for “cheating” on me. My plan worked, as once my brother swung the iron skillet to scare Sandy, the handle slipped out of his grasp and cut of the tips of two of my toes. So of course the girls were scared shitless when I started screaming and bleeding on the carpet.

My mom decided the girls were unfit to watch us and pushed them away. Another two months passed, and…no, let’s skip ahead to when I was 12. I’d been a compulsive shoplifter and scam artist through the years in between, and I had two long term, incestuous relationships that were not sexual most of the time, but were very intimate.

My best friends during this time were three girls near my age, all of whom had taken adult sexual partners. They saw me as a girl in a boy’s body, and so I was unfit as a sex partner. The girls sometimes encouraged me to look around for my own “fella” on the grounds that an adult would be more gentle in taking my virginity. I was not ready to think about sex with guys of any age, since my only experience with them was violent and painful.

When adults asked what we were doing together, the girls would say, “cheerleader practice.” Sometimes, just to keep the adults guessing, we even did some cheer-leading chants. The girls painted my nails for these sessions, and I got spanked by the principal. My dad revoked their right to spank me, one of the few times I felt like I was making progress in getting him to see the real me. This did not last long.

During the next summer I was separated from my friends and forced into male activities against my will. I was told that it was inappropriate for me to be playing with girls their age.

For me the temptation to out my friends and shatter everyone’s illusions about our innocence was very strong. But I couldn’t betray them, nor their adult lovers. Not after they’d been the only real friends I’d ever had. So I suffered through boy scouts, dodge-ball at the Y, and little league baseball. There I sustained hip injuries from wild pitches TWICE from the same pitcher. I’d no sooner healed from the first sloppy pitch before the little bastard nailed me again.

Oh, and then there was Summer Sunday school, where the teacher informed me that certain people were abominations. According to the folks at the first church of Nazareth, people like me were doomed to go to hell no matter what we did. Because even if God really loved us, he also really wanted to see us burn for being vile sinners. I hated church, and I didn’t want to go, but Dad forced me to do it, because he claimed he wanted us to learn about faith. Instead, it turned me away from God and all of his flocks. In my own words, I said, “All right, if I’m going to hell, I’m taking some of His people with me.”

Which is why I chose to become a witch and fight as an enemy of God’s people. After this point it’s safe to say that insanity motivated most of my choices. Angry and lashing out, I plotted to frame my dad and send him to prison for… well, for a lot of stuff, really. I may make him seem like not such a bad guy. But the truth is, he wasn’t worthy of a parent of the year award either.

My plan succeeded, and he would have gone to prison if not for my mother, who took over the “narration” of how evil my dad was. In her version of events, he was thrashing us kids with metal studded leather belts and other instrument of near-death thrashing. In truth, my dad rarely touched me with his normal, non-studded leather belt. One of the last times he did was because I shot out his windows with a BB gun. So yeah, kinda had it coming. Dad mostly just ignored me, lest he realize he had a queer kid. So his worst crime against me  was neglect, and that wasn’t nearly as bad as what my mother and brother put me through.

(Between the two parents, Mom was worse because she was emotionally and physically abusive. I ran away and reported her to a cop for forcing my little brother to kneel on dry rice and popcorn for upwards of a half an hour at a time. The cops ignored my report until 20 years later, when my mom smacked a kid she was babysitting. The parents complained, and THEN they ran across my complaint in the records and revoked her child care license. To this day, she insists that it was my little brother who turned her in.)

I digress, the result of Mom’s insane ranting was that the cops rightly assumed she was nuts and wandered away without making any arrests. But the truth nearly destroyed my dad, and it almost ruined a lot of other people in my family too. My little brother knew what I’d done, and his loathing for me motivated him to torment me in every way he could.

I always suspected that this was why he chose to blackmail me, but the final straw came six months later. I’d started taking babysitting jobs to earn money instead of taking things and flipping them for cash at school.  I was also turning down my brother’s request to go shoplifting with him, so he kept getting caught. Mom fostered his hatred for me, because every time she dragged him home from a grocery store or a stay in juvenile detention, she would point at me and say, “Why can’t you be good like him?” Bro was already pissed at me for framing Dad, and Mom kept goading him with this emotional abuse that made life into a daily competition.

During my sitting jobs, there was one older girl I watched who took an interest in me, and we made out on the couch with our clothes on. My brother walked in on us cuddling post-orgasm, and  he just stared at us. So while we were laying there, I leaked semen into the back of her skirt through my jeans. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason why I was never asked to watch her again. I was waiting for the cops to show up every single day, and they never did.

But that moment when bro saw us together, that’s when he settled on his plan. I can even agree with his logic all these years later. We talked about all of this as adults, and he was almost right for what he did. He saw me as a hypocrite and a corrupter, the demon seed who was ruining his life while posing as the good child. So he chose to blackmail me.

I stopped babysitting because of the girl who didn’t come back, but my mother talked me into watching two sisters, Audrey and Rachel, then 9 and 4. I’d been watching them for a week when my brother said he wanted me to seduce Audrey because I was “good with children.” If I refused, he would call the police and tell them about everything I’d ever done from the age of 7 forward.

For any normal child, there shouldn’t have been much to fear in blackmail. As it is, every time I tell this story in person, people say, “You were 12, what could you possibly be guilty of?”  But I was already guilty of multiple counts of indecency with minors, shoplifting, breaking and entering, petty larceny and destruction of private property. Even at a conservative guess, I was looking at a few years behind bars.

My mom was always talking about how she hoped she could send my dad to prison so he could get raped. In my mind, prison=rape, and bro came home from juvi his first time with tons of bruises. So yeah, bro had no trouble convincing me to go along with his plan.

Just as he’d been tricked into sex by our sitters on the premise of playing games, he wanted me to convince Audrey that we would “play sex.” Once I convinced her to try it, bro moved in to take his turn. Then Audrey mostly “played” with him.

Things changed when my brother was arrested and put in juvi for a full two months. Audrey came back to me, and I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure how to explain that she’d been tricked, so I just let the games keep going.

Then Rachel found out what was going on. She demanded to play the games too, and when I refused, she called her mother. I let her get right up to the point of saying, “I saw them taking off–” Then I stopped her, and she became a part of the game too. Every few weeks, I’d balk at a request, and then Rachel would head off for a chat with Mom, either mine or hers.

When bro got home from juvi and found out, he labeled me a pedophile. He “forgot” about blackmailing me, and even after I explained the problem, he felt that I was enjoying my affairs with a 4-year-old. I didn’t, and I was in hell every time she said she wanted to play. She was as dreadfully underfed as I was, and I considered her physically repulsive.

Six months passed, and then bro told the girls that I’d tricked them into sex. And that’s when I realized that he hadn’t forgotten anything. He set me up so that I would end up looking like the monster while he looked like a hero for “saving” the girls. Audrey drifted to him, but Rachel chose to keep using me.

During this same time, my brother went to my only childhood boyfriend and told him about my relationship with Rachel. I’d been hanging around Ben because he was big enough that the other boys wouldn’t pick on me. He had already realized that I “wasn’t a real boy.” He started inviting me into his house to kiss and make out, but I wouldn’t agree to have sex with him.

Bro’s information allowed Ben to blackmail me into spending one night with him. I let it happen, but the next day, I told him he was guilty of rape, and he could join me in juvi if he felt like calling the cops. With that, our relationship was over. I bled for a week afterward, and scared that I might be dying, I tried to confess to my mother. She belittled me, and I called her a bitch. So she threw a beer bottle at the back of my head.

(When I confronted my mom on this years later, she denied she did it. BUT she then confessed to throwing me into a cabinet door when I was 18, months old. I also want to mention that she denies ever throwing anything at me, but both I and my brother recall multiple incidents of hurled coffee cups, or ashtrays. When I was 19, she threw a sewing machine at me.)

My brother’s blackmail schemes continued. He forced me to work with him on his shoplifting runs. On a few occasions, he would force me to go on visits with his friends. During one of these visits, he had me ambushed buy three older teens, telling them, “This is my brother. He’s a fag.” I sustained multiple fractures, had my nose broken and suffered a concussion. Once I could limp home from being ghetto stomped, my mother wouldn’t take me to the doctor. Her exact words when I complained about my pain was, “Well maybe you deserve it.” Gee, thanks, Mom.

After my brother got arrested again, my mom decided that city kids were a bad influence on us. So she moved us out to Devine. By then, I was such a freak that I once tried to make out with the family dog. (I never did anything that freaky again, and to this day, I still feel weird around certain breeds of dog, like I should apologize to them for molesting one of their cousins.)

Months after we we’d moved, Audrey and Rachel’s mom brought the girls to live with us. Rachel started sleeping with me. By this time, she was 6, and after a screaming match, we had finally come to an agreement to slow things down and stick to cuddling when she was feeling clingy.

This for me was a major victory, and the screaming match came about because she’d fellated me in a strangers backyard in broad daylight while I stared at a woman washing her dishes in her kitchen window. If she’d ever once looked up, she would have caught us. That was way too close for me, and after we got home, I exploded at her.

That one fight changed everything between us, because when she threatened to tell her mother, I told her that she had to, because I was sick and tired of her. This wounded her, and she started to cry. And then I did too, and we both realized that we were all we had in the world.

For most of our two year relationship, I despised Rachel. But in Devine, she became the only person I ever spent time with. Rachel and I started to share a bed, and when Rachel lay on my side, our parents remarked how we were such a cute couple. (We all stayed in the same bedroom during the winter.)

Her frame also filled out in the time in between, and she was no longer hideous looking. I’m sure all of this is disturbing to you as you read it, but the thing is, Rachel became the first person I really loved. I despised most of my relatives, and I had no friends among the “normals” as I called them in private. I’d hated Rachel too, but after we came to an agreement and she stopped using me like a toy, I loved her and thought of her as the most important person in my life. So it was inevitable that she should leave.

My two year affair with the sisters ended when their mom moved away with her ex. I drifted alone in my own world for years after that. I saw Audrey once on the bus, and she got wide-eyed and jumped up to get off at the next stop. I’d never realized how much I terrified her until then. Sometimes I wish I could see her again, to give her the chance to vent and tell me how much she hated me. Maybe it wouldn’t help either of us, but not ever seeing her again, I often wonder if she ended up just as messed up as me, because of me.

(When I was 23, I came out and admitted to my mother what had happened between us kids. I’m 75% certain she was lying, but my mother didn’t bat an eyelash before she said, “Oh, we knew all along.” Even assuming that’s a lie, let that answer sink in. How do you respond as a parent to the confession that your child was molesting other children? Acting like you knew and it’s no big deal is probably not on your list of answers.  On the other hand, assume she’s telling the truth. In which case, my mother set me up to sleep with two young girls, because she thought it would “be good for me.”)

I was completely insane by the age of 15, unable to deal with reality in any capacity. My mom’s rants about “us versus them” bolstered my delusions, and everyone else around me was an enemy who couldn’t be trusted. But her attempts to make herself into my ally just made me despise her that much more.

Once Audrey and Rachel were gone, my brother got arrested again, and my mother disowned him during his sentencing in court. (Even if I hated my brother by then, it was hypocritical of her to call him “a waste of space, and a poster child for retroactive abortion.”) With my brother and the girls both gone, I threw myself into reading all the time, ignoring everyone.

The kids at school took my aloof nature as a sign that I was gay, but in truth, I was just tired of being “the freak.” I saw sex as the root of all my problems, and contact with any of my peers might lead to another relationship. The upside of the kids thinking I was gay was, some of the redneck boys in Devine believed they could catch gay by touching me. So while I was still a social pariah, the number of beatings I took dropped to nil overnight.

My fears of falling into old habits were validated when I agreed to attend the birthday party of a “school chum” and almost ended up making out with his little sister. During the same party, my chum asked if I wanted to see some porn. From the corner of his mattress he took out what looked like a familiar pile of loose pages, until I realized they were all bra and pantie ads from the Sears Christmas catalog.

After that awkward party, there was the girl in band class who overheard me making a joke about girls fingering themselves, and she dropped in my lap and slipped my hand down her panties. We got caught, and that was how I lost my reputation as a queer. I never even got her name, nor had the chance to thank her.

After her there was a string of “hand-holding” girlfriends. They were naive about sex, and I didn’t care to educate them unless they brought it up. None of them did, so this was the closest I ever came to being good. (I was still stealing things, though.)

The older I got, the more I isolated myself from normal kids voluntarily, and as I grew into adulthood, I moved out to the fringes of society. I started with gamers and anime fanatics, and I moved outward to ganbangers, hookers, former hookers, wife beaters, drug dealers, and closeted pedophiles. Seriously, when I chose to accept myself and be a bisexual transsexual, I was actually moving a step UP in society.

For most of this time, I was living as an “out” pedophile in an effort to keep people from coming anywhere near me. Given that I’ve had multiple opportunities to have a relationship with a minor and I walked away, obviously I’m not. But the problem is, my brain is permanently wired to see kids in a way that adults should not. Because of this, it’s not that hard for me to convincingly play the role of a pedophile, and while you might think this would lead to my arrest, I was out for years without problems.

I still had lots of friends who thought I was just awesome, even if I was a little creepy. As one friend put it, “I wouldn’t let you watch my kids, but you’re all right.”Which I suppose was the point of my act. People liked me, but they wouldn’t think to leave their kids alone with me. And, this was a good thing, to my mind.

I really wish that was the end of my confession. It isn’t. I sometimes visited the dollar cinema to take part in the weekend Rocky Horror screenings, and that’s how I met Toni, who was 15. I was 21, and she and I hit it off right away. She came back to my place the same night we met. We had sex once, and then she broke up with me two weeks later to sleep with a hot guy, and she broke up with him to move on to someone else a week after that. I ran into Toni again after she was 18, but when she tried to talk me into sex for a second time, I turned her down.

This has not been a full history of my sex life, simply the things I’m most troubled by. Over the years I was sometimes presented with the chance to get involved with minors, and I turned them down. I had a LOT of sexual relationships with adults my own age along the way, or with adults who were much older than me.

Sex was always consensual, and despite my fucked up orientation and libido, I never went in for kinks like handcuffs or ponies. But the thing is I wasn’t turning the younger partners down because I knew it was wrong, or because I felt guilty for having lewd fantasies. I mean really, it’s hard to feel guilty for being warped when the warping began at such an early age.

No, I turned those girls down because I was tired of having so much fucking drama in my life. I knew if I got caught by their parents, I’d be facing hard time, and that was way more drama than I cared for. I didn’t turn good. I just became more afraid of being punished by good people. In short, I’d never stopped being crazy.

I just wanted to be a boring hermit PC technician who didn’t talk to anybody. And ultimately, my PC career ended because even hiding in a back room, I still ran into a minor who I needed to avoid.

So, finally we come to my last confessions, which happened when I was 27. My boss from the movie theater moved in with me and my other roommate. Due to a problem with her ex-husband that I won’t get into, she had to move her daughter in with us shortly thereafter.

Willow was 15. I’d met her before when she was 13, and I already adored her. I also recognized that I could be a threat to her, so I tried to avoid her during her first visit and during her stay in our apartment. She started coming to my room to hang out. Things got more serious, culminating in me masturbating her to an orgasm in my bed. We’d kept our clothes on, but I knew things would keep escalating because I would start pushing for more intimate contact.

I didn’t want to mess her up the way that I have been, so I chose to make a confession in a roundabout way. I started my first online journal, and I wrote what happened. Willow checked the entry on her mom’s computer, and in checking the browser history, her mom found my confession three days later.

That should have been the end of it, but when her mom tried to call the police, I reminded her that she couldn’t, not without going to jail with me for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Real classy, I know.

Willow was given a job at the theater, and her mom started finding reasons to berate me, even when my direct supervisor could confirm that I was doing my job. Yes, I still worked for her for six months.

During this time, I came to the point where I realized that I had shoved everyone in my life  away. There was no one left to make up a fake role for, and no family members left to be offended by me. So after many long years of using sex as a way to “prove” my masculinity, I chose to give up the act that kept getting me into more trouble.

I gave up being a male and chemically castrated myself using antiandrogens. I also started taking estrogen and went into therapy. I thought I would need to talk about my past, but any time I did, I was advised to stop “making myself too vulnerable.”

I was approached by co-workers and asked constantly why the boss suddenly hated me when we’d been living together without problems for months. Some people assumed that it was me transitioning on the job, but I had to keep quiet about the real reason. After six months of silently enduring her ire, I broke down and confessed to a co-worker…who promptly ran to Willow to see if I was lying.

And that’s how my boss ended up on my front door, screaming at me at the top of her lungs. She walked into my apartment and slammed the door, and suddenly, I didn’t see her. I saw my mother, and I attacked her. I shoved her back into the door. She tried to reach for my throat, and I took her arm and swung her to the ground. I straddled her chest, and I tried to strangle her before my roommate could run in and throw me off.

The police were summoned, and after taking our stories, the cops asked if I wanted to press charges against my boss for criminal trespass. I asked why they weren’t arresting me for molesting Willow, and they said that was consensual, so they would overlook it.

And that’s when I moved back hoe with my dad. I lived out of one room there, and by some odd miracle, I met my husband online. He adored me, and nothing I told him about my past or myself fazed him. Still, I couldn’t get over my guilt for everything I’d done, and I called state mental health services to turn myself in. I gave them everything I’m detailing here, and they asked me if I planned to kill or molest anyone. I said of course not, but that I was afraid I might. The counselors decided that I was crazy, yes. But, I was not crazy enough to be a threat to myself or others.

Hubby continued to chat with me every day, encouraging me to keep writing. He worked to keep up my spirits every time I felt a depression, or I was dealing with another bout of shame. Nine months into our online relationship, he finally convinced me to come see him. Which required explaining to my immediate family that I was about to flee to the other side of the planet to be with a man.

So as of right now, it’s been six years and some months since I attacked my boss, because I thought she was my mother. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it and wish that there had been some other way. I try to push it aside and only think of writing. If I can focus on the stories and not think about that regret, I’m okay. But once I acknowledge it, I can’t stop thinking about it, or the regret I felt for not being a better friend to Willow by just leaving her alone. And once I acknolwedge those regrets, I get back to the two biggies:

I should have let Rachel finish that phone call with her mom, so the charade would have been over before the worst two years of my life.

I should have told my little brother to call the police, so that I would never have messed up Audrey as badly as I’m messed up.

The rest, the stuff that came before, I feel nothing for it. I feel no guilt for stealing porn, or for sleeping with my sitters. I feel nothing for the shoplifting, although I do feel like shit for taking money from a blind woman once. I also tried to hit on her, and she at least had the common sense to turn me down.

But it really hasn’t been so long ago when I was a monster, the worst kind that society fears. And I wasn’t arrested, because the whole time, I wore my crimes on my sleeves. I confessed to anyone who would listen, and maybe they could tell that I had a death wish. So instead of beating me up or sending me away, they would say things like, “Well, now that you’ve confessed, you’ve got it all out and you can move on and never talk about it again.”

But that’s not possible. There’s so much anger in me, anger that makes me want to scream at my family. But ther’es also so much guilt, because even if I was being beaten up daily by other kids, I coped by becoming something far worse than a bully. I became a sexual predator and a thief.

But the real problem that bothers me now is that removing my testes has not made me “better.” My brain still won’t work right, and if I don’t keep it occupied constantly, my memories start looping back to my childhood, back to the places I’m not supposed to go.

I worry that I’ll never get better, and I’m not thinking that this online confession will make the hurt go away any more than any of my face-to-face confessions did. I’m just tired of writing the same entry year after year, only to delete for fear of exposing myself. Because fear of exposure is what led me to this miserable mental state in the first place.

If this offended you in reading it, I’m sorry. I can’t hit undo and start over. All I can do is try to be honest about what happened and make a daily effort not to hurt anyone else.