2016 Mar 18
by a Valuable Contributor
Dear whoever is reading this;
When I was young, my mother bought me the books of Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Sleeping Beauty, all of which I read happily. I watched all of the movies too. I watched the boy kissing the girl, I watched the girl holding the boy’s hand, I watched them getting married under church bells, and I watched them ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. With every move they made, I was hit with what I assumed at 6 was normal: a yearning for romance like that in Disney. Not a prince to come and whisk me away… just romance, and knowing that one day I will be with the love of my life, when I was a grown-up.
Oh god, how naïve I was.
At 10, I had a crush on this girl, and I thought it was because she was so boyishly charming, and so assumed it was natural. The boys on TV always behaved like she did: laughing, climbing trees, playing guitar and so on. I figured it would go away, just like my five-minute-long crush on Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid. But I began dreaming of a relationship with the girl that I was a close friend of, I dreamt of building a life with her, and I thought then that this was the romance that I would get to experience when I was a grown-up, so I decided to think on it and keep it to myself until I was old enough and mature enough to ask her to marry me.
Cue the pimples on my face and the hair under my arms at 13. But instead of worrying about the more unattractive aspects of adolescence, I was excited to be blossoming into a woman, excited to finally begin understanding the intricacies of a relationship with my body and another’s body. Before I tried anything, I wanted to learn what it was like, and here began my journey of sex education, with science textbooks. I looked, and I looked again, in different parts of the library, to find out how it was to be done. But all I ever found on the subject was how a child was conceived, naturally, meaning that everything I read involved a man and a woman. I began feeling confused, but I assumed that my mother would be very angry with me if I asked her about intercourse just yet, that my father would be uncomfortable, and that my friends didn’t know much more than I, so I never said anything about it. It’s important to understand that my life was a very sheltered one, with whatever books I read being monitored by my mother before I read them, and internet usage always being supervised by an adult. And so I never even had a word for the feelings I had for this girl, and just thought of it as love.
I started understanding the stigma surrounding this kind of love by the time I was 14. “Lesbian, gay, homo,” were a few of the words that a lot of people spat scornfully when they saw any display of affection between those of the same gender. I began to get the feeling that what I felt was not love, that it was a disease. But how could something as pure as the way I felt be something as disgusting as the things these people make it sound like? I began to hide myself, because of the fear that my family would not accept me. I became so scared that I once decided that I could change it, that this could be changed, that I would change who I was rather than tell anyone about the feelings that coursed through me when I saw the girl I had been infatuated with for years. I once tried to bring it up casually, in a conversation with my mother who was disgusted that the word “homosexual” had even passed my lips. I realized then that there was no way my mother would even consider me her daughter if I ever let her know that I liked people who had the same type of genitals as me.
And I was right.
One day, when I was 16 and had stayed out very late for a party, my mother and I had a very heated argument, with voices raised. She was yelling at me, telling me how worried she was that I had taken drugs, or had any alcohol, or had been promiscuous, and before she could get any further I said “well, I suppose it’s one less thing you have to worry about, because there’s no way on earth I could get pregnant, considering I am as gay as the sky is blue.”
Two days of me being locked in my room later, I was in a “rehabilitation center for sexually confused girls” which was fancy talk for “we’ll rape you until you like boys.” Which was essentially what they did. With my parents’ consent, these people continuously subjected me to pornography between a man and a woman, had lectures about the importance of a healthy relationship, and made me engage in sexual relations with men I did not know or want. And they did it as charity, saying that what they were doing was for the good of humankind, and that they were doing the best job they could with the limited resources they had because they wouldn’t take money for shaping people to be the way they were intended to be.
By the time the three-week (emotionally speaking: three-year) program was over, I was so hollow inside that I did not have the strength in me to do anything but eat and sleep for days. My parents were ecstatic, even bought me a fancy dinner, and their conversation was peppered with the phrase “now you’re not a lesbian anymore.”
I barely passed my O-Levels, didn’t even attempt A-Levels, and just did odd jobs here and there to make some income for the family, and all the while it seemed to be someone else going through the motions of the day.
I contemplated suicide many, many times.
And then I contemplated using my story to find refuge somewhere that my parents couldn’t find me.
Because of my depression, I couldn’t find the energy for either. I am now 24 years old, and I live with my parents because I don’t have the strength to do anything else. I am 24 years old, and I don’t even have the emotional stability I did when I was 10, because my parents refused to accept me for who I was, and were willing to get someone to rape me to have a normal daughter. I am to be married off to some rich, gullible man later on, and I will be expected to bear children. I don’t want to, with every fibre of my being I don’t want to go through that.
And that is why I am writing this letter. Starting today, I’m turning my life around. I will not be tired all the time anymore, instead I will be emotionally ready for the strikes and slaps I will go through when I tell my parents I am still a lesbian. Tonight, I am leaving home. Tomorrow, I will be in a different part of the country, at a friend’s house, and I will take on a job as a waitress or a busboy or anything else, to keep myself from starving. And someday soon, I’ll have a roof over my head that I pay for, a woman I love who loves me back, and the life of a happy soul.
Here’s to hoping that that someday is coming soon;
A hopeful homosexual.
Disclaimer: The above story is a work of fiction. It was simply written to bring to the attention of the reader the unrecognized hate crime that is corrective rape.
