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“We are only responsible for the kids during school from nine to three.” For the rest of the school year my mother dropped me off and picked me up. “That’s not my job,” my mother remembers him saying. She went to my principal and asked why he or any of the teachers hadn’t done anything to stop it. I feared this bully would bash my brain in so I told my mother. I didn’t know what to do about Richard Clark. And all I remember seeing on television were straight white characters offering a veritable panoply of options for straight white people. The main source of news was via television. It was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and people were afraid of having any association. Celebrities and politicians and nearly all public figures for that matter didn’t want anything to do with gay people. Websites such as It Gets Better didn’t exist in 1984. When Richard came to pick up his brother was when he saw me and started picking on me. He had dropped out, but his brother went to my school.
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He didn’t go to my school or any school for that matter. Richard Clark was taller, bigger, and five years older than me.
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A browned-skinned kid getting bullied in the school yard stood out like a black smudge on an all-white wall. There were only two brown-skinned kids in my elementary school, and I was one of them. In the words of Aretha Franklin, “Let’s go back, let’s go back, let’s go way on to way back when.” When I was in the sixth grade, I was bullied by a kid named Richard Clark for being gay. It certainly would have helped me through the horrible memories I have of a young brown-skinned boy who thought he wasn’t normal because he was gay. We have to stop selling the idea that every gay man lives this way, and start showing gay kids, especially brown-skinned gay kids that this is not what being gay is all about, that gay men are more than stereotypes and random hook ups. The gay man’s introduction was a scene with him fucking a stranger underneath of a staircase outside of a gay bar. There has only been one gay character on the show in its five seasons. Even great shows like The Americans stereotype gay men. It upsets me that Hollywood, for all of its liberal political views, offers nothing but a numbing sea of stereotypical homosexuals who are prancing around, desperately looking for love through sex, or just having raw unadulterated sex with random guys. Our idea of good quality television was not something we ever agreed on, hence one reason we’re no longer together. He said it was the funniest show he had ever seen. I was forced to watch Modern Family when my now ex-partner bought season one. I’ve also been told that there’s something wrong with me, and that I’m too sensitive because I find shows like Modern Family appalling.
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I’ve been called strange, weird, and nuts by gay friends because I prefer to wait and have sex with someone I’m dating rather than hook up with random guys. Hollywood has made millions of dollars off of typecasting gay men, but it’s the rest of us who have to pay for it. Gay men who behave in such a manner embarrass me the same way a slave would embarrass a black person in 2018. When I see a gay man diminished by stereotypes, I say to myself, "That man is a member of my sexual orientation,” and I feel embarrassed, enraged to be a gay man because after all that the gay community went through during the AIDS epidemic, to be able to get married legally, and to be looked upon and treated as an equal and not as a bunch of Neanderthals humping each other, it portrays us as victim, exploited, subjugated, a slave who is coerced into organizing and administering his own demise. I don’t spend my days on apps like Grindr looking for my next sexual conquest, and I refuse to spend my nights viewing television shows like Modern Family where gay characters perpetuate stereotypes. It is the gay world that I live in that I find it difficult to fit in. Yet it’s not the republic I find myself at odds with. Today’s news stories depict a republic that is more than ever before accepting of blacks and gays. I have had three long-term relationships. I have been published in many respected magazines. I have two degrees and one advanced degree. I have attended some of the best universities and colleges in the country. This need to belong has forced me to spend my entire life making sure I fit the mold society has etched out for me. Whether it be to someone or something, we are bound by an inherent, inevitable feeling that cannot be extinguished.