Why does bigotry feel like an affront?

 Why does bigotry feel like a personal affront to me? I'm a white dude. I have a good education. I make good money. My father and mother had college degrees.I spent the first ten years of my life in North Eastern Ohio. Why then do i end up in a place where injustice angers me so?

On the inside? I grew up poor. My family was on welfare. My father was mentally ill. It was controlled by drugs, but he was still not the person that my Mother had married.

My memories start in married student's housing at Kent State University. My friends came from all over the world. There was Tarumi from Japan. There was Fonzi from Nigeria. There were the Greek kids a few doors down that could barely speak English. There were my friends Buddy and Glen from Hawaii. There was Brian and Joy Marcano from Venezuela. There was Jordi and his mother Royce, the woman who introduced us children to Vodun around the campfire. And then there the two weird kids from Kansas.

After three and half years we moved. We moved just far enough that I went to a new school. This is a pattern that would recur every year and a half, for much of my life. Always far enough that I was the new guy. The one at the bottom of the totem pole. I got picked on a lot. i got beat up a lot. I was regularly jumped after stepping off the buss.

The idea of Racism was alien to me. It was alien until the year we moved to the suburbs, and then it was horrifying. It was horrifying to discover that existed. And after a year of that, we moved to Houston.

Houston was another education. We moved to the outskirts where I was "a yankee." I got beat up more. Also, my bully, Craig, from Kent just happened to live in the same complex. Talk about bad luck.

And we moved from there to another shitty apartment complex. Wish more shitty neighbor kids. My parents broke up. I lived through an August without electricity. It was horrible. I was attacked at school. Knives pulled on me. I was a bowling ball with arms and legs. Never a good thing for middle schooler.

I moved in with my mom and sister. She lived in the hood. Over the next few years the hood turned into the bario. It's amazing how quickly that can happen when everyone is a transient on section-8 housing. It was a nice suburban high school, though.

I could feel the racism seeping into me from the environment. The subtle judgements; the moment of hesitation, and no understanding of how to prevent it.

That's where I figured out how to exist outside of social situations. And then between my second and third year of high school, over the summer, the weight vanished. I came back, and nobody recognized me. I was still an outcast, but at this point as much by choice. I'd discovered my group of friends, and only one of them went to the same school.

In my high school people thought i was weird because I wasn't religious. An agnostic? An atheist? How can one exist like that?

And then worked. And then I moved into the center of town. The only really great neighborhood in Houston; then Montrose area. Coffee shops. Night clubs. Museums. Rice University. 24 hour diners. Health food stores. Record stores. Book stores. Also, the gay neighborhood.

I was a skinny long haired dude in the gay neighborhood who happened to walk or bike. And on Friday and Saturdays, I regularly had to run from gay bashers. Always the well of late-teen to early 20's dicks who came in from the suburbs in the cars their parent bought for them.

Why do I fucking care so much about this issue, why do I feel it affects me? Because my entire life I've set off people's gaydar. It doesn't matter that I'm way off on the other end of the Kinsey spectrum.

I spent a good chunk of my life being treated the way that gay men are. I've had people threaten me, or driving by screaming "FAGGOT!" I've run for my life.

Nobody should be treated like this. Nobody should have to run just to live.