I'm a survivor, alright?

Ladies and Gentlemen, Queers and Non-identifiers, I was a victim of bullying and live to tell the story.

Although I am now skinny, I grew up a chunky Hispanic boy in a lily-white suburban elementary school with half-rimmed glasses and a sweatshirt tied around my waist. When I answered the phone at my house, the caller always thought I was my mom, and I assure you my inability to play sports, obsession with Greek mythology and latent homosexuality were not factors contributing to my popularity.

I was an easy target, to say the least. The gym class locker room was a war zone. I was teased for reading girly novels, for wearing the wrong underwear, for doodling in class and for saying a boy was cute at the lunch table.

I didn’t quite understand what it was that I was doing, but one thing was certain — I was doing it the wrong way.

Being different in a school environment is something of a social death wish. Kids aim to blend in for a number of reasons: They’re boring, they’re scared, they’ve been told to do so, someone threatened them to do so or it’s simply mimicry.

The rules of the schoolyard seem to have no origin, and no one was there to stop them. The only instance I can remember is when a science teacher made a student apologize for calling me a “fruitcake.”

They are an unspoken set of commandments. Boys like girls. Eat sandwiches for lunch. Cool kids have the most friends.

The fact of the matter is that these commandments — these invisible binaries separating what’s OK and what isn’t — were instilled somewhere.

Kids take after their parents. They take after the patterns they’ve witnessed and the laws that already exist, whether it’s a law forbidding two people to get married or a dad giving his son a set of toy tools for Christmas.

Hold that thought.

Across the country, an outpour of “traditional family” proponents have responded in opposition to the anti-bullying movement. In Michigan last year, a provision was inserted in an anti-bullying bill to excuse harassment on account of “a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.” This movement is called anti-anti-bullying.

Christian parents of Christian children are seeking to protect against the “homosexualization” of their school systems, and, once again, the bully is backed not only by culture but by law.

This anti-anti-bullying is a reinforcement of these social categories: black and white, cool and not-cool, Christian and non-affiliated, gay and straight. The prejudices of the schoolyard start here. The victimization of 13 million students a year starts here. The blood of gay teens’ suicides starts here.

Doug Wilson — conservative author, Christian apologist, slavery sympathizer — will be speaking at IU on April 13. I’ll let his words speak for themselves.

“Gays and lesbians are therefore not the cool kids. They are the footdraggers, the hangers-back, those afraid of success. They are not the future. They are the embodiment of failure to launch.”

To Doug Wilson, I am the one who doesn’t fit into his categories. I am, as he puts it, “the ick factor.” I am the deviant tainter of his social constructions, heterosexual oppression and cool kid agenda.

Well, Mr. Wilson, I have a few words, on behalf of myself and all the “footdraggers,” for you and the delinquents who take you seriously.

I am successful. I am the future. I launched with flying colors despite the “cool kids.”

I am a survivor.

Through jeers on a bus empowered by your tripe, I am a survivor.

Through smacks to the face and ceaseless use of the word “faggot,” I am a survivor.

Fifteen years of school, 10 or so friend groups and a dozen lunches sitting in the hallway later, I am a survivor.

One foot higher, a few pair of cut jorts, a couple cries on my floor and three drafted suicide notes later, I am a survivor.

I am the brightest example and the best-case-scenario of the sufferers and the casualties that give way to the likes of bullies like you.

And there isn’t a god damned thing you can say to change it.

­— ftirado@indiana.edu