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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “Lonely Visitor” Down in the Dirt v209 (7/23)  Order the paperback book: 
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What’s Old is New Again
Bill Tope
When I was 12 and just starting the
sixth grade, I was called “queer” by
my classmates, with a viciousness
that I didn’t fully comprehend till two
years later when that appellation
morphed into “faggot.” All it meant
to me was that I was different, out
of the mainstream in thought, dress,
behavior. I didn’t try to be any
different. I didn’t at first connect it
at all with sex.
By the time I was a senior in high
school, I was known as a “fairy,”
“queer bait,” or the old reliable,
“homo.”
In Health Class the teacher, as he
enunciated the word “homosexual,”
looked my way. He was also a P.E.
teacher and always ridiculed a
certain species of student in all his
gym classes. Whenever a boy
would perform below his level of
perfection, he would address him
as a “girl.”
Lo and behold, by the time I got to
college it was nearly fashionable to
be a newly-christened “gay” or
“Lesbian,” new monikers for a “new”
minority.
In my TV Journalism class, students
still wrote and produced news
segments which featured “Sapphic”
and “Uranian” students on campus.
I suppose they thought that by using
classic names they would be less
offensive. It didn’t work. I remem-
ber other students in class laughing
uproariously at their filmed “antics.”
They always got good grades for
their “editorial finesse.”
It wasn’t just in school that I felt
the slings and arrows of prejudice.
Attending church as a favor to my
mother one Sunday, I languished
under a barrage of invective hurled
by the minister at all “the sodomites”
at the university I attended.
I couldn’t take it any longer.
Excusing myself to my mother, I
waited for her in the car in the
church parking lot.
By the time I was a working reporter,
I felt intense pressure to prove my
maligned “manliness,” and so
pursued and bedded as many
females as was humanly possible.
But I was fooling no one, least of
all myself. The passion just wasn’t
there.
Whenever I’d go out or attend a party,
others, not meaning any real harm,
would put an album by Ellton John,
or George Michael, or Freddy
Mercury on the turntable. Trying to
make me feel welcome, to out me,
or otherwise make a point? I never
knew.
You can believe I heard about it when
John Wayne Gacy was arrested in
1978. It was the same with Jeffrey
Dahmer, eight years later. I had no
connection to either of these serial
killers, but to hear people talk, one
gay person was the same as the next.
And that hurt.
By the 1980s, HIV/AIDS was killing
everyone I knew, and the President of
the United States couldn’t be bothered.
But dauntless doctors and researchers
and outreach workers performed
magnificently, working their magic to
save as many as possible.
Today, a diagnosis of AIDS is no
longer an automatic death sentence.
At the turn of the century, the President
remarked that it was “unnatural” for same
sex marriages to transpire.
It became illegal to discriminate against
LGBTQ persons—another new, more
inclusive rubric—only in the past few years.
So time for the non-cisgenders crowd has
not stood still. As of this writing it is still
legal to marry my lover, as well.
Progress has been made. Now is a
moment in time when, outwardly at least,
LGBTQ has a certain cachet; at least for
now. One never knows what’s in stock
for future culture wars. However, I’m not
at all certain that I want to go back to
being called “queer.”
