Alone and Unobserved

When I was fifteen, my older sister and I went to work for a couple weeks detasseling corn in a series of massive South Dakota seed-corn fields. The work was grueling—we got up long before dawn, received few breaks, and tramped up and down the rows in sweltering midwestern heat, continually slashed by sharp corn leaves that cut our hands to ribbons, finally finishing in the late afternoon—but the worst part was dealing with other workers. They were mostly thirteen- and fourteen-year-old mouthbreathers kids, and a few of them were wretched little monsters who thought nothing was funnier or more interesting than making fun of me. The taunts weren’t very inventive, but they were relentless.

“Faggot!”
“I bet you like taking it up the ass, don’t you?”
“Homo.”
“How many guys’ dicks have you sucked? It’s your favorite thing ever, isn’t it?”

Responding only made it worse, because then they would shriek with laughter and mimic my shrill, effeminate tones. Sometimes there were slaps or shoves, which I was always too slow to avoid. Even though they were almost all younger than I was, most of them were bigger, and all of them were meaner.

When it was time for our lunch break, we would pile back onto the big yellow school bus that hauled us from town out to the fields and back every day, and they would surround me as I tried to eat the lunch I had packed the night before, usually a PB&J sandwich that was now soggy and half-boiled.

“Homo.”
*slap*
“Faggot.”
*shove*
“Ass bandit.”

Up front, the crew leader—a (gorgeous) gung-ho blond male college student—ate his own lunch and pretended he didn’t hear.

All in all, I’ve probably gotten off easily when it comes to bullying, seeing how I was homeschooled from the time I was seven until I was fifteen. There were a lot of reasons my mom made that decision, some of which I agree with, some of which I definitely don’t. (You are correct if you assume that those motives had to do with religion.) But on the whole, looking back, I’ve always thought that I did better—from a strictly scholastic point of view—studying what interested me at my own pace at home than I would’ve done studying the approved curriculum at an artificial pace in public school.

When Mom pulled us out of school, my sister and I were in second grade. I already knew I was a little different from the other kids, but I had a few friends, and the teasing wasn’t that bad. I generally liked school, except when the pace of the lessons was too slow. (I also hated the fact that second-graders weren’t allowed in the chapter-book section of the school library. Thus my absolute opposition to ageism in libraries. But that’s a different story.)

After my mom started homeschooling us, my main social contact was with other Mormon kids in the area—at church, at youth activities, in the local congregation’s Scout troop. As we got older and my acquaintances entered middle school (sixth grade, or eleven to twelve years old), suddenly they stopped being nice. Teasing became namecalling and constant mocking, and I was frequently the target. They had always been “church friends,” never actually my friends—although I don’t think I realized that until later—but now they weren’t any kind of friends at all.

Things got slightly better when we turned fourteen and they all entered high school. I still felt like a complete outsider, but this time there seemed to be an identifiable cause: they were in high school, and I wasn’t. Their conversations revolved around which teachers they liked and which they hated, which extracurricular activities they were a part of, which scene they were into.

I, in contrast, was homeschooled. I only had one teacher, and then only in the loosest sense of the term. I had no extracurriculars—except church; how cool—and I had no scene. The solution seemed simple: Ditch home school! Enroll in high school! Try out for a team! Join a club! Make friends! Enjoy life!

Things didn’t exactly work out that way. My sister and I begged Mom to put us back in public school, and she finally gave in and went to talk to Mrs. Rose, the school district superintendent. She had been our principal in second grade, and Mom had approached her back then as well for advice on the transition to home school. Mrs. Rose had been only too supportive at the time, but now she was less positive.

She explained that re-enrolling us in public school would be difficult. There would be placement tests to take, and given our nonstandard homeschool curriculum, and notwithstanding how bright and studious we were, we might be forced to do remedial coursework in any number of subjects. Also, Mrs. Rose said, knowing us and our situation, she thought the social adjustment would be especially onerous. Not impossible, but perhaps not worth the effort. Why didn’t we consider enrolling in the local community college instead? All we’d have to do was take the CHSPE (California High School droPout Exam, the easiest standardized test known to humanity) and we could be college freshmen.

College was 1000 times more alluring than high school, so my sister and I didn’t take much convincing. Who needed dumb teenage friends when we could hang out with cosmopolitan twentysomethings at a podunk junior college in Nowheresville, CA? We scheduled our CHSPE test date and began reading SAT prep books. And of course we also needed to earn some money, for tuition and books . . . which led us eventually to a yellow school bus in an enormous cornfield in South Dakota.

My story had a fairly happy ending. After a week of lunchtime heckling, the bus driver—a fun, down-to-earth lady in her late thirties—invited me and my sister to come up to the front of the bus and sit behind her. The bullying petered out, and few days later the detasseling season was over. We went back home and enrolled in the community college, where virtually everyone else was an adult and acted like it.

I sometimes wonder whether attending public school would have prepared me better for the insults and the taunting I experienced on that big yellow school bus. Would I have had more armor? More weapons? Would I have been more used to it, not cared as much? I would almost certainly have experienced more frequent, more sustained, even possibly violent bullying in school. Would I have been one of those bullied gay kids who gives up, drops out . . . commits suicide?

U.S. President Barack Obama just signed an inclusive hate crimes bill into law (eleven years after Matthew Shepard’s torture and murder in October 1998), but something needs to be done to combat the wave of anti-gay bullying and hazing in public schools. That summer detasseling corn is still one of my most nightmarish memories. The thought of any kid having to endure the same—or worse—for years, with no support or recourse, is horrifying to me. It’s time for every school district to have an anti-bullying policy that specifically addresses bullying against LGBT students. It’s time for every school to have anti-bullying and gay-tolerance training and activities. There are thousands of gay-straight alliances in schools across the country, but there are not enough. It’s time to create a new culture of tolerance and acceptance in our public schools.

Resources:

• GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network)
• ThinkB4YouSpeak.com
• National Day of Silence
• No Name-Calling Week