Bullies

I’m not sure when the bullying began; maybe grade three. Thinking back, it seems so obvious that the other kids would’ve teased me about my last name, Gajdics—at the time, pronounced “gay-dix.” My father, an immigrant from Budapest during the 1950s, had anglicized his surname to make it easier to pronounce, and so I grew up never knowing that the correct Hungarian pronunciation was “guy-ditch.” It didn’t take much for the kids to make a leap from my name, “gay-dix,” to just screaming out “gay,” and always in a pejorative way. At the time, in the early 1970s, I hardly even knew what the word meant yet, but from the way the kids chanted it in my ear when running up behind me in the playground and slapping my back, or spitting in my face, I knew it wasn’t good.

Clearly, “gay” was not something I ever wanted to be, and yet that’s exactly what I felt myself becoming, as I went through puberty.

It was painful to reconcile myself to being the very thing that seemingly caused me so much distress. Separating the name-calling and sense of shame I felt, all connected to my very name, from my emerging identity was fraught with difficulty, and confusion.

I spent almost all of elementary school being teased. The bullying was relentless. The one and only friend I had, Patrick, quickly “changed sides” when he discovered that in order to be my friend he would need to push back against the bullies. He would not. He caved. I suppose to his credit, in retrospect, even though he stopped being my friend, he did not taunt me while the others continued relentlessly.

Finally, my parents sent me to a new high school for grade eight. I was beyond elated. Fresh start, new opportunities, the possibility for actual friendships with no history of ridicule.

At the new school, across town, the other boys and girls welcomed me and I made friendships quickly. No one teased me about my name, even though my family still pronounced it “gay-dix.” I suppose it didn’t hurt that my three older siblings had all gone to the same high school before me, and all of them had been popular. For the first time in my life, I was popular.

Unfortunately, my high school was also near the bottom of the then ranked academic institutions near where I lived. My parents soon realized this, and removed me from that high school at the end of grade eight, sending me to an all-boys school for grade nine. The new high school, it just so happened, was also where all the bullies had gone after elementary school. Even before the first day in September that year, 1978, I knew I was walking back into my worst nightmare.

And so it came to pass that I was not, indeed, mistaken: my history had preceded me, and it seemed as though everyone in the school, even those younger than me, knew all about me and my name when I walked into school that first day. The taunts, ridicule and isolation continued unabated.

I have long been inclined to depression and thoughts of suicide as a means of “escape,” and I am sure this is where it all began: in school. There really was no escaping the ongoing trauma, while in school, and so as my only form of escape I skipped school. Often I ended up downtown, alone, which led to even more problems when men three times older than me stalked and then sexualized me for years. The sex, though sometimes pleasurable because it was, after all, still physically arousing, only made matters worse. The psychic dread I felt around possibly ending up “gay” (and “like them”) only exacerbated.

I left high school, finally, in 1982.

Two years later, I was working in a movie theatre in the downtown core. By this time I also had many new friends, though my tendency toward depression always remained just a breath away.

One day a new employee began working in the theatre—one of the bullies from my high school. His name was Bob Taverzan (not his real name, but close enough). I’m sure he recognized me the moment we first laid eyes on each other, but he pretended otherwise. I remembered him as being one of the worst of the worst—daily threatening to beat me up as soon as the school bell rang at the end of the day. He always walked as part of a pack, like wolves, with the other (perhaps “second tier”) bullies circling close behind. The level of fear in my body lasted for years, because of people like him. In more recent years, I have also struggled with adrenal fatigue, which I know can typically be brought on from prolonged trauma, and I’m sure at least in part it dates back to these years of living hell.

Not long after he started working in the theater, I knew what I needed to do. I suppose by this time I also had a much stronger sense of self, and so when he was cleaning the carpets as an usher one evening, I approached him, alone. This would have been in around 1985. Playing in the multiplex were movies like The Colour Purple, The Breakfast Club, Back To The Future, and The Purple Rose of Cairo—pretty fantastic, all things considered.

From across the otherwise empty lobby I could see the panic registering in his eyes, as I cornered in on him, more self-determined than ever before.

“We went to high school together,” I said, several feet away.

“I don’t remember,” he said, backing away, obviously freaked.

“You were a bully. You threatened to beat me up every day. You kept me in of state of terror for years.”

Slowly, he took another step back. He looked scared and small, not at all as I’d remembered him from school: fearsome and larger than life.

“Stay out of my face or else I’ll smack you,” I said, enraged. Then I turned and left.

He quit the theatre sometime soon after that.

Several years later, I was in a gay dance club late one night. From across the club I saw another one of my high school tormentors. The dance floor was body-to-body with skimpily dressed gay men, all sweating, laughing, kissing. I had long suspected that many of the bullies from high school were gay, or perhaps might have ended up gay, which begged the question of whether or not simply being gay was enough to precipitate being bullied. Bullies, I had learned by then, in fact, came in all shapes and sizes: tall, short, skinny, fat, Caucasian, Black, male, female, straight, bi, gay, trans, young, old, whatever.

I walked around the dance floor and stood next to him. His name, I had never forgotten, was Gregory John (also not his real name, but close enough). Seconds later he noticed me standing next to him. Obviously thinking that I was cruising him, he grinned. I did not.

“We went to high school together, years ago,” I said. Startled, he looked me up and down.

“My name is Peter Gajdics,” I said, pronouncing my last name as I had in school, “gay-dix,” even though I’d long since changed the pronunciation back to its original: “guy-ditch.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, finally and flatly, looking pale and expressionless.

I stepped a foot closer, and then moved directly in front of him, staring him in his eyes. Animal to animal.

“Well I do. You teased me for years. You were an asshole. You used to call me faggot.” I glanced around the club, an obvious reference to the fact of where we were: a gay bar. “I lived in fear for years because of you. I just thought you should know.”

I continued staring him in his eyes, until he looked away first. Then I turned and walked away, not looking back.

I saw him many more times after that one time, usually in the gym. He always avoided me.

In summary, here’s what I’ve learned about bullies:

They move in packs, like wolves; the more of them together, like one great “group identity,” the stronger they feel. But they are not strong. As individuals, they are weak.

They will eat you alive as a group, but when alone as individuals, without packs to hide behind (even, especially today, virtually), they will often back down out of fear, or run in the opposite direction.

Bullies are terrified and deeply insecure. They are fuelled by adrenaline and lies. Calm, reasoned truth and a belief in one’s own self-worth are enough to defeat them. Though their threats and bullying and even possible physical violence leave lasting scars, which can never be undermined, ultimately, bullies don’t win.

“Please, Sir, Can You Stop the Torture?” (Or, When to Stop Begging)

Recently I declined a request for a radio interview in Ottawa, the first interview I’ve ever declined since the publication of my book, The Inheritance of Shame, in 2017. This latest request came from a journalist who wanted me to discuss “Trudeau’s promise to prioritize the conversion therapy bill his government failed to pass if he’s re-elected.” I told the journalist that I feel “quite conflicted (at times, disgusted) about this government’s past so-called ‘promises’ and any new ones they’re making along an election campaign”—so, for the time being, I would “not be able to add anything constructive to an interview at this time.” And then I politely declined. 

What I did not tell the journalist, as I know it would have served no greater good, is that I’m just not interested in repeating myself endlessly in the form of yet one more interview about the harms of so-called “conversion therapy.”

I have no interest in clarifying, yet again, that the term itself, “conversion therapy,” is a misnomer and that these “treatments” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual minority people are nothing more than institutionalized abuse.

I do not want to say for the hundredth time that I think a ban on “conversion therapy” is important, life-saving; that the language in such a bill should criminalize “conversion therapy” outright—that it should be for all people, regardless of their age, and not split it by age so that only minors would be protected and not explicitly adults. Criminalizing “conversion therapy” for minors but not explicitly for adults makes about as much sense to me as criminalizing sexual violence on minors, but not on adults, since some adults might “consent” to the “treatment.”

The fact that Trudeau still makes the issue of outlawing conversion therapy to be about protecting “kids” instead of eradicating a form of torture of all LGBT people tells me that he either still does not get it or is playing more games of political wordsmith. When he talks about his party being committed to the issue of banning “conversion therapy” since the “beginning”—I have to wonder which “beginning” he’s referring to. If memory serves, in early 2019 his government rejected the idea of banning “conversion therapy” and said that it was a “provincial and territorial” issue, not a federal one.

The “beginning” can also stretch back years and years earlier, for survivors and advocates who’ve been trying to get their voices heard through legislation, but hearing only silence.

What I also did not tell this journalist is that I absolutely do not think that I can stomach telling my “personal story of ‘conversion therapy’” one more time to anyone. A lawyer acquaintance recently asked me to tell her “what happened” in my treatment, and I told her to maybe just read my book. It wasn’t a sales pitch, it was self-preservation. 

The thing about repeating one’s own personal narrative of trauma is that if we tell it to enough people over a long enough period of time, decades, really, eventually the same story told just does not reflect who we are as a person “today,” which of course is a constantly shifting point in time. Facts remain the same but their meaning changes dramatically. After a period of years, relaying the details of torture even becomes somewhat banal, and I do not want to do that to myself anymore. I deserve better.

Naturally, I also did not tell the journalist that I do not think I have it in me to say much more about these issues on radio shows that care little about nuance, but are all about a “7-8-minute” sound bite. In less than five minutes on-air, I’m sure, I would be afraid I might start crying (I’ve come close during other interviews in the past). 

When I talk about these issues publicly, all the rage that I felt originally around the injustice of my own “therapeutic experience” and how these forms of abuse continue to play out today, in different ways and with more and more people, sets me on an emotional tailspin. Speaking on the radio about these issues stirs my emotional juices and then, all at once, the interview ends, I hang up the phone, and it is me who has to pick up the pieces of my broken heart. Alone. Again. The job of these journalists, through no fault of their own personally, I’m sure, is to get a quick and catchy on-air interview, but it is always me who has the job of dealing with the atomic fall out to my soul once the interview ends abruptly.

In one form or another, I have been writing and talking to political leaders about these issues for almost twenty-five years, and I sincerely cannot tell any journalist today how sickened I’ve become by the ways in which these leaders make the issue of saving lives into their latest election tactic. The cruelty of it all hurts far too deeply. 

To review the facts: “Conversion therapy” would not exist at all if these practices were aimed at trying to change a heterosexual’s opposite-sex desires, or to change a cisgender into a trans person.

Well, of course not. The mere suggestion is absurd.

“Conversion therapy” exists solely because of the oppression, the shame, inflicted on people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or any other sexual minority—or even those who do not identity as such but whose inner desires and genders do not match what society has told them they ought to be. “Conversion therapy” exists because of the internalized shame that drives these people to think they just do not deserve better.

“Conversion therapy” exists for no other reason than to try to “change” or to kill these people out of existence. To silence them.

“Conversion therapy” is sexuality abuse.

“Conversion therapy” is gender abuse.

“Conversion therapy” is torture.

Finally, what I find most troubling about discussing the whole idea of trying to outlaw what amounts to torture is that at the end of these interviews I often leave feeling like little orphan Oliver, in the musical, Oliver!, begging for one more measly bowl of soup. “Please, Sir? Please can you stop the torture?”

We deserve better.