Ode to Jamie Hubley

I was fifteen year’s old when a French kiss in the women’s bathroom of Toad Hall, (a nightclub in Red Bank New Jersey that, at the time was one of the few places in Jersey that would let punk bands play) changed my life forever.

I had no idea I was gay. I had never even considered the notion, but five seconds into that spontaneous and miraculous kiss with Cindy Butler (name changed, she’s not as brave as I wish she was) and I knew my life would never be the same.
Suddenly all the answers to questions that had plagued me since I was four-years-old came spilling forward like an avalanche!

That’s why I had to bring my first grade teacher Mrs. Mahon an apple every week!

That’s why I could not even consider being anywhere but the television set every Wednesday night, in time to see Lindsay Wagner play “The Bionic Woman!”

That’s why I felt a sick, wrong and uncomfortable feeling in my chest every time a boy tried ANYTHING with me!, Well hmm aside from the fact that some of the guys I met on the Long Branch Amusement Pier in 1981 weren’t exactly pinnacles of society.

I took a lot of abuse in the 7th and 8th grade and didn’t even know why I was targeted, but my abusers knew. Pretty preppy popular girls who took one look at my husky-boys K-mart back-to-school clothes and knew there was something just not Kosher about the girl in the flannel shirt. Boys who tried to hit me and spit on me because I was not the norm.

Oh I got my revenge my dears. I broke out of my shell and ruled my high school as the badass rock-and roll biker chick from hell!
But even then, I was covering up. I knew I was different just didn’t know exactly how, that is until that one kiss blasted the walls open.
It wasn’t like I was ready to say I was gay, exactly, no not in Rumson New Jersey in 1981, but I joined a theatre club filled with gay and bi-sexual actors and learned being bi-sexual was all the rage in the punk, glam and theatre scene. It took me a few more years to say I was gay and when I finally did, most of my pals answered, “DUH! Of course you are!”
In the years that have followed, I have marched in parades, sat in floats, joined rallies, raised my fist and my voice high in the air to announce to one and all those immortal words; “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it!”

But even now, decades later, when I see a headline, like the one I saw about Jamie Hubley, the gay 15 year old from Ottawa, Canada, who committed suicide on Friday, I am right back there.
I am 13 years old, sitting in a bathroom stall eating my lunch because I am too ashamed that no one in my grammar school lunchroom is brave enough to risk the taunts of bullies to sit with me.
I am 16 years old and not able to say out loud that the real reason I don’t want to go to the prom is that I cannot go with the person I really want to kiss without being run out of town.
Oh my darlings, of course it gets better and thank god for sites like www.itgetsbetter.org who can say this in the voice of thousands.
But for Jamie it never had a chance to get better, because he ended his young life far too early.
He chose death to three more years of high school.

It has to end.

Our teachers, our parents, our students all have to band together to stop bullying in our schools and if principals and teachers and teacher’s aids are too cowardly to stand against it, FIRE THEIR asses because stopping bullying and homophobia against our kids has got to be part of the job requirement!

It did get better for me oh my dears, so much better but there where days when I was a kid that the idea of living comfortably true to myself out loud and proud just seemed like a dream.

My dream came true and so can yours. Don’t give up, ever.