{"id":5499,"date":"2012-04-11T08:34:36","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T13:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=5499"},"modified":"2018-11-14T09:24:44","modified_gmt":"2018-11-14T14:24:44","slug":"message-in-a-bottle-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/5499","title":{"rendered":"Message In A Bottle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every now and then, like yesterday morning I run into a fellow American who has spent time in Germany.\u00a0 When I tell them I want to visit there someday they all tell me I should definitely go.\u00a0 They always say Germany is a really great place and their time there was just wonderful.\u00a0 And if some of their time was spent in Bavaria, I always ask them what Bavaria is like compared to the rest of Germany.\u00a0 And the first thing they always say about Bavaria is that it is a Very Conservative<\/em> part of Germany.\u00a0 Also, generally very expensive to live in.\u00a0 But Very Conservative is always the first thing that comes to their minds, when it comes to Bavaria.\u00a0 Not just conservative, but Very Conservative.<\/p>\n

So I’m guessing it would probably be hard to be a gay kid there.\u00a0 Or to be a gay kid whose family is from there.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, it’s hard for gay kids here in the U.S. too, in some states.\u00a0 The mostly rural conservative states anyway.\u00a0 You see a lot of them who have fled to the more liberal, tolerant states or cities to get away.\u00a0 But it’s hard to get away from your family.\u00a0 Those kids, they always have the most difficult time of it, even when they’re out and proud and living in the gay ghettos.\u00a0 What happens is they just learn to live with the stress of family relationships and move on with their lives.\u00a0 Because one way or another it’s going to be hard.\u00a0 Everyone who comes out of the closet does so knowing what is on the other side of that closet door.\u00a0 So you might as well just be yourself.\u00a0 You can’t please everyone.\u00a0 But you can be real.<\/p>\n

That’s something I learned ages ago, ironically well before I entered adolescence and found myself having to deal with being gay.\u00a0 See…mom’s family positively hated dad, and dad’s family.\u00a0 After my parents divorced when I was about two, mom moved me back across the country and I grew up here in Maryland instead of California (which I will probably go to my grave regretting except for the fact that I met you).\u00a0 And since I had dad’s face, I got a lot of flack growing up just for being his son.\u00a0 Stinking Rotten Good-For-Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap<\/em> was grandma’s favorite name for me (where mom couldn’t hear it), even though I was a pretty well behaved kid.\u00a0 But I had his face, and grandma hated dad, and I was handy.\u00a0 So I caught the flack.\u00a0 And gay people catch a lot of flack too, simply because we are handy.<\/p>\n

So you see, when I turned seventeen and came out to myself I’d already had a childhood knowing that some people would hate me just for something I was and couldn’t help being.\u00a0 But I knew I was loved too.\u00a0 Mom never let me doubt that.\u00a0 So much as it distressed me, I just learned to live with the fact that grandma and others just didn’t like me because I was my father’s son and I would never change that, and I got on with my life.\u00a0 Mom loved me.\u00a0 I knew I was loved.\u00a0 I knew I could be loved.\u00a0 That was all I needed to grow up on.<\/p>\n

Here’s what gay people know: strangers can gay bash you, beat the living crap out of you, take your life from you, but only relatives can chew your heart up and spit it out.\u00a0 What we learn from it is this: your family are the people who love you just as you are.\u00a0 That’s the real family you have.\u00a0 Everyone else is just a relative.<\/p>\n

Just a fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every now and then, like yesterday morning I run into a fellow American who has spent time in Germany.\u00a0 When I tell them I want to visit there someday they all tell me I should definitely go.\u00a0 They always say Germany is a really great place and their time there was just wonderful.\u00a0 And if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[81],"class_list":["post-5499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-message-in-a-bottle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}