Ultraviolet Thunderpussy's View: Commentary, Vintage Male Photos, Videos.

The power of a blog.    It empowers those of us who have things we'd like to overcome and provides us an avenue to reveal - in our own words - in our own due time - what we've hidden from the world.   Hidden from even those who raised us from toddler to adulthood. I won't pretend that my situation is worse than anyone else's, yet my experience was a pivotal one - partly marring what I could have been - and partly motivating me to develop swords of words and sharp humor.    Being someone who experienced childhood in the late 1960's and into the early 1970's, I lived in that world before digital this and that.    Research and understanding meant trips to a library - not a download after a Google search.    And my resolution of this situation wasn't resolved as many do now with firearms. For some reason, my parents chose to name me after a close family friend - a wonderful thought - but the dynamics of such a move would be a pork chop that I wore around my neck and that would attract ridicule on countless levels and create personal shame. I wasn't a boy named Sue.   But I did have a girl's name with a male spelling.     For some reason the pork chop didn't become uncloaked until the fifth grade - but the experience in this year still chills me and makes me wonder how I even became as less maladjusted as I am with regard to society.    I won't throw in the budding homosexual issues here as those wouldn't even enter my reality dealing until high school, but I often wonder if the name I bear didn't influence this issue on an unconscious level. I was not born with natural beauty nor athletic abilities.     As I often joke, God made my body, as average as it is, to keep my head above five feet of water and for no other purpose.    Whether through luck or just being able to use whatever brain matter I have more efficiently than others, I am above average in intelligence and it wasn't until fifth grade that suddenly I was confronted with being too intelligent for some of my classmates.    At the time I lived in a far northern American state and winters were snowy than average and for some reason, one day, in the winter of my fifth grade, I was singled out by a group of students and pushed into a snowbank at school and then assaulted with a rotten banana in my face and "court was held" where I was "tried and convicted" of being too smart.    From then on I suffered continual and unmitigated taunting.    Too smart.   And a girl's name.    More than sufficient ammunition for elementary school predators. At recess as things warmed up, I then was subjected to being "the queer" in a classic school yard game of "smear the queer".    At that time I had no idea that queer was boy loving boy and I certainly hadn't given reason to express the curiosity I had in that regard with anyone in that school.    So for some reason I was the queer that was unmercifully taunted and hunted with the ball at recess. I am unclear on the next part of this as to how it started, but I started to withdraw at school and to go off in another world, and I'm not sure why my teacher allowed this to persist, but I was allowed to surround my desk with a fold out hand puppet stage that surrounded my desk and allowed me to hide from others - to this day I can't recall how long this persisted, but I remember the feeling of angst and fear as I hid from others after having been taunted during this grade and phase in my life. I am not sure, even reflecting back now in this introspective exercise, why the fifth grade was a decloaking pork chop period and why sixth grade onward had the pork chop restored to its invisibility.     The taunting I experienced later was never as painful nor as deeply scarring as was in this period.    The girl's name pork chop would activate from time to time and I would always feel ashamed of it - often contemplating changing my name - if not legally - on the fly so that I could be one of the boys - but resorting to my middle name was no more a precious gift of manhood than my first although it wasn't feminine, it was odd. I share this because this provides a back story to why I feel compelled to devote time and space on bullying here.    And while I fully believe that that year of my life that was a living hell - a groundhog day not unlike the video "Dear Dad" posted in "Act Two" of this series - was instrumental in making me an introvert and eschewing social interaction on a more personal level, it nonetheless did result in my ability to have a quick wit and the ability to develop satire and word-based challenges that I could not otherwise reproduce in physical protection.    And it thus this finely tuned ability to protect myself with barbed words that was my "gift" from being bullied.   Ultimately within two years of this bullying episode my family had to relocate to a southern state where my pork chop was hidden from others and I got to start a new and gained a greater acceptance - it is odd that the North promotes itself as so cultured and ahead of those rednecks in the South, but things were far different for me here and that was the break I needed. I would face a far greater challenge to my sanity by having to deal with my hidden homosexual aspect of my being later in my life as I successfully hid the feelings by just ignoring them and not understanding the true nature of being attracted to guys and not girls in school.    And I would experience further bullying later in life as I shed the trappings of being straight for a reality of my inner rainbowness.     As oddly as it seems - that fifth grade torment prepared my for a greater and more personal battle as I grew to accept my own homosexuality - being able to handle the rejection by some and the torment of others as I became more public with my sexual orientation.     The shame of this process and my dealings with it are well chronicled in my "Coming Out" journal excerpts that I have posted on this blog.    You can read them here to live vicariously words that I wrote each day during that time on my first computer, a commodore 64, that I later was able to move to a pc and onto this blog.