When I was between 11 and 14 years old I realised I was gay and was deeply in the closet; I was terrified of being outed. There was another male student in my class whom I read as also gay, but also not out. For two years I did all I could to separate myself from him, ignore him and, ultimately, which I realised later, to try to throw suspicion off me. I spread rumours about him and encouraged others to ostracise him. Soon afterwards I went to another school and we lost all contact.
Since then I’ve grown into a proud gay man and, from his social media, it seems he has too. I have wanted to reach out to him for years and apologise for my actions and if they affected him, but should it just be left alone 25 years after the fact?
Maybe dredging things up for him would be more hurtful. Part of it is my guilty conscience but a part is that I genuinely want to make amends for someone in my own community whom I was homophobic to at a really crucial age.
Eleanor says: Internalised systems of oppression are so hard to unlearn. As a rule we often hate the things we most fear we are, so our preoccupations and recriminations tend to map the things we wish we weren’t. As a result, in a world of homophobia (or misogyny or racism), we get this self-hating enforcement of the rules: the more we fear we’re the target of the system, the more we become its footsoldier. The most vigilant enforcers of a particular order are often the very people it targets.
This is especially true of homophobia, such a schoolyard staple, and so entrenched in visions of the “normal” nuclear family: even articulating the possibility of your own queerness can take time and hard reflection, never mind unlearning the norms against it.
That’s all to say: being in the closet is really hard! A 12-year-old in the mid-90s couldn’t have been expected to think it all through correctly on the first go.
But, as you also know, it’s not totally fair to hope your former classmate will also take that perspective. The bird’s-eye view is often fairly forgiving; a lot of the bad stuff we do can be understood and explained. But we can’t expect the people we’ve hurt to take that bird’s-eye view. When we do wrong by someone, we give them the standing to be biased.
Guilt is a bit like grief in that respect: there are concentric circles radiating out from the original wrong, and different people in different circles deserve different kinds of treatment. You can know the perfectly humane explanation for why you did something hurtful, and you deserve to have that recognised – by yourself, and by others further out from the wrong. But when we turn inwards to face the person we hurt, we can’t always expect that same perspective. We have to prepare ourselves a little to be the villain in someone else’s story.
So if you do decide to apologise it will be important to make clear to him what you’ve said so thoughtfully here – this isn’t about absolution for you. That means being spare with biographical detail; light on the fact that it hurts you to reflect on this; and most of all, prepared to hear “I don’t forgive you”.
Equally, though, I do think there’s a version of this apology that could be a relief for him to hear. In a funny sort of way, you share a lot: you may be one of the only people alive who also knows what it was like to be a young gay boy in that place, at that time, and one of the only witnesses to what he went through. Hearing from you might well make him feel (retroactively) as though that childhood self of his has at last been seen and cared about.
There’s a risk that hearing from you would stir up bad feelings but along with it there’s the chance it may lay to rest a long resentment.
I think you’re allowed to roll that die – as long as you’re doing so for him, not you.
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