School bullying because they think you're gay?

[bluestateguy]

That is, being bullied in school because for whatever reason you are perceived as being gay (even if you are not). A male student who is perceived as too effeminate or not sufficiently Alpha Male enough can be vulnerable to similar bullying that students who actually are gay may experience.

This happened to quite a few people I knew in school, and even to me on a small level. One boy I knew was bullied for partaking in ballet, another because he found football to be "stupid" sport. Another person I knew was so shy around girls that he was taunted for being "gay", when in fact the reason he never had a girlfriend in high school (or dated, or had sex, or anything) was because he was petrified to make any moves whatsoever with the girls he liked.

[xchrom]

1. it's about conformity -- and in this case coerced conformity. nt

[bluestateguy]

2. kick

:kick:

[bullwinkle428]

3. It all comes down to "the gay"; whether it's real or perceived, that

is THE basis for the bullying! I experienced it myself as a straight kid growing up, simply based on the "not sufficiently alpha enough" image that was present. It just made me that much more empathetic to the struggles that all GLBTers experience on a daily basis.

[bbdad]

4. Thanks for your OP. You're absolutely right.

I can't believe how stupid these kids are. Haven't they ever heard of Brian Sims or Esera Tuaolo? Sims never hid his homosexuality when he played college football. His teammates supported him because he was an asset to the team. Tuaolo was a professional player who once participated in a Super Bowl game. He came out of the closet shortly after he retired from the NFL. There are other players who won't come out of the closet for obvious reasons. Gay men have participated in rough contact sports, just as they have participated in just about every other realm of human endeavor. Yet even today there are psychologists who claim that any boy who doesn't like sports should be suspected of having homosexual tendencies.

I get sick and tired of this "alpha male" routine, which says that "alpha males" are superior to all other guys. How many "alpha males" were involved in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s? How many "alpha males" participated in civil rights marches in the Deep South during the early 1960s (which was not the safest political activism) before the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were passed? Since machismo denigrates empathy and compassion as supposedly being feminine (and therefore undesirable) traits, I wouldn't expect that many "alpha males" supported civil rights for racial minorities before it became politically expedient to claim to be color-blind. One of the greatest heroes of World War II was the courageous Swedish humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews, only to fall victim to Stalinism. According to his half-sister, Wallenberg "detested competitive team sports." So, where did we ever get the idea that boys who have no interest in sports are sissies and wimps? As I've seen in my own experience over the years, wimps -- that is, moral cowards -- come in all sizes and shapes.