When I was 11, I moved to a tiny island in the vast nothingness that is the Pacific Ocean called Guam. It may come as a surprise to many of you to hear that I had a tendency to mope about when I was younger, so in looking back at my time in Guam, I did not fully explore the full potential of adventures and possibility that living on a beautiful tropical island, still mostly untouched by commercialization, offered. (I am sure that has changed now—Guam was and is a significant attraction to Japanese tourists, as the island is much closer to Japan than Hawaii, and much cheaper as well.) I do remember vaguely realizing how special it was to have a plumeria tree in my backyard, and that right outside my front door red and hot-pink hibiscus grew thickly without any prodding on anyone's part but Nature's.
I am talking about this because I caught some of Oprah Winfrey's show today, which was about children so tormented by bullying that they ended up killing themselves. And I started thinking of when I was in middle school, and how cruel, swift and effective young children are at hurting and excluding one another. In the seventh grade there was a white boy named James who didn't fit in. I remember he had a whiney voice, squinty eyes, and a long, pointed nose. He was white, whereas most of the children at my school were brown—either Chamorro, the indigenous people of the island, or Filipino, like I am. I remember how the boys would tease him, for being fat, for being slow, for being stupid. He may or may not have been any of those things; I didn't know. I gave him wide berth. I didn't want to be associated with the ostracized, lest I be ostracized myself. There were other white students at the school (one of Guam's major employers is the U.S. military, and many of them stationed on the island send their children to the various parochial schools, which offer a better education that the public schools do), but none of the white boys in the class tried to make James their friend. One of them even went out of his way to torture him, tripping him in gym class, jeering at him when he spoke in class—once even throwing a rock at him, which hit his face and caused it to bleed. Now that I look back on all of this, I wonder, why? What was it about James that these boys sensed as "other" and made them turn on him, as hungry as sharks that smell blood in the waters? Was it because he wasn't as attractive? Was it because he was chubby around the middle? There were fatter, thicker boys who weren't that attractive, but they had the benefit of being 1) Chamorro and 2) friends with most of the boys since kindergarten. They were familiar—they were not of the other. But James was, and he was forever a marked man at that school. Not a day went by that he wasn't hassled or bullied.
Nowadays it seems as though "gay" is the new "geek." It is the new label of otherness, whether the bullied child is actually gay or not. I wonder if it is something inherent in our biological makeup, to seek out what is not of us, mark it as dangerous in its otherness, and do whatever we can to drive it away.
