The Lone Man on the Island

Oh, school. How best to describe it? It's like being a hamster, running in a wheel...no, scratch that. It's like being stuck under the hamster wheel, where the constant motion slowly peels the skin off your back one millimeter at a time. This year, the biggest wheel for me is English 2025: Fiction. Yuck. I thought I was done with English two years ago, when I still thought I was going to be an English major. I figured that I liked to read, so I would like to be an English major, right? Wrong.

So, this semester, I'm finishing up my English requirement with this fiction class. Our first book is Robinson Crusoe. Talk about a snooze fest. One British guy all alone on an island. He doesn't even masturbate. I mean, literally, nothing sexual at ALL. What's a horny little gay boy to do?

But I admit, something in the book actually inspired me. Scary, huh? Abridged version of Robinson Crusoe: man wants money and adventure, goes on ship, storm on the ocean, stranded on island alone, finds footprint, cannibals that scare him, gets rescued, yada yada. And it made me think about the kids who use to tease me in high school. One, in particular. He was a horrible classmate (my age, but got held back so he was one class below me); always calling me queer and gay or at the very least making references to my face and behind my back. I was never scared of him, I don't believe, but I do think I might have been scared of the truth he was presenting to me. Did he know I was gay before I did? No, but I wasn't ready to come out, and I wasn't ready to be confronted with my homosexuality. The sad, and ironic, part is that I'm pretty sure he was, is, gay (or at the very very least bisexual, whatever that means). This seems a pretty common pattern throughout a lot of gay men's lives: the tormentors are the tormented. Nowadays, I think I pity him, but I'll also be the first to say that I'm still a wee bit angry at him.

So, what does all this have to do with Robinson Crusoe? Crusoe was tossed around on the ocean, isolated on an island, and fearful of his his neighbors ("invaders"). The life of my tormentor is comparable. Let us say I'm correct, which I am. I'll call my high school tormentor, Tort, to make things simple. Tort is so deep in the closet he's finding old Christmas presents. Suddenly, he experiences thoughts and emotions that confuse him, thoughts of attraction to other men (the tumultuous sea). Tort denies himself further and ends up in a place where he can never be happy (isolated on the deserted island). He is confronted by evidence of other homosexuals and homosexual activity; confusion and fear becomes anger at the constant intrusions onto his otherwise well structured life (the cannibals on the island). If he's lucky, one day he'll encounter someone to take him off the island and back to the Port of Queeria, but most likely it will never be that way. So many men are destined to be the Crusoe on the island for the rest of their lives, alienated from the one place they could be comfortable.

Wow. Did I get all of that from an English class? I'm kind of impressed...maybe I won't skip the next class, after all.

Sincerely,
Your Spy