Self-Respect Forged From Pain of a Death : Intolerance: A gay man shielded his homosexuality from the world and kept silent at anti-gay remarks. But the murder of a youth in Hillcrest has forced him to wonder if that silence has contributed to the homophobic beliefs that led to the slaying.

I am an editor for a local television station that ran a story on 17-year-old John Wear the night he was fatally stabbed in Hillcrest. The two attackers called John and his friend “faggots.” That night I received a call at work from the friend’s mother. She said she felt that we were unfair in our coverage because we had run the stabbing story just before a story on a gay and lesbian talk radio show making its San Diego debut. By running the stories together, she felt, we insinuated that the assaulted boys were gay.

I explained that we intentionally left their sexual orientation out of the story because we could not ask the boys themselves. She said, “I know he’s not gay because I’m his mother.”

I explained, “That may be so, but there are many mothers who don’t know if their sons are gay.” The answer was short but accurate, because I am gay and my mother never knew.

What I found more interesting than whether the boys were gay was how important it was to this mother that no one even question that they might be. I understood the fear. Huge numbers of people hate gays. They consider a heterosexual child “normal” and a gay child “defective.” The only thing defective is the thinking that any person could be defective.

I know all too well the shame, humiliation and hatred associated with being gay in America. I was once shot by a guy in a car who drove down a well-lit main street and fired a pellet gun out of his window, yelling “Faggot!”

I can understand why this boy’s mother wouldn’t want her son associated with gay people. Who would ever wish that wrath of hate on anyone? Who would ever choose that for themselves or their children?

As a gay man, I wake up every morning knowing that millions of people hate me and that many of them want me dead. The scariest part is that some of them are willing to act on that hate. I wake up every day knowing that, somewhere in the country, people are sitting around tables at churches and in board rooms planning ways to take away my health insurance, take away my job, keep me out of their neighborhoods, prevent me from having children, keep me from serving my country, excommunicate me from the church, prevent me from visiting the people I love should they be ill or injured. And there are even meetings going on to try and get me and my gay and lesbian friends put away in isolation camps.

The irony to me is that even though I know about and understand the hatred, I hide it from myself so that I don’t have to feel it.

The night after John Wear was stabbed, I couldn’t hide it anymore. That night I left work at 11:30 and went down to Mercy Hospital to see him.

I thought hard on the way to the hospital. What is it that’s compelling me so strongly to go and see someone whom I had never met?

I never got to meet John. When I got to the intensive care ward, the mother who had called me at the station greeted me.

“John died just a few minutes ago,” she said.

I began to cry. I had never known John, but the pain of his death was very real for me. It was a pain I didn’t even know I had.

I felt somehow responsible.

They set out to kill someone like me and instead got a 17-year-old straight boy.

I actually began to think: “Wouldn’t it be a better world if I weren’t alive, if there weren’t any gay people at all to get everybody so upset? Maybe my death could avenge the death of John. Maybe his life was more valuable than mine.”

While I was thinking these self-destructive thoughts, I was feeling the toxic shame and guilt of being gay. Some people will say that it is the shame and guilt of leading an immoral life. Think again. It is the shame and guilt that has been projected onto me all my life by hateful, intolerant, scared people who don’t understand homosexuality and are too ignorant to even try.

For 30 years, I bought into society’s hateful lies about myself. And then I went ahead and communicated through my behavior that they were right.

I confirmed for people that being gay is a bad thing every time I changed the pronouns in my conversations. I changed all the “he’s” to “she’s” and the “Bob’s” to “Betty’s.”

I confirmed for everyone that being gay is something to be ashamed of every time someone made an anti-gay remark and I let it go. After all, if I defend the gays from disrespectful remarks, then people might think I’m one of them. If I won’t defend gays, then I’m saying that my own life is not worth defending. And I confirm ignorant beliefs that gay people are a lower class of citizens and better off hidden every time I try to pretend for parents, friends and co-workers that I’m not gay.

It seems that all I have to do is pretend that I’m one person for part of the day and then become another person for the rest of the day. Sometimes I switch in and out of personalities on a second’s notice. I seem to think this will make my life better, more manageable, freer from risk or repercussions, maybe even happier. But John’s death makes me ask myself if the “pretend we’re not gay” plan is working.

I know I am not responsible for that boy’s death. Yet my silence has contributed to a collective agreement that homophobia is good. My silence has contributed to the belief that murdering gays is less significant than murdering heterosexuals, that firing gays from jobs is understandable, that housing or health care discrimination is acceptable, that adoption, family and marriage rights are exclusive. These things all say that I’m a lesser human being. And I have sat back and let people say them about me.

As I cried away that Saturday night, I saw that, like John, we are all victims. Only when we behave as if we expect respect and dignity do we get a quality of life that we deserved all along.

I have looked for the differences between gay and straight people and I can’t find much at all. We all want to be loved, find some importance in the world and lead a fulfilling life. That would make John and me alike in many ways. The only difference remaining between John and me is that I’m alive to do something about it.