I wrote in to Savage love about two years ago, when I was a 16-year-old who was being tortured by my parents for being gay after they found porn on the family computer. Here is the column that my letter appeared in, in case you have forgotten.My dad, a very religious asshole, engineered much of this suffering. Well, two years made all the difference. My mom and my dad got a divorce, my mother got full custody, and I haven't seen my dad in eight months. My mom has apologized endlessly for her badgering of me, she cried when explaining how my father browbeat her into submission on the issue. She explained that the reason she nearly broke into tears when I told her that I didn't have a girlfriend wasn't because she was disappointed in me, as my father had told me, but because she knew that with every passing day my father would treat me worse and worse, and because she knew that there was nothing to be done about it.
Now that the monster is gone, my mom accepts me, I have privacy, I have a boyfriend who my mother has met and likes a reasonable amount, and I no longer feel a constant strangling pressure to conform. I can't explain through mere words how relieving it is, how life-changing my parent's divorce was, and how much I appreciate the help you gave me two years ago. I'm writing this because, on the off chance you were still concerned with me or even remember my circumstances, I figured that you would appreciate some closure. My sign of then was "Christian Parents Angrily Chastise," but that no longer works. Sign me...
I.J.
I can't tell you how much it means to me to hear from you, I.J. I'm so happy to hear that your circumstances have improved—and your mother's circumstances too. Thank you for writing. And please tell your mom that I take back all the names I called her. The names I called your father, however, sadly still apply. Here's hoping he comes around some day. If not, I.J., always remember that it's his loss, not yours.
And thanks for drawing my attention to the column that your letter appeared in, I.J., because there was some advice in that column for a lesbian going to school in a small town, a girl whose classmates were being cruel. The advice I gave to "Tired And Losing It" two years ago sounds like it could've been written for Constance McMillen, a lesbian high school student who is being abused by her cruel classmates, their asshole parents, and the lying fucksticks who run at her high school in Fulton, Mississippi. That advice—originally for TALI, and now for Constance—is after the jump.
And while you're talking to yourself in the mornings, TALI, tell yourself this, too: "Fuck my school, fuck my classmates, and fuck this town." The shits conspiring to make you miserable, TALI, are unlikely to have lives anywhere near as interesting as the one on which you're about to embark. Your classmates are making you miserable now because they know, deep down in their little black hearts, that their lives are going to be duller than day-old douche water compared to yours. Their lives aren't going to be dull because they're straight, TALI, but because the value they place on conformity—that's the reason they feel they have a right to abuse you now—is a prison they've constructed around themselves.Right now they're making you feel like an outcast, TALI, and the malice stings. But what exactly are they casting you out of? Your high school? Their asshole cliques? That shit town? You haven't been cast out, TALI; you've been liberated. Freed. Sprung.