Draco: the Bully and the Bullied

Oct 08, 2010

Posted by: abandonedboyjon

Bloggers - Jon

You
know that scene in the
Goblet of Fire movie
when Lucius is taunting the Weasleys at the Quidditch World Cup and Draco tries
to join in, but his father sticks his cane right in his stomach? I must have seen that movie at least sixty
times, but that part always makes me flinch.
Now, here’s a character who likes to refer to Hermione as a “Mudblood’
never misses an opportunity to remind Ron of how poor his family is, and tries
to serve Harry Potter up to the Dark Lord himself and yet, you can’t help
feeling bad for him. I mean, with a dad
like that¦

Months ago, I had been
tempted to write an article about some bullying that I was experiencing. I think when we get to be a certain age, we
like to say people are just being prize-winning jerks, but we all know what
bullying is, and we know, even at 24, when it’s happening to us. You’re being picked on mercilessly, humiliated for
the entertainment of a large group of peers, or shamed for something about you
that is true, that you can’t control, and that you so desperately wish to be
able to be proud of, but can’t because it will only exacerbate an already bleak
situation. This is not easy for me to
admit, but I had been hiding a bit at work.
Of course, I’m out. People ask me
my name, and I’m out, but I consciously toned myself down. These guys I worked with were tough on me
from the beginning. They didn’t want me
in their club and picking on me actually made life more fun for them ’ I could
literally see their camaraderie strengthen over this. Some guys wouldn’t look or talk to me at all,
even about work, and would only engage when one of their buddies was picking on
me. So I toned down some of my more
flamboyant qualities and I dressed with less fashion sense (the HORROR), honestly
because I find when people are already struggling to stomach my transgenderism,
they’re downright repulsed by the fact that I have a rather fluid sexuality. But try as I did, I just am who I am, and before
I knew it, I was getting some attention.
At first, I was happy for it to fly under the radar of my superiors,
fearing retaliation. Eventually, I had a
one-on-one altercation with one of the guys over my right to use the men’s
bathroom. I, of course, went home that
night and just hoped that I could forget about it and that they’d leave me
alone, but the very next day, I was told the owner of my company wanted to meet
with me, and when we did, he informed me that
five people had come to him about “what happened.” The funny thing was, none of them could tell
him the details of the situation at all, probably because if they had, it
wouldn’t have shown their friend in a very good light. But they’d still gone to him, with nothing to
say, they’d gone, taken time out of their lunch hours to put a stop to¦ me.

A few days ago, I was talking with my mom
about the recent teen suicides that were a result of anti-gay bullying. I brought up Lawrence King, the gay teen who
was shot in 2008 by his classmate, Brandon McInerney. I had read a quote from
Newsweek that said that the shooting was “the most prominent
gay-bias crime since the murder of Matthew Shepard.” I don’t know why the countless hate crimes in the
decade that passed between didn’t get much media attention, they were every bit
as violent, but perhaps the even greater injustice is the anti-gay bullying
that has been going on for years and years that has never even been treated as
violence until now. Verbal abuse is violence. Millions of
kids went through our school systems during that time- what happened to the
kids who didn’t become Brandon McInerneys?
The kids who didn’t have access to a gun? Well, for the most part, the ones who don’t have
a great life-changing experience, they maintain the same attitudes and beliefs
and turn into grown-up bullies.

These
kids are the Draco Malfoys of the real world.
Most people parrot their parents’ beliefs until they develop their own,
but when the parent is a bully, not only does the child adopt the beliefs, but
they learn how to bully. And that’s
something they’re desperate for, to alleviate their own pain from
being bullied, and as we all know, this
is sometimes a lethal combination. There’s
no way to weed out people who will be that kind of parent, but we can target
the belief. As Ellen Degeneres said, when
speaking about Lawrence King on her show, “When the message out there is that
being gay is so horrible you can get killed for it, we need to change the
message.” Ellen also spoke about the
recent suicides on her show: “There are
messages everywhere that validate this kind of bullying and taunting.” Kathy Griffin posted a message on YouTube
where she called out the homophobic politicians and public figures, saying “Remember
trickle-down economics in the eighties?
Well, this is just trickle-down homophobia.” I’ve cried over these suicides and I’ve
looked at that picture of Lawrence King a million times, but I never forget
Brandon. I never forget how both boys
were failed by the system and fell through the cracks. That’s really key in all this, isn’t it? Never forgetting.


Brandon McInerney, left, Lawrence King, right.

So, as a final thought,
I’d like to draw a little attention to some of the less prominent, but no less
violent, anti-gay hate crimes that occurred, with the exception of the first, during the time between the murders
of Matthew Shepard and Lawrence King.

WARNING: this
is graphic stuff.

Michael Goucher, 21, murdered February 2009 in
Pennsylvania. He was murdered by two
teenagers who wrote graphic poetry detailing the
murder afterwards, including the following lines: “Stabbed this
mother (expletive), right into his neck and I stabbed him in the head, we
checked but he started running, his (expletive) wasn’t dead¦the mother
(expletive) started pleading, he was all light-headed cuz his throat was all
bleeding.”

Nireah
Johnson, 17, murdered July 2003 in Indiana.
She was on a double date with her friend and two men, who discovered she
was biologically male by following her to the bathroom at the murderer’s home. Johnson and her friend Brandie Coleman, who
had recently become a new mom, were then bound, driven to the woods, and shot
in their car. After one of the assailants’
brothers called to alert him that he had seen the teens dead in their SUV,
their murderer returned to the scene and set the car on fire.

Billy Jack
Gaither, 39, murdered February 1999 in Alabama.
He was beaten to death with an ax handle and then burned on a pyre of
old tires. Testimony was given at trial
that one of the assailants himself was gay, by a man who had engaged in sexual
relations with him.

Gwen Araujo, 17, murdered
October 2002 in Newark, California. She was
beaten by four men, strangled to death, and buried because her attackers had found
out she was transgendered. In some of
the murderers’ trials, a trans panic defense was employed, wherein the accused
claim temporary insanity because of unwanted sexual advances by a transgendered
person.

Ryan Keith Skipper, 25, murdered March 2007 in
Winter Haven, Florida. He was stabbed
twenty times, his throat slit, and his body was dumped on the roadside. The
killers then drove around him in his own car, bragging how they had killed a
“faggot.”

Pvt. Barry Winchell, 21, murdered July 1999 at
Fort Campbell in Kentucky. He was beaten
with a baseball bat by a fellow soldier because he had begun to date a
transgendered showgirl, Calpernia Addams, who is now one of the most well-known
transgender activists in the movement.
An internal report done by the Army concluded that the 101
st
Airborne, of which Winchell was part, did not suffer from an unacceptable
degree of homophobia.

Ronnie Paris, just
3 years old, murdered January 2005 in Tampa, Florida. This boy was beaten to death by his father who
was trying to “make Ronnie Antonio tough and to teach him to fight,
because he did not want Ronnie Antonio Paris to grow up to be gay.”

And for the teens
who were so badly bullied that they lost hope:
Asher Brown, 13, Billy Lucas, 15, Seth Walsh, 13, and Tyler Clementi,
18, my heart is with you.

-Jon





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