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It’s time for another edition of SE(N)O, an essay series on A+ for personal stories we wish we could tell on the accessible-to-our-employers-and-everyone-we’ve-ever-known mainsite, but can’t for personal and professional reasons.

When I was seven years old, my parents, thinking they were trying to raise a young boy into a man, signed me up for Cub Scouts. It was there that I learned how to whittle a bar of soap into the shape of a whale, how to walk old ladies across the street and how to stop acting like such a little girl.

The scout troop I was in was run through the Catholic Church, and I guess they thought it was more important that we learned how to be Men of God than how to pitch a tent or tie a knot. I may not know how to start a fire without matches, but I did learn how to treat a girl on a date: never let her ask you out; always hold open doors and pull out chairs; refuse to let her pay; only kiss her on the cheek.

Surrounded by nothing but boys my age who were eager to learn these lessons in manhood, I felt completely alone. I felt like I had no one who understood me, who I could relate to, who I belonged with. Except for one boy, Michael.

Michael and I met when we were in the same kindergarten class at St. Anthony’s Catholic School. He was one of two Michaels and I was one of two kids with my name and the four of us bonded over not feeling as unique as the rest of the class.

Michael and I also bonded over how little in common we had with the other scouts and how little we had in common with our scout leaders’ idea of what a Real Man should be. The two of us saw something of ourselves in each other and we latched onto it. Unfortunately, the other scouts saw it too, and they attacked us for it.

At scouts, both of us would get made fun of for the way we dressed, talked and acted. Kids started asking if we were gay before any of us really knew what sexuality even was. They would laugh and point at us each time we need to pick who would be the “queer” in Smear the Queer. They would call us girls, as if that was the absolute worst thing a boy could ever be. The other scouts saw all those things in me because I was a seven-year-old girl who had to get out of bed very morning and pretend to be a boy. I don’t know exactly why Michael was that way, but I was damn thankful that I wasn’t alone.

As Cub Scouts turned to Boy Scouts, things got even worse for the two of us. The boys were older, the lessons stricter and the bullies meaner. But having Michael there with me made things a whole lot easier — or at least I thought it did. But things weren’t so easy for Michael. At scouts I was called a sissy and told that purple, my favorite color, was the official color of AIDS. But Michael heard those same kinds of things everywhere he went.

As we moved through the sixth grade, I knew that scout camp was coming up and I knew that it was going to be hell. Seven days surrounded by boys and men who wanted nothing but to make me less like me and more like them. I was only comforted by the fact that Michael would be there with me.

Four months before camp, on Monday, February 23, 1998, my friend Michael came home from school, found the key to his parents’ gun locker and killed himself.

Michael was the first person in my life who died. It’s a pretty big shock having the first funeral you go to be one for a friend who’s the same age as you. Especially when you’re still in elementary school. Especially when he kills himself. I didn’t know how to process it. I still don’t, really. It was weird and uncomfortable and wrong and stupid. I hated it.

Scout camp came and it was every bit as terrifying as I thought it would be, maybe even more so. At this point in my life I had gotten pretty good, or maybe really just okay, at pretending that I didn’t hate everything about being a boy — that I didn’t go to bed every night and wake up every morning praying that God would use one of His miracles to turn me into a girl. At pretending that I was fine. But I wasn’t good enough to spend a week with the people who most reminded me of how much I needed Michael and act like everything was okay.

I spent most of my time at camp in my tent, crying or hiding or both. I think the only part I enjoyed was a conversation I had with the other Michael, the one from kindergarten. The two Michaels had stayed best friends over the years. Other Michael told me that on days when the bullying was extra bad, Michael would talk about jumping off a cliff, saying that no one would care if he died. Other Michael would tell him to stop joking around, that jokes like that weren’t funny. Other Michael also said that when the neighborhood kids would call Michael a fag, he would make similar claims, only to be told he was too much of a girl to actually do it. He even said this to the bullies right before he went into his house and killed himself. It still didn’t make them stop.

Michael saying those things to the bullies made sense to me. I had had similar thoughts, even if I was too afraid to actually say them out loud. I started to wonder how much we had in common. I wondered if he also secretly wished he was the girl that the bullies said he was, that the reason he hated that kind of bullying so much was because he was afraid that there was some truth to it. I wondered how many more days of bullying I could take before I tried to join Michael. I wondered how I would do it.

I wish that I could see the person Michael was supposed to grow up to be. I wish I could thank him for making one of the most intolerable parts of my life a little more tolerable. I wish I could tell him that just because we were bad at being Boy Scouts or even bad at being boys, that doesn’t mean that we were bad at being ourselves. I would tell him that the world was too ignorant and afraid and mean and that the things it hated about him were the things that made us friends. I would tell him that not all little boys have to grow up to be the kind of men that our leaders and classmates and bullies tried to make us into. Some of us can even grow up to be women who are strong and confident and happy, at least some of the time. And when people call us girls or queers or gays, those people are our friends, not bullies, and it no longer feels like hatred. Now it feel like it fits. Like they’re finally seeing us for who we were all along.

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