His words haunted me: “People like us have to stick together.” I thought I knew him, that I had understood him. I hadn’t. Who was he?
More importantly, who was I?
That’s a question we all ponder at some point in an attempt to find the meaning of life. But that night it was just something that kept echoing in my head as I lay in bed unable to sleep, quietly crying through the night until the darkness was broken by the early morning light straining to make its way through our back windows and downstairs into my room, the only place where I would ever again feel safe.
Even though Graham’s homosexuality was something I couldn’t really understand, it didn’t scare me. The way he had constructed things, positioning himself as a lonely and misunderstood victim, made me sympathetic toward him. In fact, it made me think he was even better than the rest. He, a lonely man, an outcast in society (remember, this was nearly four decades ago), was still engaged in the most manly of Canadian sports and at a level where he was seen as more progressive, more intelligent, simply superior to others. I liked his story and its appeal of an underdog triumphing against all odds over the know-nothing Neanderthals. His story got to me at both an emotional and an intellectual level.
The reality, of course, was that he was no underdog. He was just a sociopath, a serial sexual offender. He was the powerful one. I was his victim and the true underdog. But I couldn’t see that, for he had groomed me to see the world his way.
Graham had been very clever. After physically assaulting me, he didn’t come out and tell me he was gay. He simply referred to “people like us,” leaving it to me to connect the dots (a disgusting metaphor given what he had just done to, or rather on, me). He left me to process what had happened and reach my own conclusions. He hadn’t presented me with something I could reject out of hand. Rather, he positioned his own desire for a sexual relationship as an inevitable conclusion for me to reach myself, for me to conclude that I wanted what he wanted.
His implications that I too was gay, that people like us needed to stick together and support one another, that we needed to keep our secret, and that I needed to come back to him for his support all fit into the narrative that he had constructed from the information I had given him over the past months. Graham had slowly made his world my world, and my world was now being further defined by him as he wanted me to see it. In this construct, his physical actions toward me made perfect sense. He was bringing me out of my shell and showing me my true self. He was liberating me.
To me, Graham’s interest and support were the actions of someone who cared about me. They were actions that respected who I was and what I needed to do to become the best me that I could be. The furthest thing from my mind was that I was being groomed by a sexual predator so that he could abuse me. No, to me he was the one delivering to me all that I needed, all that I wanted, all that I deserved. The physical actions were just a new dynamic in my development of who I was and what I would become. In this light, he was helping me be me. I believed that he and only he knew anything about me and who I really was. I believed that he cared about me.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself when I was crying the hardest.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I was gay. I had thought I knew who I was. I mean, I had an ability to understand who I was through outside feedback about school and hockey, but my sexuality had never been on my radar except in respect to the normal issues all teenagers deal with. Graham was now introducing something dramatically unexpected.
I had previously always thought, never doubted, that I was heterosexual, and had never for a moment thought otherwise. I had never fantasized about anything other than girls and women and, while I was quite shy, I was very interested in girls. So it was confusing for me to find my body responding to him physically. I try to make it easier on myself now by noting that the average teenage male can have an erection simply because a breath of wind hits the right place. This protects me from facing a difficult reality that I continue to grapple with to this day, notwithstanding all of the therapy and the greater insight I now have into how the body operates. Whatever he was doing to me, I was responding to it physically.
Although I had always thought that I was heterosexual, evidence to the contrary was piling up. The result was a great deal of confusion and a huge impact on my personal development and self-image.
The easiest part of assessing the impact of sexual abuse is considering the actual physical actions themselves. Still, words like massaging, touching, fondling, groping, masturbating, oral sex, and ejaculating don’t come close to describing the horror of what was going on. And all victims, whatever they have experienced, live with that horror of the physical actions. There is no erasing the memories, and until they invent a pill that allows you to control your own dreams and nightmares, I will never know from night to night whether I will or won’t revisit those horrors in my sleep.
It is harder to deal with the lingering uncertainty and confusion created by the disconnect between who you once thought you were and who you now see yourself being. A single incident of abuse by Graham left me with deep questions about myself, questions I answered in ways that left me less than whole.
Who am I? I must not be who I thought I was.
Why did my body respond to his advances and actions? I must have liked it.
Why didn’t I stop it? I must have wanted it and I deserve what I’m feeling now.
But there would be more than just a single incident. Much more.
I was, on the outside, still succeeding at everything. But sexually confused, isolated from my parents, and without close friends at school or a support network within my own hockey team, on the inside I was now alone with a secret, which, if revealed, he had told me, would shatter all of my dreams.
But was I gay? I didn’t have any girlfriends during high school. Oh, I had crushes on girls and I had dates with girls, but I had little free time outside of my extracurricular activities for dating. As much as I thought that I was heterosexual, I couldn’t honestly and unequivocally confirm to myself that I wasn’t gay, especially now that I had had this physical response to a man. There was no Internet to consult about sexual abuse. There was nobody I could speak with, nobody to counsel me. My physical responses to him were all I had to form a judgment against myself.
And I still had him, his interest and his support. In poker parlance, he was now all in with me. All in.
Me? Who was I? I had no idea. I thought I did, but not anymore.
Me, that teenaged kid, lost, all by himself?
I, as I had known myself, had ceased to exist.
I was now nobody at all.
FOUR
TRAPPED
I WENT BACK TO him—and hated myself for it. Part of me knew I should run away from him, but the rest of me knew I needed to go back and stay with him because my dreams depended on him. I couldn’t run away, because I was locked inside a reality established and controlled by him. I had no ability to step back and rationally assess the situation.
Why couldn’t I run? Why couldn’t I just end it? The one truly at risk if our secret ever came out wasn’t me but Graham. He was the adult, he was the teacher, he was the hockey coach, he had everything to lose. It should have been easy for me to tell somebody what had happened, right? It should have been a no-brainer to go to my parents,