DISCLAIMER: The fast is in full swing, and my brain is a bit foggy today. If the posts over the next few days are erratic, it's the lemonade speaking...
“I went to Hellgate.”
For anyone not familiar with Montana, that is a startling sentence. It doesn’t reference a trip down the river Styx to play fetch with Cerberus, the three-headed dog, but instead refers to a middle, and high school that people attend in Missoula. I have yet to hear anyone’s Middle School top that, but I’m sure something as ludicrous must be out there.
From second grade until I left for High School, I attended Hellgate, while most of my closest friends fell into the much tamer “Washington” district. Somehow, I still managed to create a fairly substantial group of cohorts at Hellgate. Wearing bootleg jeans, and appearing on the cover of the Entertainment section of our newspaper in white tights didn’t do wonders for my reputation, yet compared to other gay friends of mine, nothing about my middle school years seemed especially hellacious, except the name.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve run into five of my classmates from my middle school days and am amazed at the type of reactions it prompts in me. I feel more alienated from them now, and look at them with a sense of wonderment that was absent during my initial friendships with most of them. There’s a feeling of nostalgia that rises up whenever a face from my past pops up in a coffee shop or restaurant, and part of me wonders if I could ever have a substantial friendship with any of them today.
Other than Facebook, I don’t keep in touch with the people that populated my school days here in Missoula. Through social networking sites, I’m able to see that some of them still interact with each other, most of them list their political views as “Very Conservative,” and “hunting” is a common interest. Most of the contact I’ve had with them in the past nine years is through online communication, and that has been sparse at best.
Because of the type of alienation that comes with being a gay adolescent, I find that it’s common for gay adults to share stories of their tumultuous upbringings. While I certainly remember uncomfortable moments, for the most part they weren’t that far away from what the straight kids went through; I never got called “faggot” until I was almost out of my teen years.
In eighth grade, girlfriends were more of an obligation for me than other kids, I was about as good at throwing a football as I was at building a rocket, and I kept my dancing a closely guarded secret. Somehow through all of this I maintained a close group of friends who were jocks and cheerleaders. My recesses were spent alternating between running around on the field praying the ball wasn’t coming my direction, and watching from the sidelines while I huddled with the onlookers (i.e. girls). Even though much of my behavior welcomed ridicule, and my sexuality (while I wasn’t quite aware of it) was about as obvious as the fact that Missoula is surrounded by mountains, my friends chose to overlook it.
It wasn’t until I reached Hellgate Middle School that I ever felt the need to be anything but myself. Sexuality wasn’t something that fourth graders were concerned with in my days, and I had plenty of other things for which to be ridiculed (X-Men trading cards, Pogs obsession, the list goes on…). Fortunately, most of my friendships were built through grade school, and I did a good enough job at masking any sense of being uncomfortable.
That ability has dwindled in the past years as I’ve grown up and become more comfortable with my sexuality. Every time I come to Montana I tend to be hyper aware of the way I am acting, as Montana isn’t the bluest of states (even though it happens to be blue right now). That being said, the way I act doesn't change. Seeing kids from my past reminds me that even though I wasn’t teased much, it was still one of the few times in my life where I wasn’t comfortable being myself.
It all makes me wonder how much power nostalgia has? Would the boys who were once able to overlook my sexuality be able to do the same now? Even though I see my homosexuality as resting far down the list of defining characteristics of my personality, it seems that to outsiders in Montana it’s often a trait that trumps all others.
Hey Matt,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You're a good writer and a good photographer. And I bet you're a great dancer!
I don't have any words of wisdom for you. I would hope that when you see people from your past, they'd reach out to you and do the right thing. Hopefully they'd surprise you, in a good way.
Posted by: Esther | January 21, 2008 at 10:05 PM
No one know about this things anymore. Kids are way to much into Hannah Montana and Justien Bieber these days.
Posted by: Giulia Crane | December 02, 2010 at 09:29 AM