IMAGINATION TURNED TO WRITING
It was in the summer following the fifth grade that I
wrote my first story. I wrote a story entitled “AN UPSTAIRS AFFAIR.” It was a
story about an African American girl and a Caucasian girl, who captured a white
boy and made him their sex slave. They handcuffed him to a metal frame bedpost
in an upstairs apartment.
There were no detailed pornographic scenes, just the
agony of the boy who was starved because the girls failed to feed him
properly. Finally, the boy was discovered
by his mother and the two girls were hauled off to jail. The story was written
in a rough form in the cursive of a fifth grader with a lead pencil on regular
notebook paper. A copy was mailed to “True Confession” magazine. No one in my
family knew what I was doing although my mother knew that I was up to
something. Several weeks later the story was returned in a brown envelope with
a nice written rejection letter.
However, the story didn't end there. Several months
later I read a story published in this same magazine that was very similar to
the story I had written. In fact, the story had the same title. Later, the
story was turned into a movie. Once again, I was just a kid and had no proof
that this was indeed my story. I did not have it copyrighted so nothing could
be done. And the fact was that an elementary, country, school boy did not have the money to hire a lawyer.
But things continued to be interesting. My sixth grade teacher Mrs. Colbert was the
nicest, gentlest, sweetest, teacher anyone could imagine. She loved children
and her actions proved it. In the sixth
grade we sharpened the skills we had already learned. We reviewed
multiplication tables. We practiced long division and we read. Mrs. Colbert had
a large collection of books and we were encouraged to read.
It was in my sixth grade year that I wrote a second
story. It was in that story that my imagination played a major role. The story was about the marriage between a
cat and a rat. The rat was the husband and the cat was the wife. They shared a
happy home in the forest. They had three children, two boys and a girl, and the
children were called karats. Their
school teacher was the wise, old, Mr. Owl and their gossiping neighbor was Mrs.
Chattering Squirrel. Across the meadow and on the other side of a big pasture
filled with blooming flowers, was a range of small mountains. Inside one of the
mountains was a cave and the children had been warned never to enter the cave.
But one day curiosity got the better of the children and they decided to
explore. The cave was filled with different channels and Wilbur, the older of
the boys, decided to explore a different one. He became separated from the
other two and got lost in the cave. He became confused and was unable to find his way out. The
other children were forced to report to their parents what they had done and
confess that Wilbur was lost.
The parents panicked and a posse of forest animals was
formed for the purpose of entering the cave to find Wilbur. The posse was led
by the sheriff, Mr. Raccoon and included Mr. Possum, Mr. Armadillo, Mr.
Squirrel and even the famous Mr. Red Fox.
Wilbur was located and a happy reunion occurred with his parents.
My sixth grade teacher loved the story and kept it
with the intention of having it published during the summer. But in that summer
tragedy struck the Colbert family. Their teenage son committed suicide.
Information about this was kept at a very low key but all I learned was from my
seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Raney Glanton. She informed the class that after
the death of her son, Mrs. Colbert moved from the small town of
Several times since then I have tried to rewrite the
story, but all attempts have failed. I have never been able to rewrite it the same way as I wrote it when I was a sixth grader.
From the seventh grade I entered High School. My
writing career suffered because I began to realize that I had the possibility
of a problem. I was not developing a
like for the opposite sex as was expected. At first, I thought I would grow out
of it, but as my teenage years progressed the problem grew more acute. Even though I did not let it affect my
grades, I became a troubled teenager.
I attended church regularly and I heard many sermons
concerning the evils of homosexuality. The fear of hell made a great impression
on this teenage boy. Realizing I had a
problem, I turned to religion to solve the problem. I actually thought at one
time in my life if I dedicated myself to Christianity and prayed often enough
that I would be touched by the magic wan of the Holy Spirit and turned into a
straight man. After college I entered the seminary to continue my quest to
study the scriptures and wait for the transformation.
However, the transformation did not come. Finally, the realization came to me that all my hopes of being transformed into a straight man were delusional. Realization was a happy release, but realizing I was gay, I thought that I had to develop a plan to deal secretly with my homosexuality.
(To be continued)
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