Wednesday, January 20, 2010

My Ogunquit Tale

I’m letting those who read my blog (now many, if at all) a little bit about my life for posterity. This was a formative experience for me. I even wrote about my experience in college in '87. I didn't tell anyone that this actually happened to me. It was for a fiction writing class. I think I received a B or a C. Classmates said that my story was unbelievable and that the main character, me, was unsympathetic.

We were staying at our grandparents beach house in Moody Beach, ME, between Ogunquit and Wells. We left, we were smokers at 16 years old, to walk down to Ogunquit, It was about a mile or so. It was the three of us, Steve, me & Kris. We enjoyed our time in Ogunquit. Kris remarked that there were a lot of people holding hands. A lot of GUYS holding hands and a lots of GIRLS doing the very same thing. What we didn't realize is that Ogunquit was very friendly to gay people or so we thought...

On our leaving Ogunquit we were followed by a girl, two what looked like college-aged guys and a kid that looked to be about our age. The thing to remember is that we were relatively small for our age. We had to walk about a half mile or so where there were no houses. To make a long story short, I remember my little brother, Kris, got the brunt of those homophobes wrath. All this time we were wondering why they were picking on us. Later in life it obviously dawned on us. We were the victim of gay bashing pure and simple. I believe the one woman was more vocal than anyone else. I guess she had something more to prove.

We weren't beat up but we had bottles thrown at our heads and my younger brother was tripped up and the two "college" fell upon him, luckily he was no worse for the wear. Eventually we reached the first house that was the start of the beach houses. They were having a party and when we knocked on to door they wouldn't let us in. They were friends of my grandparents, but they didn't recognize us. I will always remember those people as indifferent to us even though we were informing them of our recent plight on the beach. We were just 3 young guys and they were a bunch of grown-ups who didn't care a fig about what was going on outside their comfortable home.

Eventually we made it back home to our grandparents beach house. We told my grandparents and father what we just experienced. The cops were called and they thought that they had found the suspects in a car. Remember, we were followed down the beach, they didn't have a car. I didn't realize it at the time but our tormentors weren't in car and couldn't have returned in time to get a car. Eventually we looked at our "tormentors" we had a chuckle to ourselves, or at least we wanted to chuckle. There were long hairs in the car, not the squeaky clean kids the were ACTUALLY our tormentors. Our irritants (and that’s all they were, but if we hadn’t found that first house we wouldn’t have known what would’ve happened) were probably college bound.

In college and beyond I cozied up with gay people because of my early childhood experience. That's probably why I'm a fierce advocate of the down and out in society or the misunderstood. The freaks WILL inherit the earth, of that I AM certain!

My brothers went away with a completely different viewpoint.
[heavy sigh]

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