Thanks for being a badly needed voice of consent and respect in this community. Do you know if there is a place, a home or charity or the like, for broken, abused bottoms? I have a friend who got caught up with one of these "my property" assholes who finally kicked him out, HIV+ and wounded to the soul. I'm enraged by some of what's here. Sick of homophobia as a kink.
Thanks’ for the compliment, I’ve always, often in difficult circumstances, done what I can to make a positive difference, no matter how small that difference may be.
Like you I can’t abide; homophobe’s, discrimination, and predator’s, in any guise. But when discrimination is used by predatory abusers, to fuel their sexual gratification, I find it doubly abhorrent.
Where your friend is, or how his experience measures-up on a scale of abuse is not totally clear. What is clear to me, even in todays polarising world, in many areas, there’s more understanding of sexual differences, and the problems that can be caused by some of the choices we are in danger of making through; being deceived, naivety, ignorance, or insecurity. Help is out there, but we have to lift our heads and look for it. Often help’s not too far away. In every major city there are gay support groups, therapists, and organisations that are willing to help on a multitude of levels.
One point I frequently make is that, the problems we experience, what ever they are, are human problems, problems that any of us can experience, regardless of our sexual preference’s.
My personal experience has been that, focusing specifically on gay support can narrow ones outlook when we need help. At a time of great personal crisis, when everything I loved, and cared about was cruelly snatched from me, it was; caring, empathetic, human’s, of every social/sexual difference who made a positive difference. It was not only gay friend’s I turned to.
Regardless of what my problems may have been, being open and honest with myself, enabled me to find the right help. That help often came from the most unexpected quarters, those who had least to give, frequently gave most. Those without an agenda, where the most empathetic… “Seek and you shall fine,” is so true.
Another strategy for me has be to use my negative experience’s, to make a positive difference for the benefit of other’s. This has had the double benefit of helping me too.
I struggled coming-out as gay. When finally I did, in my early 30’s, it was through a bogus helpline. The guy running it was using the helpline for is own selfish sexual need’s. He was a true predator. I fitted his bill of fare, was used sexually, and promptly discarded. Within a year of that experience I had created what became the biggest regional gay switchboard in the UK. We hosted the first regional HIV conference in the UK. Started gay night’s in local pub’s, arranged after hours shopping for transvestites. The whole thing just snowballed, to a point it no longer needed me, and I moved on, a much stronger, more rounded, open, out gay man - proud of what I’d achieved.
I then fell in love and within weeks, we found-out my lover was HIV positive, and I was not, and in 1985 that meant he would die, and he did, in my arms. I could have curled up and died too, I wanted to. Instead I engaged with very programe I could, to further the knowledge of HIV transition, and created a course of what became known for it’s; “HIV Sex Intervention Techniques” (basically talking to guys in their language, about their choices, when their balls were talking, and not their brain).
When I was suicidal, I trained to become a “Samaritan,” to help others who were feeling as I had done…
I don’t know what your friends experience was, and I don’t want to down play it, but it’s all too easy when we experience a setback to see ourselves as victims. Indeed there are times when that may be true, but it’s also true, that; “Experience is not what happens to a man; experience is what a man does with what happens to him.”
Simply being a friend, helping your friend to see that not all men are predators, or sexual abuser’s. Getting him to see, if, in some way, he was complicit in what happened to him. Helping him find the positive in his experience, will not only help him grow, it may help others grow too.
Perhaps in being the friend you would want to have helping you in difficult times, you could do your bit to help your friend identify what he really need’s, and where to find that, and how to grow beyond his experience?
And in doing that, in being the kind of friend who helps others find their way, might your friend, might not you, might not we all grow also, to help others?
Dave Gregory dgbastide-blog
