Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 99. Everett Cooper “Don’t tell me, because I don’t want my mind changed"
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“Don’t tell me, because I don’t want my mind changed.”
Quote from a former farm boy on straights+ preferring to choose hate. The following testimony comes from a person born in 1957 and raised in an extremist, fundamentalist family.
When I was somewhere between thirteen and fifteen [circa 1970-72], we were at my grandma’s, and there was a report about Gay men in a park somewhere in California. The family got all up in arms, saying “Kill the perverts,” and that kind of stuff. […]
[M]y mother has said on more than one occasion she would rather one of her kids die than tell her they were Gay. […] There are people at work I’ve come out to, but with some of the people in my family, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would pick up a gun and shoot me. So I’m just playing it by ear. My dad would get real deadpan and order me out of the house; or, he could just beat me to a bloody pulp. […] He has in recent years.
I have some frustration and anger about the friction between my religious upbringing and coming to grips with my orientation – about being forced to be stuck in a lie; about the unfairness I’ve experienced in disentangling myself from my most recent marriage [to a woman]; about being thirty-five and just now coming out. And by god [sic], I’m so sick of other people dictating. […]
When my second wife and I started going through the process of divorce [circa 1991], we told close friends and our pastor and his wife that I was Gay. At no time did anybody say, “Wow, this is interesting. Tell me about it.” They just put up walls. I have a real deep sorrow that people don’t want to know. It’s not a matter of “Oh, I didn’t know that – that's neat to know.” It’s “Don’t tell me, because I don’t want my mind changed. I’m comfortable being antagonistic and prejudiced against you.” It makes me very sad that a lot of people think we’re all a bunch of perverts [read, H-words] running around. And not only do they think that, but they choose to think that – they choose not to know the other side of it. I would like somehow to become politically forceful in changing that perception. […]
Now that I’ve stopped worrying about what if and why not, I look at the beauty of the [two-and-a-half year] relationship I had with the guy in Colorado Springs. I think in some ways, same-sex partners are far more capable of being real in a relationship, because they understand more closely where each other is coming from. The physical love and spiritual communion I have had with other men have been far superior to what I have observed in heterosexuals.
—Everett Cooper,
oral interview, 1992
The italics bracketing the word choose are per the original.
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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