Growing up as someone who is different from the majority is difficult no matter the circumstances. For the LGBTQ+ it is horrific when just your very existence is called an abomination and you are equated with the worst being in history. Especially when your parents and your god are pushing the idea that you are a monster who can only be cured if you follow their god, their church doctrines, have their feelings about everything in your life. Hugs.
A guest essay by Sean Robinson – Spencer’s boyfriend.
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When I was around 10 years old, I remember horsing around in the grass with my oldest brother. I asked him the meaning of homosexuality, a word that I had heard from my parents and from the New Order Amish and Mennonite communities I was surrounded by growing up in upstate New York and rural Virginia.
Sean and his dad Upstate New York. Photo courtesy of Sean.
While I wasn’t certain what the word meant, I knew it was bad and I was pretty sure it was me. So when my brother responded to my question by saying that homosexuality is “demonic,” I pushed those thoughts down.
A few years later, my dad told me that once someone becomes a homosexual, they will “want more and more and more” and it will lead to a sexual desire for “children, then animals, then blood.”
Sean and his dad through the years. Photos courtesy of Sean.
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Hearing these ideas persistently and consistently made me feel like there was this horrible thing inside of me that I just hated. I had learned that it was akin to being a pedophile, and that’s how I felt about myself.
These feelings created so much shame and fear but most of all a level of embarrassment that was so intense that I vowed to myself I would take my secret to the grave.
Sean and his parents. Photo courtesy of Sean.
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But I didn’t. When I met just one gay person at Danville Community College, I felt a small but significant rumbling of hope. This encounter gave me the courage to leave. So at 17, I told my parents I was moving to New York City to pursue the performing arts.
While I was semi-interested in being on screen, I saw NYC as a symbol of a new life where I could be my authentic self. A few months after I moved, I came out to my mom over the phone, who later told me—through a puddle of tears—that I might as well have died in a car accident.
I had to dig to make a life for myself with few people in my corner. I utilized NYC social programs like SNAP benefits, free health care and low-income housing. These services gave me the bootstraps I needed to pull myself up.
The years of familial and community rejection and efforts to change me through conversion therapy took more than two decades of treatment, medication and supportive friendships to help me find a formula where today—at 40 years old—I can manage my depression, anxiety, tics (that were at one point debilitating), no-contact relationship with my parents and low self-esteem.
I am so grateful to the heroes who helped me through these years: Paul Warner, Jerry Meadors and countless others. You lifted me up, taught me the ropes, allowed me to couch surf and showered me with love.
Sean in his teens. Photo courtesy of Sean.
Fighting the demons of my past, including years of religious trauma and physical abuse disguised as “corporal punishment,” is something I’d wish on nobody. When I read Uncloseted stories that discuss how nearly 40% of LGBTQ kids seriously considered suicide in the last year, my heart breaks because I know that could have been me if my path had veered a degree in a different direction.
Sean with Spencer and his psychiatric service dog Carson. Photo courtesy of Sean.
Flash forward 20 years and I’m sitting next to Spencer, who’s helping shine a spotlight on the very thing I tried to suppress in the darkness of my mind. I am now a video editor at MTV, working on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the groundbreaking television show that has helped so many queer kids across America feel seen and feel safe—something every child deserves.
I’ve always been resilient and tough.
But finally, I feel calm and free.
Response from Sean’s Dad:
In a text message to Uncloseted Media, Sean’s dad, Chris Robinson, wrote that he remembers saying that “when the moral fabric of societies begin to decay it usually starts with the sin of not acknowledging Almighty God, the Giver and Sustainer of life. [If] that condition of man continues then more sin comes [including] adultery, fornication and general unfaithfulness. The next level is men allowing women and children to rule. This would have been the feminist movement of the 60’s. Next comes homosexuality then bestiality and finishing up with child and adult sacrifice and much shedding of blood. This progression is recorded in Genesis and through the Chronicles and Kings in the Bible.”
In response to Sean’s references to corporal punishment, his dad wrote that he remembers being “shocked at [Sean’s] fearless defiance to [his] authority … as being the one responsible for order in the home” and that he would punish him—after multiple verbal warnings for misbehavior—by giving him “4 or 5 good licks with the switch and [would then] give him a hug and prayer and hope he got the message.” His dad added that he and Sean had many good times too and that he “still shed[s] a tear at times in memory of [his] little Seany.”
Response from Sean’s Mom:
In a text message to Uncloseted Media, Sean’s mom, Michelle Robinson, does not remember telling Sean after he came out that he might as well have died in a car accident. “My mind is blank for anything specific,” she wrote.
In response to Sean’s reference to corporal punishment, his mom says that out of the hundred times where corporal punishment was administered correctly through biblical spanking done with love, there were “a handful of times when his father admits he acted more in anger as [an] immediate reaction because of Sean’s behavior and he realizes he should’ve done that differently [and that his dad] always immediately apologized and they always had special time together and they worked through that.”
“We believed in honoring God with our life. We were not perfect but our heart was to please God,” she wrote, adding that Sean was treated with love as a child and through adulthood.
Sean’s brother did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.
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Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
On October 16, 1758, Noah Webster and his wife Mercy Steel Webster welcomed a new son into their lives. They named him after his father. Noah Sr. was a farmer and weaver, and Mercy was a homemaker, and by all outward appearances, they lived a rather normal life in the West Division of Hartford — what would become West Hartford, Connecticut.
Though the elder Webster had never attended college himself, he placed great value on education, so from an early age, Mercy taught the younger Noah what she could of spelling, mathematics, music, and other subjects. At age 6, he began attending a one-room schoolhouse; later in life, he described his untrained teachers there as the “dregs of humanity.”
Regardless, Noah took to learning like a fish to water, eventually outgrowing the educational opportunities of his hometown. When he was 16, Noah Sr. mortgaged the family farm so that they could afford to send the younger Noah to Yale University to continue his studies; he graduated four years later in 1778, in the midst of the American Revolution.
After Yale, Noah wanted to study law, but his family couldn’t afford it. Remembering the deficiencies and horrors of his grade school days, he recognized that education might be a better place to make his mark. So he became a teacher.
Most of the books used in American classrooms at the time still came from England — some even included pledges to King George. There was also the matter of patriotism. There was a scarcity of American textbooks for American children, and Noah Webster decided he could help.
So in 1783, he published his own textbook, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Because it was printed with blue covers, it was known colloquially as the Blue-Backed Speller, and it became one of the most popular American books of the late 18th century, helping teach children to read, spell, and pronounce words.
But the words themselves were still anchored in Great Britain, and the lexicography coming out of England didn’t encompass the American experience. This realization set Webster on a course that would change the language. In 1801, he began collecting words and their definitions with the aim of creating an American dictionary.
His first edition, published in 1806, was called A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and it contained the spellings and brief definitions of 37,000 English words, including thousands of new words that originated on the left side of the Atlantic, words like skunk and raccoon and moccasin (entered as “Moccason or Moggason”).
Webster wasn’t the first to refer to his word hoard as a dictionary. That word had been used in English to describe a reference work at least since the early 16th century, including in the titles of Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie (1623), Thomas Blount’s Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language, now used in our refined English tongue (1656), Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and Francis Grove’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788).
The word was apparently coined by John of Garland, a 13th-century English teacher, from the Latin dictio “speech, word.” There are quite a few dict words in English from the same source, such as edict (“to speak out”), contradict (“to speak against”), and benediction (“to speak well”). The adjectival form of dictio is dictionarius, meaning “of words.” In Medieval Latin, a book containing an ordered list of words was called a dictionarium (which might be a shortening of dictionarius liber), whence the English dictionary sprang.
Compendious is an interesting word. It traces to the Latin preposition com “with, together” and pendere “to hang, to weigh.” Compendium is literally “that which is weighed together,” but in Latin it meant “a shortening, a shortcut.” A compendium is a concise summary of a larger work or, more generally, a compilation of related things. The adjective compendious, then, was chosen to indicate Webster’s attempt to be both comprehensive but also brief.
And brief is a good word to describe the entries in Webster’s Compendious Dictionary, especially when compared with all the information found in dictionary entries today. The vast majority of entries are a single line on pages arranged in two columns. And while they are technically accurate definitions, they don’t always help the reader understand how to use the word. For example:
Definite, n. a thing defined or explained
Sailing, n. the act or art of sailing
Stoic, n. a philosopher of the sect of Zeno
Webster continued to collect, define, and compile words, and in 1828, at the age of 70, he published what is considered his magnum opus: An American Dictionary of the English Language, containing definitions for about 70,000 words. That the word American replaced Compendious in the title says a lot about his motivations. He was working toward a new edition when he died in 1843.
Webster famously simplified (corrected is the word he used) the common spellings of some entries based primarily on pronunciation, creating the separation between British English and American English that exists today. For example, his dictionary dropped the u from words like colour and honour. He also favored -ize over -ise in words like crystalize and emphasize, though he wasn’t wholly consistent.
Though Webster’s dictionary was widely popular in the United States, not everything he included was universally welcomed or adopted. Some of his spelling reforms simply didn’t take: For instance, he entered the word bedclothes into his dictionary as bedcloaths, sleigh as sley, and tongue as tung. He also included words that some found objectionable. In the December 27, 1828, issue of The Saturday Evening Post can be found this bit of snark:
Webster’s Dictionary has been issued from the press of Mr. Converse, the publisher. It is contained in two large quarto volumes, and is executed in a manner highly creditable to the press of our country. He introduces into his new dictionary as legitimate, the word lengthy. We should like to know whether his reasons for so doing are breadthy and strengthy.
Regardless of the criticisms, Webster’s lexical toils set the foundation for American dictionary scholarship that extends into modern times; the dictionaries of Merriam-Webster are the direct descendants of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language.
And that’s why October 16 — the anniversary of Noah Webster’s birth — is today celebrated by lexicographers, linguists, and logophiles as National Dictionary Day.
I have been really struggling lately. I keep saving comments to answer later that days go by I don’t get to. I keep saving them so I can reply. I have not announced it here on the Play Time but I finally made an appointment with a therapist.
When I made the appointment they asked a few questions and then tried to get me to come in the next morning. I said no. I just couldn’t deal with it. On top of the car just needing a new engine for 4 grand due to a faulty temperature sensor we had the van checked. It is 17 years old. It has a lot of small stuff wrong but each fix adds up and the total was two grand.
I am hardly sleeping and during the day the intrusive thoughts can get me struggling and crying. So what should only take me a few hours ends up taking me 6 to 8 hours. It is even more frustrating because my attention deficit disorder has increased to the point I can lose track of what I am doing or get switched over to something else almost without noticing so that I get pulled down rabbit holes until I see it.
Also I find sitting at the computer gets painful so I get up and do things like the dishes. Sadly I drive myself to the point I can’t stand or are near collapse. That happened last night. Ron was doing other things so I had the night before promised to take a small amount of mashed potatoes left over and fry it along with making him scrambled eggs. Then I did dishes at noon and right after I made a red sauce. I was exhausted and not able to stand by the time I got it done. Ron put the red sauce aside and made us the planned supper of chicken, pork, and beef chopped up for fajitas. But I could hardly eat.
Then Ron found me falling asleep at my desk I was so tired. Ron asked me as he helped me to get my nighttime meds and go to bed, Ron asked me if I had managed to get to the comments I had told him I saved. I just sighed. I told him I still have them saved and will get up in the morning and reply to them. I did not do that. I used to jump out of bed fully energized which always amazed Ron. Now I struggle to get up, often laying there for several hours hoping to go back to sleep. In the past I would get up in the middle of the night if I couldn’t sleep, but now I just lay there desperately hoping to sleep without a nightmare.
But this is not what this post is about.
I use a name not used by my abusers. The name they used for me was a slave name. You can see it used for one of the prominent characters in Roots. It was used to make me an it. I was often told how I got my name at age three. My first real memories are a bus ride next to a woman I did not know. I am told when she introduced me to the “family” one of my hell spawn female siblings ask “What do you call IT“ My new adoptive mother gave me the name normally given to slaves in the south as I understand. I never used it personally and hated it all my life.
Ron never used it even though they tried to get him to do so. They would use it to him to refer to me and he would pretend to not know who they were talking about. I guess good for me the name was not the one used on my birth certificate so as I got to move beyond their influence I could use my birth name and then when I got away from all their ability to influence or threaten me I modified my birth name to what I felt most comfortable. See the only time they used the real name was to mock me and so when I got the chance to choose my name for myself I did.
I am Scottie !!!
I love who Scottie is and think he is done very well with the life hand he was dealt. But all this is to explain why the series of cartoons by Sophie Labelle are so important to me. So here is the one by her that jogged me to make this post. I had tried to restrict posts about my abuse. But this was so on point I knew I had to do so. Sadly I had no father or other to help me find it, they hated that I demanded they call me by it. It caused me to hang up on them repeatedly when they would call me by my abused name. They finally did adjust when in their old age they needed me to help them. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 