JESUSLAND

[max sg]

JESUSLAND
by Max Gordon
November 23, 2004

There is a thirteen-year-old boy in America who walks to school this morning. He believes he is a pervert because he is sexually attracted to a boy in his class. Undressing in the locker room for gym, he is terrified he will get an erection or his friends will notice him staring at the other boys and call him a homo.

At night, he lies in bed. He promised God he wouldn't look at pictures of naked men having sex anymore, but he did it again after school. As a punishment, he pinches his penis between his fingernails until he breaks the skin. He believes the pain is good for him. It is only a fraction of the pain that sinners feel when they go to hell, or what Jesus must have felt on the cross.

He sits in church on Sunday and knows the priest is referring to him: deviants whose unnatural desire will keep them from entering the Kingdom of God. When he takes communion, he prays that God will heal the sickness inside him and make him clean and perfect like his Son. He promises to try even harder not to sin than he's ever tried before.

After failing again, he decides he has no more tries left in him. He cannot stop the thoughts or change them. He believes God is disgusted with him and that He refuses to help. He stands looking in the bathroom mirror and wonders if he is what a homo looks like. He thinks of his youngest sister coming home from kindergarten with school papers tucked under her arm, and wonders if the boy from his class is in bed sleeping. He lifts his father's gun and shoots himself in the head.

On January 2, 1997, 14-year-old Robbie Kirkland committed suicide after struggling with his homosexuality for four years. His mother said at the time, "Our family loved, supported and accepted him but could not protect him from the rejection and harassment he experienced at his Catholic schools." On May 8, 1995, Bill Clayton, 17, took a fatal overdose after being hospitalized for depression. He'd been assaulted by a group of boys in his community because of his sexual orientation. Jacob Lawrence Orosco, 17, hanged himself on September 3, 1997, in his mother's home. When Jacob and nine of his friends tried to form a Gay/Straight student alliance at his school, a group of students at a nearby high school formed SAFE-Students against Fags Everywhere.

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