Warning: Discusses abuse of minors, trauma, family violence and mental health crisis. Reader discretion advised.
By Paul Brzeski
Continued on from Part 1: End of Childhood
When morning came, I realised I had no plan so I went to the Freedom Centre and begged them for help. Due to my age, they had no avenue to protect me and had to call my parents to come and collect me. After what happened, I was able to negotiate my parents into accepting that I was there after school a few times a week – and I had a strict curfew of being home by 6pm.
I find it deeply troubling that my parents minds went to some fantasy that I was hanging out with paedophiles, when I was with a legitimate support group for LGBT youth with people my age, while they did nothing about an actual paedo who groomed me on the internet in their own home. To this day they haven’t once asked me why I at one point wanted to move to America to live with some stranger. Now that I’m older I suspect they always knew what was going on, they just lacked the maturity and intellect within themselves to even have a difficult conversation about it with their son.
I went back to the Freedom Centre as often as I could hoping to see Chester again, and one day he showed up and tried to avoid me. When he finally allowed me near enough to talk he told me off for coming to his place and that I was too young and immature to be with someone his age. In hindsight, I fully agree and respect him for trying to reason with my younger self – but obviously at fourteen I was heart broken. I remember crying a lot and feeling like the world was over.
Reflecting over two decades later on the intensity of the feelings I had for Chester, I still think I might have been in love, ever so briefly. Sure it was stupid unrequited puppy love – but it was real. And it was my first time falling for someone that way. I wish I’d had the wisdom to talk to one of the volunteers about what was going on with Chester instead of moving onto the next thing of telling my parents about who I was.
After about a month, I started to develop an interest in another friend I’d made at the centre – James (not actually his name). James was half Filipino and half white like me, but also three years older. Within the confines of the Freedom Centre, things never went anywhere but he did seem interested in me so one afternoon as the curfew my parents had mandated came I decided to stay a little longer so that I could spend a bit more time with James. This was going to cost me everything.
Eventually I came to my senses and left the Freedom Centre at 6pm, rather than being home for the time. The buses had stopped by that time so I walked home. It was only about 30-45 min walk and the sun was mostly out so I remember being in a good mood feeling like things weren’t so bad. As I crossed onto my street, I saw my mum pass me in the car and waved to her but she didn’t see me.
When I got home, my dad was furious at me saying my mum had just gone to go find me because I was late. I said I was sorry and that I missed the bus and had to walk home, and that I tried to wave at her when she passed me but she didn’t see me. As I settled into my room dad pulled out an extension cord and coiled it around his arm, I was a bit confused for a second but when I looked into his eyes I realised he intended to whip me with the cable. He then proceeded to do so while screaming at me – accusations of wanting him to do this, of wanting my mum to cry and go driving into the city looking for me. Obviously none of this is what I wanted, but he didn’t seem interested in my point so I grabbed the cable he was lashing me with and so he wrestled me over it and pushed me through the glass of my bedroom window.
After realising that he was potentially evenly matched in a fight with me, he screamed at me to get out and punched me in the face. I didn’t hit him back on that final slug to the temple nor did I even do anything during the entire incident but defend myself and try to get him to stop hitting me. It’s unthinkable to me to hit another person, let alone some fourteen year old kid. He told me that since I’m happy to run away, I should just stay away and not come back. I recall this as the moment my innocence came to an end, because my dad kicked me out of home.
Bruised, bleeding and crying, I walked back to the Freedom Centre and was of course greeted with nothing but compassion and concern. The lashes from the cable were particularly painful, probably exactly what my dad intended. The volunteers told me my mum had been there, rocked up at the front, honked at the buildings a few times before one of them told her I’d already left.
This whole thing was a stupid misunderstanding that my parents escalated to the worst possible place, much like they tended to do with each other in their fights with each other, but this time I was their target. With nowhere to go, James said I could come stay at his and so when the Freedom Centre closed that night I followed him home on the train.
When we got to James’s house, it turned out I’d gone from one unsafe house to another. James warned me his dad didn’t know he was gay and that I’d have to pretend to be a friend from his anime group JAFWA. Again, you’d have to be pretty stupid to not think your son bringing home another boy and sleeping in a tent in the backyard is nothing but suss but hey, ignorant people are ignorant.
As we were midway through the act, James said “I Love You!” which I naively believed. I was still getting over Chester but hearing that James felt love for me back made my heart plunge and I was in. I was really happy that night. The morning after, I felt like it was the beginning of a new life where anything was possible. James then said I probably need to find somewhere else to stay because his dad won’t accept me staying there and he wasn’t interested in a relationship with a younger guy; “You’re the same age as my little brother!” he said as he ripped my heart to pieces.
For a brief moment I’d trusted someone and he’d discarded me after sex, I didn’t understand how he could just say he loved me and toss me aside. Now that I’m an adult, I have a lifetime of experiences of guys just saying whatever they needed to get in my pants and then curiously having no other time for me, wasting my time. That day I had nowhere to go, so once again I went back to the Freedom Centre hoping for a lucky draw – maybe someone nice would be there who could offer me a place to stay if I seduced them. That afternoon heaven sent me an angel called Daniel.
It was a long train ride to his place – we went to the end of the line and then walked for a long time to get to the house he lived in with his dad. Thinking this would be the same as Chester and James, I fully expected to sleep in the same bed as Daniel. He was their age, 17, but somehow had a greater wisdom and maturity about him – he wasn’t just thinking with his penis. Daniel said I was too young to be with him and made a bed for me in a separate room. Too bad more people don’t have that kind of restraint with young people!
The next day, we went back to the Freedom Centre and were told my parents and the police had been there and that I didn’t have to go back to my parents – a family friend had volunteered to let me stay with them while we underwent family counselling. This was a really positive step and I was looking forward to a new mutual understanding with my family.
Staying with my godmother, I felt nothing but acceptance and care. It was a huge shock to my system when I told my god sister that I was gay and she just smiled and said “Is that all? Geez I thought you got a girl pregnant or something! I have lots of gay friends, don’t worry.”. That acceptance from within the social group attached to my family was the first time I realised my family wasn’t normal.
At the first counselling session with my parents, it was a relief to see that the psychologist was neutral and wasn’t there to convert me back to heterosexuality. A few weeks prior my dad had taken me to the family doctor who was Polish and she told me I would get HIV and then AIDS and then die young because of being gay.
Anyway, back at the psychologists the treatment plan seemed to be what I had hoped for – creating a new understanding with my parents. We left that building feeling like a family unit again, and I was welcomed back in the family home that night.
When we got home, my parents had a whole other plan in mind. My dad claimed I was only feeling confused about being gay because I wasn’t attracted to Australian girls and that if I lived in a country with nicer girls I would feel differently. So the offer was made – I could move to the Philippines and be as gay as I wanted there, he wagered that I would feel differently once I got there. What a load of male bovine excrement.
The family apartment was put on the market and we split in two – I went with my mum to the Philippines while my sister stayed back with dad to sell things off, or something. That whole time there felt like a dream – I initially cried a lot every day missing James even thought he’d used me, perhaps missing him because of that. I missed my nerdy friends from school and my old life.
After settling into a summer school course to enter main school, I would hang out at the mall before going home. There was a cute guy who worked at the bag check-in area and I asked him out one afternoon, we went to see a movie together on our first date. My mum was busy working at her business so I had a lot of autonomy with my where abouts, I thought it was safe. Certainly both parents had convinced me I was in the Philippines to be as gay as I wanted.
So once again I’d lost track of time with a cute Filipino guy and found myself in trouble. While we were in the cinema, my mum started messaging me asking where I was. Within minutes, she appeared in the aisles and shouted at me to come with her and created a scene so I left with her. The detective skills of an Asian mother are not to be taken lightly.
When we got back to our rented house, she gave me a huge lecture about how I’d failed to follow the plan to be straight here. I was confused, I asked what she meant and she said I wasn’t supposed to be gay here – that was just something they said to get me away from anyone that interfered with their control over me. I was horrified, I couldn’t believe that I’d given up my entire life for a lie and that I’d been trapped in another country with no support – so I did what I always did as a kid and retreated into technology and my own mind.
At some point my dad and sister came over, as part of the planned move. Things fell apart once they started to look at the logistics of living in a third world country, particularly for dad who didn’t see a way to buy a house or business that could sustain our lifestyle. My parents decided to break up, my mum would stay in the Philippines with me and my sister would be raised by dad in Australia. They never really explained what was going on, they just decided things and then did them.
So I was alone in the Philippines with my mum. Thankfully it was a great time to be a computer geek there – there were plenty of other nerds. I had a lot of friends at the internet café, playing Counterstrike every day after school and then crying at night about how my whole reality had been completely destroyed. I was able to attend school for a while but eventually my mum banned me from the internet café and I had no friends at school so I just I didn’t have the heart to leave the house anymore. Some of the boys at school threatened to bash me which didn’t help. It wasn’t a homophobia motivated threat, they just didn’t like me. After that, I just stayed home on my computer all day and my mum didn’t know what to say to stop me.
The months rolled on, I started to shift towards a more nocturnal schedule – preferring cooler air and quiet of the night. I didn’t have anyone to talk to anyway and the days were pointless, I remember playing so many games but Max Payne 1 & 2 particularly stood out to me. The mood, maybe. I started to work out every day and as my muscles grew the lack of sunlight made my skin paler. Eventually I was the lightest colour I’ve ever been in my life.
Feeling like some kind of vampire in a prison, I decided I had to change something so I decided to lie to my mum. If they could lie to me to trap me here, I could lie to them to get me out. Knowing that my mother had an all-consuming loathing for my father, I told her that I only said I was gay so we could get away from him. I still remember her knowing smile in agreement, as if she had been expecting this answer from me all along.
Keep reading in Part 3: Telling Stories