Author: silentbutcudly@hotmail.com

Queer as Hell by Justin F. Robinette

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Queer As Hell is a queer horror anthology by MTL.

However, it lacked in both the horror and queerness. Most of the stories only had a fantasy/paranormal element, and the queerness was rarely more than subtext. Also, many of the stories ended just as they were getting interesting, leaving you feeling cheated.

While there were a few stories I enjoyed, such as Attachments, by Justin F. Robinette, in which a ghost haunts his former lover who spurned him; and HUSAVGUD, by Bernardo Villella, in which a gay man must face his past to move ahead; most of the stories were forgettable.

Overall, I felt this anthology failed to deliver on both the horror and queer aspects and pulled a bait and switch. I give Queer As Hell 2.0 out of five stars and don’t recommend you read it.

View all my reviews

Introduction

Welcome!

Today’s post will explore my coming of age and sexual awakening. Unlike today where being LGBTQ+ is mostly accepted, back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, being gay was the worst thing imaginable, especially if you were Black. So much so it was the go-to insult on the schoolyard.

Growing up, all I heard was how awful and gross being LGBTQ+ was and what few depictions of them in the media weren’t flattering. So, as a young Black queer boy it was rough, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Confessions of a Pervy Kid

 To put it lightly, I’ve had a complicated relationship with sex and sexuality.

I was a toddler when I saw my first porno. The way my parents tell the story, they’d rented Pinocchio from the video store, but instead of the Disney classic, the store gave them the X-rated version, and it wasn’t until they came to check on me and the other kids because we were suspiciously quiet that they discovered the mistake.

Fast forward a bit and I was now two going on three and my parents had left me home alone, as they often did in those days.

I was a curious kid prone to exploring, and while searching in the closest I found a videotape. Thinking it was one of my cartoon tapes, I popped it into our VCR and on came a porno.

I still remember it to this day; the premise was a busty blonde didn’t know how to deep throat, so she employed a hung Black guy to teacher her how. There I was enthralled, lying on my stomach, feet kicked up in the air, watching them go at it, when my dad came home from work. He saw what I was watching and tore my ass up.

Thus began my perennial mission to seek out all things sex related.

You Show Me Yours I’ll Show You Mine

When I was a bit older, me and another boy from our apartment played you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Recalling the event, it wasn’t sexually so much as out of curiosity.

 Jumping forward a bit, I was now five, and we’d moved to Detroit.

One day, a girl from up the street took me behind some bushes and flashed me her privates; I did the same, and that was the end of that.

TW: Child Sexual Abuse

Following this, my Uncle Pat’s girlfriend’s son, who was a few months younger than me, began molesting me and my brother.

 It started with I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Then he taught us how to masturbate by rubbing ourselves against stuffed animals. Next, it progressed to oral sex and sitting on his penis. I didn’t know what to do because the only thing I’d been told regarding child sex abuse was the abuser was an adult stranger, not family.

I now know this type of abuse is common in the Black community, though rarely spoken of.

However, back then, I didn’t know how to process it. And as often happens, I abused others, namely a boy visiting one of our neighbors. I’ll spare you the details and just say it involved penetration.

Rightly so, his parents were livid and banded me from being around him, and I got the requisite ass whooping from my parents.

Jumping forward a bit, my family and I were now living with my dad’s mother in the house next to her old one while we waited for the land lady to transfer things over to my parents. I was snooping in my parents’ room when I found my mom’s playgirl magazine.

I was oblivious to everything as I thumbed through the pages and didn’t hear the door opening. Betty, my father’s mother, saw what I was reading and beat my ass with a wooden paddle so hard it broke. My dad being a huge mama’s boy, said nothing about this and I went on my way to explore the empty house next door.

I found my Uncle Pat’s massive collection of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. I spent a couple of hours perusing them, and when I came how my mom asked if I’d enjoyed looking at those porn mags. I acted like I didn’t know what she was talking about, as I didn’t want another whooping.

In hindsight, the clues I was bisexual were all over the place, but more on that later.

Shortly thereafter, I had my first case of Steven’s-Johnson syndrome, which you can read about here, and all thoughts of anything not hospital related left my mind until I hit puberty.

Cumming of Age

Over the years, it became a habit of mine to sus out my dad’s porn collection, only for him to discover this and beat my ass. My brother and Uncle pat’s girlfriend’s son got in the act too; at one point when I’d discovered a porno tape, one of them would stand guard for my mom while two of us watched the tape.

But in between that, I came of age.

 Due to all the steroids given to me to reduce the swelling in my airway from the allergic reaction I mentioned above, by eleven I could ejaculate and had tons of pubic hair, and it was around this time that I had my first inklings I wasn’t straight.

There was a teenage boy in our neighborhood who would play with us younger kids, and I remember being infatuated with him to the point I got hella jealous when he played with anyone but me.

 Looking back, I was totally crushing on him.

 It was also around this time I had my first serious crush on a girl. I was about twelve and she was in the grade below me, so we only got to see each other in the few classes we shared. I was super shy and never worked up the courage to confess my feelings to her. But the worst part was everyone knew how I felt and teased me about it. I think is partially why I have approach anxiety with asking people out.

A Whole New World

The summer I turned thirteen, a whole new world opened to me when I got a PC and internet access.

It was 1997, the days of dial up, AIM, and 56k modems. Like any horny teen, I promptly found my way to porn sites, but given the limitation of the technology at the time, I found it faster to read my porn than watch it.

It never crossed my mind that I was mainly reading gay erotica, or that there was anything wrong with that, until the guys in my age group all started talking about hooking up with girls.

 Now like then, I’m more attracted to men than women, but because of bi erasure and biphobia I thought I had to hide my attraction to guys.

But over the years, those stories I found online became a lifeline to me, and eventually inspired me to become a writer.

Time passed and I and one of my friends started messing around. Truthfully, it was purely sexual as had been all my attractions to guys up to then.

I’d only experienced romantic attractions to girls until the summer I turned fourteen.

The Day the World Changed

The summer between eighth and ninth grade marked many changes.

I had my first major depressive episode and lost interest in everything save my computer, video games, and Dragon Ball Z, all things D liked too. He was my brother’s friend originally, then we became friends over games of Rival Schools, Tekken, and other such PlayStation games. Because my brother had chosen that summer to start running the street, D would be at our house waiting for him.

This was before cell phone were ubiquitous, so it wasn’t like he could call or text him to see where he was at. With D being two grades below me, I was reluctant to give him the time of day, as I was about to be a high school guy.

But it turned out we had a lot of the same interests and the same pervy sense of humor. Over episodes of Dragon Ball Z we bonded, and without me even realizing it, I fell for him hard.

This hit me for a loop as one day we were just chilling and the next I’m wanting to kiss the dude. I hid my feelings and tried to act normal around, but it was torture. I crushed on him all throughout high school, but I never acted on my feelings.

 It’s a good thing too, as he’s straight, lol.   

Stay tuned next week for part 2.

Introduction

Welcome!

This is the next post in my ongoing series of autobiographical stories. TW: this post deals with the physical abuse of minors and descriptions of medical trauma. Reader discretion is advised.

Readers Are Leaders

Growing up, my dad read to me often and even made up his own stories. As a result, I’m a lifelong reader and bibliophile. However, today I’m going to talk about a time when the library became a source of pain and horror for me. I’d just turned six years old, and my class went to our school’s library for the first time.

For legal reasons, I’ll refer to the librarian involved in this story as Mr. M.

I’d taken my seat when the boy next to me kicked me. I kicked him back and Mr. M told us to knock it off. A few minutes passed when the boy kicked me again. I kicked him back and the next thing I knew, Mr. M pulled me out of my seat and threw me headfirst into a bookshelf. I remember him pulling me from my seat and throwing me, then being pulled backward, but the impact is a blank.

Then he made me stand with my arms out like Jesus on the cross for the rest of the hour. In the days after he assaulted me, I didn’t remember anything of it, but luckily a neighbor girl who lived up the street from us saw the whole thing and told my parents.

The school started an investigation but allowed Mr. M to continue working.

The next week, while my class went to the library, I stayed behind and had my first seizure. My parents took me to the hospital and after running tests, they diagnosed me with epilepsy and after an MRI they found a cystic mass above my right temporal lobe at the site of the impact.

They started me on antiseizure meds and scheduled surgery to remove the mass, but a week before surgery I caught strep throat and the doctors prescribed me penicillin, even though my parents told them penicillin allergies ran on both sides of the family.

This was back in the early ‘90s when the only insurance we had was Medicaid, so they forced us to go to the doctors they assigned us. Said doctors told my parents not to worry, and they listened to them.

They shouldn’t have.

A Year-And-A-Half of Hell

The combination of antiseizure meds and penicillin triggered the first and most severe allergic reaction of my life: Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (TEN, NSFW pictures in link). Initially, I developed a red blotchy rash and flu-like symptoms. My parents took me back to the doctors, who said there was nothing wrong with me.

 But I only got worse as the days passed.

 Week after week, my dad kept taking me to them, only to be told I was fine while I got weaker, and my fever soared.

Two months into this, I ran a fever of 103-104F and not even an ice bath could break it, so at my Uncle Stanley’s suggestion, my parents took me to Children’s Hospital in Detroit.

Within five minutes, they’d diagnosed me with Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS, a less severe form of TEN). The next thing the ER docs did was cover me in icepacks to break my fever. It worked, but the sudden change in body temperature caused me to go into shock and I flatlined.

What I remember most from the time I was clinically dead is the absolute silence and darkness I found myself in, the utter nothingness. I later learned it took them over forty-five minutes to get a stable pulse, but to me, it seemed like only seconds had passed.

When you get defibrillated, it feels like being slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer. And when your heart doesn’t restart, you gain momentary consciousness until the charge dissipates.

Then it’s back to nothingness.

Once they stabilized me and took me to the ICU, they started me on a new antiseizure med that made me hallucinate a giant spider was trying to eat me. I tore my bedding to shreds trying to get away from it and that sparked a lifelong aversion to spiders.

False Hope

I spent the next three months in the ICU and appeared to get better, so they moved me to a regular room, then released me the week before Christmas.

 Everyone at my dad’s job pitched in to buy me presents, including the brand-new Game Boy, all of which my roommate stole while I was at a magic show the hospital put on.

A week after being released, I started having breathing problems and my parents rushed me back to the ER.  

Over the coming weeks my breathing got worse and my skin began to peal, until I’d eventually lost over eighty percent of my epidermis and had damage to my lungs and windpipe. I had to be put on a vent and slipped into a coma for six months.

Rude Awakenings

I came to a few days before my seventh birthday, which we celebrated in the ICU with an Oreo ice cream cake. But the vent tube was the only thing holding things in place, so when they removed it, my air way collapsed, and they had to do an emergency tracheotomy.

When I regained consciousness three weeks later, I now had a breathing tube and I couldn’t talk well, as my vocal cords had accidentally been severed, rendering me effectively mute.

Because of the length of my coma, I had to relearn how to walk and how to communicate. I spent months in rehab and months more waiting for my parents to complete training how to take care of me.

Those first months were the hardest as I was full of displaced anger and lashed out at everyone, blaming them for what happened to me. Then I turned that anger inward, viewing what happened to me as divine retribution for my deviant sexuality (a tale for another time).

A New Beginning

When I finally went home for good, they homeschooled me for a while; a private tutor came to our house once a week and spent most of her time grading my work and didn’t teach me much of anything.

After a few months of this, I started third grade at a school for kids with disabilities like mine. Being the new kid and not being able to talk well made school a living hell. I kept to myself as the other kids didn’t want to work with me, and they would glare daggers at me whenever our teacher made them work with me.

And so my life settled into a pattern: I’d get sick and go into the hospital for a few months at a time, come out, have surgeries on my airway only for them to fail, rinse, repeat. I had anger issues for years and acted out by destroying things and getting into fights with my younger siblings.

Again, it being the ‘90s, my parents didn’t put me into therapy and instead beat my ass with a thick brown leather belt. And when that ceased to make me behave, they’d threatened to relinquish to the state, which gave me abandonment and intimacy issues that I’m still working through today.

As for Mr. M? My parents sued him, and it came to light he’d abused two other students, breaking one’s arm and the other’s leg. They fired him from his job and he lost his limo business.    

And the doctors responsible for my allergic reaction? When I was 12 my parents settled a malpractice lawsuit with them out of court for an undisclosed amount.

I’ve led quite the life for one not even forty. I still have my breathing tube, and while there have been talks of trying to reverse it, right now I’m content with the status quo. Medical technology has advanced a lot since my initial reaction. Who knows?

Maybe I’ll get rid of it yet.   

Conclusion

Thanks for reading and let me know if you want more of these stories.

What early childhood events have shaped you? How did you react?

Let me know in the comments.

Introduction

Welcome!

This is the second post in an ongoing series of autobiographical stories about my coming of age in the metro Detroit area.

Let me set the stage.

The year was 1989, and I’d just left the only home and friends I’d known back in West Germany. Because of the chaos caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall, my father’s discharge from the military got jammed up, so for the first six months of our stay in the US, it was just me, my mom, brother, and sister.

Having spent most of my life oversea in a tiny mountain town, coming to Michigan was a huge cultural shock. Back in Bindlach, no one cared that I and my siblings were biracial, but upon coming to Detroit I got racist comments like oreo, zebra, and worse, hurled at me. But the worst of it came from my father’s mother (whom to this day I refuse to call my grandmother) and my uncles.

The House that Betty Anne Built

 When we arrived in the US, we stayed with my father’s mother in Northwest Detroit (Six Mile and Grand River). Her house was a two-bedroom affair that we squeezed ten people in (eleven when my dad joined us). With so many people in such a small house, we were all over each other, and it was hell.

My father was the only one with a steady job, so money and food were in short supply, so much so, you had to guard your food when you ate to stop others from taking it right off your plate. To make matter worse, my three uncles (all in their 30s) would spend what money they had on the daily lotto and weed.

We were on welfare during this time and while this helped us greatly, my uncles would eat up all the food in the house when they got the munches, so there were days we only had slices of bread or nothing at all to eat.

Betty Anne was a self-proclaimed Baptist preacher and from the moment we moved in with her, she spewed all this bullshit about how white people were the devil and us being half white made us unclean and less than fully Black people like her. My Uncle Stan got in the act too, constantly spouting off about how the (white) man kept Black people down and how they needed to separate themselves from whites.

If that wasn’t bad enough, her house was infested with roaches and my Uncle Patrick’s on-again off-again girlfriend Penny would steal my brother’s and mine clothes for her son, which prompted my mom to label our clothes with permanent markers. But this did little to stop Penny from taking them.

I never understood why Betty treated us like shit while she doted on Penny’s son and his half-siblings, all of whom were biracial too.

But c’est la vie.

My dad was the oldest of Betty’s kids but was and still is a complete momma’s boy and let her walk all over us and I resented him for the longest time for this.

A Silver Lining

School was an escape for me, and it was there I met my first friend since coming to Detroit. My teacher Ms. Mally was awesome, and I still remember the clean up song she made us sing when we put away our toys.

 One day at recess, I got into a fight with another kid and bit him. They called my mom up to the school and had a meeting about it, and that was how I met Wenderryl McKenzie. As young kids are wont to do, we squashed our beef and became fast friends, which made things at home less sucky.

Then things turned for the better. The people in the house next to Betty’s moved and she and my uncles moved into it, leaving my family to live in her old house. The process took a few weeks, but by the end I had my own room and wasn’t crowded anymore. With only five mouths to feed instead of eleven, food wasn’t as scarce and I didn’t have to worry about guarding my plate while I ate, but it took me years to break that habit.

Even though we no longer lived with her, Betty still had a hold over my dad and whenever they were short on money for rent or other bills, she hit him up. This caused friction between my parents, so much so that they separated, and my mom took us to live with her friend Kay up north in Otter Lake, Michigan.

Otter Lake

Kay’s house was a ranch style two-bedroom, and we lived with her and her teenage son for several months. She had diabetes, and a highlight of the day was when she drank a juice because she’d let one of us finish it.

As with any change, it took time to adjust, and one of the biggest changes was going from being surrounded by a ton of other Black kids to being the only one in my class. The kids and my teacher were nice enough, but I missed Wenderryl and Ms. Mally, and my dad.

To help ease the transition, my mom would take us to the gas station near Kay’s house and let me play on their Super Mario Bros. arcade machine. I remember getting so frustrating at not being able to beat it, that I’d give myself nose bleeds.

I also recall that she had satellite TV and how I’d stay up late watching soft-core porn, among other things.

As for Kay’s son Jeremy(?), he tolerated me, even though I followed him around like a lost puppy. At the time I thought he was a jerk for ignoring me, but in hindsight, who could blame him for blowing me off? What teenager in their right mind wants to hang with a five-year-old?

Eventually my parents reconciled, we moved back to Detroit, and I started first grade with my all-time favorite teacher, Mrs. K.

For a while, things were good, then my class took their first trip to our school’s library, setting off a chain reaction of events that forever changed my life.

But that’s a story for another time.

Conclusion

Let me know if you like these stories as I have more to tell.

What were your early years like?

Let me know in the comments.

Description

 His full name is Jason Jordan Miller. He’s 16, 5’7, 185 lb, with light brown hair and green eyes. He has buck teeth and constantly wears a beat-up Tigers’ cap.

Personality

 Jason is a carefree, practical joker and a major fuck boy. An underachiever, he’s more concerned with socializing with friends than doing his work at school and has the habit of putting off assignments until the last minute. He can also be an asshole and take things too far. Jason is also obsessed with money, power, and fame and always has a plan going to get all three.

Likes

 He loves video games, hooking up with anything that moves, sleeping in, and pulling pranks on people and posting them on social media. He loves being the center of attention and can be egotistical, high jacking conversations to talk about himself. He’s also big into weed and drinking. He also enjoys working out with David, Lance, and Matt; and loves crypto, NFTs, and day trading.

Dislikes

Jason hates responsibilities, doing boring assignments and homework, and not getting his way. He also hates having his authority challenged and anyone calling him on his BS.  

Goals

 His number one goal is to have as much fun as possible and sleep with as many people as he can. Second, he wants to become a journalist and report on celebrities and sports.

Desires

 Jason desires sex, fun, and living life to its fullest, and screw the consequences.  

Fears

He fears intimacy, being “trapped” and having to become a responsible adult and being poor.

Morality/Religious Beliefs

Jason is Catholic but doesn’t take his faith too seriously. Morally, he’s hedonistic and libertine, caring only for his pleasure and freedom.

Political Alignment

Politically, he’s a libertarian.

Thanks for reading. Next week’s post will be the second in my series of autobiographical tales about growing a QPOC in the Midwest.

Welcome!

Introduction

This is the first in what I plan to be a recurring series of autobiographical stories.

From the time I was born until age five, I was a military brat; my father worked vice for the military police, and I spent the first years of my life at the Christensen Barracks in Bindlach, West Germany, AKA The Rock. It was called so because it was a tiny town in the Bavarian mountains with only one main road that wound around the side of the mountain.

‘80s baby

Like many kids in the ‘80s, I was left to my own devices for much of the time as both my parents worked, and as kids are wont to do, I found ways to entertain myself. I’d explore our apartment and the surrounding environs, hang out with other kids in the neighborhood, and do typical kids’ stuff like have sleepovers and go to Sunday school.

One vivid memory I have of The Rock is the Christmas I found a snail outside and one of our neighbors gave me a glass container shaped like a Christmas tree to put it in and I proceeded to show it off to all my friends. One of my guy friends whose name I can’t recall had some red food coloring and put it on himself pretending it was blood.

While running up and down the stairs, I slipped, the glass container shattered, and a chunk of it pierced my left side just above my hip. My parents rushed me to the hospital, but on the way there the engine of my dad’s Nissan caught fire and he had to extinguish it with my mom’s can of Pepsi. Afterward it wouldn’t start, so he carried me the rest of the way to the hospital, all the while blood was running down my side.

Once at the hospital, the doctor jammed his fingers into the wound to fish out glass fragments and sutured me up.

Birds and the Bees

   A fonder memory I have is when my sister was born.

I was three when my mother had my sister Sherrie (my brother Jamarr having been born thirteen months previously, six months premature and in the NICU all the while). My father took me to see them right after my mom gave birth and I remember being struck by how light-skinned my sister was (is still is) as she could pass for white. I also recall that my mom had fried chicken with vanilla ice cream and a Pepsi for dinner that night.

While my parents had told me I was getting a new sibling, and showed me an animated vhs tape about the birds and the bees with anatomically correct names of genitalia, it came as quite the shock to me when my parents brought home two babies instead of the one I saw.

I wasn’t happy going from an only child to the oldest.

But that’s life, lol.

There was also the time the twin girls in the apartment upstairs from us got chicken pox and my mom made me and Jamarr go play with them so we could get it too. Our case was severe, and I still have scars from where I scratched myself raw in places.

Then there was the year on my dad’s birthday when all the adults ganged up on him and striped him naked as a joke.

But the best memory from The Rock I have is of my next-door neighbor and BFF.

You Got a Friend in Me

My best friend at that time was a boy named Marcus, and he, I, and his older sisters would play house together. And he and I would play games on his computer (a commodore 64 if I recall correctly). His family and mine would also go on trips together to the beach and PX.

We and a few of the other kids in the neighborhood would hang out at the playground together and regale each other with the curse words we’d learned since our last meetup.

Being such a small town and me being so young, I thought everyone was like my family: a Black dad and a white mom. It wasn’t until we came stateside in ’89, shortly before my fifth birthday and the fall of the Berlin Wall, that I learned differently.

But that’s a story for another time.

We moved to Detroit to live with my father’s mother, and I came down with rubella. Marcus’s family moved stateside too (to Minnesota if I recall correctly), but with it being the era before social media or the internet we lost contact and I’ve never spoken to or seen him or any of the other kids from The Rock since.

Truthfully, I never had any friends later in life like the ones I did back then.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this piece. Let me know if you want more of these stories as I have tons more to share.

You’ll be the death of me.

Another season has come and passed.

Another pointless fight,

Another sleepless night,

Another reason this can’t last.

Another birthday; man we’re growing old fast.

Another evening of screaming and weeping.

Another reason for ending this.

Another reason I’m done with this hot mess.

Another chance to start anew.

I’m sick of you.

No more time to see this through.

I was such a fool,

But now I’m free of you.

Here’s to the death of the old me.