My son, did you read about that gay boy who committed suicide?
Reflections of Ale and EDA published on Huffingtonpost.itApril 28, 2015
A few days ago, I went to see my parents. After my father's retirement, they moved out of Rome, near Cerveteri, aging they opted for a healthier lifestyle, a house with a garden, a small vegetable garden, ovary hens and two dogs. Over the years the radical choice has proved winning, today they are a beautiful pair of eighty -year -olds, sober and relaxed.
Several months had passed since the last time we had lunch together only the three. At the table between a plate of spaghetti and an omelette, the vicissitudes of relatives and family friends summarized me, then my mother gets up to prepare coffee and with worried tone says to me: "Have you read that fourteen -year -old gay boy who suicide?". "Yes, mom, I read." Screwing the moka, puts it on the fire and continues: “Sometimes I think about it, I think of the sad world that we are leaving us old, young people never learn from the mistakes and shortcomings of adults; if a young man takes his own life, it is because before it has been excluded and has not been put in a position to express himself freely".
My father takes the floor: “We, that you were homosexual, had understood it since you were small; we were worried, we didn't have the tools to face this and we deluded ourselves that it was not true, until they want to believe that our certainties were only wrong sensations. However, this happened more than thirty years ago and knowing that in Italy there are still parents who are not able to understand and reassure their gay children I am sorry! " As I returned home, I noticed that a Magrolino boy was pushed and made fun of by a group of peers. "" Ugly gay, do you think he is a female? You suck, you're sick! " Gay dirty! ".
I approached myself, I was afraid and they sweated my hands, but I still started screaming against him: "Shame you! Leave him lose it, you are many and he is alone, go away!". I told him badly and them, after telling me a few dirty sparse, left. The boy with his eyes full of tears looked at me for a few moments and then ran away. "I finish drinking coffee and I look at her, my mother, young heroine of the weakest. But there is one thing that does not square me in this story and I tell him smiling:" Mom, it is difficult for me to think that in a Roman village of the 1940s they used the gay word! " A bad word, born to offend; It is a word that embarrasses me, even just in saying it, especially in front of you who are my son and that I love you so much ".
Returning home, an anecdote came to me too, who after my father's words, detects in a clearer way. I was also fourteen, I attended the first year of the art institute and I was fascinated by the punk movement. Like many kids, I experienced a possible social identity, bringing hair with a small red crest. One day my uncle, addressing my father, present with me, did he say "But is your son tinged his hair? Will he be a fagot?!". Those words came to me like a beating in the face: I had been discovered, I didn't know how to react, my father looking at me fixed in the eyes, he replied in a dry and hard way: "My son is just a boy and he can do what he wants!". Then, by turning his gaze towards my uncle, he added: "I don't like that you use these terms in front of him".
During my adolescence, i happened To have repeatedly made fun of, humiliated and feel deeply oppressed. but that Trust that my father had agreed to me in "being Able to do what i wanted" and that understanding in his gaze were a solid foothold for Me. a foam that helped me strengthen and test myself; a foam that has helped to avoid that, in moments of despair and bewilderment, i decided to end it.
