Thank you for taking the time to write that. A few last thoughts for this exchange:
The vigil was organized by those who wished to gather together and express their sadness over Channing’s death, not to protest his existence. Someone upthread raised a question about whether any of those who showed up at the vigil had been among those who taunted Channing online after he was outed and were now trying to cover their tracks with a public display of apparent grief; at this point I don’t know enough to draw conclusions, but I’d say that that horrifying thought cannot be ruled out.
I’d also like to say that I am sickened and horrified that you were subjected to what your uncle did to you-things like that happened to people in my family, including the woman I was married to(she passed away in 2004, for unrelated reasons). Please read the next few words I’m going to write here very, very carefully, because your mental wellness may depend on you understanding them-what your uncle did to you is not “bisexuality”; it is pedophilia(and now I understand why you were thinking of that). Your uncle’s actions had nothing to do with whatever sexual orientation he had regarding adults, and what he did was not, in any sense, your fault or in any sense deserved by you. And pedophilia is not a sexual orientation; it a disorder within the psyches of those those who feel those compulsions and an unspeakable betrayal against those they assault, such as yourself. I truly hope you are able to find support and healing, because you have been wounded in ways you have not as yet fully understood and you cannot process what has been done to you on your own.
The scientific/medical consensus now is that sexual orientation is innate, that it is not a choice. And it cannot be reversed through stigma or repression; it cannot be forced into hiding; and nothing healthy comes to people forced to try and hide their sexual orientation by society or to the society which imposes such repression on people.
The salient fact is that Channing felt utterly alone in the face of betrayal and the prospect of ostracism or perhaps violence. It simply isn’t for another person to say that he should have been able to tough it out or that he wasn’t as alone as he felt. None of us were in Channing’s head when this betrayal occurred and none of us are entitled to judge this young man.
You appear to be open to learning about this range of issues. At some point, after you have finished processing the trauma your uncle inflicted on you-btw, if he called what he did “bisexuality”, the man was not only sexually assaulting you, he was lying to you on an epic scale, probably to deflect the anger he knew you would eventually feel about his actions onto an entire group of other people-people who had nothing to do what what your uncle did and bore no responsibility for it-after finding closure on that-I don’t think you are emotionally ready to go to this next place until you do-you should read up on the actual life experiences of LGBTQ people-specifically, how THEY would characterize the origins of their orientations, how they respond to the assertion that sexual orientation is a choice-a lot of them spent years emotionally torturing themselves in desperate and futile efforts to cease being LGBTQ,
May you heal, and may you learn.
