He totally turned into this monster
Jim, Michigan
Seems that sexual harassment laws are set for professional/educational types of instances. I know that it isn’t exclusive of public situations.
I was at a party with many friends and acquaintances. The crowd was of a swinger/sexually-experimental mindset..which was fine by me. Alcohol was involved. See also: other drugs.
I was standing in a circle with a small group of people conversing politely, and this gay guy asked me to kiss him. I said no. He asked again. I said no. He persisted still…he began to force himself onto me. Leaning into me. I told him to stop. He told me to kiss him. See, he totally turned into this monster.
The situation later fizzled out and nothing else happened. But I’ve never been the same around him or those people.
Thing is, now those friends won’t talk to me anymore. They know the situation and they tell me that he was just drunk and that’s how he is.
I have gay friends, but I now find myself judging gay men. I see some kind of similarity…as if they are all derived from the same archetype. I tell myself that this guy was just a sleaze. It makes me feel horrible because…because of him I mistrust the others.
I suppose that I just have to make sense of it to my own ability and move on. It sucks that my friends take his side..maybe they weren’t my friends after all. Grow.







January 28th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
I’m sorry that this happened to you. It sounds like you experienced two betrayals: one by the guy and one by your friends. Please remember that they are wrong. Even though you feel alone, you are not crazy!YOU ARE RIGHT! That guy shouldn’t have pushed himself on you - and the fact that he is a repeat offender (his friends justify his actions by saying ‘that’s just him’)doesn’t EXCUSE him! He needs some boundaries; and real frineds would help him find some.
The great irony about harassment is that the witnesses/by-standers won’t even admit that what they have seen is wrong. It adds a new layer of pain into an already painful experience for a community to tell you that you aren’t a victim. But WE know. WE believe you. You are safe here. The same thing has happened to alot of us. There are intellectual explanantions for that behavior, but before I would ask you to think about them, I want to reassure you that THEY ARE WRONG. That guy should have gotten off of you when you told him to. How tough is that?! And his friends should stand by you, the same way that they would hold him accountable for other crimes he might commit: mugging; burglary; etc. They wouldn’t excuse those crimes - they shouldn’t excuse this one.
I think that your new reaction to gay men is understandable. Lots of victims have a sense of hyper-vigilance after they are violated. Your mind is trying to protect you from a newly-identified source of danger, and the new level of vigilance around gay men is a manifestation of that. I understand from your story that this attitude is a change from what you had in the past. This change in attitude is just one more way in which your perpetrator has affected you. Does it feel like another loss? Another violation? It may be that couseling helps you over come this natural protective response, and you can feel that you have regained control back from your harasser. Be sure to read the cautions about counseling on this website.
I hope that you experience a complete recovery, whether with some counseling or not. You deserve to feel safe again, even if you have a new level of wisdom about the dark side of life. There is a lot of safety and care too. I hope you find it.