of the Westboro's ilk. I milked this for some healing catharsis.
Long before this so called "church" rose to national fame, A brief but significant encounter with Fred Phelps and some of his extended family turned my teenage life to shit at 16 years old. I'd been "outed" as gay in the small, rural mining town my parents had moved me to. There were some local Phelps family in the community. Not long after it had become obvious that I had become a singular object of scorn and continual bullying, one of the local Phelps kids my age invited me to a "party in my honor". He said his uncle wanted to meet me and talk to me.
Okay, I knew something was a little off here, but I went just to satisfy my curiosity. It was horrifying. As soon as I walked into the door of their household, there stood Fred Phelps, angrily condemning me to hell for all eternity. All the rest in attendance stood around me chanting weird phrases such as "burn in hell, fag".
I didn't stick around long. I just shook the whole thing off as extraordinary. But it didn't stop there.
From that day on the bullying escalated at school. One of the members of the same local "church" had been preaching at my father daily. At first, my dad expressed his annoyance with this, but with persistence, my father became more distant and neglectful.
I'm going to try to make a long story short here: the whole thing is a novel I've finished but haven't copyrighted or published.
But the jest I'll share here is that the local Westboro-ilk convinced my father to attempt to murder me. He very nearly succeeded.
And it was the reason I ran away from home at 16. I became afraid for my own life to be hanging around that community any longer, and justifiably so. I left early in the school year, before winter hit. I dumpster dived. I slept in cardboard boxes under freeway trees and bridges. I soon learned to sell myself on Polk street. It was there, however that I became very ill from a black widow spider that had bitten me, and a kindly old man took me in and kept me as his houseboy for nearly a year.
I'm scared all over again. Trump's election and the quick-to-judge and prosecute mentality that did so has pushed all my PTSD buttons all over again. I recall that Thanksgiving as a hungry vagrant who had nothing to eat but some shortbread cookies I had dug from the dumpster.
Here, finally would be one of their bunch who possibly would listen and comprehend the real consequences I largely blame them for. Congratulations, Megan for overcoming the brainwashing you'd been subjected to. i doubt you are even old enough to know some of the horrid malevolence your family initiated.
But if I could sue that entire organization for the pain, suffering, starvation and impoverishment that the Phelpses and ilk caused me, I would not hesitate one moment to do so.
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