Let's say you have a father. He finds out without a doubt that his son was raped and infected intentionally with the HIV virus. Then he finds out that the plan to rape his son was long and drawn out and it included the use of police officers that arrested and jailed him. Once he was jailed his home was then robbed and he was in custody without the ability to call his mother because our dear friend, Laurie (that's sarcasm), forwarded his mother's phone so he couldn't call her.
The father is, at first enraged, but then becomes far more concerned with the plight of two women that knew about his sons rape and did nothing to stop it or warn them about it. They didn't get involved. Like Jodi Foster's cheering squad on the side of the pinball machine in "The Accused", they did nothing but somehow managed to capture the complete attention of the father, even to the point of forgetting about his own son's rape and the rapes of all of his friends. The cheerleaders became the favorites and the victims became the enemies...because they didn't help any of them. Even the father forgot about his son's friends, ignored him and for six or seven or eight years that son had to sit and watch while the women that knew he got raped got more attention from attorneys, parents, friends and everyone else...he got none.
"Me, me, me," the girls cried to the over-sympathetic father.."forget them, think about us." Until he did.
Meanwhile the friends of the young man whose father refused to help him turned to his friends whom had all been raped and forgotten too. Knowing that we wouldn't ever be treated the same by anyone anywhere, we banded together to let each other know that even though a father can forget what happened, we won't. It couldn't have been a worse case scenario for the boys whom made up 99.99% of this crime to have to sit and watch the two women that did nothing and told people to "do nothing" get all the attention and all of the praise for their non efforts. It made the boys sick to their stomachs wondering just how far these attorneys would go to make gay male victims look worse than ever. Diminishing the role of gay males even farther than Laurie was ever able to accomplish, this lawyer managed to push every single person that helped other people out of the way in favor of the two step sisters that nobody liked.
To make matters worse, the two women acted like they deserved all the attention sharing the spotlight with nobody but themselves. Every minute of every day was spent trying to make the ugly stepsisters into beautiful swans...sometimes the ugly is way underneath. When asked to help their male counterparts to try to redeem their reputations their response was "Why? we're getting everything we want...why should we." And the father continued to ignore the anger from the crowd of me that he shunned for the two women he felt sorry for, but nobody else did.
On the surface the girls pretended to care about other people, but behind closed door and in whispered conversations they did nothing to find the woman that raped the gay men, for if they found and arrested her, the women wouldn't be able to pretend they were so wonderful any longer. Having been shoved out of the way by the two women that pretended to be "my friend" then secretly sabotaged any chance I had of escaping this crime, the women wondered what it would be like if everyone really knew how deceitful they'd been. How absolutely grimy the two crawled into the picture without shame or dignity. They simply overwhelmed everyone...and then told the rest to fuck off with a smile.
The men then did something even more amazing. They dropped the father and his ignorance and decided that men don't need a father, they need each other. They don't need his feigned concern and lies that never ever reach any of us. They didn't need his bullshit excuses for not allowing the men to talk to each other and support each other. They no longer needed his money or his fame because all of that was what the women wanted. We wanted to count...they wanted to count money.
The son learned a very valuable lesson from all of this. Some women cut you with a knife and some cut you with your father's knife...both hurt. The son screamed, "Pay attention Dad! Pay attention! I want you to be the kind of dad that everyone said saved my friends...dad? Dad? Where did you go...?" You see the son couldn't keep the attention of the father that didn't understand that being a man and being raped is something more hurtful than you could ever imagine...and people that treat these men like they don't matter, like the girls, make it so much worse.
Eventually the men and the few women that saw the picture for what it was realized something. Six years of being ignored was something that we'd become way too accustomed to, something we accepted as normal because of women like these two. The good friends realized that without the father, the attorneys or the girls they were much much stronger and much much more loved by one another. It became obvious that the lawyer's plan to keep all of us separate was just another woman plan to keep us from being strong. Then we realize one important thing, the chosen women, the ones the father had become so enamored of that he forgot all of his son's friends, we a liability to our strength. One by one as the victims banded together they all had another commonality...they all never got any help from these two women. A crime for sure, but a crime of morality as well. Having them included brought a cancer to the goodness of helping all of the victims, so the men and their women friends struck out on their own to find justice for all, not just the father's favorites.
All alone in the corner sat the son, feeling like he'd let his friends down, horribly distraught over the feeling that his own father didn't care enough about what he had done for them, looked up with a tear. "Why didn't he listen? Why didn't he care?" That's when the friends all came together and hugged away his sadness and told him, "Sometimes fathers forget that their sons are angels too. We still love you for who YOU are. We don't blame you. We love you...despite your father's ability to forget us and leave us all behind, we'll never leave you. You are our family too" The son realize then that when you are a gay man, sometimes your friends have to be fathers when the real one can't. Or won't.
The angel son learned to hug himself or ask his friends when he needed one from then on.
