Overcoming Our Childhoods (Spring 1999)
By Dick Stein
 
I am going to talk about some of my experiences growing up as a person who stutters and as a gay person. These experiences are painful to recollect, and may be painful for you to read about. But I am sharing them because of the value of sharing; both for those might profit from knowing that they are not alone, and for some possible cathartic value to myself.

Many of us, and probably I myself, have written about the similarities between being gay and being a person who stutters. Growing up with either one of these characteristics carries the baggage that being part of any minority carries: very likely feeling alienated from the larger society, and being misunderstood and sometimes even maltreated by parents, teachers, schoolmates, and strangers.

Probably well before my adolescence I was clearly growing up to be a "sissy". This caused my parents distress, as well as providing grounds for them to blame one another for not raising me properly. When they were not busy arguing about who was responsible for it, my parents wanted my sissiness to be "fixed" (as well as my stuttering, which I will discuss later). I had to endure being taken to a lot of psychotherapists, and the humiliating experience of being taken to my aunt's endocrinologist in the big city. My aunt and my parents gave me a phony story as to why I should see this doctor, while they presumably requested him to check on whether my body was showing normal male development.

And I endured teasing and bullying by bigger boys when I was small, and by classmates when I was in high school, for being a sissy.

When I was a child, and in the environment of a fairly small town, stuttering, like homosexuality, was something that most people had no experience with. My parents, being good middle-class parents, wanted to fix my stuttering, too. So I was dragged from speech therapist to speech therapist. In those days stuttering therapy was not very advanced, so few if any of these therapists made any difference.

Stuttering, like being gay, carried the baggage of being made to feel abnormal. Young classmates in grade school might ask what was wrong with the way I talked. A friend of my sister's, one time, by way of derogating something I was saying, said, "You can't even talk right." As an example of the reaction from strangers that I'm afraid a number of us have had, at least one time, when I went into a hardware store and stuttered, I was assumed to be of below-normal intelligence.

So, between being gay and a person who stutters, over and over again the message I got from others was that I was abnormal or defective, "broken," somehow in need of "fixing" by one or another type of professional who was be given the chance to tinker with me. I was so full of defects, you really had to pity my poor parents! My mother, I'm sure, felt sorry for herself—but these are matters of her psychology and her neuroses, and today she is beyond help. The more important issue right now is whether I carry scars, or at least psychological "baggage," from these experiences.

Today, as an adult, I continue to have some negative experiences; we all do, judging by what some people have recently said on the Passing Twice e-mail mailing list. I don't think I am as hurt by these present-day experiences as I was by childhood experiences. The difference is that today I am not a child any longer; the childhood events I've recounted were many, many years ago, and today I am not so easily wounded by other people. I am sure that even as adults we have wounds that we still lick, or even real psychological scars. What is most likely to be a lasting effect of the sorts of experiences I have been talking about is impaired self-esteem. If we can look into ourselves truthfully and acknowledge that we are not happy with ourselves, with who and what we are as les/bi/gay people and as people who stutter—if we can identify and admit to ourselves that we have a problem in the area of self-esteem, we can heal to a large degree, maybe entirely on our own, or perhaps with the help of another. You might want to look out for groups that are focused on self-esteem issues.

I'm sure that many of my experiences as a person who stutters are shared by other people who stutter; and that many of my experiences growing up gay are common to other gay and lesbian people. Probably some who is either gay or a person who stutters can identify with at least a few of my experiences. Hopefully, our sharing with one another, even when it is painful for us, is a good thing. I know that many Passing Twice people have been very open in sharing on the e-mail mailing list. Informal as the Passing Twice group is, in structure and membership, we are forming bonds by this sort of sharing.
 

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