“Please Accept Me As I Am”

This is an article that I had written for my school’s School Magazine 2012/13. Now that the magazine is officially and finally published and out there, I think that it’s then eventually all right to at last share with you what I wrote. Hope you like it! Don’t forget to share your views as well in the comment box below 🙂

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   “I won’t have a gay son.”

   “Then, mom, you don’t have a son.”

   “Fine.”

 

   In the award-winning television film, Prayers for Bobby, Bobby Griffith decided to end his life because he could not live with the guilt of being homosexual. Although he had gone to live on his own with an understanding cousin and his caring boyfriend, he could no longer bear it. He could not live while knowing that his mother did not accept him as he was.

   This film is based on a true story.

   It is said that people fear what they don’t understand. I totally agree with that. The time period between being a child and becoming an adult, called adolescence, is a very hard and inevitable path. If we think about it closely, the physical part of this transformation-in-progress was the easiest one, am I not right? We quickly get used to our new body.

   But what about the emotional part of it?

 

   “Why can’t you admit that you can’t stand what I am?”

   “What you’ve become.”

 

   Teenagers have to go through so many mood swings as they gradually discover new feelings… which can’t be controlled! Our steps become more and more unstable. Where would this lead us? We are scared. We are constantly searching for a branch, a big rock… a hand; anything that can help us to rise up again to get back on track. If it ever happens, then, we move on, but deep inside we are no more the same.

   The main goal for an adolescent to accomplish is to find what they really are. Finding one’s true self. And sometimes, when the answers come out earlier than expected, they are insulted, bullied and rejected, not only by friends, but by the persons who mean the world to them: parents.

   I nevertheless understand that any parent would be panicked if the child they always thought they knew told them that he was an homosexual and that they don’t know this child anymore. This is when worlds turn upside down.

  

   But being gay or lesbian or bisexual is not a “sin” or an “illness”. It is natural. Teens should not feel guilty about their true sexuality. (Note that I’m excluding all those who embrace a new sexual orientation by choice because it is ‘cool’ or ‘trendy’. Don’t try to pretend to be someone else when you don’t even know who you genuinely are.)

 

   “I know now why God didn’t heal Bobby. He didn’t heal him because there was nothing wrong with him.”

 

   Are you aware that so many adolescents dread the moment they wake up and have to go to school? So many of them wish they could stay at home everyday, so that they will not have to deal with the stares and naughty names. Some actually do it. This is definitely worse than laziness. It is the anxiety that slowly builds up inside of their growing mind that will make them fall sick, not the fact that they are attracted to the same sex.

   Now, who is to blame?

   Even the tiniest remark can feel like an arrow in the heart.

  

   “I didn’t know that each time […] I referred to Bobby as sick and perverted and a danger to our children, his self esteem and sense of worth were being destroyed. And finally his spirit broke beyond repair.”

 

   So wake up everyone! Today is the time we all do something about this. We live in a civilised and modern country – and we should prove it. Actions speak louder than words do, don’t they?

 

   “In God’s eyes kindness and love are what it’s all about.”

 

   All the quotes have been taken from Prayers for Bobby which were uttered in the film by Bobby’s mother, Mary Griffifth.

 

Daphnée Kwong Waye

An Evil Nymph