I was seven years old when I knew that I was different from the other boys. I didn't know what my feelings meant, and I didn't have a word for it. I only knew that something about me felt wrong, not from being told, but from what wasn't said, and from learning which things were safer kept locked inside.

I grew up in an abusive home. There was no room there to figure out who I was. No freedom, no kindness, no safety. So I carried the question alone, and at home and school, I tried to be what I was expected to be.

Middle school was hell. Bullies have a gift for naming things you haven't named yet, and mine named me every day. Faggot. Buttfucker. Any boy I talked to was my "gay lover," so I stopped talking to boys. Making and keeping friends was impossible. Everyone in authority could see it. No one stopped it.

The school had an Assistant Vice Principal for Discipline. He was a bigot and a bully, and he always sided with the students who made my life hell. They faced no consequences for their verbal and physical harassment. If I said one word in my own defense within earshot of a teacher, I ended up in detention.

One day at lunch, a bully grabbed my mechanical pencil out of my hand and stabbed me with it. My own pencil. I was bleeding. Thirty feet away, the vice principal stood at a microphone, calling out which tables could stand and get in line - orderly, in command of the room - while I stood up, blood dripping on the floor. I asked to leave. He told me to sit down - into the microphone.

I walked to the doors and shouted the only two words I had left.

The room went silent. I went to the nurse's office.

I was suspended for inciting a riot.

The bullying led to meetings between my mother and the administration. The school defended everything it had done by pointing to its zero tolerance policy. Those were the words they used. They had zero tolerance for me, as a human being, or for anything I did. They had unlimited tolerance for the bullies, and for the teachers who looked away, and for themselves. The district referred every complaint back to the school, which ultimately answered to no one.

My mother came to every one of those meetings. She went through every motion that established her, in the eyes of the school, as a good and concerned parent. It was a lie. At home there was no such person. Watching a parent pretend to be an upstanding citizen in public and cruel in private is its own kind of terror, because no one would ever believe me. The school had met my abusive mother. They liked her.

My grades were good. A's and B's. Teachers used that as proof that everything was fine while I suffered. I did what I was told because it was the one thing I could control, while everything else - friends, a social life, any dreams of a future - was taken from me a day at a time. Bullies called me socially inept. They were right. They were also the cause.

By fifteen, I couldn't contain it anymore. I came out. At home first, then at school.

My mother's response was: "How could you do this to me? How could you have lied to me all these years?"

At school, the harassment found a new target. I had dated a female friend freshman year, trying to will myself into being straight. When I came out, the bullies turned on her. They said she had "made me gay." They said something was wrong with her. She was punished for my existence, and I was forced to watch my coming out, the truth I could no longer hide, end her high school social life.

This is what it's like to be a queer kid in a school run by adults who decided hurting "the right children" is okay, who wave away an abusive home life under the guise of policy. There is no happy ending, no glow-up, no success story. No child should have to survive this and then be told to be grateful for anything that comes after.

All of this is still happening to queer students. And this November, it could get worse.