[Editor’s Note: Of all the entries in this journal, this very one is the one most likely to foster mockery and censure. I struggled with including it, thinking perhaps the ramifications for a negative outcome were too great. However, I reject those notions. I feel it has a lot to say about the pernicious effects of sex culture and the repression and duality inherent in all Fundamentalist religions. However, I have chosen to self-censor the more injurious and hateful details before posting it. As I said in the warning before the first “offline” entry, I was basically a vicious little incel weasel for most of my 20s. I must state for the record that my Mother had died before the events below took place, leaving my Father to raise two boys on his own, he was a part of a sex-positive, near Cultic counter-culture on the West Coast during Vietnam, and with the benefit of experience I believe he was ill-suited to handle his problems, and likely dealt with some type of abuse or neglect himself. As always, trauma begats trauma.]
Now I will write about the events which I believe to have had the most devastating effect on my attitude toward Love.
It all began around 198X or 198X. Dad had started a home school for the children of the members of our church, of which my uncle was the Pastor. However, it was extremely lackadaisical and provided almost no real education. Basically, all of the students gathered at our house and were required to complete four or so pages in each of our PACEs (extremely lightweight booklets containing extremely biased Christian educational materials) and then we were free to do whatever we wanted for the rest of the day. Two hours or so of work at most, and the rest of the time goofing off – playing videogames, running around outside, laughing, talking – anything.
I should have realized something was wrong when the girls of the “school” started showing an extreme amount of affection for my Dad. They ranged in ages from 10 to 14. They would hug him, sit on his lap, baby-talk him, all sorts of things to get whatever they wanted. And Dad always complied. I somehow understood this was wrong in my subconscious, however, because I would have premonition-like dreams about these girls due to which some disaster unfolded that destroyed our home.
I don’t know if any questionable physical contact occurred between my Dad and those girls. I suspect it did in at least one case. It all ended when Dad decided to give a sex ed talk to the girls without their parents’ permission, an absolute no-no in any Christian school. All of the parents pulled their children out and Dad’s home schooling days came to an end. (He probably got money from them for that bullshit.)
My Dad’s behavior toward those girls formed the basis for later attitudes I would develop. They became the most important thing in his life. He would do anything for them, especially if they baby-eyed him and begged him in a childish voice. He would travel to [REDACTED] to visit them almost every day, despite seeing them for most of the day at the home school. He used to leave us at home (by ourselves!) to make these trips. I remember one time I talked Henrietta into asking Dad to bring us down with him. Dad got angry at me and accused me of using her to manipulate him, which was akin to the sin of Witchcraft! I was aghast. But of course it worked. Dad started letting us visit their home more often. However, I started showing a bit of jealousy for them.
The next event was a girlfriend my Dad got named Jesse. She initially started working with him on his music projects as the Lead Singer. She had a really good voice, and was quite attractive (as I recall). She was also young – in her 20’s and about half Dad’s age. He had been Widowed for over two years and it’s no wonder he developed an attraction to her. But my resentment of “Dad’s Women” began in earnest with her. Dad would drop everything to satisfy her. He didn’t care about us, his job, anything else but her. I quickly realized that I would always take a back seat to whatever woman Dad was interested in at the time. I didn’t realize until much later that Dad was fucking her, too, and that horrified me given my religious background.
Our family’s attitude toward sex was typical for most Christian families. For the most part, it wasn’t discussed. There was a standard medical description of Sexual Intercourse when I was about 10, but after that sex was never mentioned again. No warning of the extreme amounts of sexual desire I would experience later. No discussion of the unstoppable craving and self-pleasure cycles all teenage boys go through. Nothing. There were standard boiler-plate exhortations to avoid Premarital Sex, but it really wasn’t emphasized as a soul-destroying sin as it would have been in say Puritan societies. I don’t really know why I started to view it as such an evil thing. I think I got most of it from reading those Christian “Teen Advice Books,” purporting to help developing men and women deal with their bodies, and specifically their urges. They had very strong warnings against Premarital Sex and any type of Lust whatsoever. I specifically remember one of them stating that “self-pleasure is okay if one doesn’t fantasize about women” … which is next to impossible!
At some point during this period my bitterness toward Dad became extreme. I had asked him to do something for me – to take me somewhere or buy me something – and he refused. Right after that he went off with one of his women and gave her his full attention, ignoring me completely. I walked out into the large field behind the Church my Uncle had at the time and, weeping, told myself I hated physical relationships for what they had done to my Dad’s priorities, and vowed to myself that I would never get involved in one due to the problems it would cause. I didn’t know then that this would turn into a powerful curse.
The next big event was the serious one … Brianna. I don’t remember her last name. She was a 17-year-old girl in Dad’s “Youth Group” in Lebanon, Tennessee. Once again Dad concocted a reason to be around teenage girls most of the time… this time by being appointed head of the Youth Ministry at the church we attended. A man named Houston was the pastor … can’t remember his first name .. although he had two sons with which we became rather close friends. This Houston fellow had a lot of connections in the Gospel music industry. I’m sure Dad starting going there in the hope of getting exposure for his music in Nashville. None of it panned out, and in fact, Dad sabotaged any chance of it with his Escapades.
Our Youth Group was very … weird. For one thing, everyone spoke in tongues. We would have hours-long “prayer sessions” where people would claim to see Angels and get Demons cast out of them. It was almost Cult-like, with Dad as the Messianic figure. All the kids viewed him as a pal and a mentor at the same time, and looked up to him and thought he was really cool. Once again the girls started getting a little more intimate with him than they should have, but at least they were a little older this time. Eventually this intimacy ballooned into full infatuation with the aforementioned girl, Brianna.
Anyway, worse came to worse and something physical happened, which should have appeared inevitable in hindsight. He came home one day (once again he used to leave us alone for hours at a time) and explained that he had committed a Sin. He had engaged in “heavy foreplay” with Brianna That’s how he described it. Maybe it was the least offensive phrase he could think of. He used extremely sterile, medical terms to describe what it meant. He rationalized what he did by saying that he and the girls were watching Dirty Dancing and a “Spirit of Lust” actually descended over the room and influenced him to do it. He had no culpability, of course, other than putting himself in a vulnerable situation. Dad also admitted at this point that sex was his weakness, and that he basically couldn’t live without it.
From that point forward, we were ostracized from the Church. Dad never went back. I still didn’t fully understand what was going on, how serious it was, nor did I realize Dad could have gotten in serious trouble for what happened. Later I realized Brianna’s parents had probably agreed not to pursue the matter if Dad simply disappeared. So that’s what he did. We holed up in our shitty little rented house with the bad carpet and the roaches until Dad could arrange to move back to Kentucky.
After that was Tessa at Juvie. Again she was half his age. She was also rumored to have a 180+ IQ, and was obsessed with Lesbian Vampires. She was … really odd. But Dad fell for her hard. He married her, but that only lasted a year. She was a Smoker and Dad picked up the habit, too, due to proximity. She eventually convinced him to send us to the Boarding School she taught at, an absolutely horrible Reform School where all the worst Dregs of Youth were sent – all the ones who had been kicked out of every other school for bad behavior. [Editor’s Note: Due to potential identifiability concerns, I will refer to this school as “Juvie.”] My Brother & I were abused frequently – both verbally and physically. We were sent there ostensibly because the school provided a “good education.” Which they did have Advanced Placement classes for College Credit, which wasn’t true for any other school we attended.
Once Dad’s relationship with Tessa fell apart, he ended up living with his Mother, my Granny Bernadette, in [REDACTED]. He entered a full-on depression. I lost whatever little Faith I had in him, and his lack of a strong moral center contributed greatly to my eventual abandonment of Christianity. After all, if belief in God couldn’t hold a man together during trying times, of what worth was it?
He began a relationship with an older woman eventually. Unlike all the previous times, she was actually around his age and much more of an appropriate choice. But, he still showed the same obsession with her that he did with all his women. I remember one night lying in the living room while he talked to her on the phone, and I heard him say: “I love you more even than the boys.” Whatever petty bitchiness she had directed toward him for a few moments prompted him to this horrible admission. I was devastated by it. He ended up marrying her. But, Dad has maintained proximity to young women and girls through his music lessons and CD projects. I have suspected many times that he has had an affair or two.
By this time my resentment for physical love had become unchangeable. From this point on, any time anybody showed a preference for a woman instead of me, whether it be family member or friend, I found the old bile rising in my throat and the hatred setting in. I would curse them in long diatribes to myself. This manifested itself many times over the next few years, and always caused trouble with me and the people I grew resentful toward. I grew to hate all forms of intimate love, and made it a point to rely on only myself for any needs in that area (which is impossible).
So it’s yet another feminine quality I have. I’m a grown-ass man who still has Daddy issues, and I still view the sex drive as a weakness for all men, evidence of their own pathetic nature. I hate them because they think with their penises. And I still don’t want to be that kind of person myself, even though I can’t stop myself from being exactly that. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.