If there’s one thing about having grown up on Canadian Armed Forces bases in Canada during the ’70s and ’80s taught me it was to just ignore homophobic slurs.
Mind you I didn’t start hearing these slurs until after the CFB Namao affair, but they started nonetheless once my family was moved from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach in October of 1980.
Captain Terry Totzke was the first to refer to me as a homo. Yes, he would use the clinical word “homosexual”, but he would also drop “homo” at times as well.
Totzke was also adamant that if I didn’t stop being a homosexual that I would end up in prison like the priest.
Although I had no idea of what priest Captain Totzke was talking about, he was talking about Captain McRae, the base chaplain from CFB Namao. The base chaplain that had just been investigated for having committed “acts of homosexuality” with young boys on the base.
My father, Master Corporal Richard Wayne Gill, would use “homo”, “fag”, and “cocksucker” at home.
And once news spread from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach that I was the boy that had been caught being buggered by the babysitter in his bedroom it didn’t take long for the kids at school to start using slurs and isolating me.
So, when I get this shit on social media, I don’t really care.
Yes, somebody sent me the suggestion to go hang myself.
I report it.
Sometimes it gets taken down.
Sometime it doesn’t.
But, when that’s the language that was used at home to describe you, you just get used to it.
Especially back in the ’70s and ’80s.
If you were a kid living on base and you were suspected even in the slightest of possibly being queer or a little light in the loafers, you had to grow a very thick skin, otherwise this shit was gonna kill you.
I remember I was in Richard’s car once. I forget where we were going, but we were heading north on Keele St.. We had just passed Sheppard Ave. Richard asked me why I had joined Sea Cadets instead of Army Cadets. I said that my friend John was in Sea Cadets and John took me to one of the parade nights, so that’s why I wanted to join. Richard said that everyone knows that the grunts are in the Army. I looked at him puzzled. He said that the grunts are queer, and maybe I’d be better off in Army cadets.
The worst base I lived on was Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Toronto.
CFB Downsview didn’t have a school on base for military dependents. We went to the local schools like Sheppard Public School, Downsview Public School, Elia Jr. High., Pierre LaPorte Jr. High and others.
I never really had much issue with the civilian kids.
It was always the other kids on base.
And when you come from a visibly dysfunctional home, the other kids have absolutely no sympathy. It’s like you were to blame for your father’s alcoholism and violent tendencies.
There were three kids on that base that made every living moment of my life a fucking hell.
The homophobia, the slurs, the taunts, the teasing, the fights.
Yeah, if you didn’t fit in, you were mocked relentlessly and shunned.
I’ve talked to other former base brats over the years, a majority of them absolutely refuse to admit that there were issues with alcoholism, or family violence in the PMQs on the bases.
But that’s the way things were back then. Dysfunctional families were ignored. They were an embarrassment.
When queer kids got beat up or shunned, everyone ignored that.
And yes, I realize that these attitudes existed out in the civilian world.
But living on base, everything was concentrated.
There was no escape.
So, you just learned to be extremely self sufficient.
And you grew a thick fucking skin.
