WordPress sometimes prompts me to write about a certain topic. It’s geared towards “family” type events.
There are very few that actually seem to apply to me.
Today’s prompt was somewhat interesting.
I think the biggest fear that I had in my life was my father.
I overcame that fear somewhat in 2006 during a series of phone calls that I had with him.
Then there was his death in January of 2017.
That was a major relief.
My brother thinks that I’m over exaggerating my fear of Richard, but as Dr. Gabor Maté observed, “no two children have the same parents”.
The most significant fear that I had of Richard was his temper. Richard had very poor impulse control and very poor control of his anger. He also couldn’t take into account the difference in physical strength between himself and the person he was lashing out at.
My fear of Richard only grew more intense when I became involved with military social worker Captain Terry Totzke.
Richard is dead and gone. And the world is probably better off for this. But his effects still haunt me and have left their traces upon me.
My grandmother was another person that I feared as a kid.
Her anger and her impulse control were worse than Richard’s, but at least she lacked the physical strength of Richard.
Alcohol. I’ve always feared being an alcoholic.
Both my father and my grandmother were intense alcoholics. Both were happy drunks for the most part. Conversely both were intensely angry people when they were sobering up.
I’ve had so little alcohol in my life I can almost remember every exact time.
The last time that I had a drink was back in July of 2011.
Before that it was January of 2010
Before that it was August of 2006
Before that it was September of 2005
Before that it was May of 1994
Before that it was sometime in the winter of 1990 in Gagetown, New Brunswick.
Before that it was sometime around 1986.
I can’t remember all of the “sips” that my father or my grandmother would give me when they were drunk.
I do remember the beer that grandma made me drink in the summer of 1984.
Most of these were just casual get-togethers when I was changing jobs and moving up the so called ladder.
But becoming an alcoholic has always been one of my fears.
Growing up on military bases I was exposed to a significant amount of alcoholism. It was as if being an alcoholic was a requirement to join the Canadian Forces back in the ’50s through the ’90s.
Being a “homosexual” and subsequently growing up to be like the babysitter was always a major fear of mine. Both Captain Totzke and my father would keep telling me that if I didn’t stop kissing, hugging, and being interested in other boys that I would grow up to be just like the babysitter and the priest from Namao.
Imagine the type of fear that would instil into a 9 to 11 year old.
Being told that you’d be going to a psychiatric hospital or jail for “allowing” the babysitter to do what he had done.
Okay, so I had a little bit of a learning curve with my estrogen patches.
Yes, they’re supposed to stick you your skin. But I found for the first couple of days my patches kept falling off.
And not really wanting to miss out on any of my meds, I had to think of something to do to keep these from coming off.
If I could put them on my upper arms like a nicotine patch, that would have worked, but the estrogen patches have to go on either my butt or my lower belly for the best effect.
So I turned to Tegaderm.
I put the patch on, then I put a Tegaderm dressing over top of the patch. And the patches don’t fall off. which is nice.
I don’t want to miss out on any of the meds.
Coming up this Friday I have my first blood test to make sure that my body is handling the estrogen properly.
As I’ve said, I’ve never really taken part in pride, and I really don’t identify with it.
I guess part of it has to do with the environment that I grew up in.
Military communities were isolated. And by isolated I mean that the Canadian Armed Forces had control over the types of people that were allowed to live in the military communities on base.
By way of filtering recruits, the Canadian Armed Forces could control the political leanings of those living on the bases. And it should be of no surprise that these military communities were very conservative and right leaning.
The thing is, when you’re living within these communities, especially if your exposure to the outside world is very limited, you come to see the political leanings of these communities as being “normal”.
Yes, Canadian Forces Administrative Order CFAO 19-20 did no apply to children living on base, it only applied to members of the Canadian Armed Forces. But as has been indicated through various studies, members of the Canadian Armed Forces often had a problems with separating their military careers from their home lives.
As the civilian social worker that dealt with my family noted during various home visits to our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, Mr. Gill orders his children with simple commands and answers their questions with yes or no replies and the children don’t question these decisions.
Being in the Canadian Armed Forces, Richard was nothing more than a cog in a machine that demanded his servile obedience. His was not a position to question. His was a position to do as he was told. And like many men who are stripped of the authority in their lives, he made up for this lack of authority by exerting his authority on those he could.
When it came to me and my issues from Canadian Forces Base Namao he was not going to question the authority of Captain Terry Totzke. If Captain Totzke said that I was a homosexual, that I was exhibiting signs of homosexuality, who was master corporal Gill to question this?
When I’ve talked to other base brats about how things were on base I get this Pollyannish rose coloured view of what things were like on base. This usually comes from former brats that didn’t have “issues” and therefore weren’t exposed to the underbelly of life in the “company town”.
I have encountered a few former brats that don’t participate in any of the social media groups for base brats. They want nothing to do with acknowledging their past. And I have an inkling that the brats who don’t want anything to do with remembering their pasts as base brats vastly outnumber the number of brats that celebrate their past as base brats.
The number of broken and dysfunctional families that lived on the bases was probably a high percentage, especially when you look at how the recruiting process would naturally filter out more liberal minded recruits. The military communities were rife with homophobia, racism, misogyny, victim blaming, victim shaming.
Another matter that played into the sterility of the military community was the fact that military housing could only be rented to members of the Canadian Armed Forces, and that these members had the ability to decide who could live in these houses and who couldn’t. If a service member wanted his spouse out of “his” PMQ, she was booted off the base by the military police. Same thing for his kids. As long as provincial law allowed for it, the serving member could give his kid the boot. The age that a child can live on their own varies from province to province. In Ontario a 16 year old can move out on their own.
I’m not sure what the rules are any more, but in my day living on the bases, 18 was the absolute oldest a base brat could be. Once you hit 19 you were expected to get off the base. There were exceptions to this rule, care givers could live in military housing so long as it was to look after military dependents, persons with disabilities could live on base past their 19th birthday, and students obtaining a higher education could continue to live on base until their 24th birthday.
As you can imaging, there wasn’t a lot of diversity. Everything was sterile. Everything was the military mindset.
Queer kids just learnt to stay in the closet.
Queer kids learnt that they were defective and a national security threat.
Kids on base learnt that there were no victims, that it always took two to tango.
Kids on base learnt that compassion was a liability.
Living on base there were no “others” like us.
Living on base we only had exposure to adults that passed the requirements of the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting agents.
Our view of the world was shaped by the monochromatic views of the world espoused by these serving soldiers that passed the conformity tests.
You know all of those soldier that have been implicated in hazing rituals over the years? Yeah we grew up amongst those people.
I lived on the base that was the home of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. We grew up amongst the mindset and the racism that lead to the death of Shidane Arone in Somalia.
All those sexual assaults that occurred in the Canadian Armed Forces? Those were committed by men of the Canadian Forces, many of whom were our fathers.
The misogyny and homophobia that were rampant in the Canadian Armed Forces back in the day? The men espousing these views were often our fathers.
I grew up in a community that allowed everyone up the chain of command to escape responsibility for the murder of Shidane Arone and allowed a lowly private, private Kyle Brown, to be made the scape goat for the whole sordid affair.
I grew up in a community that allowed sexually abused children to be blamed for the abuse they suffered at the hand of members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
I grew up in a community where the chain of command could determine who was a victim and who wasn’t a victim.
I grew up in a community that had the legal power to investigate itself and its members for sexual assaults against children.
I grew up in a community in which officers with no legal training and no legal background could summarily dismiss service offence charges that had been brought against their subordinates.
I grew up in a community in which a 3-year-time-bar applied to all service offences, including service offences of a purely civilian nature.
I grew up in a community which claimed criminal code offences related to children as service offences to be dealt with solely through the military justice system.
I grew up in a community served by such a compromised justice system that it was dismantled and restructured due to horrific miscarriages of justice.
What makes this whole matter much worse for me is the fact that people knew.
As I’ve said before.
My father knew about the assaults.
He may not have known about them when they were happening as he was always living off base.
But he knew about them when he eventually had to move back into the PMQ with us on CFB Namao.
Richard used to wear wool sweaters at the time and I used to refer to him as “wooly bully” at the time as in the song by Sam Sham and the Pharos.
When Richard moved back in with us, he was a different man. I was certain at the time that my real father had died on a training exercise and that the Canadian Forces had replaced my father with a look-alike.
Richard may not have known the true extent of what had happened on the CFB Namao, but knew what the babysitter and I had been doing as my father would be in the “counselling” sessions that I started having with Captain Totzke when we were moved down to CFB Griesbach in October if 1980.
Richard was present when Terry told me that he had the base military police watching me and that they’d tell him if I ever kissed or touched another boy.
When Terry said that I shouldn’t play sports because of the change rooms, my father ran with that. Richard never once questioned it. In fact Richard used this logic to deny me permission to go on a swimming trip in Edmonton.
And I know that Richard also used this logic when I was going to Sheppard Public School in Toronto while we were stationed at Canadian Forces Base Downsview. My grade 6 class was going on an end of the year school trip to Quebec City in Quebec. The school was covering the costs of the transportation, and the meals, and the accommodations. Richard didn’t want me going on this trip out of fear that I was going to be uncontrollable with other boys in their beds. Somehow Mr. Cross and Mr. Blair convinced Richard to allow me to go.
It’s obvious that Richard knew.
And it’s obvious that Richard’s attitude towards me was heavily influenced by his knowledge that from age 7 to age 8 I had been sexually abused numerous times over the course of a year and a half.
The fact that Terry had described me as a homosexual at age 9 and that if I didn’t change my ways that I’d be going to prison wouldn’t have really been very beneficial to the relationship between my father and I.
What I wouldn’t know though is how many people knew.
But suffice to say, a lot of people knew.
It’s not the fact that people knew that is driving my desire to die.
It’s the fact that people like Captain Terry Totzke and my own father, Mcpl Richard Gill knew, but allowed my mental health problems to fester untreated.
It the fact that my gender identity and my sexual identity were destroyed by Totzke and my father.
At this point in time, I really don’t give a fucking rat’s ass as to why it was decided to keep me from receiving proper psychiatric counselling for my issues. But, just remember that the DND and the CAF did throw a “wall of secrecy” over the entire Captain McRae matter.
Were they afraid that if I receive counselling for my mental health issues that I’d blab about what had happened on the base, and that this would get the civilian authorities asking questions that DND and the CAF didn’t want asked?
a “Wall of Secrecy”
In fact, I would say that the actions of my father, Mcpl Richard Gill, served to amplify my mental health issues and my suffering.
Just because I didn’t know until 2011 that I had been diagnosed with Major Depression and Severe Anxiety, or that my condition had deteriorated by the summer of 1982 to the point that I was supposed to have been institutionalized in a psychiatric facility, doesn’t lessen the damage.
In fact, not knowing what was really wrong in my head made things that much moe fucking worse as I always blamed myself for being a fucking loser and a fucking fuckup.
There were times in my life when I couldn’t believe how fucking stupid I really was.
The fact that I didn’t know until 2011 that I was in the process of being removed from the home and placed into residential care or foster care doesn’t lessen the fact that the house that I was living in was emotionally and physically abusive.
As I’ve said previously, my father had his own treatments for my depression and anxiety. It was literal kicks in the ass, open handed smacks across the face, hits to the back of the head, the leather belt on my bare ass.
My step mother had her own treatments for my bed wetting and my depression.
My grandmother had her own treatments for my issues.
If I wasn’t left to suffer all of these issues on my own, and if I had received timely help with my issues, what would my life have been like?
Boyfriends, girlfriends?…….. who knows.
Trans, gay, straight, bi?……. again, who knows.
In a way I wish that I didn’t have any sex organs as I really don’t like the idea of sex. Since Namao I’ve always really despised my genitals.
Nowadays there is emasculation surgery, which would remove my penis, my testicles and my scrotum. Absolutely nothing down there save for a little hole for me to pee from.
At least I wouldn’t have that fucking thing down there. That fucking thing that caused so many problems in my life.
The reason I changed my name back in 2008 was more than just to get away from the Gill clan. I had no idea what my gender was. My gender has always confused me. I’ve never really identified as a male. I’ve never identified as a female. I don’t like having sex with women. I don’t like having sex with men.
Actually, that’s not true. Sex with men is great, I prefer sex with men over sex with women. But I don’t have it very often because Totzke and my father are screaming at me in my head. Sex is really unenjoyable with that shit going on.
And as much as I like having sex with men I can’t stop wondering if I’m a homosexual because of what happened on CFB Namao.
So, it really is a no win situation with me.
In 2008 I changed my first name to Bobbie. Bobbie is the unisex spelling. Bobby is the male spelling, Bobbi is the female spelling, and Bobbie is the unisex spelling.
I really loved having a first name that didn’t indicate the junk between my legs.
Is Namao alone my reason for my gender issues. Probably not, but Namao and Totzke really didn’t help with my issues.
There were so many opportunities that I missed out on in life.
Finishing high school?
Trade school?
College?
University?
Theatre?
Arts?
I have no idea of what I could have been or what I should have been.
And remember, I wasn’t able to make these choices because I was lazy, or because I was scatterbrained.
I wasn’t able to make these choices due to intentionally untreated mental health issues that I was left alone to struggle with.
Drugs won’t fix my fucked up brain.
Drugs won’t fix my gender issues.
Therapy, nope, been through a lot of therapy since 2011.
Maybe if I had therapy back between October of 1980 and 1990 things would have worked. But I’m 52 now. The rot in my brain has been allowed to fester since 1980. That’s 44 years now. And it’s not 44 years of issues that no one knew about. That’s 44 years of issues that were started off by 1-1/2 years of sexual abuse and 2-1/2 years of very inappropriate counselling.
I know that there are those who will say that I have to simply try harder. That I need a positive attitude. That I need to be thankful for every day that I am alive. And that I need to stop whinging about something that happened over 40 years ago.
Nope.
I just want M.A.i.D.
If society doesn’t want people like me obtaining M.A.i.D. to escape our pain and our torment, don’t let us suffer this pain or this torment in the first place.
Finger wagging at me, and tut-tutting me are completely inappropriate responses.
I don’t owe it to you to suffer another 20 years so that you can say that you saved me, like I’m some fucking pet project of yours.
My life is my life, I lived it, and I don’t want to live it any more.
How the Canadian Forces attitude towards homosexuals affected their investigation of Captain Father Angus McRae and his victims.
Prior to 1994 the Canadian Armed Forces had a policy against homosexuals in the military. This was enforced by Canadian Forces Administrative Order CFAO 19-20. I’ve been told by others that this policy would have had no effect on military dependents living on Canadian Forces Bases as we weren’t subject to the Code of Service Discipline.
That may be true, but the attitude towards homosexuals was an official policy, and every service member in the Canadian Forces would have been exposed to this policy and the reasoning behind this policy.
No father in the Canadian Armed Forces would obviously wanted a mentally ill homosexual living in their house.
What this means is that every person living on a Canadian Forces Base, whether they be a service member or a military dependent, was exposed to the horrific treatments that CFAO 19-20 enabled.
The investigation of Captain McRae was commenced in mid-May 1980 after the base military police interviewed Peter due to numerous complaints made against him by other parents of children living on the base.
This was confirmed to me by retired Canadian Forces Warrant Officer Frederick R. Cunningham on November 27th, 2011.
According to Peter’s father Jack, two military police officers came to Jack’s PMQ and questioned Peter in the kitchen. Peter quickly told Sgt. Mossman and Sgt. Clark about Captain Father Angus McRae.
This was confirmed to me when Sgt. Tenaschuk read to me the contents of CFSIU DS 120-10-80 before I requested my own copy from DND in an Access to Information Request.
May 12th 1980 is when base security officer Captain David Pilling requested the CFSIU investigate Captain McRae for “Acts of Homosexuality”.Item #2 makes clear what Captain Pilling wanted Captain McRae investigated for.
How much of a hangup did the Canadian Armed Forces have on “homosexuality”?
HomosexualityHomosexualityHomosexualityHomosexualityHomosexualityHomosexualityHomosexualityHomosexualityThe military was obviously concerned about “homosexuality”
As you can see from the gallery above “homosexuality” gets mentioned quite frequently. Not seen anywhere in these documents is “sexually abuse” or “sexually assault”. The word “victims” only shows up twice in the entire court martial.
The Canadian Armed Forces considered the children that Captain McRae was plying with beer and wine to be “homosexuals” as well.
None of us were victims.
We were all willing participants.
We were all homosexuals.
The 54 year old padre, the 14 year old altar boy / babysitter, and all of their victims.
We were ALL homosexuals in the eyes of the Canadian Armed Forces.
This is why I was involved with Captain Terry Totzke for 2-1/2 years from age 9 to age 11.
He didn’t care in the least that my home was dysfunctional, or that I was suffering from major depression or severe anxiety. He obviously didn’t care in the least that my father took no responsibility for his own family and always blamed others for the issues with his family.
No, Captain Totzke was concerned that I had shown signs of being a homosexual on CFB Namao and that homosexuality was a mental illness.
I wonder how many other kids from CFB Namao were involved with military social workers who were convinced that they were not victims of a 54 year old officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, but were instead homosexuals.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely nothing against homosexuals. I even considered myself to be one. Now, knowing what I know about the past, I consider myself to be nothing. Captain Totzke and his “therapy” took any orientation I may have had away from me. But it pisses me off to no extent that the Canadian Armed Forces were so willing to pass off “child sexual abuse” as “homosexuality”.
It upsets me to think that the Canadian Armed Forces thought that the best way to help me get over the events of CFB Namao was to accuse me of being a homosexual when I was 8 years old.
And I can only wonder how many of the other victims of Captain McRae would go on to commit suicide or attempt suicide over the years.
I don’t think I’ll ever figure this out because I don’t think this confusion was solely mine to begin with. It was kinda a group thing if you know what I mean.
Going by the number of sexual encounters I’ve had with women, I’ve had maybe 3 female partners, you’d assume that I have very little interest in women.
Going by the number of men I’ve had sex with in my life ( not including the sexual abuse), I’ve probably had about two to three dozen partners in my life, you’d assume that I’m homosexual.
Yet, every time I get intimate with a man, Captain Totzke pops into my head and starts admonishing me about my mental illness called homosexuality and that if I didn’t like the abuse on CFB Namao then I wouldn’t have allowed it to go on for so long. And then there’s my father whom also pops into my head and starts reminding me that I allowed the babysitter abuse my younger brother.
And of course, just growing up on military bases in the ’70s and ’80s would turn any queer child into a self loathing human.
And let’s be honest. I’m 50. I’ve really only had two long term “partners” in my life, and I’ve never really had any interest in a partner. This in itself probably stems from the way my father viewed his relationships and how little joy or pleasure he seemed to get from them. He was forever complaining how much his relationships were costing him in time and money and how much he had to do for the other party, so maybe that had an effect on why I’ve remained single my entire life.
My depression and anxiety couldn’t have helped much either.
Was it the sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao? What I endured and what I saw happen from 1978 until 1980 have more than likely affected me for life.
Was it my involvement with the military social worker Captain Terry Totzke, who for nearly three years had drilled into my head that I was showing “homosexual tendencies” due to what had happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao?
Was it my father’s reactions, which were in no doubt guided by Captain Totzke and the military’s view of “homosexual activities”?
Was it the sexual abuse on CFB Griesbach?
I have no doubt the sexual abuse prior to my 13th birthday probably helped to form my opinion on sex. I didn’t have my first orgasm until after I had turned 13. So sexually pleasuring those abusing me was a one-way street.
Was it the sexual abuse on CFB Downsview at the hands of Earl Ray Stevens? Earl knew that I was a military dependent. As he was a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces he also would have known that I would have been in a deep trouble if anyone in the Canadian Forces, whether it be the military police or even my father, found out that I was having sex with men.
Was it the sexual encounters I had with the much older teen in the summer of 1985 when I spent the summer with my grandmother?
It’s really hard to say.
But I would say that these events obviously have had some effect.
Looking back I’m pretty sure that being loner and on my own set me up for a lot of the abuse. And with what I’d gone through on CFB Namao, and the counselling that I endured from Captain Totzke meant that I pretty well thought that being abused was something that I was something that I was to be blamed for.
And when you’re not getting any type of love and affection at home, when somebody sexually abuses you, at least they’re paying attention to you, right?
In my life I’ve had boyfriends.
In my life I’ve had girlfriends.
My first boyfriend was on CFB Griesbach of all places. The place where Captain Totzke had warned me about homosexuality being a mental illness. The same place where Captain Totzke said he had the military police watching me.
He was a boy my age. He lived two houses down from mine. His father was a sergeant in the Canadian Airborne Regiment. It was nothing serious, and nothing sexual. We liked to kiss. And hang out together a lot. His father caught us kissing once. My father nearly killed me. Said that he never wanted to hear again, especially not from a sergeant, that I had been kissing their son and that if he did that he’d “break my fucking neck”.
Megan wasn’t really a girlfriend. We did like to talk and hang out a lot. And there was the clothes swapping thing. Definitely nothing romantic.
In the aftermath of Earl Stevens I started to believe that I was gay. Earl had impressed upon me that men will pay for sex and that sex was always supposed to be meaningless except for the person paying.
I frequently got beat up bad in grade 8 for being a “queerboy” and a “faggot”.
I had a boyfriend in the late ’90s. It didn’t really last too long.
I wouldn’t have sex with a woman until 2002 when I had a relationship with a woman. We met at the local motorcycle hangout. Not a biker club or anything like that. It was the local Starbucks where all the weekend motorcyclists would hang out after the rides. We both had our reasons for liking each other. Mine was primarily so that I could get people to stop wondering if I was a fag or a queer. Her’s was that she wanted to have kids.
I have absolutely no interest in having kids or raising kids. She did. And even at the start of the relationship when I wanted separate beds, she wanted the beds together.
I guess my primary reason for getting together with her is that I thought that it would get a bully manager off my back at work. He kept referring to me as “Freddie” or “Liberace”. He kept telling me that if I didn’t do things the way he wanted that he’d out me to the board of directors.
In 2003 I took her up to meet my father. He wasn’t buying it, and neither was my stepmother.
Even when I got mugged in July of 1995, the attending VPD officer was adamant that I was a homosexual and that I had been beat up in a “trick gone bad”. Even when I was able to produce proof that I had been where I said I had been and that the man and woman who mugged me had followed me from where I said they did the responding officer, a VPD Constable, wasn’t listening. I was a male prostitute as far as he was concerned and until I admitted such the investigation was going nowhere.
Another thing that may have hindered my ability to form relationships is I really hate being touched. This was something that was noted in the aftermath of CFB Namao. And it’s something that persists to this day. I don’t like holding hands. I don’t like being touched. The wrong touch in the wrong place can upset me and turn me off like a light switch. Even at work I don’t like being patted on the shoulder.
I guess there’s something about a person’s mannerisms that marks them as “not straight”.
What it is, I’ll never know.
Is it the way I talk?
Is it the way I walk?
And if I am in fact gay / queer / homosexual why don’t I enjoy homosexual relationships?
Did Captain Terry Totzke and his desire to cure me of my apparent homosexuality set me up for life to be a self-loathing homosexual?
Was it the sexual abuse in my youth that taught me that sex in just a base act that one does to pleasure another person otherwise you’d get in trouble?
Did growing up in my father’s household teach me that intimate relationships are not worth the effort?
Another issue that could be at play is the complete lack of the ability to form emotional bonds. In my household, relationships were of a calculated nature.
As I said at the beginning, I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to come up with an answer for this.
Beeshive 