Tighten the Screws

How I survived Art class

I had the same Arts teacher for the first three years of secondary. He was a big faggot. Bald head, black moustache, leather suspenders, and a high faggy pitch. That tongue always carried a nagging and reprimanding tone. The voice secretly spoke to my underbelly: bad, mistake, shame…destroy!
And each class he'd tighten the screws.

You know when stuff is safe. You can relax, and there’s an invitation to express, which I fortunately could experience later in life. But not in his class room. Everything was under scrutiny, judged, penalized. No, it was worse. Any self expression was going to be rejected. That was the vibe. Boy, did I hate his classes down into the marrow of my bones. I felt sick each day I had Art class, always glad when they were over, counting down the days to the next horror show. Twice a week. It had nothing to do with art and everything to do with obliterating what was left of my soul.

I can’t recall anything significant or expressive paintings during those years. The products were just exercises designed to make you suffer, technical, rules, marks, orders. I didn't keep anything. Nothing to hang on my wall. A two year old could do better.

Yes, this teacher was a full-on masochist. He was the real piece of art. He had contorted himself completely. One day he had bleached his moustache. Like he had to torture himself in the belief he was a shameful boy. In order to not to deal with his pain he had to impose it on everybody else. I sat as far away from his desk as possible.

There was this pure boy Jordy in our class, he somtimes sat next to me. He was the young guy who’d dance with all the girls at the school dances. A pure, sensitive, and happy soul. Somebody who had escaped primary school without scars on his soul. I don’t think the teacher appreciated his purity, for Jordy became his main target. The teacher would often call him out and he’d have to go into the back office with him! I can’t remember the reasons why but it was minor. Jordy was a friendly boy who never offended anyone. Deep down, I believe, our teacher wanted to be like little Jordy. Free, sensitive, expressive.

For ther record, I don’t have problems with homosexuals. But this guy was the YMCA abusive type. He was apparently part of a gay choir Singing Seed. I could feel his intentions. That classroom was unsafe. Nobody’s artist was secure in that place. The man must have had an abusive past, but was unfortunately perpetuating it onto his students. His gayness might have provided a carte blanche for this torture. It was not okay.

This is the problem with school. It's communistic. There's no choice. In a free market school system that man would have had very few customers. But kids somehow have to swallow whatever is fed to them. How can anyone call that education? It's abuse.

Meanwhile most adults are walking around with their inner artist abandoned. And we think it's normal, because it's rampantly prevalent. But the whole society is creatively handicapped and traumatized. That there's even a notion of division between the creative and the non-creative is complete insanity. There's nothing advanced about the school system. It is a machine set to destroy the nature of the individual.

Perhaps all this had to do with my fear of becoming gay in adolesence. That artistry equated abuse. I understood I had a creative soul and was unescapably being YMCA'd. Yeah. Indeed the fear of becoming gay ended when his classes ceased in year 4 and I got myself a completely scientific course pack: physics, chemistry, math, biology.

How sad.

I can see now how not only Jordy got murdered in that classroom.
But me as well.
I just quietly died inside.

I would never, in a million years, voluntarily sit, in that cage.

But I had to endure it.