Seventh Grade

My book effectively starts with eighth grade, but I covered my earlier life in my initial autobiography, the tome from which my book was taken. I've done blog posts about earlier segments in my life -- third grade; sixth grade.

I've been reminiscing about seventh grade lately. It was the year just before our family moved to Los Alamos NM. In an odd way, it's like the stump or stub of a life I might have had if we hadn't moved. Mostly, that's not a life that I wish I'd had; if anything, I've been more inclined to think about that with a shudder. The venue was Valdosta GA, the timeframe 1971-72.

Seventh grade was my one and only year at Valdosta Junior High School. It was quite different from the elementary school experience I was used to. In elementary school we had been treated as children, which included not just condescension but also tolerance for a certain amount of roughhousing and bullying and loud disruptive behaviors. In junior high, for the first time, we were being treated as large dangerous unruly threats to the public order. I think part of the underlying issue was the sheer size of the institution: Valdosta had a dozen or more elementary schools, but everyone was funneled into the same single junior high when we passed from sixth to seventh grade. Grades 7, 8, and 9 for the whole town were taught there. That also meant racial integration: the elementary schools had de facto segregation because they were neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were fairly segregated. I had had black kids in my classrooms in elementary school, but they were a distinct minority; other elementary schools had ranged from almost exclusively white to almost exclusively black. And now at the ages of 12-15 we were all being placed together, and whether there was an actual history of racial tension or just worried adults, I think that played a role in how we were treated.

The place was run like a military boot camp. No nonsense. Get out of line and there'll be hell to pay, so behave! The line was a literal line much of the time: in the school's hallways, all students were to walk single file, on the right side, no talking. They meant it: male teachers armed with heavy wooden paddles would enforce it physically. Being in the hallway at all except between bells would earn a student the same fate.

It may seem odd to you that I partly liked it that way. Especially since I mentioned thinking about the place with a visceral shudder. But, you see, I'd been bullied and harassed and picked on by other kids (mostly boys) for several years prior to this, and all this rigid discipline gave me protection. Yes, if the adults took students' misbehaviors seriously, if infractions actually got punished severely enough to shut them down, I was a beneficiary. "It's about time", I said to myself. "They should not be allowed to get away with that stuff, and now they can't! Good!" The problem was, I was not perceived by the authoritarian adults as a nice well-behaved good boy, a person whose obedience to the rules and the spirit thereof earned me respect as a colleague. Nope, they glared at me suspiciously, convinced that each and every one of us kids (especially us male-bodied kids) would misbehave and act up if given the opportunity. They treated all of us as if even when we were not directly incurring their wrath, the only reason that was so was that they had intimidated us into compliance. I resented that, resented their attitude, and my resentment was something they could see on my face. And I occasionally ended up in trouble with them myself because they made arbitrary calls and issued orders that contradicted what we'd been told previously. In short, I was ambivalent.

Against that backdrop, please understand that I was a very sexually naive kid. It was an earlier era, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I was exceptionally naive compared to other kids my own age at the time. I had only as early as the summer after fifth grade learned that people had sex because they had an appetite for it, as opposed to doing it for the purpose of making babies (and that that is what the word "fuck" referred to). And in the wake of that revelation, I was still, at this point, knitting together my own feelings and sensations and experiences with this new awareness. I was trying to figure out how much of what I did and felt was this, the sexual feelings that apparently everyone had, and not something unique to me. And so it was that when a handful of us were standing outside the band room, awaiting the beginning of band class, one of the girls who played oboe was talking with some other band members and tossed out the fact that she knew what 'masturbation' was. I didn't know the word (I wasn't uniquely ignorant; she hinted that it had to do with sexual biology) so I looked it up later in the dictionary. And then spent a lot of time wondering if that thing that I do is this and, if so, oh, so other people do that too? and the ramifications of that if it were indeed the case.

Also taking place this year was my first experience with the existence of gay people and the concept of homosexuality. The boy's name was Malcolm, and he knew me from seeing me in church on Sundays. He was one of the small handful of people I hung out with at school, going out onto the playgrounds after lunch. I was pretty cut off and didn't have many friends, so it was quite nice to have someone interested in spending time with me, laughing and talking and telling interesting stories.

"Who do you like from class?" he asked me. "Are there girls who you want to be with?"

"I've always like Betsy Johnson. I've been in class with her on and off since fourth grade, and she's really smart, and pretty and cute. And I like Tess Minton and Carol Slocumb from McLaurin's English class too. They're really nice".

"Do you ever try to look up their dresses or skirts and see their underwear? Do you wish you could get your hand inside their underwear and maybe take it off and see them naked?"

That wasn't how I thought of Betsy and the others, and I told him so. I wasn't interested in humiliating them or erasing their dignity. (And I had kept a secret of my fascination with girls' shapes and even if it was true I would never tell them so and creep them out. And the way Malcom spoke about it was too much like how boys were always obsessing about farts and stuff, so it was like he was accusing me of being disgusting).

"She would do that, you know. She does do it. She lets boys touch her there, she lets them look and see her there".

I didn't believe it, it didn't at all mesh with my sense of her and how she behaved in general.

"Do you ever think about sex with another guy?"

I scowled at him, perpexed, and stuck out my left and right index fingers and bounced the tips off each other. "You can't put one inside the other other! How would that work?"

"One of them puts his dick in the other one's butt hole"

"Eww"

"Or you could also lick or suck it. That feels really good. Would you want to do that?"

"Umm no, yuck"

"Would you like someone to do it to you? I would, if you think you want to try it".

"Umm, no, no thanks".

After that, we continued to hang out and spend time together during lunch break and the topic was never discussed again.


I was not close friends with Betsy Johnson and Tess and Carol and other girls I liked. I think we had some degree of mutual respect, but I could not call it friendship. I hadn't had a girlfriend since Karen moved away from Valdosta in third grade, and the girls that I had been just "friend friends" with were also a part of the past.

I was shy and sort of shut down socially. People in general didn't just tend to like me and include me, and when I had tried to be more outgoing, to be more of a character, a class clown in my own way, it had backfired, back in fifth grade. Trying to be exaggerated in my expressions and responses and behaviors in the classroom, to draw attention to myself, had not gotten people to laugh with me, only to laugh at me, and not in a good way. For some sissy guys, being silly and humorous apparently worked well for them when they were younger, but for me, when I tried it it only generated ridicule and offenses to my dignity; it wasn't my thing.

The shudders and the dread I feel when I look back at Valdosta, and imagine what it would have been like if our family had remained there, mostly have to do with the spaces in between anything that actually happened. Sooner or later I suspect there would have been incidents, outside of the protected hallways, away from the heavily disciplined school. Sooner or later I would have been subjected to hostile mockery about all the things I didn't know and understand. I think it's likely that I would have encountered sudden unanticipated violence, including sexually invasive violence, and I would not have been ready for it, would not have had the necessary coping skill to deal with it.

Los Alamos was a shock for me when we moved there. I was quickly exposed to a lot of overt homophobic hostility, and a lot of my sexual ignorance was stripped way in a barrage of contempt and mockery and teasing. But most of that was verbal and the culture I'd been moved to was less given over to violent hidden assaults that get laminated over and never spoken of. I think I was better off with things as they actually happened.


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