“What the hell is this?! What the hell were you doing, Randy?!”

I didn’t know at that moment, as a sixteen-year-old boy, that those words would follow me far into adulthood. 

“I didn’t raise a fag in this household!”

That day would never leave me. I was reshaped into a new man that day. Into a man even I didn’t recognize anymore.

By my own father.

“What the hell is this shit?!” Dad yelled at my face as I tried to fade out of reality in fear.

I’d forgotten to clear the browsing history. I had done that one thing I always feared the most: I forgot.

“I don’t know!” I answered in panic, almost hyperventilating. I knew my days were over. “I didn’t watch it, I swear!”

“Stop lying to me! You’re the only one using this laptop besides me, and I sure as hell am not watching this… this…!” 

He looked like he was about to explode. His entire head was red from anger. His eyes were enormous as if they were going to pop out as he waved the big laptop around like it weighed nothing.

I’d never been so terrified in my life. He was so mad, so unbelievably angry he couldn’t even speak anymore, and when I opened my mouth, hoping to lie myself out of the situation, he threw the laptop at me. I couldn’t dodge it in the tiny space between my bed and desk. The heavy machine hit my head, nearly knocking me out cold.

The pain was unbearable, but the fear of death kept me conscious. I felt blood running down my shoulder when I stood up.

“I didn’t watch it, I swear…” I said, begging and crying.

“Two dozen videos!” he screamed at my face. “If it wasn’t you, then who the fuck watched all this faggot shit on my computer?! On the computer I bought and paid for?!”

“I didn’t…”

He hit me. It happened so fast I had no time to react. “I didn’t raise a fag in this household, you hear me? I didn’t raise a fucking squealing pig in this household, you got that?!”

I froze when he hovered over me, his hands balled into tight fists as he glared down at me. I thought he was going to kill me when he brought his face closer to mine.

“Are you a fucking squealer?!” he yelled in my ear.

“No, sir.” I spoke, my voice trembling, my entire body shivering.

“Don’t you ever fucking forget that!” he replied, then stormed out of my room and slammed the door shut so hard one of my framed posters fell off the wall.

I slouched against my bed, sliding down to sit on the floor, and cried my soul out.

Everything about my life went to hell after that. Mom was dead, so I was alone, completely at Dad’s mercy. He isolated me from the outside world. I could no longer see my old friends since Dad believed they were the reason I had “gay thoughts”. God forbid his son was actually gay. He believed I acted that way out of disrespect toward him and corruption by my peers, and he was determined to weed those disgusting thoughts out of my head.

“You’re coming to the gym with me,” he declared one morning during breakfast not long after the first incident.

“The gym?” I asked carefully – I’d quickly learned to be afraid of him.

He slammed his fist on the table, making me jump in my seat. “Did I stutter?” he barked at me with a furious frown. “Or would you rather be squealing for the fucking pedophiles?”

“No… Gym is good…” I muttered, my heart racing inside my chest.

“Speak like a man! You sound like a sissy!” he yelled, and I nearly panicked. “Are you a fucking sissy?”

I shook my head, and the case was closed.

Every single conversation we had followed that exact pattern. He degraded me, humiliated me, and mocked everything I did and said, while I did everything I could to please him. The angrier he got, the harder I tried. And he was so angry… He always got angry whenever I walked into his view. Violence became my norm. He didn’t give me a break, not even once. If I ever stepped out of the mold he had forced me into, he made sure I regretted it.

So what could I do? I did my best to adapt. I did everything he asked. I changed so much… I became a person I was not. Even my thoughts stopped being my own. 

And I was never good enough. I was never a man enough. I wasn’t big enough. I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t speaking or acting or even thinking like the man he expected me to be, and if I showed any kind of weakness, he went ballistic. 

There was this one night that really hit me hard. I was eighteen at the time, and he was drunk…

“You see this?” he asked, forcing me to sit down to watch his favorite porn in the living room. “You see that guy? That’s a man. See those massive tits and tight pussy? That means she’s a woman. Do you have tits or pussy?”

I shook my head, already seeing where this was going.

“You don’t, so what does that make you?”

“A man,” I replied, and he immediately slapped me in the face, but not nearly as painfully as I was already used to, so I merely flinched.

Then he grabbed me by my short hair to yell in my ear. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re not a fucking man, you’re a pervert! You’re a squealer. Men fuck women. You really think you’re a man? You’re nothing! You’re human waste! Someone should cut your cock off because you are not a man! You will never be a man!”

He threw me on the floor and spat on me before sitting back down, panting as his anger subsided.

After two years, he couldn’t let it go. He hated gay people so much he would never let it go. Sometimes I wondered why he still let me live in his house, but later I figured he loved taking his hate out on me. I’d been an easy target. I never even considered fighting back because he’d sucked the fight out of me a long time ago with his tyranny.

I sat up and stared at the screen without seeing a thing. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t move a muscle. I just sat there, and he still got angry at me again.

“Yeah,” he drawled in a way that made me want to throw up. “You’d just love to take her place, wouldn’t you? You fucking disgusting pervert… You’re all the same. Fucking sick freaks… I hope you get raped… That’s what you want, right? You want to get raped. That’s what you’ll get if you go near those disgusting fags… If you ever do that, you better stay the fuck out of here. I don’t want any of that fag shit here, you hear me?”

I stood up and walked out of the living room, his drunken yells following me.

“I should throw you out! I didn’t raise a fag! It should be legal to kill a fucker like you! You should be dead, you hear me?! I hope those rapists kill you!”

Once I got into my room, I closed the door, holding back my need to throw up. I stopped to stare at myself in the mirror. I was twice the size I used to be, thanks to Dad’s ruthless workout routine, but I still couldn’t even consider protecting myself. There was no way out for me.

I looked in the mirror again. The muscular, brown-haired tall guy stared back at me with dead eyes. I could barely even look at him. I didn’t know him.

“I’m not a piggy,” I whispered, turning my back on the image. “I’m not a fag.”

My life got a little better when Dad’s friend gave me a job as a mechanic at his shop. I started dating a hot chick, a daughter of my coworker. Dad finally got off my back. At least he didn’t talk about gays that often anymore. The girl was all right, I guess, but nothing special. I kept her around to keep Dad happy, and my life easier.

I thought everything was fine. I hated everything about myself and my life, but I was too numb to understand that. I thought everything would be alright, but no. Not for long.

I had an incident at work when I was nineteen. The garage I worked at was old and dusty, and things often broke because the owner couldn’t afford to replace them. One day, the lift we used with cars broke, dropping the heavy station wagon on top of my leg. It hurt like hell, but I swallowed the cries of pain like a man.

I thought nothing of the broken leg. I spent my long sick leave at my girlfriend’s place and went back to work once it was fully healed. The injury wasn’t supposed to be a problem. People broke legs all the time. It wasn’t as good as new, but it was fine if I was careful.

But then Dad decided I wasn’t man enough if I didn’t join the army.

I got disqualified right away because the injury was still quite recent. They told me to come back once it wasn’t causing trouble, but my dad didn’t take it lightly.

Not at all.

When he found out about it, he beat the crap out of me.

“It’s because you’re a fucking useless sissy! Real men don’t get turned down from the fucking army!!”

That was pretty much everything I remember of that day. The next time I woke up, I found myself in a hospital. I didn’t know how I ended up there, but the pain all over my body told me why I had ended up there. My injuries were so bad I was surprised I was still alive.

Again, I didn’t know at that moment, as a nineteen-year-old man, that my life had turned around once again.

I learned that my coworker, the father of my girlfriend, had been keeping an eye on me. When I suddenly didn’t show up at work, he came looking for me. What he’d found was a bloodied mess that was at least supposed to be me, and all hell broke loose.

I stayed in the hospital while the hell was running loose. I only had to give a statement to the cops who were eager to put my father behind bars. I learned a lot of new things about him during the next six months that ensued. The worst? He’d had something to do with the death of a young gay man, but no one ever found enough evidence. 

But now they had me. I was the evidence they needed. The family of that poor dead soul finally got what they wanted: a monster behind bars. And I got my freedom at long last…

If only I knew what to do with it.