While I continue to focus on healing, today’s “on this date” memory hit me right in the feels. Like many of my creative compositions over the years, now that I’m awakened to the horrors of the traumatic childhood memories that my family attempted to erase from me noggin, I find myself profoundly humbled by the power of the subconscious and forever grateful to my Grandpa Joe, who coached me on how to awaken from the hypnosis designed to entrap me back in 1978.
After a series of mysterious photos of me that took place on Christmas 1971 and 1972, the curiosity got the best of my family. They wanted answers to the questions that the photos presented. Who was I looking at in the photo taken in 1971 and what caused the unexplained shadow shaped like angel wings cast across the photo? What was it that scared me in 1972 and triggered me to tug on my Grandmother, as if to pull her away from yet another shadow cast across her living room, leaving two unexplained images in its wake, one of a devilish looking man and the other of what appeared to be a medieval couple hiding from the man.
In an attempt to find answers, my family placed me through a series of hypnosis sessions when I was 7, which were conducted by my Grandpa Joe. My father being the pragmatic man that he was thought it was all nonsense, so my mother and I moved into a townhouse by my grandfather, where I could build a friendship and establish trust with my grandfather to better ensure not only my comfort but the success of the hypnosis sessions themselves.
While I’ll save the details of those sessions for another post, I can reveal that my family received confirmation that I was gay, which wasn’t a hard sell given my aspirations of becoming a ballerina in 1978.
It was my Grandpa Joe who conducted the gay conversion therapy at the insistence of my parents, and it broke his heart because doing so meant violating the trust we had established.
Before that final hypnosis session which entailed erasing the memories of our time together, my Grandpa Joe coached me how to awaken myself through creative expression, a process that included tapping into the music and artwork that most resonated with me. While the conversion therapy could erase what was on the surface and influence my self esteem and worth as a gay man (one where I’d view homosexuality as something sinful, perverted, and lustful), the hypnosis couldn’t remove the time I spent with my Grandpa Joe all together, so long as I had the courage to be vulnerable and fight back through creative expression.
When we met that last time, my Grandpa Joe said that he was going to leave me money when he died. He also told me that he was going to build me a house to atone for the sins of my family and asked me where I wanted to live. I wasn’t very worldly in 1978, so I chose North Carolina where I often visited my grandmother who divorced him the decade prior.
My mother disowned me last Christmas and, ironically, threatened to sue me for defamation of character because her ego couldn’t handle the magnitude of the truth I was tapping into. After hiring a romance scammer posing as a personal trainer to toy with me ticker and paying other strategically placed, criminally minded men within the gay community to attack my character and slander my reputation, she was in too deep.
You can’t sue someone for defamation of character for speaking the truth, which put my mother in a precarious situation. Instead of taking accountability for her crimes, she attempted to weaponize my kind, agreeable nature and vulnerable position against me. It was easier for her to portray me as a delusional man that was a menace to society that needed to be locked up. The only realization that makes the whole experience more horrific is knowing that she bribed court officials and people within the gay community using the money my Grandpa Joe left for me.
Unfortunately for my mother, I didn’t get angry and lash out of my circumstances to support the narrative she was pimping. Instead, I went within and expressed myself creatively to make sense of her irrational behavior and the ill intentions of others, which ultimately led me back to the fond memories of a long lost friend who I affectionately referred to as my Grandpa Joe.
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