On a sunny February morning I sent a text to my younger sister. This all-important text was one where I finally outted myself. Within 20 minutes my sister had contacted my mother and they were at my apartment brimming with tears and accusations. Once my mother accepted that I was not attempting to put her on, she looked at me a moment and asked “Did he do things to you?” He is the subject I’d like to to tell you about.

This is a subject I have never really pulled together completely and shared. I say “pulled together” because to understand this story involves sharing considerably more than just my experience but I believe that it deserves to be told and to my knowledge the silence has lasted 20 years. I am ending the silence now.

I grew up in a small, rural, conservative community of Dutch immigrants and their offspring. There are a few other communities like this one around the country and people tend to travel between them when they decide to travel at all. As with most insular communities, this one sought to keep the world out. Secrecy is a lifestyle and fills and buffers community dialogue as well. The community tried to conceal as much inside, as well, even from other members. Alcoholism, domestic abuse, and child abuse were never discussed, although they were rampant. While the whole community gathered once a week for church, those sorts of things were never appropriate to mention. These abuses were left to grind away painfully, quietly, in the dark, tearing up lives over the course of decades. So many silent screams.

This experience begins with a teacher. I am not really sure whether I should name him or not. I feel fine including the names of beloved educators like my second grade teacher, Miss Grey, but when it comes to him, I feel a form of shame on his behalf, but also my own shame that nothing has been done and the shame of being associated with such a monster. Twenty years has passed and nothing has been done. The monster has moved on to torment someone else. The shame that I have done nothing is enough to burden me, even to this day. I guess I will call him by his first name, since that is what we called him as students, instead of by From my perspective, I called him Ivan rather than his proper name because I felt there was nothing else for me to do. No matter what I said, I was going to be sent back to the same school, the same classroom, the same teacher. Stripping him of a respectful term “Mister” was all I could do to make him smaller at that time in my life. My small, pathetic attempt to level a playing field that my parents and the other parents would not level. It took work at first to remember and make a cognizant effort but in time, it came easily. He was Ivan and I believe he was sexually assaulting boys in my school.

Where do we begin? Ivan had moved to Washington State from Michigan though he was originally from elsewhere. He was single and in his 30s and that made some people a bit wary of him. My mother once called into question the sexual identity of Matt Lauer on the Today Show because he was 40 and unmarried. She said men are incomplete without a wife and if they were not married by 25, they were either socially inept or homosexual or both. If they were the former, they got a degree of pity. Not enough pity to associate with them beyond the barest of niceties, but some pity nonetheless, which was more than any gay man or lesbian ever got. As a sidebar, I am not conflating sexual orientation with the crime that Ivan committed. Ivan was a child predator, which goes far beyond any attempt at classification of sexual orientation.

Ivan had dark hair and continuously sported a mustache and khaki pants. I was informed his forte in college was physical education and aside from playing some inventive adaptations of standard sports for recess, it did not show much that he was physical health conscious as he had a bit of a belly on his otherwise average frame. I was in the third grade. I was a bit of an irritating knowitall who sadly did not have access to enough academic materials to know more than the average student did. This translated to mean more that I said a lot of over-zealous ‘nuh-uhs’ when someone else was clearly wrong and that I had few, if any, friends. The school was small and Ivan taught 3rd through 5th grade in the same classroom of about 20 students. It was a private school and the classes were completely made up of students who went to the same church as I. It meant that all of the students knew each other, and each other’s siblings, parents and occupations. There was no way to hiding in that intimate of a classroom and no place to hide. There were few secrets about what happened in there and the one’s that did exist amongst us were deeply borne.

Things started off with swimming lessons. For years it had been a tradition in the 3rd-5th grades that every other year there would be swimming lessons offered twice a week for 4 weeks at the local YMCA. We would bus for 15 minutes to the facility and have lessons there and our parents would pick us up afterward. As a bit of an outsider who was not invited to a lot of sleepovers, and thus not terribly used to being in a space where others were changing, I was incredibly nervous. We arrived at the YMCA and split up by girls and boys and filed into the locker rooms to change. As per most lockerrooms, there was not a lot of privacy to be had for anyone. The room had showers and stalls with stalls on one side and two or three open benches surrounded by lockers on the other. As an overweight eight year old with few friends I wanted privacy more than anything but soon realized there was little to none to be had.

On our first day we also learned something else. Ivan would come in and change with us. There were swim instructors who worked at the facility and they taught the classes, and changed elsewhere. Ivan felt he needed to be involved and shunned other changing rooms/times to strip down and change with is. Into a crowded space that was filled with 10-14 pre-pubescent boys went my teacher. He picked the most open space on the center and began to slowly undress. I had never seen a grown adult naked and this was incredibly uncomfortable for me. I was not terribly far away from his spot in the middle of the room and feeling something akin to vulnerability, so I wrapped my towel around my waist as I attempted to shimmy out of my pants. Just as I am stepping out of my pants, my child-sized fist clenching my towel closed, I heard his voice call our my name. I had been facing away from him as much as I could, and I turned to see if standing there, completely naked, with his hands on his hips. He announces loudly to me “You don’t have to hide your body with the towel. We are all men here.” The boys around the room looked at me in pity and alarm as many of them were hiding behind towels or already rushing off to the shower, having been faster to change than I. I dropped my towel as requested, exposing my 8 year old body to my naked teacher. Other students tried to change in the toilet stalls, but they too were called out and not allowed to hide their bodies from his gaze.

This behavior was the same from after lessons with the exception that Ivan stripped naked and showered and strutted around for as long as possible. Any attempts at hiding our bodies were met with similar comments to the ones I received and at times he would laughingly pull away our towels or try to joke and rough house with us whilst he was naked in the shower, tearing off out swim shorts and holding us against him. It became the norm that the boys would rush into the lockerroom after fast as we could to change. Ivan got wind of this and made us wait outside for him, telling the people at the front desk that he was doing it for our own safety, so we would not slip in the lockeroom. There was no getting around him seeing us naked, no matter how hard we tried.

Where were our parents? I was a mouthy child, as previously mentioned, so I told my parents but I toned down the severity of what was going on. I was afraid. Telling them that I think my teacher, a member of their church, enjoyed watching and touching naked boys in the lockerroom would have gotten me written off as some sort of pervert. To even mention such a thing in that community made people think that you too were damaged, for how else would you know what molestation and sex were? I assumed none of the other boys cared, except me, so I shared that Ivan was in the room while we changed and nothing more. My parents did not seem to care and never dwelled on the subject long, though if they did anything about it, I would have no way of knowing at the time. It was a sad, lonely place to be.

If that had been the extent of it, perhaps it could have gone on for years and no one would have really been willing to pick it up and run with it. The two older grades of students during that year were filled with troubled, difficult students. While I won’t go into too much depth, I will say that they were from challenging homes that did little to make sure their children were respectful, got passing grades, or even cared about other people. I being the awkward, irritating child was the butt of jokes and teased quick regularly and held little warmth for most of the children I knew and spent time with every day. There was one particular boy though that struggled to fit in as well. I’ll call him Brent. He came from a very large family and frequently wore handmedowns to school. He never fit in well, assumably because his large family tended to be more conservative he the only other boys in his grade tended to be more the trouble-making type. To the outsider, it appeared as though Ivan had taken him under his wing, to the rest of us kids, we all had assumptions and they largely centered on Ivan molesting him in some fashion.

Its hard to recall so many exact instances and the talk of this was big on the playground for months. I do recall one instance however that I can retell specifically. The childhood sleepover was a staple even at my rural school. Each Friday it was a norm to see kids with extra bags, each nervously approaching the cars of other kids’ parents on their way to spend the weekend. Brent was not the most popular kid and thus went on few of these that I ever saw. On one Friday, I saw Brent standing inside the school with an extra bag instead of waiting outside for his ride home, something we were not allowed to do after the the bell rang. He said he was staying with Ivan and going to help him we some neighbor’s animals that we was going to caring for at the moment. I thought it was odd and I was alarmed for him, but completely helpless to do anything. My brother arrived, late as usual, to pick my siblings and I up, and I did not really give it a thought until Monday morning before class.

I arrived to a group of students around Brent. I listened as they peppered him with questions and he tried turning his face away awkwardly as he answered. Before I could get a complete story out of him, I saw Ivan walk from the front door of our school building and cross the gravel driveway to his truck, which was odd for him to leave so close to classes beginning. The group had quieted as he walked, only to flare to life again as soon as he was in his vehicle. Once he was out of sight, one of the girls flipped off the area where his truck was previously parked. The air was electric. I asked one of the boys from the group what had happened and he recalled to me that apparently Ivan and Brent had left school on Friday an Ivan decided that he wanted to go swimming. They went to a nearby lake and got out of his truck. Brent explained that he did not have swim shorts and Ivan told him it did not matter and that he should just strip down and swim naked. Brent asked if Ivan was going to join him but Ivan said he just wanted to watch and proceeded to do exactly that as Brent stripped down and splashed around in the cold lake water. I was wrapt in the story and knew that this was a big deal but Brent would not share anything more about what happened. Apparently, Brent arrived at school before I on Monday morning and confronted Ivan who asked him not to tell others what had happened and promised to buy him treats and such if he did. This was the reason why he left. We were still standing there when he returned as he called Brent inside. The bell rang shortly later and we all went inside to class. I talked to Brent again at recess and apparently Ivan had purchased him generic soda and some candy bars in exchange for not telling anyone. He in turn told me to not tell anyone.

I once again told my parents. My father, a complex and often angry man at this period of my life, seemed confused and befuddled at first and did not immediately provide me an response to the situation either way. A few hours later he made a point to come back to the back of the barn (as we lived on a farm) where was I working and shared his thoughts. He stated that the situation involving my teacher was probably a misunderstanding but what was certain was that it was none of our business. The issue fell squarely on Brent’s family to handle. With that, he moved on to the greater issue at hand, which was the evils of homosexuality and how the media was so pervasive that it had convinced me that my teacher was a homosexual by leaching its evil messages into my brain. He spent the next thirty to forty minutes sputtering and angrily spitting while explaining how all gay men are doomed to try to have sex with children because they are vampires that feed on innocence and that they should all be castrated or preferably killed. He went on to graphically explain what a gay rape would look like and how homosexuals are filthy and perform anal sex because they like and need to hurt others. I was about 9 years old, and when the talk was done,it felt like I had been sexually assaulted a second time, and this time by a man I was supposed to love and trust.

Where does this story end? It doesn’t really. I moved away in high school but I hear that Brent was never the same and had troubles in his personal relationships going forward. Ivan moved away without being confronted, charged, or prosecuted; though I did hear he tried again in a new state and was fired for it. My parent’s church fragmented into smaller pieces and people generally distanced themselves from other over time. I, however, was well aware that I was gay when my father spoke to me. I spent the better part of a decade wrestling with the fact that I was gay, firmly believing that I would undoubtedly turn into a lonely, predatory, monster who fed on the innocence of children and deserved nothing more than to be locked away or lynched by the decent people around me. What Ivan did to me was terrible but the real damage was done by my father and that community. The crime was denied, justice was denied, and in the end I was blamed and silenced.

Not any more.

P.