It was a mid-winter’s afternoon and the sun had started to drop behind the hills on the horizon, casting a cool shadow over the school quadrangle, but I felt white hot.

As I pushed through the crowd of hollering teenage boys, I felt them claw at me, punch me in the back and the head, and spit on my face. “Dirty f---ing faggot!” they screamed. “You’re going to die, poofter!”

The volume of their yelling and jeering was deafening. I willed myself to just keep going, to make it to the bus stop at the front gates.

When I got there, I reasoned, it’d be a few minutes wait, then a 15-minute journey home, followed by a four minute walk up our steep dirt driveway, and then a 30-second brisk walk upstairs. I just had to keep my shit together for 20 minutes, and then I could kill myself.

Then my whole miserable existence would be over.

That horrific afternoon is burnt into my memory. I was in the middle of grade eight, it was the final period of the day, and as I sat in graphics class I became keenly aware that something was amiss.

Kids kept looking over at me, sniggering, laughing, gasping in horror. They were looking at something. It obviously involved me. Then one of them stood and took it — a piece of paper — to the front of the room and handed it to the teacher. He read it, looked at me and then stood. For reasons I still don’t understand, he read it aloud.

My blood ran cold. What he read was a fairly graphic love note to one of the boys, apparently from me. The teacher should’ve known that the chicken scrawl on that paper looked nothing like my proudly neat handwriting, but he didn’t care. And in less than a minute, he made me public enemy number one.

In the immediate aftermath, my state was beyond hysterical. And yet, I vividly recall every detail. I remember how badly my chest hurt from holding in a torrent of tears, so as to not give the culprit the satisfaction. I remember the feeling of betrayal that an adult would do such a thing. I remember that long, bumpy bus ride home that seemed to go on forever. I remember the smell of the dirt as I clambered up the drive, desperate to get inside. I remember thoroughly collapsing into myself in a way, thankfully, I haven’t since.

I remember feeling like there was no reasonable alternative than to take my life. And so I broke open a disposable razor and retrieved the blade, and sat, violently shaking, on the edge of the bath.

I don’t speak about my adolescence often. The truth is that I’m still traumatised by the unspeakably horrific things I endured as a teenager that the mere thought of them makes me ill.

At my NRL-mad, all boys Christian school, it was painfully obvious that I was gay. I didn’t play sports. I liked to hang out in the library. I loved writing and art and theatre. I was tall, gawky, not very cool and a bit camp.

And every single day for years, things were hell. I feared for my life. I ran, hid, kept my head down, stifled my spirit, tried to be the furtherest thing from myself — anything to avoid being a target.

I was bashed, ridiculed, taunted endlessly, you name it. I was almost run over. At a school camp, I was tied to a tree and beaten with an oar. Teachers seemed indifferent. Some blamed my “personality”. I lived in despair, although in hindsight, it’s clear I wasn’t really living at all.

That’s why programs like Safe Schools are important. And it’s why the lunacy of the debate about it in recent days has enraged me. The fact that an elected official could so gleefully draw comparisons between homosexuality and the “grooming” of children is incomprehensible and abhorrent. It shows just how far we have to go when it comes to reaching the ultimate goal of tolerance, let alone the even basic expectation that adults might be able to debate an issue without skirting terrifyingly close to pure evil.

media_camera Journalist Shannon Molloy interviewing Ed Sheeran at the TV Week awards in 2014. (Pic: Supplied)

That I didn’t top myself at 14 is the product of timing and luck — a last-minute decision that mum’s ensuite was an utterly terrible setting for such an act, and then later that the whole idea itself was garbage; coupled with the perfect timing of the only kid who was nice to me, Andrew, phoning after he heard what’d happened to see if I was OK.

A program like Safe Schools might’ve helped too. It might’ve stopped or at least reduced the relentless bullying in the first place. At the very minimum, it might’ve given me some hope, with the knowledge that I wasn’t alone, that things would get better and that there was a whole, wide world full of people like me.

I was not a unique case. What happened to me isn’t something left in a far less understanding era. LGBTI kids are still bullied to horrific extents. They’re more at risk of suicide, self harm and mental illness. And something needs to be done.

media_camera And with fellow journalists on board the Queen Victoria for the Today Show. (Pic: Supplied)

For any young gay person reading this, please believe me — it gets better. School ends and real life begins, where you get to call the shots on what you do, where you go and who you spend time with. You get to pursue things you’re passionate about, that excite you, that enrich your life. The vast majority of rational, reasonable people you’ll encounter aren’t hung up on who you are.

media_camera Shannon Molloy, pictured hiking recently in northern Thailand. (Pic: Supplied)

You’ve probably heard it from celebrities in awareness campaigns and it might seem hard to believe in those dark, crappy moments, but take it from a very ordinary person — it gets better. It did for me and a bunch of other normal, ordinary gay kids that I know.

Seriously, the thing I am most grateful for in life is not taking mine that awful, awful day. My world now is incredible — almost offensively so. I am surrounded by people who love me, I’ve achieved my dreams, I’m loved and I love… things are awesome. And so it will be for you too.

Yeah, there are people who will try to make you feel pretty shabby, such as George Christensen. And small but bizarrely vocal groups like the Australian Christian Lobby, whose mission appears to be to insist that you’re not normal, that you’re somehow a part of all the world’s ills. And that sucks.

But at the end of the day, their entire existences are spent being obsessed with other people, torn up inside about them, spending every waking hour hatefully spewing rubbish about them to the point where they can’t even rationally see how insane they sound most of the time.

How sad is that?

If you or someone you know needs help, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit lifeline.org.au

Shannon Molloy is a National TV Writer for News Corp Australia.

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