I was groomed

Meryl Links
4 min readJun 19, 2023

--

Raindrops on glass

Content warning: this is my experience of growing up queer in an unsupportive environment. I don’t go into any heavy details or anything - that would be unnecessary - but the topic is hardly a pleasant one.

So, I was a queer kid. Since as far back as I can remember, I knew I liked boys, and I knew I felt some kind of way about my gender. I used to cross-dress in private and eventually at school by swapping clothes with one of my friends. I lost my virginity at 13 to a slightly older boy. However, at 14, I had basically nobody to talk to about being gay or any of my feelings about gender. My parents insisted it was all ‘a phase’, friends didn’t really understand, the guy I lost my virginity to was in DEEP denial and never wanted to talk about it, and teachers were Section 28'd into silence on the topic. Nobody would acknowledge that I was gay, nobody would talk about what I was feeling and experiencing. They all insisted it was ‘just a phase’, I’d grow out of it and that I should stop talking about it. That was all they would say on the topic. End of discussion. I had nobody to talk to.

Except for one person. A man I met online. He listened to my feelings, and told me he understood. I can’t remember how we met, but I do remember chatting with him on MSN messenger. He was the one person who spoke to me as though he knew what I was going through and didn’t treat me like I was in the wrong somehow, and that helped me so much, it gave me hope that my life would make sense one day. Only, he wasn’t listening or helping me. Not really. He was manipulating and exploiting my vulnerability. Over the course of a few months, he manipulated me into taking nude photographs of myself and sending them to him. Eventually he persuaded me to meet him in real life for sex. He offered to buy me things that I wanted. I was a 14 year old. So I did it.

Even after it became clear to me that he was only using me for my body, I had nobody I could talk to about it. I felt terrified that I would be ‘blamed’ and that I would once again be lectured and scolded for my sexuality. So I hid what happened. I hid it all in shame.

I hid everything from the adults in my life because I knew the conversation would just be yet another chance for them to try and tell me to stop being gay. Stop wearing girl’s clothes. Stop being me. That isolation and inability to talk to trustworthy adults was what made me vulnerable in the first place because I was desperate for somebody to listen, and it stopped me from asking for support when I was exploited. For years, I carried the shame of what happened to me, and it became self-loathing. I hated what had happened to me and felt like it was my fault, because I was gay. Even years after the fact, I was reluctant to talk about it since I was worried about fuelling the narrative of predatory gay men (since I had been preyed on by one), which would only come back around to hurt me anyway since I was gay too. I felt mortified at the thought of being blamed for being abused. I was disempowered, exploited, then silenced. Disempowered by a system that refused to accept and properly support me, exploited by a man who saw an opportunity that system had created, then shamed into silence by a society already too willing to see people like me as deviants.

That’s what real grooming looks like. It’s not having a rainbow flag in a classroom, it’s not being told that gay people exist in PSHE, it’s not school policies that protect children from bullying for daring to stray too far from society’s norms. Grooming looks like being vulnerable and alone, and having that vulnerability exploited because the systems that should be protecting you have either alienated you, or pretend you don’t exist.

I deserved to be safe. I deserved to be supported. I deserved better than what happened to me. I deserved to have sex-ed that taught me how to stay safe, how to say no and somewhere/someone to talk about what was happening to me. All LGBTQ youth deserve safety. You can’t create safety for them by denying their needs, ignoring their thoughts, deriding their feelings and pathologising their identities. That only makes them more vulnerable to predators. If you don’t create safe and accepting spaces for queer kids to discuss and explore their identities and feelings, you aren’t ‘protecting’ them from anything: you are creating vulnerability and isolation which will be exploited by actual groomers and abusers.

Which is why it absolutely sickens me that the current anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ movement has fully reversed the roles between abusers and safeguarding. They scream ‘groomer’ and ‘abuse’ at teachers and parents trying to create safe environments for queer kids, whilst themselves helping to create a brand new cohort of disempowered and vulnerable children. They scream those slurs at people who even dare to acknowledge that queer youth exist.

But we do exist. And we deserve safety. And it sickens me that the people trying to create that safety are instead slurred and villified as if they’re the ones abusing vulnerability.

--

--