A Story 29 years in the making

It's a story I can’t escape, I can’t change it, and I can't just “let it go”. There are some things in life that you can't just move on from, especially when that trauma was stored for so long before I could even bring myself to say. A night in April of 1996 changed the course of my life forever. One night would change me, how I would see myself in the world I would soon be in, and a future filled with confusion about why I seemed to struggle so much with things other people didn’t seem to.

The voice in my head that once whispered difficult thought processes that confused a young boy would immediately turn into a scream, a voice so loud and grew more effective and more dominant over time that would lead to moments of utter destruction and a never-ending cycle of mental health problems. That inner dialogue feels like the biggest enemy of the words. I was raped. It still feels uncomfortable to say those words out loud.

But that one co I will ever face.

As I write this as a 45-year-old man, there has barely been a day of relief since that night, and if I thought things over the years couldn’t get any worse, I would somehow be shocked when they constantly did. And they sure as hell did, and continue to do so today.

As difficult as this is to write, it’s important to me to put it into words, in the hope that it will help me heal and share my experience with others who may be feeling the same way I am.

Shame. Regret. Stupidity. Those are just some of the main things that I feel about what happened to me. As a victim, it is incredibly difficult to overcome certain emotions, even when my logical brain can see that it wasn’t my fault. The hard truth is, I only half believe that. I believe what was done to me was wrong, but unfortunately, I don't think I will ever believe it wasn’t my fault for putting myself in such a naive and dangerous situation that let it happen in the first place.

My Story.

I was 16 years old when we first got the internet. Back then, the technician would come to your house to physically connect it. The old sound of the modem connecting and paying $200 for 200 hours. But it would open a whole new world to me. As a 16-year-old exploring my sexuality, I managed to find gay content that both scared me and excited me at the same time. It was my biggest secret; no one could ever find out. I had already lived through extreme bullying by my brother and in high school. Being Gay in Lithgow was an absolute no. That thought was buried deep within me, and I inherently knew that in no way could anyone find out that it existed.

It is important to talk about my relationship with my father and brothers, because this heavily impacted my decision to never tell a soul what happened.

My mother and father separated when I was 10. Yes, it was messy, and yes, it was difficult for everyone. But I was 10. I shouldn't have had to worry about who was on whose side. I was blamed for going with Mum when she moved out, even though I had no choice in the matter.

From the day Dad moved out, I never spent one night with him. He never took me anywhere just to spend time together. Everything for him was about anger and money. If I asked him to take me somewhere, he responded angrily, “Your mother can pay for it”. He wouldn’t even come to my high school graduation because Mum would be sitting in the same hall. Our weekly time together consisted of him picking me up a block from home, taking me to Red Rooster, and dropping me back.

As for my brother Ryan, he has had this hatred for me for years. To this day, he hates me for no apparent reason. I was terrified of him; he was vicious, violent and a typical bully. He took every chance he ever could to be cruel and horrible to me, all because he simply appeared to hate my very existence.

This brings us to Cameron. He is the oldest of the four of us, so there is a fairly large age gap between us. This meant that, growing up, I was never close to him; he never really joined in when we were playing, so I didn’t really know him very well. He got engaged to Nicole, and suddenly Mum became enemy number 1. This didn’t line up with him being upset about her leaving Dad. It had been 6 years since she had been with Ray, who had helped Cameron financially when Dad refused to. Though he used it as his reason, it was a huge mistake. When I was 16, I will never forget the phone call where Cameron told Mum he didn't want anything further to do with her, Michelle or me. In one phone call, he wiped out his mother, sister and brother. Mum was begging him on the phone, and I will never forget it.

The difference with Cameron, as of today, is that we are now in touch and trying to build a relationship, which I am extremely happy about. Cameron was never like Ryan; he was never cruel to me or said unforgivable things. He simply vanished.

So what this meant was that I didn’t have any male figures in my life that I wasn’t either terrified of, or who didn't want anything to do with me. I was and always have been extremely close to my sister Michelle, but at the time she was going through her own things, and without realising it, she did provide me an enormous amount of comfort, being the only one out of the three siblings who didn't appear to hate me for no reason.

I started exploring online chat rooms, desperate to talk to someone like me. Again, it both excited and scared me. It felt like a whole other world existed outside this little town I grew up in. I wanted to know more about it, what life could be like, and, most of all, what love could be like. In 1996-97, there were no stories about safety online; it was so new that no one really knew what the potential pitfalls could be. In my parents' defence, Mum had absolutely no clue what I was looking at and who I was talking to.

For me, though, it was like a whole new world was being revealed to me for the first time. And each time I spoke with someone, I felt a little less terrified about being gay.

One night, I received a message from a 19-year-old who lived in another country town a couple of hours away. His name was Michael. I was so excited, here was someone in a similar situation to me, who had lived in a country town and who had actually come out as gay. I told him everything, every detail about my life, and he asked a lot of questions and seemed to have the right answer to everything.

The conversation was nothing sexual; it was more about having a lot in common and him being there to support me while I figured things out. Looking back, this wasn’t his first time; he knew everything to say to make me comfortable and trusting. If I were upset with Dad, he would encourage me not to spend time with him. If it were Mum, he would encourage me to lie to her to smooth everything over. When it came to Ryan, he was like my personal soldier; he rallied to my side, made me feel like I had an ally in the fight.

Gradually, he started asking what sort of things I was looking at on the internet. I was shy about admitting to things, so to make me more comfortable, he started sending me some pictures of naked guys and then asking whether they were my type. It was a slow burn; he was in no rush to get the job done, and everywhere he led, I happily followed. The pictures got more and more graphic, and although they made me uncomfortable, I was still a 16-year-old teenager.

He expertly interwined friendship with more and more sexual content. I trusted him, I felt like I had a secret ally that no one knew about and who could help me navigate my sexuality in a town that rejected anything that wasn’t considered “normal”.

Eventually, he started to hint about meeting in person. He had done so much to help me that he thought it was time that we met up and chatted together face to face. There was never any talk of anything sexual; in fact, I remember saying multiple times that I was nervous that he would want to do something. His responses were always nonchalant and jokey, waving the notion away as if it were a crazy thing I was worrying about for no reason. Again, he used the help he had given me as a reason I should feel comfortable and almost as if I owed him in some way, at least that's how I felt about it.

I had no idea I was being groomed, or even what grooming was. So, after much deliberation, I agreed to meet. In that moment, I had unknowingly sealed my fate. We waited patiently until my Mum and stepdad were going away for the weekend, leaving my sister and me at home. I had a car at the time, but no license because I was a few months away from getting it.

When the time came, I was more nervous than I could possibly imagine. I made up a story to my sister about going out; she had no idea I was going to take the car and drive off. It was not out of the norm for me to be out with friends, so she had no reason to question anything, nor did she hear me take the car, purely because of the setup of our property.

So, having no real idea what I was getting myself into, I drove my little car up the highway to the park where we had arranged to meet. We had both told each other what sort of cars we would be in. The plan was to sit in his car and chat, and maybe go for a drive if I was comfortable with how things were going. I pulled into the parking lot that I had been to a thousand times. I was the only car there. Already, my instincts were starting to fire. Then a car came through the car park twice and finally parked right next to me. My heart was thumping out of my chest. Should I drive away? It’s too late now.

I watched as a guy got out of the car and came over to the driver's side of my car. He tapped on the window with a massive smile on his face. Kyle! He almost shouted with excitement. He opened the passenger side of the car and said, “Jump in,” and then went back around to the driver's seat.

Once again, a few seconds ticked by, and I thought to myself, " This is wrong, I need to get out of here. But it was immediately followed by “it's too late’ It all happened so fast that before I knew it, I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car. He started making small talk, but all I could think was that this guy wasn’t 19, more like 25 or more. Another bolt of fear struck my body.

All of a sudden, everything changed. His demeanour changed completely. He wasn’t the friendly guy he was 5 minutes ago; he was cold, his voice laced with a tone that told me one thing: I was in trouble. He started the car and said, “We might as well go for a drive”. ‘OK’, I squeaked out. I was about to ask him whether he wanted me to show him around when he headed straight for the highway and towards a Lake that at this time of night was going to be isolated and completely away from anyone else. I was stuck in flight-or-fight mode;; he didn’t say a word as he turned off the highway onto the turnoff to the lake.

As I expected, when we pulled into the car park, it was completely dark, and there were no other cars in sight. He had still not said a word, and I was stuck in my own head, thinking this could be it for me. But what was waiting was worse than I could have ever possibly imagined.

“I've got to piss”, he said as he got out of the car and slammed the door. The doors clicked down, locked from the outside. I tried the door, and a rush of horror overwhelmed my body. I couldn't see where he was, and I was locked inside his car. Too much was happening too fast for my brain to figure out what to do. I didn't call out for help; I wasn’t scared he was going to assault me. I was terrified he was going to kill me.

Suddenly, the passenger door was flung open, and, in the same movement, I was hurled from the car onto the ground. I remember it vividly. His strength shocked me, and as I struggled to process that I was now face down on the ground, I said only one thing to him. “Please don't do this”. He sort of laughed and told me I had had this coming for months. He said it was so easy to pull me in, now I'm about to get what I really want”.

I started to get up, and he pushed me back down with both his hands and foot. The ground was gritty; it was close to the lake, so it was also sandy. I remember the feeling of the rubble and dirt on my hands and legs, then I was pushed further down until I felt his full weight pushing me down.

Something in me switched off. I knew what was coming, but the only thought I could process was that I was certain that I was going to die, that this was just the beginning. But suddenly that feeling didn't seem so bad; feeling nothing at all would surely be better than this nightmare unfolding in real time. So I didn’t say another word.

I can only describe what happened next as af time slowed down while he violently held me to the ground while he raped me. The pain was indescribable, but I didn’t make a sound. I remember staring out towards the lake as it happened. It felt like it would never end. I don’t know how long it took; it could have been 5 minutes or 10. For me, it felt like an eternity. There was still some part of my brain that couldn’t believe what was happening. How did I get here? How did this happen so fast?

As quickly as I was pulled from the car, it was over. I was still on the ground as he kicked me in the stomach and said, “Now you're gay”. He walked around the car to the driver's side, got in, quickly reversed out of the spot and headed for the exit.

What has just happened? I was still on the ground, and the area was lit only by a couple of lights here and there. I was about 3 or 4 kilometres from my car, still trying to comprehend what had actually happened.

I stood up, I was covered in dirt, scratches up and down my legs and was bleeding from my behind. I took a breath and started walking. The further I walked, the more my brain started to switch off. It was like it had already started processing the fact that I knew I could never tell anyone about this. My new mission was to make sure this story never saw the light of day.

By the time I had reached the car, I had already come up with a story to excuse the grazes and bruises that were hard to miss. I would say I had tripped on the driveway and waved it off as no big deal.

In the coming days, I did everything I could to act as if nothing had happened. When the feelings started to bubble up, I immediately pushed them back down. I threw myself into school and my social life. I never missed a day at school from then until I graduated well over a year later. School became my happy place. It was a place where I felt genuinely happy and safe.

It wouldn’t take long before my brain reached a point where it just couldn’t cope anymore. I had my first depressive episode when I was 20. The strange part was that I had pushed what happened down so far that I didn’t recognise that it was the root of a great deal of the difficulties I would face right up until writing this article.

I see it a little like a box; it's full of the trauma of what happened, and I have been quite successful at keeping that box closed. However, in doing so, other things have come flying out of the box because there is simply not enough room for everything. So anxiety and depression have become part of my daily life, with them either going way up to a dangerous level, or being bad enough so that I am only just able to cope.

I started seeing a Psychiatrist in 2011 and saw him twice a week right up until 2017. It wasn’t until 2015 that I told him what had happened. This man knew every little thing about me, except the biggest thing in my life. Of course, he already knew and was waiting for me to get to a point where I was comfortable telling him. Once I did, the floodgates opened. I was able to talk about it for the first time in my life. Over several sessions, I told him the whole story.

He asked me how I saw myself in the situation and immediately replied: “I put myself in such a dangerous situation, I guess I was asking for it”. I could see his face change and soften. “Was that the wrong answer?” I asked. “There is no wrong answer, Kyle, but what you have said is very sad”. Sad? Why? Surely you would think the same thing. Meeting a stranger from the internet at a park and getting into their car was, for sure, a massive lack of judgment that led to what happened.

As we started to talk about my feelings about it, I began to see the situation differently. It took a long time and still takes work to this day to say “I was the victim”. It takes even more work to say “I did nothing wrong”. The words are easy to write or even to say, but genuinely believing them is something else altogether.

I knew it was time to tell my family, and I knew it was going to be hard. Telling your mother, who has supported and loved you, that this horrific thing happened and she knew nothing about it was hideous. I knew she would feel guilt; why didn't I tell her? I could only reassure her that not telling her was nothing about her; it was about the terror I felt about telling anybody. Because telling someone would make it real, and at that time and that age, I simply couldn't do it.  

We aren’t built to endure such trauma, especially when our brains are still developing. It's astounding how our brain attempts to protect us. But time is not your friend, and as it moves on, the coping strategies that once kept that box locked start to break through.

In today’s media, victims who are highlighted are generally female. It means it's very hard to find anyone who can relate to my story. With such a focus on protecting teens from social media, who wants to hear a story from a 45-year-old gay guy?

My story isn't just about what happened to me; it is about the impact that it has had on my entire life. I have never had a long-term partner and have lost most of my friends. I can’t honestly say that I have been happy in my life for any substantial amount of time.

So, unfortunately, I can't give you a happy ending as the story still continues. What I can say to anyone who reads this is, please, please tell someone what has happened to you. For me, trying to change now, to do my best to maintain some semblance of a life, has come after so many years of thinking that what happened was 100% my fault. Changing that thought process is extremely hard and takes work every day.