My first kiss was a colleague of the Military College on a study trip to Alentejo. He was 15. It took months to gather the courage to seize the opportunity, without a single word. The debate me with forbidden feelings. The hide a affection that other students considered criminal.
It was a single kiss, which began a relationship in the years following hid the institution. And it grew out of the school doors. We did the two programs on Saturdays, Sundays and on Wednesday night, when the students of the boarding can go sleep at home. The other colleagues saw us only as friends. In classes and in schoolyards not we approached each other. There was the terror of being discovered.
I realized that homosexuality was a bad thing after just 10 years, when I joined the Military College. It was prohibited by a code of honor written not taught to students. A code where steal, take drugs and being gay was three unforgivable acts. Principles passed on to younger students like me by graduate students in the 12th grade, which are the basis of tradition proudly handed down from generation to generation in the century-old institution, alongside other values such as rectitude, loyalty or truth.
So I was distressed and confused when the 13 or 14 I started to notice me from my homosexual desires. I thought it was a criminal. Just I thought I had to do everything to stop these feelings to change. In my mind one thing was clear: there was a choice that was me being imposed. I had to decide whether I wanted to be a student of the Military School or be homosexual, because there could never be both. I chose to be a student.
I have always lived with the fear of being discovered in the military, which I left at the end of 12th year in 2008, with the honor of being door standard, a distinction that is usually only given to best students of the course. No one ever suspected. No one expects to happen there. But happened. I remember that there were students excluded and despised for being homosexual in the academic year 2004/2005. I was in 9th grade, when I was told that two colleagues of the 7th year had been caught in homosexual acts. Affections are prohibited by the rules of the college students. The story was drowned. The parents of the two students were called. Students left the institution on the same day. The next morning they were no longer at breakfast. Never saw them again.
That day I thought that I too would be discovered. The older students, teachers, directors would be able to read my thoughts. And tell my parents. I created a camouflage. When I insulted him, calling me words like “fagot”, pretending that it did not affect me. Whenever there was talk of gay disguised and responded to my colleagues, “since the fags do not mess with me, it’s okay”
Today I believe that this homophobic code in high school stole an equal adolescence to the. others. Colleagues could fall in love without being in secret, without thinking that was in them was something wrong. I Do not. Just took my homosexuality to 20 years to friends and family. Today I live in Australia and I want to tell my story because I believe that the military institution must change. I do not hate the college. I love school and that is why I argue that the institution has to accept and protect their gay students. Not with prohibitions and exclusions that the Military College must respond to students. Should rather accept them and integrate them.
Testimony collected by Joan Ferreira da Costa
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