Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Author:Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press

It Gets Better?

Matthew D. Blanchard

In early October 2007, I was discovered alone and on the brink of death, after what doctors now believe must have been ten to twelve days of comatose confinement. I had apparently fallen unconscious, laying face down in bed with the side of my head pressed slack-jawed against a dirty pillow. In a painfully contorted position, I allowed eminently dangerous bacteria to enter my mouth through the constant stream of saliva that dripped between my lips and cheek. Alone in my bed, just days after my twenty-eighth birthday, I was stricken with an overdose-induced, HIV/AIDS-related PCP pneumonia and necrotizing bacterial infection of the face.

The San Francisco Fire Department busted down my door in response to an anonymous call, to find me covered in my own vomit, urine, and defecation. My face was blackened by corrosive decomposition, and all but nine of my teeth had fallen out. I was rushed to the nearest emergency care unit. For eight weeks, I remained in a medically-induced coma. After some quick and effective lifesaving maneuvers (i.e., blood transfusions, dialysis, wound care, heavy doses of antibiotics), doctors stabilized my fading heart; brain activity restored.

A team of San Francisco’s leading diagnosticians, doctors, and surgeons fought valiantly, yet failed to defeat the necrotizing bacteria which infected my face. Their only option, in order to ensure my survival, was to perform an emergency debridement surgery. In effect, the greater portion of my upper jaw, mouth and nose were amputated, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of my face.

Plastic surgeons replaced the missing portion of my upper mouth and jaw with skin and bone grafts from my lower left leg. An 8”x16” slab of flesh eight layers deep was ripped from my calf, sutured and sewn inside and over the opening in my face, but only after a six-inch section of my left fibula was sawed off and screwed flat to the remaining portion of my jaw, forever destroying its natural curvature.

Early on in the reconstruction process, my surgeons told me flat-out, “You will never look normal again.” When I asked if I would ever be able to smile, they responded with a long, awkward silence, and then one of them said, “You will be able to express happiness.” As if that was any consolation!

Since waking from sedation, I wear surgical masks to hide my monstrous face from the curious, insensitive scrutiny of the public: the bystander, the spectator, the voyeur. Tragically yet tenaciously, I am learning to accept my new face and its continuing transformations. It has been an unspeakably difficult experience living through disfigurement, but I maintain hope and grace, courage and pride, and a damned dutiful determination in life, that I may live once again in pure and unabashed beauty. Beauty eternal! Beauty internal!

Suffering through a childhood and adolescence of incessant ridicule & fag-baiting, I planned my escape from the double-locked and triple-chained closets of conservative Southeastern Virginia. My choice to remain in Virginia to attend university was a decision I regretted for a very long time.

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