The stories more often deal with class-based taunting the victims “don’t fit in” because they don’t have the right clothes or hair or live in wrong neighborhood. While the young girl in Trevor screenwriter James Lecesne’s “Still Not Dead” is lesbian, most of the teens in these stories are not gay, although sometimes, as in Elizabeth Miles’ “Defense Mechanism,” they face accusations of being gay or lesbian. It gave me the opportunity to remember a past transgression and infuse this otherwise dark memory with hope – seeing each experience as a marker from which I could measure not only how far I had come, but how much further I wanted to go.”Ĭornered reminds readers that being bullied can happen to young people for various reasons, regardless of sexual orientation. As editor Rhoda Belleza writes in her introduction, after hearing about friends’ experiences being bullied, “Learning these details seems instrumental to my understanding of who they are now – and it inspired me to turn the mirror on myself. The authors in Cornered use their stories to take us inside the minds and skins of those who are being bullied, and the bullies themselves, to show readers just how wrong thinking teen-aged harassment is “not that bad” can be. There were times, many times, I wished I was dead.” And only people on the top, or at least not on the bottom, would ever, EVER say it wasn’t that bad. When teenager Bryan Forbes says, “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” to Tiffany Sanz, a girl he and a group of others bullied in elementary school, she replies: “It looks totally different from wherever you sit on the totem pole, my friend. In the light of the recent revelation that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney may have bullied a fellow student in high school, something said by character in “The Shift Sticks,” Josh Berk’s story in this collection, gains unexpected relevance. ‘Cornered: 14 Stories of Bullying and Defiance’ edited by Rhoda Belleza
0 kommentar(er)
