I don’t have good memories of growing up in Cypress, even though it will forever remain in my mind as “home.” For those years when I was trying to be a fiction writer, almost all of my stories were set there. Looking back, most of those stories were really the same one told over and over. They were all concerned with misfits who couldn’t escape the intolerance of their small, conservative, close-minded Christian town. One reason I couldn’t hack it as a fiction writer was because I was frozen in this one place in time every time I tried to write. I couldn’t seem to write about any other place. I even started to question if that place really existed, and if it was as bad as I remembered, whether it had calcified into something more terrible as time went by.
After hearing about Asher Brown’s suicide, and the story of another kid in the Cy-Fair school district who was bullied last year for being gay while school officials stood by and did nothing, I’m beginning to think I got it right the first time around, that my memory of where I grew up as someplace awful is, sadly, anything but a fiction.
” —Asher Brown’s Suicide Hits Home | DISGRASIAN™