The Letter Q

Aisa Radoncic 813 “The Letter Q” In the book, “The Letter Q,” written by many different writers but edited by Sarah Moon and James Lecesne, I noticed a pattern. The pattern that I noticed is in the book, everyone (so far) gets bullied as a child, and as they get older, there life gets better and better. Here are Martin Moran, Erik Orrantia, and Arthur Levine’s stories. As a child, Martin Moran was having sexual relationships with another boy for three years until he was 15. He hated the life that he was living, he felt as if he was doing something wrong, so he tried to kill himself. He tried to do it with his mothers pills, which didn’t work, all he ended up doing was throwing up all over his bedroom floor. So he decided to take his father’s gun. He was shaking with anger as he put the gun up to his head. As he was pulling the trigger, his inner self who knew that he still wanted life must have caused the gun to shift away from his head and he just missed the bullet. He put the gun down, and started to live his life. He became a writer and moved to N.Y.C to begin his great life. When Erik Orrantia was a child, he was called really mean. He had a rough time going through his childhood, He wasn’t sure about what he was going through, he thought that there was something wrong with him. He was different than everyone else. But as he got older, he started to embrace the names that they called him. He enjoyed being gay, it was him, not something he was trying to be. Finally, when Arthur Levine was young, his parents could tell that he was gay. He was playing with dolls, and 98% of his friends were girls. His parents took this as if there was something wrong with him. They made a rule that Arthur can only hang out with girls for 2 days in a row, then he had to hang out with guys. His parents didn’t know how to handle this so they gave him little hints such as, “Is anything BOTHERING you? We will gladly pay for you to see a psychologist.” But as he got older, all that tension seemed to slowly knot away until it was completely gone. He got married to a wonderful man, and has a family. As you can see, I found a pattern in my book, which is that the writers in my book got bullied as children, but their life got better as they got older. I think this pattern occurs because people find that being gay is a bad thing and that it shouldn’t happen, so they make fun of it. I think the writer’s messages are that you shouldn’t make fun of someone just for the person that they are attracted to. I think this pattern tells us that there are so many people getting made fun of by something they cannot control, and that there are many people that have a story to tell about it.