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1) and I was often swollen and visibly injured, though I hid my injuries as best I could with clothing. I still have scars on my body as a result of the abuse I sustained from my father.
2) I remember that at one point, a whole week went by without him assaulting me. He told me that he missed doing it and would find a pretext to get back at it again. As I felt his hatred grow I became ever more scared. As a result, since the age of seven I started thinking of fleeing my house. I was not able to take any more of that treatment.
3) Sometimes my father did the same thing with my brother Juan Carlos, who resembles me a lot – Juan and I look different from the rest of my family. I think my father may have been concerned he was gay too.
4) I also heard on the radio how other gays were treated. I heard they were beaten, sexually assaulted, and even murdered. This happened in small towns as well as in the major cities. Homosexuality was depicted as an illness and as a crime: that homosexuals did not have the right to life & safety in my society. It was, in effect, a crime punishable by death.
5) I felt extremely guilty and afraid for being gay. I thought I was doing something wrong, or that there was something wrong with me. I wondered why I deserved this treatment. As a result, I often thought about suicide, and repeatedly attempted to carry it out – approximately 7 times, but lacked the courage to carry out the attempt.
6) As a result of the daily and constant violence, I deliberately tried to act as ‘straight’ as possible. I was terrified of being perceived as gay, and for most of my life it was a constant concern – concealing my homosexuality was a matter of preserving my immediate physical safety and became a very powerful instinctive behaviour for me.
7) The wounds on my body were so painful that I was not able to even take a bath, nor sit down nor rest on my bed. I always tried to hide my bruises when I went to school, but everyone would notice how tired I looked.
8) My neighbours knew what was going on. They sometimes saw when I was being punished by my parents, since my mother would sometimes beat me too, and shouted at them: “leave your kid alone, don’t mistreat him that way.” But that didn’t help at all. My father shouted back at them: “This is none of your business, I can do whatever I want with my child, don’t interfere and mind your own problems.” This is consistent with the normal cultural rules in Nicaragua, where a man’s family is his own private domain.
9) At the age of ten, tired of all this violence, I decided to denounce my parents before the Ministerio de la Nińez y la Adolescencia (Ministry of Childhood). The staff at the Ministry told me that unfortunately there was nothing they could do because there was no law protecting children or women, but they could put me in a place far from my father.
10) They sent me to a centre for children (a reformatory for street children or children who don’t have anyone) named Remar in Managua. I stayed there for several months.
11) Even here the other boys would call me ‘marica’ and tell me that I was pretty like a girl. The supervisor, who was from Spain, realized this. One of the other guys had asked me if I was a homosexual because I was different from the other boys and ‘too pretty’ for a boy. He told the supervisor that I had told him I was homosexual. The supervisor took me aside and started slapping my face telling me that this is what faggots deserved. As he went to look for the guy that had denounced me, I was able to escape. And I never came back to the centre. I ran into the fields (the reformatory was in the countryside) and found a house where I asked for help, telling them I had fled the centre where I had been abused.