EqualiCon summit addresses bullying, other topics

David Spradling was the victim of bullies as a young boy, and the problem continued through high school and into college.

The East Central University student said when he attended another Oklahoma college, many of the school’s male student athletes singled him out for bullying. When efforts to stop the bullying failed, he informed officials, who told him that they didn’t want someone like him representing the school.

“I had won awards a week prior to being told this,” Spradling said Saturday. “I was nominated and voted on as an Aggie ambassador, Homecoming king, just a couple of things that I was awarded. And within a week and a half, they stripped it all away from me with no explanation, except they just did not want a person like me representing their school.”

Spradling later transferred to ECU, where he joined the college’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

Spradling, who serves as the Gay-Straight Alliance’s president, shared his story during EqualiCon2K15, a daylong summit for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and allied college students. The Gay-Straight Alliance hosted the event, which was sponsored by Freedom Oklahoma.

The event attracted about 115 students, plus some faculty members and advisers, from across the state.

The breakout sessions focused on social and political topics, including effective lobbying, the transgender experience in Oklahoma and ways to stop bullying.

Spradling talked about his experience during the discussion of bullying, one of the last sessions of the day. He said he was bullied his entire life by other students and his own relatives, but he has developed a strategy for coping with the problem.

“I choose now to just ignore them because they’re small-minded people, and I’m above that,” he said. “But it hurts. It still hurts to go outside and be stared at, be pointed at, be told you’re going to hell because they assume something of me.”

Spradling said many people think a bully is someone who hits another person for no reason, but there are actually many forms of bullying.

“Bullying can be as simple as telling someone, ‘Your hair looks ugly today,’” he said. “That is the start of bullying, because it starts with the hair. Then it starts with their shoes, and it starts just because they look different.

“That was a lot of the bullying that I got, because I didn’t have the best clothes. I didn’t have the best clothes back then. And I grew up very poor.”

Other students said they had experienced similar treatment at the hands of schoolmates or relatives.

Panelist Robby Bradley said he was born in Iowa, but his family moved to Marietta when he was about 8. After moving to Marietta, bullies targeted him because he was an outsider.

“I was the new kid at school,” he said. “Nobody knew me. All these kids had grown up together. Very small community that you didn’t sneeze without somebody knowing that you did.”

Bradley said one older boy bullied him from sixth grade all the way through Bradley’s junior year in high school, when the other boy graduated. But when Bradley retaliated, he was the one who got in trouble.

Two years after he graduated from high school, Bradley told his closest friend that he was bisexual. About three months later, Bradley acknowledged that he was gay — but he was still closeted as far as his family was concerned.

Bradley later enrolled at ECU. He was working on a paper for his sociology class when he went home for Thanksgiving break that year, and he wanted to know how his relatives felt about LGBT people. So he asked them a question: How would they react if they knew he was gay?

Bradley said his mother told him she would love him no matter what happened, but his grandmother said she would shoot him if she knew he was gay.

“I have lived with that since that day,” he said.

Stopping bullying

Panelists and audience members also shared tips for preventing bullying or alerting officials to the problem.

Freedom Oklahoma staffer Matt Caban warned people to be careful about using social media outlets such as Snapchat, which have become fertile ground for bullies.

“You’ve got to be careful with what you share and also just be wise and respectful,” he said.

Caban noted that several social media sites have procedures for reporting bad behavior, and people who are victims of bullying — either online or in the workplace — should report it as soon as possible. He also recommended keeping detailed records of any bullying incident, making it easier to convince authorities that there is a problem.

“If you don’t have that documentation, then it just becomes ‘he said, she said,’” Caban said. “And we’ve all been through arguments and discussions. If you don’t have proof, you’re not going to be able to prove the situation.”

By Eric Swanson, The Ada News. Copyright 2015 The Ada News.

The Gayly – April 2, 2015 @ 9:45am.