Being a Celebrity Special Needs Pet at a High School: A First-Person Perspective

The author on the day he was born

By: Jackson Hamilton, Guest Writer

Being on the spectrum has come with years of oppression in many directions, most of which are absent from the public discourse surrounding disability. Even the anti-bullying movement seems to miss the most common form of bullying I experienced. That was “circus monkey” bullying wherein my social blindness let people get me to perform for them in humiliating and degrading ways. This often happened in the sight of faculty who saw nothing wrong with it. It also was not immoral or unethical according to the Rawlsian principles on which our public institutions run since it was consensual and Rawlsian ethics recognize no human dignity, just basic human rights.

As Wando’s celebrity pet retard, I was nominated for homecoming king, prom king, was elected to student council, and got two yearbook superlatives. A resumé one would expect from someone who had yet had their first kiss (I still haven’t had that) or had been invited to parties. More confusingly was how I was treated which was not overwhelmingly negative. Some people regarded me as a baby and spoke to me in a doggie voice, others found me annoying and didn’t like my hyperness or antics, still others found me prey for their sadistic schadenfreude.

I was taboo to be friends with and, unquestionably, the most painful aspect of being a special needs person was the harrowing loneliness. It still is. I wasn’t taboo for the reasons of being a pariah, mostly, but because it was inappropriate to hang out with people like me. I’m fairly high-functioning but I had taken longer to get there and until mid-high school had the phenotype of a mild intellectual disability. When this stopped being the case, I did make an attempt at a social life and to get a clique. Unsuccessfully.

When nominated for homecoming king, I asked a girl to be my homecoming escort. We had to have “escorts” which I found weird since being a nominee and escort sounded like a political sex scandal. Prince and princess would have made more sense. Anyway, we had to pick someone to lock arms with on the football field. The girl I chose I discovered really liked me after her tenure as my escort. And while I only intended a platonic relationship with her, she slipped her arm around me discretely once and but retracted it fearing her friends may accuse her of romantically liking a retard.  Her affections for me were widely known and mocked and one of my yearbook superlatives was “Best Couple That Never Got Together” with her.

She was petrified by the scandal of her crushing on a special needs boy, seemingly oblivious on how this all made me feel and how her being petrified made me feel since the entire thing regarded me as subhuman. She tried to spin the scandal as a special needs kid having a forgivable unrequited affection for her which was what this was supposedly about. My intentions with her were platonic, her feelings for me probably weren’t. Coming out of this, I saw her as an utterly spineless moral coward. Despite private messages to me explicitly expressing her desire to have a platonic friendship, when asked to meet, she was too afraid to be seen with me in public. While she was mocked for romantic interest in me, she was too afraid to be seen with me in public even platonically. I was that subhuman. All because I was Asperger’s and was in special ed.

Not only was I supposed to be alone, even platonically. I was supposed to be because it was wrong for special needs people to have any social lives whatsoever. What, in hindsight, is so shocking is that a story with no sex, no violence, no drugs, could possess the emotional tumult of the drama of a sexual love triangle. That I was so subhuman and toxic for having a mild disability that I was beneath even the platonic league of everyone and to be platonically associated with me was toxic. She nor any of them had the courage to defend my humanity and my human dignity. It brings to mind the Taylor Swift song “Fifteen” about adolescents regarding their social politics with deadly seriousness.

The song sounds relatively innocent but is far less so when regarded in the context of this. The degrading of someone with a mild disability to the point of being beneath humanity. Being so desperate to save face and afraid of losing social capital that she engaged in sociopathic social politics at the expense of someone with less power and much less social capital. That is in addition to the circus monkey bullying which she nor anyone else did anything about. And authorities were looking on seeing nothing wrong with it, in part, because the ethics of the institutions were Rawlsian and the bullying was mostly consensual and while the degradation was not, it was subtle and civil enough to not be wrong according to Rawlsian ethics which only recognize the bottom, and no step higher, on Maslow’s pyramid of needs. No love, no kindness, nothing that could be construed as moral outside of minimal rights.

I was urinated on, had rocks thrown at me, was accused of demonic possession and had exorcisms performed on me, and much more, but those were not very common or representative. The stories that I elected to share reflected the typical hardships I faced and still face. They aren’t the goriest or juiciest stories. They best tell what Autistic life has been like. It was being alone most nights, weekends, and summers, and being a toddler puppy or prey for schadenfreude at school and the authorities who were too Rawlsian to do anything. The PTSD from all of this was massive and the chapter that came after, the College of Charleston was a disaster, in part, due to their and their population’s reaction to my autism and PTSD. It’s a beachside party school dominated popular-esque kids and was how Pete Davidson described Staten Island. A living hell. My PTSD got worse there.

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