Tweet of the Day: Vhar’s Rape Survival

In 2017, our very own Vhar (of 890, 1213 and Pure Black Grey fame) penned a heart-wrenching piece about the experience he had getting raped. It was a piece titled THE OTHER SIDE OF HEALING. As writers, especially those of us who write fiction, we tend to weave fragments of our actual lives into the makeup of the characters we write, and before Vhar penned this piece, I already had just the faintest of knowledge about his traumatic past from following his 890 series.

Then this writeup happened, and as someone who has come close to getting raped myself, I could not quantify just how much love and support I felt toward him for managing to stay both strong and vulnerable about what happened to him.

A few days ago, on Twitter, he marked the fifth anniversary of this trauma. He is surviving it. And he is talking about it. And he is removing the mystery from such a foreign concept as gay men getting raped. In the words of Gabrielle Union, herself a rape survivor: “Once I shared, others shared. You know what happened to me; you know what happened to my child, my mother… I realized I was offering a bridge, a hand, to other people who wanted to share, or who just needed to know, ‘Hey, I’m not alone.’”