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“I figure a bus full of anything sounds kind of bad, so I choose to get off and they laugh, then they pointed and called me a homo,” he said.Īntonellis said over time the meaning of the joke sank in and with the help of normal day to day experience, he came to the conclusion that he was a “homo”, and that was bad thing, and the best way to deal with it is to hide it from everyone, especially himself. This was a tough question for me to answer, I’d only ridden a bus a few times with my grandmother and she always told me when it was our stop, plus, what’s a homo, why is the bus full of them and what am I doing on the bus.”Īntonellis said the big kids are standing there, waiting with wicked grins on their faces. ” I’m about seven years old and some big kids call me over from the across the play field and they ask me, “If you were on a bus full of homos, would you stay on or get off?”. “I’m going to share a short story from my youth,” said Antonellis. It was a speech filled with discrimination, sorrow, encouragement, pride and triumph in the face of ruthless bigotry. In light of the Orlando terrorist attack that targeted members of Florida’s gay community and left 49 innocent victims dead, East Boston’s Todd Antonellis’s speech about his struggles as a gay man in Boston seems more significant and poignant in lieu of the events in Florida last weekend.Īntonellis was this year’s keynote speaker at Eastie’s annual Gay Pride Flag Raising ceremony last Thursday at Piers Park.