Gay High School Senior Censored by School Publication and That Time a Bad Realtor Censored Me

First, there’s no feeling worse than being censored. Thankfully, I’ve never been censored by any publisher I’ve worked with, but I was once censored by a realtor I worked with. She was awful. A loudmouth, pushy, sneaky, always in your face, and usually filled with wrong or bad advice. She gave me these pillows once to stage with and I looked at them and thought, “this is crap. I’m not putting it in my house.” The only reason Tony and I stuck with her is that we didn’t have to see her very often and it was easier than getting a new realtor. We were so wrong. 

Then one day she really dropped the ball on something. And it was something that could have cost us a lot of money. So we got out of a really bad deal (for us) and dropped her as a realtor. A few weeks later when I went on to Realtor.com to check out her reviews. I found several negative reviews and they were all similar to my experience with her. IN fact, they were identical to my experience with her. One person wrote, “if you see her coming at you, run for the door.” So I left my own honest review. I said nothing wrong and told the absolute truth…my opinion of her. 

The moment I hit publish, and my review went live, she e-mailed me like a maniac. I guess she had alerts? I don’t know. She screamed at me in the e-mail, accused me of defamation, and told me I was wrong about the very bad deal she wanted us to take. Well, the review was my opinion and I’m smart enough to know the difference between my honest opinion and defamation. I’m a writer and I’ve had hundreds of books published and thousands of reviews. I took the bad reviews like an adult and never tried to censor them. And I would never defame anyone with lies. And a year later it turned out she was wrong. We listed our house with another realtor and sold it for a lot more money than she wanted us to settle for. She was THE worst. 

So after a heated e-mail exchange, I shut down because it was late at night and didn’t think about it again until morning. However, when I checked out her reviews on realtor.com the next morning they were ALL missing. My review was gone, plus all the other bad reviews. The only things that were left were sugary fake comments by friends and family members of hers that were all praising her. My first thought was what an asshole. She censored me and everyone else. And that bothered me because it had never happened before. Of course, I contacted Realtor.com but I was told it was their policy to allow realtors to handle their reviews. If you write an honest review there, the realtor can censor it and take it down. And then I let it go. I wasn’t about to waste time with a real estate site. Or a sneaky bad realtor. 

With all that said, here’s a story about a kid in high school who was censored by the principal for wanting to write about his gay experience as a teen. I feel so bad for the kid. 

“It just kind of shows you, when they ask what my biggest challenge is and I answer it honestly, then they respond by showing that it is my biggest challenge by trying to silence me,” said Tyler.

Here’s more.  There is a happy ending this time and you’ll want to read this one in full. It’s much happier than my ending with the bad realtor who censored me. But at least we were smart enough to dump the idiot and sell our home for a better price. So I guess we had a happy ending, too. 

The Wizard of Pride

Amazon E-book or Paperback

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