Nobody likes to be teased. Here, Billy B. gives advice to a taunted reader who will soon realize that the joke Is ON his tormentors.	March 1, 2003 American Salon
	I love getting reader questions. I recently received one that struck a chord with me. It read: "I'm the only guy in my cosmetology class. I get a lot of crap because people think I'm gay for wanting to be a hairdresser. My family is in the business, and I like doing hair! Can you give me some advice? You seem like a person who does not take other people's crap.-Kevin" It took me many years to get to the place where I am now at emotionally. For the first 23 years of my life back in Mississippi, I took a lot of crap from the people there. The truth is, people make fun of others to make themselves feel better. If they are insecure or have sexuality issues, they try to detract the attention away from themselves and onto someone else. Unfortunately, the target is always the gay kid, the overweight kid, or the slow kid. It's always the "underdog." I left Mississippi for college, choosing a school away from home to escape. One problem: I majored in fashion and marketing, a major that typically only interested girls. Here we go again! It was nothing new for me because I had been ridiculed my entire life, but it still hurt. The sad reality is, people like that are everywhere. I recently spoke to Rick Haylor, international creative director of John Frieda Salons, who had experiences similar to Kevin's. He grew up in Kent, England, a place where if you were gay, you wouldn't even think about coming out. He was teased when he told his friends he was going to be a hairdresser, but he thought: An insult is only an insult if you allow it to be. He didn't let it bother him because he knew he was heterosexual, and they just teased him because that's what kids do. He would either laugh with them, or spew a comeback to embarrass them right back. Interestingly enough, when he finished school and started working in a salon in London with a bunch of gay men, he experienced reverse discrimination. He handled it the same way he did before. Now when he goes back to Kent, they marvel at his success. Life is too short to buckle under peer pressure and go in a direction that is not going to make you happy. You will spend more than half of your life at work. It's important to pick a job that you love. You can't let other people's thoughts get to you. When I returned to the place I had run away from so many years earlier, the very people who had tortured me came up to me and congratulated me on my success and confessed that they always admired my guts. If Rick or I had given in to the teasing, we wouldn't be where we are today. In Rick's case the joke was on them. He now lives in New York with his wife and two kids, and while his old buddies are working in more "manly" positions with grimy men, he sees between 10 to 15 beautiful women a day-many of them models or celebrities. Now doesn't that prove that hairdressing is the perfect job for a straight man?