Angela de Jong went to exactly the same narrow-minded high school as Robbert Rodenburg, but not in the same year. “I am twenty years older than him,” explains the AD opinion diva.
It was the horror for Robbert Rodenburg: he spent his school years at the reformed Driestar College in Gouda, where you are seen as inferior as part of the LGBTI community. The documentary about his youth and school days attracted several hundred thousand viewers to NPO 3 yesterday, including Angela de Jong.
Not accepted
In the documentary we see Robbert go back to his high school, where they still appear to have the same narrow-minded ideas. “I used to keep track of how long it took before I finished that school, because homosexuality was not accepted there,” he tells EOs Beam.
“I hoped that my old teachers would think differently now, but that was not the case. If there weren’t cameras there, I think I would have stopped this search at that moment.”
Angela at the same school
Angela watched Robbert’s documentary with above-average interest, because she went to exactly the same school. “We grew up a few villages apart, in the same strict Christian environment and also went to the same high school. I’m only twenty years older than him,” she says AD column.
He grew up in Bergambacht, she in Ouderkerk aan den IJssel. Angela herself is heterosexual, as they liked to see at that school. “But while I already had a lifelong aversion to three-point speaking, the threat of hell and damnation if you just watched TV and hypocritical pastors and elders, it was many degrees worse for him.”
Fighting against deviation
Angela thinks it is horrifying that Robbert was told at that school that he had an abnormality that he had to fight against. “To my horror, I realized that when I was growing up, no one was gay. Not in the village, not at school, not in church. Nobody. And of course that is not possible. Idiot that I never thought about that before.”
You shouldn’t want to go back to those regions at all, according to the opinion diva. “He does not feel the need to strongly oppose his origins. Me neither, although I prefer not to talk about it.”
Car wash
A few years ago Angela did. The conclusion? She no longer has anything to do with her reformed origins. “Ouderkerk is still a village where people take offense if you wash your car on Sunday.”
That will never go away completely, she decides. “Ouderkerk and all those dogmas are simply in me. I recently had to go to Ikea on a Sunday morning; then I immediately think of my mother and feel guilty.”