After a historic battle for marriage equality several weeks ago, my newsfeed was flooded with red equal signs and messages in support of LGBT people. More than anything, I felt that last week, the nation and UF gave a collective nod of approval in the direction of its gay and lesbian members. Living in my liberal college bubble, I often hear that LGBT issues are moving into the past. “Gay rights are human rights” has become a well-worn mantra around the country. Almost as terrifying as it is for people to be called racist, being publicly labeled a homophobe has become similarly taboo. I mean, there’s a gay (probably white, probably wealthy, and probably cisgender male) character on every other show on television. Duh, being gay is no big deal.
This momentum for the gay marriage movement over the last week filled me with a sense of invincibility, a sense of unity among the people in our nation, and a sense of validation in who I am – but these feelings quickly faded. Being gay doesn’t feel like “no big deal” when people loiter on campus to spew bigotry in the name of a holy text or encourage proposals to resolve the problem of same-sex marriage with separate, but (not) equal solutions. And it feels even worse coming from Facebook (and real life) friends.
So I suppose that now is a good time, if any, to take out and shake off the dusty skeleton we APIA people like to keep so well hidden in our closets. It’s time to talk about the gays.
So I suppose that now is a good time, if any, to take out and shake off the dusty skeleton we APIA people like to keep so well hidden in our closets. It’s time to talk about the gays.
So often when we harbor hostility or discomfort with a group of people, whoever the group is – LGBT people, people of a different race, people with disabilities, people living in poverty – we do so by taking out the “people” component of their identities; we strip them of their humanity. We fail to see how people who make us uncomfortable are similar to us, and instead, we take issue with the movement, or an ideology, or whatever helps us disassociate parts of people from the people themselves.
Of course, no one ever said that bigotry was black and white. I dare not even get started on the marriage equality movement’s singular-minded focus on the objectives of its (largely) white, middle and upper class, able-bodied gay and lesbian members. Marriage equality is a step forward, but it is not enough for m(any) in the LGBT community. But, I digress. My intent with this blog post is not to discuss the politics of marriage equality, but to garner a greater understanding of and a common empathy for people in the LGBT community.
What I have to contribute to this fight is not the only, the best, or the most moving gay story in the book, but it is the only one I can give; my contribution is my story and experiences. Although I have yet to organize the mishmash of thoughts bouncing around my head about being an APIA LGBT person, here’s to giving it a shot.
I grew up in a fairly conservative Southern Baptist Chinese-Jamaican-American household, with a mom, a dad, a grandma, a sister, and a whole lot of trying to make sense of things in my mind. Transitioning into middle school and high school I learned to become silent as a mouse, holding in all the things that bugged me – my body image, my less-than-excellent grades, my sexual orientation – because my Chinese culture made me believe that my problems were my own, and that no one but me needed to know about them. I found myself part of a culture of silence, so I kept all my hurts tucked away, letting a rage grow hidden inside of me.
Transitioning into middle school and high school I learned to become silent as a mouse, holding in all the things that bugged me – my body image, my less-than-excellent grades, my sexual orientation – because my Chinese culture made me believe that my problems were my own, and that no one but me needed to know about them.
At the same time, I wanted so badly to just be like everybody else. I let my personality, my opinions, and my voice become quiet so that I could adopt the personality of whoever and whatever was most popular at the time. Except that didn’t make me popular. By the end of high school, I had let myself become so invisible and insubstantial that there weren’t many people left who noticed that I existed.
After leaving high school and coming to UF, I finally gave myself a chance to warm up my vocal cords again. I slowly allowed myself to have opinions that weren’t replicas of those of the people around me, and gave my personality a chance to shine. I joined the main LGBT organization on campus during my freshman year, took classes on sexuality, explored who I was, and gradually started to value what I had to contribute to the world.
At the end of my sophomore year of college, my dad picked up on some of these changes and essentially made me come out to him. He requested that I leave UF and return home to live with my parents in Miami for a semester because he could tell that I was “heading down the wrong path.” I decided to face my debilitating fear of coming out to my family, partially out of a sense of duty to my parents, but mostly out of anticipation of finally being able to talk to them about the hidden parts of me.
After a short while of being home, I began to lose the sense of courage I came in with. My dad sent me to a Christian therapist, who I didn’t take very seriously, but who scoured my past in a humiliating and frustrating search for reasons I could be gay. My dad attempted to conduct his own therapy sessions too, sitting me down almost every week to read Leviticus aloud, trying to understand why I made this “choice,” and shaming me into soon internalizing the idea that I was inherently a bad person.
Shortly after, my mom joined these conversations and began to throw cultural values into the mix, making my coming out experience even more complicated. Being a prominent member of the Chinese Christian community, she focused on how the community and our extended family would receive her, obviously at fault for being the parent of a gay daughter.
This is not where the story ends, but the rest of the gritty details can be left out. It is easy for me to tell this story by giving a timeline of what events took place when, but that is not what makes a difference for anybody who hears any story. What moves people to action are the emotions, the rawness and openness that connect us to all humanity and can convince a crowd of that a wrongdoing in the world that must be corrected – and corrected immediately.
To understand my story and why being an advocate matters to me, you cannot only know what happened, but how it made me feel, how it changed me, and how it is at the core of my very being. For me, the consequences of being APIA and a gay woman have been trying. I have been gawked at and harassed for doing nothing but holding hands with the one I love.
To understand my story and why being an advocate matters to me, you cannot only know what happened, but how it made me feel, how it changed me, and how it is at the core of my very being.
I was told I was disgusting, sick and immoral – and I have believed it, too. I became convinced that there was no such thing as home anymore. I had hate shoved down my throat and pain scrawled into my narrative. I hurt myself. I lost myself. I cried, not just out of sadness but out of frustration and betrayal and injustice. I felt trapped and alone, and I reached a point when I didn’t want to be around anymore.
For those of you who have felt these things too, be convinced of this – you are beautiful, you are worthy, and you are exactly who you are meant to be, just the way you are now.
For those of you who find this experience foreign, know this – the impact you can make is more powerful and more necessary than you believe. It is by how we empathize and what we do with our knowledge of injustices committed by people, to people, that our character is determined.
Stories help us relate to people and things that we are unfamiliar with. Stories give us a new perspective on life. Stories are what drive us to make a difference, because through them we see our connection to other people. Stories give us a common humanity, a shared narrative of how we, as individual beings, have shaped the world together.
Said best by Sylvia Plath, “Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
