“Lo que mas me gusta de ti es que no se te nota.”

A while back, as my younger sisters were leaving behind their early teenage years, they asked me why I had never come out to them. “That’s easy,” I responded, “it’s cuz Ma kicked me out when I came out to her.” I caught them off guard with that response, because while it was that simple, there is also more to the story. From their perspectives (eight, nine and fourteen at the time), their older brother left the day after graduating high school to Mexico and just didn’t come back to live with them. I also wouldn’t put it past my mom to have told them that I was just tired of living with so many girls, as she alluded to many years later. Although I did want some space from them, the reality was that I felt that I was contributing by that point to the toxic environment, so when I was seventeen years old, I left home and didn’t return.

This isn’t a tragic story about running away and living in the streets though. After all, my mom had made it very clear my entire life that she would not hesitate to turn her back on me if I acknowledged who I was. By that point in our lives, my mom knew. Whether it was the gay porn on the family computer’s history, the way I pined in angst over specific male friends, or whether she had snuck into my room, found my journal or a library copy of some same sex young adult novel, I haven’t asked. Nor is our relationship close enough now that I feel comfortable finding out from her. Still, she had made it clear she knew and had an issue with it. So, before coming out to her, I made a plan for how I would spend the summer before college, as I had decided to come out to her toward the end of my senior year of high school. I asked an aunt in Mexico City if I could stay with her and my bio dad if I could stay with him in between college orientation and my move in date for the freshman dorms.

Of my actual coming out, I still look back on it as one of the worst days of my childhood and really one of the defining ends to that time. It has left an unmistakable mark on my relationship with my mom, the mostly single parent who raised me, and on all my relationships. After all, that day was proof that some love is conditional. Her response that day she saw as just something she had to do. Not only did she disapprove, but she insisted that I left her no choice, she had to protect my sisters by casting me out, lest I somehow spread “it” to them. I still remember the tears and melodrama, her struggling to breathe as if she were the one suddenly without a home. To this day, I struggle to have a relationship with her, because I know that if I had not gone on to be “successful” she would not speak to me. After all, now she can brag about her son the engineer. If she leaves out my sexuality, I can’t fully blame her, because even now, out of convenience I do the same.

But back then it was seemingly the worst thing I could have done to her. My rage at the time was that if she had not wanted to know, she should have continued to turn a blind eye. After all, I was almost done with high school and would be leaving soon. Perhaps the college admissions process had made her feel small, as I had largely done it on my own and she didn’t think to tell me to apply until admissions letters started arriving in the mail. I don’t blame her at all for this and she had made sure I was going to the type of schools that had guidance counselors that knew what they were doing. Perhaps it was that we were arguing so much in those days and she wanted to retaliate. So it is not difficult to see that my mom had been trying to push me to come out so that she could punish me for it as well and was doing what any bully would do, picking on things that make us most ashamed or that we feel are our biggest faults. 

Although I understand how this is rooted in shame, it feels so reductive to say my mom is ashamed of me or that I am ashamed of my sexuality. How I view myself now is tinged with modern thoughts, but back then, my vanity and arrogance helped me press onward in the face of opposition and yes, this is a defense mechanism, but it worked until it didn’t. It is more apt to say our entire culture is ashamed of queerness, on both sides of the border, and we were just two small people adrift in all of that. It would be easy to say this is just because we are Mexican and I have met many Mexican-Americans who would leave it at that. After all, the quote up top is from my aunt, one my mom’s cousins and only a couple years older than me, telling me at a party how she appreciated that I can pass for straight. Yet, it was a different cousin, my mom’s age, who accused my mom of homophobia and asked her to let my then housemate visit, mistakenly believing we were more than just friends. However, it is eminently more convenient to have most of my American coworkers assume that I am a prude with high standards, a bit of a nerd who has a hard time meeting women, than it is to have to deal with their discomfort at knowing that I am a sexually active queer man. Those who have found out and are not supportive, have no shame themselves in letting me know. Worse even are those coworkers whose prejudice blinds them to an obvious fact and who then drop the professional guise to relax into casual homophobia and expect me to agree with them. So, there is no letting America off the hook either or casting aspersions to Mexican culture as if it is a monolith. Or myself, because if I’m honest, professionally I’m still in the closet, selectively coming out to coworkers but also allowing them to assume that I am straight. 

Shame is a topic that I want to explore more. Both in how I was taught that being queer was bad as a child, how it has served me as an adult, and how I need to push it off to thrive as an adult. It just felt that coming out was where I had to start, because it marks such a difference between what is seen but not acknowledged and what once acknowledged lingers over every interaction out there in their hegemony. Because as nice as it is to believe that one day it won’t matter, that day is not today, and except in a few industries, it seems that we are all still encountering people who reward those who can pass more than those who cannot. 

I’ll leave it here for now, to gather thoughts on what the next post should be.  

Note: I tried to schedule this post to publish on March 16, 2021 at 6 PM. I apparently didn’t set this up correctly so I manually posted it and backdated it.