Aguilas Off Pine

Author: Aguilar

On LGBT Representation in the Media – The Queer Films and Movies of My Youth

Aguilar

Nowadays there’s not much stopping me from consuming any and all media with LGBT characters except taste and preference. Queer characters have begun to pop up in many different shows, some geared toward children and age appropriate. Today, we’re far removed from the nights I would quietly stay up, way past my bedtime and try and sneak an episode of The L Word or Queer as Folk. By some miracle of packaged channel subscriptions, my parents had bought LOGO TV without being aware of it. I couldn’t openly watch it, but if I stayed up late and made sure to cover all the open spaces in my door frame through which light and noise could filter out, I could sneak an episode or two, the volume barely above a whisper.

I couldn’t have been much older than twelve, the apartment in my memory was not where we lived during my later high school years. So much of what I saw flew over my head though, probably a consequence of the low volume and of being more preoccupied listening for movements from my parents’ room. When I went back to rewatch as a young adult, I realized just how much I hadn’t picked up on the sex, drugs, and problematic behaviors of the casts of both shows.

At the time, these two shows were more or less all I had as far as explicitly same sex behavior. Occasionally Will and Grace would enter the rotation, but it was on too early for me too hide from my parents. So, I was left with content aimed exclusively at adults. Movies were no different either and through the magic of the Internet, I found a way to view those too without my parents finding out. I was thirteen when Brokeback Mountain (2005) came out, I remembered streaming it many times over the winter break, quietly sobbing into my pillow over the drama of those bisexual cowboys. Around the same time, my parents had gotten a copy of Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001). Brokeback Mountain was all over American news and hungry as I was for queer media, it was easy to learn about it. Y Tu Mama Tambien I only heard about because of my parents. I recall reading the back cover of it and Amores Perros (2000) and thinking nothing of either film, except that Gael Garcia Bernal was very handsome. My mom saw me reading the covers though and reacted, “Deja eso!” She warned me not to watch either of the two. I tell you, the only reason I remembered to watch that movie was because of her.

Those years I spent much time trying to find queer media without alerting my parents. I’d known for years that I liked boys, I recalled registering a desire to hug a boy in my fifth-grade class and knowing I could neither act on that nor tell anyone about it. The confusion at the time wasn’t why I was drawn to him, but if I was that way, why was I still crushing on the girls in my class? I didn’t want to be them or hang out with them, but I still liked them. Without realizing it at the time, I was most drawn to films that showed characters whose sexuality was not so fixed. There are many examples of gay films where the formerly straight character ends the film fully in love with a man, or a boy if it was a younger, coming of age film. That’s not what I’m referring to though. The films I came to enjoy, that still stand out in memory now, are those that acknowledged sex, gender and desire as something between two people, irrespective of gender and stated preferences, although they weren’t all necessarily positive.

Honorable mention goes to Plata Quemada (2001) and A Home at the End of the World (2004). Plata Quemada, as problematic as its representation of bisexuality remains, was one of my favorite films. Of the three main criminals, one was gay, the other bisexual, both together and stereotypically men, macho, killers and thugs. There was something about seeing queer characters being not just problematic and messy, but violent and angry that appealed to the troubled young man I was. Unsurprisingly, the bisexual character at one point cheats on his partner, but if it hasn’t been maid clear, these protagonists were not meant to be role models. A Home at the End of the World was a film I could only watch once, maybe I rewatched it to understand what had just happened. From reading a plot summary these many years later, I hadn’t understood the plot at all, but I saw what I understood then as some sort of polygamous arrangement, a love triangle consummated. From the plot summary, it’s not clear that that ever happened, but I was a very young teenager and far too naïve to understand anything.

The movies I want to wrap this discussion up with are Different for Girls (1996), Chasing Amy (1997). and Bedrooms and Hallways (1998). Although these are not queer films of the aughts, there is no conceivable way I watched these the years they came out, rather, I would have viewed these in the aughts, through the magic of the internet and hidden from my parents. Bedrooms and Hallways remains a treat, I found it recently on YouTube and rewatched. In my youth, it painted a picture of these cool late 20, early 30 somethings who were still figuring themselves out. It has the typical storyline of straight men discovering their sexuality later in life, funnily enough through a men’s emotional support group. There’s an effeminate gay best friend, Darren, who, despite his rather slutty vibe, is focused throughout the film on going steady with his somewhat boyfriend. What I treasured at the time was that the very handsome lead, Leo, and spoilers obviously, Leo spends the film stumbling around figuring himself out as a gay man but ends the film wrapped in the arms of a prior girlfriend. Darren finds the two, asleep post coitus on the couch and says, “God, just a phase” before wandering off to his room. As the film ends there, it’s not clear what becomes of the friendship or relationship, but, surrounded by the messiness and fluidity of all their friends, it’s hard to imagine this as a friendship ending event.

By contrast, in Chasing Amy, it seemed that a character’s bisexuality was more threatening to their lesbian friends. I don’t mean to draw this distinction as a stone’s throw at lesbians, implying that they are less accepting of bisexuality. I am not a woman, so I don’t have any experiences with women’s acceptance of bisexuality now, but I have been on many dates with gay men that ended after admitting I do find women attractive or having the wonderful experience of reminding a boyfriend that I did indeed tell them I identify as bisexual exactly because I am worried about rejection further along in the relationship. It seems, even as far back as the 90s, that the Europeans were more accepting than the Americans. In Chasing Amy, the three leads are a straight man, Holden, his very jealous best friend, and a woman they had gone to high school with, Alyssa Jones, played by the beautiful Joey Lauren Adams. Alyssa is seemingly a lesbian, and a quite promiscuous one at that, until she meets Holden. They kick it off and at a certain point she informs Holden that she’s essentially lost her friend group, previously shown helping her put together material for a comic convention, because they feel she’s been lost to the straights. Although at the end of the film they are no longer together, so, presumably, Alyssa can go back to identifying as a lesbian and indeed she is shown with one of her prior friends at a comic convention, it is easy to imagine that they don’t all take her back. After all, bisexuals still face scrutiny from the monosexuals, gay or straight. Somehow, despite the strong implications that Alyssa gets around, the threatening relationship/sexual encounter is the seemingly stable one with an opposite sex partner. It’s easy to imagine that they felt Alyssa would disappear into her seemingly straight relationship, her rather lengthy past erased. Fluidity seemed reserved for the Europeans, the lesson was well learned from the films I watched at the time and relearned as a young man in the dating world.

The final film is special in my heart, as it cemented my love of a whole genre of music, one that most queer men seem scared to approach.  Different for Girls focuses on two close friends, Kim and Prentice, who grew up together, Karl and Prentice, but then lost contact. It is the earliest film I watched that had a positive portrayal of a transsexual character, although truthfully, I can’t recall caring too much about her transness. It wasn’t that the film didn’t discuss it, details abound, intimate discussions about the experience and even harassment that she experiences because of her sexual reassignment. It is just that I loved how she explained her masculine preferences as a youth. There’s a scene where Prentice is accusing Kim, questioning Kim’s femininity given that as youths they would often go to rock shows together. If memory serves, it was punk shows specifically, the implication that this was too macho for a transperson. With one gleeful laugh, Kim brushes the accusation aside as, “It wasn’t about that for me. It was about the energy and the movement of the music.” As she says this, I recall the lithe movements of her wrists and hands, raising her arms above her body as she mimicked a dance from before. Whether or not the movie’s language would hold up to our scrutiny now, 25 years later, the intent behind the film was beautiful. That moment highlighted the transformative and liberating power of punk and rock, decades before Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! would come out, and was always what I recalled when asked why as a queer man I liked rock, punk, metal the most.

Chicanos Don’t Know What Being Mexican Is

Aguilar

I was thinking that since we’re coming into Pride month, I would focus in on and talk about the queer media I have consumed growing up and pointing out specific instances where I’ve picked up phrases and thoughts or felt certain things that I still look back on fondly. However, a couple recent experiences have led me back to the other big identity I had been wanting to talk about, the other driving reason why I wanted to start this blog.

It is an increasingly frustrating part of my own experience to be called white washed by my fellow Latinos, but even more so by Chicanos and Mexican-descended Latinos who have never been to Mexico or who can’t speak fluent Spanish. I know that reeks of classism and elitism, issues within the community which deserve to be challenged. As the son of working class, undocumented immigrants, I feel justified in using that as the primary defense when accused of being white washed by my peers, “Well, have you ever been to Mexico?” Because not only have I visited extensively, travelled throughout with family in the capital and the ranches where both sides of my family originate, but I’ve even spent time living there, a period of time when my parents felt they could no longer afford to stay in California. Yet, the increasing frustration is borne from the knowledge that as my socioeconomic status here becomes more secure and as I help my siblings improve theirs, I will be further and further from the ignorant stereotype of what it means to be Latino, or Mexican, here in the US.

I don’t sit quietly when I am challenged this way though. I have in the past asked them to define what they mean by white washed and what they consider to be Mexican. What I have heard back is the most offensive stereotypes of us as lazy and uneducated, only interested in a narrow set of predetermined interests and certainly not in something like the great outdoors. I have heard this from other gay men. I have even heard this from other educated Latinos, who themselves acknowledge being called white washed. Some of these in the latter group are even foolish enough to consider themselves white passing, as if our degrees somehow conferred upon us a different racial status, a different color of skin. In this latter group, it reeks of the gay man so desperate for acceptance from the heterosexual majority that he convinces himself that he’s not like those other gays, who in his mind embody only the most negative stereotypes.

Against both groups I push back on the ignorance. That’s why it’s easiest to start by asking them if they’ve been to Mexico, because if they haven’t then it’s useful to point out that they only know of our culture from those of us who have migrated. My argument there becomes that we are not, as a majority of those of us in the US, descended from wealthy people who could afford to easily migrate. Rather, our antecedents are those who needed to travel here to work, to make a living, who were fleeing some sort of instability, or felt that the opportunity would be greater here. Again, the classism, because it is not that these people were inherently bad, but that in a society such as we have here, so driven by wealth and resources and so aggressively against the impoverished, it makes sense that the Mexican American community, lacking in familial roots, will struggle to be exemplary by American standards.

This does not hold true when you return to Mexico, not by any means. Within my own family and on both sides, there has been familial support and slowly but surely the families have been able to advance their socioeconomic status. The same generation of aunts and uncles on my dad’s side, great aunts and uncles on my mom’s side, are all going to leave their children with greater wealth than those siblings that decided to migrate north. But extended beyond my family, traveling throughout Mexico you see the greater diversity of Mexican culture, a different hybrid than the one we have here. Yes, I am aware that there are great problems down south that I am glossing over here; for example, one of my first exposures to the issue of water rights was not here in Southern California, but in Mexico City, as my older cousins had been invited to the screening of a film on the water shortages facing the poor on the outskirts of the city, water that was being taken from them to keep the wealthier inner city denizens hydrated. That complexity in the Mexican experience, one in which wealthy urbanites are doing their part by watching the woke film but going home and doing nothing about the plight of their rural poor, is what is lacking up here, in the north, where so many Latinos seem to allow themselves a narrow definition of what the Mexican identity is.

Finally, what triggered all of this is that I went on a friend date recently with a Mexican borne software developer who let me know that he’s gotten flack from other Latinos too. He came over on a work visa and recently got his residency. As a software developer, he has a comfortable salary and is proud of the work he did to get there. However, he told me he bristles when he is asked by other Latinos if he nabbed a guerro who got him his residency and his money. I wonder if I had a thicker accent if I would get the same questions asked of me or if I was less noticeably dorky. From there, I got into my views on how disconnected we are here from Mexican culture and the narrow options we have for ourselves. I’ll refrain from repeating myself, much of what I had to say is above.

I am going to write more about the Chicano identity, but wanted to get this specifically off my mind.  Mexican culture is so much more than what we think of it here in the US and we need to acknowledge that. Those Mexican roots are growing in US soil and environment though, which is why I identify most with Chicano. 

Aversion to Intimacy

Aguilar

I don’t understand what’s so broken in me that small moments of intimacy can cause me to spiral.

On Friday I went out with an engineer I had previously gone on dates with but with whom nothing long term seemed viable. We still touched base every once in a while when I was in Long Beach and now that I’ve been living here we’ve chatted but hadn’t met up. We had talked about why I didn’t seem interested in hooking up and I guess that’ll be open ended because sometimes NSA fun can be had, but going out for dinner seemed pretty low stakes. The conversation was good and we ended up going for drinks too.

I think we chatted for about five hours straight catching up on our lives since last we met, fairly surface level though. I guess he wanted to work up the courage for it, but after the first beer he asked, “So what about your love life?” I was so irritated to be asked because I knew there was nothing great to talk about. I let him know that I was bitter and disillusioned from my last relationship and that it was difficult right now to put myself in a situation where I might get hurt again. Perhaps I said it differently to cushion it a bit, but in a short summary that’s where I’m at emotionally. I explained what had happened with my ex and answered his follow up questions for a while and then asked him about his love life.

He reminded me that he wasn’t out to his parents yet and was waiting until he had a boyfriend. I didn’t let him know, but I recalled that being one of the reasons I thought I wouldn’t end up dating him. I asked some probing questions of his decision to wait. No, he wasn’t financially dependent on them. No, not all his siblings knew, although they likely suspected. No, he didn’t think it would be too much pressure to put on the other guy, although he understood what I meant. The topic shifted to some difficulties I’ve been having and how I’d like to go back to therapy and get that sorted, possibly diagnosed, in part so I can tell future potential partners that I process feelings differently for specific reasons. He questioned that reasoning, saying he liked to let his dates discover him and he wasn’t so worried about telling them about himself. When he told me later in the evening that he had commitment issues I asked him if he didn’t think those two behaviors were linked. It honestly was a nice night.

The problem is that on the way home I was crying after the intimacy of our conversation. It wasn’t even that it was that deep, it’s just that I haven’t been that open with anyone in a while. I have moved away from my closest friends and while I still chat with them often, it isn’t the same as being in the same space as the person you’re showing your heart to. And maybe it wouldn’t come as such a shock if I was more open in my day to day life or made more time for others instead of prioritizing solo activities.

The next morning in fact, I was out by Mt. Wilson with two close friends. They too had had a recent death in the family and at different times in the hike we teared up telling our stories. Maybe that didn’t bother me as much because it was familiar territory. It’s true we hadn’t had deaths in our families before, but as friends we didn’t shy away from difficult conversations and had had lots of emotionally charged encounters and yet, we’re still all friends and we’re still in each other’s lives.

For meeting new people, it’s been difficult to be that intimate, because I’m not sure that they will still be there later on. So I close myself off, letting my nurtured aversion to intimacy lead.

It isn’t just new people either. Yesterday my brother in law pressed his head into my shoulder to read a restaurant menu off my phone. I imagine he could feel me tense up and he has called out our family for being too frigid. He grew up with a family that is more physically affectionate than we are, maludjusted in their own way. I had left home thinking it was just me that couldn’t deal with physically being close to people, but have since learned it’s all of us siblings too. For those moments his head was resting on my shoulder, I felt a warmth inside of me and it made me uncomfortable, not the warmth itself but that it originated from my brother in law and that intimacy felt stolen, as if I was crossing a line in feeling anything from the physical touch of my sister’s husband.

That awkwardness around physical intimacy even carries into sex. During foreplay I am actively engaged in physical affection and haven’t ever had a problem with it in the moment. But last Thursday I hooked up with a guy I had been with in the past and had really great sex. The sex this time was awesome too, but there was a moment in between, when he had finished inside me, that I felt uncomfortable laying beside him. I told him my stomach felt a little bubbly and that I needed a moment. While it’s true that I felt a pressure inside that hadn’t been there before, when I got to the bathroom I took some time to just collect myself emotionally. He had been trying to cuddle and spoon me affectionately and I just couldn’t handle that. I went back to his bedroom and we continued for some time, but I noted how, for a time anyway, my mind had detached and wandered, removing my heart from the sex and it was just my body performing a penetration.

I have known what it’s like to not worry so much about these types of things, to not be shocked by intimacy because it’s more normal. Although there is some degree of this that is related to the pandemic, as touching strangers still seems like such a charged event, the awkwardness is not new and had gone away. I think, as I described to the engineer, I’m still reacting to my breakup, to the sudden loss of emotional support. Although I want that, I’m so scared of losing the support suddenly that I’d rather not build it with anyone new.

That’s why, instead, I’m just scribbling into the void, letting these out onto the internet, to fester online.

Clashing Intentions and Actions – Just Part of Gay Adolescence?

Aguilar

I took a small break because I have been stressing out due to an upcoming exam that I am not studying well for. Outside of college, it hasn’t really happened for me that I’m able to study without a classroom structure. After this, I’m going to go ahead and sign up for in person classes, or study with a coworker. Because of these exams and because of my recent break up, I’ve been very upfront on all the dating and hook up apps that I’m keeping it casual for now. Unfortunately, I’ve been having interactions with other men that don’t seem to understand what I mean or where I’m coming from.

I often see it repeated online that coming out leads to a form of gay adolescence, as gay and lesbian teens don’t have the same opportunities to experiment with dating as their straight peers do. Personally, although I had started coming out as early as middle school, I was too much myself to have dated in high school. I did try though and over time those experiences stumbling and putting myself out there have worked to help me figure out what I want and when I want it. That is, while I’ve been comfortable being single and having casual relationships or hooking up off the apps, when I want to be in a relationship, I know how to communicate that out and pursue that. I had two recent encounters where the gentlemen’s stated intentions clashed with their actions and words and I considered whether this was just a part of gay adolescence that I would continue to encounter as a man dating men. 

Of the first, I wrote a bit already about my interactions with him. Following a cousin’s funeral, he freaked out because I hadn’t been in contact with him. Some time after I posted the prior interaction he reached out to apologize and said that the text didn’t help us understand each other, that he tends to be very sensitive and was being selfish, but that he didn’t want to be ignored in the future and he wanted to prioritize that. As I was on my way out of town, I said thanks for the apology and let him know I wouldn’t be around. I talked to the friends on that trip out of town and they told me that, told of someone’s funeral, they would have backed down as well, not insisted on being heard out. With that, I decided to unfollow him and remove him from my followers too.

He didn’t notice however and reached out to make small talk, discussing the exam and the vaccines. I engaged with the small talk for a while but after some reflection, let him know that I didn’t want to talk to him anymore as I had just gotten out of a relationship where I had to create emotional space for my ex’s angry and jealous outbursts, but when I finally got angry at him, he dumped me. I related that to what had occurred between us, summarizing it as me having created space for him but he being unable to do the same for me. For some context, when he had come over, I held him while he cried because, as he stated, he just felt very comfortable around me; when he reached out to me because he felt I had stood him up, I apologized but told him it was a bad time as my cousin’s funeral had just happened and rather than back off, he insisted that I needed to prioritize his need for communication in a friendship. As the friendship with him required more from me than I could give, I insisted that we not talk anymore, although I pointed out that he was equating my grief with his personal insecurities and asking me to set my feelings aside.

What I never got around to discussing with him, because I was much less invested in this situationship than he was, was that he had not laid out all these rules ahead of us meeting in person. In fact, it felt like he suppressed all his requirements for having a friendship until after we had had sex. In a way, I feel more responsible for ignoring the red flags as I am slightly older than him and definitely more experienced, but I also felt that I had said many times that I was not looking for a relationship or really any responsibilities right now as I wanted to focus on myself. Although I stand by that, I do feel that I should have paid more attention to what he seemed to mean, which is that he needed a therapist and a stable, committed boyfriend. On the therapy part, I won’t say more than I already have, but he raised several topics after we had met, but before he got upset that I didn’t follow up on a potential hang out, on issues that I let him know immediately were pretty serious and should be discussed with a professional. And on the boyfriend part, it became clear just how serious and committed he expected his friendships to be, to the point where he should just be looking for a boyfriend and find a different kind of trouble.

My next issue with men hiding their intentions, or not being honest with them, comes from men hiding their age. Although it’s never truly been an issue, it happened recently that two men, one in his mid-thirties and another in his forties, have said that they are 29 years old. The latter’s profile actually stated 26, but I asked him what his age was after he sent some face pics. He said 29, I pointed out I was turning 29 and asked if he’d like to try again on giving his age. Now, I’ve said all this very politely, because I get that youth is a commodity in the gay community, but it feels odd to have them use my age when they’re clearly older.

The former deserves a little more talking about as I went on a date with him. He started off as a blank profile, which immediately set off flags, but he was quick to share pictures of himself. I let him know right away that I would be on my guard because I always am with blank profiles. Although I understand that there are good reasons for that, such as teachers not wanting to be seen by their students, I haven’t had good interactions in the past with these types of profiles. This time was going a little better; we agreed to meet at a local restaurant and other than being a little late, he showed up. Immediately I could tell he had lied about his age, but decided not to bring it up right away.   

We chatted about different things and overall had a pleasant conversation. At some point, he mentioned a six year relationship, described how it had ended some short time before the start of the pandemic, so seven years ago. I told him that was a little odd because his profile said he was 29 which meant he had to be 22 when they had gotten together. At that point he said, well no, he was something like 33 or 34, which made more sense for the length of their relationship, but said his profile was just old. The explanation was suspect, but as my most recent ex-boyfriend is older than him, I didn’t care to follow up. What did interest me was how he went on to describe his ex-fiancé as a home-body, preferring to stay in on Fridays than go out, how he just seemed very boring and didn’t like going out as much as he did. He had previously let me know that he would be partying all of Saturday and Sunday, specifically hosting a giant get together at the beach on Sunday. So in my head I really considered asking him for his ex-fiancé’s number. All I said was, “that sounds how I like to spend my Fridays, just prepare some food, have a nice edible and just relax.” Even on the question of weed, he said he hated being around stoners. He didn’t know the lingo but basically once couch lock set in his anger would peak.

Although the date went well, I figured I would not bring up the topic of dating again. He ignored me all weekend anyway, which was fine. But tell me why on Monday he hit me up saying he felt like we had a great connection and that we should date more seriously. I let him know that I didn’t want to given that the issues he had with his ex would be the same we would have and that I didn’t feel the need to put us through that. I was happy to continue to hang out with him on the weekends but not for anything beyond casual fun. Unfortunately, he has decided that I will change my mind and that I just need to give him time, to make time for him, and I’ll see.

For these guys, I don’t know exactly what’s leading them to navigate the dating world in this way. But I can see that they aren’t clearly communicating their intentions and needs. At least in the first case, from his perspective he was wrong to have placed any respect, or trust, in me. In my case, if he had let me know just how critical the stakes were for our interactions, I would have left him alone, certainly not inviting him over to casually hook up, or not believing him when he said he was open to it. On the latter, I’m not ready to date. But when I seek to return to the dating world, I’ll be trying my hardest to avoid personality types exactly similar to my ex, so it’s interesting to have a guy who described all the problems with his ex be things I love, and still have that same guy be interested in me. Finally, as far as hiding intentions go, I don’t think I’ll get to the point where I want to hide my age. In part, it’s because I’m not interested in younger men, but also, I think as a young man of a certain age, I’ve been exposed to more age positive media. But I’m hoping to always be just a little too lazy to lie, a little too lazy in dating to be anyone other than myself.

After all, in the words of Darren from Bedrooms and Hallways, “Simplify your vibrations. Your sex life simplifies itself.”

Old Friends and Past Flames

Aguilar

TW/CW: underage drinking and sexual assault (unwanted kissing)

I saw a friend I grew up with on the apps. I stared at Michael’s profile and felt so many things, curiosity, shame, excitement, nerves. I pictured us at the ten-year high school reunion that didn’t happen and wondered how much more intense the feelings would have been to learn face to face that he’s now single. That I didn’t know he and his college boyfriend had broken up did not surprise me, he’s one of the many people who I went to grade school with but with whom I have struggled to keep in contact.

It is not that I never go to my hometown, Santa Ana. After all, although fewer and fewer family members live in the city with each passing year, my mom and sister are still there, my godmother and aunt is still there, as is her son. In fact, I was over at my cousin’s place when I noticed his profile. I didn’t know whether to say hi or not, didn’t even try to remember the last time I had seen him. The second thing that came to mind was a horribly embarrassing entry I had recently read from my high school journal, concerning this friend’s twin brother. At first I figured I would use the application’s “Are you interested?” feature and said yes, in a way putting the ball in his court. Then I realized how silly that was and changed it to a no, thinking it would be better to leave him alone.

Outside of family members, I struggle when interacting with anyone I grew up with. It feels as if, were I to allow myself to get close to people who knew me back then, then I would immediately fall into my old self-destructive habits. This fear reasons that, back then, I had to hide so many aspects of myself to survive, so these people only knew that masked self and the ways I struggled to cope. Seeing me now, less burdened, they might ask me to reconcile the difference. This fear suggests that, having the question posed and in the time between their ask and my response, I may knowingly obfuscate and lie or on the opposite end, may overshare and embarrass myself. At no point does the fear allow for the fact that the people I grew up with have had their own lives, which do not revolve around me, and so may not question what has happened in the time since, attributing the differences to just that, time passed since last we spoke.

However, that’s just the general concern for people in school, not for those old friends of mine who enabled the destructive tendencies. See, there are two friends, Sarah and Remi, specifically who I wanted to get away from, both very integral to the social fabric of my hometown friends. Remi is possibly more complicated. My last post was in response to an audio/visual piece he recently posted and I am worried that there is more to the story of our hometown friends to relate there and at another time. Sarah though, she was that friend I texted when I wanted to forget about life, get drunk and hang out. It is at her place that I spent the evening before SATs, showing up hungover the next day and then going back out with her in the evening. Not all of our memories centered around alcohol, the most harmless memory was driving out to some outlets with her to help get her a prom dress, only I’d never driven on the highway before, only had a learner’s permit, and we got caught in a storm on the way up. All in all, a fun time. But most of the time it was about us getting shitfaced drunk and being rowdy. As I got older though and tried to leave the excessive drinking behind, I found that I had to also distance myself from her and her family, who either encouraged us getting blackout drunk or expressed concern but never actively prevented teenagers from drinking in their home. 

It is this trend of getting black out drunk with Sarah that leads to one of my worst memories with Michael. We had gone up to visit him for his graduation in Santa Barbara. I was taking some extra quarters to wrap up my engineering degree and wouldn’t graduate till the following year, 2015. Sarah had not gone directly into a four year university and had spent some time in community college to reduce the cost of her accounting degree and herself would not wrap up for another handful of years. The day started as playful drinking and a land shark in the early afternoon. There was some perceived flirting on my part from Michael, despite that at the time he was living with his boyfriend and had been with him for several years. As drinks and bars wore on, his boyfriend decided to go home and Michael and I danced and grinded on each other. At some point, Michael finally got too drunk and had to go home as well, we put him in the back of a taxi and called his boyfriend to let him know he was headed home. Sarah and I stayed, I found another guy to dance with, somehow lost my glasses, almost lost my shirt, and I think ultimately got kicked out of the bar too. Thankfully at the time, Sarah had a boyfriend that guided us back to Michael’s, because I was fading in and out of consciousness at the time. 

As we got back to his place, I remember all I could think about was wanting to get with Michael and playing back the sultry smiles and jokes that we had exchanged. We got to his place and his boyfriend let us in. I moved around him, perhaps saying I was going to the bathroom, but beelined straight for their bed. I woke Michael up and we began to make out. In a very real sense, I was assaulting him, as not only was he asleep moments before, but I had helped carry him into a taxi because he was so very drunk by that point. After making out for a bit, he said he couldn’t and I left, forgetting what happened next but suddenly waking up in the morning. 

Like many nights back then, these blurs of recollection did not come all at once, nor was I aware of the fading consciousness as it was happening. The morning after, I showered and cleaned myself up, then noticed I didn’t have my glasses and also that I had given my number to the other boy I had been dancing with. From there I pieced together the night before, remembering some of what had happened. I began to search for my glasses, which Michael’s boyfriend noticed and he helped me look. Michael woke up too and began to search, at which point I asked if they would mind if I just checked their room. “But you never went in there,” I recall the both of them saying to which I looked at Michael and responded, “Well, I just peeked in last night to make sure you were ok.” They seemed to accept this, which was some relief for me as I did not want my drunken sloppiness to ruin his relationship. 

We didn’t find the glasses. We even turned back up at the bar and called their lost and found, only I was informed the lost and found wouldn’t open until the bar did. We didn’t want to stick around. As for the boy from the bar, I never saw him again. Apparently, during the dancing, I had bitten him, roughed him up a bit, and although he said I had definitely crossed the line. It didn’t surprise me to learn that I had done that, so I apologized despite having absolutely no recollection of it. 

I wouldn’t learn my lesson about my drinking for another several years. The next time I saw Michael was another alcohol infused outing, this time after the presidential elections of 2016. I was not happy to learn who had won and through Sarah, had gotten together with other friends from growing up, who could relate to my mixed status family better than my college friends. That night, I had a lot of pent up feelings to let out and mostly cried on the phone to my parents, one who had only recently obtained her residency through my turning twenty-one and applying. However, before I got to that point in the night, I had asked Michael if he was aware that I had gone into his room and did as described above. He had no idea that it had happened but he wasn’t mad about it. I said ok and dropped the issue, not sure how much more to process what had happened between us. 

It was with all this weighing on my heart that I decided to leave Michael alone. Instead, he reached out to me, “You’re alive!!!” We chatted a bit, and as I feared, he invited me out to hang with Sarah and some other friends on Saturday. I mentioned that I had lost touch with many of these people. He said it was understandable and that I didn’t have to explain myself. As we’ve left it, I’m not sure if we’ll end up meeting or not, but then again, Santa Ana and Long Beach are not that far apart. 

A Reflection on Avoiding Pity in Response to Sharing Trauma

Aguilar

“Thank you for sharing these moments and your monologue. As always, I admire your courage in saying out loud and publicly what so many of the rest of us do not. I am glad you’ve found a community on which to lean on, even down in OC. Sincerely…”

Today, a friend from high school recently posted his experiences with sexual assault via his Instagram. I clicked through the link in his bio to his own blog and started listening to the audio on my way home. It cut in and out, my cell phone reception spotty as I traveled down the 710. When I got home, I inspected his blog to find the direct link to the audio clip and listened a couple times to the way he finished his audio essay, pained but declarative and affirmative in the kind of response he would be able to receive. It took me a while to think about what I wanted to write, what I could say in a public forum, how to keep the focus on him while not being careful not to sound like I was pitying him, and I settled on the above. I was not surprised to learn that he had been sexually assaulted, it seems all too common amongst men, especially queer men of color.

Another young man, also Latinx, had recently shared his own experiences with sexual assault and I listened to him and let him know that I understood and that what had happened to him was not right. He seemed aggravated as well, declaring that he hated sharing his experience because he did not want any pity. I kept my emotional distance, acknowledging that I had once felt the same way, but did not share with him my pain. This young man ended up crying and I felt validated knowing that sharing my sharing my own experiences with sexual assault would only distract him from the hurt he had not yet processed. When he brought it up again over a private message, I again said I was really sorry to hear how hurt he had been. He asked me to stop saying that, as it made him feel bad, and he only wanted to feel good when he was around me and tried to turn the attention to our sexual encounter. I asked that he stop trying to police my emotions, pointing out that all I was doing was having a legitimate reaction to the topic he kept bringing up, that it was serious and deserved professional attention, but that I wouldn’t push him into anything he didn’t want to and wouldn’t bring it up anymore if he didn’t.

This week’s reflection is on a recent experience sharing my trauma and experience in therapy, as well as a meditation on why when showing that vulnerability, we feel that we must avoid pity as a response to sharing traumatic stories.

My cousin interviewed me this week for one of his courses, the topic at hand being something like health in the queer Latinx community. For his interviewees, he was reaching out to yours truly and to a mutual cousin of ours, also bisexual, but undocumented and cisgender female. On questions of physical health, it was easy to point out to my careful diet, forced upon me by a series of stomach issues and social anxieties, within which I gave myself the pleasure of indulging, as well as the ample physical activity keeping me sane throughout the week. On mental and emotional health, I shared that I had been in therapy for some time in grad school and was looking to go back, to work on specific issues which I couldn’t detail yet. I shared instances of self-harm in my past and of the years of my life I spent depressed and contemplating suicide. I pointed out that a great amount of shame came from homophobic family members, including his own mom, my blood relative. I could tell by the look on his face that he was feeling something strong, but I didn’t question him on it and continued to answer truthfully, allowing a silence to hang in the air between us when I wrapped up a rather painful thought or memory. It was clear sometimes he was uncomfortable, but that was completely fair and a valid response to some of the uncomfortable moments I had shared with him. Toward the end of our interview though, I did ask him to consider how these same questions might affect our cousin, who has had less access to resources than I have had to help deal with these issues. I don’t know that she has been sexually assaulted herself, but I had told him that it felt that my sexuality added an extra level of pain from the intolerance around me growing up and that it was only now that I had so much help accessible to me that it finally felt like I was zeroed out, more in control of my emotional state than not, and that I was finally able to receive other’s legitimate reactions.

On those portions of the interview where it was my turn to share grief, pain, and suffering, I did not find myself wondering, more out of intellectual curiosity than anything else, how he might be reacting to my story, but did not find myself sanitizing my pain to ease his consumption of it. Not in the same way that I used to, because I know that there was a time when I felt ashamed to share my own stories so as to avoid a pity party. I remember the first time that I told my therapist of my own sexual assault, a twenty-two-year-old reflecting on his time as an eleven or twelve-year-old. I told that him that it was difficult to place that memory in time, as I had instinctively tried to suppress it and reject its occurrence in a time that was my past in order to refuse to carry it into my future. I remember that he got quiet, dabbed his eyes with a tissue paper, and he said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.” I recall freezing for a bit, processing the scene in front of me and wondering why it was that he was crying but that I only felt a calloused indifference to my own suffering. Our sessions for the rest of that year continued in much the same way, me sharing instances of trauma and abuse, detailing them in ways that had only been written down, only once before spoken aloud and never to someone who was not also sharing their own trauma, with my therapist allowing himself to be visibly upset and me maintaining every nerve and muscle under strict, practiced ease. I doubt I fooled him, nor was it the intent to fool him, I just simply was not ready at the time to feel sorry for myself or to acknowledge that my inner child was still hurting from the violence.

That time has come and gone and with it the sense of shame as if I was responsible for things adults had done to me as a child. It is not that I feel sorry myself now for surviving my childhood abuse and the resultant echoes into my young adulthood. It is that I understand now that pity is not anathema to the healing process and can sometimes be a genuine reaction to complex and disturbing situations. The top definition that Google brings up for pity is “the feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others.” I would not wish any of the trauma I endured onto others, therefore, I acknowledge that it is suffering and misfortune. Similarly, when I see it in others, I do feel a great sorrow that abuse is all too common and remind myself to be compassionate to the individuals in front of me, wherever they may be on their own journey. I know that back then I did not want to experience other’s pity because I was not ready to admit just how much I had been hurt. This twisted itself into the insidious phrase, “It is, what it is,” which I found myself thinking about others around me as well.

See, what inevitably happened was that as I found myself denying that I was deserving of pity I began to create a baseline that had to be overcome for me to feel pity, compassion, or anything other than cold indifference and left me emotionally crippled, unable to really express my feelings, I was utterly unable to acknowledge the negative events that had happened to me and thus unable to acknowledge when those around me were hurting. This conflicted with my desire to help others, to find ways in which I could contribute to society, a desire itself deeply rooted in my low self-esteem and the need to feel accepted within society. This problem continued to grow, as I spiraled into a denial of my past and of what could be happening to others around me. As I’ve said before, I have at times been rewarded for being able to set aside emotions and apply a cold logic. Those positive responses to my suppressing my emotions cause me to shudder in imagining who I would be had I never stepped into that counselor’s office and asked for help.

Whatever it is, the instinct that drove me to desire a kinder, softer world won out and I began to work on my ability to create a space for others when they needed a friendly listener and allowed myself to accept that I truly needed a therapist. From there, I have begun to work on allowing myself to feel that same compassion and pity for myself, to allow myself to acknowledge how that pain has shaped my life, and therefore, to accept that other people may feel pity towards me when I share my stories. In truth, they may feel any sort of which way and that those reactions to my pain are as much, if not more so, a reflection on them as they are on me. After all, not everyone can be a fully trained professional, versed in the best methods to react to different traumas, which is totally fine. But where it is coming from a place of love and kindness, a reaction of pity is simply an acknowledgement of pain.

In that words are limited in their ability to capture broad spectrums of human emotion, it is worth acknowledging that pity can also be “used to connote feelings of superiority, condescension, or contempt,” as per the Wikipedia article on Pity. I understand that false compassion as a way of contrasting the object of pity from the clearly wiser subject expressing pity. This type of pity is anathema to the healing process and has often been the sign of someone who could not allow healing in those around them. As I have grown, I have learned to distance myself from these people, to create space and strengthen boundaries from those who want to see me down as away of themselves feeling elevated above. But it has been a difficult process and it wasn’t always clear from whence this type of pity came. Although I do still try to avoid those who can only interact with my pain through a condescending superiority, I know that this isn’t the type of pity that I was scared to receive when I first started telling others of my pain. After all, toxic and controlling behaviors would not have been new to me then, what was new was gentleness, love and understanding.

In continuing my own journey, I seek to remind myself that it is ok to feel down, it is ok to feel overwhelmed and deserving of some pity. It is ok to feel vulnerable and incomplete. On days that the despair wins out, I allow myself the rest and consider that my life isn’t over and I’ll try again tomorrow. 

Thoughts a week out from the funeral

Aguilar

I wasn’t sure whether I would continue talking about it or not, but I figure that it’s better than keeping it bottled up. I have had a rough couple days since the funeral. Part of my problem is that I was trying my hardest to puh away my cousin’s death. It doesn’t seem accurate to say that I was acting as if it hadn’t happened, because in truth I hardly saw this cousin. But I had also tried not to think about it too much since that first week after we learned the news and the nightly prayers had stopped.

I let my dad enter the mortuary first, not so much out of deference as to give myself the ability to react and avoid him by keeping him in sight. Besides, a cousin had texted asking if I could confirm the stream details for the family in Mexico. My aunt was greeting people at the beginning of the room, asking those who felt comfortable to sign in. She talked with my dad a bit, although I couldn’t hear what they said. We talked too, which left me more dazed and confused. She said something about a hat, how they had asked her to bring his favorite hat, she said something about how it didn’t even look like him, how it was a mannequin except his lips matched. I tried my best to be consoling, but I couldn’t make sense in the moment of what she was saying. Someone had convinced her it would be better to let the entire family see his body. I didn’t know how to say that if she truly had faith then shouldn’t she believe that his soul had already left his body, I hoped that it would be comforting, but I figured that if I didn’t know how to say it, it was better to not say anything. Besides, I didn’t believe it myself.

It bears mentioning that I’m going to describe what I saw. I won’t past this paragraph, although I’ll stretch it to say everything I want to say, about the body… I walked up to the open casket and looked in, but having heard my aunt refer to a mannequin and processing what was before my eyes, I had trouble recognizing my cousin. I sat in the front row, but could not stare in from where I sat. At some point an aunt and I slipped away to get dinner, tuning into the same livestream as our relatives in Mexico to follow along with the program. I asked her to clarify and she confirmed that he was indeed in the casket. I got a chance later on in the evening to stare in though and, in looking back and forth between a photograph and his body, I finally recognized his lips. There was little else there however, as his hair had fallen out in the two months his body had rested in the morgue. He was young and his dad fairly smooth, so he had no facial hair yet, but I wondered what my own jawline would have looked like if it was me instead and my beard had fallen out, my head covered by a baseball cap instead. That’s when I noticed that his jawline had been reconstructed. It was like the flesh from his chin to his neck had been peeled up, stretched, and then pulled down past his neck. It wasn’t obvious at first as it followed the contours of his neck, but once I saw the first ridge I noticed more. I wasn’t sure if it was related to the embalming process or the accident itself, but it snapped into reality that before me was in fact a dead body, pale flesh and hairless.

Having to sit still for the viewing confirmed that I wouldn’t be able to sit through mass the next day. It reminded me of how much trouble I had having to sit still in class, hour after hour in grade school. By the time I had gotten to college, I had learned I needed to burn off a lot of the nerves to rest easy, focus, and pay attention. The morning of the wake I couldn’t get up and had not gone out for a run. I stayed in bed till just past noon, not sleeping, scrolling through social media trying to think about anything but the funeral. I had enough time for a short walk but had to leave before traffic really picked up toward the Inland Empire. By the time I had sat down in the front row with the aunts and on time cousins, my leg had started to twitch. Without a doubt it was nerves, but if the stillness of a viewing was getting to me, what hope did I have to make it through the mass.

There were moments of tenderness during the wake. I held my cousin in my arms as he cried for his lost brother. My uncle’s sisters rushed to his side as he wept over the closed casket. The next day, these moments continued during and after the funeral, the family coming together to grieve. We even got together after the funeral at my aunt’s house and at some point, all the 20-year old cousins were gathered out front, drinking beers and laughing over our now buried cousin’s twitter. Our lives didn’t end there though and the days that followed, away from that familial cocoon have been rough.

Since I couldn’t be with them, with those specific family members, I withdrew. I still went to work the day after the funeral. Or maybe it was the Thursday after, because I distinctly remember talking to my supervisor and he is only in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We talked about the randomness of life and how unexpected this is. He cried a bit and I just wasn’t able to get there myself. That’s what it was. See, I had gone to work on Wednesday and around lunch had to excuse myself, went to my favorite coffee shop near work, Patria, and cried in my car. So, the next day, I had been crying and well before my supervisor getting teary-eyed, I had seen how bloodshot my eyes looked.

The emotional space my supervisor created for me at work contrasted perfectly with the space someone I had recently been talking to had refused to create for me. In casual conversation on the Wednesday after the funeral, this young man had let me know that if I say a certain day is a possibility to meet, it would be helpful to follow up. I told him I understood and let him know that I had had the funeral and needed to take care of myself. I clarified that if I had said that Saturday was certainty, I would certainly have reached out to cancel, but was too distracted to remember a possibility. He said he understood but felt that the maybe still warranted me reaching out. At that point I had looked at the prior messages to see if I had possibly been unclear, but the prior messages still read as me asking to confirm later in the week if we were set for Saturday. He pressed on and said communication is important, that he is not just some guy I am having sex with and that for him friendship was more important than anything else. I apologized to him for feeling stood up but let him know I truly did not even remember well enough to reach out. As this back and forth seemed likely to continue, I stopped apologizing and let him know that he was prioritizing his assertion that communication needed to happen over the context of my situation and that this continued insistence was quickly becoming rude, despite it initially being a valid concern. His next message was still about the Saturday, he hit me with the classic “I’m sorry if you feel that way, but…” So my next message back was to let him know I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for the level of engagement he wanted and wished him a good day.

Between these two contrasts, I am happy to say that most people have been on the end closer to my supervisor. As I doubted my judgement and have a history of putting my walls up too quickly, I showed the texts to a friend and to a cousin, both who seemed annoyed at how quickly the young man had moved on from me letting him know about a funeral in my family. It is in coping with these small annoyances that I’m pleased to see how I have grown, even if my responses are not always perfect. That’s something to focus on as I try to move on beyond this death in the family.  

Evidence of Absence

Aguilar

At the mortuary where we were viewing my cousin’s body, I was surprised to see my bio-dad showing up in the back of an uncle’s car. I hadn’t seen him in two or three years, but I recognized him right away, strangely, looking happy to see me. It annoyed me that he immediately went in for a hug but I was also just puzzled he was there. The first thing out of my mouth was not hello but, “I’m surprised you bothered to show up.” He quickly responded, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

A hundred reasons quickly ran through my head as I assessed my priors. I had known he would be back in the States around this time, so it wasn’t out of the question that he could show up. Growing up, he hadn’t brought me to every family function, but now as an adult myself I have skipped a dinner here or a party there, but knew the seriousness of this event and only thought I might skip because I couldn’t get out of bed. Still, his relationship with his siblings had gotten strained lately, specifically he and his brother had started drifting away from my aunts. Plus, I had hoped he would not be there, because I did not feel like I had the emotional capacity to see him.

However, it didn’t go as poorly as I imagined, likely because my expectations of him are so low. We politely greeted each other, exchanged a couple sentences summarizing our lives, and did not sit together for the vigil. At the cemetery itself, he stood nearby, as much to talk to me as to my cousins. During the final ceremony, reflecting on my family’s loss, I began to cry. At some point, I was again surprised to hear sniffling and quiet sobbing coming from his direction. Beyond that surprise to hear signs of emotion coming from him, I didn’t feel anything and walked away. The timing is a bit hazy, but I think they had already lowered my cousin’s body into his grave and were letting us drop white flowers down. I dropped mine off, waited until I could hug my aunt, and then cried a bit more holding her. I deeply needed that hug, needed to feel warmth and affection.

As has happened many times growing up, in listening to my aunt talk about her son, I saw the evidence of  absence of a strong emotional connection between myself and either of my parents. My aunt loved her son deeply and seemingly, unconditionally. As she spoke about him yesterday during the vigil, she demonstrated a profound love, a patience with her son, and perhaps most tellingly, she reported that she had nothing to regret, nothing but good memories with him. I joked with her a bit that she couldn’t say the same of one of her older sons, one of the cousins I’m closer to, as I knew they clashed. I felt a tinge of remorse saying that, as I knew similarly my parents couldn’t say the same. She admitted it was true they had bad memories, but that she loved all her sons in their own ways. 

My uncle loved him deeply too and was devastated. Yesterday after they closed his casket, my uncle leaned over it and sobbed, his shoulders heaving with the weight of his sorrow. His sisters and wife consoled him. My father had already left, one of the only two immediate family members to have taken off. I can’t picture him caring so much about me to display such strong emotion. This isn’t because I feel unloved, rather that he himself has told me that he had no desire to be a father and had only been interested in reconnecting when I was younger because he was lonely and didn’t have many friends. Thus, it is difficult to imagine him being so broken to have his son taken away suddenly, given his voluntary absence for large periods of my life.

When I was younger, I often only found myself realizing what I was missing by observing other families. Before I started school, I don’t remember ever wondering where my father was and didn’t realize I didn’t have any male role models in my life, as I couldn’t truly miss what I didn’t know existed. In kindergarten, around Father’s Day, we were asked to make cards that we could save and give to our dads, as we would soon go on summer break but, the teacher explained, they still deserved something special for that day. I remember raising my hand to ask, “What if we don’t have a dad?” I assume she had been prepared for this because she asked, “What about an uncle or older brother?” I didn’t have that either and after some back and forth she got me to admit I sort of had a step-dad. I made the card and when he picked me up from school later that day, I threw it in the back of his car as I didn’t want to talk to him, scared I’d say something wrong or that he wouldn’t take my card. I don’t know who found the card, someone must have when the van was cleaned, though neither he nor my mom ever brought it up. For my part, I focused instead on summer break and forgot the card until years later when I was thinking about my early childhood. If I had had the clairvoyance necessary to know he’d still be around these 20-plus years later, or the diplomatic skills to see the value in giving him the card as a request that he step up to bat and act as a father figure, I would have given him the card. It’s not that I regret not giving it to him, it’s just that, given that he bothered to stick around, I now wish he had been more of a father to me, instead of ignoring me or picking on me so much.

I remember years later, when a family friend of my parents began to have his own sons, I realized just how much I wanted to have someone like a dad that loved me. I watched this man push his son on a toddler swing he had installed indoors, the same style that he used to push me in, and then later he picked him up and tossed him in the air, all the while laughing. I hadn’t felt such a sharp pang before and started to panic from the strong emotions swelling up in me. I was scared that someone might see my cry, but I felt a strong longing that I had never felt before, having never seen before signs of such strong paternal affection. After all, although my stepdad was still in our lives and by this point had fathered my two youngest sisters, he wasn’t exactly affectionate with them either and at nine or ten years old, I still didn’t have a grasp on what a father really could be. If anything, the closest person to a father figure at that time was this family friend and his wife had just given birth to my replacement. Seeing how he treated his own flesh and blood made me realize that I didn’t have that, presented itself as evidence of the absence of paternal affection, and the sudden lack had me in tears. 

Although that was the pain I felt then, the truth is that I had also missed out on my mother’s affection during those early developmental stages. Looking back into my early childhood, I remembered the loneliness of my mother always having to work, how I would cry into her legs when she was leaving for work and would hide in her closet so I could smell her clothes while she was gone. As a young adult it dawned on me that the reason my mom couldn’t stay was because neither my dad nor her next baby daddy had bothered to stick around and help her support their children. Knowing my mom as I do, I know she told them she didn’t need their money and was proud she could work long hours to provide for us. Knowing my father as I do now, I know he would have taken that opportunity to keep his money, even though it was badly needed; I imagine it was the same for her other baby daddy. Still, it wasn’t until I started having friends that told me that their moms stayed home from work that I realized what I was missing out on, evidence of the absence of a mother’s (or father’s) love in those early years. I want to stress; I do not blame my mom for having to work and not being able to be round during my formative years. I do blame my dad though for allowing himself to live a very comfortable lifestyle while my mom worked long hours to scrape by.

In short, it wasn’t until I met parents who supported and loved their children that I realized my parents did not. Well, not exactly, as for example, I had already been kicked out of the home when I came out. Most damning, I learned from straight friends that their Mexican parents had told them that if they were gay it would be ok, as all they cared about was their happiness. In learning this I came to realize just how conditional my parents’ love was and how much it was not dependent on their nationality or geographical origins. That is, even my friends with parents from Hicksville, Mexico, had been told they were loved, gay or straight. Meanwhile, both of my parents have at times abandoned me and it was in seeing how supported my peers were by their parents that I truly came to appreciate how much I lacked. So it goes and will continue to show itself.  

I truly believe that if I had not gone on to be successful, as defined by our capitalist society, that neither parent would talk to me. I can’t prove this now, but the signs point to their conditional love and support. Had I ever stumbled, had I needed them to accept me as a broken person needing help to rebuild, I fear they would not have bothered. It is immensely reassuring that this theory will never see itself tested, that on this I can only speculate and never truly gather evidence to support it. 

  

No Fresh Fade before the Funeral

Aguilar

My 19-year old cousin died in February. On his way back to his dorm he fell off his skateboard, into the street, and was run over by a passing vehicle. The driver was only 20 years old. It was close to midnight, visibility was poor, my aunt and uncle seemed to understand and had no resentment towards the driver, although my uncle was much more visibly distraught. 

It happened on a Friday evening and come Saturday afternoon everyone who could, aunts, uncles and cousins had gathered at his parents to be there for them and for his four older brothers. The brother I am closest to, the second oldest was in tears. He felt, as many older siblings do, that he had somehow failed his baby brother and that it should have been him, because he doesn’t have a degree. I told him that our lives hold more value and meaning beyond fancy papers, but felt awkward. “It’s easy for you to say that, with your master’s degree,” my inner voice criticized.

His mom was much calmer. She spoke of godly grace and love, thankful for the time she had had with her son. I could feel in myself the absence of such faith, although I have found my own comfort in the universe’s indifference to our lives, one moment here and another gone. Before we left that first saturday, members of her congregation had come to grieve with her. 

The religious traditions surrounding death continued into the week, although virtually because of time and space. Family in Mexico was able to join, as well as those of us with jobs that would have prevented making an evening trek, 3 hours out to where my aunt and uncle live. Those that could drove out to my aunt and uncle’s place and sat with them in the living room while the rest of us followed along on our phones and laptops. Two of my older cousins had together created a sideshow presentation so we could all follow along in prayer. Each day, different family members paired up to do the call and response readings. I even did my first of such readings, although, unfamiliar with the structure, I read over the response prayers. 

On Wednesday my aunt cracked. One of her sisters asked her how she was holding up and she got as far as, “I’m thankful we’re doing this…” Her voice trailed off and she hid her face in my uncle’s shoulders. The next day I cried on my way to and from the office. I called out Friday because I hadn’t stopped crying. I didn’t know my cousin well, I’m ten years older than him and there’s many other cousins between the two of us, including his four older brothers. But I am closer to my dad’s side of the family and seeing my aunt break seemed to give me permission to do so as well. My uncle, from the get go, was not well, at some point that first Saturday he had just walked away from the house and we had to go looking for him. 

That week came and went. On the last night of the prayers I was over at their house again, bowing my head at the right time but otherwise staying quiet so as to not remind my family I didn’t know the prayers. Not that they minded, but it felt too much like I’d be drawing attention to myself. The family agreed to gather virtually one more time and we did, a little more distant from the date of the accident but still with my cousin’s corpse in some morgue somewhere. 

Finally after two months of waiting, the funeral is happening. Today, I’ll be leaving to the Inland Empire for the viewing. Hopefully, it will still be early enough that I can beat the work commute traffic. Tomorrow, we’ll bury his body. I didn’t work today and I’m fact had a hard time getting out of bed. I had pushed out of my mind the fact of the matter, ignoring the loss as a way of coping with it. It’s almost as if, because of the mortuaries and cemeteries being so backed up due to Covid, that the indifferent universe conspired to have our grief frozen. I don’t think I know any other way to cope, or rather, that’s my default and I find myself having to force the processing of my own emotions. In that my own emotional wiring is tangled up and broken, I can appreciate the traditions and customs forcing us to see what’s in front of us, to gather with those most deeply affected and share in their misery, expunging our own grief and reminding us of theirs. Perhaps that’s why I laid in bed for so long this morning. I wasn’t ready to go experience that intimacy yet. Not that I am now either, but waiting will only make the traffic worse. 

Owning the Benefits and Costs of a Straight Passing Identity

Aguilar

I’ve been going back and forth on how to write this, because it feels unbearable to read, “I’m a masculine guy so I have a hard time in queer spaces.” I roll my eyes when I see this and think to myself, “This guy’s trying too hard.” However, I do need to acknowledge how I’ve benefited from people assuming I’m straight and most importantly, if I don’t accept that I make queer people uncomfortable then I won’t be able to work on attracting the kinds of friends I actually want. I know it’s going to be a difficult process working on expanding my identity to make those types of friends as well, but, it’s something that long term I would like.

At first, I was considering just writing about how straight passing and masculine I come off and poking holes in it, because to a straight man, no matter how much I pass, I’ll still be queer. That ignores that the benefits are so great to just having general strangers assuming my straightness and leaving me alone. I thought about starting here because of how much the gay community prizes masculinity and seeks straight passing men. Even in the super liberal city I now live in, I still routinely see “masc for masc” or other ways of stating that preference on the apps. Even the guys that don’t say that on their apps will still approach me in a certain way that makes it clear that they’re chasing after a straight passing fantasy. Although I’m unsure of my own masculinity, I have to acknowledge the conversations I’ve had with other queer men, which are really stupid in my mind but are these constant surprises when I say I don’t like sports, don’t drink beer, etc. 

I don’t think it’s particularly surprising to say that gay men share some of the same stereotypes around masculinity and sexuality that the greater straight community does. So usually after these conversations is my attempt at defending the identity I have in my head, which is that I’m just a huge nerd. Now, with how much STEM is being prioritized as a good industry to go into, I don’t think this is an undesirable trait. I just think I need to work harder on showing my comfort with being perceived as queer.

To that is the reality that I choose to play into the visuals of straightness and desire a straight passing public persona because I’m worried about being perceived as queer. My politics might be queer, but my perceived identity is not. Like most queer men, I’ve learned a bit about how to market myself and choose to market myself as straight passing. The hours I spend at the gym, the hobbies that are another form of exercise, and the constant dieting and mindfulness of what I’m eating is so that I can have a body that men desire and that plays up the natural traits I have that are tied to perceptions of masculinity, such as my body hair and broad shoulders. On top of the skin, the way I dress is still safely heterosexual, leaning into the natural traits which other men have chosen to play with in a way that approximates androgyny and femininity. For example, when I’m riding the metro into downtown Los Angeles, I make sure to wear a dark jacket on top of whatever floral pattern I have on, buttoning it up before riding through Compton and Watts and making sure it stays that way until I get to a gay bar; my pants and shoes, as I’m too cheap to buy more fashionable ones, have not been an issue.

I’ve been rewarded for this type of behavior. It would be one thing if this positive feedback loop was limited to awarding me sexual partners. However, it’s everywhere in my life. From the family members that applaud me for passing to the coworkers that are happy to read me as a particularly nerdy but straight engineer. Grossest of all is that in prioritizing the quickest and surest way to financial stability, I ended up in a straight, male dominated and heteronormative industry. In fact, I could be tempted to summarize that the only drawback is that I make other queer people uncomfortable.

However, there is a cost to maintaining that sort of identity. So many of the habits I’ve picked up have been learning how to suppress certain tells and emphasizing others, so that people can attach their own stereotypes to the identity I’m projecting. That stiffness isn’t something I’ve easily been able to just drop when I’m amongst the queers; as laid back as I am at home, I know that in crowds and public I get uncomfortable, but so much of that is a fear that I might be seen, a concern that someone will clock me and thus disrespect me. The clothing is not necessarily an issue, because it’s similar enough to things I could wear at work. But, when I’m looking longingly at someone at the bar who is freer than I, I am also analyzing what their identity costs them.

I don’t think it’s particularly ground breaking to say that feminine men have a more difficult time in general. I’ve given myself this platform, but the reality is that I need to take a step back here and have someone else really go through what their feminine identity has cost them. See, at the bar I’m just being superficial, wondering how much the nicer shirts cost, the clothes, the accessories. That’s what I had initially started off thinking about, the superficial costs of maintaining our identities. After all, we all have these accessories or shortcuts for identity, to signal how we’d like to be perceived and those all cost money. But, that doesn’t get at the missed opportunities and public scorn that feminine men might feel is more critical.

As the pandemic wanes and queer public spaces reopen, I have to task myself to keep in mind how I am perceived and work to change that. I’ll complain about it more in detail in another post, but I don’t want to continue dating men who are into me because of my proximity to straightness nor do I want to make friends that are constantly policing their gender expressions. Thus, in order to attract a different type of person I need to put in the work to present queerly.