Aguilas Off Pine

Category: Childhood

A Birthday Dinner in San Diego

Aguilar

8/21/22

Yesterday was one of my sister’s birthday, Paola’s twenty-third. We went down to San Diego to celebrate. I had told her I was planning on spending the whole day there and meeting up with them for dinner, but that she could come along if she wanted. She decided to come with, invited a friend, and we spent the day down south. After a long day, we met up with our family for dinner.

Our family had showed up at the restaurant first and then I had to use the bathroom, so I didn’t pick where I was sat. I was disappointed to see that they had left me a seat next to our mother. I had a headache, and I was tired from being out all day, I didn’t know if I would have the energy to be so close to her and listen to her talk. I ordered a coffee right away, got back up pretty quickly to take of my contact lenses since I remembered that after a while of wearing them, they irritated my eyes. I needed to get into a better mood quick.

My stepdad recently received a green card. After near thirty years of being in this country without any papers, he finally had legal permission to work and be in the country. So this was his first time in many years visiting San Diego and he had driven them down, so my mom had permission to drink. She had one, then another in short order. After she stopped trying to hover over another sister, Yvonne, and her youngest, she relaxed more. We talked about my stepdad’s status for a while and then Yvonne brought up that our grandmother had been calling her youngest by her eldest’s name and couldn’t remember the difference between her two daughters, roughly four years apart, despite being reminded repeatedly.

I pointed out that sounded like a sign of dementia and that she had already been hospitalized once for a stress related panic attack. She had temporarily forgotten something like everyone’s names and didn’t know where she was, I myself don’t remember the details because I had minimized my involvement… But I’m remembering it happened after a brother of hers back in Mexico had suffered a stroke. I talked then to my sisters about the importance of finding healthy ways to process trauma and to deal with things like grief and stress, but didn’t feel it was my role to walk my grandmother through that. Yvonne wasn’t too sure about the mixing up of names being a sign of emotional distress and mental health, but I pointed out the ongoing pattern and my mom, who was seated to the left of me and listening, agreed.

She then took over the conversation and told us that it was just so that the previous night she and her mom had been having a difficult conversation. My sister was impatient with our mom and kept interrupting her with questions, or maybe she felt she was guiding our mom along a conversation. Eventually, mom was able to explain that she felt her mother would be depressed today. They had talked the prior night about how grandma had really messed up one of her youngest siblings, a half-sister named Alejandra. Alejandra was young enough that she was born into my great-grandmother’s alcoholic era, after my great-grandfather had passed and after La Bocha, as they called her, had given into despair and began living from bottle to bottle, man to man, had walked out on her eldest children and would go on to birth, but not mother, several younger half-siblings. Alejandra’s father was one such man, neither wealthy nor educated, but he had wanted to take responsibility of his daughter.

My grandmother decided that she would not permit Alejandra to go live with her father. She threatened to sue, to involve every legal recourse at her disposal to keep Alejandra with La Bocha. And permit me this aside, I forgot to ask when this was all happening, but, based on the threat of legal recourse, I have to imagine this is after my grandmother had attained some sort of establishment within Mexico City and had friends to call on, so by this point my mother was already born. At least, from the way my mom was telling us, it sounded like she had been there to hear my grandmother’s rationalization. My grandmother had decided that her sister could not go with her father because, having already lost her husband, my grandmother figured that La Bocha could not bear the loss of a daughter. So, to spare the mother’s feelings, my grandmother damned her sister to live with an alcoholic mother who beat her and exposed her to the hard life of an Indigenous alcoholic woman in the metropolis of Mexico City. On the outskirts of society, Alejandra was made to suffer untold horrors to spare her mother’s feelings.

It seemed my mother and I were on the same page of what else was being discussed at the table last night. I said something in a very academic Spanish, using bigger words to convey exactly what I meant and to hide from what I was feeling. My sister said something like, “Grandma couldn’t have known.” To which I responded that, “Me parece que esta familia tiene un patrón de poner en alto los sentimientos de un adulto, y especialmente poner esa carga sobre el bienestar de los niños a su alrededor.” My mother agreed with my sister that she will always prefer that a child go with its mother, but that in this circumstance, Alejandra should have gone with her father and that my grandmother should have allowed La Bocha to suffer the distance rather than subject Alejandra to living with a parent who was mentally infirm. She told us she placed that blame squarely on my grandmother, for fighting so hard to prevent Alejandra’s father from taking her. Yvonne protested we seemed harsh, but I said, kindly, that at a certain point it does fall to older siblings to do their best to protect their younger siblings. It isn’t fair, I said, it’s just birth order and responsibilities.

Then, the issue my mom had been dancing around. In discussing this pernicious pattern in our family with my grandmother, she let us know that she had told my grandmother she also saw that in effect in how persistent they had been that I should see and visit my father, be left alone with him, despite my protests to the contrary. We did not revisit that topic in full last night, but when she said that I remembered giving up asking my mom and grandma to stop sending me to my dad’s. Every time I did, they would point out that he gave us money and bought me toys. For a price that was too much for me to talk about then. I couldn’t overcome their concerted effort to keep me going to his place, I didn’t have the language back then to explain that he was molesting me. And, since they simply ignored me every time I said I didn’t want to go back, I kept having to be alone with him.

It is with a bittersweet sensation that I reiterate that it only happened once. Sweet because it did not go further than that, did not happen more than that once. Bitter because it should never have happened. Last night, I simply looked ahead as I heard my mom admit some fault, saw that she was trying something. I don’t know what, I didn’t and don’t currently have the heart to hope. Yvonne didn’t let the silence linger and asked my mom what she hoped to accomplish by having these conversations with grandma. My mom said she wanted our grandmother to grieve, to accept the ways that La Bocha was a horrible person, because since her death our grandmother had done the opposite and was sanctifying the poor woman. I interjected that this felt similar, “Ella tiene que santificar a su madre. Si admite las maneras en que su madre a fallado, tendrá que ver también las maneras en que ella también fallo como madre y abuela. De hecho, nosotros emos hablado eso mismo e…”

I stopped myself as I realized what it was that I had been admitting. I had said the same thing about my mother and our grandmother in our siblings group chat. My sisters had been complaining that our mom couldn’t recognize our grandmother’s faults, couldn’t accept that my sisters needed and were asking from space from our grandmother, space our mom would not allow them to have and would pester them about needing. I had said that exact thing, that our mom could not accept that we were distancing ourselves from our grandmother, could not accept us holding her accountable, because to do so would be to accept that the things our mom had done as well were sufficient to cause harm, to justify distance and possibly the end of a relationship. My mom looked over at me as I let my sentence die mid-thought, but I did not match her gaze. I had told myself I didn’t want to talk about us, about my mother and I, while celebrating my sister’s birthday. A waiter interrupted and I did not pick the topic back up, nor did the opportunity present itself again that evening.

Loving and Forgiving an Abused Body

Aguilar

I went back and forth on how to start this post, because it covers a lot of recent progress. In short, I had been having dissociative and dysphoric feelings lately, including wanting to transition to leave my body behind. This seems to be the more mature version of the suicidal ideation of my youth, itself a response to childhood sexual trauma foremost and shame at how my body reacted then. However, in so far as I can’t leave my body and memories behind, I have no choice but to continue living life to the fullest. Further, I vowed to work toward building a stronger support system such that, if in the future I want to transition, I will have an easier time doing so than if I started that process today.

I had just written about trans thoughts that had coming and going. It is perhaps more appropriate to identify them as a type of intrusive thought, not exactly a desire to transition. These intrusive thoughts come in different shades, sometimes violent, sometimes critical, near constant. I had worried there was something more there and, as if it was reading my thoughts, Tik Tok showed me a video of a marine who had transitioned later in life after being a meathead and gym rat in his youth. The music for the video is MGMT’s “Little Dark Age” and the specific lyrics that triggered the discomfort are “forgiving who you are… just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away.” I have been struggling with this idea for quite some time and saw its echoes in different media I was consuming. I’ll return to the idea of transitioning further below, but at this time and as I’ve stated, these thoughts feel more like aspects of the way I’m still responding to childhood trauma.

I hadn’t connected the dots until this past Friday, after a Halloween weekend that I spent out drinking and not sleeping. I was listening to the Cerebro podcast episode on Illyana Rasputina and the host, Connor Goldsmith, and his guest and current writer in the X-verse, Leah Williams, were commenting that Chris Claremont intentionally wrote parallels between the way Illyana’s and Magneto’s lives were shaped by trauma. They continued to reflect on how both these characters took an immense trauma in their youth and made it a source of strength. Beyond the aforementioned characters is the trend in comics for characters to have a defining moment rooted in trauma, which usually results in a new code name or new powers. I considered how I have tried to move past my own trauma in the same way, turning it into a source of strength. I recalled a recent interaction with a laborer, staring up at this 300 pound plus worker who, in a moment of frustration, had gotten in my face to yell at me about a side decision I was enforcing that would result in an expensive rework. I had recently told my mom how all the physical abuse from her and her mother had toughened me up in this way, let my blood run cold when I should be worried about getting swung on. I had the opportunity then to show that strength, took a short breath and then, “I understand that you are upset and can empathize, really, I know it will cost time and money, but the decision has been made.”

To be clear, the problem isn’t that I can keep cool in these situations. My parents taught me to keep my face still and not show emotion, lest I suffer the wrath of their insecurities. When my mom saw the wrong thing on my face, she would pick a fight with me and make the problems in her life my fault for having been born. This is not an environment that encourages softness, vulnerability, and emotional expressiveness, especially toward my parents.

I can, by appreciating how that upbringing allows me to work in a male dominated, homophobic and racist environment, make peace with that trauma. However, even after these years of therapy, there are still times I wish I wasn’t. If you could could fall asleep on the plane and wake up as someone else, would you? I thought this came from Chuck Palahniuk’s books, but I can’t find the quote. The short answer is yes, absolutely; the longer answer is that I’m going to have to talk to my therapist about this, because I think at the root of the trans thoughts I’ve been having lately is a desire to not exist anymore, to escape from my traumatized past and just move on by leaving my self behind. Back to the comics, I envied characters that could transform their bodies and I envisioned being able to change my body and leave the trauma behind, leave behind the way my body responded to the physical stimulus of when sex was done to me. The greatest shame I still carry is that my member grew erect when my father was touching it, touching me. Perhaps it is the last bridge I have to cross, especially now as a grown man whose body does not react to such stimuli. My young body was overwhelmed, the newness of the physical sensation overcoming the emotional turbulence, and I have to accept that this didn’t mean I was enjoying what my father was doing to me.

I had hoped I was past this… past the thoughts of escaping my body due to the sexual trauma. Halloween gave me the opportunity to transform, to put on a different character literally and leave myself behind. I took advantage of it, worked on different costume ideas, and then partied hard. The revelry left me depleted and in desperate need of some alone time. I stayed up two nights playing video games, strategy games in which I could perfectly micro-manage everything until I snowballed into a victory. A gentle form of escaping life, because, even after all this success, I do not want my life or my body. The shame is still gnawing away and came back, manifesting this time as desires to transition.

I had been scared to look at the thoughts head on, was terrified that perhaps these feelings were legitimate and that, if I engaged them more fully, I would end up wanting to transition. It’s possible they are legitimate, but there is a greater context of a history of self-destructive tendencies that I developed over the years to deal with what was going on to me. Ever strategic, I found socially approved but still masochistic hobbies: lifting heavy weights, running long distance, grueling hikes. Other hobbies tended toward escapism: reading, video games late into the night, binging shows. In them I was looking to either hurt my body or escape it, driven by shame and disgust. So it was this newest obsession, transitioning to escape my body, in hopes that the memories of what had happened and how I reacted would stay with this shell. But this isn’t a comic, and the memory wouldn’t suddenly disappear, it would go with me.

Since I can’t escape, I have to move toward acceptance. Reintegration. Allowing myself the grace to have been a child then and know that the situation wouldn’t turn out the same way now. Couldn’t. I have confronted my dad on this and have even gone so far as to fight him. I have done right by my younger self thus far, but I need to find a way to forgive and love my body. To treat it right as it’s the only one I have.

What if the feelings are legitimate though?

On Twitter, I saw a chart posted from a study on why people were detransitioning. The chart included things like job insecurity, familial disapproval, and generally other societal pressures. I don’t have the energy to deal with the worst of us right now. I’ve already been exposed to the depravity of humanity and those scars have not fully healed. Thus, if the feelings are legitimate, they will need to wait. And I will be ok with that. I will focus on building for myself stronger support systems, continuing in therapy, and advancing my financial well being such that, if I wanted to transition later in life, I would be better shielded from the worst of us. That’s not the here and now. Just this week, I was the butt of homophobic jokes from my coworkers, with my supervisor joining in.

To my future self though, my sole focus and drive won’t be to transition. It will be to build a support system that lets me be happier. If, once that is more established, future me wants to transition, so be it and I hope not to judge myself for waiting. After all, just transitioning won’t bring me happiness, won’t let me escape what happened.

On that final note, I have learned and am learning how to sit with the discomfort of life. The least I can get from all of this is resiliency, learning how to process negativity and move on from life’s little struggles without letting them steal the moment’s joy. Given how bad it can actually get, why ruin the present sweating the details.

 

The Struggle for a World in Which I Would Not Exist

Aguilar

I most recently posted the immediate thoughts and feelings after telling my therapist about my father’s role in my life, which I wrote about at length here. Over the past several days I have been largely depressed as I mulled over the impact childhood abuse has had on my life. I had been contrasting the trauma from both my parents and trying to find a thread to pull on, a story to tell myself that could help me integrate these events and how they have shaped my personality. I hadn’t immediately realized that’s what I was doing, but I knew that in order to move on I would need to find a way to accept the past, when my parents took advantage of my youth to abuse me. But it wasn’t just that I had to accept that it was ok for me, as a young child, to have been at a disadvantage, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to defend myself against the two people who are supposed to have protected me. No, I also had to come to terms with the ways some of that abuse has prepared me for a harsh world and has left me, in a way, unable to fit into the kinder softer world that I desire. Or, more pointedly, I desire a world in which I wouldn’t exist, in which parents protect their children better because they have the resources that enable them to be kinder. 

Let me be clear that I don’t think what my mom did was correct, but that, in the severity of it, I have become accustomed to a harsh world. I was telling a coworker of mine how I have my younger sister living with me, almost rent free, while she gets her life together. He commented that I was a nice older brother and I let him know that I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, necessarily, because I saw how quick to fall apart some of our coworkers were. This included, as I shared with him, some of our supervisors. By contrast, I felt that the worst things in life had already happened to me, my parents gave me no leeway and rather than let me live with them for extended periods of time, had kicked me out at seventeen and bid me make my way in the world. He said, “See, sometimes I think tough love is important.” Because I crave a kinder, softer world, I didn’t agree with him, but I did stay quiet and let him keep talking. I sometimes worry, am forced to acknowledge, that in my behavior I’m not creating that softer world, I’m just thriving in this one and wishing things were different. As I told my therapist during this most recent session, I can live with my mom’s trauma in that I can see the good and the bad in the effects of the trauma I have suffered at the hands of my mother. When the woman who birthed you has beat you, berated you, bullied you and then lied about it, nothing a coworker or contractor can legally do will phase you. And you’re not expecting anything from a cold world.

Not so with my father molesting me. That still feels like the pits of hell, although less so with every day I truly acknowledge it and the depravity of those actions. There was no well-meaning intent behind his perversion. There was simply the act of a physically larger person, a person who was trusted to take care of me as a child, unchaperoned, there was the act of this person taking advantage of my youth, my childlike body, my literal weakness. There is no making light of it nor finding a silver lining in my sexual awakening being at the hands of my father… And my therapist agreed with me. She affirmed that to even try to find one was folly, because while she seemed to appreciate that I could find something good in how my mother raised me, there was no doubt in her mind that I was right to say this was just all bad. As she reiterated, my father is a monster.

She even tried to get me to write a letter and I told her I understood the therapeutic exercise but that I had nothing to say beyond I hate you and I wish you had never come into my life. I told her that I had seen people, met others who had been abandoned by their fathers. Not to play the oppression Olympics with them, but I let her know that it felt like I could have overcome the painful guilt of abandonment so much easier than the feelings I have regarding my molestation. To belabor the point, I did have those feelings of abandonment, I do remember feeling in some way responsible for my dad not being around before I met him.

For the first decade of my life, I didn’t know my biological father and I was distinctly aware of this. I recall the elementary school yard watching other young boys who were playing soccer and wishing I knew how to play, but my mom didn’t know and my stepdad didn’t want to teach me. I never even felt safe enough around him to want to ask. I can recall these thoughts and feelings I had, watching these kids play at recess and knowing this was just something dads and older brothers taught them and that I was going to be excluded from that. I didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone to teach me, didn’t even feel like I could join the other boys at play. This isn’t a moment where I went and discovered I preferred to be friends with girls either. No, I just sat alone and read, trying to push away the feeling of being left out because I didn’t have a dad.

I must have then, at some point, asked my mom about him. Given that the above is a memory I can recall and that I was at least in the third grade, if not a little older, this does line up. Not too much longer after that, I got to meet my dad. I remember being very excited, thinking that this was the best thing that ever happened to me. I remember feeling special, ready to forgive him for not being around and finally feeling like I was worthy of having a father, again, because it felt like my father hadn’t stuck around due to some character defect in me. And then things went downhill and my memories of the time are scrambled. Before I turned ten and after about fourteen, my memories have temporal relationships for each other. I can generally recall when two memories happened in relationship to each other. For example, one of the earliest memories I have is about catching and playing with a ladybug in the garden, which came before a particular afternoon in the pool during which I swam behind a woman because I had mistaken her tan swimming shorts for nudity and was shocked by what I thought I was seeing. From about ten to fourteen, when the childhood abuse peaked, the combined effect of the traumatic events shattered my perception of time. It wasn’t that I could no longer tell when it was morning or night, but rather and for example, I can’t place when my dad molested me in relation to other events involving him. Similarly, I don’t know if that most severe of beatings at my grandmother’s hands had already happened by the time I was molested, although I remember that these things happened around the same time. In order to live on, I had to bury the pain of these events, had to bury the boy that happened to. I couldn’t undo what had happened, but I could attempt to freeze them out of my timeline, to trap those memories and that body feel outside of my timeline.

That day changed my life, and suddenly, the pain of abandonment didn’t seem so severe. I began a long campaign of getting away from my dad, of skipping weekends with him. Suddenly I wished for the days I had never known him. I used to say at least I got to meet his family, but the truth is they had always been in and out of my life, had always tried to maintain a relationship that he did not appreciate. Problematically, rather than my mom blaming an absent father for my sexuality, once she found out, she blamed my father molesting me. She didn’t even wait a while to ask this question, when I told her what my dad had done she and my grandma immediately and openly started theorizing that this is why I’m uno de esos. This must have been easier than listening to what I was saying, which is that I had fought and argued so much with the two of them for me to stop being left in my father’s care and that they had each and every time yelled at me and told me I was stupid for advocating for myself.

Pardon for abruptly changing topics, but during the session we also discussed my extreme aversion to unwanted physical contact. She said, “sweetheart, no one wants to be touched that way by strangers.” I got her point, I think perhaps she feels that I feel alienated by my emotions, like they’re not normal, but I don’t think she got mine. There’s a physical pain I feel sometimes emanating from my body… That’s not the right verb. There’s a physical pain I feel throughout my body and internally reverberating, almost like my body is shocking itself in disgust at any casual contact with another body. She asked if this happened in relationships too and I told her that, no but yes, that not often like she was referring to but sometimes and I would have to take a minute to collect from this intrusive recollection. There are times when someone brushes up against me, just to pass by, without lingering or even really acknowledging me and this shocks my body. We talked about concerts and packed venues, gay bars after everyone’s a little too drunk and starts to get too handsy. I told her of a specific time in WeHo, I had gone alone to the bars to take a break from my schoolwork and ran into someone who I couldn’t get off me. He was trying to undress me, the entire time insisting that he would make a good boyfriend for me and that I should have a drink. I had repeatedly and firmly kept telling him to get off me but he didn’t listen and instead tried to force me to drink, at which point I had swatted the drink out of my face and had run away. I didn’t tell her, because that wasn’t the point, but I had called a close friend crying, disturbed by what had happened. It was only during this week’s session that it clicked, my mom had always shamed me for getting angry or for physically engaging with the world and that had left me with tremendous guilt every time I had to act to protect myself. My body’s reaction to casual contact seems clearly linked to my father molesting me, but the anxiety around my inability to protect myself and my guilt when I have used anger to act in self-defense, that comes from my mother.

My parents have done all this only to abandon me again as an adult. I needed to cut off my father anyway, but even before I had exposed him, he had been growing more and more distant. I mentioned it in the past, but, once he was back to himself and following his mental breakdowns, his pride and shame led him to run from any support system. So it was that when in college I took him to Mexico to get mental help and he finally returned, he took a while to reach out to me and ask to see me. I had never been particularly close to him, but the time between our visits began to grow. Eventually, in graduate school, I started going to therapy and so it was that after his next breakdown, I was ready to confront him, to take the time after he’s back on his medication and rational, but before he has been on them too long and emotionally cold, to ask him a series of questions. Per our short interview, he had never wanted to be a father, had never loved my mother, and figured she would do a good enough job raising me, even though she was much poorer and undocumented. With these answers, my mother could move on from him and I could confirm to anyone who cared to doubt that my father was indeed a massive asshole. Of him molesting me though, there wasn’t much for him to say except, “It’s just how things are in el rancho…”

 

It isn’t as if I need either parent to put a roof over my head and feed me. But, especially as an adult man, having a rough time and not being able to go to your parents’ house or to call them for comfort, to vent, to feel reassured, that sucks. There’s no getting around the fact that I have living, breathing parentals that are not able to care for me in a way that I need them to. That support all must come from relationships I build with strangers, have thankfully built with many friends, or I have to allow myself to lean on my younger siblings. All of this could be worse, but still, what I really want is to go home and lay on my mother’s lap and have her sing me a lullaby or tell me it will be ok and to have me believe it, to feel the love and warmth from an older relative. Instead, I am coming to terms with the reality that I won’t get to experience what I’ve described. My father chose to exit the picture and my mother I had to block to stop her from spamming my phone with her anger and frustrations, disappointed as she is with her own living relationship and only able to process that by being angry at her two oldest kids. Add to that my mother’s sexist and machista attitudes, which lead to her specifically lashing out at my expressions of feelings and emotions, things she wasn’t allowed to have as a young person either but that her culture specifically only allows in certain kind of men.

That’s the depressing part. I had said at the beginning that I was looking for a thread to tie this all up neatly in my past, allow it all to become part of my story, part of the drive that I have had thus far in life. There’s a couple quick things. I grew up in a harsh environment and am now in a harsh environment that pays well. Construction and engineering are somewhat lucrative fields, completely dominated by men that struggle to express what they really mean, men who let ego and feelings get in the way of work, but are unable to recognize that happening because men don’t have feelings. So my parents teaching me to disregard my emotions, to swallow my ego, lets me take in everything around me and synthesize the needs of many people to find a solution that seems most reasonable, minimizing the burden on specific groups but recognizing how our contracts obligate certain responsibilities onto other groups and having enough ego to insist on and see the solution through. I was praised recently by several coworkers and supervisors for how I had been handling a couple weeks of touchy situations recently. A superintendent said, “You don’t even seem bothered by all the ranting he does,” in reference to a specific and difficult coworker. I told him my parents were worse and that no matter how long the rant, I still got my paycheck at the end of the day. That I owed so much professional success to my childhood background caused a tinge of pain but acknowledging this and incorporating it into my story will help me move on.

As for moving forward, I have to borrow from Cruising Utopia to abate the despair in realizing that I’m too harsh for the kinder, softer world I desire. I know that the phrase itself originated from a webcomic, A Softer World, that I used to read, although I had found the idea first and the webcomic second. In fact, the original comic relates a darker setting, a softer world that doesn’t judge the dark and sexual violence of the protagonist. Perhaps at the time I saw my sexuality as something dark and could only relate to the idea of a softer world ironically, but now there is no sarcasm or ironic defense, what has always driven me since I was young was the desire to create a kinder, softer world, for the young versions of me that I couldn’t go back and raise. In honor of when I needed a helping hand and in gratitude of those who extended one, I have dedicated myself to this idea. However, I have feared and have seen how my upbringing has prepared me for rougher environments, emotionally cold and stunted, but profitable. These fears have been assuaged by the idea in Cruising Utopia that those of us who work toward a queerer world are then left behind when that queerer world is created; we are the products of a straighter environment and so do not even know what we need to unlearn to continue being able to push out further and further the acceptance of our ever changing society. A different synthesis to Munoz’s argument is that each generation must push change and then must step aside and let the newer generations push as well. In this I find some permission to continue being myself, to note the things from my upbringing that I want to change but also not to excessively blame myself for not being a softer person, for not having the ease and loving attitude of someone who grew up sheltered, with stable parents and in affluent neighborhoods. And most importantly, simply to accept that I can have grown in the environment I did and still aspire to see a healthier change in the world beyond just revenge against my parents but not feel guilty when those feelings occur.

Reflecting on Telling my Therapist About my Father

Aguilar

Last week during therapy I read parts of my last post regarding my relationship with my father and this coming week we’re supposed to discuss how I feel about it.

One of the questions she had during our conversation was asking whether it felt better to finally tell someone about this. I corrected her and let her know that I have told many people in my life what happened. Specifically, I had to tell my dad’s family that he molested me when I noticed that my older cousins were letting their kids be around him, presumably unchaperoned. I mentioned that the guilt I felt hiding his secret led me to speak out to prevent something awful from happening. Even writing this down, I still feel a tremendous nausea and disgust, my mind doesn’t even let me imagine what could have happened I just have an extreme feeling of pain, a ball of hurt that won’t let me put to words my fears of what could have happened. I have to allow myself to feel that pain, it’s coming from my own past, but I also have to note that it didn’t happen. I did the right thing, spoke up, righted what I could.

But since talking with his family about it, it’s been more like a family secret than a family reckoning. I do think I would have moved on from this, except my aunts keep sending me updates of him now that he’s moved to Mexico. It is uncomfortable but manageable to see him once in a while at family events. It’s disturbing to have his pictures sent directly to my phone. I will probably need to mention this to my aunts at some point. I do know that in the aftermath, one aunt and uncle specifically chewed him out. They called him out for his pathetic justifications that it’s just something they do back where he’s from and iced him out for a while. He showed up at their son’s funeral, there are some events that unfortunately all people show up for. I have only talked once or so about this with a couple family members, they just wanted to confirm what they had been told and I said, basically, that my mom hadn’t handled telling them well and I acknowledged that, but the truth remained the truth. 

Complicating matters are that my father has been diagnosed as a bipolar schizophrenic. His diagnosis has varied with time, as medical science has advanced and clarified the differences between the two. A quick google search and based on my experiences with him, it does seem like he’s on the more extreme end of his illness. I have seen him have hallucinations and speak in tongues… When he has episodes, we often have to get him into a facility where they will bring him back under the effects of medication. He has several times now decided on his own that he will be lowering his dosage, because he doesn’t feel good on them. I empathize, but his illness is not manageable without a more complex support system, both from the medical field and from his family. While not in an episode though, his pride leads him dismantle the support systems and ignore the medical field. To highlight how distant I am from him though, he had an episode after, or was in the midst of one, during my cousin’s funeral. I learned from his younger brother that he had been experimenting with his dosage before he’d even gotten onto the plane from Mexico and the emotional distress of the funeral knocked him off course. I haven’t gotten an update from his family and hadn’t bothered to check in…

Briefly, I’ll mention that I have also told my other parentals, one of my sisters, some friends, older partners… I actually prefer not telling people anymore. Unfortunately, it also means I don’t provide context for my past sexual behaviors, but I also haven’t met someone who I really wanted to know me that way, with full context. Knowing what I know of my experience, I don’t feel shame. My younger self was doing what I thought was correct at the time, reacting in self-destructive ways but I outgrew that mindset.

I found my high school journal and I cringed while reading it. I was so excited to be hooking up at the gym, I had made a game of it and felt I was so grown up to be exploring my sexuality in this way. I even noted the times it went too far and I just wanted it to stop but I just didn’t. I knew then this wasn’t great, but I kept doing what I was doing, apparently not sure enough in myself to stop, to advocate for myself. I see that mindset now in people even my age, where it’s just about numbers, just about keeping the sex going, and that’s why I cringed. I feel like there’s more to life than just having sex, there’s prioritizing having good sex with good people and really enjoying each other on those personal levels. There’s also still going to bathhouses and nude beaches, we do contain multitudes after all. But for younger me, it was specifically running away from what had happened, that pain underlied those interactions.

Continuing the question, what does it feel like to have talked about it? She asked me more about him, did I want to hurt him? I told her yes, obviously. I explained to her that it was unlikely I could do so without getting caught or hurt myself, so I wouldn’t, but I wanted to. I have even imagined turning up at his home, back in the ranch he grew up in and lives in now, and just shooting him in the head and ending him. I told her I felt justified, not just because of what he did to me, but because I felt it likely that he would do it to other kids. After all, his justification was that that’s just how things are done back where he’s from. So now that he’s back where he’s from, why would I doubt that he’d go after the young people in El Timon, Guerrero. If she presses me on it, I’ll explain to her that this is a place so remote that I wouldn’t be able to get back there without help from my family, he would literally know I was coming. I’ve only been once, maybe twice in my life, spent several months there one summer. This is a remote and disconnected place, rural and lonely. I would argue that I can connect with the rural people of the USA, but back there was the added difficulty of political and narco violence. I had an uncle who ran to be mayor of a larger municipality adjacent to the pueblo they grew up in. He won, but was told the same night of his victory that he had a couple days to leave the region and never come back, or he and his family would be assassinated. Las Tierras Calientes…. Both sides of my family come from this region and I’ll need to mention more about it but I want to do so separately. 

To wrap up for now… I feel relief to have told my therapist about all of the prior things and can work with her to continue working through the issues, processing the feelings of weakness? I certainly think I was still judging my younger self, wanted to have been not so young, not so weak, not so exactly tuned for victimhood, so that I could have done something sooner. But those are ways of thinking I need to leave behind, to allow my younger self back and to acknowledge that pain and how young I was… How I didn’t need to be anything more than what I was because the adults in my life should have been better equipped to have helped me and or not been fucking pedophiles in the case of my father.

I’ll never get that clear shot with him. And now I’ve put this out into the universe, showing premeditated intent to harm him. But I don’t doubt that I’d enjoy it. Fuck him.

I want to take some time to go work out but I don’t think I’m done with this prompt unfortunately. 

Coming to Terms with my Father’s Role in my Childhood

Aguilar

I read “One Family’s Struggle to Make Sense of 9/11” by Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic’s September 2021 issue. The author describes one trait of a victim’s mother’s grief, how for years she couldn’t bear to hear someone else talk about their child, she just couldn’t. The article itself focuses on the author’s personal experience and connection to the family of a specific young man, but I forced myself to sit with the discomfort of the mother’s aversion to other’s happiness and set aside the magazine for later. Last Wednesday, I went out with coworkers for a goodbye lunch and, as often happens with my coworkers, the conversation turned to their children. My manager mentioned that he really was only into rock climbing because it was the only thing his teenaged son would let them enjoy together and I sat quietly in that, not sure how to say that it was really nice of him to think that way. I had noted that for the first time in a while, a father expressing his love for his children finally did not bring tears to my eyes.

I immediately empathized with the mother who could not listen to others talk about their children. From a young age on, I have burst into tears when I see children being cared for by their parents and more so when it’s the father in the picture. I don’t think I was ever caught crying… but there’s also the insidious thought that perhaps my parents did notice me crying and just figured it was best to leave me alone. It was not the only time, but I recall one family outing specifically that resulted in me sobbing in the front passenger’s seat, both struggling to suppress the body tremors that come with deep sobbing and deathly afraid that I would have to explain the intensity of this emotion. I had seen a family friend, the closest I had to a friendly parental figure, bring out a swing similar to, if not the same one, that he had swung me in before when I was much younger. If it was the same swing, he had kept it for almost a decade and was now bringing it out to play with his son, the youngest of his children and the only boy. I watched them play and felt pangs of jealousy and longing. I hadn’t personally kept a close relationship to this man, but seeing him swing his son brought up memories of when he had also played with me that way and in the great wasteland and deprivation of parental warmth, that memory had bite to it.

That memory of that car ride home, begging my body to hold still but also unable to contain the tears, is now about a decade old itself. But the pain of having grown up without a father has only recently subsided. It was only three years ago that I almost broke down in my then supervisor’s car. We had been working together for near a year at that point and finally had a moment to sit down and have a long lunch and open up a bit more. I shared some of my background with him and he did as well. We were both Mexican-Americans, born to working class Mexican parents that had managed to get us a decent education. The key differences in our upbringing were that he had grown up with his father, who had gone on to teach him soccer and other such things that fathers do, and that I grew up relatively pampered in Orange County to his experiences in inner city Los Angeles schools. I told him how I had a difficult relationship with my father and that he had once tried to teach me soccer, but that he was quick to point out that I would have been a better soccer player if he had raised me. I mention that anecdote to people often to highlight my father’s cruelty, after all, he could have stuck around to raise me had he wanted to. My mother partially named me after him, in a misguided effort to have him acknowledge me as his son. My supervisor said one of the only things people with healthy relationships to their parents know how to say, “Sorry.”

My issues with my father specifically have eroded some of the pain from his abandonment and from generally growing up without a father. However, that pain still shows up from time to time, especially when talking to my coworkers and the relationships they’re trying to foster with their children. That same day we had lunch, my then supervisor explained the rationale behind his and his wife’s decision to home school their children and, in the way that engineers speak to each other, explained the benefits they sought to maximize, while addressing the possible issues that might arise. His careful explanation, his well thought out rationale for his children’s upbringing, felt in that moment almost like a slight against my own upbringing. Had I not been opening up all afternoon over that two-hour lunch, had we just been talking about work, I may have remained more composed. But for a moment in that car, I felt suffocated by what I did not have in my own life, what I so desperately wanted. I had to excuse myself to the bathroom once we got back to the office, to let myself cry and then wash my face, dry it off and compose myself to continue working.

I don’t know how or why the intensity of those feelings has faded. Perhaps it is as simple as acknowledging them and crying about it, over and over again until their intensity fades. The English language has its limits for naming certain things, but I would surmise that the feelings I was feeling can be described as follows: a general feeling of parental abandonment, both physical and emotional; whiplash or post-traumatic stress from experiencing the emotional intensity of my parents, juxtaposed by the careful and thought out planning of my coworker’s parenting styles; for the family friend, a feeling that nothing I had was for myself and myself alone, everything had to be shared and therefore my needs would have to be second hand, second to my younger siblings but also to my parents’ emotional needs; a longing to be loved and cared for as my coworker’s children are.

I told my therapist that at this next session we could talk about my dad and I already mentioned that there are specific things he did that left me longing for his absence in my life. I didn’t meet him until I was around 10 or 11, even though his sister, my godmother, had plenty of times babysat me while my mom worked. He very quickly proceeded to molest me, as he explained later, to satisfy some curiosity he had over my body. What I have gathered in the decades since is that my grandfather may have molested at least the youngest three of his children, my father the eldest of that trio; that the ranch my dad and his siblings grew up in was sexually permissive with the animals; and that my father seems to be, unsuccessfully, suppressing homosexual desires that contributed to his lack of respect for my body. For his family, his bipolar diagnosis complicates matters, as they treat him as if he is never truly sound of mind. I am not a therapist, and I am biased, but I don’t buy that for a minute. He didn’t appear manic at the time, and he didn’t disappear from my life again after it happened, as he would later on following other episodes, so I believe he was within his ill reasoning when he molested me. On top of the molestation, he was generally an under educated, arrogant and mean person. He actively campaigned against me attending any after school or extracurricular activities that were too focused on science and not enough on sports, was disappointed I would go on to attend college instead of getting to work right away, and was fond of saying that things would have been different had he raised me. I agree they would have, and I assume I would have grown up more homophobic, more traditionally masculine and interested in sports, likely less well educated, and unfortunately even more scarred as I assume my father would have molested me more frequently and more often.

Whenever I think back to that day, I get an ache of discomfort. I know there’s a part of me that still wishes I had done XYZ thing to have changed what happened. Unfortunately, so much of my behavior then was molded by both parents and so I was a good victim. After all, my mom had taught me already to suppress my emotional needs, to make them secondary to the whims of my parents and authority figures in life and she had taught me that she would not tolerate any emotional vulnerability in me, would lash out at it even… So after it happened, I had no one to turn to. I recall how much I fought with my mom to stop planning weekends for me with my dad, telling her that I didn’t want to see him. She would argue back with me that I should continue to see him, that we needed the money he was providing. In retrospect, it’s not clear why she didn’t just ask the courts for child support from him. It is true she was often too scared to do these types of things, wanting to minimize her interactions with the court given that they were connected to immigration services and could deport her. But she had already taken legal action against her second baby daddy, was already receiving child support from him. My grandmother would often step in too, the likely source for the argument that I should continue seeing my dad for the money. I will say, I was back then often tempted by the fact that he could afford to buy me things my mother couldn’t and things I wouldn’t necessarily have to share with my siblings, since that wasn’t their dad. When I finally told them, a little over a decade after the fact, I put blame on them for never listening to me, for never letting me not go over to his house, for not picking up on how I was trying to advocate for me to not be left alone with him.

Although my body had started to undergo puberty at the time, I would say my mind was still pre-pubescent. I hadn’t so much as masturbated and, although I had experienced the fresh pangs of desire, I would not say that I had started lusting after peers. Before, there was just a general sense of wanting to feel warmth from my peers, physical warmth yes, but chaste. My father may have given me my first erection. The only ambiguity is that I don’t remember if my body had done that on its own before. Either way, my sexual awakening was at the hands of an overweight construction worker whom my mother trusted, loved so much as to let him take her only son. I recall that we were laying down together, essentially him spooning me. I don’t recall exactly how it happened that his hands were on my flesh beneath my clothes, I remember feeling how he traced the whisps of hair on my stomach. I didn’t move, but enjoyed the feeling and continued staring at the television on the ground above us. His hands traced the elastic of my boxers before he pushed further down, blood had already been rushing to my penis. He firmly squeezed my erection, played with it for a while and I think rested with it in his palm for several minutes. I started to move around a bit once he had slowed down, excited by the touch and wanting it to continue. Perhaps he thought I was asleep.

I believe that was a Saturday afternoon and this was an overnight stay but besides the pants I was wearing, I don’t remember much else after that. He didn’t explicitly tell me not to say anything. My mother wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. I began to masturbate soon thereafter and for a couple years until I started cruising in gyms, I didn’t have an appropriate outlet for the sexual longings I felt. I recall humping a lot of pillows and being more willing to participate in games with friends and other cousins that were sexual in nature. I didn’t know how to initiate that back then, would often find it happening to me, but I wanted to have my penis played with.

Exploring at the gyms, cruising, was certainly an outlet, but I wouldn’t say it was the healthy outlet I needed. For one, I started young, when I was probably fifteen if not a little older. Because my parents did not want to pick me up from school and because I had joined the football team, which made my schedule different than my siblings, I was given a car and license very young. By fifteen and a half, I was able to drive myself to the gym, one of the only acceptable places I could be out at besides school. I had forgotten this, but remembered it in writing, but I believe I was even younger when I started cruising, because I used to ride my bike to the gym too, before I could start driving. In some small defense to the grown men I began to have casual encounters with, my body hair and thicker facial hair aged me up some. This is not an attempt to victimize myself, but I believe it’s true that the body hair enabled me, as it made my body and face look older than I was. However, now as an older adult than they were, I think it would still have been very clear that I was, at best, borderline legal and at worst, a risk for statutory rape if we were caught. There are men who were clearly gay but that seemed incredibly disinterested and, in some cases, even annoyed at me. I recall one in particular that I couldn’t tell if he was gay, that I had seen once masturbating in the showers and had wanted to join but he quickly left; I ran into him years later at a pride event in Santa Ana. I had made a game back then of detecting other queer men and had been excited to have been right about him. We had chatted, I had initiated a conversation in the steam room, and he had told me he had kids only a little younger than me. Perhaps that is why he was able to acknowledge how young I was.

Not everyone was so scrupulous. My MO back then was to lift weights, run, all the while observing the other gym patrons and then go wait in the steam room. It was good for my acne and gave me a way to prolong my gym visit, to extend the time away from home. I think because the steam room was in the locker room, not co-ed, I recognized that men were not wearing undergarments below their towels and I adopted the behavior. It was not long before one of these men undid their towel, showed me their erection and we would begin to mess around. It felt liberating, a secret thing that my mother couldn’t know about and also exciting, the release of endorphins and the touching of my body in ways that I didn’t know how to ask for. But, because I didn’t verbalize these desires and because these were men that were preying on young men, some likely excited at the possibility that I was not of legal age, I often found that these encounters went further than I was comfortable with or with men that I actually was not interested in. Some of those men downright disgusted me, but I hadn’t learned how to say no.

That legacy belongs to both my parents. Each one contributed to my inability to voice my own desires and boundaries. Again the English language shows its limits, but, for my mother’s part, she pulled me into her emotional messes, exposing me to adult conflict that I was not ready to help process and punishing me when I gave unwise, youthful counsel. My father literally introduced me to sexual desire, primed my body for it long before I had even learned sexuality and thus I had no vocabulary with which to act upon it. I quickly picked up the language of cruising, itself primarily non-verbal, but did not have the necessary defenses to be able to insist on rejecting people, verbally and clearly, nor even to listen to my body when it was saying it wasn’t interested. I learned very quickly to dissociate, to leave my body while things were done to it and let men finish. Most of these guys did not have condoms and this was before the preventative, anti-HIV pills were readily available, so this was mostly non-penetrative. I recall at least once that one did have a condom and did want to insert himself, but at least there I acknowledged my discomfort (or was it that my internalized homophobia flared up) and said “No.”

I have already written about how my being in the closet exacerbated the situation after an acquaintance sexually assaulted me, which is linked to the above because I was still learning how to say no to unwanted sexual advances. Unfortunately, beyond just the cruising, I did lose my virginity to a man who had catfished me and who I was not interested in. Because my father had taught me to just quiet up and let him finish, I had that in my ill fashioned repertoire of sexual tools. It was not long after I started cruising at the gym that I started lying about my age and meeting people off Craigslist and Adam4Adam. I was so drawn to sexual desire that I was risking being kicked out of my home, because my mother later did do that when I came out. In college, as a freshman, I figured I was finally old enough to lose my virginity and had even found the perfect candidate, a grad student with a toned, hairy body and also in the closet. The person who turned up at my doorstep had no relation to the pictures and was much heavier, smooth, and not the least bit hygienic. To my every no he had a negotiation and finally, to get him to leave, I let him ride me to his completion. After he came, I asked him to leave again, and that was my first time.

So it is that I recognize the pain in movies when they show children who have been molested or forced upon by older relatives. Even to those who were later taken advantage of there is an intense feeling of sharing their trauma. I don’t know if that feeling has a word, but certainly, I am “triggered” when I see sexual assault portrayed in the media. There is an intense feeling of dissociation, perhaps because I have not fully reckoned with the pain of the molestation. I can attribute behavioral patterns to it, I can acknowledge that I will experience intense discomfort when I hear stories of sexual assault or see them in television, but perhaps I still keep the pain at arm’s length and so have not fully healed from it. I don’t know how to process it any better. Let me name the feelings as I did above: there is the discomfort in knowing that my body experienced pleasure as well as the memory of my mind drifting away; there are shades of guilt, of wishing that I had been bigger or stronger enough to overpower my father and remove him from my side; there is resentment that my mother would not have believed me and seemed intent to ignore the complaints I had to be around my father; there is that I will never get to experience a first time like in the movies, awkward and messy but with a peer; there was the confusion in the years between when I was molested and when my mind finally caught up with my body and I began to explore my sexuality in a way that I could verbalize; there’s the danger now that I get too unconscious, that I let myself get into a scenario where my mind could leave my body and I could let something happen to me, something that would remain in my flesh’s memory even as my mind tries its hardest to not feel it; there’s rage at other parents who do this, other predators who do this, the absolute wrath to grow stronger that I might destroy these people… I picture myself hulking out essentially and wiping my father off this planet but not stopping there, somehow finding all these pedophiles and destroying them too; there is too, sadly, some measure of compassion for my father. Be it his illness or repressed homosexuality, there is something that is driving him to express sexuality in such an unhealthy manner. I do not wish to know what it is, but I feel bad for him. In essence, that is wrapped into my desire to kill him, that he may do no further harm, given that he is weaker than his base impulses.

I sign off with this as a declaration of where I would like to go from here. The idea of someone hurting children in front of me still drives me to anger, which remains proper. If I see something in front of me, I want to be so in my feelings that I will overcome social mores to speak out, to tell the parent I think they’re wrong to raise their child that way, to report what is so evidently wrong. But what I am tired of is reacting to even movie and television portrayals of this. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing that it led me back to therapy, but I recall several moments in Netflix’s Feel Good that I had to legitimately walk away from my television, barely holding in vomit and a desire to have my body torn apart that I may no longer feel that disgust. There is the fact that I can’t watch Michaela Coel’s HBO show, I May Destroy You, because from the very beginning it is clear this show will be about sexual assault. This sensitivity to these topics, I don’t know that it serves me, I don’t even necessarily need it gone. I just think of how I used to cry at the examples of good parenting… Will something similar happen as I process the pain of sexual assault?

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. 

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. 

  

The Burden of the Closet and of Secrecy Being the Default

Aguilar

It is in retrospect that I have begun to see the painfully obvious ways in which being in the closet, in which defaulting to secrecy, has hurt me. After all, being in the closet is an active effort and required picking up habits that don’t go away just because you come out. Unfortunately, the more painful memories require a trigger warning as they involve child abuse, sexual assault, efforts to cover the aforementioned up, and my reactions to it, which includes recreating trauma.

I don’t remember when I learned to keep myself secret. When I told my mom that a male family member had molested me, I blamed her when she asked why I hadn’t told her sooner. I wasn’t able to talk to her about it until after I had been through a lot of therapy and a lot of that time focused on the dysfunctional relationship we had. Plus, there wasn’t anyone else around involved in raising me. Generally, she had taught me that I should be seen but not heard, that I was around to help her process her feelings, sometimes that included being her punching bag, and that the person who had molested me could do no wrong and was forgiven, usually, for any of his past transgressions. This person is no longer in our lives, because my mom finally was able to stop letting him in, but I digress.

When it happened, I was eleven or twelve years old, well before I had started to have real sexual urges, although I had started puberty and had already noticed that I was also attracted to boys. I don’t even remember being told not to tell anyone; it was as if he knew that I just wasn’t the type of person to talk. I was painfully quiet back then and perhaps that was obvious to the adults in my life and doubly so to the predators looking for an easy mark. Indeed, it was only after therapy lessened the impact that I could begin to talk about being molested. I wrote about it often, but it took me close to ten years to tell anyone other than two therapists about it.

I’ve reviewed my journals from back then. Although I noted what happened, near as I can gather or remember, I only didn’t tell anyone because I was worried that they would take that as the thing that “turned” me gay. That the pride and assuredness of my own sexuality blinded me to the hurtful impact of continuing to keep his secret is an irony that I think anyone with more experience could have seen. And really, that is the undercurrent to the ways in which I have hurt myself by being so secretive; if I had had a trusted adult and been able to be honest with them, the self-destructive behaviors that came after may have been curtailed. I don’t blame myself though. In retrospect, I can see the parts when I let shame control the narrative, but in large part it was about survival: as I’ve said prior, I knew that coming out would see me homeless, I thought I was controlling the narrative about me, and it also true is that you need a sense of pride in your sexuality to survive in a heteronormative hegemony. Yet, again, that trusted adult may have been able to point out to me the link between the childhood molestation and all the cruising I was doing as a young person.

I used to go to the gym a lot in high school and college, work out, then cruise in the steam room and locker room showers. As I wrote about it back then, I was excited to be sexually active and also saw it as my obligation, a way of sticking it to society by having lots of gay sex when, at least in California, the right to marry was being voted on and being taken away. It wasn’t just about sexual freedom, but revolution, after all, no amount of shaming could take away how good the good times felt. The issue was the bad times. Stone cold sober, I would lose agency over my body, freezing in place and letting people I was not attracted to touch me and pleasure me. I remember explicitly telling myself to just close my eyes and let it happen, it would all be over soon. I didn’t understand what was going on then, that I was recreating the earlier childhood trauma by letting these older men use me. Apparently, I also didn’t understand that I could just say no and conceptualized what was happening as an obligation, although I’m not sure why I felt obligated to do anything.

In the gyms, this cruising consisted of mutual masturbation and oral. I don’t know why it never went further than that. Perhaps, from up close, some of these men realized how young I was and never invited me anywhere else. In the post-orgasmic clarity, they realized the hairy chest couldn’t hide how young my face looked and the fact that my voice still cracked. I apologize as this may be too much for some people, but I do have some sympathy for these pederasts. Attracted as they were to younger men, they were playing a dangerous game, as they never bothered to confirm my age and would certainly have gotten themselves in trouble if we had ever been caught. See I never lied about my age, one or two did bother to ask and I would always respond honestly, “Seventeen!” And perhaps it was that I rode my bike to the gym and would not have wanted to bike anywhere else but home, or be driven anywhere else as I wanted to stay in control.

Whatever it was, I managed to hold onto my virginity until my freshman year of college. The one close friend I had back had their own unhealthy sexual patterns and encouraged me to get rid of it. I deeply regret that I didn’t have someone else to talk to about that and that the culture in general led me to think I wasn’t a man until I did. I chatted with a grad student on the hook up apps who was fairly attractive. He sent over a couple pics of his body and I was ready to go. Unfortunately, when I opened the door, the person before me in no way resembled his pics. An older me would have angrily confronted him about this and sent him on his way. But instead I walked him back to my room and I tried to ask him about his pictures. To every question he had an answer and to every hesitation he had a negotiation. We did get some of our clothes off and at some point, I rationalized to myself that if I just went along with it, he’d finally leave. I remember he rode me until he came and then I asked him again if he would leave. He finally did. I thankfully insisted on wearing a condom. I remember taking a long hot shower and then logging onto some forums, probably a reddit forum, to brag that I had finally gone all the way. I didn’t even bother writing about it in my journal though, although I do remember feeling as if something was not right.

My freshman year of college, I decided to go back into the closet. In a truly hare-brained move, I thought I would stay in the closet, not make friends, get my degree as fast as possible and then move on with my life. I think, without having written it down, I can admit that I wanted as much financial independence as soon as possible because I knew my parents would not support me. Second, I certainly did not fit neatly into the gay identity and was scared because of that. Although I knew that I was some sort of bisexual, my then favorite author spoke often how he knew many gay men who started off as bisexual and were just kidding themselves. I wasn’t sure about my own sexuality and didn’t want the scrutiny, so I just didn’t bring it up and kept my online and gym cruising to myself. Per my journal, I then went on to feel tremendously guilty when I did make friends who I wanted to come out to, but was scared they’d feel bad about me lying. Still, I wish I had come out, not just to help me reflect on the above behavior, but also to have warned me about the only other gay person in our cohort.

By the end of my freshman year, I had managed by and large to avoid scrutiny because I was really into two of my friends. Really a third if I’m being honest, although he was a guy so I’m not sure how I kept that crush a secret. It isn’t as if I went around telling anyone who asked that I was into my friends, but with one specifically people could tell I liked her. At the end of the year, I had started considering how I would come out and was even wearing subtle rainbows and yet was not being recognized. The one time it happened at a party that an older guy asked in code if I was family, I happily said “Yes! We’re all one big engineering family!” He kept insisting that no, he wanted to know if I was family, familia, which truly confused me because the minority engineering program at this school painted itself as a family and I could not tell the difference. The upperclassmen interceded and told him to leave me alone. As I later learned, he had a habit of getting his classmates drunk and sleeping with them, clearing out the closeted men in his generation and they didn’t want him wasting his time with me, so obvious was my crush on my female friend.

We had a guy my year that was following in his footsteps, regrettably. One of our friends told me later that he had a list of all the guys he wanted to get drunk and sexually assault. I know for young gay men and for a certain type of older gay man, the fantasy persists of getting a straight man drunk and “turning” him. Having been on the receiving antics, I can say that it’s awful and that no means no. As I later found out, this guy had made a list of all the guys our year that he wanted to get drunk and sleep with, his go to MO as he remains a total slime bag. Still, it was another end of the year party and apparently it was my turn for him to try something.

The party was fairly non-eventful. At the time, I recall him being persistent in handing me booze and me telling him many, many times, that I needed to be careful with how much I drank. If needed I can elaborate on it later, but I had broken my leg and was on crutches at the time, so I knew I needed to stay sober enough to walk on crutches. I made it home safely and I wish I had ended the night there. However, I had made it a habit after any party where booze was involved, to stay up late playing video games until I was completely sober, as I get the spins when I try to sleep while inebriated and inevitably end up puking. I don’t remember who messaged who first, but I do recall him pointing out that if I wasn’t going to sleep yet that I should come over and hang out. Even though my gut was telling me not to, I figured I’d go up and see what happened.

We got there and it was fine, until it wasn’t. We made out, I did get hard, and we fooled around a bit but then I said no. I told him I didn’t feel comfortable proceeding with more but wouldn’t mind staying to sleep together. He said ok and let me doze off. I awoke some time later to him stroking me awake and I got mad, told him no, and went back to sleep. This kept going for a while, because while I was wanting to leave, I was scared at the thought of having to hobble my way down from his dorm room and back to mine, so late at night and so desiring to just be asleep.

That was the last party of the school year and I pushed it out of mind that summer. When I returned that year, I noticed that some of the freshmen seemed to already know something about me and that the gay ones were particularly stand offish. I didn’t know what it was at the time, I figured that having recently come out (again) I was still a bit awkward and, having joined the officer positions in the minority engineering group, I did not want to come off improperly toward them. What I didn’t learn until later was that the guy above had participated in a summer program and had told all the incoming minority engineers that he and I had issues because I was homophobic.

I didn’t learn this until well after college and in retrospect, I applaud the sociopathy of this man. He figured since I showed such discomfort being openly out that I wouldn’t effectively counter the narrative that I had a lot of internalized homophobia. And in a way, he was right. But the reason I went on to dislike him was because he had forced himself onto me. After all, I had given him several clear and precise nos. What could have been drunken mistakes then turned into sober cover ups. Also, to be clear, by the time he had locked his eyes upon me, I had started to come out to our friends anyways and either way, had already come out to my parents, something he hadn’t done. There was no way to cast him as a man trying to help someone struggling to come out. And truly, if he had not tried to turn people against me, I might have continued to have said that he and I just didn’t get along. See, it wasn’t for another year that I bothered to tell anyone about what had transpired against us and it was only because he insisted on trying to make me a bad guy.

I am happy that I finally stopped trying to keep things secretive or private and, in the end, came forward with my story. It didn’t undo all of the issues I had with the younger gay men in our group, after all, I am still a huge dork and at the time was still very socially awkward. But it no longer made them afraid of me and thankfully, it minimized the amount of times I had to be around this rather unpleasant individual. I only wish I had seen sooner what it was costing me to keep secret the ways in which other people had hurt me. Our peers did turn against him and helped me keep him out of my life, which was the other side of secret keeping. Not only was I holding onto this pain by myself, but managing the scenario fell on me alone, when I could have been getting help the entire time.

Because I have already written so much and because I still want to go hit the gym, I will stop here. I want to follow up to make clear what else hiding all of this caused as well as elaborate on the relief I felt in telling my story and some of the help I received.

Coming out and Familial Shame

Aguilar

“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.