Coming Out And Coming Together: A Personal Essay About Love And Community
She looked at me, with doubt and disappointment, the moment I told her I was gay. The air froze around us despite the new year’s lively mood, where everyone seemed excited, touting their past-year experiences.
My aunt was glad about our reunion: she shouted my name and held me in her arms when I saw her. She took me to buy local street snacks while gossiping about whether I had a crush on some girls. I knew it was time to tell her my real feelings, even facing the risk of not being understood or accepted.
The exclusion does not taste good, especially during lunchtime at school. The girls always sat together at a few tables and the boys would gather around others. I did not know where to go because it felt awkward either way. When I sat with the boys, I knew I had few common topics with them: Video games, nah, and making judgments about other girls’ appearances and romantic predilections makes me flustered. But when I sat with girls, they seemed to form a group while repelling me because of my sex. Especially when we disagreed while chatting, they usually supported other girls instead of me regardless of the essence of our arguments.
It was, indeed, never easy for me to find a group to which I felt I belonged. I tried to find people who were just like me from the public when the LGBTQ’s visibility was extremely low. I was looking for femininity in boys and masculinity in girls, characteristics that make them stand out.
Using this criterion, I found someone. He liked taking selfies and photoshopping a bit afterward, using hand cream, and talking softly and gently – habits that resembled mine. Moreover, he did not judge girls. Just like me, he switched between eating lunch with girls and boys.
I thought he was gay, and I wished we could be more than just friends every time we hung out, studied, or played sports together. It was always fun with him because of the similarities we shared.
But he told me he was completely straight when I came out to him. I was heavyhearted, or rather, befuddled. Ironically, I realized that when I strived to find “my people” in a minority community, stereotypes nevertheless limited the way I perceived identities and made me overlook numerous possibilities of individuals.
People display their gender in various ways regardless of their biological sex or sexual orientation, but when I simply put a definition on each group of people, I am ignoring their potential to behave differently, to join many other communities regardless of their identity.
To define is to limit. My passion for exploring life sciences pushed me to run for the president of the biology club and impart the knowledge I acquired to students. My love for Ping Pong led me to play in and organize matches even though I was not the club leader. My openness helped me get elected to be the president of the art studio club, so I created opportunities for members to think out of the box and design artworks that represent their inner values and voices. I thus did not restrict myself to a specific realm during my explorations.
But the perspectives of sexuality and gender is still at the core of how I decipher and interact with the world. I actively tried to change other communities for an inclusive and diverse environment. I researched the factors that may influence the public’s attitude toward the LGBTQ community in my Project-Based Learning class and founded a gender studies club, as a community for people of various identities to join and contribute, with the help of that straight friend.
I smiled at my aunt even though I could still sense disgust on her face. I knew changes would take time to happen, yet they might as well start now.