In Your Face

Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth

John Dececco, Phd, Mary L Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136577758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

From In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth, you'll gain a clearer understanding of the specific needs of gay/lesbian/bisexual youth and, thus, will gain the tools needed to more effectively meet these unique needs. This groundbreaking book presents discussion generated by gay, lesbian, and bisexual youths themselves contextualized within the broader scope of the issues. You'll see how these young persons experience and define their lives, their views, and their visions of their futures.

Chapter 1

Background: Profiles of the People You Will Meet in This Book

NOTES ON WHO YOU WILL HEAR IN THIS COLLECTION

The young people in this collection are a diverse group with a range of experiences, classes, ethnicities, and sexual identities. The stories of fifteen speakers—nine young men and six young women—ranging in ages from fourteen to eighteen, are presented here.

This first chapter attempts to contextualize the voices behind the stories you are about to read, by providing the backgrounds of the young people in this collection. In chronicling the stories of their family lives, hometowns, and general life circumstances at the time they were interviewed, I hoped to document something timeless: where they were at and where they had been.

These backdrops—the finer points of their histories and biographies—may shift in perspective with the passage of time, but they are relatively stable, physical pictures. Learning you are not the only queer person in the world takes on even greater meaning when you discover that there are also others out there from similar cultures, classes, or family dynamics. This contextualization—often left out of similar studies—provides additional points of recognition and resonance for the reader.

I find it striking that so many of the youth in this collection, regardless of their backgrounds, express, at very early ages, a sense of isolation and desire for connection. The sentiment of “feeling different” can be interpreted in many ways. Some see this commonality of expression as evidence for a genetic link to sexual orientation. Others may read this as the connection felt among those who have endured the same oppression. However, many young people brought up in the fractured and disjointed atmosphere of U.S. capitalist consumption may express a similar sense of isolation regardless of their sexual identity. What makes these young people different from their heterosexual peers?

Unique to this group is that they have sought loving connections beyond the heterosexual norm, and they choose to view these desires as defining characteristics of who they are. And in pursuing these relationships, they face a common obstruction to these desires: a predominantly hostile, unaccepting, and homophobic social environment.

Their backgrounds illustrate that they are not dramatically different from other young people you may encounter in the United States today. They come from a broad base of circumstances that are relatively unremarkable and arguably typical (of course, defining typical is a highly contestable enterprise). Yet they are hardly just like everyone else their age. They endure a discrimination that permeates practically every social sphere of their lives, from their communities and churches to their schools and often, sadly, their homes.

The young people included in this collection are in no way meant to represent all youth identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. But, hopefully, the people here will cast reflections of youth the reader knows or identifies with in some way. The examples of resiliency depicted demonstrate various strategies implemented by queer youth to establish and fortify their identities. Although the juxtaposition of their stories reveals how different the lives of gay, lesbian, and bi youth can be, it also illustrates how much they share in common as a result of the adversity they have faced in a homophobic society.

Anthony Gomez

My name is Anthony Gomez. I’m a fourteen-year-old gay male. My birth date is May 3rd. I was born and raised in Healdsburg, California. It’s a redneck town. Right now, my space of living is Hayward in a group home. I call it home/hell, same thing. My six housemates are assholes.

My father is in Arizona State Prison. I haven’t had any connection with him for about ten years. And all of a sudden, I get letters from him now every so often. He says he misses me. I would like to be able to have something with my father and have him be there for me. The thing is, he does not know I’m homosexual. And I know I’m afraid of telling him. I want to tell him face to face. And I’m afraid if I don’t, he’ll run away. It took so long to find him. I went to Arizona four times before I finally found him.

I have two sisters and one brother. They’re all little. One is three-and-a-half years old, the other one is two-and-a-half, and the other one is around eight months. I have two stepsisters who are eighteen and sixteen, and one fourteen-year-old stepbrother. I’m like the black sheep because I’m just out there, but I didn’t tell them I was gay myself. I never really had the nerve to tell them. The night they found out I was gay was the night that I got taken to a mental hospital, and then from there, I was placed in a group home. So, I never got their reaction. Me and my mom got in a fight that night and I said, “I’m better off dead …. You don’t care about me; I don’t give a damn if you come to this house right now and kill me.” She called the police, ’cause we were having this huge argument. And so my mom told the police what I said, and they took me. Well, right now I’m trying to get out of the group home. I need a place where I can be stable—where I can actually sort out my problems, without all the bullshit that goes on in the house.

Adam Hardy

My name is Adam Hardy. I’m now eighteen years old; I’m from Huntsville, Alabama, and I go to college at Simon’s Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. That, in itself, doesn’t tell you much about me. However, the story might become interesting if I told you that I was a high school dropout; that I went to college early; that I dropped out of my senior year because of the serious homophobia in my old high school that was killing me.

Not that Huntsville was such an awful place to live. I miss it terribly sometimes. The city is actually rather northern, since Redstone Arsenal, Intergraph, and a few major companies draw in people from all over the nation to live in the city. That’s probably why I don’t have a southern accent. However, the subtext to the city is entirely southern and shapes a lot of the attitudes that people have about religion, abortion, and homosexuality. I’d say Huntsville is a pretty large city, one of the major ones in Alabama. I lived there until a little over a year ago. Right now, I’m finishing up my first semester as a sophomore here at college.

I grew up being the closest thing going to an only child—my sister Katie was eleven years older than I and moved out when I was six or seven. My parents are typically dysfunctional, and my mother went through a lot of changes when she had me. She’d “failed” at parenting with one child—she’s always been rather strict with Katie and submissive to my father—and she was determined to be as “present” a parent as possible. She was sick and bedridden for most of my childhood, and I spent a lot of my time with her, playing games and learning to love reading and drawing.

My father was night to my mother’s day. My mom is warm, giving, emotional, extremely liberal, and she’s loved me unconditionally all my life. My father seems to have shut down emotionally at some point. He’s cold, inexpressive, repressed, and is really only capable of showing anger and frustration. His sense of humor disturbs me, as he only laughs when others are embarrassed or in pain. My father was sort of the mold for my personality, as the plaster fitted onto someone’s face is the template for a bust … I was determined to be everything he wasn’t. I suppose that this makes me a prime target for conservatives who believe that homosexuality is caused by having a weak father figure and a strong maternal figure. The way I see it, I had less of a masculine role to rebel against when I came out to myself, facilitating that process. My father is, of course, hopelessly conservative.

My family, beyond the immediate, consists of my mother’s side, who I will tolerate, and my father’s side, whom I will not. My father’s side is mostly made up of very conservative people; my mother’s side is made up of mostly dead people. One is much easier for me to deal with than the other. I care for my grandmother, but wouldn’t much notice if most of the rest of the family were to suddenly up and vanish.

Alan Wiley

My name is Alan Wiley, and I’m eighteen. I was born on November 19th in Bellflower, California. I lived in Costa Mesa until I was two years old, and then I moved to Poway, California, where I lived until I went away to school to San Francisco State. I’ve got one younger brother who’s seventeen and one older sister who’s twenty-one. My parents are still married, and I usually live with both of them when I’m not at school. My mother is a priest, and my father is an elder and has been a minister and pastor in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or the RLDS church.

Poway is suburban hell. It’s a really extremely Mormon, extremely Christian town. It probably has maybe 60 to 80,000 people in it. I lived there for a long time, pretty much my whole life all my life that I can remember. It’s very conservative, and I had a really difficult time dealing with my sexuality because of that.

Eileene Coscolluela

I’m nineteen, and my birthday is July 11th. Nutley, New Jersey, is my hometown. It’s a very small, conservative town—well, small in comparison to other towns in the area. It’s a suburb of New York City. The high school has fewer than 1,000 students (my graduating class is about 220). My town has primarily forty-year-olds and older. The crime rate is exceptionally low, and the average income in the town ranges from the extremely affluent to lower middle class. I’ve lived in the town since 1979, when I first came into the country from the Philippines. I have a younger sister who’s thirteen years old. I have a mother and a father. My uncle, my mother’s brother, is currently living with us, a recent immigrant from the Philippines.

Dawn McCausland

My name is Dawn McCausland, my age is seventeen, and my birth date is April 21st, which means next month I’ll be eighteen. I grew up in Sebastopol, California, which is in Sonoma County; it’s kind of country, fairly liberal, and not a very culturally diverse area. It was a pretty good place to grow up.

My father passed away when I was four months old. I grew up with a stepfather, a stepbrother, my sister, and my mother. My parents were both psychologists when I was growing up. My mother went back to school through all my growing years. Then my parents got divorced, and I lived with my mother. It was around that time, after the divorce, that I started dealing with coming-out issues. That was the beginning of high school; I was about fourteen.

Eriq Chang

I was born in Walnut Creek, California, and I moved to Pleasanton, California. Pleasanton is a pretty conservative town. It’s considered a rich city. But that’s about it. I’m seventeen. I live with my parents. I have one sister. My sister knows that I am bisexual, and my parents do not. My sister is fourteen. We do a lot of things together. I do drag—-just sort of a fun thing. So, she kinda knows; she asked, and I didn’t want to lie to her. I turn eighteen November 20th. I’m a Sagittarius. I think it’s just gonna be, “I’m eighteen.” I’ve done a lot of things at this age that even people who are twenty haven’t done. I don’t drink. I don’t see any point in going on about drinking and stuff. So age, for me, hasn’t been a big, total setback or advantage. I’ve been able to accomplish a lot of things at this age, which is really cool. Jogging is my passion. I have to jog. It’s The Thing. If I don’t jog, I get depressed. And I’ve been depressed this week.

I’ve been taking pictures for about six, seven years. I got really good at it two years ago because I studied Annie Liebowitz and Tom Bianchi. I totally study their work. I love art. I really do. That’s what makes the world go ’round, which is probably why I like taking pictures of things.

I love pop music—I really love dance music. Dance music is the release for me. That’s how I can vent my frustrations at times, just totally dance and go off. I love Dee Lite. I used to like C&C, but now they’re gone. The mix master, I’d have to say, is Junior Vasquez, who remade “Secret.” I love Tori Amos. She’s so-o-o rad. She’s like a goddess, I think.

Ernie Hsiung

I am eighteen years old. I was born in Hayward, California and raised in El Sobrante, Califonia, a small suburb a couple of minutes from Berkeley. I lived there ever since junior high (seventh grade.) I live with two parents and a sister. My father is currently sixty-two, my mother fifty-nine. My sister is twenty-eight, ten years older than I am. Since my sister is so old, I consider her more of a mother than anything else. It was difficult living with my sister because I had to live with her through her hardships. She has a learning disability. She had a mental breakdown at fifteen. (I still remember the police dragging her out of the house when I was five.) I saw her life as she became dependent on medication, how she “gave her life to Christ,” how she now lives by herself in a rented room, barely making it month to month. Being Chinese, this puts a lot of pressure on me to succeed.

Since I am a first generation Chinese American, I was raised speaking English, while my parents speak to me in Chinese. (My mother to this day refuses to speak to me in English.) This causes a lot of communication problems. While I can talk to my parents about conventional things—dinner, money for college, the weather outside—I am unable to talk to them about abstract ideas, such as my being gay, without added bits of fractured English.

Kyallee Santanders

I’m nineteen years old; I was born April 22nd. Most of my schooling took place in Falcon, Colorado. My parents lived in nearby Black Forest. My high school had 500 kids in it, and the school was literally in the middle of a cow pasture. In other words, it was pretty rural…. I moved there at age ten and stayed there until I “escaped” to Boulder at eighteen.

Growing up in Falcon, I was living with my parents and four younger siblings. I now live in the engineering dorms in my own room. The roommate thing just never seemed to work out—they’d claim to be open-minded, but then they’d go tell all of their friends what saints they were for living with a lesbian.

Lisa Campbell

My name is Lisa Campbell. I’m eighteen years old; my birth date is March 11th. I’m originally from Louisiana. I lived in two different towns; Sugartown, and Merryville, on the Texas border near the Sabine River, in Beauregard Parish. You probably have no idea where that’s at. The biggest town near there is Leesville, and then Lake Charles is probably a hundred miles or something from there. I lived in Louisiana for about twelve years—so basically from the time I was about two ’til the time I was about eleven.

Sugartown was very small, a couple thousand people. At our high school, there’s maybe a thousand people, and that’s counting preschool to twelfth. It’s a working town. Most of the people in the towns that I lived in were doing factory jobs at a place called Boise Cascade. People like my mom had jobs at the sewing factory and local grocery stores and stuff like that—people trying to get by. It was a poor town basically. I can’t go back there and live a straight life.

I have one half brother, and, well, before my mom got divorced, I had two stepbrothers growing up. They were around pretty much the whole time I was growing up. One was my age and one was about three years older than I. The one my age and I argued all the time; we were stuck in the same class two years in a row. The teachers sat us right across from each other.

January of last year, my mom decided she wanted to get a divorce. And then it was finalized after my grandfather’s death. It’s weird now when I go back there because I don’t see them, and if I do, we don’t talk or anything.

I decided to move out of my mom’s house after my fifth-grade year, and move to California and lived with my dad in Hercules, near the Richmond area. My mom didn’t object because she knew her financial situation and everything, and things were gonna be pretty tight in the next year. I moved to California for a year, and then I decided that I wanted to go back to Louisiana. So I went back and I lived there for two years.

When I moved out I was eleven; I came back there when I was twelve. I had a job in the store where my mom worked for a while, I worked in the meat market packing meat, dealing with all the saws and the big meat grinder for ground meat and all that stuff.

I finished high school out here in California. Me and my mom were really clashing heads. Part of it was that she treated my half brother Richard, a lot differently than she treated me. I think some of it had to do with the fact that she was in love with Richard’s father and she hates my father. I have a lot of characteristics that are like my father’s: my hands, the way I look a lot of it is like my father. I can’t help that. My mom just saw that my temperament and my personality were a lot like my father’s, and she just couldn’t live with that; she couldn’t deal with it then.

My mom treated me pretty badly a lot of the time. She was going through some tough times, though, too. After I moved back there, Stanley, my stepfather, lost the house in a bad business deal, and they auctioned it off in the sheriff’s auction; we ended up moving into town and renting a place for a while. The next year, in the summer, I went to see my dad; the day I came back and stepped off the plane, my mom said, “Don’t unpack your suitcase tonight.” The next day we moved out. It was three days before school started.

Because the towns I lived in were spread far apart, I had to change schools. It was an hour-and-a-half drive between each. I was supposed to be in the marching band that year, but I didn’t get to do it because of that. A couple of years later, I was back with...