whatisqueertalk-blog

[whatisqueertalk-blog]

Coming Out Videos That Made Us Feel

Juan Pablo Jaramillo 

Alejo Igoa

Ingrid Nilsen

Shane Dawson

Nikita Dragun

[whatisqueertalk-blog]

Being an ally is more than having a gay best friend by Jannette Aguirre

“You go to hell if you’re gay.”

“He’s a faggot.”

“Calm down with that gay shit.”

“He’s gay, that so sad.”

These were probably the first words that I heard regarding the gay community while I was growing up in Indiana. Disgust and disapproval and sometimes even pity always found in their tone. I knew that being gay meant that a man loved another man but I never understood why that was wrong. You remember when you were little and your parents told you Santa Clause would bring you everything you wanted and you believed them. Well, since every adult in my life would tell me that being gay was a bad thing, I believed them. I didn’t really need proof, just their word. So I grew up making fun of boys at my school that talked and acted like the girls.“Maricon,” was my go to insult.  

On the first day of my freshmen year of high school, I walked into a class and sat down with the first friendly face I saw which was a girl I semi knew in middle school. She introduced me to her group of friends and we all sat together at lunch. They were all the funniest people I had met since probably 6th grade. We would talk about music, do homework together, help each other cheat, talk shit about the people who we didn’t like (not very nice, I know), give each other advice on typical high school struggles. We soon became close and soon after that I found that every single one of them was gay, lesbian, or bi. Even though I had been conditioned to think that “those people would burn in hell”, for the first time I could smell the bullshit. There was no way anyone of my friends were going to go to hell just for being gay. Being gay, lesbian, or bi didn’t changed who they were one bit. I didn’t even notice until they said it, so how were they going to burn? Someone explain to me. It was like I walked out of this brown cloud of hate and saw the beautiful rainbow.

Of course you don’t stay friends with your high school friends, especially the ones you met at the start. We kind of just drifted apart as we continued into our high school careers. But one person who I didn’t drift apart from was my best friend, who at the time was straight. It wasn’t until senior year until he got the courage to tell me that he was gay. Let me tell you his coming out was not just him saying “I’m gay” and then us hugging and crying together. It was 40 minutes of watching him cry his eyes out and fighting his inner battle on whether he should say it or not. All he kept saying was, “You know what it is,” through his tears. And yeah, I did know but I wasn’t going to say it unless he did. But this moment made me realize how important and nerve racking coming out is. I will never understand it and I will never pretend like I know what it feels, I can only imagine. But after he came out, he literally shut the doors to his closet and never looked back. He transformed into the person that he was hiding all his life. A beautiful queen ready to walk the runway to bring the house down boots! Yass mama! (He told me to write that.)

Not everyone was as accepting as me. His coming out was not taken well by his family, who also belong to the “being gay means you need Jesus” group. Even straight friends of mine started asking me questions like, “Why does he wear a purse?”  “He get his nails done now?”

My response was and always will be, “It’s his life. He can do whatever he wants. I don’t see him asking you why you kick around a ball for 3 hours with a bunch of dudes and let them slap your ass when you make a goal.”

If I am going to call myself an ally to the LGBTQ+ community, I have to do much more than just have gay friends. I can’t allow people to disrespect or ask these types of questions about my friends. They offend me and I am straighter than a ruler. Every time someone ask me a question like that, I feel my blood boil. But after, I give my snappy remark, I remind myself that I was them. I didn’t understand that being gay was nothing wrong. So if they are still willing to listen to me, I try to educate them on what it is like to be gay from my best friend’s perspective. I don’t tell them his life story but I explain why those comments are wrong, even though I am pretty sure they already know they are. My brother, who is 15, started telling his friends to stop using the word fagot especially when my best friend is around. Talking about it and trying to educate people actually works, sometimes.

As allies, it’s our job to stand up for a community that needs our help. As a brown Mexican/Honduran/American living in this country, I am constantly discriminated against just by my skin color and even I know that if I wanted to see changes in that, I need the help from white people. Same with the LGBTQ+ community, they need our help to change the way this society views gays. Thankfully there has been a lot of changes but there is still more to change. We also need to educate ourselves on the issues that effect this community. Do some research. Be involved. Be at every Pride Parade. There is so much more that our gay best friend’s expect us to do.

[whatisqueertalk-blog]

Hello World,

My name is Bryan just another ordinary Latino, fem gay. Yeah I know basic right. But not really. I’m creating WhatIsQueerTalk? because of this and many other things. Growing up gay was one thing girl but growing up gay and Latino after almost 20 years of trying to hide (honestly I wasn’t hiding anything but anyways that is not the point) I am finally fully out to all my friends and family Well those that accepted me. I still have that one crazy Tia who thinks I got rapped and that is why I’m gay. Yeah I know, I’ll give you a minute to let that set in. And the gag of it all girl is that her daughter is lesbian too.Shit is crazy. But anyways I’m creating this blog to give a voice to those who don’t have a voice or those who are to scared to speak up. Trust me I understand. I went many years trying to be who others wanted me to be. And yeah, its hard but you will get through it and you will be okay. I want people to feel like this is a place where you can take off your mask for a minute and put your wig on, put that good cakey drag makeup on and strut down the runway. Because your are a Queen, a Superstar whatever you want to be. As the famous RuPaul once said “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag”-RuPaul.