Growing up gay in machismo community had its difficulties. Not meeting the status quo can make you feel horribly excommunicated. Often times I would feel as if it was expected that I partake in "manly" activities that just made me feel uncomfortable. Cat-calling and football just weren 't for me. Because of this, I typically felt like I was a failure as a man. But i also felt uneasy conforming to the stereotypical idea of "the gay male". It wasn 't until i was able to see how other guys my age felt about the expectations of their male dominant Latino communities that i was able to see myself as the man that i am.
My father is a first generation Hispanic and my mother is a second generation Hispanic, so i grew up with a pretty typical Latino …show more content…
Mid-summer I attended an event sponsored by the National Hispanic Institute called the LDZ Youth Legislative Session. This eight day program at the Texas Lutheran University had one of the largest impacts on my life so far. On the first day my parents dropped me off at the dorm assigned to me and a peer who would be rooming with me. Once every participant had arrived on the campus the event started. Everyone was given an ID card on a lanyard and each card had a sticker on the back of it with a superhero emblem. People with the same superhero sticker would be grouped together into their respective "dot-groups". Your dot-group was the people that you would meet up with at the end of the day to bond and discuss the events of that took place; they were led by a senior and junior counselor who had gone through the program before and took on the responsibility of guiding the new participants through the journey of LDZ. Ricky or Cowboy (we called him that because he always wore cowboy hat) and Dakoda were my junior and senior counselors. At the end of the first day they called together the ten members of my dot-group and decided to have a little ice breaker. Cowboy asked us each to say something personal about ourselves that we might not typically tell other people. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to tell them …show more content…
The way it works is the mass of young participants separates into political interest groups that have similar opinions about what steps society has to take to become a better place for everybody. The political interest groups would then combine to create two politic parties which would nominate candidates for different legislative positions. I created a political interest group for supporters of feminism which merged with several other equality-themed groups to form the Democratic Utilitarian Party. All of my dot-group members allied themselves in the opposing party, the Republican Party for Business Conservatives. I was nominated to run for one of the thirty-two senator positions; as a nominee, i was expected to give a speech that expressed my vision for the Latino community. It made me question myself. What was my vision? What did i want to change in my community? What i wanted most ... it was to never feel the way i did the night my dot-group talked about gay marriage, it was to never feel tied down by the chains of an ancient machista way of thinking that never brought anything but hurt to anyone and to be free of ever having to keep my mouth shut instead standing up, holding my ground, and fighting for who i was and demanding to be treated as an equal. When i
My father is a first generation Hispanic and my mother is a second generation Hispanic, so i grew up with a pretty typical Latino …show more content…
Mid-summer I attended an event sponsored by the National Hispanic Institute called the LDZ Youth Legislative Session. This eight day program at the Texas Lutheran University had one of the largest impacts on my life so far. On the first day my parents dropped me off at the dorm assigned to me and a peer who would be rooming with me. Once every participant had arrived on the campus the event started. Everyone was given an ID card on a lanyard and each card had a sticker on the back of it with a superhero emblem. People with the same superhero sticker would be grouped together into their respective "dot-groups". Your dot-group was the people that you would meet up with at the end of the day to bond and discuss the events of that took place; they were led by a senior and junior counselor who had gone through the program before and took on the responsibility of guiding the new participants through the journey of LDZ. Ricky or Cowboy (we called him that because he always wore cowboy hat) and Dakoda were my junior and senior counselors. At the end of the first day they called together the ten members of my dot-group and decided to have a little ice breaker. Cowboy asked us each to say something personal about ourselves that we might not typically tell other people. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to tell them …show more content…
The way it works is the mass of young participants separates into political interest groups that have similar opinions about what steps society has to take to become a better place for everybody. The political interest groups would then combine to create two politic parties which would nominate candidates for different legislative positions. I created a political interest group for supporters of feminism which merged with several other equality-themed groups to form the Democratic Utilitarian Party. All of my dot-group members allied themselves in the opposing party, the Republican Party for Business Conservatives. I was nominated to run for one of the thirty-two senator positions; as a nominee, i was expected to give a speech that expressed my vision for the Latino community. It made me question myself. What was my vision? What did i want to change in my community? What i wanted most ... it was to never feel the way i did the night my dot-group talked about gay marriage, it was to never feel tied down by the chains of an ancient machista way of thinking that never brought anything but hurt to anyone and to be free of ever having to keep my mouth shut instead standing up, holding my ground, and fighting for who i was and demanding to be treated as an equal. When i