It was a magnificent day during the warm month of April, 2014 when young, early teenage me confronted my worst fear head on with the utmost courage and pride within myself that I never knew I had. “I… am gay.” I recall saying to my mother and father, this in turn invoking a bloodcurdling silence that saw me debating whether I had made the best or worst decision of my life. Fortunately, my deeply loving parents embraced this news and reassured me they cared not for my sexuality nor my flamboyancy but for my happiness and ability to accept myself for who I am. However, not all my same-sex loving peers are greeted to the warmth and affection that I was. With the slow but steady rise in the gay population in recent years comes a truly disturbing set of unwanted problems: self-doubters who disassociate themselves from loved ones due to fear of being recognised, homophobic fools with their childish impertinence and medieval few on …show more content…
Samuel Brinton, a non-binary (uses they/their pronouns) advocate for the LGBT movement and nuclear engineer in an interview with Elite Daily in July 2017, states that they were taken to a conversion therapist’s office just days after their father ‘punched them so hard that he went unconscious immediately’ for coming out to him even though they believed their father would be accepting of it. Brinton recalls the moment where their ‘hands were bound, placed in ice and pictures of men touching men, holding hands, were shown.’ Brinton also says: “Needles were stuck into my fingers… Electricity was shoved through my body as pornographic images – the very first pornographic images I would basically ever see – were shown to me.” How barbaric. How wrong. How inhumane. If this does not open the worlds eyes up to the true horrors behind the doors of the therapy room, then what will? This is the horrible truth that everyone needs to educate themselves
What is afraid of change is society, which is bitter and conservative. Strong parental figures give children exploring their gender identity much needed hope and support. They also assist with the fight against society’s expectations by giving children the choice to be whoever or whatever they please. Many celebrities are coming out now as LGBTQIA+ because they now have support. This assistance has provided said celebrities with confidence and happiness in their treacherous journey of discovery.
In the novel, Just Above My Head written by James Baldwin, the theme of homosexuality is discussed throughout the book. One key passage that involves homosexuality is when Hall says, “Arthur had to pull himself to a place where he could say to Paul, his father, and to Hall, his brother, and to all of the world, and to his Maker, Take me as I Am! (472). This passage from Hall can be significant especially in Arthurs life because he needs to finally coming to terms with his sexuality and accept himself for who he is. He no longer wants Arthur to hide who he is and wants him to tell the world, and specifically his maker, which would be god, that this is who he is and he is not changing.
Society tries to create a “perfect” image on people; leading us to believe that if we are not the specific way that we created, we do not fit in. In reality everybody is supposed to create themself, regardless of what society believes. Does what we label others matter? Who are we to judge how others chose to create themselves? In David Crabb’s memoir Bad Kid, Crabb takes the readers through what it was like discovering that he is gay, and how that changed how kids treated him during school.
In the second week of September, Brian Burke came to our school to talk about acceptance of who you really are. The presentation was largely based around his son’s involvement in the LGBTQ community, and how you should not be ashamed of who you are. He correlated it to our unit “relating to others” by speaking about how when we accept others we become better ourselves. We should not turn away people based off of sexual orientation, culture, and general differences, but rather welcome them. No matter who you are you can have a normal life that even includes athletic activities.
In this day and age, the LGTBQ+ community is expanding rapidly. Therefore, the community has included the plus sign at the end to represent those who are questioning, pan-gendered, intersexed, transsexual, or two-spirited and the many new ways people are self-identifying. Each generation is becoming more exposed to more information and are capable to choose from openly out members of the LGBTQ+ community as role models. For younger generations, it may become easier to recognize and acknowledge one’s sexual orientation or gender identity than those apart of Generation X and the Baby Boomers. However, even in this more open-minded society, homophobia is still living, breathing, and thriving.
Chapter three discusses the prevalent “friends as family” metaphor and questions how widespread its use is among gay men. The chapter jumps right into the two controversial areas of family and sexuality and affirms that friends are like family. Men look at their friends as surrogates, but the type of support has evolved through the change of generations. Research from Lillian Rubin and Karen Lindsey provide a different point perspective by making us consider if the whole “Family as friends “ is just a metaphor or it is something that is literally followed in the gay community because of the rejection by blood kinship. Friends as family is just a metaphor because no matter what is said and done a blood relative continues to be a relative regardless
“Parents in the old days actually threw their children out with the clothes they were wearing when they found out they were gay.” Rejected as outcasts in a society of prejudice and discrimination against minority groups, suicide and homeless rates ran high in the LGBT community as many felt they had nowhere else to turn to. The gay community seemed to be a lost cause in their fight for equality. The Stonewall Inn and Mafia Corruption
Many parents of the victims often have a hard time accepting the fact that their child is different and react in an unfavorable way. For example, in the book “Violence Against Queer People,” by Doug Meyer, who explains how most teens who come out to their parents are thrown out of the house. Being thrown out of their own home drives them to substituting school pastimes. “Drugs and prostitution replace school as a way of life. At the most critical time of their lives, their parents have denied them the support they need to become productive adults.”
Lawrence King was a fifteen-year-old kid that was shot in the head for being gay and not dressing to his supposedly “sex”. He was shot dead in the computer lab in his Junior High, E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, California. (Cathcart, 2008). King was very open about him being gay, like going to weekly meet ups with Ventura County Rainbow Alliance every Friday night (Cathcart, 2008). King classmates said he started to wear makeup and dress in women’s cloths and proclaimed himself gay to the whole school.
Most people would argue that a parent should love their child unconditionally no matter what, but how is it that nearly 43% of homeless LGBTQ+ youth were forced out of their homes after coming out? (Seaton Perspective | homeless rates for LGBT teens are alarming, but parents can make a difference) Given this high percentage, it’s easier to understand why so many kids are scared to come out and share themselves. More importantly, they help us understand more about Yasaman, the main character in “Why I Learned To Cook”, a short story by Sara Farizan. In the story, Yasaman, a bisexual girl, faces the same struggle many members of the LGBTQ+ community face, coming out.
In being seen as different and as challenging a societal norm, they are often ostracized and discriminated against. Therefore, in an investigation into the higher rate of suicide among LGBTQ youth, people should not look to them for the cause, but to themselves and their stigmatization of the LGBTQ youths because people perceive them as “different from
We sometimes find ourself contemplating about who we are and what do we want in our life. As a gay man I have found myself stuck in many places, this is totally normal. We all try to find that perfect life but sometimes it involves barriers. Being wrong and owning up to what you want in life makes the ride easier. Thus being said, I would like to introduce myself with memories that shaped who I am and the struggles that I’ve achieved.
Substitute the word “gay” in any of those cases, and the terms suddenly become far less loaded, so that the ring of disapproval and judgment evaporates. Some gay rights advocates have declared the term off limits. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance against slander, or Glad, has put “homosexual” on its list of offensive terms and in 2006 persuaded The Associated Press, whose stylebook is the widely used by many news organizations, to restrict use of the word. Miss Suhashini a, lecturer of Phycology Department at UTAR who was currently doing research about LGBT has looked at the way the term is used by those who try to portray gays and lesbians as deviant. What is most telling about substituting it for gay or lesbian are the images that homosexual tends to activate in the brain, she said.
Queer theory argues that traditional or social standards should not define or categorize gender and sexuality. Furthermore, social boundaries set upon the individual result in forcing it to perform or act as the norms dictate. Thus, desire, feelings and actions areoppressed. Moreover, queer theorists claim that categorizing identity is unacceptable in view of the fact that identity is not solid, but it changes over time and this is a continuous process. Queer studies also examine “the ways that, across history, cultures have understood or repressed queer acts, enacted queer identities, or abused or denied the existence of queer people” (de Lauretis162).
Homosexuality was once considered sacred in ancient Rome, albeit being treated poorly since the middle ages. Like this, homosexuality has been suppressed for a long time and thenceforth, the public opinion towards it has been on a downward road until recent years when LGBT groups started stepping up front and coming out along with the increasing controversy towards their rights. The subject of homosexuality has always been polemical. Every once in a while a news article would come up saying something like "Manny Pacquiao provokes storm by calling gay people ‘worse than animals’" or "Sam Smith Talks Coming Out As Gay".