Reflection About Homosexuality

As I was growing up, I have always thought that the world only adheres to a single idea of how things work, that everything was natural and was flawlessly laid out. I was kept in the blind, naively living under false consciousness of how the real world was. As I was cocooned in my safe little world, everyone else was living in a different world that I knew so little about. It was only a few years back that I started to get glimpses of how different the worlds are in the eyes of others. Given the circumstance, I befriended an individual who impacted me so greatly, but she was living in a world that was foreign to me and a lot for others too. She had a sexual orientation that was different from my own. From then on, I started to understand more

Hence, expressing her sexual orientation was not seen as an option. The society we live in now seemed like the world that I was used to when I was growing up, only adhering to a certain idea. In this case, individuals having to abide to the rule of only having a certain sexual preference that was out of their control. As I see myself as deeply rooted with my religion, I obligatory and voluntarily object to homosexual practices, but I am still interested in the social and personal experiences of homosexual individuals. Reason being that I believe that people should be treated equally, despite the different values or morals they stand by. I chose to compare homosexual cases from China and America because of the different ideology of homosexuality that is shared amongst people and the laws implemented by the government. In this writing, firstly, I talk about how the state laws affect homosexual rights and homosexual individuals. Secondly, I include the personal stories of those who are homosexuals in both countries. Lastly, I mention extra findings I have collected and my critical review of this

From BBC News (2010), an anonymous homosexual man from Guangzhou, China, tells his story of how he is married and has two children. He lives in the countryside where he mentions how homosexuality is unknowing to the people there. He has told some of his friends but plan to never tell his parents, wife and children. He mentions how getting married has always been a tradition you cannot escape in China, as the pressure mostly comes from the family. He said how he is happy with his wife and his children, but he also meets his gay friends and do activities such as badminton and dinner. He said that he is content with the way he is living. Although he believes that being homosexual is abnormal, he has accepted the fact that he is not able to change. He also stated, “Freedom is perhaps the most important thing in the Western world, but for us Chinese people, the most important thing is harmony. I don't need freedom. I need to keep this secret, so that I can live normally”. In America, Blake (2010) from Madison, Connecticut tells Imfromdriftwood that he and his friends were verbally and physically harmed, which was an unexpected occurrence in a ‘gay neighbourhood’. The police did not take proper action despite the reports they made. This incident was spread across social networks. Blake and his friends also ended up being interviewed in a local show in New York. Afterwards, the police contacted them and only