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| I should have gotten the license plate number. Next time! (s) |
Today, I was biking through the campus next to me, Babson
College, and some bro in a white SUV shouts at me, “SUP FAGGOT!” This really
caught me off-guard, and I first was not sure he had yelled that at me, then it
sunk in that someone was stereotyping me and trying to bring me down.
In my day to day life, I’m very comfortable with my friends
discussing gay things, and if my sexuality is relevant in a conversation with a
stranger, I will come out. I think of myself as someone who is comfortable with
his sexuality and my identity as a gay man. However, when that bro in that SUV
shouted at me this afternoon, I still felt a lot of pain and anger. I felt
really small at that moment, and I felt frustrated that someone could make me
feel so small by calling me “faggot.” It’s not that I feel that being gay is
wrong or that it’s wrong for a guy’s gender expression to not be entirely
hetero-normative.Yet somehow, the words hurt.
I felt so inadequate at that moment. It’s like I was
brought back to that previous point in my life when I really felt that there
was something wrong with me because I was gay. I remember thinking that because
I had been gifted in other ways with friends and family, I had to have some
sort of problem in my life, or some negative to me. But now I know there’s
nothing wrong with being gay. Absolutely nothing, and I still got hurt by those
words. I think it could also be the feeling of knowing I was looked down on and
unwanted, the feeling of being an outsider. And that’s something I’ve dealt
with as a Japanese-American in Boston. There are not very many people of
Japanese ethnicity in Boston. Back home in Hawaii, Japanese words such as “hai,” (yes) and “oishii~” (tasty) are a part of my vocabulary. But here in Boston,
if I use those words in conversation, the flow of talking is interrupted, and I
need to explain what I’m talking about. Same thing with Japanese foods or even
foods from Hawaii. Another example is when I take pictures. For fun, I like to
make the peace sign, but here when I make the peace sign in pictures, I feel
like I get looked at, and I feel like I’m playing out a role, when back home, I’m
just posing for a picture. I’m not really complaining. I enjoy being in a
different place, and I have nothing against Boston, it’s just that for me,
feeling like an outsider is something I’m sensitive to.
So what I do is I stop wearing surf shorts around, I stop
making peace signs, and I drop non-english words from my vocabulary. Some
people might say, “you shouldn’t need to do that!” and my response is that I
don’t need to, but I feel more comfortable not fully expressing myself for the
sake of blending in. I think queer people will understand this, the act of
blending, being “discrete,” “acting straight” or “cooling the flame.” It can be
easier to just pass than to be fully honest about yourself. Now, I’m sure this
is psychologically damaging in some way, but I am honest around my closest
friends. It’s just when I’m out in public. And this is why I love being around
queer people, because I can be super queer, and they understand. I think this
is why I’m so passionate about my on-campus queer organization, and this is why
I enjoyed attending the NQAPIA conference (National Queer Asian Pacific
Islander Alliance) so much. I’m also looking forward to starting a chapter of
oSTEM (out in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) at my school. It’s
great being around people similar to you who understand you. I encourage anyone
feeling like an outsider in your ordinary life to seek out groups of people
with a similar identity. Especially great are places at the intersections of
identities.
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