You’re Special Just Like Everyone Else

In the past two months, I’ve seen as many articles by gay men who are trying to explain why all gay men are seemingly obsessed with their physical appearance, specifically their physique.  The first article I saw was back in mid-July from the internet site Gawker, entitled, The real reason gay men don’t get fat.  The most recent article was written this week for a blog called Hommemaker.  Orlando Soria writes Why gay men hate their bodies.  Both articles make the unremarkable announcement that gay men are (wait for it), into physically fit bodies.  And not only are they into physically fit bodies they are, in fact… (drumroll) concerned with their own physical fitness.  Shocking, I know.  The main problem with posts like these, from my perspective, is less on the content and more on the stereotype and over simplified statement it makes about the gay community as a whole.

The Identity of West Hollywood

As a an eager young politico, I followed West Hollywood’s recent city council election last month with great interest.  However, as my previous post may have suggested, I was a little turned off by some of the rhetoric coming from the opposing candidates.  I thought the rhetoric implied that the LGBT community in West Hollywood was a monolithic group all moving the same direction with the same tastes and preferences.

As it so happened, my final report in a physical planning class I am taking at UCLA offered me an opportunity to explore a question I have had since moving to West Hollywood in August of 2010.  I could sit and argue that there is another group, another community in West Hollywood that was being ignored in this grandiose messaging but I could not prove it.  My final report for my class was on precisely that.  I sought out to prove that there are, in fact, two distinct communities within West Hollywood as evidenced by the physical environment.

I have pasted a clip from my introduction below.  Please feel free to download my report (15mb).  Critiques and counter-arguments are welcomed.

SCOTUS Ruling Against Christian Group is LGBT Victory

A case that was probably more interesting to local San Franciscan’s, LGBT and Bay Area legal observers was settled on Monday, June 28.  The case: Christian Legal Society V. Martinez, was ruled in favor of Martinez (aka UC Hastings School of Law) saying that a law school has the legal right to refuse official recognition of a club or group that won’t let gays join.

Confessions of a Third Generation Latino: Walking Through Ivory

This is the 4th post in a series.  For my previous post, click here.  This post focuses on my time away from the Central Valley while i attended college and my evolving outlook towards my place in the Latino community.

Walking Through Ivory

Before i left for college, my father passed away.  It was in the summer before the start of my senior year at Redwood High when he finally succumbed to liver cancer.  My father left a large imprint on my life, especially on my views of who I am in relation to being Latino and I still wish today that he had lived long enough to hear me come out as a gay young man .  My father grew up on a farm outside of Visalia and hated it.  He left home to pursue a career that made him equally a target to the more fundamental characteristics of local Mexicans.  But he beleived that he didn’t have to be anything for anyone except himself and his family.  Perhaps it was something that he developed later on in life; further along than the stage of life i am in now.  But perhaps it too began in college and at one of the same universities I would soon enter.

Redwood High, has about 2,000 students every year and more than half of that population is Latino.  Unfortunately, district wide, Visalia has a 1/3 drop-out rate in grades 9-12.  In my high school class a lot of those who made it to graduation did initially take off to college.  A good number of them attend the local community college: College of the Sequoias.  I haven’t found any data on this specifically but anecdotally, a good number of those students who leave for college usually return to Visalia before completing a 4-year degree.  Many of those who do leave home attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (SLO).  The joke around most high school campuses in Visalia is that SLO is a lot like Visalia except near water.  I did not attend SLO.

Confessions of a Third Generation Latino: Community

This is the third post in my series.  This post focuses on my time in middle and high school.  Compared to my previous post, this post explores my self-realization of my place in the Mexican community in Visalia and how i addressed it at the time.

Community

The last post in this series was meant primarily to set the foundation of what happens next.  I was a young Mexican kid who, in all fairness, wasn’t that Mexican.  I became more acutely aware of this fact when i left Royal Oaks Elementary and entered middle school and high school.

The teasing continued througout this time and it did bother me to a good extent.  But where i once knew not why i was the target of such ridicule, now i had reasoned why.  I wasn’t Mexican enough for the rest of the community living in Visalia.

The Mexican community in Visalia and, arguably throughout the Central Valley, are rather fundamental about what it means to be Mexican.  As i mentioned before, the Latino population largely settled in the North Side ghetto and lived below or near the poverty line.  The parents of other Mexican kids i interacted with were mostly Catholic and conservative and held more blue-collar and labor-intensive occupations than my parents did.  They also held a much more skeptical view of their white neighbors, and not necessarily without good cause.

The Central Valley is not a bastion of liberal ideals as San Francisco would be or even as moderate as Los Angeles might be.  The Central Valley is politically and culturally very conservative.   They voted heavily in favor of Proposition 8 and if polled today, would probably support Arizona’s new immigration law with similar numbers.  That being said, the Mexican community responds by behaving similar towards other as well as their own.