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My Place in This World
While children and adolescents can be pretty cruel with almost anyone, I think that childhood and adolescence for me, like many other QV people, was an unrelenting hell. Mexican culture has a long history of criticizing non-conformity, but when it comes to sexual difference, things are much different. Society not only criticizes people for being QV, it believes that QV people should be punished. This punishment became a daily, prolonged execution. Now, so that anyone reading this will not think that I am blind, naive, or stupid, let me make it clear that I well understand that because some people in Christian religious institutions promote intolerance, they are primarily, if not entirely, responsible for the grotesque hatred that tears our society apart. This has created conflicts at different levels between groups and families. It has even caused conflicts within individuals themselves when they feel that who they are goes against church teachings. I am aware of this history. However, while I was growing up, I did not have any contact with religion because my mother refused to raise her children in the church. As a result, at the age of 13, I was able to have an unprejudiced encounter with God's presence during a Benedictine Easter celebration. At this celebration I encountered, for the first time, a feeling of unconditional love that is present in the sacrament. Although I was the same person whom everyone seemed to make fun of at school and in my neighborhood, for reasons still unclear to me, the people I encountered that Easter immediately took me into their hearts, and kept me there for years after that event. They became the only source of support that I could depend on outside my mother's home. Until that time, I had been completely friendless in and outside of school. This relief brought me happiness as an emerging QV adolescent and spilled over into my school experience, making manageable what was previously unspeakably painful. No one in my new, loving community seemed to take any notice of the things that made others laugh at the "maricón." The most significant experience that revealed the authenticity of my connection with the church occurred at a retreat when I was 15 years old. Each participant was asked to reveal something about his life that was troubling or frightening. Naturally, all I could think of was the fact that I was QV. Because this community had, up to that time, treated me with unconditional love, it was impossible for me to consider lying or concealing the truth. So when my turn came, I was honest, but fearful that I would be destroying the loving, trusting relationship that had been transforming my life for two years. The depth of my agony was more than redeemed when my retreat roommate took the time and pain not only to reassure me, but to affirm the dignity and integrity of my experience and my risk-taking. He didn't even show any change in his comfort level around me in the dormitory bathroom. During this time, I had begun attending a co-ed high school. For the first time, I found myself able to make friends, first with women, and then with men, QV and straight. My new-found love for myself, initiated and nurtured by a group of Christians, kept growing throughout my college years. I developed into a Christian activist and leader and was invited to participate in various parishes and religious vocational activities in the region. The spirituality of the Society of Mary (Marists), among all the others, was the one that grabbed my attention and held it. Having been "out" in the Christian community since I felt its call, it was inconceivable that I should begin hiding now-and I didn't! I decided to go into the seminary. During my admission interviews, not everyone who interviewed me, understood my perspective on my sexuality. However, they had no real doubts about the authenticity of my call and my answer to it. Ultimately, my experience in the seminary gave me indisputable clarity about my vocation to service, even though I found that the Marists' institutional structure did not correspond to my sense of self-development and understanding-so I left. Upon leaving the Marists', I found work almost immediately, in my profession, organic chemistry, and I also became romantically involved with a man whose last lover had died of an AIDS-related illness. In my journey of faith, this was the moment of my second "Baptism of fire." My first baptism was my initiation into the life of the Christian community. My second baptism was my initiation into the life of a Christian living in the world-a confirmed adult, assuming complete responsibility for his life, including the risk of acquiring HIV. Would I be able to do it? Of course, the question remains open in some senses, but it is clear to me today that the life that I chose and the lesson that I learned in choosing to tell the truth on that retreat, helped keep faith with me when I learned my HIV status. My vocation did not end when I left the seminary. Today, I live in New York City. Learning to live in New York
has been a new ordeal, as one may easily imagine. Life in the
Big Apple can be challenging in a variety of ways. One can easily
feel isolated, ignorant, and unloved. Finding one's "family"
requires patience, openness, and energy. Even though I'm Latino,
my connection with the New York Latino community has not been
a panacea. For me it has, at times, been a trial in itself. But
I have managed to find a community of people here who understand
and share much of my experience involving my journey of faith.
An advantage to living in New York is the great variety of agencies,
committees, commissions, community centers, and QV groups, including
QV religious groups, that anyone can access. I have made careful-perhaps
even guarded-forays among them, and I think I have found a faithful
community that resides here. New York proves to be a place where
I continue to give and receive in the ways that I had begun to
learn in Mexico when I was 15. And so I find myself persuaded
that, even in this complex urban environment, much of my faith
"language" is spoken. Faith will stay with me if I
continue to keep faith in the truth that I have lived and the
truth that I have yet to learn.
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My experience
growing up in Mexico City is probably very similar to the experience
of many QV men growing up in Latin American countries. Some
people may even think that Mexico might even be worse than many
other places-it is where the word "macho" was invented.
My experience was terrible in many ways. Although my mother always
showed me and my siblings unconditional love, and taught us that
honor is a fundamental value, nothing could prepare me for the
shock of being mocked, rejected and hated for being the person
that I am. This rejection occurred even before I could understand
my own sexuality.