Fitting In When Its Nearly Impossible

(Finding a place to fit in can be a difficult talk and can cause some people to reach out for help from others.)

The essays written by Asian-Americans and their experiences dealing with sexual orientation and gender identification are hard for me to relate to. I am a white, heterosexual female. Although I am Swedish, Czechoslovakian, German and Scottish, I identify myself as an American. I don’t have any gay or lesbian relatives so I have not dealt with this directly in my family. A good friend of mine, however, dealt with and is still dealing with the fact that he is gay and revealing this to his family.

When I first met Johnny*, he was not openly gay. He is a tall, handsome, intelligent business student with big goals and the ambition to accomplish them. He and my sister, Adrian, were best friends. They met their freshman year of college and had been extremely close since. I first met him my junior year of high school when I came to visit my sister. He was friendly and cute but I didn’t spend much time with him. Senior year, I came to Austin to celebrate my eighteenth birthday with my sister and some of her friends. He was there, and we hung out quite a bit, which I consider to be the true beginning of our friendship. From there on out, we talked often, saw each other with and with out my sister, and began to get to know each other more.

He and my sister were better friends, and he confided in her more often, so when she came to me and told me that he had come out and was gay, I wasn’t surprised. In all honestly, we had assumed just as much from certain comments and actions, although we weren’t certain. My sister described the night that he came out:

He was leaving the following day to go to Hong Kong for a semester and she was staying with him at his house to spend the last night before he left.
(The Gay Pride Parade in NYC is an event that shows great support for the gay community.) As they sat there, he told her that he had something to say: he was gay. He then began to cry. He continued crying for quite awhile, explaining that he hadn’t told anyone else and was still not sure how to tell people. Over the next few months, he told more and more people, but still kept the knowledge to a limited group.

As a business student, he feels that he will be potentially hurting his career and future success by revealing this vulnerable part of his being. When reading the essays, I was intrigued by Vincent Ng’s story of his experience with revealing his homosexuality. He describes his participation in a play for “Theater of the Oppressed” and his role as Derek, a gay male attempting to fit in with his homosexuality. Vincent “knew that in many ways the young man’s struggles to gain acceptance, recognition, and attention from his peer group were no doubt experiences that paralleled [his] own life” (Ng 880). Fearing his parents’ reaction, he was unsure of how to present to them that he was gay.

The struggle with homosexuality is difficult on its own. (Asian Americans are a big part of American society and must contribute while still maintaining their culture.) Now imagine adding to that an uncertainty about where you fit in within culture groups. The students who wrote these essays all have feelings of being oppressed in some way by homosexuality and/or ethnic background.

As a society, we must take steps to relieve these feelings that so many are experiencing. We must accept those who are different from the general public. America is the “melting pot” of cultures and is meant to be an accepting nation. We need to take others in and allow them to “selectively assimilate in order to retain [their] rich culture” (Andrade 852).