APPLYING WHAT I LEARNED IN THIS CLASS TO MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMPACT AND EFFECTS COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY AND REPRESSIVE AND PERMISSIVE SEXUAL FORCES HAVE HAD ON MY LIFE

Compulsory Heterosexuality

This sociology course is the first place where I ever heard of the term “compulsory heterosexuality” and yet, the term reads like an indictment of the nightmare I endured during my formative years through the 1960’s and 70’s. I have searched this term on the internet and there are literally thousands of references to this term in available literature and links. In many of the articles I see that “compulsory heterosexuality” is of concern to feminists, lesbians, and many scholars. Compulsory heterosexuality is blamed as the cause of violent homophobia as was discussed in Harpers Magazine article entitled Mathew Sheppard and Compulsory Heterosexuality published September 16, 1999. There is even talk in the literature about how compulsory heterosexuality harms straight men in that “love is not just an abstract concept - it is "life's defining line," one held firm by "all the little things of a culture, mostly unnoticed and unremarked, like the way in which the simplest show of affection is a decision about safety, like the way in which a man entwined with a woman is the stuff of everyday commerce, but a man expressing vulnerability is equivalent to a quaint notion of virginity - you save it for marriage." Ever fearful of the stigma of homosexuality, the article suggests that heterosexual men escalate their isolating culture of masculinity until homophobia consumes them.” (http://www.glaad.org/action/al_archive_detail.php?id=1502)

I was born in 1961 in Santa Monica, California at St. John’s Hospital. My parents had married several months earlier in Las Vegas, sometime after I had been conceived. They met while they were both employed at the Los Angeles International airport. My mother moved from the farm life she had been born and raised in Iowa to California in search of opportunities, to own a home, and have a career. I don’t really know if meeting a man and getting married were in her immediate plans, but she did fall in love with my father and soon afterward became pregnant and they rushed to get married so I wouldn’t be born a bastard.

My father was an immigrant from Ecuador. Pictures of him from this time in his life make me think of Desi Arnaz in “I love Lucy.” He is a very eccentric and somewhat flamboyant man who has a distinctly feminine style of relating to the world. His appearance and demeanor, his pitch and his style of dress are very masculine but he prides himself in wearing well made and designer clothes. He has a flare for the artistic side of everything from cooking to home decorating. He came to this country with basically no money and got a job as a baker for American Airlines. My mother apparently was also working in the baking department. He spoke scarcely 30 words of English when they met.

My father is a natural story teller. He loves to embellish his stories with vivid visual descriptions and colorful metaphors. So, as children, we learned all the stories about our family; how my parents met, how my father’s family came to America, and so on. I was the firstborn in my family on my father’s side in the United States, and my sister’s, myself and three other male cousins are the only American born kids of our generation. All of us were born between 1961 and 1965—six kids in all. From three of the six kids there comes the next generation of children who now number twelve. I will be the first in my family to graduate with a bachelor’s degree but alas I am getting ahead of myself. You see, at first my parents didn’t have a common language with which to communicate so they apparently settled for the “language of love.” They were compelled by their physical attraction for one another and conceive a child, and then they were compelled by religious convictions to enter into marriage as a result and all before they could speak each other’s language. So you can imagine that growing up in this kind of a situation for me was unique, to say the least. That is why I used the word “nightmare” in my opening paragraph in connection with the term from the class “compulsory heterosexuality.” This term, and my reactions to this reality has profound implications in my life!

From the lectures I learned that compulsory heterosexuality is “an institutional and ideological foundation for the family in the US. Universally in beliefs and values, cultural representations, patterns of social interaction, and in policies and practices of institutions and organizations there is a common assumption and expectation of heterosexuality as the norm.” (Williams lecture 1/23/04) This belief need not justify its existence nor withhold its influence from every sphere of reality from biology, psychology, and morality to parenting and education. Same sex attraction and same sex families must remain invisible, and better still eliminated all together.

Soon after my parents married and moved into a home together, my grandparents arrived; from both sides of the family. My grandmother Opal on my mother’s side came with my grandfather Isaac. They had a total of ten kids between them and on my mother’s side of the family I have more than a hundred cousins and second cousins. The sad think is that socialization with extended family took precedence on my father’s side more than my mother’s side and I feel that I was deprived of some of the experience I could have had if I had gotten to form closer ties with that side of the family. My grandmother Luzmila had also arrived from Ecuador with two of my cousins and my only surviving aunt. They had left my grandfather in Ecuador to die from cirrhosis of the liver. Apparently he had been a very mean and angry alcoholic and they were happy to be done with him. I didn’t learn about all of these family secrets until much later in my life. My mother tells me that at one point she almost packed me up in the car and fled to get away from the suffocating pressure that having two mothers’s in law fighting for control brings to bear.

My father tells me that I was a very happy child full of joy and laughter and that I loved everybody. He says that in all his years he has never seen someone more generous, more caring, and more compassionate than who I was as a young child. In the early years, while my parents worked at their jobs at the bakery, they went to night school and got technical degrees so they could get jobs. My mother went into civil service while my father went to a beauty college and got his license in cosmetology. Just as he was graduating from his classes and received his license he was helped by two of his customers from the beauty school to buy a shop in Beverly Hills that needed only a $1000 down payment to acquire. They believed in him and loaned him the money so he could buy the shop. In just a few short years his shop became one of the top beauty salons in Beverly Hills in the late 60’s. He innovated many hairstyles and his salon was one of the first to introduce individually glued eyelash augmentations and acrylic nail enhancements. Given this line of work, he had to maintain a certain level of class and sophistication; and his wife and children were expected to also maintain the appearance of class and sophistication. My father became the puppet master and we became his puppets.

Just to give you a little insight into where I am headed with this story I want to reveal a shocking discovery I recently learned from father’s own lips. Apparently before he had met my mother he was a virgin. She is the only woman he has ever slept with. Before he came to this country he had been engaged to marry a woman in Ecuador who came from a very wealthy family. However, he also had a very wealthy male friend who had been his best and closest friend since early childhood. My father ended up breaking his engagement with his fiancé in Ecuador so he could immigrate to the United States with the help of his wealthy male friend. The shocking revelation that my father told me is that this male friend apparently was in love with him and had expectations of them having a relationship in America. My father told me that he very cruelly terminated his friendship at that time with his friend because of his shock and his fear about his own feelings for his friend. In other words, my father told me that he made a conscious decision at that moment to live his life as a heterosexual man even though he had very strong feelings for his friend. Had he not met my mother, he might have chosen an entirely different path for his life and I would never have been born. His homosexuality had to become something hidden or transformed so that he could establish himself in his new life in America. Marrying my mother and having American children helped to solidify his dream and in order to ensure his success he set about the task of making us into the image of his dream. My mother became his main model for all of his early hairstyles and public image and we children all had our hair lightened so we would look like the all-American family. Most if not all traces of our Latino heritage were eliminated when it came to our life in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood society.

While my father had come from a Catholic background, and through my grandmother I had a tremendous amount of Catholic indoctrination, on the other end of the family continuum, I had my mother who came from a protestant and evangelical fundamental ethic; she was Southern Baptist. All through my formative years I had so many mixed messages and role models. I had the influence and gender modeling of my father who was a closeted and celibate homosexual choosing to live as a heterosexual man. I also have a mother who becomes a civil servant and later becomes an accountant. Her gender role models were mixed in that she served both functions that of mother and also that of career woman which in many circles would be considered a masculine thing to do. My father’s early friends and associates were mostly wealthy people who happened to be gay, lesbian or they were Latino and were experiencing their own success in America. While my father is having extravagant parties and social events, my mother and my grandmother are involving us with going to church and learning about the expectations for young boys and young girls; to have a work ethic and to love learning. I went through all the religious expectation of me from serving as an altar boy to becoming a lecture during mass and later leading worship and music.

Both my parents quickly moved from the poverty level to becoming middle class. By the time I was thirteen years old my parents owned three houses on the same block. My father owned a successful business and my mother had a successful career in accounting. We were being educated in private Catholic college preparatory schools and my father was attempting to insert us into the upper middle class and into Beverly Hills high society. But it was at this time that our family dynamics began to deteriorate and we began to experience the fall out from cultural assimilation and compulsory heterosexuality. The biggest conflicts lay in the fact that our family experience didn’t match the ideal of what a heterosexual family should be. Being in the beauty business, you basically come into contact with quite a diversity of sexual expression. My father had several openly gay people who worked at his shop and as kids we often went with our parents when they went to play poker with these friends. I was exposed to things that are very uncommon for most children to see.

I learned very young to relate to adults much easier and more quickly than I could with children my own age. I learned very young that kids my own age were boring, older people than me were more happening. These peers of mine were also bullies to me and called me names life fatso and fag boy. It was as if they had radar or something because they seemed to be aware of how different I really was compared to them. Unbeknownst to them I was sexualized at a very young age. I am sure that I was influenced by what I saw and what I heard. By the time I reached the age of fourteen I had had numerous sexual experiences with people of both sexes and ranging in age from nine to early twenties.

The first sexual experience I remember was an older female cousin who was nine at the time using me to masturbate her when I was almost five years old, and then later I remember male cousins that came from Ecuador who also masturbated and touched me. The first time I had a sexual experience with an adult was at the age of twelve and it was with a man who was a friend of my father who stayed one night at our house when my parents were away. In my rational educated mind, I can look back on these experiences and say “OK I was molested!” However, none of the sexual experiences that I participated in were forced on me and none of the sexual experiences were unpleasant. In fact, I learned to like what I was doing so much that by the time I reached the age of 18, I had more than 2000 sexual partners. I had become a sexually active bi-sexual androgynous male. My idols were David Bowie and Elton John. I lived a double life. By day I was a high school student and by night I was a Hollywood hustler. The first time that I was raped or had a disturbing sexual experience was when I was in my early twenties and by that time I was an old pro at the game. It’s no wonder that I left during my junior year at Loyola high school and left home and started an independent life away from my family.

While I was going through all of this, my mother was rebelling against my father’s dictatorial rule. She began to put on weight and to assert herself more at home. They started having huge fights because I think that my mother suspected that my father had a hidden side to his sexuality. She was upset about his gay friends and feared that association with these people could lead to the destruction of the morality of her children. They had begun to experiment with marijuana and my mother had become a legal addict to methamphetamines that she received to control her weight. She didn’t want to take the shots anymore. She began to question his masculinity, his manhood and laugh at his impotence with her. He came unglued. One night when this was all playing out and growing in loudness and intensity, my sisters and I were eating dinner at the dinner table when suddenly I heard my mother scream from the other room. I ran into the room to find my father on top of my mother and trying to strangle her and slapping her in the face. I jumped on top of his back and tried to pull him away. Then I started pounding on his back with my fists to make him stop hurting her. He kicked me and told me that I was not his son. Then he stopped what he was doing packed a bag and left our home. In the days that followed my mother worked on us to make us afraid of my father and to hate him. But she wasn’t entirely successful at this endeavor. My sisters and I were much attached to my father because we had fun with him in spite of his anger and his dictatorial rule of our home.

We had a very non-traditional family and our family would probably be an interesting one to study from a sociological perspective because of the incredible diversity of experience and the fact that our family represents the fallout from a clash of cultures and the acculturation process that immigrants go through as they try to live up to the expectations of the host culture. I am reminded of the text from the class in chapter two where it talks about family scholars, “Family scholars differ from broader social scientists in that family scholars challenge the idea that there is one reality that can be objectively perceived by researchers.” (Seccombe and Warner Chapter 2) So often growing up I remember trying to reconcile my experiences with what was taught to me by school, society and the media as to what normal families were like, and what the actual reality of my family experience was. So all the traditional social theories I had become familiar with through the social institutions I participated in up until taking these sociology courses at Lane now that I am in my forties never explained or validated my experience and consequently I felt alienated and isolated as though I were somewhat of an anomaly. This class and others like it dealing with gendered communication and social stratification have given me a new language with which to speak and care about my experience and a new paradigm in which to make sense of my life.

I believe that much needs to be done in order to address the effects of compulsory heterosexuality especially because if the social standards that are used to judge people, families and relationships were different, then the patterns of interaction social policy will match more closely the diverse reality of human experience instead of the narrowly focused standards that compel heterosexuality and all its characteristics as the norm for every soul.

Repressive and Permissive Sexuality

I am a victim of the conflict that exists between the repressive and the permissive forces of human sexual experience. Through the repressive force, I was not allowed to learn about my sexuality in any way other than through my own trial and error or through my exposure to sex in the media or what I had encountered through my father’s friends and associates. Sure I had role models of what it means to be masculine or feminine, but at the same time my father was hiding his own sexual secrets while simultaneously advocating for abstinence and piety. My mother was the only one who was fighting for moral virtue in our family and facilitating repression on religious grounds. At the same time, my experiences brought me in contact with the permissive forces that encouraged me to exploit my youth and my looks and through sexual attraction gain access to secret places where people could enact a multitude of sexual practices without interference from repressive forces. I learned about all the sex clubs, bath houses, pick up bars, and hustling hang outs while at the same time I would alternately do my time in church or meetings to attempt to purify my thoughts and alter my behaviors. I tried to live as a Jehovah’s Witness as a last ditch effort to live the ultimate in repressive life, which I though was the pure approved life by God, but I couldn’t do it. I was excommunicated from Jehovah’s Witnesses on the grounds that I was an unrepentant homosexual and drug user.

Sometime during my sexual experiences in my late teens I contracted the HIV virus. I didn’t learn that I had been infected officially until I reached the age of thirty, but I am quite positive that I was infected sometime in the late 70’s. I just didn’t really want to know the truth until I was two weeks away from getting married and needed to know before I consummated that marriage. I do believe that if I had had some formal sex education I may never had contracted the disease because I would have been armed with the knowledge of how to protect myself from getting infected by using condoms. I learned the truth in 1993 and that truth has forever altered my life and the focus of my life. At first I thought that I had been handed down a death sentence and that I was going to be dead in a few years.

Needless to say I was devastated by the news and quickly worked to distance myself from my fiancé. She still wanted to get married even after I told her the truth about myself, but I wouldn’t have it. At the time I thought I was being handed a death sentence. I couldn’t go through with the marriage believing that I was going to be dead in a few years. I didn’t want to marry someone and leave them as a widow so soon. I also thought that my disappearance would give her a better opportunity to be happy in her life. Little did I know that we would be here, 10 years later, and my ex fiancé is getting a divorce from her husband. She had four daughters with him. She is divorcing him because he is a violent communicator. We saw each other recently and she told me that even though she loves her daughters very much she wishes that I had gotten married to her when we had the chance. She would have been perfectly happy with the love I had to offer her. She would have accepted me exactly as I was.

I broke off my engagement with my fiancé and drowned my sorrows in alcohol and methamphetamines. I went off the proverbial “deep end.” However, I eventually came to my senses and made a conscious decision in my life that HIV was not going to be a death sentence for me. I was not planning on dying of AIDS. Since I had left high school and went to work I had never attended college. So I enrolled in classes at Lane starting in 1996 and I have been here ever since. I will soon have three Associate of Arts degrees from this college and will be transferring to the University of Oregon to complete a bachelor’s and eventually a master’s degree.

During those years after I had broken up with her, I pretty much stayed single. I tried to initiate relationships but ended up being rejected once they learned about my HIV status. I eventually gave up on intimate relationships and focused on spiritual pursuits and education. By 1999 I had become quite lonely and I longed to be in love. In a small ritual I put out to the universe that I was giving myself permission to be in a relationship. And in the fall of 1999 I met this man in an online chat room. I invited him to meet me at my office on one occasion and then he invited me to eat on another occasion. By our third date we became inseparable and within 6 months I gave up my apartment and moved in with him. For almost the past four years now I have been living with this man who I call my partner.

My partner grew up in El Salvador during the USA's secret war in El Salvador between1981-1992. He was 10 years old at the time and learned to keep his head low when bullets started flying. He has told me many horror stories of the violence he witnessed in his native home land. But nothing could prepare me for what I learned about the violence that was perpetrated against him because of his “feminine” traits. His biological mother had long since fled for her life, to the US to try and make a life for herself and someday bring her son to live with her. Meanwhile, my partner’s father had grave concerns because his son was exhibiting “feminine” behavior and took it upon himself to “masculinize” his son so he wouldn’t grow up to be gay. He was strictly controlled and punished when ever he exhibited abhorrent behavior and yet, his familial oppression only served to cement his resolve to rebel against his father in creative ways; mainly by blocking his attempts at communicating which really meant indoctrination into heterosexual masculinity. They even disfigured his face to make him unattractive to men—so he wouldn’t be a pretty boy. This is a good example of repressive sexuality taken to the extreme.

In sharp contrast to his childhood, I had a very indulgent childhood as my father was an immigrant to this country who found success in his life rather quickly as he used “feminine” communication patterns in his chosen line of work; glamour and publicity. As I stated earlier he owned and ran for many years a successful beauty salon in Beverly Hills and later got into the public relations and marketing of cosmetic surgery and rejuvenation treatments. Since he had done well, my siblings and I were afforded levels of luxury that few children our age ever experience. When I revealed the homosexual side of my sexuality to my parents, their reactions were quite different, while my mother chose to reject it on religious grounds; my father embraced it and tried to accommodate me in our family home with my new found boyfriend at the age of sixteen. At that time in my life, my father actually let me move my boyfriend into our home and live with us! This is a very good example of permissive sexuality taken to the extreme.

From the preceding descriptions the reader may ascertain that my partner and I come from really different backgrounds, and yet we share a common cultural heritage: that of being Hispanic and gay. The big difference is in how and when we were acculturated, and how we were gender socialized. These facts and circumstances account for our participation in different speech communities. I apparently have very strong “feminine” strategies of communication while he has very “masculine” strategies of communication; this fact is what is derailing our attempts at communication. Another big element that is impeding our communication is the fact that we were acculturated at different ages; I was acculturated from birth, while he hadn’t started his acculturation process until he was entering high school. I speak with very clear English, having spoken both languages from birth, and I have developed adaptable styles of communication to suit the circumstances I encounter. My partner speaks with a Hispanic accent and learned most of the meaning of words through his academic studies and through watching television. We use the same symbols of communication but we have entirely different meanings associated with these symbols.

Our first year was really grand. We had many intellectual discussions and he learned about my HIV status and accepted me as a partner. This was a huge step for him and I tried to show him my appreciation in every way that I could. But I also have a very strong and demanding family and life long friends, and conflict developed over my continued involvement with them and since we had unprotected sex. Since the one time we had unprotected sex, he has avoided having intimate contact with me. When I told him about my HIV status I also told him about my early lifestyle from my teens to my twenties. At the time he told me that he didn’t care about my past. And yet today, when he is angry at me, he insinuates that I still am whore. Slowly over the past three years our communication has deteriorated and I have been feeling that there may not be much hope for us. We seem to be so different. I am confused because the person I fell in love with is gone.

Here we are now 12 years after receiving official confirmation of my HIV status, and according to estimates from a few medical experts, I have been living with HIV for over twenty years. I had previously been sick to the point of hospitalization and all my loved ones were certain that I was going to imminently perish. However, there is something at work in my life that is more powerful than my or other people’s intellectual capacity of understanding. I believe that it is the result of self-empowerment that is continually taking place in my life. It is the result of my absolute faith and belief that HIV is not going to kill me. And it is the result of a radical restructuring of reality that I underwent in my life—a sort of personal inventory in which I shed my masks of denial and embraced the light of understanding through the multicultural, multiracial, multi-sexual, and multi-gendered eyes.

I truly do have strong feeling for my partner. But I also am tired of his aggressive and dominant style of communication. I feel as though we end up in arguments because he is unwilling to acknowledge my feelings and my distaste for his affect and tone. He is very cross most of the time and he frequently yells at me and criticizes me in very mean ways. His speech is mostly non-facilitative and he is constantly upset and complaining about things. Whenever I try to talk about my feelings he gets mad at me and tells me that I am talking about “bullshit” or “psychobabble”. He isn’t a very good caretaker with me, and the times I have been sick he has gotten mad at me for not taking good care of my self.

My partner has agreed to go with me to counseling, but then in arguments tells me how he is going to tell the therapist about what I am doing and what I have done or not done. He makes me feel as though he plans to sabotage the sessions. He rejects any attempts I make to change the way we communicate. He closes the door frequently on discussions about gender, class, communication, and ethnicity; especially if I am challenging his stereotypes and/or attempting to correct his understanding of language symbols. He will say things like “I do really not like the way your communicating with me since you read that book.” I feel like I have tried everything to bridge our communication but I am also trying to find a balance. I don’t want to be his doormat either.

My hope is that through this class I will gain greater insights into myself and others and hopefully learn better ways of speaking and caring about my relationships with others; both men and women. And perhaps I will either reap great rewards in my current long term relationship or I will gather the courage to leave an unhealthy situation.