“People judge you just because you are true to yourself. It does not matter what sexual orientation you are even for the most minimum detail in your life they are going to say something to hurt your feelings. Fight for what you want, do not let people put you down,” Alex Ramirez, a member of the Los Angeles Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender community center, said.
Ramirez continued, “I tried for so long to make other people happy being who they want me to be, but they never were happy because they always told me that I was doing something bad. Being someone who you are not is very difficult because it makes you miserable and [it] feels like your life is not valuable.”
He denied being gay just because he wanted his parents to be proud of him. He was very afraid of telling his family, but most important he did not want to disappoint his parents.
“I actually dated my best friend because I did not want my parents to find out about my sexual orientation. I tried so hard to fall in love with my best friend, but I couldn’t. She is a very awesome girl, she is smart, lovely, kind, but I cannot fall in love with her,” Ramirez said.
Alvaro Lopez is another member of the LA LGBT community center he said, “I always had very good communication with my mom, so she was the first person that talked to when I was sure I was gay.
“She helped me a lot because she started to talk with my father. She convinced my father that I was gay, and that there was nothing bad about with being gay. At the begging it was hard, but father understood after a couples of months.”
Lopez thought that his father was going to be very disappointed with him, and would never talk to him again.
“First, my father did not talk to me because he said that he did not know how to talk to me about this, but he was always going to love me. I was surprised to know that he did not talk to me because he didn’t know how.”
Both Lopez and Ramirez agreed that even though the situation was not what their parents expected from them, their parents support them and help them overcome most of the obstacles they have to face.
