In the world of sexuality there are people that believe that people are born one way, and that any other thing is wrong. There is no deviation from the course that they were born into and that if there is a deviation the deviant is obviously flawed. Some religions even push this to the point of destroying the deviant. Luckily this doesn’t happen to people in the United States too much. Each one of my backgrounds had a different effect on my beliefs but they all came down to one thing in the end. I am who I am, and other people have their own ways, whither they are homosexual, heterosexual, or any other sexual.
My family members are all over the board. My mother seemed to be accepting of anything that wasn’t the norm. She realized that it isn’t in the norm but she doesn’t let it bother her. And on the other hand is my father, who is completely against different views then his. If I were to tell him that I was gay he would instantaneously disown me. Luckily I don’t have to worry about that but it still bugs me that someone can be so against something that he wouldn’t ever talk to me again if that were to be the case. Neither of them really quite affected me too much. Not like a lot of my friends did, siding with their parents.
It was the people at the school that gave me the beliefs that I have today. I ran with two groups of kids. The first was the group that contains my best friend. It was a bunch of guys that I shared so many things in common. We loved to just sit around and play video games or go out onto the back porch and just talk. I never caught onto the fact that we never really talked about girls, unless it was just something like, “Ashley got pregnant,” or “Jenna decided to get herself sterilized because she never wants to have kids.” Never was it about who’s hot and what not. Well, it turned out that that never happened and for good reason. It turned out that I was the one straight guy in a group of ten gay teens. It seemed strange for about 30 minutes, the time that it took for me to realize it didn’t matter what he thought of me. I’m sure that he has looked me over before but it didn’t change anything. I came to the realization that it wasn’t any difference from me checking out the girls I hang out with.
By the end of the night they were talking freely about all the guys they liked, who they wanted to date, who they have dated. I realized that they were not any different from me. Sure they were into their own equipment and I wasn’t but other then the fact that the body parts were different, well, the same, in the relationships they had the same things that I did. Love, lust, caring, it really is blind, or at least genderless.
The other pack that I would hang out constantly was made up of five girls, when I wasn’t in class or at home I was with them. Most of the time it was with just my girlfriend and her twin sister but sometimes it would be the six of us. And it went the same way that it did with my gay friends. I learned from them what it was like to be a woman, or at least I learned the best I could. They always talked completely open around me. It was fun being one of the in-crowd, feeling what they feel. I feel that the experiences that I got from them really changed how I love. I was shown that a lot of girls aren’t really looking for just some hot guy. Sure the looks were important, but they didn’t seem to be anything compared to what kind of value that guys put on just sheer beauty. They were looking for someone that would actually sit down and listen to them, connecting on some level that’s completely foreign to most men. For some reason it makes you seem homosexual to a lot of people, but if that’s what it takes its what ill do.
So between those two groups I have came to the simple realization that everyone of us can have our own idea of what sex and sexuality is to us. No one should be able to impede on my choice of who it is I want to have relationships with, just as no one should be against what others chose to be. No matter if it does go against everything you believe. How would you like it if the world hated you just because your belief was different from what was considered the “norm”? My friends and I have had to put up with it for years and let me tell you. It really blows.