A Journey of a Thousand Miles
It’s around 3 in the morning, I should be sleeping, but instead I’m sitting at my computer writing my first blog post. And when people read this tomorrow (or today, I guess I should say), they’ll probably want to know why I chose to start one now, this morning, and why it couldn’t wait until tomorrow afternoon getting acquainted with my bed.
Writing a blog is something that I’ve desired to do for a long time, but I’ve never felt that I had anything important to say. However, this weekend I had to attend a diversity conference for school, which at first I thought was a major waste of time. Why did I need to attend three days of diversity training? I’m a minority, ethnically, sexually, and religiously, and my friends are a pallet of diversity: different races, family structures, religions and economic backgrounds. I have strong feminist friends and others who desire to be housewives. I know people who support black separatism and others who think assimilation is the only method for equality. In my mind, I simply didn’t need diversity training, but I had no idea how far from the truth I was.
During the break-out sessions in our training, we spoke about the individual groups represented within the group as a whole. The first day, I was horribly disappointed because not a single person mentioned issues surrounding the LGBT community. I thought “how could people be so insensitive? They talked about their issues of gender and race and economic background but not about the issues that other people faced?” I went to bed that night and realized that I, expecting others to speak up for me, contributed to my invisibility as a gay man.
The next day, we participated in more activities to explore our personal issues with diversity: one of the more painful ones forced us to look at one demographic we belonged to and to state the things hated about being within that group. The activity, whose purpose was to get us to look at internalized discrimination, was the first time in five years of being openly gay that I critically thought about what it means to be gay and actually spoke up about my sexuality. And you know what? It felt good. The past weekend was the most growth I’ve experienced as a gay male. I’ve decided that I’m going to do that more often: if I expect full equality with my heterosexual friends, I’ve got to learn how to speak up or shut up.
Tags: introduction
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