Tell Me Who You Are by Winona Guo & Priya Vulchi

Author:Winona Guo & Priya Vulchi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

My parents kicked me out at age fifteen. I come from a very Catholic, Hispanic family, and when I came out, they couldn’t accept who I was. I didn’t want to get into the system, and so I started couch surfing, putting myself through high school, then college, taking several on-and-off jobs along the way.

Three years ago, I went with two of my undocumented friends to a gay bar here in Tulsa. When they showed their international passports to the door person checking IDs, she went through them and asked, “Where’s the stamp that proves that you’re here legally?” They kicked us out, and said they would call ICE if we tried to get back in. That broke my heart completely. How can a marginalized community marginalize another community?

That was a Saturday. Sunday, I called the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center. I filed a report, talked to the executive director, and met with lawyers. Thursday, we met with the bar, which had apologized. Everything was good, but that’s when my work started.

I am a gay, Latino, Catholic man who has survived domestic violence, and this is intersectionality at work. There is this culture within Latinos that doesn’t accept gay people because of Catholicism, and then there’s racism within the LGBT community, and discrimination toward people who identify as bisexual or other orientations. All the programs I start here at the Equality Center come from those intersections.

As of 2013, an estimated 55 percent of the 35.4 million Latinos in the United States identify as Catholic, which has consistently declined every year. At the same time, a third of all U.S. Catholics were Hispanic, a number that is rising because of the growing Latino population in the United States.

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