Homosexuality; Available in SAP

I feel like I really appreciate having essays like Tomas Almaguer's included in our assignments. I think a lot of time we easily ignore cross-cultural views on certain topics not because we don't care, but because it's different and relative to a culture foreign to our own. This thereby makes it difficult to understand and we conclusively shun it. But in looking at the ways that different countries/cultures treat the same issues we face I think we get a better sense of what's real in an issue. While in America we may "construct intricate rituals" to allow us to "touch the skin of other men" (Kruger represent) as even one act of perceived homosexuality is enough to tip the scales of one sexuality and in the eyes of their peers forever negatively brand them as a homosexual, in Chicano cultures men aren't punished for performing an assumed homosexual act but for performing an emasculating homosexual act. In our culture we blame the subject for being gay, that is disgusting and inappropriate; in Chicano culture it is to lose sight of your masculinity. Though there are obviously a lot of problems in doing any type of societal penalizing for shacking hegemonic norms (Writing 140 represent), I think that in a strange way Mexicans may have a better sense of what we should be getting all fire and brimstone with someone for.

In America we get mad at someone for "acting" like they're gay; assuming that to be gay is a performance that one chooses to put on to intentionally aggravate everyone else. We turn gayness into an act of rebellion, an insult, instead of a trait of a person's being. In Chicano culture, they still do get mad at a male for "acting" in a certain manner, assuming that they're doing this as an act of personal defiance, but the homosexuality of the act doesn't matter. By feeling this way it validates homosexuality as, if not a natural, an at least real state of being. Chicano's get angry at males for losing a sense of their maleness, dropping part of what Chicano's feel is important in retaining own's identity. It may still be kind of awful, but at least it cares about the person's point of view.

--Jheanelle G.