Personal Narrative Essay: Homosexuality And The American Dream

Being a lesbian is the best thing that has ever, well, happened to me, I guess you would say. I love who I am and the person I have become. Even though the American dream does not agree with my idea of love and who I find attractive, I will stand alone if I have to. But fortunately I don’t have to stand alone. I, unlike many lesbian, gay, trans, and bisexual individuals, have the support of my family and friends, and while yes, I have had a hard time coming out, I know that my story is not as deep as the one of, say, the young eighth grader that was shot and killed because he was a little, well, what’s the word they all use?, different. No, my story is nothing like that. However I have been left out because of my irreconcilable differences. About a year and a half ago, I finally came out to my family. My friends had long before known and were all in support of me and
in support of keeping my true self a secret for a while. When I finally got the nerve up to tell my mom, she was all like, “Yeah, we know.” Apparently, I was not very good at hiding the fact that I liked girls. Maybe it was my notebook of Angelina Jolie and Drew Barrymore pictures that gave it away, or maybe it was the fact that at that time I had a girlfriend and I acted weird around my mom when I talked to this girl. Whatever it was, it took a big weight off of my shoulders to know that she was in support of me from the get go. The next step was to tell my step dad. His reaction was about the same. Probably my favorite quote that came out of his mouth was, “well, we don’t have to worry about her getting pregnant.” Whew, what a relief. But what about my little brothers and my sister, how were they going to react to the news. I guess it would be easier to talk to you about the way my brothers acted. My brother, Dylan, well, he was the one that I had told in secret the first time I ever thought that I might be, oh no should I dare to say it, “gay”. So he took the news well. Next on the agenda was to tell my other younger brother, Sean. Sean’s reaction to the news was this: “ Cool, dude. I can’t wait to tell my friends.” So there was an even bigger sigh of relief. But I still had one more person left to go… my sister, my younger sister, four years younger to be exact. And that is a big difference when you are fifteen and your little sister is eleven. So it was time to tell her the news. I hoped that she would take it as well as everyone else had and that would be that, but unfortunately, that wasn’t just that. I told her and she cried. She cried for what seemed like days. She was embarrassed and ashamed, and she really didn’t understand the whole concept of another girl liking a girl. A few months earlier, she saw me and my girlfriend holding hands and she thought she saw us kiss. She came in and went straight to my mom and told her what she thought she had saw, tears streaming from her eyes. My mom had to beg me to tell her that we were just friends and we did not kiss, that we were holding hands because we were friends. Since then, my sister has come a far way in how she views things. She may not fully understand why I live this lifestyle, but she loves me and she knows that to love me means to love all of me. I still thought there was someone I was forgetting to tell. Lets see, I told my mom, my step dad, my sister, my brothers, who am I missing?… Oh that’s right! I felt like I needed to let the people at church know about my lifestyle. I felt like a liar, coming to church and pretending to be something that I wasn’t. So about four months ago, I told my youth pastor and his wife that I was a lesbian. What I expected them to say was, “well, we don’t agree with your decision, but we will support you no matter what.” Maybe I expect too much, or maybe I believe in things that are just unreal, but I truly thought that they would stand behind me no matter what I was going through or whatever decisions I chose to make. Boy was I wrong!
Not only did they choose not to stand behind me, but they decided that it would be best for the church if I no longer attended. So they kicked me out of the church. But before they kicked me out they gave me a big lecture on how they thought that I “grew out of that phase” and that God would punish me for choosing this lifestyle, that God was very disappointed in me. You see, a year and a half ago, that girl that I was going out with that my sister saw me kiss, well, we decided that she should come to our church because our church was, get this, a very understanding church and they really cared for the people that attended. My youth pastor must have figured out then that I was a lesbian and must have thought that, because we broke up, it was just a phase. But it really upset me that they kicked me out of the church because of something like this. I don’t understand how a pastor could kick someone out of church. It seems to me that if they thought that this was so wrong that they would want me to continue to go to that church so that maybe it would influence me to “change my
ways.” My belief is, God loves everyone, no matter who they are, what lifestyle they “choose” , or any of that. God loves everyone. The bible clearly states that. To kick someone out of church is just plain, well, sinful, to me. They should be spreading the word of God, not limiting the amount of people who get to hear it. In the past month, I have been accepted back to church, an apology at hand, and being myself seems to be going well. No one is shutting me out of their life for being “one of them” and all seems to be going as planned. I am no longer referred to at school as the “lesbian chick,” I now have a name, my name, that they all call me by. While I know that there are still going to be people judging me for being different, I have learned to accept the fact that, yeah, I am different and I am proud. I am proud to show my true colors.