Sorry for the late reply… so time for the explanation of how things happened.
Honestly, nothing happened. At all. Really. Well, some things did happen, but I’ll talk more about this later. We did talk about marriage and the family but all that happened was we learned a very interesting argument for ‘traditional marriage’ with the gender roles and everything. I found it kind of interesting and I could imagine a Side B person being very intrigued. I admit I was not very comfortable for that week at all, but I survived, the issue of my orientation (or orientation in general) did not come up at all, and we have since moved on to the next topic which I like much more. And I guess I was a little bit disappointed in a way because I was kind of hoping I’d get my chance to stand up for myself. But I guess God knows best and maybe he thinks that ‘a chance to stand up for myself’ is not nearly as necessary as I think it is. Actually, I think God is helping me become more comfortable in this environment in a different way which I think is even better than the confrontational-flavored method I had thought was the only option.
Although this is not directly related to the class, it is related to me being gay in my school and I have to say that, things are really looking up. Well, for a long time I had difficulty making friends with guys, because I had somehow got the idea in my mind that girls are more accepting of gay men than guys are. As my class is mostly male (I go to a really small school… I alone make up over 10% of this class.), this had caused me to disconnect from most of my class and seek friendship from what was almost an exclusively female crowd of friends. Not that these girls were particularly the most affirming people in the world, but I just got along well with girls and it never really crossed my mind that I could have comparable relationships with the guys in my school as well. Which I realize now was my feeling ‘disqualified’ from having normal friendly relationships with people of the same-sex because of my homosexuality – which I guess is actually a very subversive form of internalized homophobia, isn’t it? By distancing myself from the other guys in my school I was telling myself that are certain things that I cannot do as a gay person, and one of those things was become close friends with people of the same sex.
Now here’s the interesting thing. That same exact week of that class was the week that I began to click with this other guy at my school in a way that I never really reacted with him before. It was kind of, well, different for me, because I didn’t really expect this from him in particular and also because my relationships with guys at this point were pretty much mostly surface level, which in my way of thinking is exactly the same as nonexistant. But we got along surprisingly well. If you asked me to list my friends maybe three weeks ago, I probably wouldn’t have any guys at all on the list. I have quite particular criteria when it comes to identifying someone as a ‘friend’ (that word means more to me than it does to most people I think) and bizarrely, on the week when I was supposed to be cowering in terror, this guy who I saw everyday and never really thought too much about actually became a friend of mine.
And then the week following, I began to connect more with the other guys in my class. And that was kind of not on purpose. The way that works is it goes back to the girls thing. My best friend is this girl who does not like hanging out with the other girls in this school. And she’s outside with some of the guys from my class. On normal circumstances, I would avoid hanging out with the guys in my class (yes, I recognize that I am pathetic in that way). But since she is out there, I decide to go out there with them. And although I had gotten along with these guys before, it was actually like we were connected more. And as it turns out I know that two of them are actually very accepting of me and one of those two actually got really angry about the girl in my class who has harrassed me (not seriously, but pretty insensitive stuff) about my orientation in the past. So wow, how’s that for a reversal of what I thought was the way things worked? So really, it turns out I’m sexist and homophobic myself, just in a more subtle way. First, I assumed that people of the same sex as me would have a harder time accepting my orientation than people of the opposite sex, which turns out to not be true. People are individuals and it’s wrong to think a guy will be more accepting than a girl because he is a guy or a girl will be more accepting that a guy because she is a girl. I realize now I was being unfair to the guys in my class to assume they were incapable of accepting me because of their gender. Second, I was being homophobic towards myself by assuming that I couldn’t have regular relationships with guys. I’m trying now to overcome that and be more open to mixing up the gender balance of my friends.
So. Yes. That week (and the week after, since I took so long to respond) turned out to be very different from what I thought they would be. But it’s all good, I think… I’m starting to actually be very comfortable being openly gay in my school. I don’t wear a rainbow neon sign saying that I’m gay nor do I feel that’s necessary… but I’m not making any efforts to deny it and if people find out, I really don’t care and in fact, I’d be relieved if they did. So yeah… that’s my week and I thank God that it turned out the way it did instead of the way I imagined it. 🙂
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