Miami Vices

My coming out story, a story with a lot of anachronisms to explain my experience. There's mention of drugs and some vague mentions of sex, so feel free to pass this over if you're offended by that.

I’ve been itching- no, burning- to come out to my brothers for a long time now. I remembered that when I came out to my mom, I was extremely annoyed that she wouldn’t say anything to them. It was more work for me, and I felt that it meant that she wasn’t sticking up for me. But at the end of the day it was my burden to carry, and I accepted that.

 

I’ve been gay ever since I could remember. I was different, not just because I was gay, but that was certainly a part of me that was inescapable. There’s this one time that I’ll always remember: the first time in my life that I realized that being the way I was wasn’t going to fly with everyone… including my family.

 

Go back about 17 years, I’m in the car with my dad and little brother, Jesus, one day when I was no more than 4 years old. My father flipped out over what I thought was a completely harmless comment at the time. I was talking about the Little Mermaid with my little brother and just casually mentioned that I loved Flounder more than Ariel because I like boys better.

 

Overcome with a fury so big that he could not hold it back, he told me that I should like girls because I was a boy- effectively telling me to like Ariel, which I totally did… just not as much as Flounder. The response I gave him was very, very interesting looking back at it. I really wonder how I came up with it or who had put this idea in my mind at that age. What I told him was that I would change and like girls when I grow up.

 

Baby me was such an open book in stark contrast to me now, me since a period I can’t precisely pinpoint in elementary school when I learned to shut my mouth for my own good. Baby me was so brave in dealing with my angry dad. But I digress. It’s been almost a year since I’ve come out to my parents and I haven’t come out to my brothers. For someone that leans towards the hyper-sensitive, introverted, socially anxious, and brought up in a conservative, Nicaraguan, Catholic family in Hispanic Miami, coming out is no walk in the park.

 

But lately the desire had been bubbling up over the fear. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my Boyfriend, that I was considering telling Jesus, now 18, that I was gay. Honestly, I’m pretty sure my brothers knew by now. Things just didn’t add up to heterosexuality. For a while I had stopped trying to cover up being gay. Never mind the inclinations I’ve always had against sports, cars, and gross humor. Or that I never spoke about my friends in much detail since after high school and never, ever mentioned a single thing that could be skewed into a faux romantic life.

 

I could go on forever and a day about the reasons that my immediate family should know. The fact is that, while I’m not a cookie-cutter flaming queen, I’m very far from macho. I have my moments on both ends of the spectrum, but most of the time I lie somewhere in the middle. Anyone with half a brain that doesn’t want to fog their own vision should know, though.

 

When I park in the front lawn of my parent’s house, my dad is outside. I tell him that I’m not going to park because I have to go. My brother sketchily walks past him and my dad asks where he’s going. He tells him that he’s going to chill at his girlfriend Carla’s for a bit. Bullshit. He told me that he was going to try to go to Ultra. My dad tells me to get out of the car as I’m about to leave, and when I’m up close he asks me where I’m taking my brother.

 

I look him in the eye and tell him that I’m taking him to his girlfriend’s place. He trusts me, so there’s no discussion after that. My other brother, David, decided to tag along. He’s 15. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable telling them both at the same time so I didn’t after some consideration. We go pick up molly and a dub for this girl before heading to her place in Hialeah Gardens.

 

We f**k around about s**t on the way there. Nothing unordinary. Jesus admits he popped a molly. I wipe some sweat on my forehead. I ask him what he was thinking and go about lecturing him. He says it should be out of his system by his next piss test. I hope so and let him know it. I tell him that he needs to quit this s**t or he might end up in jail and they might not be as kind as they’ve been to him. The subject eventually changes as we park on the street in his girlfriend’s neighborhood.

 

She walks towards us sporting a somewhat gothic raver outfit with yellow, washable hair coloring partially hair. Carla is unsurprisingly Cuban, and just came to the US from the island a few years ago. She’s 24, unemployed, and has a daughter. She’s dating my 18-year-old brother that is on probation, has no job, no car, and is finishing high school in this tiny private school for problem children and children with problems.

 

But hey, she seems nice enough. I just question whether she’s good for my brother to be around right now with his current situation- his probation requires him to take piss tests 3 times a week for having 5 Xanax on him after someone snitched on him. David and I drop them off at the metro station. They didn’t say bye, so I was slightly confused for a second.

 

David needs a dutch. We stop at the Walgreens by Jesus’s old school. I take a piss and buy it for him. We talk about rolling and different DJs. I take him to his friend’s house right by my parent’s place. I’m telling myself to just do it. To be brave. As he’s exiting the car, I tell him to wait because I have something to tell him. We never talk about anything too serious, so it’s a little strange.

 

“What?” he asks with a smile on his face. “I think you already know, but I’m gay,” I say. He says it’s cool, he does already know, and then tells me he loves me a few times as I say a couple of different things. I ask him if my brothers already know. They do just like I suspected. Apparently, everyone knows, but he’s off before I’m able to ask who everyone is. I’m elated as I drive back home and I tell my boyfriend, nearly high from my brother’s reaction.

 

I never expected that kind of response from my brothers, but I should have. Even though he follows in the footsteps of Jesus, he’s just really nice and openhearted. I post a status about this that has nearly 100 likes on Facebook. I try to give people the gist of this occurrence but I feel like it’s too short to really express the moment in its entirety. My post on Tumblog does a better job without really going into too much detail, either.

 

A few days later I go to my parent’s house. After some time chatting with my mother and Gerardo, my youngest brother, my dad and other brothers arrive. My dad zips off almost as quickly as he got there, eager to escape. My mom tells him kindly to wait for a second. She tells him that David and Gerardo need a haircut. Sharply, he says, “Y?” Mom asks him if he has money. He says he does and gives it to her.

 

I take David and Gerardo to get our haircut and this place nearby. The guy that was free didn’t understand English. My Spanish is understandable enough to get me by in a conversation but it’s far from being correct even 90% of the time in a real conversation where my responses are more than just a few words, but I’m understood most of the time.

 

So I ended up getting something I didn’t want. The barber had cut off the top when I had asked him not to. I know I hadn’t fucked up in explaining myself. I even asked him if I should get a skin fade or a 1 on the sides faded because I didn’t want to get anything off the top. It still looks good, but now I’ll have to trim and possibly even shave my facial hair. I never, ever shave. Hate how it looks.

 

Gerardo wasn’t even half as lucky. His tape was significantly rounded like a half moon. It looked like he had a motherfucking bowl on his head. After getting milk my mom needed and some donuts my brother wanted from the Sedano’s, we head back home, making jokes as always. My brothers are getting into mocking the Cuban accent, calling each other “papo”. The latest word for them is “pingudo,” which translates literally to big-dicked.

 

We get home and have dinner. My mom made some amazing cannoli’s stuffed with chicken and a salty, slightly sweet stuffing she always makes for the Holidays. One thing I always miss about living at home is my mom’s cooking, not like I don’t visit at least one or two times a week. She’s great at changing things up and even her basics are tasty and pretty wholesome.

 

I’m thinking of coming out with it right then and there as we’re sitting outside. But apparently coming out in a group setting to family is just a bit too intimidating for me. So I wait. I have a donut. I ask my mom if David had told him what we had talked about. She says no and asks what it was about. I told her I’d tell her later because my youngest brother was there and I wasn’t feeling it. She knows what it was and asks what he said. I told her, and she says, “que lindo.”

 

I go to Gerardo’s room. Jesus is alone watching a documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church. I ask him if he got into Ultra. He says no. It was probably for the best. He better hope I’m giving him a ride there next time. He’s taking up all the space on the bed so I get on a corner. Then I sit on the floor because it’s too close to the screen. I don’t know why I’m not telling him to scoot, but I’m building myself up for this as we’re watching this insane bigotry on the screen.

 

My mom walks in. She asks why I’m on the floor and not on the bed, tells my brother to make my room. He laughs and says that I hadn’t said a thing. I tell him to move over and laugh, saying I didn’t know why I hadn’t. My mom leaves. After a bit of time, I ask him if David told him about what I had told him. He says yeah. He doesn’t know what I think I’m hiding from him. I told him I had stopped seriously trying to hide anything for a good while now.

 

In my mind, I remember thinking about just talking about my boyfriend to my brothers nonchalantly instead of going through the more formalized process of telling them that I’m gay. Jesus is cool with it. What ensues next is a long, long conversation in which we reveal a ton of things to one another. To try to remember everything said would be nearly impossible, so I’m just going to write about the things that really stood out.

 

Jesus says that ever since he’s known what the word gay means, he’s known that that’s what I was.  He asks if my parents know. I told him they’ve known for nearly a year now. He says that that makes sense. He lets me know that a lot of the family already knows. He’s had conversations with my uncle Juan, the oldest of my mom’s siblings. I tell him that I’m not too surprised, really. I reveal that I had told Christina, the youngest of my mom’s siblings before anyone else in the family. He figured she’d be one of the first to know. We’ve always been so close.  

 

I go through relatives that probably know. Juan’s wife, Jimena definitely does. She used to press me so much without actually asking me directly. It annoyed me so much. Now she’s all affectionate with me and tries to not so slyly say that she supports gays. She even tries to teach my oldest cousin, Alondra, to treat them with respect. Jesus says that he’s heard her talking about it with this Nicaraguan lady that used to come and help around with the housework, saying that he was, too.

 

I think she must’ve been f*****g around. My brother’s fucked around with a lot of girls. He lost his virginity in elementary school I think… He wasn’t really interested in relationships before, which was a little weird to me, but hey. I could never get that close to p***y. I remember feeling scared thinking of moving past first base when I was with a girl. There wasn’t ever any arousal or urge to do so. I’ve never even groped a tit, honest to God. If you could manage that, then you consider yourself straight in my eyes.

 

He surprises me with the next one: my grandfather on my mom’s side. I wouldn’t have guessed him. He’s older. He spouts homophobia here and there. Kinda’ crazy, humble, and open like the rest of my mom’s side. My mom’s somewhat of a black sheep in that her craziness is expressed in her emotionality, her deep caring for the ones she loves, and her boldness when it comes to confrontations.

 

My brother says that he would find out from other people eventually going to high school in the same area. I told him I used to stress out so much when I worked in the Country Club, but I knew there was no way that my brothers wouldn’t find out. He says that when he told people I was his brother, they would say, “Yeah, he’s always been a homo.”

 

Damn. I knew that a lot of people in high school suspected it. I was terrible at hiding it at first, and then I got better when I realized that being so uninhibited was earning me the title of f****t. My brother asked me if my huge worry was all since I wasn’t accepted in High School. “No one’s accepted in high school.” I looked at him funny. I told him I didn’t care about that. I was just worried my family would find out that way.

 

I was processing too much to tell him that I never felt accepted, especially where it mattered most. From a very young age, gay was wrong. It was disgusting. It was sin. It was the worst thing ever. This was all I heard at home, and later in school when it became a topic of conversation. So when I noticed these inclinations, or whatever you want to call them, I tried to change. After years of trying to force an unnatural attraction to women, I accepted that this wasn’t going to change, and slowly started accepting that I was gay.  

 

All throughout my parents convinced themselves that I was just different, as it seemed to be apparent to everyone who knew me at school that I was gay. Why would I be gay? They never did anything wrong. I was just sensitive and shy. They were proud of me for doing so well in school all the time, and for showing maturity, responsibility, and occasionally even wisdom beyond my years. But, my parents were unable to see me.  What they saw was an incomplete picture, covered by nothing but their own denial for quite some time.

 

He tells me that he’s happy that he has a brother like me. Homophobia is a stupid fear to have. He could care less what other people think. He even used to sit with a bunch of lesbians and gays at his old school before my parents transferred him because of his probation and because they had heard from Jesus and David’s tennis instructor that Jesus was the go-to man for drugs at his high school.

 

I’m grateful he’s brave enough to be a supporter. So many people in life claim to be cool with you, but don’t end up standing up for you or GLBT people when under attack. I can only hope that one day this will be the case for my entire family. My brother says that our family probably wishes that he was just gay. I laugh and say that they probably do without addressing the faulty assumption. If only he knew some of the gay people that I know that are just as crazy if not more than he is, drug dealers he wishes he could be as successful as.

 

We talk about his situation. About how my parents have tried so hard to blind themselves to the truth, refusing to see what was right before their eyes all along. We know that it’s tough for them coming from where they come from, but it’s also very much in their nature to be this way. Whenever there’s a perceived problem, my parents hide it from the world and my dad particularly has difficulty confronting it directly, whether it’s me being gay, my brother being a drug addict drug dealer, or even David’s learning disability.

 

Since my brother was put on probation, my father has yet to speak to him like he told me quite angrily that he was going to. Every time my brother and him are in the car together, my dad cracks his neck every five seconds. It drives my brother insane that he can’t just talk to him. But what should he expect? It’s tough to confront a situation like this, especially for someone like my father. So instead he bottles it inside. He escapes whenever possible by running off to go play tennis at the country club. Tennis is an addiction that's healthier than most, but an addiction nonetheless. You should see how defensive he gets about it when my mom expresses to him that she wish he'd play less.

 

But anyways, as I was saying, with all the emotions and stress bottled in for so long, the pressure built up from a lack of healthy release, he explodes inappropriately. His rage is scary. Well, it is for me. I’m significantly weaker and less athletic than he is. Shortly after my parents found out Jesus was smoking pot, my dad had it with him one day and punched him in the face, knocking him out. I was always scared of coming out while living at home and things getting physical. Enraged, my father is unfair, going after the innocent on an occasion I will never forget… but that’s a story for another time.

As we're talking about my dad's lack of coping, all I can think about is this time recently when I went to go get my car's oil changed at the dealership my dad co-owns with his twin bother. During my visit, my dad and I had a long, serious, heart-to-heart conversation about his life. He opened up so much to me, telling me about all his problems. About how the dealership isn't doing so hot right now and about the issues he's experiencing in his relationship with my mother. Never before had my dad spoken so seriously about the problems he was facing with my mother right now. I tried my best to hear him out but I also tried my best to stand up for what was right and told him a few times about how I disagreed with him and what he's doing. I vaguely told my brother about this conversation and how someone like my dad needs to be heard out in a situation like that even though I disagreed with so much more than what I actually talked to him about. 

 

My brother has told me before that he wants to be a big, successful drug dealer. He says he feels like he’s addicted to the money more than anything else. It’s too easy. I tell him that it is, but that it’s not worth it. It’s not worth the stress and the loss of all freedom. He starts talking to me about a rehabilitation program he was in that I didn’t know about. Another example of the smoke and mirrors my family puts up to conceal the truth. Apparently it was a few years back. He went through some bullshit program and then decided to go blasted out of his mind on the last day.

 

The person in charge of the clinic and program decided to discharge him after a lengthy conversation. The program didn’t work even though they thought it had. It was bullshit. My brother… Why didn’t he just go through with it and have my parents off his back and do things on the down-low so that he could move out one day and live his life, letting my parents sleep easy.

 

Things are different now. He’s worried about that molly he popped on Friday. I asked him what made him take it, and he reveals that it was his girlfriend. I tell him that that’s fucked up. She knows very well the gravity of his situation and she didn’t just passively let him do something like that, she actively convinced him. “If she’s willing to do that, then she doesn’t really care about you.” But he says that she does. In fact, he goes on to say that if you find someone who cares about you then you should stick with them. The same way he didn’t care about the girls he was f*****g, they didn’t care about him.

 

“That’s the worst criteria ever to get into a relationship,” I said with a laugh. I’m in slight disbelief that he feels this way. You can’t just get with someone because they care for you. There needs to be more… Chemistry… Compatibility of values, goals, personality, and lifestyles just to name a few. Otherwise, you’re just committing out of loneliness. He tells me more about her. I ask him how he feels about her having a daughter. He’s yet to meet her and doesn’t really want to. It’s one of the things that really turns him off about the whole situation.

 

He goes on to tell me that they’ve already had an abortion. He said he told her that if she didn’t do it and wanted to keep the baby, then he would split. She would never be able to find. “Hold up, was she threatening to keep it?” I asked. “No, she didn’t. She understood,” he said. I go on to tell him that I don’t think she’s worth it. He says that he doesn’t think it’ll last fun, but he’s in a situation where he doesn’t interact with girls. I guess I can understand that…

 

I tell him I have to go, and I leave the house after saying bye to everyone. This whole conversation, which I could never be able to recreate entirely, was so much to process. I should be feeling happy, but I’m not. I feel upset. I'm not sure why exactly. I feel a bit like a fool for what turned out to be mostly futile attempts at hiding who I am. But shouldn't I be happy? For all intents and purposes, the conversation went really well. I am accepted on some level... I may not be completely out in the open, but I'm less hidden than I ever was before. And isn't this what I always wanted? I try my hardest to be happy about what had just happened, trying to make sense of everything, but I couldn’t escape the unshakeable sense that everyone, including me, and perhaps in this moment especially me, was in some way broken.

Author's Note

Any feedback would be appreciated! Just came up with the title on the spot as I finished.

Reviews

[mikerich]

Great title. A fascinating read and, in the end, seems to be more about your brother's drugs and probation than your coming out. But maybe that's the point. Coming out is always a big deal for the one coming out more than for those you're coming out to. But maybe that's the point, too. This read with an easy-going flow, and each character was well drawn and easy to identify as I read on. Not really acquainted with the community you (or the narrator) lives in, I was drawn into everything immediately. I felt your humanity and the warmth of your family - even those you (or the narrator) didn't like much. The whole piece is a great portrayal of life and living in your community. A great read.

[Ezequiel Esquibal]

Thank you!

Funny that you mention the lack of acquaintance with my community because I was thinking about how I didn't really bother to do too much explaining/describing of it just last night, haha. I'm definitely thinking about revising to give things more flavor. Living here my whole life definitely has me jaded by the familiarity, haha.

Glad you enjoyed it! Your review was very helpful and got me thinking about how I can improve the piece more as well as things to keep in mind for the future.

[Reuben]

Awesome man

[Ezequiel Esquibal]

Thank you very much! Glad you liked it.