Molly Bienstock's Response 'At Least I'm Not Gay'

When I thought I was a boy in the fifth grade, I had an odd sense of uncomfortability looming before me that I later realized was some severe insecurity about my true self.  There were countless thoughts running through my head as the tornado of shit that was Middle School became fast approaching.  Middle School: the land of smelly bodies, budding facial hairs, and a heightened awareness of the fact that you are completely unaware of your physical and emotional self.  Reading this article, 'At Least I'm Not Gay': Heterosexual Identity Making among Poor Black Teens by Carissa Froyum, made me feel deeply empathetic for the children mentioned and interviewed in this work for it seems as if they live in a hermetically sealed institutionalized Middle School with no exit in sight.   

Every bit of information I obtained from this article ended in the notion of self-esteem.  Every practice, behavior, and belief system in place in the Urban Youth Network comes from a place of fear and need for protection of self worth.  “Both boys and girls at UYN police gender conformity as part of constructing affirming, moral sexual identities,” (Froyum, 607).  This quote helps to prove the issue of reaffirmation in a marginalized ethnogeographic group.  People who are made to feel inadequate by the dominant culture in place are going to be conscientious of their status in all realms of life.  For young black teenagers growing up in an under funded, low property taxed, ethnic minority neighborhood, it is tremendously difficult to care about much when it feels like you yourself is not even being cared for. 

The progression of details in this article about kids’ opinions of homosexuality intrigued me to no end.  To start, it is apparent that there is a lack of any sort of sexual education in the Urban Youth Network.  Not that I think we even have a decent Sex Ed program in place, but it is necessary to know that sexual orientation is not contagious.  “’I told them, hanging around the girls, you might pick up some of their stuff, like some of their accents and stuff, what they do’.  Most importantly, they might pick up their sexual attraction toward boys,” (Froyum, 611).  These kids think that homosexuality is something you can catch if you hang out with too many members of the same sex and can “increase one’s risk of going gay and by extension being sexual immoral,” (Froyum, 611). 

Why is that these children can ‘love him for who he is’ toward a friend or family member, but harass anyone else who crosses their path a strange way?  This concept of control of oneself by putting others down is a common theme in social norms.  Many of the students stated in their interviews, though, that they could think about trying things in alternate sexual arenas.  “In understanding sexuality as ‘doing what I want’, the ultimate responsibility and accountability for one’s behavior and sexual desires was shifted to the individual,” (Froyum, 612).  The end of the article begins to touch on this topic of individual sexuality in terms of choices.  The individual has the power to dip his or her toes into a particular identity sphere for just a moment until the individual takes on a fresh path as “one’s ‘true’ nature as heterosexual.  This change supposedly comes via a religious conversion through personal revelation of the wrongfulness of homosexuality…connecting gender nonconformity to homosexuality,” (Froyum, 613-615).  This connection is so profoundly engraved into our social fabric that is hard to penetrate, but teaching impressionable children to hate themselves and others is definitely not a good start.