Maybe this is why they ask me if I knew Aiden before doing the story...

Mixing the two important conversations I had this weekend, maybe now I know why people ask me if I knew Aiden before reporting the story. It isn´t pretty.
Manu is Colombian, I am Chilean. I´m having problems figuring out how my cultural background might affect my approach to this story, so I asked Manu for her opinion.
We spoke about how Latinos just allow themselves to discriminate. They see a gay couple and they have no problem with saying out loud "qué asco!" (how repulsive). They have no problem with looking down at African Americans. "An American just doesn´t do that," I said to Manu, "when they ´feel like´ discriminating, they work on it and stop themselves. It is socially unaccepted to discriminate, it goes against social rules." Manu said that yes, that´s true, but that we also need to consider American´s double standards. When they say one thing, but mean another. Manu said something like "maybe they say they accept it and they act like they don´t gossip about these things, but we would need to see how things go in their private space. Inside their houses. Maybe they say things just like Latinos do, but they act publicly as if they don´t, because of the double standards that rule here for everything." She has a point.

Then, I spoke to Alexis, this guy I wrote about on a previous post, and I remember him talking to me about how, from his point of view, Americans have an easy time accepting things when they are not personally affected by them, and a really hard one when things happen inside their families. Like, it would all be rainbow and sunshine as long as their close relatives are not affected. A mom would be all fine and good with lesbians until her 13-year-old daughter´s best friend is a lesbian. Then, conversations would take place during dinner. Or maybe not even that: conversations would take place between that mom and her husband. But the conversations are there, and this mom´s concerns would be the same ones of a Latino mom, the difference being that the Latino mom would express them right away. And out loud--really LOUD. Most Latinos don´t publicly say they accept something, and then change their attitude when it hits home: they publicly say they are not accepting, and they keep it that way when it hits home. It is awful because their lack of acceptance is impossible to break, but at least it is honest. You always know what you are dealing with. There is almost no difference between their public behaviour regarding -let´s say, lesbianism- and the position they adopt in their private space about it. Here in America, some people draw a line, a pretty strong line, between what happens in the street and inside their houses. They can say they really accept something and that they celebrate it, but you don´t really know until you see their reaction when the issue in question hits home. And that is when they really deal with things and figure out how they really feel about them.

If this is true, I´m tempted to think that this is why they ask me all the time if I knew Aiden before reporting the story. Somehow, I get the vibe that they think there must be a personal experience explaining my motivation for this story, and said personal experience would have provided the context for meeting Aiden. It can´t just be that I was interested, there must be a personal experience explainin why am I choosing to bring home the question of gender identity. Like, I´m choosing not to stay in the safe place of "yeah, I totally support the LGBT community" and I´m voluntarily putting that community in my resume, I´m bringing it home. It is not hitting home, I am inviting it, and that is too hard for some to understand: if I´m choosing to deal with these things, it must be because it was hitting home already.
Surprise, surprise: it wasn´t. I was born a female, and I identify as girl. I actually like girl things! Not so much into gender roles, though, those have given me trouble a time or two. It was just a really interesting story: I felt there was a huge world in front of me and I knew nothing about it, so I went there, found a host and learned! Having the LGBT community in my resume isn´t a scary thing, as it isn´t a cool, hipster thing either. It is just one more thing there: I plan to report on the Opus Day and on the military world. I want to write about nuns. I want to write about anarchists, too. There is no hipster resume, or hipster Maite. There are just identities to be both questioned and celebrated.
Maybe this is the problem with doing journalism of identity: that people want you to identify with the communities you are reporting at. Am I going to have to deal with this forever?