Hello! My name is Mario, I am 18 years old and I live in Madrid, the capital of Spain. I have always struggled with my sexuality. Even today, the incapacity to label myself as bisexual or homosexual bothers me. Society appears to push me towards deciding who I am, even if I am ok with not knowing 100%.
Since I was a little boy, I have been different from the rest of the boys. I liked soft-toys, Barbies and baby-dolls. I loved pink and everything related to that colour, basically. I enjoyed the company of females better than the one of males, and I loved dressing up with my mother’s high-heels and play with her lipstick around the house. My family has always been supportive of me and has let me be me. They have always pushed me to be whoever I wanted to become in life.
However, the outside world has not made it easy.
When I was in school, I began to feel the first signs of laughter and intimidation. As a kid, I did not understand why I was the target, but I soon realized that it was the assumption about my sexuality what was causing this behaviour. The kids laughed at my voice and called me “gay”.
“Gay” soon became the worst thing I could ever become. “Gay” became a label by which my friends and family could be legitimized to stop loving me. I could not allow myself to be such thing. I rejected it with my whole heart.
Since I was very young, I loved dancing. I would dance around the house, I would dance for my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my parents… I had always thought that I would become a professional ballet dancer, like Billie Eliot did (that movie has been always inspirational for me). However, this dream would be destroyed when my feminine side and high-pitched voice was always highlighted as wicked.
When I was 9 years old, my mother drove me to watch a classic dance class, and offered to sign me up if I liked it. I absolutely loved watching the kids dance, I pictured myself dancing, free and happy. However, a sudden thought entered my mind: “What if the kids in school find out?” When the class finished, I told my mum that I had hated it, and I wanted to go home. I could not bear with the fear of those kids finding another reason to make fun of me. I gave up dream because of them. In the battle between my passion and hatred, hate speech won.
In High School, the situation did not get better until I was 16, my voice changed and I grew a few inches taller. At first, I tried to make boy-friends to seem more masculine, but I never felt integrated. When I came out as bisexual to my closest friends, I explicitly said: “I understand if you not want to remain friends with me, its ok, I would hate me”. Today, it amazes me that I thought it was ok to discriminate me for my sexual orientation, but it is the reality of thousands of kids around the world.
If I, a kid with the loveliest and most supportive family living in a country with freedom or sexuality, have struggled... how must it be for other kids? There is need for a change. Kids should not prevent themselves from dancing or doing what they love for the fear of being pointed at and laughed at. There is need for a change in the schools, in the family environment, in the institutional framework…
I want to highlight that hate speech was not only insults. Hate speech was laughing when I walked by. Hate speech was allowed by those teachers who did not cope with the situation properly. Hate speech survived because kids laughed in situations of injustice. Hate speech was silent as well, it was those kids who did no laugh but watched and said nothing due to the fear of being the next victims.
Hate speech will not survive in schools and highschools if we all speak up. Those who insulted me were a minority, if the majority who stayed silent would have spoken up, maybe I would have gone to dance class.
Today, I am a first-year university student and proud to say that I am me. With no regrets and no fear. I have never done a ballet class in my entire life, but I have the determination of beginning this summer 2020; it is never late to leave these harmful comments behind and be who you want to be.
I hope that in the future, we build a community where hate speech will not prevent any kid from becoming a dancer, an actor, a politician, an astronaut, or whatever their dream is.