Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Atrévete
Atrévete
As someone obsessed with learning about other cultures, especially those of Latin
America, I am a big fan of reggaeton music and in particular, the songs of Calle 13, a
famous reggaeton artist from Puerto Rico. My favorite song of his is titled “¡Atrévete, Te,
Te!” For years I listened to this song, even before I knew how to speak Spanish. Like
most gringos (Latin American term for white americans), I never knew what it meant.
Embarrassing, I know. After I moved to the Dominican Republic, the song was finally
translated for me, and what does it happen to be about? Here’s the translation: “Dare, to ,
to, to, come out of the closet. Escape, take off the nail polish. Stop covering yourself, no
one is going to take your picture!” Perhaps the song is a bit racy and probably insulting
to gay people, but I am not the kind of person to take offense to song lyrics about
homosexuals, it’s just not worth my time or energy. Ironically, this ear-opening
experience came as I was discussing and building up the courage to come out to my
parents. If thats not a sign, I do not know what one is. I have struggled with the fact that I
was gay for years and asked myself the depressing question “Why can’t I be straight?” In
hindsight, I don’t even really want to be straight. I thrive on the fact that when people see
me kissing my boyfriend on the street or holding his hand that it makes them turn their
heads. Now that I have matured enough to move past the whole “I just wanna be
accepted” phase of my life, the new question I ask myself is “What would I do if I had
ended up being straight?” I truly believe I am a more open and understanding person
because I am gay, and I would take that over being heterosexual any day.
While I would not consider myself the most adventurous or dauntless person in the
world, I would like to think that I have that daredevil edge that allows me to make every
day just as interesting and eventful as the last. So when it comes to facing what life
throws at me, on a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate my fear level at about a low to mid-
ranged 2. Not bad, right? Well, let me just say, coming out to my parents was one of the
high school, older european girlfriends, a girl I actually loved, a pretend exotic novia, an
uber-liberal university, douche bag boyfriends who I thought I loved, moving to another
city, then to another country, and meeting the love of my life, I was still a pussy when it
came to coming out of the closet. So much of a wimp, in fact, that I did it through an
email. Welcome to the 21st century. After all of that worrying and obsessing over the
reaction I would get, I got the most disappointing and unsatisfactory response from my
mom (not surprisingly, also in an email), “All is good on our end. We met [him] last
summer remember?” Imagine spending years of your life, from the days when you were
experimenting with your sexuality as a teen going through puberty up to graduating from
high school and moving away from your parents, building up to this huge moment where
you think your life is going to change forever, that you will be shunned or disowned, and
you receive a response as anti-climatic as that. All I could think was “Am I crazy? Have I
tortured myself for years and made myself miserable, when all I had to say was ‘I am
gay. I have a boyfriend that really makes me happy and I want you to meet him.” All
things considered, I made things a lot harder for myself. All that I had to do was accept
that being different doesn't make me any less of a person. My only regret is that it took
Now, I am fully aware that coming out is not easy for everyone, so this is in no way a
celebratory story about how everyone should just come out and deal with it. That is
certainly not the case. I am very fortunate to have such a support system behind me, and I
will never take that for granted. Being gay is not a disease or a curse, it is who I am and I