A Writer's Reflection

In the year 2008, I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Human Communications from California State University, Monterey Bay. The curriculum was full of Philosophy, History, and Literature, but my area of concentration lay in the writing aspect of communication. Creative Writing not only allowed me to stray from the hum drum task of writing research papers, but it also allowed me to express in any way I saw fit, the things I learned in my professor taught, florescent lit classrooms as well as the class of life.


The Creative Writing major encouraged students to take a Social Action angle with their writing, using poetry and short stories to share their experiences with injustice.

Being a woman of color, I am no stranger to injustice. I have dealt with issues of racism and sexism, prejudices of every nature. From the time I was a teenager, I have always felt a connection to the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) community, working, going to school, and living in the San Francisco East Bay Area, I have come to see them as family.



April 13, 2005- Day of Silence. Please understand my reasons

For not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence, a

National youth movement protesting the silence faced by lesbian,

Gay, bisexual, transgender people and their allies. My deliberate

Silence echoes that silence, which is caused by harassment, prejudice,

And discrimination. I believe that ending the silence is the first

Step toward fighting these injustices. Think about the voices

You are not hearing today. What are you going to do to end the

Silence?





Word for word, that was written on a 3 x 5 index card that I carried around with me to all of my classes that day. I had a piece of duct tape covering my mouth for eight hours. I was able to take the tape off for my last class of the day- Cooperative Argumentation, in which the professor felt it was necessary to open the floor to discuss the gay community and the idea of homophobia. The professor wanted from us, an explanation as to why we as a society can react violently towards the LGBTQ community. I made the mistake in letting a ditzy sorority girl voice her thoughtless two cents.

“Homophobia is a lot like my fear of cockroaches. When I see one, I want to kill it,”

What stopped me from getting out of my seat and putting my hands around her throat, I have no idea. In a strange way, allowing her to say what she did only illustrated to me just how much work needed to go into educating those around me regarding gay issues. If people in higher education felt it was completely and totally appropriate to compare homosexuals to cockroaches, we were in deep, deep trouble. When I say we, I am not referring solely to the gay community, I am referring to all of us.

My last year at CSUMB, I had a rather unique living situation that not many can say they share. In a moderately sized, two bed, one bath apartment on campus, I lived with two trans-men, a bisexual, and an ‘experimental’ young man, open to different things. Had I not the ability to see through a surface to the people that lurked inside, the sight of two (in all other physical ways) men walking around at the end of the day with chests might have urked me. Experiencing birthdays, graduations, and even deaths with each other when our own families were sometimes too far away, made all of our differences seem irrelevant. We all searched for love in any and all ways humanly possible; we all suffered from loneliness in one way or another. Though we identified differently when it came to sexual orientation, it was as relevant to each of us as being of different nationalities.

Having only been a citizen of the United States for less than a decade, voting was not a practice that I ever thought to be too important to me. I didn’t really become politically active until I started studying in Monterey. I had my thoughts surrounding the war in Iraq and the preceding events of 9/11, but maybe I had grown a bit too cynical to believe that any amount of protest would end a war that no one could explain.

When the 2008 elections came, I had graduated and was living in the city of San Francisco, waiting for the end of the Bush administration that I felt would only do good for our country. Yet, still, the idea of voting was not something I decided to exercise my right to do. It has always felt to me as though my vote would not make a bit of difference. Whoever had the money and the power was going to get their way regardless of whether or not I wanted them to. So, I sat back and watched as our country voted for our first Black president, something that offered so much promise for our American society.

However, I also sat back and watched as the state of California, a state that I have come to call home and have developed such great pride in, pass Proposition 8, banning same sex marriage. What? California, home of cities like San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles was not going to allow couples to get married simply because of what’s between two people’s legs? California, a state known to burn down its own cities in protest was going to regulate blatant discrimination? Our country, in a state of war where casualties will rise as long as it continues, can still find a way to wage war on love? I was, for the first time, overcome with a tremendous amount of guilt over not casting my vote. In my grief and sympathy for my fellow man, I had to do something. Though helplessness took over me as I watched the Twin Towers fall to rubble on the streets of New York City, with a degree in Creative Writing and Social Action, I felt a bit more armed and ready to take on my first act of political dissent.

Having taken with me the experience of doing creative academic work that involved interviewing, transcribing, and editing a project that surrounded the reversal of Roe v Wade, I decided to embark on a journey to understand the chaos that affects my fellow Californians. One of the things that the Human Communications department taught me is that in order to create change, one must be able to step back from themselves in order to see the entire picture. My Senior Capstone that surrounded Roe v Wade, showed me that the perspective that I might have walked into it with, may not be the ones I leave it with.