AHS’s rainbow: insight into the LGBT+ community

Joe Dominguez sits in the AHS library wearing black jeans, a Star Wars black hoodie sweatshirt, and a RVCA hat. A few years ago, Joe’s hair reached about an inch past his shoulders, differing from his current shag. Joe is transgender, trans-male to be more specific. While assigned female at birth, Dominguez now lives the life of a male high school senior.  

  Like Dominguez, many students at AHS identify as a part of the LGBT+ community. These students must navigate their way through high school while also struggling with their identities and fitting in.

  According to The William Institute, approximately 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and an estimated 0.3% of adults are transgender. It seems that with each day, more letters are added to the Acronym, LGBT+, and it can be hard to keep track of what each letter represents. What people don’t realize is more letters aren’t being added, but rather, more letters are being acknowledged. There is still a lack of education and understanding for the various aspects of the LGBT+ community.

Aiden Krause is an AHS sophomore part of the LGBT+ community.  

  “People think being LGBT is a new thing,” Krause said. “It’s not a new thing, it’s been a thing since forever.”

Krause identifies as pansexual: one of the many parts to LGBT+. Pansexuality is defined as “the sexual, romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity.” In addition, Krause, similarly to Dominguez, is trans male.

  Krause does not want to be known as trans male, but rather male. Krause walks the AHS halls with a backpack decorated with pins, letting the world know what his identity is to relieve any confusion and/or uncertainty.

  “I don’t want to go around screaming ‘Hey I’m trans!’ I only have those pins on my backpack because I want people to know I’m a guy and why I identify as that,” Krause said. “I don’t want to scream it, but at the same time, I still want to keep it low key.”

  Krause didn’t just throw the pins on his backpack in kindergarten. He, and every other LGBT+ person is going through their own personal journey to discover and fully understand themselves. For most LGBT+, their identities were present throughout their whole lives, even if they weren’t understood.

  AHS sophomore, Isabella Castillo went through the process of understanding themself at a young age. They now identify as gay and agender.

  “I figured myself out long ago, but I kind of kept it under wraps. I did a lot of research to figure out who I was, truly,” Castillo said.

  While some agender people use the pronoun “ze” rather than he or she, Castillo prefers they/them pronouns.

  “I define [agender] as lack of gender, lack of a feeling of gender,” Castillo said.

  Castillo also addressed how they learned they are gay.

  “One thing I usually say is I was always like that, because as a little kid, I’d have crushes on the big, hot girl celebrities with the dresses and stuff,” Castillo said.

  Castillo and Krause are members of the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) club at AHS, which Dominguez is the president of. Dominguez’s story of discovering himself started at a young age as well.

  “I remember I never liked female characters in shows or books or comic books but I always liked the male ones. Like I identified more with male characters than I did with female characters and I think that was an early sign,” Dominguez said.

  Unfortunately for Dominguez, his process of understanding himself was a difficult one.

   hhh“[When I was young] I was always acting like the boys. I would get up in class and run around and act out, but I was never put in a special ed or had any help for my condition, which I now know is ADHD. I think that was a sign that I’ve always seen myself as male, but I just didn’t know how to express it because I didn’t understand it,” Dominguez said.

  From his journey, Dominguez feels that there needs to be more focus on a child’s behavior and the reason for acting out.

  “I think teachers, especially, need to stop silencing kids and stop punishing kids when they’re crying for help and they need to accept kids for whoever they are. Besides parents, in an adolescent’s life, a teacher is the second most important influence,” Dominguez said. “We need to stop seeing acting out as something that should be punished, but something that should be looked into. I didn’t see my behavior as wrong or anything. A lot of people who have what I have are looking for attention because they don’t want to be silenced, they don’t want to be thrown away.”

  Dominguez thinks that in addition to looking further into a child’s behavior, there needs to be more education on the topic of LGBT+ at a younger age.

“I think one of the biggest things that I personally want to change is to stop making being gay an adult topic. I find [this notion is] ridiculous because they’re trying to say that being gay is inherently sexual and I think that’s a huge stigma that was created by a ton of homophobia that really needs to be erased,” Dominguez said. “What we need to start doing is educating children about gay topics and about transgender topics so that they can make their own decisions based on that. If we continue to keep kids ignorant about LGBT topics it will only create more bigotry.”

Castillo agrees with Dominguez and emphasizes there is more than two genders.

  “There’s lack of education, and there’s people who aren’t educated who try to say things that they know they shouldn’t but they still do. And they say things that are discriminatory toward someone, who is non-binary, who does not fit the binary rules of boy or girl,” Castillo said.

  One of many educators taking action to make AHS a safe environment for the LGBT+ community is English teacher, Maile LaPenna.

  “Maile is such a good supporter, she’s amazing, she’s one of the best supporters we have in the school,” Krause said.

The teacher plays an essential role in the life of a student, and LaPenna, a first year teacher at AHS, puts in the extra effort to put her value into use in supporting the LGBT+ community.  

  “When you’re younger and you’re going through stuff and it’s hard, the more support you can get from different angles around you that are not just your family or your best friends, you start to see those ripples in a larger sense, and it can feel really validating,” LaPenna said. “I know I had teachers that made huge impacts on my life and the things that made the most of an impression on me were not academic. I just feel like anytime that someone is feeling undervalued or feeling scared or feeling that they can’t be themselves because there’s a fear of not being accepted, we need to do all we can as a community for all those people to make them feel safe and make them feel happy.”

  This is what the LGBT+ community sees is the value in straight alliances: that they are there to support and make them feel welcomed into the world.

  “I mean it just kind of grows the community I guess. It doesn’t make us different or strange or aliens. It doesn’t make us out to be strangers or something bizarre or out of the norm, it makes us out to be just another person and that’s great,” openly bisexual AHS sophomore, Chamberlain Peacock said. “To me, the LGBT community is anyone who supports. You don’t need to be gay to be in the LGBT community.”

However, it is expressed that there is a difference between a supporter and a bystander and what the value in speaking out is.

  “People are going to continue spreading bigotry and misinformation if we don’t speak up about it. If you’re an ally, that’s great, but if you’re just going to stand there and listen to people you’re not being an ally,” Dominguez said. “If you’re an ally who is straight or cisgender, you’re not doing anything by just listening. You need to actually talk, you need to go to the rallies, you need to show up to pride week.”

Vince Johnson, Special Education Paraprofessional at AHS is on the Board of Directors for AspenOUT, as well as a founding board member of PFLAG (originally named Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). Johnson acknowledges that some may not understand what it’s like being LGBT+, but that that’s okay.

  “You don’t have to understand.  I’m an adult gay man and I’ll never understand what it’s like to be a transgender teenager.  It will never make sense to me. It took me years to understand that I don’t have to,” Johnson said. “I just have to be empathetic enough to know that if it’s one additional stress that I can help take off of a student’s mental well being so when they are studying and cramming for finals they don’t have to worry about ‘am I going to be called a bad name at school today?’ Or something as simple as when a trans student comes out and changes their name to what they want to go by, we need to, as a community, as a support system, we need to honor that immediately.  Because what harm can that do? Let them figure things out on their own versus them constantly being told by someone refusing to use the pronouns they prefer or the name they prefer. That can do a lot of psychological damage.”

  This translates to roughly 700,000 people of the US who identify as transgender. Of these 700,000, approximately 41% of transgenders attempt to take their own lives. Joe Dominguez is one of the contributors to this percentage.

  “[My friend] told me, ‘killing yourself isn’t going to make you a guy,’ and that advice has stuck with me forever,” Dominguez said. “I think it’s important for LGBT kids to know that it’s not the answer because it won’t solve your problems. Ending it is not going to change who you are, it may get you an obituary, but if you keep persevering, then you can live your life the way you want to.”  

  To support the LGBT+ community, there are organizations all throughout The Roaring Fork Valley. The common goal of all of all these organizations is to support the well-being of the LGBT+ in the community as well as their friends and parents dealing with their allies coming out.