By the Bay

For the 2016 Spring Symposium, I would like to present my research on teenage boys coming out* to their siblings. I conducted this research through interviews with my peers, scholarly articles, and through a creative writing... [ view full abstract ]

For the 2016 Spring Symposium, I would like to present my research on teenage boys coming out* to their siblings. I conducted this research through interviews with my peers, scholarly articles, and through a creative writing piece about my own personal experience of my brother coming out to me. The interviews gave me a better understanding of young men’s experiences of coming out to their siblings, especially to their sisters, for whom in most of the cases, it was the easiest. The main section of the project, however, was the spoken word poem that I wrote and performed. I wrote the poem as an expression of love towards my brother and as an acknowledgement of his pain. I also wrote it as an expression of my own guilt—the guilt that followed me as I witnessed him be the target of harassment and hurt while keeping it all inside. The poem expresses the nuanced relationship of siblings in the midst of secrecy, depression and healing from childhood to late adolescence.
My presentation consists first, of a short explanation of my interview findings and then a performance of my spoken word poem, “By the Bay.”

*Expressing their sexual orientation as gay