Sex, Race and the Identity Labyrinth

I'm sitting on the edge of my stepson's bed searching for words. One of his friends just came out as pansexual, another as non-binary.

"I kind of know what they mean" he says, his voice heavy with confusion.

I think back to my experience growing up and my own struggle with identity. I was in the fifth grade when I learned I was part American Indian.

How is it possible that one could learn about their own racial design so late in life? I could posit a number of ideas, but if I'm being perfectly honest, it just never came up. My mom never spoke about it, her brother, her mother- nobody ever mentioned it. In fact, I didn't even learn it from them, it was brought to my attention by my elementary school principal.

It was a crisp September morning when I was pulled out of class and asked to make my way to the staff room. I was a troublemaker- frequently punished for the very same well-timed wit that has carried me through most of my adult life- and I was no stranger to the principal's office. But the staff room? I had hit a new level, I thought. While my feet confidently marched down the hallway I contemplated what could possibly constitute a visit to the one room in the building that was shrouded in secrecy.

Then it hit me: the porn magazines we stole from the abandoned house a few blocks away.

It was the middle of July when my friends and I discovered a treasure trove of hardcore sex in the basement of a spooky house hidden behind a tangle of overgrowth. Roughly ten garbage bags full of magazines so explicit it makes me uncomfortable to think of the images even now. We spent the summer learning not only about human anatomy, but also the absolute limits to which certain organs could be stretched.

"Oh my god, they know" I thought to myself. "We didn't wear gloves. They have our fingerprints. The cops are here and that's why I'm going to the staff room. They need enough space to arrest me."

Beads of sweat began to swell on my forehead and my knees weakened immediately. My stomach churned with anxiety. My mom had warned me if I didn't get my act together something like this would happen. She was right.

I wanted to drop to my knees and scream to the heavens, "She was right all along! God, why have you forsaken me?!" but my incessant need to be cool kept me from following my instincts.

I reluctantly forced my body through the entrance to the staff room where I was met by my principal and a Native American man draped in traditional Haida regalia.

"Jason, this is Mike" she said softly. "He specializes in working with kids like you."

Mike proceeded to explain to me that I was a First Nations person and that I would be attending weekly classes to learn more about my ancestry. According to him, I needed to be taught in the traditional ways and that's why the conventional methods of education weren't connecting with me. The principal stared at him bright eyed the entire time. She ate up every word with enthusiasm.

From that day forward I noticed a shift in the way I was treated by the education system. Previously I was expected to meet a certain standard and was held accountable when I failed. Now I was expected to fail and when I did I was merely meeting an almost negative threshold set by the system itself. In high school I was placed in alternative or "dumb" classes where we spent more time hanging out in the hallway chasing girls than we did in the classroom. The "traditional First Nations education" continued, but it was nothing more than all of the indigenous students crammed into a room with a befuddled PE teacher who would rather let us hang around and listen to rap music than bother engaging with us on any level whatsoever.

I dropped out of high school in the tenth grade. I returned a year later after many nights of tearful pleading on the part of my mother. When I walked across the stage at my graduation ceremony I was handed an empty leather folder that should have held my diploma. A few weeks later I received a letter notifying me that if I wished to achieve a high school diploma I would have to start again from the eighth grade. I never went back.

The real tragedy is that I was actually a bright kid- and there were a handful of teachers who knew it. The very reason you're reading this right now is because of a tenth grade english teacher who discovered my talent for writing and encouraged me to pursue it. When I was challenged or engaged I excelled- often completing courses like psychology and english literature with A's- but I was rarely challenged, and therefore I was deeply disinterested in academic learning.

I often wonder what my life may have become if the education system never learned of my ancestry. What interesting subjects I may have discovered and what new pathways would have opened to me. Perhaps I would be a novelist, or a physicist, or maybe an engineer. I'll never know because I was limited to a dumbed down curriculum based on the notion that I was intellectually incapable due to a racial category I was placed in, which in their view was tantamount to a genetic defect.

It was the way they identified me, the way they wanted me to identify, but it was never my identity. The latter perspective was the only thing that saved me later in life.

I think hard about how to address this new sexual identity issue with my stepson and I fall on two potential options: I can give the "everybody is unique and you should love them for who they are" fairy tale most parents tell their kids, or I can give him the truth.

And given my own history, I resolve to share the reality rather than the idealist fantasy.

I begin by pointing to the backgrounds of these friends; the non-binary friend is a black orphan adopted and raised by a well to do white couple and the pansexual friend comes from a broken home with siblings who suffer from mental health issues. I explain that these are more than likely identities these young men are trying on in the hope of finding themselves, and they will probably experiment with many before they discover what they're looking for. It is also entirely possible that this is who they truly are, but an adolescent boy doesn't randomly find within himself a new gender or sexual identity without at least some minor outside influences planting those ideas in his mind, and when the trends shift toward something else and these identities grow unpopular, they will almost certainly be discarded for whatever emerges next in the mainstream lexicon that will boost their social profile and make them feel a sense of belonging.

But whatever the case may be, these are your friends and it's important to be a friend to them through it all because they will eventually grow into their true skin, and they undoubtedly need a confidant by their side as they continue along their journey toward whomever is waiting for them at the end of that long, twisting road.

I suspect race was never a focal point in my home for this very reason. My mother knew it would become my identity and through the process of both internal and external prejudices, I would ultimately fall into the trap of racial and cultural self-victimization. She never allowed me to be a victim, no matter the circumstance, and because of that I never allowed myself to accept a lesser existence. Even as I traveled through high school and failed stupid class after stupid class, I was reading Hemingway and Orwell and Dante and Chaucer. I knew there was more to who I was than what the system was telling me and I took it upon myself to rise above the laughably low bar that was set for me. The only difference between who I was and who these two kids currently are is that they can remove these non-binary and pansexual identities at will, mine is embedded in my DNA.

I just hope someday they realize their identity is not defined solely by their gender or sexual preferences, but rather the whole of their character and the experiences that built them.