Some of the reasons why I care

It’s really hard to articulate why I personally feel like I need to make this film but here are some of my scattered reasons.

Since like 6th grade I have always had a few gay friends who I love dearly and just cannot understand why they receive so much undeserved malice for something that they did not choose. Being gay is only one aspect of their being but still it’s seen as everything. It hurts me that they receive so much hatred from society. I wonder if people fear or question their own sexuality so much that they constantly have to defend the “right way to be.”

I absolutely love sociology because it teaches you that people can be any way if in the right context. I can’t help but apply this notion to everything I see. In soc there is an emphasis on gender, and it really opened to a lot of issues about discrimination and gave me a vocabulary for what I was seeing at school, in the public sphere, in my family.

I have two identical twin cousins that are around my age. My grandpa always judges me by my looks and not by intelligence or talent but my cousins represent everything I don’t- power, potential, strength. When we were like 8 we asked him what he thought we would be when we grew up. For Jaron it was a doctor, for Nick it was a lawyer and for me it was an artist, but not just an artist, a FAILED artist. I can’t help but laugh at how close his prediction was, Jaron a pre med major, Nick wants to be a sports journalist and I’m a film major, and I wonder if he is right that I’ll never really succeed. Even though I have been on the Deans list for 5 semesters, my grandpa still thinks my cousins are more successful in college because they are charismatic athletic young men. My grandma Fofo has always been considered with my weight. She used to criticize everything I put in my mouth, because in her eyes I was overweight, and that mattered more than anything else. It’s interesting to look at the generation gap- what they think a woman should be vs. what I think a being a woman is. My mom has always been the opposite of my grandparents; she’s a feminist who raised me basically by herself. She is very strong and independent. I am basically a less OCD version of her. I believe that my former Step dad is gay, but I know he will never ever come out because he knows it wouldn’t be accepted. So my family has been an interesting place to look at and examine gender roles/society.

I just feel like I have a lot invested in furthering my own personal knowledge and understanding of gender, and that I would be a good person to make a film about people who don’t fit in the mold because I am empathetic and very concerned with social equality and the reasons that equality is not achieved and the ways we can change that.