Carlos Gerena Conflict Between Religious Beliefs And Sexuality Summary

For my article journal assignment, I chose Conflict Between Religious Beliefs and Sexuality written by Carlos E. Gerena. This article is an autoethnography, which is based off a person’s personal experience with any cultural, religious, political, or social experience, under an analytical lens to have a larger understanding of not only that person’s experience, but the general experience in that culture, religion, political or social background. Gerena writes his autoethnography about his personal experiences with religious and Latino upbringing, while simultaneously being gay. He describes the trials and tribulations that came about as he grew from his youth, and how he copes with them at the time the paper is written. Personally, some ideas

While attending Pentecostal church services and schools, and living with his family he had several experiences in which he was taught and told that homosexuality was wrong, evil, even. When Gerena was 10 years old, he began to realize that he was attracted to the same sex, and began his journey of navigating life as a gay Pentecostal Latino. At first, he describes feeling confused, and pressure from the fear of rejecting his faith or going against his cultural norms. He pairs the retelling of his feelings with statistics detailing how religious views on homosexuality can become oppressive to the religion’s followers, and how these oppressive ideas that stem from religious and cultural values can negatively affect those in the LGBTQ+ community, to the extent of self-harm. As the paper continues, Gerena writes on how these negative experiences influenced his decision to not be an active member of the church, but keep his personal relationship with God, and to earn his bachelor’s degree and eventually a graduate degree in social work. Through his time in the graduate program he was able to begin healing the emotional turmoil he experienced at the hands of homophobic views held by his family members and religion. Gerena states that he still has his own personal relationship with God, and now works as a social worker for children and their family that struggle with their homosexual

In high school, there were discussions regarding homosexuality in my religion classes, but also in some of my English classes, the same for college as well. Although we were taught in high school that homosexuality was not permitted in the Catholic church, we were also taught to respect those in the LGBTQ+ community, as we had no place to judge them. In college this class is the first that I have discussed homosexuality under the scope of religion, and the discussion was more open, and allowed more personal thought on topics such as gay marriage, gay couples adopting, etc. Genera’s autoethnography interacts with these differences, as he discusses the importance of opening up conversations around gay youth struggling with their identity, as prejudice poses multiple risks not only in a person’s physical environment, but their emotional state as well (pgs. 5,6). I believe that if I had these open conversations more often in high school, it would have been easier to understand myself, in terms of how my bisexuality and Catholicism coincide. Through discussions and reading materials I have been given in my classes throughout high school, and currently now as a college student, I can see how important Genera’s