Trilingual1946

Now older than God (by a few months, at least) I've been "out" since I was 16 but knew that I was attracted to other males by the time I was 3 years old. My coming out was a drawn-out process that ran from my junior year in high school in a big Midwestern city to my junior year in college in New York, when I finally fully accepted my sexuality and identity as a gay man. 

Although I am white-skinned and was born in the U.S. I grew up in Mexico City (my dad was in the diplomatic corps). We moved there when I was two years old so I have no memory of not speaking Spanish as well as English. Almost all of my elementary education was in Mexico, where I attended bilingual schools. My father also grew up bilingual (his mother's family was from a small almost entirely Spanish-speaking South Texas town) so while we lived in Mexico I spoke as much Spanish as English at home as well as with with my childhood friends, who were almost also bilingual. As a result I speak, read and write Spanish and English with native fluency. That influences me to this day. For example, the history we learned in school in Mexico was very different from the way it was taught in the US and even as a kid I knew that only one version was likely to be true. That made me become a reader and a questioner to try to discern the truth behind the "official stories". As a kid in Mexico I also learned what it was like to be a member of a minority in multiple ways -- I was a güero (someone fair-skinned and light-haired in a country where most people aren't), a gringo, and Jewish in a predominantly Catholic nation. I was also navigating my attraction to other males -- I was young enough not to have words for being gay but somehow aware that I was exclusively attracted to men and that it wasn't considered a good thing back in the 1950s and early 60s. If anyone needs a poster boy for intersectionality, that would be me!

After returning to the US my family lived in a number of cities where I finished junior high and high school. I spent my freshman year in college in my Midwestern hometown, transferred to a college out-of-state, and didn't return to live in the Midwest for more than 30 years. I lived and worked in a number major cities around the country and abroad. I also traveled extensively in Europe and Latin America, and ended up living in Rio de Janeiro for several years after I retired from a long civil service career. My fascination with Brazil began with seeing Carmen Miranda in films as a child (would you expect anything else?) and I made the first of many extensive trips there beginning in 1983. Spanish and Portuguese are very closely related languages so I was able to learn Portuguese very quickly once I was in Brazil and forced to speak it in order to communicate well. Now I have achieved near-native fluency in it. Being married to a Brazilian guy (we're now separated after 17 years together but at home he and I spoke exclusively in Portuguese that entire time) and living in Rio certainly helped with that! On my trips to South America I also spent a great deal of time in Argentina, mainly in its magnificent capital city, Buenos Aires, where I had made many close friends. In all this traveling and living in different places I also had a very active gay life, so there likely will be references to all of them in stories I write. 

Thanks for reading. These are my first attempts at fiction, so commentary and feedback are definitely welcome by e-mail and in the comments section here. So are questions, especially about gay life in Latin America. Feel free to write in English, Spanish or Portuguese!