Louis E. Perego Moreno,
New York, NY.
All my life, I have been out of more than one box. However, after wrestling with the subject for over 20 years, I have arrived at a point in my journey where my identity is defined by belonging to three worlds: Latino, Gay and USA. Many Hispanics in the USA hyphenate their parents’ country of origin with American. I can’t. I am Cuban-Argentine born and raised within the Puerto Rican community of the South Bronx. That’s why it was so much easier to adopt the term “Latino,” which I embrace because it encompasses my three Latin American countries because I never felt that I belonged to any respective one. Then add “gay” to either my Latino or U.S. layer as something shunned by either culture. Though I am a U.S.-born, Spanish-speaking, Caucasian Latino, it was always assumed that I was Anglo. Yet in the U.S., I am placed in a Latino box. I finally realized that there is really no one like me in Cuba, Argentina or the South Bronx. I have arrived at a place where I have taken the best of being Latino, as well as the best of being from the U.S. and injected that into this gay individual and created a unique person who has finally arrived at a place where I am comfortable in my skin and at peace with myself.
