It wasn’t until their mid-20s that Luis Garay said they understood the depths of two of their identities.
Garay identifies as a queer Latinx person and is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro pursuing a degree in Educational Studies. One of Garay’s research interests is understanding educational experiences of queer Latine students in the southern United States, primarily North Carolina.
“Sometimes the best research is me-search” Garay, who is also the director of Elon University’s Gender and LGBTQIA Center, said. “For me, my research is based on my own personal experiences.”
According to a report from University of California, Los Angeles, 36% of LGBTQ+ Americans — more than 5 million people — live in the South, making it the most populated region of LGBTQ+ Americans in the country.
In addition to the population of LGBTQ+ Americans, the Hispanic and Latine populations have been rapidly growing in North Carolina since the 1990s, according to a report by North Carolina State Demographer Michael Cline.
Elon University English professor Meleena Gil, who identifies as a queer non-binary Latinx person, has found that being in the South and in North Carolina has allowed people within those identities to find ways to build community and protect each other. Gil has also found those outside those identities who also support people within them find ways to do the same.
“Being in North Carolina — we are in the South — there’s something really beautiful about the ways that people have been taking it upon themselves to educate themselves and educate each other on what is effective allyship,” Gil said. “How do we take care of each other, protect each other? How do we circumvent police force? How do we hide people in ways that are or hide the things that we do in ways that are safe, or get people to come to the conclusions that we want without necessarily feeding them that information head on?”
Gil said they have also been able to build community with students of similar identities.
“I don’t know if that’s because I’m queer and Latinx and so queer Latinx students gravitate towards me, but I do find that there’s some level of ‘I don’t fit in, but I will find my home’ everywhere that I think unites us,” Gil said.
As Garay went through college and pursued their master’s degree in college student personnel administration at the University of Central Missouri, they said they began to see overlaps between their queer identity and their Latine identity.
“This connection to a history and a lineage that’s bigger than myself,” Garay said. “I’m not the first queer Latinx person to walk the earth. There are plenty of other people who’ve done that, and there’ll be plenty of other people who are going to come after me.”
While Garay recognizes that they are not the first nor the last queer Latine person, they also understand that both of those identities have a history and culture outside of their physical characteristics.
“When we talk about Latinx identities, we’re not only talking about race and ethnicity,” Garay said. “We’re talking about a history of language, geography, for some people, immigration and migration. We’re talking about just a specific and unique experience to a certain group of people.”
Garay said that LGBTQ+ people also have a rich culture and history.
“For me, culture is not only a history, but it’s also people who have lived through times in those identities that have contributed to an understanding of what that identity means, or what it could mean,” Garay said.
Gil said they recently had an interaction with a child that showed them how previous generations’ perceptions of certain identities can be passed down. They had a conversation with a child about their two dogs, a male chihuahua named McFly and a female pit bull named Dorothea. Gil said the child could not wrap their head around the smaller dog being a boy and the bigger dog being a girl.
“It was a sad moment of realizing that a lot of the kind of gender expectations that he was bringing into this interaction with the dogs and with us was a direct rehashing of whatever his parents have taught him about how women are supposed to be small, quiet, not strong, not scary. Men are supposed to be bigger, more macho, less timid,” Gil said.
Aside from their own personal experiences, an important moment for both Gil and Garay was the Pulse nightclub shooting. In 2016, 49 people died and more were injured after a gunman fired shots at the Pulse nightclub, a well-known gay club, during the club’s Latin Night in Orlando, Florida.
The shooting also affected Gil, who grew up in Orlando cleaning the owner of Pulse’s house.
“I feel very connected to that community,” Gil said. “It was transformative for me as well, both in that I was experiencing great loss and was experiencing fear of what it means to be queer and to be Latine, period.”
Despite the community support that came about in Orlando following the shooting, Gil said that safety has never been guaranteed — especially in marginalized communities.
“Name a time in history in which it was safe to be Latinx or to be queer,” Gil said. “There hasn’t really been one. We’ve gotten into an era of a decade in which it was less dangerous. But even then, it wasn’t great. Even then, people were still being deported, mass deported. People were being put in cages. People were being hate crimed. There has never been an era in history in the United States in which presenting as a racial minority, as a queer person, was safe.”
In August, the United States Supreme Court was formally asked to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark case that extended marriage rights to same-sex couples. In 2022, after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas stated in his concurring opinion that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to same-sex marriage and relationships.
In 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigations reported an increase in hate crimes in the United States, with a significant increase in hate crimes against Latine people.
Throughout Gil’s own field of study, research and education they have found overlaps between LGBTQ+ and Latine identities.
“It gets complicated what rubrics are we using to unite us,” Gil said. “It always feels like a kind of in between, which is already kind of queer in its own right, where you don’t fit into a clear category.”
This broad categorization can even be seen in the United States Census, which defines Hispanic or Latino as a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.
“These terms came from a place of like, ‘What do we do with this group of people that we’ve suddenly just annexed into the United States?’” Gil said. “Then how do we categorize them? Because they’re not white, but they’re also not black.”
Despite the collective history, culture, identifying characteristics and categorization of identities, Gil said that it’s important to note that there can be division amongst identities such as queer Latine people and Latinos for Trump.
Gil said while both LGBTQ+ and Latine identities have their own pockets within itselves, they are still united by broader labels.
“We don’t often fit in together, but we fit in with each other, but also not really all the time. And I think that a lot of folks resonate with queerness in that more fundamental, abstract way,” Gil said. “Whereas queerness as an identity is similarly like, I don’t really fit in.”