Gender and Sexuality: My Uncle Robby by Jesslyn Montecillo

BACKGROUND

jmont257 — 2025-08-27 05:37:30 UTC

This is Robby. I originally had met Robby because I was working for him as a caregiver given he is disabled and elderly, but I ended up learning so much about him and now we consider each other close friends. Whenever I go and visit him, he shares bits of his past and the first memory I can recall is when he talked about growing up in with polio in the 50s to 70s and having conservative parents. He is originally from Washington and he told me of how homosexuals were not as accepted as they were today in terms of progressive thinking (even with its challenges still) and how he was both gay and a minority. Robby was shunned by his father when he came out as gay and tried to introduce who he calls his “lover” at the time to his father but he was heavily homophobic and was mad that he was not only disabled but homosexual as well. Although Robby’s mother was also very religious and traditional in her beliefs, his mother was more accepting because he grew up very close to her and she told him that he is still her son. The construction of masculinity is why his father was deeply disappointed in him because he was seen as weak in his father’s eyes and not what a “man” should be.

Moving to SF

jmont257 — 2025-08-27 05:55:36 UTC

Robby moved from Seattle to San Francisco and bought a house with his lover in the Castro who lost his life to AIDS as he moved there in the late 70s and the AIDS epidemic started during the 80s. The Castro was where people who were fluid in sexuality went as a safe haven to roam about and be themselves. He tells me all the time about how night life was back in the 70s-90s and how free everyone felt but the AIDS epidemic hit him hard as he lost a lot of friends because of it. Outside of this district it was like living in a world dominated by those with unearned privileges, but there, you could truly be fluid and feel liberated. This area even today is know for being different than following typical societal expectations of gender and sexuality norms.

How Religion Plays into Gender and Sexuality

jmont257 — 2025-08-27 06:13:25 UTC

Robby and I relate as we are both Filipino and understand that many Filipino Catholics have conservative beliefs and this shapes the basis of beliefs and attitudes. For example, when it comes to being transexual, many traditional Catholics in the Philippines in the past and even some today (as times are more progressive now but only really in the last decade or less) found it hard to grasp the concept of people more feminine or masculine which differs from what they correlate to sex as they do not understand that how one identifies themselves could be different than their biological sex because of patriarchal belief systems. My mom told me that when she was growing up she knew people who would beat up others just for not being straight or acting to feminine during childhood when considered a boy and vice versa. That being said, women were given fewer rights and couldn’t have abortions despite lack of knowledge and accessibility to birth control and women didn’t have more power over their autonomy.

Straight While Male

jmont257 — 2025-08-27 06:26:01 UTC

The election season was right around the time I started working for Robby and he and I were both outraged because of the fact that he was yet another straight white male who was able to utilize his undeserved privilege to win the election despite the fact that his appointed judges played a huge role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is a felon who “allegedly” mistreated women and had ties with Jeffrey Epstein, another straight white male who sex trafficked children, and Trump is someone whose followers added to the resentment of minorities and racism sentiment, along with many other things that if he wasn’t considered to be in the position of power and privilege he has and is in, would not have won the election. This is why issues such as misogyny and racism persist within America because we give opportunities to those who really don’t reflect the needs of the people and push forth an unfair social hierarchy.

How Gender and Sexuality had effects on Racism

jmont257 — 2025-08-27 06:45:57 UTC

The most recent time I went to visit Robby, we put on this Hurricane Katrina documentary where it really brought to light a different kind of oppression as black people were kind of left stranded and painted in an awful light while suffering without proper resources and aid. In the documentary, there was this particular scene where the media, instead of covering the fact that people were suffering, made it seem as though the people just trying to get resources after getting sick, starving etc. and labeled them as these violent looters and started a false rumor that women and children were being sexually assaulted and raped in the super dome. Women and children are seen in society typically as more inferior and submissive and they used that characteristic to make them seem helpless not because they were dying on the government’s watch and racist groups of people committing hate crimes towards them but because these men already painted as felons and unsafe criminals were harming them even though everyone in there was just tying to survive. The intersectionality of race having to deal with gender as it projects stereotypes and also is failed systemically.