Sep 21, 2007  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

By the time he was 27, Carlos Gomez had been living the United States for seven years, had had a boyfriend for two years and was out to everyone around him. But the Colombian-born and raised chef still couldn’t tell his family he was gay.

The only way he was finally able to come out to his family was by passive means. One of his sisters — he comes from a family of 12 siblings — came to visit and he deliberately didn’t remove the photos and other signs showing that his roommate was a little more than just a roommate.

“Coming out was very hard for me because I come from a culture that is very closed-minded about homosexuality,” Gomez, now 45, says. “It’s something that people don’t talk about. When I came to this country, I was very young. And I was very terrified to even mention it to anybody in my family or friends. There weren’t any books. I never went to the bookstore and saw that there were books about homosexuality. It was such a big secret.”

The lack of literature for gay Latinos bothered Gomez, which is why he agreed to consult with local writer Ann Thompson Cook on the Spanish translation of “And God Loves Each One,” a booklet that she wrote in 1988 as a resource about gay issues for churches.

“Ever since we put out ‘God Loves Each One,’ people were asking me to put it in Spanish,” Cook says. So far reaction to the booklets, which explains what sexual orientation is and how it works with scripture, has been positive.

“Everyone is just thrilled to have something going on that could make a difference in breaking the silence in the Latino community about gay and lesbian people,” Cook says. “There’s so much silence and so much fear of your family finding out and expectation that people get married heterosexually. The Latino community is very diverse, but those two things stood out in all the nationalities.”

WHETHER ALL CHURCHES will embrace the book is uncertain. So far the Spanish translation has been distributed through affirming churches and through local gay groups like the Mautner Project and Whitman-Walker Clinic as well as local Latino gay groups. A call to the local Catholic archdiocese about whether they will be using the booklet in their material was not returned by press time.

Cook, who is straight and married, says she’s never received backlash over the booklets.

“I have anticipated it for 20 years and it just never quite happens,” she says. “I don’t always get support from people who say they’re supportive, but that’s not backlash.”

Eva Young, who was born in Panama and now works at lesbian health organization the Mautner Project thinks the booklets have the possibility to help bridge the gap between being gay and religious in the Latino community.

“I think that it’s very difficult for people to support or to embrace or to validate or affirm their gay, lesbian, bisexual children because of the connotation that it’s against your religious beliefs,” Young says. “So this little booklet has the capacity to help people start to engage in that kind of conversation — that you can have your religion, you can still have those deeply held beliefs but you can still love your kid.”