Alba

Alba is about the coolest chick I worked with. On my first day on the job, about the time I was beginning to think I was the only employee with a solid grip on the English language, this girl with really striking, crazy-looking gray contact lenses said, "You're new? ...Man, you're gonna learn Spanish." It was kind of encouraging I guess, and I did learn a good bit of Spanish since I knew barely a word past "hola" back then.
But my story is about Alba.
She is a lesbian who is pretending to be straight for a family and culture that won't necessarily accept her otherwise. In fact, the first time she told me about her preference was about a month after I quit because she heard I might be of the same orientation.
No one knows that Alba is gay except for her sister and her most liberal friends. She thinks that anyone who finds out will shun her, though she's had the same girlfriend for five straight years. She also lives in the basement apartment of her parents' house--with her girlfriend. As far as her parents go, the girl is just a close friend, but they have their suspicions.
As long as I worked with Alba, she was the most ambitious of my coworkers. I got pissed off sometimes because it seemed all she talked about was making money, investments, and success. I told her I just wanted to live my life and I didn't care about money (of course this was when I was making descent money, and I'd forgotten what it's like to scrape by), but she always talked about all the things she wanted to do that involved getting rich. One day she finally told me there was a reason she cared so much about money and that she would tell it to me one day.
That day was the night she came out to me in an Applebee's. It turns out she wants to become successful so bad because she is gay. Right now, she's in college, working, and paying for a car. She's also relying some on her parents because the rent she pays to live in their basement is cheap, but she is terrified of coming out to them. She and her girlfriend have separate beds, they won't hold hands in public, and they are careful about how they talk and act around each other. Over the years, several incidents have made her parents question her sexuality like when a cop found the girls sitting in a parked car together one night, but they believe what they want to believe. She is waiting until she knows she can fully support herself--and her girlfriend, I guess--to come out to everyone without worrying about whether they will disown her or not.

What I don't understand so well is why Alba feels she won't be accepted for loving a woman. It isn't just her family; she told me our coworkers would reject her too. She said it's the Hispanic culture that doesn't accept homosexuals, and she wanted to get away from the culture before she stopped hiding. She's already unattached anyway--her family moved from Mexico before she was born, and she speaks English and Spanish equally fluently. I'm confused about the Hispanic culture rejecting her more than any other for one main reason: most of the transvestites I've seen in Georgia have been Hispanics. I'm not sure about the difference, but I'll take her word for it.