Mason Bleu, a teenager from Brooklyn, New York, didn’t have a conventional “coming out” moment. As valedictorian of his class, it was expected that he would stand up in front of the school to give a speech. What was less expected was that he would take the opportunity to announce that he was a “proud bisexual man.” The moment was caught on camera and went viral, even landing Bleu on morning talk shows. But over the phone, Bleu told me he wasn’t sure he was going to go through with it at all.

“I was completely nervous. I downed, like, three bottles of water,” he told me of the moments leading up to his speech. “Two of my teachers and my best friend knew what I was about to do. But I asked them, ‘Should I do it? Should I not?’ And it was my best friend who was like, ‘Do it.’”

Before becoming a social media sensation, Bleu was a Dominican kid traveling back and forth from New York to the Dominican Republic every summer with his family. “Every year we saw my family there, we brought clothes and canned food so they could survive,” he said. “I stayed with my aunt and cousins and it would be a big reunion. Sometimes we would go years without seeing them, so it was always a big deal to be all together.”

Both sides of his family are Dominican, he said, and his mother’s side moved to New York when she was 13. They still live within a mile of Bleu today. Growing up in his neighborhood wasn’t always easy, though, and became even harder when he started to understand that he was bisexual during his freshman year of high school. “I started to realize how LGBT people were treated in general, and we didn’t speak about it in my family,” he said. “I could tell there wasn’t acceptance in the area I grew up in. There’s a lot of toxic masculinity going around. If someone was gay, people would say something to him, people had a problem with it.”

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/2019/07/08/student-comes-out-as-bisexual-in-valedictorian-speech/