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Hi, I’m Nathan Ayon and I’m from Washington state. I went to high school in Yakima, Washington and most of my friends took Spanish for high school, for language. That’s what I took. I thought, well, being Mexican-American this will be really easy for me. I have a bilingual mother so I should be able to pass the class and that’s it. And my teacher was gay and I don’t think a lot of people knew he was gay. You know in school people thought he was just really weird but…I don’t know how to say, like, when you’re gay you know but I mean…I knew immediately after talking to him. We had our own personal friendship. It was fun, it was nice having a gay teacher.

So I was barely passing this class with a C and my dad was getting really upset with me. He was like, “Nate, you really need to pass this class because it’s a language and you should be doing it anyway!” So I talked to my teacher and I was like, “Well, finals are coming up, if I don’t pass this final it’s going to be really bad. What should I do to get my grade up because I can’t just turn all my work over again.” And he said, “Well, if you want to, there’s this song that’s really popular in Mexico that’s kind of a…kind of a risque song for its time but it’s called, ‘A quien le importa.’ So do some research on it and if you want to…”, he knew I performed a lot, “…come back and perform it and that can be your final.” So I said okay.

So I went back home, I looked the song up, it was by this really interesting singer named Alaska and she wore dark makeup and she was really loud and then when you translate the lyrics, the song was very, very what I understood as being very gay pride. The lyrics translated to, “I’ll always be myself. I am who I am. I’ll never change. This is the way I’m supposed to be.” I was like, okay, I get it. Gay teacher, gay pride song.

So on our finals day, it was a normal day of class and he was sitting and I was sitting and he said, “Okay, Nate’s gonna do his final” and everyone kind of looked around like, “What? Why isn’t Nate doing the written final?” And I was like, okay, hold on one second. “Where are you going?” “I just need one second…” So I stepped outside and I brought in two friends I had that were in my dance class that I took with. He didn’t know I had this whole choreographed dance to it and we had a strobe light on so I turned the light off and I had a mic that had a battery in it so I could talk real loud and I sang the whole song karaoke style, to the actual song though, there wasn’t like a karaoke screen at the front. My friends were in the back doing backup dances and I passed my class basically. With a B, though. So that was my Spanish final. In my last Spanish class.