This I’m A Berkeleyan feature was written as a first-person narrative from an interview with Micaela Camozzi. Have someone you think we should write about? Contact news@berkeley.edu.
My parents are first generation Americans. My mom’s family is from the Philippines, and my dad’s side is from Italy and Switzerland. They were both raised Catholic, but growing up, my brother and I didn’t feel the pressure of religion in our household.
I grew up in the Bay Area, and I attended Catholic schools in Walnut Creek and Concord. My parents thought it would keep me out of trouble.
They’d see these sixth-grade public school girls wearing little booty shorts, and they said to me “Oh, no. You’re going to wear long plaid skirts.” My dad also noticed my brother and I would play-fight often, and he had us join Kung Fu classes which kept us very busy.
In Catholic school, all students would pray every day before and after class. It was typically a Hail Mary or an Our Father, standard prayers that every kid knew.
I was with the same 30 kids in every class for 13 years, and they were all Catholic. Students in the school were mostly either white or Asian.
But I was both, the one mixed kid.
Our teachers instilled in us a sense of compassion and empathy through the Catholic religion, which I really appreciated. But they also enforced extreme stigmas about what was good, and what was bad.
I was a good student and very firm in my Catholic faith. I’d sit in the front row of class every day and answer all the questions. My freshman year, I actually won Best Religion Student at my high school. I was in the pro-life club, and I was taught to abstain from sex until marriage, and also that marriage was only allowed between a man and a woman.
It was all very black and white, with no room for grey areas. And we never questioned the things we were taught.
When I was 11, I remember thinking women were beautiful. But I didn’t know being gay was a real thing. I didn’t have the language to describe what I felt, and I didn’t know queer people existed until Katy Perry’s song “I kissed a girl” came out in 2008.
Being abstinent made so much sense to me because I didn’t want to have sex with a man. I actually thought about becoming a nun because I would think “What’s the point of marriage?”
For a religion class project once, I sewed a coat colored like a rainbow. At the time I didn’t think much of it, and no one asked me why I made it.
I think it was because of an Old Testament story in the Bible that pre-dates the tribes of Israel. The story of Joseph. He was one of 12 children and his father’s favorite. His father gave him a really colorful coat and his brothers got mad, and threw him in a well.
All of that kind of mirrored my identity at the time, and what I was feeling. The rainbow representing me being gay. Concealing my sexual identity was like being thrown in that well myself.