The first boy I kissed in Chile was young, happy and – what has stayed with me ever since – carefree. He danced the weekends away, giggling with people he'd met the same night at“alternative” discos – dance clubs gay in every way but name.

And it was that in Chile – a Catholic country where people boasted of their homophobia on national talk shows and Neo-Nazis staged raids on gay clubs – that I felt freer than I ever had before.  Sure, I was in the closet – my Chilean classmates, unlike my American ones, had no idea I was gay, and were usually shocked if I told them.  But inside the clubs, and inside my friends' apartments and homes, I felt closer than I ever had to any gay Americans.  I felt alive in a way I hadn't known I could – accepted in a community that embraced and shielded their members from callous attitudes toward homosexuality.

This joy was tinged with uncertainty, however, because my Chilean friends – those who had made me so comfortable with myself – were themselves decidedly unsure about themselves. In fact, by American standards, most were blatantly homophobic.  My boyfriend told me he didn't like locas – fairies – and that, as much as he liked boys, he just couldn't see himself without a wife and kids one day.

That he was dating a male – that he had only ever been attracted to males – did not appear to him to contradict his dreams of the future.  His weekend exploits were unrelated to his future, he said; it didn't matter what he did now, because a marriage and a family awaited him.

In America, when a boy kisses a boy, he's making a life decision: He is choosing a path in many ways determined for him – a path more difficult but, as we now see, not impossible to enjoy. When two boys kiss in America, they know that, in some ways, they are giving up a normal way of life.

But when that happened in Chile, the kiss was really just a kiss.  A friend from the study abroad program told me that a group of teenage girls in a foster home told her that all the girls were bisexuales, that all of the girls were pololeando – dating – each other.  The director of the foster home explained away the behavior, saying that the girls have their“needs,” and that they were bisexual just like prisoners were.  That is: temporarily, for fun.

Not that there isn't a gay community in Chile.  There was a gay celebration across from La Moneda, where Chile's president lives, and groups handed out flyers proclaiming that“homophobia is a curable sickness.”  But almost without exception, the gay youths I met in Valparaiso were more interested in the next song the DJ would spin than in the next chance to cure homophobia.

That attitude, I think, has quite a bit to do with the emphasis on family.  Before I went to Chile, I thought I saw my family quite a bit, that we were fairly close.  But in Chile I saw friends who'd graduated from high school spend every meal with their families, take weekend excursions with them, talk about them constantly – their commitment was inspiring.

It was also worrisome, as I saw them hide from their families their actual lives.  One day, I happened to run into my boyfriend while he was walking to get a haircut.  He shook my hand, said he'd call me later, and rushed away to walk with his mom.  Later, he couldn't understand why I was upset, why I'd felt like no more than an object; he had to ignore me – there was no choice – because his mom was there.

My friends' commitment to living as their families wanted them to – and their desire to have their own family, with children who would obey them in turn – kept many of them from seriously considering any different lifestyle.  The friends I liked the most were the smart ones – the ones studying for the national college exam, or high school seniors set on making it into engineering school.

They were determined to succeed in Chile's meritocracy – as lawyers or engineers or in another career that would buy them a house, a car, a slice of middle-class Chilean life.  And for now, they were itching to explore their sexuality.  But for my friends who wanted their parents' lives, they knew that this chapter of their lives was just that, and that they would bid farewell to boys when it was time for real life.