Abraham Esquivel and his wife, above, and Amanda Esquivel, below

Amanda Esquivel didn’t learn the truth about her father’s death until she was an adult; now she has made it her goal to help others live their truth

TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com

Amanda Esquivel’s father died when she was six years old, leaving her and her older brother to grow up in a household she describes now as abusive and neglectful and plagued by poverty. She was about 20 years old before she found out her father was a closeted gay man who died of HIV/AIDS.

Such an experience might have turned some people against the LGBTQ community. But for Amanda Esquivel, it fostered a desire to help a community that for so long had been shrouded in deadly secrecy and shame. That is why she became a licensed professional counselor, and, she said, why she now has a group practice called Room for Change open in the Oak Lawn area.

“I want to make sure we do something big this [Pride] month to reach those that are lost, stuck or unloved because of who they are or who they love,” she told Dallas Voice. “We would like to provide free mental health checkups to anyone who is struggling and open to resources.”

Learning about her father
Abraham Esquivel Sr. was 34 years old in 1991 when he died. He was, his daughter recalls, “a young man with a lot of life left in him.”

She continued, “He had done hair and makeup for people for years — he and my mother worked together — and he was always very careful to make sure his hair was perfect. But then, as he got sick, he developed encephalitis — water on his brain — and they had to shave his head to drain that fluid off. Seeing him like that, with all his hair shaved off, was the first indication to me that something was wrong.”

Amanda said that when they were children, their father’s diagnosis and his sexual orientation were kept secret from them. They were both adults, she said, before they found out. They were told he died of lymphoma, and although he did have lymphoma, she said, he could have survived that if he hadn’t had HIV, too.”

Amanda said that neither she nor her brother were allowed to attend their father’s funeral, and “he was rarely if ever mentioned” in the family after his death.

Her brother, who is four and a half years older than she is, “had more memories of our father than I did.”

And one of those memories involved being mugged and beaten shortly before his death, something that was hidden completely from her at the time.

“Thinking about it now, I am pretty sure that it was a gay-bashing,” Amanda said. “He was much more flamboyant toward the end of his life and, I think, probably much more engaged with the [LGBTQ] community there in the Montrose area” in Houston, where the family lived.

She said that her brother took his own memories of their father and things he found out from members of the extended family, “then he was able to put two and two together and figure it out: Dad was gay, and he got HIV from his male lover. I found out, I think, when I overheard [my brother] talking to someone else. I don’t remember exactly.”

“There’s a lot of secrecy about it all in our family, even to this day,” she added. “I am in my late 30s now, and most of the people in our family still won’t talk about it. I have conflicting feelings about it, I guess — about our mother’s desires to protect her children, especially considering the panic and all around being gay and around having HIV, especially at that time.

“I know that fear contributed to her withholding information from us. But we were lied to, and even children don’t like being lied to,” she continued. “And that, I think, contributed a lot to our relationship with our mother not being very good. Even today if we question her about her father, if we go to her and ask her to share with us what she remembers about our father, she won’t talk about him honestly with us.

Maybe she doesn’t remember accurately, or maybe she still thinks she is protecting us.”

For Amanda and her brother, she said, the secrecy and the difficult years following their father’s death helped bring them closer together, especially after they learned the truth. But when it comes to their relationship with their mother, Amanda said, the secrecy “was just an additional nail in the coffin.”

“When people go through trauma together, often it is a bonding agent for them,” she said. “growing up, we experienced a lot of abuse and negligence indirectly. Our mother didn’t abuse us herself, but she chose partners that were abusive and unavailable to us.

“We survived the death of our father; we survived the ‘fathers’ that came after him, and we survived poverty of living with a single mother. We moved a lot as kids. Back then for us, it was a new adventure.

But I know now we were evicted from those places we left,” she said.

Healing herself and helping others

Once she was old enough to set out on her own, Amanda Esquivel set her attention toward not just healing her own emotional scars but helping others do the same. It was — and still is — her way of paying homage to the father she never had a chance to really know.

She started giving back by volunteering as a counselor at a camp for youth from first grade through age 17 who had experienced the death of a parent or someone else close to them, whether illness, suicide, homicide, an accident or something else.

Being able to help those young people work through their grief, she said, “was a pretty amazing opportunity.”

About eight years ago, Amanda opened her own counseling practice in Garland, working mainly with people dealing with substance abuse and general mental health issues. But as time passed, she said, she began to see more and more LGBTQ clients, which made her realize the need for a practice based in the Oak Lawn Gayborhood and focusing on helping LGBTQ people.

Now the Oak Lawn office, Room for Change, is her third location. “And we can see clients online, too,” she said.

Amanda stressed that counselors at Room for Change are all “master’s level counselors licensed by the state.” But on top of that, “Many of us have gone through extra training in dealing with the LGBTQ community. We are not just relying on love and acceptance; we have the specialized training, too.”
The counselors, she said, are trained to help those who are exploring and navigating their own identity, those who are trying to come out, those who have been rejected by their families of origin and so are grieving the loss of that family while working to build a new family of choice.”

Amanda said she and the other Room for Change counselors understand that Texas is not a state that “embraces and loves those who fall under the Pride banner,” and so they do everything they can to make to the process of getting help as safe as possible. That means the counselors start with a brief interview over the phone with new or potentially new clients, then make some initial recommendations based on the client’s needs and preferences. She stressed that at Room for Change, clients are not just placed with the next available counselor; they are connected with the specific counselor who has the right training and experience to help them with their specific needs.

Her goal, Amanda Esquivel said, is to make sure others aren’t forced to live with the secrecy she and her brother had to endure.

“Secrecy breeds shame. And shame is really, really hard to get out from under,” she said. “What I want to tell people is that whether you seek help from a counselor or a teacher or a friend or a pastor or parent or whomever — get the help you need. Talking about these things, embracing the things we all have in our lives that are a source of shame for whatever reason, brings it out into the light of day. And shame doesn’t do well in the light.”

For more information, visit RoomForChange.info or call 214-385-5445.