Joined the Mayqueeze.
Names in particular are under no obligation to follow established or common spelling or pronunciation patterns. A simple search on the engine of your choosing would’ve told ya that’s the way it is pronounced. It is, of course, unusual. But they’re doing it as close to right as they can for Ralph.
For my answer I’m going to assume - because it wasn’t all that clear to me - that you are also female and you’ll be teaching somewhere in the United States of America. If I’m mistaken, stop reading here.
Kids don’t care. If you tell them this person loves that person and that’s why they’re together, that generally settles that. The problem here is their parents or other influential grownups in their lives … if they’re a-holes or just always have something negative to say about LGBT+, or worse. If news filters through to them and they’re fond of the MAGA hat, I would not be surprised if at the very least you’d be heavily discussed in a text thread of like minded parents.
I would like to say “eff it, it’s 2025, you do you! Shout it from the rooftops. You have nothing to fear in reprisals.” But I’m thinking “sh!t, it’s 2025 in America, there is a chance that you will have to deal with a ton of it if you’re unlucky.” So the question becomes one of your inner fortitude: do you think you can do this job while facing sh!t every day? This ranges from hushed chatter to outright questioning and condemning you for your identity, from kids to parents and possibly to the faculty? Do you want to risk putting quite a heavy load on your shoulders on top of what teachers carry in general? If you say yes, or you can find other work when it gets too much, go for it. If not, I’d be cautious to make it about you. You can talk in general about how relationships are described in Spanish without casually mentioning where you stand.
Personally, I want all of us to live in a world where any of these considerations seem laughable. My gut feeling tells me that we have been closer to that ideal in the past decade than we are today.
You can consider yourself anything you like. Time is relative. I’m older than you and would say 24 is young. A nineteen year old might look at you as an antique. The trick is to know your audience. Don’t openly call yourself young if you’re among the elders in the room.
I think the simplest answer is that we humans can hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. There are people who can support free speech and then censor books willy nilly. There are people who believe strongly in a religion but brazenly violate its rules of conduct on the regular. There are people who know homophobia is wrong but still are homophobic. And if this man has the hots for you at the same time this may be his way of squaring that circle.
I don’t know you. I don’t know him. Insert heaps of salt here. This doesn’t sound like a good friendship to pursue.
I think you maybe be extrapolating here from too tiny a dataset. Type “tongue out selfie” into the search engine of your choice and be amazed at how many people have written dissertations on the subject. The simplified take is it started with teenage girls and spread from there.