Did you always know you were gay?

I thought I liked girls through middle school and early high school but I think it was more of society telling me this is what I should like, and once I had a few girlfriends I knew it wasn't for me. I always kind of felt like I was dragging my little sister around. Then I had relationships with guys and it just felt so much more real, actually satisfying and fullfilling for once instead of a sort of charade to be cool. But when I was young, I never knew I'd turn out to be gay and always felt I liked girls up until about age 13/14.

 

I wanted to address the "did you know" part? And, yes, I did know that I was different from a lot of my peers and that I still am in my adult years. What I noticed and notice is that I tended to notice a lot of things going on around me and was hyper-vigilant, and could then spell it all out later, while my peers would gloss over most of it. On top of that, they told me I was weird because of being keenly inquisitive and analytical. Some people still do. I just wish I was smarter. Some people who have a real ease grasping difficult topics and subjects impress me. So, in that way, I did always feel different and still do!

 

I never denied anything. I've always been messy and beyond borders. In a way, I'm thankful for that. Despite my confusion, my years of trying to figure out "just what am I?" in the end, I'm grateful to be me -- messy out of the box me.

 

Lots of denial on my part. At ten, I was already afraid that I might be gay. At 13, I was a freshman in high school and always got an erection in the locker room and showers after gym class. At 20, I was terrified at the question on the military entrance physical that asked if I was gay. I was still a never-been-kissed virgin, but... And then around 23 I started having oral sex with men, but was in total denial that I was gay. Got married, had kids, kept having sex with men, kept fighting it and denying it, and thinking that it would go away. At 43, I told a friend about it, but still didn't consider myself gay. At 53, I finally admitted it to myself that I am gay. And over the past few months, I have been coming out to more people, but I don't know that I'll ever be out to everyone. The biggest hurdle was getting honest with myself, and coming out to myself.

 

Yes and no, I knew since about 13 I had attractions to guys but it didn't really kick into overdrive where I knew for sure until my early 20s. My attraction to women has sort of faded away, so I know first hand your sexuality is not fixed.

 

Hi,

Does it matter?

Are you aware of the discrimination, prejudice, homophobia and violence LGBT faced historically?

Good examples everywhere; see Mathew Shepherd murdered in 1998. Watch Gay USA news on feespeex
Freespeech TV.

http://youtu.be/MOF4z6xUrUo

Whether you consciously knew or not there was a tidal wave of oppression from family and society to remain silent.

 

This describes a lot of my experiences as a kid and a young adult pretty well. I always did have a sense of being different in some way, and would notice peoples' reactions to me, and the things going on around me, in a way that was unlike the other kids. It made me able to draw conclusions from what I saw and make assumptions that were generally dead on (with a few notable exceptions), and people who could really get in depth with topics that they were fascinated with impressed me no end. Still do (in fact, my boyfriend is one of those people who can grasp complex subjects easily and it turns me on no end!)

The main "notable exception" was sexuality. I can look back myself as a child and young adult and think, sheesh, how could I NOT have known I was gay? But how I understand "gay" now is not how I understood it then. That's important. I knew I had very strong feelings for guys that I didn't understand. I had what I assumed to be "crushes" on girls as well, although it's probably more accurate to say that I was fascinated with them because I wanted to be as appealing to a certain type of guy as they were. (I remember surreptitiously reading a book written by an ex-hooker on how to please a man, and getting very turned on by it, but looking back I realize that I was reading it in the first person and getting turned on by the thought of DOING the things she talked about, not RECEIVING them!)

My family was not visibly affectionate and I never really connected that visceral reaction I had for guys with anything I was "supposed" to feel for girls. Men married women and had kids. Period. My vague, screwed-up impression of being "gay" at the time was a "lifestyle choice" involving anonymous sex, S&M, drugs etc., and so on, so I never really connected my attraction to guys with being gay. I couldn't POSSIBLY be gay (although I did concede that maybe I was slightly bisexual). And I assumed my general disinterest in girls was just because I hadn't met the "right girl" yet.

So I finally DID meet what I considered to be "the right girl" and things actually were acceptable with her for awhile. We did have sex, had 2 kids (and I actually wanted more), and for a time my interest in guys was absolutely still there, but not a part of my daily life (and I assumed most guys had the same feelings). But our relationship had some definite issues, and as we drifted further apart, the feelings for guys resurfaced. I also had more exposure to gay men through my job and had already begun realizing that being gay wasn't a "lifestyle choice" but a hard wired orientation of physical and emotional attraction to the same sex, and nothing else.

So if I had had all the understanding of sexual orientation back then that I do now, I would say yes, I always knew I was gay. But I didn't. God knows there were a ton of clues. but the simple fact is that I didn't understand it enough to truly realize I was gay, and just saw myself as "different" from the other guys in some nebulous way.

 

I always wanted to be like and look like the very muscular male boys, but never understood that this meant that I was actually attracted to them, because people just didn't do that back when I was a kid. We were supposed to be attracted to girls and want to date them and get married to them and screw them and have happy families, so that is what I tried to do, after years of doing nothing at all, but watching my life drift by. Now that I know what was "wrong" with me, it all makes sense, but it is too late to change the past, even if one could go back and do the "right" thing in that "wrong" era for gay people. Just another collaterally damaged person in the War Against Homosexuality, which the Tea Party Republicans are still trying to wage. Hopefully the Supreme Court will declare peace, or at least a truce, this summer with their gay marriage decision, and the healing can begin.

 

By any chance, was that book "The Happy Hooker," by Xaviera Hollander? :confused2:

 

It was a sequel to it. Daaaamn. I was about 15 and skimmed through it at breakneck speed before one of the bookstore employees told me to put it away. The contents were filed away in the archives for future reference. Thank God it was winter and I was wearing a longish, loose coat. :eek:

 

Short answer, no. Should I have known, yes, around age 13. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch. My story is long and complicated and I may post it. For me it was like a switch went off around March of last year and I went from believing I was straight to bi to gay in a matter of 8 months. However looking back the signs were there all along. I really should have known about 4 years ago when my very close gay couple friends were visiting and we were in my hot tub and one put his hand on my inner thigh and I didn't flinch. Funny story, when very intoxicated one night I told the same friend I'm not as straight as you think I am. I remembered the next day but swept it under the rug just as all the times before.


It was never a problem with girls, as I've been with many, but I never pursued, it was always the other way around and I just went along with it I guess. I'm an introverted scientist and live in my head in a pile of numbers and data yet I am painfully unaware of my self.

 

No. I hadn't even heard the word "lesbian" until late Jr. High. And when I did, it was used quite negatively. My perception of what a lesbian was did not match who I am. In high school I developed a crush on a female friend and wrote the feelings off as "confusion" or "close friendship." In college, an enormous crush on my best friend started my questioning, and I went into denial. At times I would consider myself "A little bi," but I told myself that as long as I was attracted to guys I wouldn't need to address those feelings I had for women. Had a looong crush and short relationship with a male friend, all the while wondering and worrying what was wrong with me, and if I may be asexual. Occasionally those little doubts in the back of my mind would spring up, but I squelched them. It was only in the past year, having hit 30 and had very little experience in the romance department, that I started considering "Maybe I'm not as straight as I think I am."

 

I always had two parallel minds, or states of consciousness, like parallel universes that can't meet or a massive explosion would occur. There was the "me" who looked at boys, then men with keen sexual interest, developing crushes, and romantic fantasies, since the age of 4. Then there was the "me" who acted as if I was just an average joe, knowing nothing, admitting nothing. But, yet I knew and didn't know. I'l pull a Bill Clinton, it depends on what you mean by the word "know".

 

It wasn't until about the ago of 20 or so when I really first heard about what homosexuality entailed. I don't even know if I had even heard the word before that.

I had had feelings for men right from when I had my "sexual awakening" at the onset of puberty, but growing up in a family that didn't talk about sex at all (I never did receive "the talk") I didn't really have any guidance one way or another. I fooled around with a couple male friends in my teenage years and there was no perception that it was frowned upon (although it certainly wasn't made public).

Coupled with that I lived in a rural area, and we had little to no media access: cable TV ended at the city limits and the internet was still relatively new. The church we attended was relatively benign and so I don't remember any strong negative or anti-homosexual messages emanating from that direction (not that I actually paid much attention to what was going on in church). I very soon after, once my parents were willing to let me stay home alone, left the church as well as belief altogether.

I was also, and still am, quiet, introverted and a loner so it wasn't until I joined the Army at age 20 and my social circle started to expand that I became more aware of homosexuality and the concomitant stigma. As a result, I began to repress it more and more to the point that despite certain friends having suspicions about me, I married.

And here I am today, more and more it continues to surface in unexpected ways and is becoming a bigger and bigger rainbow-coloured elephant in the room.

 

It's funny how many memory bubbles bob up to the surface when I read other people's stories on EC. This one reminded me about when I was in class at my all male college. before class started, the guy in the seat in front of me turned around and as some kind of joke started rubbing my inner thigh with a ruler. I got hard right away and didn't stop him, honestly I was hoping that it would lead to something with him. when he realized I wasn't pulling back, he got grossed out and said "hey, you're not supposed to like it" and turned back around. you know, I was really ripe for having gay sex back then, the opportunity just never presented itself. if it had, I probably would have figured it out a lot sooner.

 

Agree, Wildside. I've been remembering much more lately. These guys loved to mess with the 'straight' guy. I don't want to say they broke me down, but they definitely helped kill any internalized homophobia I had.

 

This is me, exactly.

 

I have to say that despite my general cluelessness back then, this describes me to a T. While I was definitely making terribly awkward and half-hearted attempts at dating girls back then, if some guy had made eyes at me and shown some real interest in me--especially on a personal, friendly level--I would probably have done anything he asked. (In fact that's how my one experience with a guy came about, and although it was certainly nothing very special or satisfying, I can remember it in great detail even though it was over 30 years ago.) I'm actually thankful it didn't happen that way. I was naive and trusting to the core, with no suspicion or sense of self-preservation, back then. Had I started having sex with guys in college, I'd be dead now. I have no doubts about that whatsoever.

 

Suppression is mighty powerful stuff.

I figured out I was bisexual as a teenager, and at the time I briefly flirted with the idea of maybe being trans*, but then I began dating a straight guy with zero interest whatsoever in dating men. So, all of my genderfluid feelings went into a box, and stayed there for six years. It wasn't until after we split up in my mid-20s that I started to question again, and it wasn't until I had the support of my current, wonderful, loving (and bisexual) girlfriend that I really began to delve into figuring out my gender identity.

It's still a work in progress! But it wasn't possible with the social structures I had in the past, and it is now. Other people are terrible and wonderful things.