Is it possible to not realise that you were gay earlier in life?

I've slowly been speaking to my wife about my emerging attraction to the same sex, and whilst I haven't felt the need to identify myself as being gay or bi yet, this is a very upsetting and emotional time for us both.

One thing my wife said the other day was that she thought I couldn't be gay because I have no knowledge of 'knowing' that I was gay when I was young. Something that she thinks gay men all seem to have experience of, based on our friends' experience and likely internet research she has done herself.

Personally, I don't think this is always apparent, and after reflecting on my own experiences, fellow members of EC and hearing other stories of people coming out online, I seem to notice two different experiences of people coming out later in life:

1. People that knew they were gay when younger, yet chose to try and live a straight life (marriage to an opposite-sex partner etc.) out of fear or because living as a gay person was not a valid option.

2. People that did not even know they were gay when younger, and around mid-life realise that they are gay even though they thought they were straight up until that point of later realisation.

Personally I think that I fall into the second category, due to my fundamentalist religion teaching me to view homosexuality as a (sinful) lifestyle choice, and causing me to repress and not recognise my own orientation and desires.

Which of the above two categories resonate with you? Perhaps your experience is not explained by either of these categories?

 

My journey is more closely aligned to experience "1" as you have reflected the respective paths above. That being said, I would imagine the shame and internalized homophobia that stopped me from being authentic early on are the same emotions that cause a person not to recognize their true sexuality until later in life. These emotions are very powerful and the mind deploys its defensive mechanisms in curious ways. I personally can fully understand how someone would not readily identify there sexuality until later in life; as it takes life experience before someone can begin to overcome the shame and internalized homophobia, which opens the door to finally figuring out whom they are.

 

Hi A. I tend toward '1' too, validated more as I uncover more and more of myself. That repressed shame, self denial and internalised homophobia, not really known or identified with (at least for me) until as suggested the ones own life experiences with more maturity bring your real feelings out into the open. The process is the journey. Its really good to read your story. Well done from a newby too.

 

I'd go for "1" but I was raised in a family where other sexualities are accepted.
Due to the fact that I was traumatised in my childhood and have been dealing with severe depression and anxiety most of my life, which I have mostly recovered from, I just did not have the room in my head and life to deal with my sexuality in any way.

I've had some same sex experiences during my teens and 20s and I came out as bi 2 times in my life but I didn't feel comfortable, thought I was making it up, that it was just a trend, and also had internalised homophobia (I think).
At the time, I wasn't emotionally ready and had never met a woman with a personality I could have possibly fallen in love with either, so I thought I couldn't fall in love with them (even though I did have a crush on a girl when I was 10), that some women were only just really attractive, and that this meant I couldn't be bi.
I kind of convinced myself I was straight, because it was easier and felt safer for me and to build a certain life and future upon. I fell in deep love with a man and we're still happily married.
As I am getting older, getting to know myself better and entering deeper layers of my personality, things are just falling into place. (I'm not really comfortable sharing details about this yet.. it's just... a lot).
But I recently came out as bi a third and last time, also to my husband and he is very understanding and supportive.

 

I think it depends on how you define "know". I'm also going to introduce the distinction between knowing and accepting.

Now that I have the clarity of accepting that I'm gay, in hindsight I had gay signals in my brain that were misinterpreted. I remember thinking some guys were cute as early as 6th grade, yet I grew up in an environment where gay wasn't even on the menu, so I thought this was admiration rather than attraction. When I was in high school, I "admired" certain guys with girlfriends, when in reality I was attracted to the guy. So at some level I knew that I was gay but did not accept it.

I probably fall into category #2 because I was in denial about my sexuality until later in life.

 

I agree with SiennaFire that our definitions of "knowing" and "accepting" complicate this question. I "knew" I was gay early in life, but didn't "accept" that I was gay until a couple of years ago. However, for me, deep down I was aware of my same-sex attractions and I can't exactly ignore that I fantasized about gay sex all along. I allowed my fear and shame to convince myself that I was straight with a gay fetish or kink.

So, I think I fall into the #1 of your examples, but it could be described as the #2 as SiennaFire has done. Not sure, kinda confusing.

Whether you had some level of knowledge of your same-sex attractions but repressed them, or never had that knowledge, if you are clear that you have them now, I would suggest it doesn't really matter either way. Your wife's opinion is just simply wrong and not based upon any credible data.

 

Scenario 2, all the way until my forties. How? I don't know. Religion. Control. No real representation of anything other than heterosexuality in the books I read, media I watched, material I studied in school.

In hindsight, my first crushes were on girls, although I didn't realize that was the case. Maybe because I'm bi. I figured everyone had those feelings. Then, when I felt attraction for a guy, I thought, "Phew! I'm finally attracted to guys!" and I promptly packed up all of those warm, snuggly, bubbly attractions I had to girls and shoved them so far down it took way too long for them to re-emerge.

Oh. And when they did? WHAM. Soooo many emotions. Soooo many tears and fears and attractions. It was intense and scary. Now, with almost two years of knowing this side of me, and a year or so of having accepted it, it's wild to look back and see all the signs I was bisexual all along.

Who knew humans could be so good at denial.

 

Yes, I think it is possible to not realise that you were a different sexual orientation to heterosexual until late on in life. Quite a lot of things, I think, may have contributed to some of us not realising, or repressing this aspect of ourselves (I had not thought about it before now, but repression is different to denial isn't it, because repressed aspects of yourself haven't even seen the light of your conscious mind, so you don't even deny they are there in some cases, because you aren't even aware that they are part of you).

1. When you were growing up, perhaps you didn't see many positive images of homosexuality, or, at the very least, any overtly homosexual role models that you could relate to. This may be especially true if you are quite a masculine man or quite a feminine woman. So being gay didn't feel as if it could possibly be you.
2. Being gay didn't fit with your belief system/ religious identity.
3. You are perhaps one of life's natural conformists - so you are strongly attracted to a life style that will allow you to fit into society with ease.
4. Perhaps your closest relatives were actively hostile towards homosexuality, or just ill-informed about it in such a way that you absorbed some of the prejudices of your family of origin.
5. You might have seen the terrifying government publicity about HIV (Do UK members remember the tombstones on T.V.?), when it first became a public health issue in the 1980s: perhaps you were at an impressionable age at the time and absorbed the message - "bad things happen to those who don't follow the rules".
6. You always strongly felt you wanted children; if bisexual (even if closer to gay) the biological urge to procreate may have subconsciously influenced you to seek out an opposite sex partner. If you have achieved your primary objective to reproduce, your innate sexual orientation may now be becoming more apparent.
7. Especially if you are female I suspect you may not in the past have even realised that you were sexually attracted to some women - perhaps you thought you just really emotionally connected to certain women and did not understand that the tense feelings inside your body, or the fact that you really noticed particular women's little quirks, or the way some women drew your eye - might've​ been beyond simple comparison or admiration or friendship feelings.
8. There may have been occasions when physical attraction was so strong that it threatening to break through into your conscious mind, so then the denial defense mechanism came to your "rescue". I can recall an occasion when a very attractive female student friend of mine, who had come from a conservative Pakistani background, suddenly started wearing clothes that revealed her body. One day she wore a bright red fluffy mohair crop jumper and Levi 501s. The outfit showed off her sexy body to perfection - bare brown midriff, voluptuous breasts and generous mane of long dark hair. My reaction - I said nothing at all, but felt unaccountably uncomfortable, embarrassed and angry that she was putting all this on display as any man wouldn't​ be able to take his eyes off her - jealousy and prudishness on my behalf? Or did I feel threatened for another reason?
9. Roll forward twenty years and perhaps you unexpectedly fall head over heels in love with a person of your own gender. Of course, if this happens and you are married, your repressed sexuality is suddenly dragged up unwelcomely and painfully into your conscious mind. You may try at first to deny the validity of your feelings for this person, or to reframe your feelings for her or him, but it's pretty damn hard in such a scenario not to begin to acknowledge that you are not the woman or man you assumed you were.
10. More confusing still, you may not fall at the extreme ends of the spectrum - you are neither 100 percent homosexual or 100 percent heterosexual, say a Kinsey 4, so it is more difficult for you to accurately interpret your sexual orientation. I

---------- Post added 13th Apr 2017 at 05:42 PM ----------

Oh, and you couldn't possibly be gay if you once fell in love with an opposite sex partner, could you?

 

Peterpangirl- this list is spot on! Can we just like print this list and put it in our pocketbooks? Make it required reading for all EC newbies!!

 

Further points that may lead to a late discovery in sexual orientation:
11. We evolve as people at different rates - so it might not be out of the question for our sexual orientation fluctuate somewhat throughout our life journey - the "fluidity" argument.
12. A lot of us just never really wanted to contemplate their sexual orientation, so avoided it until some sort of crisis or confluence of life events more or less forces us to consider it.

And I think it is fairly typical of human beings to prefer to see life in black and white, rather than in shades of grey. The former makes life seem simple and our path through it all a linear trajectory, but very often in life things are not so simple, indeed the truth is closer to those shades of grey.

 

I guess I'm in category 2, although I figured it out when I was twenty, not in my thirties. But all through my adolescence and teenage years, I assumed I was straight. There wasn't a lot of signs that that wasn't the case.

Lex

 

OED27x - I'm sure my list is not exhaustive! ;-). Come on, EC members, what else could be added to "reasons why I didn't realise until now that I was gay or bi"?

 

13. You assumed that every other 'straight' person was also attracted to the same sex, thought about kissing the same sex or got all tingly the times they did kiss or make out with the same sex (ya know, cause everyone does right??)

 

The people who previously posted are spot on.
One thing that has held me back is the attitudes of people back then was even worst than now.
Also that it's hard to meet people.
There are now many churches that accept homosexuality.
Even as a Christian I never was church going, and not because of homosexuality I'm just not into that.

 

Hi Chip, dear Aj462, thank you for sharing. Its easy to connect with what you're saying.

Yes for me 50's and now almost 60, and throughout which there were/have been so many signs. Some obvious, just a few engaged in, but most run away from, while so many more so subtle. Simply the things of my life, with wily arrangement and show, to put of the observer from making the connection.

On reflection, and I'm sure age helps with perspective - its crazy really, what we put ourselves through. With no short supply of tacky encouragement from the world with its demands for status quo, 'normality' is just a view. But that too is understandable, we are all human, unique, tender, complex.

Now, looking into reality, who have I been fooling but me...LOL

The signposts have always been there, but today I'm Not turning away, Im looking up, reading, acknowleding and taking note of the direction. Refusing denial, lets authenticity breath, and discordance fade.

I guess that one difference I'm finding in my growing self-confience/acceptance/love is 'not' turning away. So while of course trepidation creaps in (thats natural) there is also relief, lightness. Joy.

The other thing Im realising more clearly, known by experience, is it is me who has been painting the signs, putting them along the road, and walking the journey, enjoying the scenery, but not stopping sooner to meet and greet and say hi. It looks so obvoius, yet so hard when in the thick of ones own jumble...who am I.

Now that I've come to a stop, having sat down at the foot of this 'EC, you and me signpost' the view, the ground, the sky, your humanity and mine, its breaktaking.

Dont give up. (&&&):eusa_danc:smilewave

PS: please excuse my meanderings, its just how I make sense of the world, to untangle the tangle, knowing there is no right or wrong way, but rather a journey unique to each of us all. Happy sign posting...!

 

Yes OED27x indeed! I thought so too, for a very long time!

 

OED27x Yes I did assume that the way I looked at certain women was the way all other women looked at women - that I "noticed" them mostly before the men in the room because women are pretty and it's only natural to look at the "competition".
14. Romantic fantasies: I have never actually kissed a woman, but I have had what I now recognise were romantic fantasies about actresses on T.V. This is where it gets blurry. I would imagine scenarios in which the actress was being seduced by an actor and was always focussed on how I imagined her responses in the seduction more than his actions - I'd get really into the emotions and her face and body language. It never struck me as odd that I didn't have romantic fantasies about men, although I'd enjoy films with certain men in them. I guess it's because I didn't recognise my thoughts as romantic fantasies - they were just thoughts without a label....

 

I definitely fall into the second category, albeit for different reasons (which you can read about in my previous post if you're interested).

What prompted me to respond to your thread is your use of the word "realisation." This is how it was for me too. Before you accept you are gay, first of all you have to realise it. This may be hard for people who have "always" known they are gay to understand, but I empathise with what you are saying.

 

AJ462, I'm wondering the same thing about myself that you are. I didn't realize any attraction to the same sex until recently (in my early 40s). Who knows why..human beings are complex and society teaches us to be a certain way early on so who knows. I was very surprised and happy to know that there are wayyyyy more people like us than you think. Psychologists have written so much about the topic of different sexual orientation at mid-life. I too thought you had to at least "have a hunch" that you were gay at an early age but that's not the case for everyone. Every journey is unique.