You’re 7 years old, playing on your Gameboy Advance in the living room while your parents watch TV in the background. You glance up from your game to see two women kissing on the screen. Your mother covers your eyes and groans in disgust as your father hurries to change the channel.
You’re 8 years old in the backseat of your parents’ car, headed to a family reunion for Thanksgiving. Your parents gossip in the front seat about how one of your cousins is gay, scoffing at the fact. They make it clear that this cousin isn’t trustworthy and how they don’t want you near them. During the family reunion, you watch them, making sure to keep your distance. You don’t want to be near a gay person.
You’re 9 years old, walking down the street of your tourist-ridden town with your parents on a steamy summer day. Two men in front of you hold hands and share a peck. Later, your mom makes a dirty remark about “the gays,” how gross they are, and how they shouldn’t be doing that in public.
You’re 10 years old in 5th grade. All of your classmates use the word “gay” as an insult. “That’s sooo gay, ew!” “Stop being so gay!” You join in because it’s the cool thing to do. You make the association in your head that the word gay is a negative, derogatory term.
You’re 11 years old on an Internet message board. There is a thread discussing whether homosexuality is right or not. You type a heated response based on all of the beliefs that have been instilled in you for years: being gay is not only wrong, it is disgusting. Gay people should not express affection in public – what if children see and copy this behavior, and become gay themselves? People argue with you and contest your viewpoints, but you don’t listen. Gay people are gross. You’ve been raised with this. It’s all you know.
You’re 12 years old. You start to watch certain TV shows and movies just because some of the actresses are gorgeous. You watch “Transformers” for Megan Fox, “Heroes” for Hayden Panettiere, “Gossip Girl” for Blake Lively, and “The Vampire Diaries” for Nina Dobrev. You write this off as admiration. You don’t want them; you want to be them. Yet, they are the last thing on your mind when you fall asleep every night.
You’re 13 years old. You share your first kiss with a boy during spin-the-bottle at your best friend’s birthday party. His lips are thin but the kiss is sloppy and wet. No butterflies set loose in your stomach like all of the songs about kissing claim. For you, this kiss is just lips on lips. Skin on skin. You feel good to be able to say that you’ve kissed someone, but inside, you feel nothing. You write him off as a bad kisser.
You’re still 13 years old, and you start watching “Glee,” a progressive TV show with several main characters who are gay. You started watching because the cheerleader on the show, Quinn Fabray, was beautiful and you saw her on a poster in the mall. You watch as Kurt comes out to his father as gay. You watch as Santana comes to terms with her sexuality and falls in love with her female best friend. As you blog about this show on your Tumblr, you realize that maybe you can relate deeper to these characters than you initially thought.
You’re 14 years old, and there’s a beautiful girl in your school. You encounter her in the hallways every so often, and sometimes, the two of you hold eye contact for a second too long. You look forward to these encounters every day. You begin to look for her in the halls. First, you write this off as admiration. But soon, you put everything together. Glee. Relating to Santana. Watching movies and shows for the pretty actresses. Feeling the butterflies in your stomach that were absent during the kiss with the boy as you encounter this pretty girl. You don’t admire her, you like her, and for months, she is all you can think about even if you only see her once every couple weeks.
You’re 15 years old, and you identify as bisexual because, deep inside, you hate yourself for loving girls. You still believe there is a sliver of yourself who could love a boy. You don’t tell any of your friends from school because your town is small and gossip spreads like wildfire. Your parents hate gay people, and a part of you hates yourself for being gay as well. This marks the beginning of the cycle of falling in love with straight girls who will never look at you the same way for three years. This also marks the beginning of the nightmares about being outed. You wake up in a cold sweat, heart racing, momentarily forgetting that your dreams aren’t reality. When people ask you what your biggest fear is, you say “clowns,” because you could never truthfully divulge that your biggest fear is being outed.
You’re 16 years old and you lose your virginity to a college boy who uses an absurd amount of teeth in his kisses. The sex only feels good when you close your eyes and imagine that you’re with a girl instead. You don’t care about your first time not being special because boys aren’t special to you. He finishes first and doesn’t care that you didn’t. As you get dressed, he asks you what your name is because he already forgot it.
You’re 17 years old, and you have your first real relationship. It’s with a girl. You’ve talked to several guys in the past, but it was never anything serious. She lives thousands of miles away but she’s better than any girl in your small, conservative hometown with the tiniest LGBT dating pool of all time. You never get to hold her hand, fall asleep with her in your arms, or even share a kiss. Despite all of this, she makes you feel things you’ve never felt before. You’re in love, and you can’t imagine ever loving a man like this.
You’re 18 years old and you just went through your first heartbreak. You move to college thousands of miles away from home with the hopes of expressing yourself for the first time. You might be more physically, sexually, and emotionally attracted to women, but you still download Tinder and swipe through hundreds of boys. You hook up with a few of them, hoping to form some type of meaningful connection. Unsurprisingly, every single time you are left disappointed, yet you still continue to identify as bisexual and write off the disappointments as these boys just being untalented in bed. You refuse to kiss a girl who doesn’t mean anything to you because, unlike boys, girls are special. Every single type of first time you have had with boys was meaningless. You want to actually feel something with girls. You need your first kiss, your first touch, your first everything with a girl to be special.
You’re still 18 years old, and you finally kiss a girl for the first time. You’ve made out with so many boys that you’ve lost track, and you have grown accustomed to their styles of kissing. The harsh rubbing of their stubble against your cheek. The way they force their tongue into your mouth. The way that every kiss with them feels frantic and hungry in a bad way. This kiss with this girl lasts a few seconds at most. It’s platonic. But within this three second, brief kiss, you feel more than you’ve ever felt with any guy. The butterflies that were absent with your first kiss and every single one in between finally release. As you pull away, you are 100 percent certain you will never allow a boy to touch you ever again.
You’re 18 years old. After an entire childhood of homophobic attitudes being ingrained into your being, you finally overcome it. You know you’re not bisexual because no boy could ever elicit the lightheadedness you feel when you’re around a pretty girl. Sitting across from a cute girl on the bus makes your face flush red while giving your body to a man in bed makes you feel dirty and disgusted. Every intimate experience shared with a boy in the past was just practice for the girls who would actually mean something to you.
You’re not bisexual. You are gay, and you are proud.
