I knew I was gay when... (Part 2)

Fall 2004:  Three years later, and I was still experiencing weird emotions that seemed beyond the typical spectrum of adolescent angst. I had absolutely denied myself the option to explore my feelings and had instead worked on suppressing and separating that seemingly traitorous part of myself. At night, I would ask to be attracted to boys in my prayers. Despite my conversation with myself at 13, I had done this every night since then. I wasn’t even religious, so praying to God meant I was desperate.

These weird emotions began to take a toll on me. I did my best to cover it up with my friends, school, and softball. But it lingered. And so, occasionally, I would try to explore what my feelings could potentially mean, casually of course. I grasped on to any indication that my feelings, none of which my friends seemed to be experiencing, were common for teenage girls. I would secretly take quizzes in magazines that declared “Could you be gay? Take this quiz to find out!”

It was a strange dichotomy that I lived. I felt equally strongly about the possibility that I could be gay and also what I thought to be the more likely reality that there was no way I was. I was so afraid of rejection from everyone and everything around me that I always kept my mask in place.

By the time I was 16, I was painfully aware of the fact that I had yet to feel butterflies again for anyone, let alone a boy (why this was such an important indicator for me, I’ll never know). On the one hand, it was great. No butterflies for girls meant that I wasn’t gay! On the other hand, I was worried that I wasn’t experiencing anything.

Of course, I had crushes on boys, which I knew was expected  of me. I found these crushes to be utterly exhausting at first. So much faked enthusiasm, but after a while I got the hang of it. The crushes fell into a pattern. I would flirt with him in school or over AIM, no problem, but the next step was always too daunting for me. Whenever I got too close to actually dating a boy, I became totally anxious and closed off. Quite the opposite of butterflies, I had a pit of dread in my stomach whenever I had to go on a date, which was admittedly rare. I was pretty good at shutting things down.

Gradually, those feelings of dread disappeared and were replaced with numbness, which I accepted as a welcome alternative. Numbness was not ideal, but it was preferable to overwhelming anxiety and fear. Numbness made it easier for me to fake fitting in with the social norm.

Looking back, these conclusions I drew seem dramatic, but I resigned myself to these feelings of numbness for the rest of my life. I was not ready to admit to possibly being gay, so I relied instead on the idea that maybe there was just something wrong with me. Nonetheless, I figured I would still get married to a man, have kids, and just never be truly happy. I honestly didn’t know that I had an alternative (again, NO Emily Fields and Paige McCullers with their puffy drapes and shared future). I couldn’t make myself picture a different future. Sometimes I thought about being alone for the rest of my life. I’m not sure which vision was worse, because I knew it wasn’t what I really wanted. I accepted this outcome reluctantly but usually comforted myself by pushing away the future and my feelings. Nothing to worry about…yet. 

I knew I was gay when... (Part 1)

As a 25 year old looking back on my pre-teen and teen years, I see so many signs and indications that I was already a big fan of other girls, that it’s hard to believe that I stayed closeted until I was nearly 21. Despite my obsession with Mandy Moore—and I mean complete and utter infatuation, like trolled her website so often that I muted the background music so my parents wouldn’t know the depths of my admiration—and my love of cuddling my girl friends during scary movies and my utter lack of understanding when my kinda-sorta high school boyfriend wanted to hang out more than one day a week, I was adamant that I was a straight girl. I denied all other evidence to the contrary. And as I’ve mentioned, the evidence was plentiful.

My girlfriend and I are recently engaged--I guess I should call her my fiance(!). We're getting settled in to our semi-adult lives (we’re both in grad school, so semi- feels appropriate). While I was in a contemplative mood last week, I thought about some of my experiences as a closeted and confused teenager and how much I’ve learned about myself since coming out in 2009. I call myself closeted, although I recognize that I wasn’t closeted in the typical sense. That is, I didn’t identify as gay in high school and keep it a secret. Instead, I strongly pushed my other-than-hetero feelings deep down and refused to acknowledge them even though a part of me knew that they existed. I went to high school in the early to mid-2000s in the Northeast, not exactly the Stone Age or the conservative Bible Belt, but there were no shows like Glee or characters like Emily Fields (a tragedy for us all). The only lesbian I knew about in real life was an old friend of my mom’s, and I had never even met her. Forget a lesbian who was my age—that was the stuff of fantasies, so I compartmentalized and suppressed. Gay was not me. I was not gay.

But, of course, our true selves have a pesky habit of surfacing, especially when we don’t want to see them; so, on to that plentiful evidence. The following memories about my younger self stand out most vividly to me. They mostly reflect the utter lack of knowledge I had about being gay and also how thoroughly anxious and upset I was. I share these with the hope and intention that people will be able to relate to them, laugh about them, or maybe just feel less alone.

Summer 2001: It was my first summer as a teenager, and I spent it making out with girls. Um, no. Not really. Even for me, it would have been too hard to play that game of denial. Actually, I was at the end of season softball pool party—yeah, yeah, cue the stereotypical lesbian jokes here—at my teammate Katie’s* house. But Katie wasn’t just a teammate; to me, she was a goddess. I hung on her every word during the whole season. I craved her attention and felt that I could be around her all the time and never tire of her, you know, the usual love at first sight sort of thing. Unsurprisingly, this sort of seemingly harmless infatuation had happened to me before, a few times in fact, so I didn’t think it was strange. Surely all of my friends experienced this with their female friends, too?

At this particular party, I remember sitting next to Katie and at one point leaning in closer to her as she pointed something out in a magazine. As soon as I got closer to her, it was unmistakable. Butterflies in my stomach. I had never before experienced butterflies, had only read and heard about them. I definitely never felt any while I was around any boys. As an over-analyzer, I was convinced that these butterflies were symbolic of something very bad.

I was terrified.

I did my very best to push them far far away until I got home that night and faced myself in the mirror. I proceeded to talk myself out of liking girls. No, I told myself simply. Liking Katie, liking girls, is NOT an option. Forget about it. And then, as dorky as it sounds, I nodded to myself, like I was making it official. I made myself try to forget about Katie and my butterflies, which was easy enough to do because she started high school that year, and I was still in middle school. Apparently, it was as easy as that. At least for a little while.

Around this same time, I discovered the movie Lost and Delirious. It would play on HBO randomly, and I would sneak away to my parents’ room whenever I could to see when it would be on. My parents’ room was the only place in the house with HBO and privacy.  At the time, I couldn’t say exactly why I felt like I needed privacy, but all I knew was that I’d be super embarrassed if someone caught me watching it. Gay by association or something like that. It was as if whoever caught me watching it would be able to read on my face who I really was. They’d be able to tell that I liked watching the two girls kiss. And that simple fact made me unlike anyone else I knew.