Community Rainbow Waves

Human – but also very much gay

I have had a very fortunate journey unlike many of my LGBTQ+ brothers/sisters/non-binary folk. I became aware of my interest in the same sex from a young age. I specifically remember when I was in elementary school around age six or seven having crushes on my female classmates. At this time, I was unaware that many people across the world thought it was “morally” wrong to love members of the same sex in a romantic way. It wasn’t until one evening (when I was still in elementary school) that I was taking a shower and my mother came in unannounced. She was holding my diary. The very same diary that I expressed my feelings of attraction towards other girls. I don’t remember the exact conversation but I do remember that it made me feel like I needed to safeguard my emotions and keep what I was experiencing a secret, even from my family.

Fast forward to when I started middle school (around age 10-11 in the United States). I got my first “official” girlfriend who was on my club soccer team. I use quotations solely because we were very young & unexperienced and didn’t tell anyone about our relationship. Eventually, during this relationship, I wanted to tell my mom that I liked girls. I panicked but still managed to muster up the courage to send her a text message (classic, I know) while I was at school. I said something along the lines of “I have a crush on …, I don’t want you to be mad and I’m sorry”. I did it. I sent the message. I wasn’t worried about an immediate response because she is a teacher and wouldn’t be looking at her phone until the end of the day. Though, when it was time for me to ride the bus home and confront her, I was terrified. I got home before she did and pretended to be asleep to avoid the dreadful conversation that was ultimately inevitable. When we were finally face to face, I remember trying so hard to keep my emotions neutral but began bawling my eyes out. Her reaction wasn’t as I had hoped. Again, I don’t remember the whole conversation, but I do remember one thing that she said – “I don’t understand, I have friends that are girls and I have never felt this way”. That comment filled me with loneliness. Now, I have always had the “I simply don’t give a fuck” attitude and exterior, but that conversation broke me.

A few years later in high school (age 14-15), I had a different girlfriend who I believe I was in love with that was also on my soccer team. There was one evening my club had a meeting about future events that my mom drove me to. As we were pulling out of the parking lot to go home, my mom asked me a very simple question. She said “are you in a relationship with …? I can see the way you feel by the way you look at her”. It was then that I decided I was not going to lie about it anymore. I said yes and the whole 30-minute drive home, my mother cried in front of me as I sat quietly.

This whole time I think I have talked about my mother in a negative light, but I don’t want to portray her as someone who doesn’t support me. Currently, I am 23 and we have an amazing relationship in which she loves me unconditionally. The way she reacted while I was in elementary, middle, and high school wasn’t ideal, but it was a process for her just as much as me, and I grew to understand that throughout my childhood and adolescence. Mainly she was scared for me knowing about how people treat others once they discover they are a member of the LGBTQ+ community, she has always wanted to guarantee my safety.

I recognize that some people don’t care for my story and that’s okay, but I thought I would put it out there for reassurance for anyone who might need or want it. Unfortunately, not all stories end like mine. A lot of parents don’t understand or refuse to understand, causing an unmeasurable amount of pain, sorrow, distrust, etc. that never goes away for that individual. I want it to be known that it won’t always feel that way. One day you will be able to leave if you decide to. With that, there is a community that will always love you and let you know that your feelings and experiences are valid. You are loved and worthy.

Another topic I would like to speak on is mental health. (I know when will this bitch end omggggg). For my first year of college, I moved away and lived in a house with my friends. It was a truly remarkable experience that I love and cherish – but it is also a place where I experienced my first horrible panic attack. Note, I was very naïve back then and didn’t know what a panic attack was before that. It has been roughly five years since it happened and I still struggle with anxiety almost daily. It is okay to ask for help, it actually takes massive metaphorical balls to do so. Please know that you are strong. You are important. You and your story matters. Thank you.

I’m a trans-masculine nonbinary lesbian.

I realized that I liked women when I was thirteen. I recognized it and came out as bisexual when I was fourteen years old. I came out for the first time on 3/29/20. I kept searching for labels that fit better after realizing that bisexuality didn’t fit me. I began experimenting with they/them pronouns and my attraction to men decreased very quickly. I chose a new name for myself and began using they/them pronouns. I began identifying as a lesbian, and came out as a lesbian in June 2020. In July, I came out as nonbinary. I started dressing masculine and I felt a lot more comfortable. I was not accepted by my family after coming out, and I struggled with undiagnosed depression and anxiety and possibly ADHD. Even though I was out of the closet, I still struggled with internalized homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality. My family continues to deadname and misgender me, despite all my efforts to correct them and get them to use my correct name and pronouns. I began to self harm to cope with gender dysphoria and my family’s rejection of my identity. I still live with my family and I am not currently able to get away from them or move out. Seeing the state of the country that I live in, and how it treated people like me worsened my feeling of hopelessness. My story does not have a happy ending yet, but I want to live to make it better. I am human. I’ve got goals, and dreams, and hopes. I am not just my past, and I am not just my trauma. I want to become an actor. I want to have a family one day. I want to adopt kids when I get older. I can’t wait to make some of my dreams come true.

Came Out at 30- CONTENT WARNING: THIS COMING OUT STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTION AND/OR DISCUSSION ABOUT SUICIDE.

Where do I start ? My childhood. I was a quiet, shy and lonely girl, raised in the middle of two siblings so nobody cared about me. I was not old enough to be heard and not young enough to be understood. So I just did what I had to do : nice girl, be graduated, find a job and live with a man. Typical hetero-normal life until I met this woman at 28 years old. She was so beautiful, so gay, so engaged and so not interested by me. But it was too late I was hooked.
I spent so many sleepless nights asking myself why… not why this gorgeous unsensitive woman… no, why NOW ??? Why not 15 years earlier ? Why not with my Best friend ? Why at the worst moment of my life ? So many why-s for one obvious Because : because life is a constant challenge, it sucks, it is hard and complicated all the time. Life is such a journey, you don’t understand everything in the moment. Life is also full of joy and beautiful people if you know where to look.
And because of course you felt for other girls and women before but you didn’t know what it was…

A couple of years before I started to question about my sexuality, my cousin died. We grew up together, he was my other half, we were different and similar at the same time. I played sport, he played music. I teached him sport he teached me music. He was gay, I was straight. He killed himself. He could not stand to be different.
I spent all my energy to be angry, to feel guilty and sad, i was a wreck. With a useless boyfriend who thought I could grieve for one month and get back to normal. But normal never came back, I miss him every freakin’ minute, and I am about to meet a woman who will make a mess with my life.
I am still grieving and now I am gay ?? What’s next win the lottery and lose the ticket ?

“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you” (Joseph Campbell) the sentence that changed my life. So I gave up my sooo booooring straight life to focus on me and only me. Life gave me the opportunity to meet bunch of people who really looked like the Earpers community. A safe, non-judging and very gay-friendly group with whom I travelled the world. I didn’t want to in the first place but I felt home with them and it was so gooooood !!!!! So good to finally speak to someone who listens.

I came out at 30 to my Best friend and she is still the best. I didn’t came out to my parents, my girlfriend did. She thought she was the one so obviously she made decisions for me. I kept my family but not her, she was so wrong !
My family agreed with only one sentence : “if it is your choice it is okay.” That was it, we never talk about the “room-mate” sensitive subject. It is taboo even if they truly think it is not.
I know it takes time to deal with it.

Gay and proud (most of the time…)

CONTENT WARNING: THIS COMING OUT STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTION AND/OR DISCUSSION ABOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT.

I always had feelings for girls, probably from the age of 9, when I really fancied a girl in S club 7, when all my friends fancied J from Five! haha.
However I went to a school where the word gay was never even mentioned, I had no idea it existed or what it was. I don’t even think it was mentioned in sex ed. I kinda just left it at the back of my mind and didn’t hook up with a girl until I was 20, when I left to go travelling to Australia and walked passed Mardi Gras, which is the most amazing pride I have ever been to. This all started up my curiosity as I realised there were soooo many people who I could relate to, and kissing a girl for the first time felt amazing.
I used to think I was Bi, I didn’t ever think that I was a lesbian as nooo that can’t be me, I’m going to have a ‘normal’ life with a husband and children, however I have never actually enjoyed being with a man. My mum still thinks and hopes I am Bi. I have been sexually abused twice by men so she thinks that I am too scared to be with men, which could be true but it kind of hurts that she doesn’t just accept that I am gay. I now know I am just full on gay and that my past trauma has nothing to do with my sexuality. I was born gay, as was my brother and my cousin. We are all out to our families and friends (my best friend always knew I was gay, coming out to her was the most fantastic experience with the love she gave me) and my brother is marrying his partner when covid allows, I am hoping to find a date for the occasion who I can eventually marry myself and also maybe children 🙂
I know I am in an amazingly privileged position as I live in a country where being gay is celebrated, not condemned. I really hope over time that these countries will make it legal to be gay, there are some charities out there helping and I am trying to raise awareness of them.

Gayer than a fruit loop, but too young to love.

I first started questioning my sexuality when I was 11. My grandma had just passed and I was severely depressed. I realised that I liked dressing more masculine, and in what I know see was a way too hide that I was gay, I decided that I was probably trans. I started going by the name Sam and started wanting to cut my hair. I even tried to bind my chest (in very unsafe ways) and I thought that I was depressed because I had gender dysphoria. After about a year I realised that I was just really fucking gay. So, I decided to lived my truth in a very homophobic school and it was the best choice I ever made.

I started coming out at twelve by mentioning it slightly in conversations, mostly by denying attraction to boys rather than admitting my love for women.

This year i turned 15 and after two gay relationships and after being out for three years Im still uncomfortable with my sexuality. I hate to say it and I wish it wasn’t like that, but my class mates and and the society we live in has pushed the ‘predatory lesbian’ stereotype on me for so long that it’s hard to forget.

I’ve recently decided that I will try to wear my pride bracelet in a way of showing who I am with out having to say something. And most importantly it serves as a small reminder for me that, no matter what my classmates say, being gay is 100% okay and that I’m so fucking proud of being a part of this community.

Ana

Hii, so, what a beautiful place to be in sharing just a little bit of my story. 🙂 I won’t take too long, I wanted this to be short but truthful. Just like Dom reiterated with her story. Well, yeah, I’m queer too I guess. I never knew this about me, and maybe when I was younger I did shove it in the little dark corners of my heart. But I won’t anymore. I started to question the heteronormative narrative about my sexuality when I started to think too much about a girl I met unpretentiously when I was 18 years old. What I keep asking myself is if I had felt this way before, but I just didn’t recognise this when I was younger, and only now I do. What helped me see this in a better light was a friend of mine (my best friend now) and she had already been dating a girl for 6 years, and they themselves overcame some pretty rough things. Still, till this day I can’t really help but feel disgusted by what they’ve gone through. But anyways, this ain’t about them. It’s about me. And when it comes to it, THIS is all that matters, guys. After starting to feel things for girls, crushing really really hard on them, I kept asking OTHER PEOPLE for their opinion. Well, now I know better. They did help me A LOT, but at the end of the day I think what matters is that yes I don’t like only boys, I like girls too.
I don’t really feel the need to come out in a huge fashion, I think people suspect this of me, and I have been bugging everyone about Kat and Dom, and Melissa, and Katie and Kristen Stewart, and Caity and Jess and a loot of actresses, so there’s that as well. But I hope people won’t give me too much of a hard time once I start dating, if it’s a girl and not a boy. I lke to think that they won’t. I will nevertheless still love them even if they don’t understand, I guess for some reason we should be understanding. Fight like hell to end LGBTQIA+fobia, but be understanding, as well.
Thanks for reading.

A genderqueer Rose.

Well, I realised I was in the community when I was 15 but I’m still figuring out myself. I started coming out when I was 16 and now I just don’t really care who knows cause I love myself and that’s all you need.

Lesbian

I don’t even know where exactly to begin as coming out happened over a long period of time for me. From the time I first admitted to myself that I wasn’t straight to the time I knew I was a lesbian, about a year and a half had passed.

The first time I questioned my sexuality, I was about 15 years old. I was in 10th grade, had a mediocre standing in the class hierarchy and had realized long before that I was in some way different compared to the other girls but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was that made me feel different. Until I did. One day a friend of mine came over, at that time Magic Mike was THE movie in our class, and this friend happened to be a big fan of the main actor. For some reason she couldn’t stop talking about the actor and, I guess, wanted to convince me that he was the hottest person on this planet so she pulled out her phone and started showing me pictures of him, abs pictures included haha. Anyways, what I realized in that moment was that I had no emotional reactions to any of the pictures she showed me. I didn’t feel even the slightest bit of attraction while my friend could barely look at a photo without blushing and fangirling over it. That night I had a lot of questions to myself. I didn’t understand why I had no reactions to the pictures – maybe he just wasn’t my type? Maybe I was just a late bloomer and attraction is something that still has to develop in my body? But then again almost every girl in my class had been in a relationship or at least talking about boys during break for years, and me not doing any of that stood out like a sore thumb to me. What is my problem?? So in a quest to convince myself that I was in fact capable of being attracted to boys I started googling actors, musicians etc. just any boy or man I found attractive. Long story short, I didn’t find a single one. I was so frustrated that the next morning I went to my mom and said: „How come, I can’t find a single dude that I find attractive but I could tell you about so many women I find incredible in a heartbeat!?”. You may think that I already knew in that moment that I liked girls, but no. Homosexuality was never discussed in our home. Not because my parents didn’t want me to hear about it but because they never thought about telling me about it. So the only „information” I got on it were prejudices and slurs against, not even queer in general, but only homosexuals, at school. So I knew the word homosexual but I couldn’t define it, all I knew was that it was used as a joke or an insult. But it was nothing I had a personal connection to back then. Because I knew I was straight. „I mean, I’m a girl so I’ll fall in love with a boy eventually because that’s what everyone’s saying”. I just accepted that but now with the whole googling my non-existent crushes that vision didn’t really work out. It was just for a short moment in that confusion that I thought to myself: „What if I don’t like any boys that way but that will never change? What if I just don’t like boys?”. I didn’t know what exactly that would mean but I knew that it didn’t feel like a far stretch. I never had a boy crush, I was never interested in boys and the only thing I really ever wanted to be with boys was best friends. That’s the moment my questioning phase began. I mean at first I went to my mum and told her, tears running down my phase, that „I think I’m a lesbian”. She reacted good. It definitely took her some time to switch from „your future boyfriend” to „your future girlfriend” when talking about my first relationship but once she realized I was being serious, she became super supportive. Still, even though I came out as a lesbian I didn’t know what that meant. And the realization of being different from the other girls in my class hit me like a rock. After coming out I had to take a step back to truly understand who I was. I couldn’t just say I was a lesbian when I had no proof for it. That’s where my questioning phase began and boy, it was a shitshow. I was watching every coming out video on YouTube after school. At that point I was in 11th grade and I was faced with a huge problem: I couldn’t tell any of my friends about this, because the second that information got to school, I feared, I would get bullied because the leading bully in my grade was a homophobe. So at school I acted the straightest I could and the moment I came home I was on YouTube, watching every second of content that would bring me closer to the question who I was attracted to. And I learned a lot. I learned about the LGBT+-community, I saw that queer people aren’t „weird” people (which was what I thought due to the intolerance at school) but just normal people like you and me. At night my brain would feel heavy from all of the new information but in the morning and at school I had no one to talk to about the journey I was going through because I couldn’t talk about it and my mom didn’t really understand what I was saying and feeling. That was very emotionally draining. The more I tried to suppress my feelings the more difficult it became. Plus I wasn’t getting the answer I was looking for: Every YouTuber kept telling me that only I could know my sexuality and that time would tell but I wanted an answer now, I wanted to know who I am and I didn’t understand why no one could tell me. The best I can describe it is that I’d think of myself as an astronaut who just kept floating around in space without a planet in sight. Just infinite nothingness. But I needed something to hold onto because that nothingness was scary and it meant that I didn’t know who I was – I couldn’t accept being „nothing”. It was the moment I stopped stressing myself out about figuring out who I was that things got better, even though it was out of exhaustion. Before, I couldn’t read my emotions clearly because I kept overanalyzing every little emotion I was feeling for people. In my head it would for example be: „is that attraction? That is definitely attraction, oh, you like that person! Yeah, you must be gay!” about feelings such as simply finding a person nice. But it was just my want to have a person I find attractive to be able to answer the question of what my sexuality is. But forcing feelings on myself was very unhealthy. So I stopped. And after some time these feelings came to me naturally and even caught me off guard sometimes which made me finally able to understand them. It took a long time for me to differentiate between finding someone nice, finding someone attractive and loving someone. But once I understood what each feels like, I was able to see that I had been attracted to girls and women from as early as 6th grade. Which is why, after almost one and a half years of trying to find out who I was attracted to I was finally able to say that I’m a lesbian.

Now there’s way more to say about my journey but that’s how it all began. During those one and a half years I also stumbled upon Carmilla and Wynonna Earp which to this day remain my two favorite series and it’s also the reason I even ended up on this page. Seeing positive representation as portrayed in both of these series helped me so much with being ok with my sexuality. Starting my journey I felt so much guilt and being different that I was not comfortable, but I have come a long way now and leaving school and afterwards coming out to everyone in my life that’s important to me and everyone being supportive is the best thing that could’ve happened to me. So today I read about this page and about Dom’s coming out and – oh, how beautiful it is! Everyone has a different journey but there is something so powerful about coming together to share our journeys. And what better person to lead the way on here than Dom. You have helped so many people Dom, including me, to come out and be our true selves and I love that it is partly us that have helped you to come out now, it has come full-circle 🙂 To everyone on here that needs to hear this: you are not alone, you are valid, and I wish you all the love and kindness on your journey that you deserve! – Laura

Lesbian

I realised kind of early I guess, lucky I know. I realised about a year and a half ago when I was 15. When I realised I sort of started to see that just because I had realised it then, it didn’t mean I had changed, it was always inside of me I just didn’t understand it. I told a few friends and one brother, but not everyone, not yet. I used to get called tranny, because I wasn’t a ‘girly girl’, I liked cricket, never wore dresses or make up. I don’t want to be a guy, but I fear that even though I know that, admitting I like girls would just be another reason for people to assume I’m more like a guy. For a while it confused me, but I know now that liking girls doesn’t make me less of a girl, so I’m hoping to tell the rest of my family soon and be out, and I know what I feared may still happen, but I realise now that as long as I accept it about myself, it doesn’t matter what they think of it.

Power in knowledge

I’m 17, and I don’t know myself. Or at least I don’t think I want to know myself. As a child, I didn’t really have anyone to talk to because I didn’t have any siblings (other than a dog). I turned to the media, video games, and fictional characters from TV shows and movies to feel a connection to someone or something. Man, I would sit in front of the TV as a kid and watch these shows where I saw these beautiful people and I would always imagine myself pretending that I was their friend. And as I got older, the same thing happened where I continued enjoying characters. But then around my older teenage years, I realized that maybe it wasn’t an “obsession” with the characters, it was that I really liked them. And I was confused because no one had ever really mentioned this feeling to me, but in my mind, it just made sense. And I’m a relatively athletic person, so I got the whole “tomboy” thing as a kid, so people probably chalked it up to that. But I didn’t. Because, as of recently, I figured out who I was. And while only select people know, it’s cool to like the best of both worlds. Like God must have invented males and females for everyone’s enjoyment, so why not enjoy them both? And I’m lucky to be able to say my parents would be accepting of me, but in a way, I feel like they know, so I have avoided making it a “thing,” because why should they focus on a part of me that’s just who I am? There is no reason. And thanks to many TV shows, like Wynonna Earp and their amazing characters and cast, and movies, and just people in general, they have helped me with who I am.