queerbychoice | Because I Feel Like Asking

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Because I Feel Like Asking

[Poll #60817]

Essay Question for Bonus Points:
Was there anything particularly interesting or unusual about the order in which you experienced these events?

Example: I first heard of the theoretical existence of queer people when I was seven years old, but since I'd never heard of any specific queer people I just treated it as a kind of urban myth, and I didn't actually give much serious consideration to the notion of "What if there really are actual queer people?" until the day I turned queer myself, the spring of 1992, when I was 15, at which point my thought process proceeded all at once in the span of about five minutes along lines something like this: "What if there really are actual queer people? But if people are really capable of same-sex attraction, why would only some of them be capable of it and not others? How horrible it would be if you could fall in love with someone and they'd be physically incapable of falling in love with you too, even if they really liked you and really wanted to! How horrible if love could be limited by something so superficial as body types! Wait a minute, that's what it would mean if everybody were heterosexual too . . . I don't believe love should work that way. I resolve to love anybody whose mind is worthy of me, no matter what body type they have."

And then I didn't meet an actual queer person other than me until nearly two years later, March 3, 1994, when I was 17. So in the intervening time I had nothing but a cheap local public access queer TV show for queer company, and after August 1993 when I discovered David Bowie I had him for company (though I was rather traumatized at the end of high school when my best friend Christine informed me that David Bowie had changed his mind about his queerness and been calling himself hetero since 1983 . . . but that was later, I'd met other queer people in person by that time). I didn't have access to queer books (lack of privacy) nor to the internet (I didn't get internet access until my second semester of college). So I grew up very isolated in a way that probably no middle-class queer teenager in the Western world ever will be again, now that internet access is so much more widely available.

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It's probably odd that the way I picked them up wasn't a sudden insight or someone whispering it to me on the playground or something... It was more like, ok, when all of the grownups are done having coffee, some of the women go home with other women and the men go home with other men and they hold hands and kiss sometimes and stuff like mom and dad do, and I guess that's okay even if it is a little odd because I only see people doing that in church, but what I really want is to go hooooommmmeeee nowwwww... MOMMMMMMMMMMMYYYYYYYY! I'm BOOOOOOORED!

And so on.

Can I tell two stories, mine and my dad's?

I was raised in a pretty open-minded family (although not as much as some), so from the age of three I was encouraged to watch the movie Cabaret everyday until it was indelibly etched in my brain. If you haven't seen this movie, there are non-heterosexuals in it, among many other "shocking" things.

So I knew it was possible, but I had never thought about it in reference to myself. Then, in junior high, people started insinuating that other kids might be gay, in a very non-complimentary way. I always challenged people to explain what was so terrible about being gay, it was an issue that really bothered me, but I wasn't sure why.

Then in high school, I started to wonder what made people gay, and I heard about people "discovering" they were gay, often at inconvenient times, and I thought that would be a terrible thing to happen, so I was going to think a lot about it right now, and see if it was possible for me to like girls "that way". And lo and behold, it was. But I still liked boys. This was the first time I had ever taken the idea of bisexuality seriously. But no one of any sex would fuck me for what seemed like ages, and when I got to college, my lack of experience with either sex was used as "proof" that I was straight, and then I made out with everything that moved for a while in an effort to prove my queerness. Then I fell in love and gave up the battle and got married to a boy. And no one will ever believe that I'm queer again, since I intend to be completely monogamous for the rest of my life. Sob. [end digression]

Anyways, I was in theater in high school, so all the boys I new were gay, but they were closeted and didn't come out till after graduation. But I knew. Does that count?

Now for my dad:
When he was in college in the late '50s, a friend of his approached him and said he thought he must be going insane, and he was really worried. My dad asked why, since he seemed perfectly sane. The friend said "I think my roommate is a homosexual." See, he had heard of homosexuals, but thought they were mythical, like werewolves, so when his roommate started acting like one, he thought he must be hallucinating!
Of course, my dad calmed his fears, and the roommate did turn out to be gay. I asked my dad how he knew homosexuals were real and he said without hesitation "I had read Proust."

Okay, sorry I went on forever, but this is one of my favorite topics, and I seriously could have been much more long winded. And yes, that was a threat.

I think for me it wasn't whispered information on the playground, but teasing on the playground that did it for me. At the age of 5 nobody called each other "gay", but they would sometimes tease boys for liking each other too much, or girls for liking each other too much, insisted that they wanted to marry each other. In fact, whenever we teased an individual for liking another individual, we'd say that the first one wanted to marry the other one. When they were of the same gender, people would see it as even funnier and weirder, but we didn't have words for it at the time.

Moreover, girls would have lots of pretend games in which they were married to each other, or say that we wanted to marry each other, without much stigma attached. Or we'd make up stupid "straight" ways that we could practically marry each other- we'd marry each other's brothers, for instance, but just so that we could be in the same family. We wouldn't actually -touch- each other's brothers, that was icky, we'd just sleep in the same big bedroom together and our brothers could do something else. And when we were on the swings, and our swings went up and down at the same time, we'd say that it meant we were "married." It wasn't considered terribly weird at the time.

I think that when I heard any words for "people who actually did want to marry people of the same sex", I must not have been any more impressed than when I heard other concepts named with words. I only realized that there was a great bit of discomfort about the idea when people started reaching puberty, and learning about sex, and learning that straight sex was the proper way, and that gay sex was, well, "gay" and "gross."

I led a very sheltered childhood, in the equivalent of "redneck" country England. I don't think I even heard of homosexuality until I was 16+ years old. I had heard the taunts at school (sometimes directed at myself, sometimes at others) but never really understood what they actually meant at the time. Despite this naievety, I knew even before this time that I was more physically attracted to other girls than to boys. At the age of 18 I had my first real boyfriend, and at 19 I had sex with him (and liked it) so I decided at this point that I must be heterosexual after all. (My continued attraction to other women was confusing me at this point). It was only when I reached about 24/25 that I realised that bisexuality was an option. (Yes, my situation was probably about as isolated as yours).

An interesting facet of my childhood was that I spent many years in the Boy Scouts. In fact, I even earned the rank of Eagle Scout, something which I am very proud of. Sadly, was the the rampant homophobia in the Boy Scouts that caused me to "push away" any homosexual thoughts I had until well into adulthood.

I now consider myself almost exclusively gay. :-)

Since you haven't bothered to actually identify yourself it's difficult to see what the point of exchanging life stories is, but anyway: for the record, I was in Girl Scouts from ages 6 to 13, and used to have the ambition of being in it for the rest of my life. However, my troop in elementary school was run (led by my mother, most of those years) in a distinctly secular fashion (my parents are agnostics), whereas the troop I got stuck in from age 12 onward met in a church and had distinct religious undertones. This rather soured me on the whole experience. It's amazing how different the atmosphere can be in one troop versus another, just because of how differently two different adult troop leaders choose to interpret the organization's purpose.

i have no real excuse for my naivete.
i grew up in california, in silicon
valley and not some miniature town.

it may sound a little strange but
i wasn't much of a person before high school.
i didn't have any real personality,
if personality is defined by how one
interacts with others, because i had
almost no friends. what friends i did
have were exclusively younger than i was
and therefore even more naive.
i lived to read, and the books i read
didn't have gay people in them,
so i never thought about it at all.

i am also one of those people who
almost never thinks of anyone else
sexually unless they have flirted
with me first. it doesn't occur to me.
this was especially true when i was
younger, and so, because girls never
flirted with me, i never thought of
them as sexual objects. the first
time a girl did flirt with me,
i decided i must be bisexual.

my thinking went along the lines of:
"heyyy she is flirting with me!
she's pretty cute. am i turned on?
i am! does this make me bi? hmmmm.
i guess it must." and that was it.

i think i never really thought about
lesbians or bisexuals at all until
i met that boyfriend that i had at
that time. he was always talking
about lesbians and how hot they were.
he had that typical male fantasy
of having two women in bed with him.

I didn't really acquire feelings until I entered 7th grade. I did have friends before then, but I didn't really . . . think of them as people, exactly. I thought of them more like pawns on a chess board, to be manipulated to serve my ends and accumulate power for me. Fittingly, I was a Republican back then too.

When I entered seventh grade all at once I actually cared about people. That was the year that puberty hit, and I fell suddenly head over heels for a boy after having sworn the previous year that boys were stupid idiots whom I would never be stupid enough to give the time of day to. The boy was the first person I ever actually recognized as a human being with feelings of his own and actually cared about . . . and even then, my recognition was pretty fuzzy at first because I didn't really at all grasp that I couldn't just command people to fall in love with me . . . the notion that anyone could possibly have the audacity to not fall in love with someone who'd fallen in love with me was quite unheard of in the books and Disney cartoons which had provided me with only instructions on love (since my happily married conservative parents did not permit me to watch trashy TV shows which might have portrayed less happy love affairs). But anyway, from that point onward I began to process the notion that both males and females were actual human beings just as real and alive as I was, wherease before then such an idea had never really occurred to me.

. . .

I am one of those people who basically ALWAYS thinks of EVERYONE else sexually until they do something which renders them undesireable and causes me to exclude them from further sexual consideration. Thankfully though, I've at least learned to ask a few questions and see whether I can easily provoke them into saying something that will render them undesireable before I actually go so far as to act upon my mad lust for everybody by throwing myself at all of them.

I never thought about the idea of being gay or queerness when I was young. I can recall asking my mom why my uncle wasn't married and why he didn't have any kids - I was jealous that I didn't have any cousins. I think I remember her telling me that he was never going to get married. It kind of shocked me. I remember thinking whoa...what do you mean? EVERYONE gets married and has kids?! So it was around then I figured out what was going on with him. He always seemed to have a male friend with him...never a girlfriend. It wasn't something that I thought twice about. I was just disappointed about not getting a cousin anytime soon.

My family was having a barbeque one summer. I must have been 11 or 12. I remember my cousin (yeah...I finally got one) asking where his wife was. I remember stopping dead in my tracks to pay attention - being the nosy little kid I was. My uncle replied that he didn't have a wife and my cousin retaliated with "Yeah you do! He's inside!" I think I stood there with my mouth open, shocked at my what my cousin had said. I remember thinking, hey, you shouldn't say that!

I never thought about being gay myself when I was younger. I had random crushes on boys, never liked any girls. I questioned myself when I was around 16 for about a second, but decided I wasn't gay. I thought it was weird and I couldn't stand ANY girls so I didn't think it was possible. I didn't really know any kids my age that were gay or questioning until I got to high school. I didn't like many of the kids I went to school with...supposed "gay" ones as well. The personalities of the kids really turned me off and I think that helped to perpetuate the stereotype of gay kids around my age that I was developing. I'm not a sexual person and I sure wasn't a sexual kid. A lot of the gay kids at school were extremely sexual and I was turned off by it all.

Finally, much more recently, I met a girl at work that was gay. We developed a close working relationship that quickly turned into a friendship. She introduced me to the gay community in an entirely new light. She wasn't your typical socially defined, feminine girl. She opened up this entirely new perspective for me. I was able to deconstruct the ideals formed by society concerning gender and sexuality. I realized there were a lot of people out there that didn't fall into rigid categories. But yeah...to make a much longer story short, I moved through 20 years of my life with little more than a fleeting thought of being gay...but it turns out I'm completely queer.

Sometimes I think about the fact that it took me so long to realize I was queer. I think about that and the relatively short time it's been since coming to that realization. I feel weird telling people about it...like I have no room to speak about it because I have no experience...but that's a tangent.

The poet Adrienne Rich identified as heterosexual until the age of 40, and lesbian after that. She didn't consider it an issue of having been lesbian all along and simply never having noticed it, though; she believed (as I do, and as Adrienne Rich wrote about in her famous essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence") that everyone is capable of falling in love with a member of any gender if only they realize that it's possible and meet someone who's right for them. So by this way of looking at it, the amazing thing would not be that it took you until age 20 and her until age 40 to realize you were capable of it, but rather that you or she ever realized it at all when 90% of the population never does figure out that they're capable of it too.

I figured I'd mention my "growing up" experiences with my asexuality, considering it's probably pretty different from most people's childhood.

While growing up, I obviously didn't start out with any concept of sexuality. I learned what sex was very early on, and immediately came to the conclusion of "Ew. That seems painful and ugly and unpleasant and smelly and messy and scary and unnecessary, and worst of all, people come from it. Therefore, I want nothing at all to do with it, ever." My collective hatred of the human race came even earlier than that, so something that actually resulted in children was the worst possible thing I could think of. And then, there was also the physical attraction element, which I was always quite proud of being immune to. I never felt comfortable around boys OR girls, and became quite the loner. I couldn't understand gender, or why people cared about it. I understood that male + female = baby, and that other combinations didn't work, but I simply didn't comprehend attraction. How could anyone find either sex pleasant? As a result, I never even developed a sense of heterosexuality...never feeling an attraction for anyone myself, I had no concept of anyone else having those feelings, either. Eventually I began growing fond of bishounen, however, mainly anime characters. Rather than attraction it was more of an envy, a feeling of "I want to look like that." Anime bishounen were unique from others, both real and fictional, in that they were highly androgynous. That androgyny was tremendously desirable to me, since it gave me a sort of anchor; that's what I should be, but instead I'm stuck in this stupid boy body that sweats too much and smells funny. So, I virtually always knew of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and everything in between, because they were what I wasn't.

I'm just lucky that asexuality is so much harder to detect among high schoolers than other forms of queerness. My lack of desire to ever have a partner just made me that much more avoided.

I remember in 4th grade when my female friends started acting stupid over boys (right around the same time they started getting ugly pointy things growing on their chests), I was deeply horrified and concluded that the tumor things on their chests caused brain damage and made girls lose absolutely all shred of sense. It was disgusting and I firmly resolved that I was not going to allow puberty to happen to me, EVER. Not to my body, not to my mind . . . none of it. Boys were stupid disgusting icky horrid piglike creatures and I was never going to be stupid enough to cease recognizing this.

I remained unceasingly devoted to this goal all the way through 4th grade, 5th grade, and 6th grade.

Then I entered 7th grade, and from the first day of school it was just suddenly "Aaaargh, did you SEE that beautiful boy??? I MUST HAVE HIM!!!!!" *hurls self at him in a manner which soon proved deeply embarrassing to self and rather disturbing to the boy as well*

I didn't even really ever pause to regret having abandoned my former anti-boy convictions. It was just an overnight conversion thing and I didn't even have enough brain cells left to worry over the incongruity of it.

Really I should not tell you stories like this. Now it's my fault if I give you nightmares. :p

Well...it's considerably easier for me to remain true to those old convictions, considering that at age 19, nearing 20, I have yet to feel even the slightest shred of physical attraction toward anything. My "Isn't he pretty?" response to certain boys is spawned from envy, and only boys since, well, that's the type I physically relate to. I still want to be a hijya.

And don't worry about nightmares...I don't think there's anything you could say over the internet that's more traumatic than having two teenage brothers.

Until I was about 15, I identified as entirely asexual. I liked people, I had no real problem with them, but in my mind sex was conflated with these ideas of liking them in some sort of "special" way, and in any case I didn't really feel comfortable with the idea of having to touch or even see someone's genitalia. My friends thought I was a repressed lesbian, and some of them might think that I've now proven them right, but really I do think that at the time I just wasn't interested in people at all.

Then I started thinking, "well, maybe I don't want to get into some sort of -relationship- with someone, but just fucking might be nice..." At that, I started fooling around with people on a clear "I'm using you for play" basis. Over time was totally converted to the side of sexuality. Hyper-sexuality. All-the-time-thinking-about-it sexuality. Yum.

Then I decided that I was more attracted to certain people who, coincidentally, would want to be in a relationship with someone they had sex with. So I tried that out and ended up liking it well enough. So I've gone from asexual, to purely sexual, to almost (gasp) a romantic. Don't worry, though, I still find most romance kind of silly, so I suppose I'm not totally there yet.

I just had to add my bit.

I think I generally knew Of homosexuality/bisexuality/etc when I was very little (I was a very curious child, I read quite a few medical books, etc.. learning the technical aspects of sex when I was about 8 - ask my mom :) but it never really applied much to me - was just something that people often used to insult others. I never thought about it much.. until I found male4male porn on my computer (or rather my parents did I believe).. which led me to contemplate homosexuality more ..seeing the possibility that my brother may be gay. That was when I was about 11 or 12.. which at the same time.. I also had a very open female best friend.. from whom I felt a slight attraction to.. and who also was a bit touchy feely. But I never even really thought about sex at that age.. I mean it was something I knew a lot about.. but I never really Involved Myself into it.

Then Freshman year of highschool.. is when I got more sexual. And also when I really started to realize that not only did I find heterosexual activities arousing.. but homosexual female activities highly arousing.. so then forth.. I basically just started to understand that I may, or may not be bisexual. (never thought I was homosexual for much more then a few seconds, because at the time I was in love with the male that I'm still in love with today)

I guess I don't find anything too odd about how these events occured. My homosexuality knowledge seemed to progress just about the same as my knowledge towards sex itself period. Freshman year was also when my first male friend came out to me about being Gay. A few more male friends came out to me in the following years. I think it all just is normal.

Heh, sorry rambling mood. Good poll, and good questions.

I didn't even learn of the existence of homosexuality until I transfered to a public school in 5th grade. It was one of those things my parents and co. tried to hide from me, I guess... not because they're opposed to it, but because they avoid anything controversial. So I had to ask a guidance counselor (in private, at least) to find out that "gay" == "homosexual". Unfortunately, until I actually realized that one of my friends was queer (a good ~4.5 years later), I somehow managed to trick myself into avoiding caring. In the back of my head I realized that homosexuals must be an oppressed group (I mean, I only heard of them in the context of crude jokes), but I had my own things to worry about, and I was outcast enough without telling people off for being homophobes. I'm really ashamed that I managed to do that... not that activism would have done much good in my school, especially when I was so young, but just on principle.

Although I've (sadly) never really been attracted to a male, my experience in having a real relationship (you know, the kind that lasts more than a few weeks) has somehow convinced me that, if this ever did happen, I would be ok with it. It still bothers me that this hasn't happened, though... because of a strange train of thought that ends in the idea that I can't treat people fairly because I might not even be able to see when my bias towards being attracted to women causes me to act differently than I would towards a man. I try to remain aware of these tendencies and thus fight them off, but it's still not a tendency I particularly like.

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Because I Feel Like Asking

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