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[amazon_link asins=’B076PYDQ5Q’ template=’ProductAdRight’ store=’ourqueerstories-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’af0ed3a6-fa33-11e7-9f80-b930bb5a1cf8′]So… I’m queer. I’m 33 years old, and only just worked this out very recently.
I guess my story starts the same way as many others. I grew up in a Christian home, believing that homosexuality is a disease and anyone who partakes is willingly “choosing to be sick”.
Some of my very earliest memories are of kissing other little girls. And not just pecks on the lips, but full-on French kissing, at maybe 5 or 6 years of age. Hiding under the bed covers, pretending to be reading by torchlight, and getting in trouble from my religious mother for not being in plain view.
But then… my memory skips to being 13 years old and having my “first kiss”, with a boy. It’s as if I subconsciously denied everything I’d experienced in my life up until that point; everyone knows it’s only a real kiss when it’s with the opposite sex, right?
A quick snapshot of 13 through to 33: I slept with lots of males; I kissed lots of females; I turned down sex at quite literally the last minute with a female because of sudden-onset religious guilt, and I still regret it every day; I had intense and all-consuming crushes on females; I fell in love with—and had my heart truly broken—by a male.
Yet, with these experiences, I still believed I was straight. I denied the crushes. I pushed the near-sex incident from my mind. I told myself that making out with girls at bars was just what fun people like me did.
The road that lead me to learning my Truth is now becoming clearer to me. I had to spend a decade learning that my “loving religious upbringing” was in fact mental abuse and brainwashing. I had to change my very core belief that there is a Hell waiting for people like me and accept that I do not believe anything I spent my entire life being forced to believe. In the words of a very wise being, I had to unlearn what I had learned. Thank you, Master Yoda.
When you’ve torn your entire self apart it’s hard work to build a new way of thinking. But, I persisted. I went to therapy to deal with my mother and the insane grasp she’d had on my life. And the more I talked about it, the more I started to feel like there was something inside of me that would BURST if I didn’t acknowledge it.
And it did burst.
I became such an anxious, depressed wreck from hiding this Thing that was trying to get out, that it got in the way of my relationship with my de facto boyfriend. I switched off completely and couldn’t be intimate with him for months at a time. Finally, one drunken night, I found myself sobbing and exclaiming “I’M NOT STRAIGHT”.
Which leads us to here. This drunken episode was only a few weeks ago and I already feel myself becoming whole. I feel like I need to shout this from the rooftop. I’M BISEXUAL, EVERYONE! And that’s okay! And my boyfriend still loves me! And God hasn’t struck me down with lightning!
The hardest thing has been accepting I am a bisexual in a straight relationship. Have I denied myself truly satisfying relationships with women? A quick glance at the internet confirms that bisexual females (and males for that matter) are not taken seriously. But I’m here, and I am proof. I love and have loved men. I am committed to a man. But I am utterly sexually attracted to woman, and that does not make my relationship any less real.
Oh yeah, and I’m not going to Hell. Come at me, ladies.