An unfinished essay from a forthcoming, yet to be named nor well thought out essay collection.
To say that I always knew I was queer is kind of a lie. For me, looking at girls or women or breasts didn’t always feel like an unnatural divergence, it felt right. Like most things regarding sexuality, I didn’t realize that I was supposed to be ashamed of these feelings.
And I feel that most queer people felt some sort of sexual feeling about the gender they were attracted to. I think I was either too young to feel sexual arousal at the time or was just unaware that nervousness was a part of that arousal.
I really loved breasts. Like really loved them. (And I still do). I think that was one of the first things I noticed about women. About my Barbies, about my Mulan action figure, I got out of a McDonald's happy meal. It felt like more than just a passing curiosity. Children might point and ask what those things are on your chest, and maybe look down at their lack of said appendages, but my curiosity was also tinged with excitement of sorts.
I thought they were beautiful.
I found more beauty in feminine bodies than in males. This aspect, along with being into titties, was often brushed aside as natural. “Who doesn’t love women’s bodies?!” I’d say. We’re so hot. But maybe it was more than that. I was so distracted by them. I was intensely, utterly distracted by them. Preoccupied even. But I figured that everyone felt this way. That everyone was pushing the same things down as I was.
When I was a preteen, I confessed that I thought I was gay.
I was with my siblings, and we would often talk for hours, or listen to music together, cramped into the bedroom I shared with my little sister. I don’t know what prompted me to share, maybe we were all sharing secrets.
After my confession, my brother assured me that I was “just confused” and that it would pass. And I believed him. Like so many other queer people, I buried that part of me. I figured it was a normal thing for it to show up every now and again, and soon stopped trying to repress any feelings that rose up, assuming they would simply pass on through.
Once I started dating men, I found that I had a lot of success. Men were easy. A refrain that I have heard from so many other queer women who have or still are dating men. I find that it didn’t take much to impress them and that their heaps of praise for the most basic hints of personality and sexual freedom was like a drug. I wanted the validation more than I wanted them usually.
There’s the term, “Pick me”, a woman that models her entire personality within the male gaze, sometimes to her own detriment. For example, a girl might say that they have more guy friends than women because women are too much trouble. A woman who repeats misogynistic catchphrases, a woman who embraces the hatred and subjugation of women as a means to appear more desirable to a partner.
That’s not exactly what I did.
I craved male acceptance and admiration. A wink at a bar there, a dabbling interest in any number of their hobbies, and they were hooked. Easy peasy. Most men, I figured, were really just there for my titties and pussy anyway, everything else was just icing on the cake.
And if you could also play therapist? You were golden.
I often say that most men who are in the dating sphere are looking for a mother that they can fuck. Someone to reassure their sense of masculinity, someone to help clean up after them whether that be literally or emotionally, someone to be their first friend, their forever date, and who they can sink their dicks into at the end of the day.
Do men actually like women? As people? Or are they simply related to them or fuck them?
My first date with a woman was incredible.
While some part of her may have been physically attracted to me, for the first time, I didn’t feel like a sack of meat trying to be a human. I felt like I was choosing to show up as myself, my physical self being the least interesting thing about me.
She was shorter than me with tough hands and a modern mohawk. She farmed. We climbed at her school’s gym and then relaxed in the hot tub afterward. Neither of us made a move. We talked about coming out and our traumas. I worried constantly about whether I was entertaining enough.
We changed in the same locker room. I felt bold and didn’t turn away as I peeled off my wet bikini top. She looked then looked away and I felt safe. While that glance maybe acknowledged her attraction, I didn’t get the sense that she felt entitled to more. Entitled to my body or that I was at fault for being attractive. We were simply existing on a date as ourselves.
A new form of intimacy was discovered that day: being in a public bathroom with your date.
We parted ways and never spoke again; I think both of us realizing that it wasn’t a match.
I had never been more delighted. To go on a date with someone who has some of the same lived experiences as you based on the gender assigned to you at birth, who wants to get to know you, was thrilling.
I didn’t know that there was another way to be alive. I didn’t know that there was another way to feel. I just didn’t know, and I’m so glad now that I do.
Recently I had a strange dream, one that follows a similar theme. I am confronting a troublesome sibling about his poor behavior. I yell his misdeeds at his face, over and over, as if I am making up for my less than spectacular confrontation in the real world.
Another sibling has confessed that they are queer within that dream, and I become protective of them. My mother says, “God doesn’t make mistakes”, and I feel the earth shift. I had long put away religion as something that I didn’t want. I didn’t want a god who hates me for something that has been missing from me for so long. But to hear those words out of the mouth of my mother who, in the real world, lets her disdain for queer people be known, was a soft miracle.
I am not a mistake.
Currently, I am seeing two women in my city.
My first queersexual experience left me feeling like I could climb a mountain or fly over the ocean by flapping my arms alone.
Was this what it’s like to be born?
I am missing so many memories from childhood trauma and I am often disassociating. To have the hearth shatter around me while a woman (A woman!) ground down onto me, I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.
Shame no longer creeps at the corner of my periphery. There is no shame in being alive as you mean to be.
