Finding myself

I am gay — a lesbian by definition, but I prefer the term “gay”. I first felt attraction to women when I was seven and known that I was gay when I was thirteen.

I was homeschooled without interaction with children my age, except for my older brother. The women I saw on TV and in cartoons attracted me in a way that, at the time, I did not understand; I now know that it was sexual arousal, but at the time, it was just “the funny feeling you get when you look at girls' butts”. On my old desktop computer I read the Wikipedia article on LGBT and asked my brother the hypothetical “What if I liked another girl?”, to which he, being 10 or 11, responded “That would be disgusting!” I was too young then to realise that my question was more than a hypothetical.

At 10, now having not only unrestricted but private internet access, I discovered pornography in 2018; predictably I avoided anything with a man in it like the plague, and watched only women. Seeing nothing unusual about this due to experiencing neither sex education or condemnation, I naïvely thought that being attracted to females was a universal experience(even for women) and that the female body was inherently, universally titillating.

After I, aged 11, learned in 2019 what each letter of LGBT meant, I went on trying new labels — bisexual, asexual, pansexual, non-binary, transgender — and discarding them every few months after realising that I did not fit them. I even called myself a lesbian for a while, but, in probable denial, ditched the label though, looking back, it fit me perfectly. I experienced sexual attraction, was attracted only to women, and never objected to being called a girl.

This period of questioning and experimentation lasted intermittently — some months I'd think of it, some I wouldn't — until late 2021, when I suddenly paid attention to my own sexuality and realised that I didn't have to lie to myself that I was attracted to men or that I was a boy. I reckon that my prefrontal cortex had finally developed enough to make connections between the “funny feeling” seven-year-old me got from seeing women on TV, my discovery of pornography, and my general confusion about myself.