On Being Queer (& Heteronormative Relationships)

Wrapping up Pride Month with a splice of my story

I remember the first time I ever learned what it meant to be gay. Ironically, it was because of my obsession with Zac Efron, a straight man. I was 7 years old when the movie 17 Again was in theaters and I begged my mom to see it despite its PG-13 rating. My mom eventually caved in to my demands with the condition that I never tell my dad. In that movie, there’s a scene where the lead actress assumes Zac’s character is gay and lists the reasons why she believes so including his hair being “perfectly quaffed” or wearing “really tight” jeans. When exiting the theater my mother nervously asked me if I knew what it was to be gay. When I shook my head she explained it to me like this:

“Well, you know how dad and I are married and live together? Two men can also be together like dad and I are, or two women.”

I responded with an “okay” and skipped along while my mother breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t have any more questions. I vaguely remember my mother telling me that she would always love me no matter who I dated while brushing my hair in the morning and I would reassure her that it didn’t matter because I wasn’t gay. 

Looking back on my childhood, I can see a lot of hints of my sexuality. I was very possessive with girls who I considered to be my best friends. In fact, my first kiss was with one of these girls. I had many arguments with myself in the shower trying to contextualize why the church I went to thought it was so wrong to love whoever you wanted to love. I remember sitting in Bible class and hearing the teacher drone on about how and why homosexuality is wrong, and I began to panic because I didn’t know if I could stand it if I grew up to be a lesbian. I combatted the fear of being gay by envisioning myself making out with another girl. Multiple times. Every day. I convinced myself that because I didn’t feel anything, I wasn’t gay. Yes, I now understand how silly this sounds.

Despite all this, I still told myself that I was 100% straight and that being gay was 100% wrong. I am no stranger to homophobia, but lucky I learned to grow out of it pretty early on. Gay marriage was legalized across the country the same year that I decided to abandon the church that raised me, and I can’t say that these two occurrences weren’t correlated. I began to open my mind to the idea of acceptance, but I wasn’t quite ready to look inward and discover my own sexuality yet.

I discovered myself in a way that many young teenagers do: with an emo phase. Thus it was at a Panic! At the Disco concert when I was 15 that I first entertained the question of my sexuality. At the time, Panic! fans would give out hearts of various colors in the crowd to shine through their phone cameras during the song Girls/Girls/Boys so that the band on stage would see a rainbow within the crowd as they played the gay anthem. I remember being so moved by this effort from the community, and the next day as I listened to Girls/Girls/Boys again I started to wonder, was I wrong about myself? The lead singer of Panic! At the Disco identified as bisexual, and it's worth noting that my obsession with David Bowie spiked around this time due to his recent passing, and he also identified as bisexual. So based on all this information, I decided I was too.

I always envisioned myself ending up with a man because that’s what society tells little girls they should expect. I had always been shown heterosexual media, and being gay was more of an insult when I was growing up than it was a fact. Every time my mother spoke to me about my future she always mentioned a man within it. Queer representation in the media is so important for little kids who are exploring their identity and want to feel accepted in the identity they develop. When only one form of love is shown to us over and over again, we are likely to believe that any other form is wrong or looked down upon. I feel very grateful for the music that I was exposed to at a very formative time in my life because it showed me that there is more to sexuality than just loving and being loved by someone of the opposite gender.

As a bisexual, I’ve dated my fair share of men. Some for very short periods of time, others for much longer. But in my reflections on these relationships and “situationships,” I realize how much I was “going through the motions” rather than feeling the intrinsic motivation to pursue these connections. Some may argue that means that I just haven’t found the right man for me –and perhaps they’re right. However, I have felt what it means to find the right person for me, and she just so happens to not be a man.

I’m almost at the one year mark of my first queer relationship, and there’s a lot that I wish I could tell my younger self who was struggling to accept her queer identity. For example, I used to be concerned about being viewed as “the man” of a queer relationship since I am generally taller than most women and have a more athletic build. Now that I most definitely am viewed as the man in my relationship, I actually appreciate it way more than I ever expected to. I am allowing myself to challenge gender conventions in a manner in which I felt limited to when I was in a heteronormative relationship.

That’s a common theme I’ve found in my comparisons of my current relationship to my previous exes: I feel much more free to discover who I am instead of being assumed into a box of what the ideal woman should be. My girlfriend is the first partner I’ve had who sees me for who I am and doesn’t try to ignore the little things she doesn’t like about me. In my experience with men, I have consistently felt like a watered-down version of myself, acting out of the desire to maintain my boyfriend’s fantasy of me or avoid facing his criticisms. 

With my girlfriend I feel like the more fearless, compassionate, and inquisitive version of myself that I have always dreamed of being. When I lay awake at night thinking about what it means to be made happy by your partner, I know that I have found it. Meanwhile it feels so strange to me that this is the kind of love that I was raised to believe was bad for you.

There are things that I am still afraid of in my relationship. I’m afraid to show my love for my girlfriend in many spaces because of the way the world is. I’ve been booed for kissing women in bars before, and I’ve been scolded for my questioning of homophobic language in my community. As much as I want to tell my younger self that she has so much to look forward to in the queer community and the world of same sex relationships, I also want to tell her that her fears are valid and unfortunately there are a lot of hardships that come with this kind of love.

I started coming out to my family while I was still dating a man, which came with a wide variety of reactions and criticisms. Even to this day, I’ve been experiencing the impact of my family’s homophobia on my relationship and my sense of self. This Pride Month I have experienced more backlash for my relationship and my sexuality than I have in quite a while. Turns out, the conversations you have with your child about acceptance don’t mean much when they actually start living the lifestyles you promised to accept. But I am resilient, and so is my relationship, so we deal with these issues in stride.

I wanted to share with you a piece of my story this June because it is one I have heard time and time again from young queers who are struggling to find a place in this world among their various communities. You can expect a lot of queer stories and poetry from me in the upcoming months, so I figured it was only a matter of time before I begin to express myself in nonfiction as well.