My Coming Out Story

Names, including mine, have been changed for privacy. Warning: I didn't proofread this before I published.

Honestly, I'm not really sure how to say this. I'm still a bit confused with the story myself. I suppose that might be what it's like for everyone else as well, but who am I to say? I'll just start with the facts. My name is Kay Birchtree. I am nineteen years old. I am bisexual, but that's not all I am. I'm also musical, creative, loving, loyal. I'm stubborn, sarcastic, and sometimes I say things I don't mean. I make mistakes--tons of them. I've had my heart shattered countless times, but I believe in love.

It took me eighteen years to accept my sexuality. I can't even tell you when I started questioning. In hindsight, I can see the signs that I wasn't heterosexual dating all the way back to my childhood. I just never connected the dots until much later. I remember a feeling bubbling inside of me while watching a scene from the 2000s film, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. To be specific, there's a scene where the Angels do a provocative dance at a bar. So, I suppose Cameron Diaz was my gay sexual awakening. But at the time, I was very young. I didn't realize what those feelings meant. At this time, there was no one parading around chanting "gay is okay". I didn't even know that some girls liked other girls. I thought that heterosexuality was the only option. It was normal for me, I didn't have anyone gay in my life that I knew of.

I grew up in an Irish-Catholic household. This basically means that my whole family was religious, never went to church and sinned constantly. My mom went to church as a child and teenager, but when she got pregnant at seventeen she stopped. She rarely went back, but she still believed in God. My three siblings and I were all baptized Catholic. We were never taught that gay people were going to hell or anything like that, but we definitely weren't encouraged to not be straight. Thinking back, it felt as though it was okay if other people were gay, but if any of us were, that was a different story. Don't get me wrong, we were never told that. It's just a vibe.

I can't tell you if I ever had feelings for a girl as a child. I know I had sexual feelings toward celebrities, obviously, but I disguised them in my mind as just thinking the women were beautiful and being jealous of them. The classic, "I don't know if I want to be with you, or be you". I never gave myself the chance to play with the idea of the former. Sexuality wasn't something I thought about in childhood. As I said previously, no one was discussing it, so it wasn't on my mind. I assumed I was straight. By the time junior high rolled around and people were discovering their sexualities, I was extremely convinced that I was straight. Fast forward to my freshman year of high school in 2013, my best friend (we'll call her Alexa) comes out to me as pansexual. I had no idea what that was. I honestly went home and googled it. I fell down the rabbit hole of different sexualities, educating myself on what they all meant. Even then, "Alexa is pansexual, that's great. But I'm straight, of course".

It's hard to discover your sexuality for yourself when the people around you are forcing it onto you. In junior high, I played softball. I loved it. Of course, with this came the lesbian stereotype. Alexa played softball as well. Of course, she was my best friend, so we were always together. We had a very close friendship. I wasn't a tomboy, I've always been sort of in between. Alexa was a little more on the tomboy side. We played softball, so we must be a lesbian couple. I have distinct memories of ranting to my friends about a group of boys who called me a lesbian. "A sport that I love to play doesn't affect my sexuality! I'm straight! Just because I play softball doesn't mean I'm gay!". I didn't think being gay was a bad thing, but I hated that these boys trying to tell me what I was. Alexa and I joked about how everyone thought we were dating, but it frustrated me. Even when I had a boyfriend, people would dismiss my relationship and think Alexa and I were covering a relationship that didn't exist. Little did I know, that was only the beginning of men forcing a sexuality label onto me.