It’s easy to make light of the situation I was in but I genuinely wanted to believe I was straight when the simple fact was, I wasn’t, I was gay and there was nothing I could do about it. This caused me much pain. The only parallel I can draw is that of a black person wanting to be white. It’s obvious they are black, they just don’t want to accept it for various reasons but, whether or not they do, they are still black and will never be white no matter how hard they try. Just as you can’t change your skin colour you can’t change your sexuality.
The only thoughts I had of lesbians were that they were fat, ugly and looked like/wanted to be men. Sometimes they had facial hair, sometimes they were Russian and lifted weights. Occasionally they looked like Ellen Degeneres but even she wasn’t the most feminine of women. I could not reconcile the fact that because I had these feelings I was a lesbian. It made me hate myself. I couldn’t look in the mirror and when I did I was disgusted with my reflection. I loathed the part of me that liked women and wanted to cut it out, make it disappear and leave me alone to have my heterosexual children.
I used to pray to God to make me straight. I’d become so anxious I’d cry, begging him to change me. I prayed every night and it never happened, I stayed gay and it felt like god had made me this way as a punishment. He’d created me gay and deliberately written church teaching, through divine inspiration, to prohibit it, to ensure that everyone in the church knew that it was wrong. Yet, I was this way and it was not changing no matter how much I grovelled. How could a god create someone only to have them excommunicated from his family for being the way he wanted? I lost my faith completely.
Imagine a plug hole at the bottom of a bath with a stream of water flowing down it into the drain. Constantly, I felt like that. My stomach was a bath which had just been emptied and all contents were being continually poured down the plughole with no end in sight, it felt as though every positive thought I had about myself was being sucked down that hole, into the drain, along with my hopes of being straight.
After just over a year of mental torment I managed to convince myself that I was bisexual as, in my mind, it was not as bad as being gay. It was a halfway house, not a diesel dyke but not the straight person I desperately wanted, but knew I could never, be. I would look in the mirror and think to myself that it was ok to be bi, it wasn’t as bad as lesbian, there was still some femininity left in it. I wasn’t a complete man and I still had a shot at my dream life with horny hetero kids, a dog and a husband.
Six months after I’d admitted to myself that I was bisexual I “came out”. I now know and knew then that if I didn’t tell someone at that time I would have gone mad. The pressure of living a lie combined with the disgust I felt towards myself was immense, ever present and unrelenting.
We were standing under a bridge waiting for the bus to go to school and there was a lull in conversation. I looked down at my school kilt (a green, knee length, tartan number - very fetching) and then over to my friend who was standing a little to my left, level with my shoulder as she was very small and I have always been rather tall. A train rumbled past on the bridge above making the pigeons nested in its awnings flap and fly needlessly.
“I’ve got something to tell you. (Pause) I’m gay”
“Is that it? I knew that already, I always knew you was a lesbian” She said, disappointed, as if she’d been cheated of a juicy piece of gossip.
“What?!” I screeched, exasperated.
“I knew that ages ago but you always got upset about it when I asked you” she replied matter-of-factly.
We continued our conversation as though nothing had been said.
I came out (as bisexual) to other close friends several weeks later and got a similar reaction from one; “Oh, I always knew that though.” I don’t look like a typical gay person so perhaps they were such close friends that they could tell by instinct. Whatever the reason, just the fact that they knew was relieving, as though I’d taken a small but hugely significant step on the way to fully accepting who I was.