My family moved out to the farm and away from that neighbor boy when I was four, so I know that my crush had to have started when I was four or younger. And it was most certainly a crush. I pined after him and wanted to kiss him.
I didn’t know. Not until I was in my late 20s and had a marriage behind me.
It seems funny looking back – there were so many signs. I was a big tomboy as a child, captain of the hockey club, hated dresses and Barbie, had a very clear crush on a female friend that, reading my teenage diaries, looks so blatant now, yet I didn’t realise.
Dating boys was just part of the fun of growing up – going to discos, snogging a boy at the end of the night, laughing with my girlfriends about it - but I was never wildly excited by any of the boys or remember having any strong sexual feelings towards them. I had a great relationship with my eventual husband, but don’t remember heart pounding, crotch throbbing feelings. I didn’t know that I was missing anything.
Until I was seduced by a female friend. It literally threw my life upside down. The sex was A-MAZING and I fell headlong into a passionate, all consuming affair.
When that ended (she went off with a man, obvs), I thought ‘well, that was exciting, one for the memoirs, now back to finding a man’.
I never did. The next relationship was with another woman, and then another, and I finally admitted to myself that this was who I was, all along. As soon as I accepted it, I never looked back.
I couldn’t imagine sleeping with a man now. It holds no interest to me whatsoever.
I knew I liked girls as much as boys when I was still a little girl. My first and most of my crushes were all girls/women but I liked boys/men too so I just thought I was stupid because being queer is just nasty and only nasty people do it.
Until my daughter’s friend came out, then she admitted she was bi. I didn’t tell anyone until I was almost forty and now in my real life only my daughter knows. I love my Mig but I don’t think he’d understand.
For some of us, it can take a really long time. As a teenager, I just figured that at some point, I’d start liking girls like most people do. I mean, I knew people who came out of the closet back then, and that didn’t seem like me. My interest in guys wasn’t like that.
In college, I pretty much figured it out, but managed to keep it in the back of my mind. I mostly just wasn’t interested in anyone. If you’re content with being celibate for the foreseeable future, why describe yourself, even to yourself, as gay? It wasn’t all that important to be concerned with the fact that it was always cute guys that caught my eye, if I had no particular inclination to do anything about it. If pressed, I’d say that I was asexual, which was largely true. Many years ago there was a thread on here about National Coming Out Day, and I described myself as “questioning” (someone’s got to put that last letter in LGBTQ).
That state of affairs lasted a while. Around 29 or 30, I got a bit more restless about it, and decided that regardless of whether I was planning on doing anything about it anytime soon, it was important to me to at least be honest with myself. And slowly started to let everyone else know. I’m still just about the least horny gay guy on the planet, but I’m OK with that. I’m not trying to pretend I’m something I’m not (other than when I pretend I’m Batman).
fell in love with my best friend at an all girls camp at 15. Talk about CONFUSING! I remember lying in my bunk thinking “OMG this feels amazing.but aren’t I supposed to be feeling this way towards GUYS?”
thank you for the replies in this thread and the other (for nongay dopers, even if I didn’t start that one).
the questions in the op weren’t meant to be insulting or… wtf or anything. it’s just that I know several people who came out as lesbians and then changed their minds later and said that it was one of those things… a phase, a way to shock people, etc.
I mean… I don’t want to tell my mother something that will hurt her or make things weird in my family and then go back later all, “just kidding!”. And I don’t want to get involved with some girl and do the same to her. And I kind of never had that burning lust sensation for anyone, really, but boys are just so boring and not pretty at all. I don’t get it. I’ve really tried, and I always figured I would get it eventually, but I just don’t.
Yeah… Lots of us have stood on the precipice and then realised I’ts not the big bad, or shocking thing that we thought it was and then stepped forward or took a step back into our comfort zone.
SurrenderDororthy - something that’s worth considering is that female sexuality can be more fluid than male, so if you’re saying you have same sex desire now but don’t know if it’ll last or not then maybe it won’t. But maybe it will, and surely better to be able to live your life the way you want to rather than repress and bury your desires and needs for the sake of others (who, if they really cared about you, wouldn’t want you to do that).
If you came out to your family you’re not doing that to hurt them, even if that’s the way they end up taking it. You can’t be responsible for how others feel about it.
How old are you?
Shrug, if my 97yo grandmother is a lesbian she sure hasn’t figured it out, but she says (and we believe her) that the reason she didn’t take lovers in her teens like her coworkers did was that she wasn’t interested in sex until she met Grandpa, and that she has never ever wanted anybody else. She was 21 at the time.
I had to think hard to realize I was straight (like Joe above, Kinsey 0 in action and something like a 1 in my head), and I was 12 at the time - I wouldn’t even have questioned it if my taste in guys hadn’t differred from that of the people writing teen mags, though. “Straight” was the default; the word “gay” had entered my vocabulary in 5th grade Sex Ed and I didn’t know anybody or of anybody who was.
If figuring out one’s sexuality was easy, there wouldn’t be people trying to cure the gay, or people who need help from relatives to go beyond the missionary, or people who can orgasm on their own but who have never orgasmed with a partner…
I never developed an interest in girls when other boys in the class were starting to hook up, but the guys on Dukes of Hazzard, Eric Estrada, and Saturday Night Fever era John Travolta were making odd and wonderful things happen.
I contend that figuring out one’s sexuality is easy, it’s people who don’t accept that it’s anything other than “sinful urges” and attempt to pray it away that make it harder.
I contend that you are wrong. I was a pretty intelligent teenager and my nuclear family was not explicitly religious or overtly homophobic. I still had a hard time figuring it out. Why? Because of the prevailing idea that if you don’t like girls there is Something Wrong. No one ever said, “if you don’t like girls, you’re gay.” I didn’t really know what gay was — how would I? By the time I learned, I was already in deep denial.
Sorry, it’s just that being told it’s “easy” to figure out makes me feel like you’re calling me, and others like me, a fool or an idiot or something. It wasn’t easy. I wish it had been.
I think this is an excellent point. My cousin asked me the very same question a few months ago, having gone through what seems like similar questions to the OP. I told her that, for some people, falling in love (or lust or infatuation) is less about gender than about the person who makes you feel safe and wonderful in the world at that time. I really believe that is true for some people.
I’m 19.
You’ve got plenty of time to work things out, then. I certainly wasn’t sure I was gay at 19. Just accept it as a possibility, and do what feels right. I have no real first-hand knowledge, but it’s a pretty common idea that there are plenty of college-age women who experiment with lesbianism. If you’re interested in exploring relationships with women, they’d likely be understanding of the fact that you’re not entirely sure what you’re into.
I strongly relate to this comic, although I’m a guy, and it took me about ten years longer to get to panel six than she did. (Or panel 1, for that matter.)
BTW: other comics on that site are NSFW, so be careful with it.
I don’t think you should put too much pressure on yourself to make a decision. There’s no time pressure to tell your family, and anyone you might hook up with at that age is unlikely to be looking for long-term commitment so you shouldn’t worry about having relationships and then letting people down. That’s what happens at your age - whether you’re gay or straight.
Just go with the flow, go to some lesbian bars/groups if you want to explore that side of you, but don’t be hard on yourself if you find it’s not for you. Experimentation amongst young women is astonishingly common. In ten years time, you’ll be amazed how many of your straight female friends will finally admit to that fling they had with a girl at college, having kept it secret for years.
Many people take a long journey to coming out and take many years before they tell friends, let alone family.You’ll know it when being straight seems …odd to you. I’m not sure how I can better express it. But that state of mind can take some time and may never be the case for you.
There was a long period of time in which I like to say that I knew, but I didn’t know I knew, so to speak: as a boy I definitely found men attractive (including a big crush on my grade 8 French teacher), and I followed gay rights stories in the news, but it all went on on a sort of unconscious, unintegrated, not quite sure why I was doing it and barely even aware that I was kind of level. I wasn’t in denial; I wasn’t even really aware there was anything to deny.
As stupid as it sounds, I finally put it together after a dream I had in December the year I was 15. Not even a sexy dream, either, just a dream where I saved another boy in my class (who I didn’t even like all that much IRL) from getting bullied, and he gave me a hug, and I liked it. It wasn’t that that convinced me I was gay, but just when I woke up, for no good reason I was finally able to put words to it and know that I was gay. It wasn’t a matter of coming to a conclusion, or deducing it; it was a matter of finally coming to know it, and I knew it as a certainty then and there.
Any doubt I had was about how to proceed. Happily I was spared any self-hatred on the subject; I know people who prayed for months not to be gay, or who slept with people of the opposite gender to try to make themselves straight. I never had a “questioning” phase, really; I moved right from “clueless” to “know I’m gay and accept it” that morning. (In the earlier stage I’ve described, I wasn’t even aware enough to ask questions.) The question was how to keep myself safe and come out in a way that worked for me.
As for the OP’s questions, as to how I knew I wasn’t doing it for those reasons, some of them are easy (I know it wasn’t a bad reaction to women because I was a virgin and had never dated anyone; I didn’t want to shock my mother, and moved into my “shock my parents” phase a year or so after I came out to myself; etc.) and others have a little bit less satisfying answers: I just… knew that those things weren’t the case, and I wouldn’t have put myself through the hassle if they had been.
It may well be that if my sexuality had been more fluid and/or I had been significantly interested in women sexually, my attraction to men might have been more confusing to me and have taken longer to realize and know what to do with. As it was, I knew, for a fact, that I thought I was gay because I was: I very strongly, inside myself, wanted to love and make love to men.
Ditto. It took me YEARS to try to figure out who I am. I remember going up to M at camp, (when she got a special award at campfire) for what I thought would be a hug. Then she kissed me on the cheek…and I was like “omg that feels good…OMG I’m GAY!!! I remember walking back to my cabin in a daze, and my counselor going “you look happy” when she was giving us our goodnight hugs.
Unfortunatly I was trying to come to terms with my identity in another way, as well as dealing with the HELL of high school. I kept thinking " Maybe that was a stage. Maybe my feelings for M were just a manifesation of how awesome the camp was. The camp was one of those places where a straight girl might find herself falling in love with another straight girl…and it was NORMAL!!!
I kept thinking " maybe I’ll meet a nice guy” … I wasn’t very popular in high school to put it mildly 
dated a bit in college, (guys) but nobody who made me go “wow”…and in a lot of ways I think I’m still trying to figure out who I am sexually. Keep thinking that “Oh i haven’t had a lot of relationship experiance (after all when you’re the weird deaf fat girl who wants to date you?) with guys or met the right guy”…this when I mainly fanatize about being with girls, and most of my erotica consumption is lesbian.
I was still trying to figure out who I was back then…so don’t worry.