When I was little, I played house with girls. It was acting; I didn’t really like the girls. Then at some point, it wasn’t acting anymore. I really wanted to touch them or kiss them and do the I’m-not-sure-what-that-is-but-everyone-talks-about-it thing with them.
At what age did I go from play-acting to actual feelings? 6 or 7.
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Me too. In all respects. I didn’t know why she um, stood out, but she did. I had a serious crush on a girl in my second grade class. In the '50s I fit right in with what I was supposed to be feeling, so it was easy, and I never had a crisis unless you count being frustrated at times.
Never told anyone this but…when I was like 4 or 5, I peeped at an aunt taking a bath
When I chose Ginger over Maryanne. I was 5 or 6.
Did you switch back to Maryanne at 15 or 16 like the rest of us? 
Girls went from being icky and having cooties to being all I could think about, basically overnight.
Isn’t that how it works for most straight adolescents?
I flirted with the hospital nurse in the newborn nursery.
That’s why she told the other nurses “Leave this one alone.”
She could tell right away I was…bad to the bone.
I’ve been toggling ever since.
I’m not quite sure what this means. Is it that you’re willing to have sex with a man, but not a romantic relationship?
I suspect there was a particular boy in preschool that I was crushing on, from what I’ve heard about my interactions with him, but I don’t remember anything clearly enough to say for sure. But I do remember Henry from kindergarten very well, and Scott from first grade. These were powerful crushes, but pre-sexual; basically, I just wanted to be able to talk and play with them and, ahem, kiss them on their cheeks once in a while.
In Scott’s case [he of the dimples], I distinctly remember wanting to kiss him on BOTH cheeks, but he had other girlfriends he favored. Oh, the agony!
I have a story of my nephew to relate from his no-latency infancy (circa 18 months old, IIRC). We were in a restaurant and his parents had already informed us relations of his apparent fascination with blondes – how he’d stare at beautiful, young women longer and more intently (or so it seemed to them) if they were blonde. Anyway, our waitress was brunette, but there was a blonde waitress working neighboring tables, and she was young and attractive. Well, my nephew was watching these waitresses on their work routines, walking back and forth… and when the blonde was approaching our table en route to the kitchen (and the brunette not in sight), he deliberately knocked his spoon off of his high chair table. She noticed, picked it up for us, and cooed over the cute little boy. My nephew beamed.
A short while later, as she was again walking past our table, he did it again.
“That boy’s going to be [in] a lot of trouble when he gets older,” was our consensus.
Scrivener-I LOLed at your nephew! BTW, he WILL be in BIG trouble when he gets older!
Similar to Scrivener’s story, I’m told that as a baby I always wanted to be held by big breasted women, and would manipulate my way via crying to being held by bigger breasted women to ‘upgrade’. Knowing myself now, I have no reason not to believe this story. 
I had crushes on boys starting in 4th grade or so.
But I didn’t go through the really boy crazy period that lots of my classmates did starting in junior high, and it made me wonder if maybe I wasn’t straight after all. After some consideration, I decided I am, in fact, mostly straight. (There are lots of women I find very attractive, but I’m not really attracted to them.) FWIW, I grew up in a very liberal household in San Francisco, so homosexuality never struck me as particularly mysterious or unusual - I’ve known plenty of gay men and lesbians throughout my life.
I realized I was neither gay or straight my senior year in high school. It was Valentine’s Day and I noticed all the roses and heart-shaped balloons, PDAs and smooch-fests going on. And I wondered, for the first time in my life, why I didn’t seem to desire any of that.
I went to a teacher after school and asked when she had started to like boys. She said she’d always liked them. And then she asked if I thought I was gay.
“No,” I said rather quickly. “I don’t think I’m anything.” It was the first time I had told anyone that…the first time I had really articulated the idea to myself. I don’t remember exactly how I felt after this confession. I don’t think I felt relieved. But the teacher was kind enough to befriend me during the following months as I came to terms with myself.
I know it sounds strange, but previous to that year, I had conceptualized sex as something abstract, not something people actually really did except in the movies. I never thought about me holding hands with a lover. I never imagined kissing anyone. I never had crushes or desired to be crushed on. While other girls were going out on dates or daydreaming about “dream” husbands, I had my nose in my sketch pad and spent my spare time being a dorky goofball.
I think my life is easier than most people’s, so I’m kinda grateful that I am who I am. But there have been times when I have felt less than human. Like something is wrong with me all the way to the core.
It never remotely occurred to me to not like boys, and I started at an early age, around kindergarten.
My earliest “romantic” thoughts were about women/girls when I was young (4-5 or so) and they were my peers. I took a bunch of hallucinogens in my teenage years, and it caused some reflection, but women had been nice to me and continued to be, and I just kept doing what I was doing, on the theory that if I’d been a closet-case, I’d have done something about by then. Who knows, but it worked “out” for me on its own.
This. I actually “came out” to my mom and stepdad after a period of self-doubt and torture-- maybe age 13-- that I was a male who found females inexplicably attractive. Yeah, I came out of the closet about being straight. Goddamn had I found women attractive from an inappropriately early age. I remember being in preschool and cherishing glimpses at magazine bra ads, or down teachers’ blouses. Couldn’t say anything though, couldn’t say anything for years. Felt incredible guilt over having surreptitiously gotten Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, etc. Much of it was due to being raided in a really strict Baptist environment (Christian school, church, and family). Got a lot of shit at school for admitting a crush on a female classmate, like it was abnormal for a young teen boy to think a young teen girl was something of interest. I was really lucky that my family began to withdraw from the extremes of Baptists around this time, and my mom had begun to re-champion some of the rebellious hippie things that had marked her own teen years.
My mom pretty much blinked a few times when I “came out”, then asked if I’d like a subscription to the Playboy magazine I’d been hiding in my bedroom the entire time. :smack: Thought I’d hidden that better. Regardless, free subscription to Playboy in an era when porn was hard to come by for an underage male? Sure! As warped as the Playboy view of women was, being allowed to revel in/celebrate liking the opposite sex was pretty damn novel to me.
Sexually, I am indifferent, emotionally I prefer to be with women. Was SHOCKEd to realise thatr people thought it was important around age 6-7, when I learned the physical mechanics of reproduction.
I guess I “knew” when I first got an erection from seeing a woman’s breasts in a movie.