I can remember the exact moment I truly realised I was gay.
I was 22-years-old, in a booth in a dimly-lit Auckland bar, airborne on e and getting a head massage from a girl.
In one great gulp of a moment I realised I wanted to turn around and plant a kiss right on her lips.
There had always been inklings; high school English teachers who made me want to stay behind after every class, sweaty dreams about getting muddy with my all-girl hockey team.
But it was in that one terrifying exhilarating moment, with my mind loosened by drugs and massaging hands, that I was for the first time able to accept within the core of myself that I liked women that I loved women.
Nothing ever happened with that fleeting masseuse, but her hands helped me come alive.
The series of failed relationships with every kind of man . . . the tall, the short, the hot, the balding, the sweeties, the roguish assholes . . . each attempt at a relationship became as empty as every one night stand I had ever had. There was suddenly a gulf of nothing there.
I don’t even remember having an e come down because the relief of knowing made me high.
I was a lesbian. And I was starving.
Do you remember the moment you truly realised you were gay?
6 responses so far ↓
1 Amanda Palmer, Florist // Oct 24, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I suspected I liked girls from the time I saw Annie Lennox with short red hair in a men’s suit or secretly stayed up late watching soft core porn on tv and only staring at the women, although the moment that really crystallized it, when I said “Ohhhh…” was the scene in the movie The Hunger between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon when I realized “That.is.the.hottest.thing.I.have.ever.seen!”. I did not, however, know I could do anything about it, and went on happily seducing boy after boy until one night, when I was 18 and a girl I had been staring at longingly decided that what I really needed to cheer me up was a dose of X and to be taken to her bed. Guess what…it worked! She turned out to be batshit crazy, but I will be forever grateful to her for getting me over my shyness.
2 Matty // Oct 24, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I don’t think I had a moment like that… I always knew I was attracted to guys - and I even fell in love with a very good friend - but I suppose my ‘moment’ was when I knew I didn’t want to hide my being gay anymore.
Then the ‘fireworks’ started!
3 Robbie // Oct 24, 2008 at 5:37 pm
The first time that I realised I was gay was when I was in primary school, at a urinal in the loos.
I was peeing, think about the stupidity of everyone not realising that I was gay. I acted like a girl (or so I was told by all of the rugby boys), and I hung out with girls, so I must like boys, like girls do. SIMPLE!! I remember that day so clearly.
4 Michael Stevens // Oct 24, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Lovely - I knew from when I was about 6 I think, well, knew I was “different” anyhow.
But I love your story.
5 Tim // Oct 25, 2008 at 10:33 pm
I love your story.
I knew from the first wank. All the images i had in my head were most definitely not what i thought was ‘normal’. But like some of the others here, it was shyness that kept me in. It’s taken me well over a decade to finally accept it.
I sat down on my birthday (mid-twenties) and said to myself, “Mate, you’re not growing up any more. If it was going to go away it would have already.”
Thanks to you all for sharing your stories - they’re inspiring.
6 frederick // Nov 16, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I realize that I was gat, when I was 12 yo. I got inloved whit my best friend, but I never told him, instead I went to fuck whit some beu mates that I now. Today whit 45-yo. my friend doesn’t now that Im gay “horfful”
Whit 16-yo I have married whit a boy whit the same age, and I have lived whit him20y, now that he dies whit cancer, I do not wish nobody else.
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