It's been too long.
Well, I sure disappeared. I haven't been feeling fandom for a good long while, but I miss you, LJ, and I miss journalling. Tumblr has not been good for my attention span, and I've been really wanting to get back to writing longer pieces.
And on that note, I'm having a sexual identity crisis.
My sexual orientation has been pretty straightforward most of my life. I liked girls, and I didn't like boys.
I was also raised evangelical Christian, so I spent a lot of time trying to be anything but a lesbian.
Nothing worked. Not praying away the gay, not burying my body in layers of baggy clothing, not escaping into schoolwork or books or fanfic. (Always het or m/m, of course. Because that's what straight girls read, right? If I was reading about porn with boys in it, I couldn't be a total lesbian.) I made a few pathetic attempts to date guys early in college, but I got skittish and ran away as soon as things looked like they might turn physical.
Eventually, I took a long, critical look at my religious beliefs, and admitted I was gay. I moved away from home, came out to everyone, and realized being gay was fantastic. I marched in pride parades and became an LGBT activist, and had dyke sex on apartment roofs, and it was all fucking amazeballs.
And then I got depressed.
Last summer, a perfect storm of work, romantic, and creative disappointment knocked me on my butt and into a deep depression that I'm just now climbing out of.
I was miserably unhappy with myself, but I rather naively thought I was unhappy because I wasn't in The Perfect Relationship. I threw myself into dating, but I just wasn't interested any more. Whatever spark had always been there between me and women had vanished, along with my self-esteem and my comfort in my own skin.
As part of my not-treating-the-problem self-medication, I read porn instead. Porn was nice. Porn was safe. I fapped to lesbian porn, but sometimes, to switch things up, I watched gay male porn or read slash. For diversity. For funsies. And if I was completely honest with myself, male vulnerability really, really appealed to me. Not sexually so, which made the whole thing even weirder. It filled me with a vague longing, but I had no particular outlet for it.
Lesbian porn did less and less for me, so I got increasingly frustrated. One day, I went looking specifically for bondage porn on tumblr. I knew bondage was a kink for me, but I never cared for the creepy male gaze that infests the stuff with female models. Turns out, Tumblr has many failings, but a shortage of good male bondage is not one of them.
I liked what I found. I really liked what I found.
I got off to thinking about men for the first time in my life.
I was puzzled, but pleased. It was fun, it expanded my fantasies, and I didn't think it would do much to impact my real life attractions. But the next day, I found myself looking at men differently. I found myself interacting with men differently. And I was, mercifully, feeling something for someone again. It's been nine months since then and I feel certain. I am definitely attracted to men, and this attraction is here to stay.
Womp womp. I saw that twist coming a mile away, you think.
Yes, yes. I know.
I know it's a cliche, and I know it's a cliche because it happens all the time. I just didn't think it would happen to me.
When I was 13, my parents had a subscription to Newsweek, and one week, the cover story was on the ex-gay movement. I immediately smuggled it upstairs and poured through it. The movement's claims seemed fishy, even to my pre-teen mind, but it stayed with me. A year later, we got the internet. I discovered fandom, which coincidentally had a high concentration of bi women and girls, including ones who identified as gay until they met the right dude. Maybe that's me, I thought? I wandered through high school and half of college, peering at my guy friends and thinking, "Are you my exception?" (I have no doubt most of these women would have been horrified by the lesson I took from their story, fwiw, but that's what happened. I was a desperate evangelical teenager.)
It was a really shitty way to go through life. My exception never came. When I finally decided to accept myself, it was a blessed relief to admit I was a bazillion on the Kinsey scale forever. Sexuality was genuinely fluid for some people. But some people were most definitely not me.
Turns out some people were me. I just had to wait ten years and be completely out to everyone in my life and deeply invested in being a lesbian. /bitter
If I were suddenly attracted to men in addition to women I feel like I'd be able to handle it, but I seem to be attracted to men instead of women, because my attraction to women is still in this inexplicable lull, and I feel like I've lost some good and lovely part of my identity and had it replaced with something alien.
Being gay used to be one of the few areas of my life that I could consistently count on. I came to see lesbianism as a soul-deep part of who I was. And now it's not and I can't help feel that there's some kind of ... grieving process I need to go through about it, if that's not too melodramatic?
Also, there's this other sword hanging over my head. The stereotype of the lesbian who ends up with a man has some pernicious, sexist-as-hell baggage, and I feel shittily like I'm playing into that. I know it shouldn't matter who I choose to sleep with... but the personal is political, and even if it shouldn't control my life choices, I feel like the accumulated pattern of choices that people like me make reinforces a really ugly cultural narrative where men are just more desirable as sex partners than women and women really need cock to be happy.
Here's the good, hopeful part: I actually have a ton of friends who are bi or fluid. They're a lovely open-minded group of people, and I know they'll have my back, and I feel like I understand them better. Having my eyes opened to another perspective has been one of the blessings of this whole thing. Truth be told, I always thought there was a platonic elegance to the idea of bisexuality, and just liking people as people. The reality of bisexuality appears to be far messier for me, but maybe that's the point. Sexuality is messy. And slippery, and politically problematic. I need to let go of my expectations for how my love life is supposed to unfold.
I've done it before and survived. It just hurts to let go of something that felt so true and hard-earned.
And on that note, I'm having a sexual identity crisis.
My sexual orientation has been pretty straightforward most of my life. I liked girls, and I didn't like boys.
I was also raised evangelical Christian, so I spent a lot of time trying to be anything but a lesbian.
Nothing worked. Not praying away the gay, not burying my body in layers of baggy clothing, not escaping into schoolwork or books or fanfic. (Always het or m/m, of course. Because that's what straight girls read, right? If I was reading about porn with boys in it, I couldn't be a total lesbian.) I made a few pathetic attempts to date guys early in college, but I got skittish and ran away as soon as things looked like they might turn physical.
Eventually, I took a long, critical look at my religious beliefs, and admitted I was gay. I moved away from home, came out to everyone, and realized being gay was fantastic. I marched in pride parades and became an LGBT activist, and had dyke sex on apartment roofs, and it was all fucking amazeballs.
And then I got depressed.
Last summer, a perfect storm of work, romantic, and creative disappointment knocked me on my butt and into a deep depression that I'm just now climbing out of.
I was miserably unhappy with myself, but I rather naively thought I was unhappy because I wasn't in The Perfect Relationship. I threw myself into dating, but I just wasn't interested any more. Whatever spark had always been there between me and women had vanished, along with my self-esteem and my comfort in my own skin.
As part of my not-treating-the-problem self-medication, I read porn instead. Porn was nice. Porn was safe. I fapped to lesbian porn, but sometimes, to switch things up, I watched gay male porn or read slash. For diversity. For funsies. And if I was completely honest with myself, male vulnerability really, really appealed to me. Not sexually so, which made the whole thing even weirder. It filled me with a vague longing, but I had no particular outlet for it.
Lesbian porn did less and less for me, so I got increasingly frustrated. One day, I went looking specifically for bondage porn on tumblr. I knew bondage was a kink for me, but I never cared for the creepy male gaze that infests the stuff with female models. Turns out, Tumblr has many failings, but a shortage of good male bondage is not one of them.
I liked what I found. I really liked what I found.
I got off to thinking about men for the first time in my life.
I was puzzled, but pleased. It was fun, it expanded my fantasies, and I didn't think it would do much to impact my real life attractions. But the next day, I found myself looking at men differently. I found myself interacting with men differently. And I was, mercifully, feeling something for someone again. It's been nine months since then and I feel certain. I am definitely attracted to men, and this attraction is here to stay.
Womp womp. I saw that twist coming a mile away, you think.
Yes, yes. I know.
I know it's a cliche, and I know it's a cliche because it happens all the time. I just didn't think it would happen to me.
When I was 13, my parents had a subscription to Newsweek, and one week, the cover story was on the ex-gay movement. I immediately smuggled it upstairs and poured through it. The movement's claims seemed fishy, even to my pre-teen mind, but it stayed with me. A year later, we got the internet. I discovered fandom, which coincidentally had a high concentration of bi women and girls, including ones who identified as gay until they met the right dude. Maybe that's me, I thought? I wandered through high school and half of college, peering at my guy friends and thinking, "Are you my exception?" (I have no doubt most of these women would have been horrified by the lesson I took from their story, fwiw, but that's what happened. I was a desperate evangelical teenager.)
It was a really shitty way to go through life. My exception never came. When I finally decided to accept myself, it was a blessed relief to admit I was a bazillion on the Kinsey scale forever. Sexuality was genuinely fluid for some people. But some people were most definitely not me.
Turns out some people were me. I just had to wait ten years and be completely out to everyone in my life and deeply invested in being a lesbian. /bitter
If I were suddenly attracted to men in addition to women I feel like I'd be able to handle it, but I seem to be attracted to men instead of women, because my attraction to women is still in this inexplicable lull, and I feel like I've lost some good and lovely part of my identity and had it replaced with something alien.
Being gay used to be one of the few areas of my life that I could consistently count on. I came to see lesbianism as a soul-deep part of who I was. And now it's not and I can't help feel that there's some kind of ... grieving process I need to go through about it, if that's not too melodramatic?
Also, there's this other sword hanging over my head. The stereotype of the lesbian who ends up with a man has some pernicious, sexist-as-hell baggage, and I feel shittily like I'm playing into that. I know it shouldn't matter who I choose to sleep with... but the personal is political, and even if it shouldn't control my life choices, I feel like the accumulated pattern of choices that people like me make reinforces a really ugly cultural narrative where men are just more desirable as sex partners than women and women really need cock to be happy.
Here's the good, hopeful part: I actually have a ton of friends who are bi or fluid. They're a lovely open-minded group of people, and I know they'll have my back, and I feel like I understand them better. Having my eyes opened to another perspective has been one of the blessings of this whole thing. Truth be told, I always thought there was a platonic elegance to the idea of bisexuality, and just liking people as people. The reality of bisexuality appears to be far messier for me, but maybe that's the point. Sexuality is messy. And slippery, and politically problematic. I need to let go of my expectations for how my love life is supposed to unfold.
I've done it before and survived. It just hurts to let go of something that felt so true and hard-earned.