What was your very first moment of realisation?

I had female crushes long before I thought about it. Actually, I had a crush on my now-girlfriend at age ten it was short-lived then, but it was there.

I first had the revelation at 12-13. I read a book...and it was fantasy, and at the end the girl left her prince and kissed her dying [female] friend to save her. I can't exactly describe the feeling, but it really hit me for the first time then. I was in denial for probably a year after that...and then I finally had to face it when my best friend (girlfriend) confessed her love to me 10 months ago!

 

I think I was about 11. It was a slow drawing thing, but the first spark of my awareness was about then

 

I realized I was bi before I can really recall, honestly. I just remember being drawn to female images and finding them extremely appealing, more so than just the male form. Eventually it became more defined and I realized I was most certainly attracted to women.

But it wasn't until last year that I realized how much stronger the preference for women was to men. I always used female images even when I was being intimate with men. Parts of being with men felt like a chore. I really just thought it was normal until I realized there was another option.

 

It's hard to say for sure. Conscious realization of the possibility I'm gay probably came along in my 20s for the first time. Maybe 25/26? And it was something I gave thought to in my early 30s. Certainly my 30s had moments of clarity when I realized that I had a very real same sex attraction, and even thought one day of having a relationship with a man. Final acceptance came when I was 42, after joining EC.

There were good clues long before any of this, however. My interest in seeing other boys nude in the school locker room when I was about 13 was a definite clue, I'd say. :dry:

 

Like you, I had crushes on other girls long before I had any notion what lesbians were or that I might be one.

For me, it wasn't really like a single big moment of realization, but more like a series of steps. I remember having my first, "OMG what if the reason I have never had a boyfriend is because I'm gay," moment somewhere in my teens, but I didn't really seriously entertain the idea until I was in my 20's. I most definitely did not want to be gay at that point in my life. It was not so much that I had anything against gay people as it was a result of growing up in a environment in a time when being gay was generally not presented as a good thing to be and not wanting to disappoint my family and be even more of an outsider amongst my peers than I already somewhat was.

I suppose the final push towards accepting that I was in fact a lesbian and not just a "late bloomer, socially awkward, a tomboy, shy" or whatever various internal excuse I had for my lack of interest in men was the first time I actually experienced actual "tingly in the pants" feelings as a result of being with another woman, which is something that has thus far never happened for me with men. Before that point, I thought maybe I was just asexual or had low sex drive or whatever.

My attitude towards the whole thing has shifted a lot over the years. I'm pretty content with it now. I still have non-supportive family members to deal with and such, but if I could flip the switch and change things, I wouldn't.

 

I was 39 years old (and married to a man) before I had my 1st conscious thought that I might be something other than straight. I was driving in my car and a good friend was my only passenger. She started talking about how sometimes she's hugely sexually attracted to men and sometimes she's hugely sexually attracted to women. Before this I hadn't known she was attracted to women, but I wasn't surprised, and the conversation felt really casual. This wasn't like A Big Reaveal, she was just chatting. I was about to say that I wasn't attracted to women (I'd said it many times before to other people) and suddenly found myself 100% unwilling to say that I wasn't attracted to women. Also I was 100% unwilling to say that I was. This felt VERY WEIRD to me. And it also felt really big. And then my mind and my life quickly spun out of orbit.


There were a million clues before age 39. Peiple even started assuming that I was gay before I was even an adult, but I just wasn't willing/able to go there before then.

---------- Post added 6th Jan 2016 at 10:33 PM ----------

Also, when I was a teenager in had a raging crush on a female character in a soap opera. Seriously, I would watch and rewatch scenes with her in them--and I never really have a rip about any of the male characters. And still the light never came on...

 

I remember there being some website where you would date random hot people on a scale of 0-10 back when I was 12 or 13. I'd rate the women and get bored and start looking through the guys. My rationalization was that I was just comparing them to myself when really I thought they were way more interesting :lol:

 

Oh man, even in primary school I had crushes on girls - I identified as bi and carried on dating men pretty much exclusively. It's only recently that the full extent of how much more attractive I've always found women is finally sinking in.

 

I remember having a crush on a girl (I'm a guy) and the same time being physically interested in a guy...around age 8. Being bi and raised in a homophobic family and society really sucks...really, really sucks.

 

My moments are more of a slow awakening. It should be when I was 12, kissing a girl "for practice" and realizing I liked it a lot. However, I wasn't aware that I *could* like girls that way, and I did like boys. So, the part of me that liked boys grew, and I somehow forgot about the part that liked girls.

Twenty years later, a collection of small moments - desires - crept in, and I started feeling uncertain/crazy/an ache. I read an article online one day that hit me right in the feels. In it, I saw a bit of my story, and knew I wasn't alone. Learning there was one other person like me sent me searching for others, and I landed here. It's been quite a shift.

 

Around 14 I felt bi, but in a distanced, non-threatening way. Non-threatening as in, I didn't think about actually being in a relationship with a woman, at all - so it didn't shake my world up. I'd experimented with a friend, and identified with the saying, "Even spaghetti is straight until it gets hot." I felt that, if horny enough, I could have sex with a female. That's as far as it went for me at that point.

Fast forward to being mid-twenties, in college, and working on a project with an androgynous girl that openly identified as queer. I had been around her for some time without directly dealing with her. Once our project started, and we started talking (platonically at first. It quickly shot into flirting down the line), I started feeling "funny" around her. I wanted to be around her a lot, and thought she was super beautiful, and generally started to like everything about her. When I wasn't around her, I couldn't stop thinking about her or wanting to text her, and that started to weird me out. Then, one day working on the project, I was watching her work and couldn't stop thinking about how sexy and hot she looked, and I felt butterflies and all sorts of stuff that I'd NEVER experienced before. Literally ever. I put a lot of excuses onto the situation: I just think she's really pretty; I wish I looked like her; she's just really interesting; I just really want to be friends with her; she's just so hot that I'm somehow picking up on sexual energy and it's making me look at her sexually (that was the best one).

I think that my ACTUAL moment of realization, if I could pin point it, was when I was sitting on the couch watching TV one night, and my parent's SO walked in from work and back into their bedroom. I just remember sitting there, thinking about what it would look like if she had just walked into that door, and that was our place, and how happy it made me feel. Writing this is actually making me want to cry because I haven't thought about it for awhile, LOL. I just remember thinking how right it felt, and something along the lines of, "Oh, fuck."

 

Wow, looking back it's crazy how much you realize. I remember checking out dad's friends, scoping out the male lifeguards at the pool, and sneaking around to look at the sears catalog men's underwear sections by probably age 10. Teenage years was blatant looking back, watching the boys varsity team in shirts vs skins and lusting after my friends. Never tried anything till early 20's and then bottled it away, got married, had kids, and now it's like a freaking boil on my rump. I want to be with guys! Still I am married and not a 100% sure go figure, a Sagittarius that can't decide .

 

I was somewhere in my late teens. 16 at the earliest. I would barely call it a conscious realization as I quickly shelved those attractions. I was attending a christian school in high school, very conservative, and there was zero acceptance of any same sex attraction.

I was unable to give any thought to it at the time. Now looking back I only knew that I seemed to be interested in some of the guys in a way that other male classmates were not. But, I was also attracted to the girls. Maybe if I were more strongly gay I think I would have figured it out sooner.

 

Haha omg honestly I've known I was gay since I was a young child- probably about 6 or 7. I knew that I liked superheros for more than merely saving the day lol. Hello have you seen those physiques?? It started with a cartoon where one of the protagonists was captured and manhandled by a very VERY buff antagonist. BOOM. Yeah I knew then lmao. Thankfully the topic of homophobia .was never really raised in my area so I honestly grew up thinking like the greeks: women for babies and family men for good company. But you only choose one. It was later on when I understood that gays needed to be in the downlow. LMAO I remember hitting puberty, reading about sexual reproduction, and thinking, "While male and female sex makes logical sense.. I think man on man sex is a lot better.. hmm.."

 

At 45 my moment of realization has come very late, but it also started late. I only realized in the past few months that about 80% of my fantasies involve men, starting out slowly in my early thirties and getting more predominant in the past 5 years. And I'm still not even sure I could be considered an actual bisexual or just a window shopper, as it's never been put to the test.

 

I was 13 when I started puberty. And have always looked at the boys more then the girls. But back then and through all of my teen years, I chose to ignore the attraction to boys and only exclusively date girls. And it wasn't until my early 20s that I accepted that I was bi. But I just choose to never act on the impulse to be with men. Then I found a woman I really connected with and we got married.

Fast forward five years. And my attraction to my wife got less and less. And the desire to be with men got way more intense. Then one day I was reading forums on how do you know if your gay or bi? And it hit me like a ton of bricks OMG!! I'm gay. And I just started crying. I'm not sure if it was because I was happy because I finally had an answer to all of my sexual frustration. Or sad because I realized what kind of situation I got myself into.

Looking back all the signs were there that I was gay the whole time. I just choose to ignore them. And I still can't figure out why I did that. I've even had people accuse me of being gay in my late teens. And I would get upset and just go deeper in the closet. But we all figured out ourselves on our own terms.

 

I was probably like 7 watching a movie I wasnt supposed to be watching and a lady took her shirt off. I didnt realize what it was but I never forgot that moment. I was mesmerized. From then there were tons of other moments throughout my childhood/teens where I was attracted to women but played it off always as admiration.