All the signs...what were yours?

No, I'm definitely not straight. But I may be bisexual. I'm not sure if I'm into feminine men, or if that has been my way to deny the possibility of being a lesbian. I'm either lesbian or bisexual, there's no way for a straight girl to check out women and fantasize about them 99% of the time and be just straight lol

 

Mine (the ones I can remember) are the following:
1. There were a few childhood drawings that I found a couple months ago depicting two girls kissing each other or two girls being happy with a heart above their heads. (I must've been about 7-10.) Then again I mostly drew girls kissing guys or princes and princesses but I think this stems from conditioning.
2. In middle school I had a good female friend who I was strangely possessive of. I got very jealous when she played with other girls. I wanted to be with her all the time. Now, I could attribute this obsession to my loneliness at the time but it can also be seen as a sign since I had other friends but didn't feel the same about them.
3.I started watching lesbian porn when I was around 16. I don't know what prompted me to switch but I just found it one day and stuck with it. I thought it was just a phase but I can't see myself ever going back to straight porn, guys and their junk do not turn me on in the slightest. When I did watch straight porn before I only paid attention to the woman.
4. I had a crush on a girl when I was 16 that faded after a couple of months. I think was some sort of I want to be her/ strong admiration. We'd been acquaintances ever since I was about 6 years old. I looked at her a lot in various situations we happened to be in at school (that includes changing rooms). I thought she was very pretty. Had no fantasies about her outside school or anything. One time we happened to sit very close to each other so that when we turned to look at each other we'd be at "kissing distance". I was very nervous and she had a beautiful smile, she was very nice to me. After that she talked about me behind my back. I think they mentioned the word lesbian or something. That's when I thought "But I'm not a lesbian, why do they think I'm a lesbian? I don't want them to think that!" I think she felt uncomfortable by how much I'd look at her and wanted to see if she was right about me so she tested me by sitting close to me and being extra nice to me. In retrospect that was kind of a mean thing to do but I have no ill will towards her, I still admire her in some ways.
5. I have had frequent sex dreams involving women and only women ever since I was about 16 or 17, back when I thought I was straight. Before that It was a mix of men and women.
5. Not finding famous male celebrities attractive. When I was 15, everyone went on and on about how attractive a certain male celebrity was. I said "I don't think he's attractive, I think he's ugly. I don't understand what you guys see in him." They were surprised and thought it was weird that I didn't share the same obsessions. I have never liked masculine men with abs.

 

No major things for me at a young age and I guess I'm kind of weird and an outlier statistic due to that. But realised I was curious about guys in my mid 20s, did something about it, initially hated it and was in denial but started to repeat the pattern and accepted I was bisexual by about 30. Met my latest wife in my mid 30s but she became more distant and I turned more gay as a result. Now a bi-gay father to a young daughter whilst dating another guy discreetly. Looking to change all of that and be a good husband and father soon, so I will see how that goes. But I love making LGBTQ friends now and see myself as one of this community. But a couple of observations about myself, drawing from the previous posts on this thread.
1) I rarely have sex with my wife and sometimes have to think about being with another guy in order to be able to "do the business".
2) With my boyfriend however, no problems at all. Quite the opposite.
3) I check girls out with long hair, long legs, athletic bodies and cute butts, but not guys strangely enough.
4) I realised I am quite kinky with my desires and like some adventure and excitement with partners...but not off the chart weird.
5) I now join loads of LGBTQ sites and groups, for comfort and acceptance. But never meet up with any groups socially for fear of being "outed" in some way.
6) I used to really despise the word "gay". I couldn't associate myself with it at all. But now I'm fine if a fellow LGBTQ person refers to my sexuality as gay. It's not a big deal for me now.
7) I only once had the Cupid's arrow heart stopping and time stopping moment when my eyes locked on another guy. He was with his son in a supermarket queue, at the checkout. At that moment I couldn't take my eyes off him, and was thinking to myself "this is weird, I only usually get this feeling with women...but you are gorgeous". He looked like a young Robert Downey Jr. That was like 6 mths ago.

 

For me, the fact that growing up I was always crushing hard on at least one girl at any given moment... it continued throughout my adolescence and I remember that whenever I got into a relationship with a boy, my feelings were never as intense as the feelings I had for my crushes. I'd have dropped any of my boyfriends in a heartbeat just to spend time with the girl I was crushing on at that moment.

 

I first starting thinking that I could be gay about 3 or 4 years ago (I'm 18 now), but looking back I guess it kind of started before then, cause there was this one guy in my groups of friends that I would play D&D with that I thought was pretty cute.
Then, after that when I started high school, I kind of gradually realized, it was not sudden at all.
What really made me accept that I am gay is when I went on a date with this girl who had asked for my number. I met up with and we were just hanging out at the mall, and I thought she was a really nice person and everything, and we had a lot of the same interests, but I just didn't feel anything romantically or sexually, and it was pretty obvious that she was really into me. Of course, this could happen with anyone, because many times we just aren't romantically attracted to people, but this incident made me reflect back and look at points in my life where I did have a romantic interest, and I realized that most of them were guys.

I don't know if this is unusual, but I can't really see myself being a relationship at all with anyone who I don't already know. I know its kind of off-topic, but thinking about this brought the thought to my mind. I can appreciate how people look, but when I think of being romantically involved with someone, I feel like I need time to know the person as a friend before I can really get close enough to be in a relationship with them.

 

@Rakkitora, in my experience, relationships built on friendships have been much more successful and satisfying than relationships built on intimacy. The best relationships in my life have definitely been with people who were friends first, and it felt really natural to take the friendship to the relationship level. I totally agree with your post.

 

Oh, best thread so far!

So I think there were signs and wonders all along, but the truth didn't really dawn on me until I started to get intense psychotherapy a dozen years ago or so. And there were always these sessions wherein I would talk about the need to leave the church (was in up to my halo until about the time the therapy started), and how much of my psychological energy was spent on getting past having entertained sexual fantasies about men and boys, or having watched gay porn.

And then my therapist asked me the question that changed my life: "And what percentage of your fantasy life involves women? Why don't you have trouble with that, from a church perspective?"

Uh...um...well...

And it didn't take me long to do the math: None at all. Zip. Zero. And I hadn't had any since junior high.

So yeah, in retrospect, I wasn't like the other boys. I never learned to relax and enjoy intimacy with females -- and in the moment, when I should have been with her, whoever she was, could not stop thinking about the intimacy I had experienced as a boy with males, how fast, easy and fearless that was, how real and natural.

The accounting became complete when I forced myself to acknowledge that the only thing that got me through sex with my wife -- for 25 years, no less -- was fantasizing about men, remembering those encounters.

It's pretty hard to go back to something you never were, right? And here I am.

 

Once I came to terms with acknowledging my homosexuality I started with the help of my therapist to go back and see if I could identify any indications in my past. Once I honestly started to look I found many.
I remembered fantasizing about a younger neighbor boy when I was in the middle teens. My life long secret fasanation with male ballet dancers in tights, male swimmers in those skimpy speedos now all seem very obvious signs. Some how missed them until recently which seems incredible because I now feel so gay and that seems so right. One would think I would have recognized those signs for what they were.

 

When I was 6, we had a school play and I had to wear tights. That stayed with me as I liked it. The next year there was another play and another boy had to wear tights. I kept staring at him. When ballet was on TV, of course I would make wisecracks about men in tights but secretly I was fascinated and turned on. I would be about 8 or 9 then. I also remember some family friends having one of their sons stay with our family for a few days and boys being boys we took a shower together. Strangely I recall that and liked it. Again around 8 or 9. I more or less repressed a lot of feelings for decades but in the mid-90s, what I thought were alternative feelings started to intensify. I did later experiment sexually with men and found I enjoyed it. ...and now here we are.

 

I strongly remember seeing my junior high classmates nude in the locker room. The first time that happened, I was overwhelmed, but after that, I rather enjoyed seeing my classmates nude. I think I told myself at the time that I liked their bodies because they had better bodies than I had, but that was almost certainly just an excuse...

 

I was 4 when I realized I like girls clothes and toys, but knew I didn't want to be a girl. Left me with a sense of shame that lated for decades.

The junior high locker room was both a wonder and a torture for me. I however, had no doubt or excuse as to why I looked at the other boys, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with those boys. Yet somehow I eventually ended up embracing denial and here I am ending my heterosexual marriage.

 

1. as a child i was so scared of myself, and i'd heard some random fact that one in ten or so women are queer and i always thought 'please don't let it be me', which i feel like the fact that it was a possibility in my mind was a giveaway

2. i literally always checked out women but in my head i thought 'all girls look at other girls, it's because i'm jealous' or some other weird excuse

3. i truly believed i was going to be forever alone because for some reason something about a relationship with a guy made me feel 'uncomfortable' i guess. like something was missing

4. the small crushes i had on boys in grade school seemed to dull to the crushes on girls- completely head-over-heels puppy love

and then my current gf was interested in me, and i was forced to face the facts...

 

-Hope no one takes this the wrong way, but women used to annoy the crap out of me. I would always think things like 'Women suck' or 'Why would someone be interested in her?' which in reflection had nothing to do with the girls, it was essentially bitterness that, A, I was lonely because I was closeted, and B, those men werent paying attention to me. Sort of a mac from always sunny kind of thing.

-Just in general i tended to admire certain men and had a tendency towards very close friendships, which on my part were crushes I wasnt recognizing.

-If my male friend ever stayed over during highschool because we had been drinking or smoking pot, I made a point of masturbating before he came over because otherwise my "hormones" would get out of control.

-I literally never fantasized about having sex with women, it was always something gay from an oblique angle, but without actually being gay. Like, strapon porn [because I liked watching men get fucked...but im not gay or anything! lol].

 

One major sign for me may have been a guy being my first sexual experience. Of course, I repressed it and wrote it off as experimentation for years, so maybe not. I also used to find myself jealous of the girls giving blow jobs in porn. That may have rang a few bells in my head

 

For a while my excuse was that I was into homoeroticism, but wouldn't really want to do that stuff....except when I did.

 

The first indication I had, looking back, was my close friendship with a girl in school. I think I was about 11. It just felt different to any of my other friendships in a way I couldn't explain. The thought of it always gave me pause, but then I had the usual crushes on boys as a teenager so I put it out of my head. There were a few isolated incidents of being attracted to women, but they were only a blip on my radar. But now and then, I would flirt without realising it...

I think it took so long to come to terms with being attracted to both men and women because of some very black and white thinking on my part. Also I went through some traumatic experiences which left huge amounts of guilt and shame and I only recently dealt properly with those. Once I did, things began to surface, and I was also reading this forum a lot at the time.

I've had health problems which held me back, and it made me sad that I was was getting older with no sign of having a partner. I don't regret it at all now because I feel more authentic in every way, as much towards men as towards women, and that part of myself has slotted into place. As far as I am aware I am still mostly attracted to men, and am definitely more romantically interested in them. I'm still figuring that out. I know I'm very drawn to men and women who are masculine and feminine in a fairly traditional way, but have the possession and self-knowledge not to be too attached to gender roles. (As it happens, they're very often not straight, which narrows the field!)

Funnily enough, my Catholic background had very little impact on my denial.

 

In my case, I did have fantasies about straight sex...but most of those fantasies never involved me. They might involve a couple I imagined. Or as a teenager, I sometimes imagined a hot boy I knew with an imaginary girl. But my focus and interest was always on the guy. I have to think that the only reason the woman was present was so I could continue thinking I was really straight.

I had a few fantasies of me having sex with a woman, but these weren't common. Plus I think those were "forced" and existed (again) so I could convince myself I was straight.

 

One of my unfinished novels, started in 2001, had at least 2 gay characters. That alone isn't necessarily a sign of anything--but I can recall having fantasies of sexual encounters my two characters had with each other that went past--well past--what was needed for the novel project.

 

Yeah. I had sex with a guy before a girl but most of my experience has still been with women