I’m trying to come to better grips with my sexuality and how I've developed to the place where I am, and I feel like I just need to talk about it, to write it all down, to dump it out share it with someone. So here I am. When I was 11, I had a good friend in school, and one day in class I said something awkward which was construed as gay by my classmates, and I was bullied for it for a long time. The bullies would mockingly sing what I had said with a kind of head-over-heels-in-love inflection. Honestly I didn’t understand at the time that it was being construed as gay, I was just very confused. In retrospect I think it pretty strongly reinforced a mentality that it was dangerous to be very close to my guy friends. In high school, I started triggering a lot of people’s gay-dars and was bullied for it. Some of it was physical – a couple boys liked touching me because they knew I would freak out at them. During high school I also found a strong furry fetish – mostly for gay stuff. I think because furry stuff feels very far from real life (I wasn’t thinking about real men) I allowed myself to explore this stuff. While for a long time I feared gay live-action porn like the plague, I could look at the furry stuff because – well I could justify it in any number of ways. I really didn’t want to be in any way queer, and I knew it. For a long time the queer stuff seemed quarantined in the furry world. I didn’t develop obvious crushes on other men – where I did to some extent women – and (with some exceptions that I didn’t want to think about) I didn’t see men as attractive in the same way as I did women. I felt a lot of guilt about the furry stuff, and I convinced myself that If I could just stop masturbating that I could feel more normal, so I kept going on “no-fap” runs as I continued to try to suppress these things. I've realized recently that for some (although not all) of my "straight" crushes, I'd find a women very attractive, but that wasn't actually that interested in them sexually. Probably normal, but I was using these instances to prop up my attempts to feel straight. It was only in college – when the bullying stopped – that I very slowly started letting more mental barriers down and started coming to grips with things. By now, it’s clearly no longer true that I haven’t had crushes on other men. I’ve never fallen in love with anyone before, but I can’t deny that I find some men attractive and have had gay crushes. There are definitely also women that I find sexually attractive, although usually not the “stereotypically” attractive women and my crushes on men vs. women tend to just feel different somehow. When I think about what I want the future to hold, I try to imagine myself cuddling with a man and embracing the feeling and not caring about anything else. It’s a hopeful feeling. I hope that I can finally leave these feelings of shame and uncertainty behind. I feel more aware than ever that when around others I’m actively suppressing myself to avoid in any possible way “acting gay”. I want to have pride and comfort in who I am. I just want to be with someone who understands. To be honest, I feel like these feelings ebb and flow a lot. Sometimes (like right now) I feel more gay, and sometimes I feel more straight – although the latter have been occurring less as time has gone on. When I take a step back, I feel like the most reasonable stance is that I’m some repressed shade of bisexual, but it all feels so complicated, and I could really use some perspective on this. Thanks for listening; even if no one cares, I feel like I’ve really started to understand myself a lot more just by forcing myself to write this all down and think about these skeletons.