Coming Out to Myself

If I had to pick an age, I guess you could say that I officially came out to myself at the age of twenty-one. I kissed a girl for the first time in a pub in Rome, Italy, on a college study-abroad trip, while my best friend was in the bathroom ... and it was awesome. This would not be quite true, though, because the first time I kissed a girl happened long before that. It would be more accurate to say that this was my first girl kiss without any negative social consequences. After my first couple of innocent attempts to kiss girls, it took a decade for me to overcome the shame that was ingrained in my psyche by the outside world and to find the courage to give my natural instincts a chance again.

I grew up in a small Texas town in a Catholic family. There were no gay people in my life at all, and I never learned anything about them from anyone in my family. As a little kid, I was a pretty stereotypical tomboy. I loved climbing trees, playing soccer with the boys at recess, and I could not stand Barbie dolls. Despite the fact that I wanted to learn the piano more than anything, play soccer, or learn to tap dance, my dad put me on a softball team in second grade, for which I became very grateful later in life. It never really occurred to me that I was different from any other kid, and my parents generally encouraged me to express myself the way I wanted.

In a perfect world, without judgment or homophobia, I'm sure that my sexuality would have developed naturally, without me having to "discover" anything about myself. The first memory I have of becoming aware of my same-sex attraction was in fifth grade. I was ten years old, and I was playing basketball with my friend Allison in the gym at school.

She was a very special friend to me, and that day, I suddenly felt the impulse to kiss her on the cheek. It wasn't anything I had planned out; it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world in that moment. To my surprise, Allison got angry at me and wiped her hand across her cheek. I stood there, confused and a little hurt. I could not understand why a kiss would make her so mad ... but I never kissed her again.

The next school year, I had new friends and had pretty much forgotten about kissing Allison. As an eleven-year-old, I still wasn't too conscious of the changes beginning to happen in my body. It certainly never occurred to me to slap a label on the new emotions I was feeling or that I had anything to hide. One day, I was in the hallway with my friend Julie, when that same impulsive urge came over me. Again, without any premeditated thought, but simply acting on the innocent emotions I felt toward her, I kissed Julie on the cheek. Julie's reaction was different than Allison's, though. Allison had been angry, but Julie just stared at me with a look of disgust on her face.

As the next few days, weeks, and months began to unfold, I started to notice people staring at me in the hallways at school. Sometimes I would catch them whispering to each other and looking at me, quickly turning away when we made eye contact. Julie told people that I was a lesbian. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew it must have been bad because of the way everyone was treating me. That was when it began to sink in that Allison and Julie were not the only ones who thought it was bad for a girl to kiss another girl. Apparently, everyone thought that. One of the lessons that stuck with me the most during my junior high and high school education was that wanting to kiss or hold hands with a girl was not only wrong but worthy of making you a complete social outcast. I even had a math teacher who made a comment about two girls he had seen holding hands in the hallway. "It's disgusting," he said.

All of the extremely negative feedback and bullying I received from kissing Julie was easily enough to send me deep into the closet for the next decade. I continued to be taught time and again by teachers, friends, church people, and family members that being gay was not okay. It was almost impossible to count how many times you would hear gay slurs in just one day of school. Kids were constantly using gay as a substitute word for any negative adjective or calling someone a fag just because they stepped outside of their gender norm for a second.

Denial combined with fear is a very powerful thing, and I put my heart and soul into convincing myself that I was not gay. Once in sixth grade, I even slapped myself on the school bus when the thought of kissing another girl popped into my head and turned me on. I became extremely active in school clubs and band, and I was always buried in homework. I was too busy to even think about dating anyone, and that was exactly how I wanted it. Also, it's pretty easy to avoid thinking about dating anyway, when your only option is to date someone of the opposite sex and you are not the least bit interested. Now and then, I was able to convince myself that I had a crush on a boy, who was usually just a close friend that I felt safe around. Either that or he was already taken, and I would not have to worry about him wanting to date me.

I always thought that I did a pretty good job of hiding the fact that I was gay, but some of the fashion trends I went through from sixth to twelfth grade may have been a clue to some of my friends and more open-minded family members. From fifth grade through seventh, I wore a vest to school literally every single day. (Vests were "in" back in the '90s, okay!) When I was about to enter seventh grade, a new rule said that we had to tuck in our shirts, and I was so worried that they would make me tuck in my vests. I didn't want to look like a nerd! To my extreme relief, my mom went with me to talk to my school guidance counselor, who assured me that I would not have to tuck in my vests. How my sweet mother was able to keep a straight face (no pun intended) during that conversation with the counselor, I will never know.

My mom was always good about letting me...