Personal Narrative: My Sexuality At Home Meetings

I live in a household with an intensely religious mother. I was taught that people were straight, married straight, and felt straight. If anyone had different feelings they had some deep rooted issues and needed to find God. Until I was twelve, I accepted this. Why would my parents mislead me in any way? They were, of course, all knowing about the world. When I moved to my third new school in 6th grade, I was introduced to new people and new information. As my view of the world began to expand I became less enthralled with the views about sexuality I had been given at home.

Since Freshman year I knew my sexuality wasn’t what I had always assumed it to be. It’s been there my whole life in the way I’ve interacted with my female friends and
little crushes I seemed to develop on everyone. He seems so lovely this week. My gosh, isn’t she just the most wonderful friend? I didn’t realize what most of these feelings meant. To me it just seemed as though I really adored all of the people around me. Then, I became amazingly invested in LGBT rights as a whole. Perhaps that should’ve tipped me off. Going from being blatantly homophobic to this strong level of support was comforting. I felt better about myself.

To get to Gay-Straight Alliance meetings I had to tell my mother that I was staying for Reading Bowl.
Even just showing support would have upset her. I have become outright with how I feel towards the community since then, and at home everyone has mostly stopped expressing their hateful feelings around me.
The first time I came out to someone was just after I had my major realization. I walked to math class with one of my friends and we sat by the door to talk as we did each morning. After looking around to be sure no one was near enough to hear, I whispered it to her. She said, “You know, you’re the second person this week to come out to me as bi.” At that point I wasn’t sure if what I had discovered was a permanent thing or just something I was imagining.

Being comfortable in my sexuality has helped increase my personal happiness, but it’s also raised the number of arguments that happened with my family. At a dinner with my cousins, I heard my father sharing a story about a man. At one point he decided to call him a faggot. Hearing the spite he had towards this person simply because of something he assumed about him ruined the evening for me. I told him the next day that it was upsetting when he said things like that. He laughed in my face. I couldn’t speak to him without bitterness for a
week.