CW: internalized homophobia, fatphobia, ableism, misogyny, mention of insects, mention of drugs, mention of animals
I just needed to vent today.
Why? Because I may or may not be arospec, and I'm also questioning my sexuality, and I just need to get all these complicated feelings down.
So the sum of it is, I questioned my sexuality a lot in middle school, and couldn't keep my eyes off of pretty girls in class, and pushed them away and dismissed them as bitches and sluts because I was so scared of the fluttering in my chest and the warmth in my cheeks whenever one of them smiled at me - more specifically, of what it meant.
Plus, I was both developmentally disabled and the class fat girl, an object for boys to laugh at, not an actual human girl that they could potentially be interested in or even, like, value and respect as a fellow human person. I've been flirted with and asked out by straight men before, but when I was twelve or thirteen I was not only a hot fucking mess and going through my awkward phase (I'm not sure it's ever really ended lmao), but I was also shy and didn't talk to anyone and had zero self-confidence, and was far more interested in writing than I was in boys (that's never really changed either).
So it's not like I worried much about forcing myself to want boys - more like I wanted them to want me. Validation from boys, from any boy, was a drug, and every boy was unattainable - so why not crush on the most unattainable boy around?
His name was Drew and he looked like every generic white male movie star you've ever seen. Over six feet tall (height was something I was a sucker for, after years of being taller than every boy in my grade and feeling insecure about it), blond, and muscular from playing baseball. I said exactly one word to him and promptly decided never to speak to him again, but immediately decided that crush that lasted like five minutes (I used to fucking pick out boys to have crushes on, good lord) was immutable proof that I was straight. And straight is what I convinced myself I was for the entirety of the eighth and ninth grade - not being cis didn't seem like a real possibility until I found out about nonbinary people.
So those were some fun times. Then, practically on my sixteenth birthday, I was innocently sitting in Spanish class, minding my own business, when a girl got up to go to the bathroom or take something to the office. I don't remember and it doesn't really matter anyway. And while, um, watching her leave...okay, you get the picture. And that's what made me finally face up to the fact that I probably wasn't straight.
My initial response to this was to internally go fuck. So then I started wondering, after the shock started to wear off: was this attraction? Did I like girls? Was I a lesbian? Wait, no, I would probably marry a man one day and had never had a crush on a girl before. Or had I? Was this a phase? Was I faking it for attention? It sure as shit didn't feel fake. But I thought boys were cute sometimes, and I liked the attention when they flirted with me, and picking out crushes was totally a thing straight girls did. I should probably keep myself open to boys, anyway, because what if I was wrong and I ended up with a boyfriend? There's a word for this, right? Oh yeah, bisexual. I was probably bi.
Maybe a day after that, a new girl showed up in my church and holy shit this feels like a TV movie or a Julie Anne Peters novel. But I digress. Said girl was cute and liked horror and fantasy, like me, and I liked her laugh. She had a 4.0 GPA, something I placed a lot of value on, and was a figure skater. We went on youth retreat maybe a week after my birthday, and I had a lot of time to talk to her. We had a lot in common. She was enthusiastic and infectious and really pretty and openly bisexual, something that fascinated me because I couldn't imagine coming out at least until I was financially independent and therefore no longer had to give a shit about my family's reaction. When we had to write positive notes to each other, the one she gave to me said that she'd loved getting to know me and thought I was pretty, and I practically squealed in delight. So I concluded that I had a crush on her.
I might have had one for real, I don't know. I did get the butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling, I always looked forward to seeing her, and I liked her as a person. And she's my type, actually, even now - feminine and a bit shorter than me and with a nice laugh.
So that confirmed to me that I liked girls. At which point, I realized: how was I going to handle coming out? It wasn't exactly a great option right now; I wasn't sure what most of my family thought about gay people, but I did know for sure that Ella and Lili (and probably their parents) were homophobic and that I couldn't lose their friendship. I could tell my friends, but what if they didn't take it well or one of them told someone else? Then gossip would start spreading around, I imagined, and more and more people would find out, and I would be bullied and harassed. The rumor mill, I decided, would circulate pretty quickly to my cousin Alex, who had been a junior at my high school back then. People already knew we were related; once a girl I barely knew asked if he was my cousin and responded "he's hot" when I said yes. Why wouldn't our classmates tell him about something that affected his family?
Alex, I figured, would probably mention it to his parents, even by accident. He's not a malicious person, but he's straight and therefore has never been on the receiving end of directed homophobia. Even before getting involved in feminism, I realized that this gave him a sort of privilege and that he might not consider what could potentially happen to me if he outed me to the wrong person. And Alex had talked about me to his mom before - when I was a freshman, my aunt confused the hell out of me by asking how my boyfriend was, when I'd never had one before. Apparently, she came to this conclusion because I was part of the nerd group in high school and that crowd tends to be male-dominated, and her son had seen me talking to some friends.
We're a close-knit family, too, like one of those small towns where everybody knows everybody's business. Which would mean that Ella and Lili would know about it, and that meant there would probably be a confrontation that I wasn't ready to deal with.
So I couldn't come out at school. I couldn't come out to my friends. And I definitely couldn't come out to my family. But how would I manage to keep it a secret if someone directly asked? If rumors circulated anyway?
This is when I realized that I needed a plan. I couldn't date girls, even girls from other schools, because someone could see us together. I couldn't flirt with girls, because if I accidentally flirted with a straight girl, she could freak out and tell her friends and boyfriend and I'd be the one dealing with the fallout from their homophobia - I'd seen it happen to other wlw, why not me? I had to be careful about how I talked about girls, how I gave them compliments, how I looked at them even. I couldn't tell my friends, for the aforementioned reasons. I had to make sure that even the people who knew me best would never figure it out, and that was harder.
So it occurred to me: what were the things that made people assume other girls were gay? What were the things that had made me assume other girls were gay? Flannels, loose-fitting jeans, bland colors, plaid, short hair, baseball caps, being in sports, being "alternative", being fat, being hairy. As a bisexual girl, the only part of my sexuality that I really needed to hide was the attracted-to-girls part; girls were already expected to like boys. I needed to avoid these things that were associated with lesbians, and I needed to do it fast.
I lost weight, bought dresses, started wearing makeup and jewelry, let my hair grow until it reached almost to the middle of my back, started wearing the yoga pants I'd gotten for my birthday, and became meticulous about shaving. It worked, and I started getting more attention from guys - and now that I was in high school and people thought I was hot for the first time ever, the attention became more sexual, more frequently, than it had been when I was thirteen but looked seventeen. I loved the attention, the validation. I needed to feel beautiful and know that I was sexy and that I was wanted, and I was willing to take that wherever I could get it. My confidence skyrocketed and my grades along with them - even with the stress of being closeted. And at first, it really was an act - a costume I put on for my own safety - but I soon enjoyed it. Picking out the perfect dress, doing my hair, wearing jewelry, putting on makeup...it's high maintenance, more work than my daily routine now, but it's fun too. Femininity is art, and no one knows that better than a closeted teenage wlw with a preference for feminine girls.
As for the girl from my church? That December, she confided in me that she had a crush on a boy in our youth group - a friend of ours, a year older than me (so, two years older than her), and cishet. She said they'd been texting and had talked about seeing a concert together. My heart sank, but I smiled anyway and said good luck and genuinely hoped that they would be happy together, and got over her fairly quickly after that.
So in February, we started a new semester, one that was a pretty big turning point in my life. I genuinely enjoyed history class for only the second time in my life, I had an English teacher who auctioned off candy, my weight dipped below 160 for the first time since sixth grade, and I had all A's and B's in my classes. I found a book called Aspergirls and was astonished by how similar the women in it were to me, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.
One of my classmates in English was openly gay, and I think that he either knew I also wasn't straight and was trying to coax me out of the closet without being an ass about it (I was Not Subtle when I couldn't keep my eyes off his female best friend), assumed that I had a crush on him (in truth, he was the first openly gay gnc person I'd ever met, and something about that resonated with me *cough cough*. Also, most of his friends were very pretty straight girls, so there was another...different reason I kept looking in his direction), or assumed that I was a conservative, Ella-type Christian and therefore avoided him because of homophobia - after all, I was indeed a devout Christian at the time, I was ostensibly cishet, I only talked to him if it was absolutely necessary, I immediately pulled a poker face whenever he said even a word about his sexuality, and I performed an almost exaggerated, forced femininity that was clearly intended to communicate that I was most definitely NOT GAY, DO YOU HEAR ME? I AM A HETERO, I SWEAR!
The real reason I avoided him is that I was afraid he'd somehow figure out I was sapphic. While I figured he wouldn't care, being gay himself, I also didn't know him and therefore had no reason to trust him. He could still mention offhandedly to one of his friends that he wasn't the only LGBT student in our fourth hour, thinking that they wouldn't care. After all, they were fine with being friends with a gay boy, why not a bi girl? But, like I said, most of his friends were straight girls, and there are way too many straight women who are fine with mlm - or just love them, those "sinful gays" that make up their OTPs - but are squeamish around wlw or treat us like we're inherently predatory. I had a hard enough time walking on eggshells around friends who didn't know I was bi, there was no way in hell I was going to put myself through that with friends who did (and yet...).
When you're just figuring out your sexuality and you're closeted for safety reasons, everything you do is about hiding it. Even from someone who could have helped you through all the fears and insecurity and internalized shame because he'd been there.
Another classmate caught my interest that semester, for entirely different reasons. He sat next to me in social studies and we became friends quickly. He was one of the only boys I knew who I wasn't related to and hadn't known for years, yet didn't make me uncomfortable and truly respected girls - unlike a lot of my other cishet male classmates, who were loud and scary and hooted like apes, said "no homo", made rape jokes, used the n-word when they weren't black, were disrespectful to the teachers (I figure teachers deal with enough shit, so I'm always polite to them), and thought it was fun to loudly talk in class about "fucking bitches up the ass" or how "her pussy is so stretched out, fucking slut" (THIS IS NOT HOW VAGINAS WORK) or how "her tits are 10/10, bro, but I could do without those thunder thighs".
So, social studies boy was fun to talk to, made me laugh, and we had a lot of good conversations together. I liked spending time with him and he made me look forward to history class. Eventually I decided I had a crush on him. I'm not sure if I actually did, and looking back I'm about 90% confident that I didn't.
In spring of that semester, I came out as bi for the first time - to my youth minister, of all people. What this consisted of was basically me squeaking out "I think I'm bisexual" just before the room started spinning and I needed to sit down and breathe so I wouldn't faint. She took it fine, by the way. I think she's forgotten by now.
I got a Trevorspace account around that time - by the way, I wouldn't recommend it, it's full of Trump supporters now and I once got a warning for telling a cishet girl that supporting The Gays didn't make her LGBT - and that was basically the first time I ever got a chance to talk about my sexuality with other wlw. It was nice, actually, feeling a sense of community for the first time. I never really felt that again until I got out of MOGAI hell.
Trevorspace introduced me to nonbinary genders and sent me to gender.wikia, which was amazing and explained so much. I came out as genderfluid a few months later, not that most people respect it. So, to cis people that I'm out to: my gender is not a fucking game. Respect it, use they/them pronouns and call me Ari at least once for the love of god it will not kill you, realize that my dysphoria matters, and maybe at least deign to acknowledge that I'm not cis. If you can't do that, get out of my life. I deserve better.
Also, reading about lesbians' experiences in the forums made me realize that I definitely have a preference for women and that I might not be attracted to men. Unfortunately, it also introduced me to the shit attraction model and I somehow ended up identifying as polyromantic bisexual - sexually attracted to all genders, romantically attracted to women and nonbinary people.
That summer, I started coming out to my friends - most of whom ended up being LGBT themselves. So far, I've befriended two genderfluid pansexuals, three cis lesbians, a trans lesbian, a cis pan girl, two cis gay guys, an agender bisexual, like ten cis bi girls, a bi demigirl, a gay trans guy, an agender lesbian, and three cis bi guys. And only five of them are people that I met at LGBT related events, organizations, meetings, etc....actually, I met about seven through church. A surprising number of friend groups are like that - a group of people will make friends, each of them thinking the others are cishet, and then they'll all slowly start coming out to each other and finding a second home in each other.
And that's what it was like for me. I don't think this was ever a coincidence.
I eventually realized that I wasn't sure if I'd ever had a crush on a boy, and as for girls, there was youth group girl and that's it. That's how I found the aromantic community. And that was nice for awhile, but the aro community is unfortunately MOGAI af. There's the straight aros who throw sga aros under the bus in order to deny their own privilege, the non-gay people who think they get to use the word h*m*sexual, the people who use the word "alloromantic" unironically but then refuse to offer a concise definition of the aromantic spectrum, the people who think that allo privilege is real, and the aroaces who think that """allosexuals""" want to bang fifteen strangers a day.
I got sucked into that, eager to minimize my sga as much as possible after having been told it was shameful for way too long, and most of you know the whole story. It's embarrassing and I'm not going to explain it again. And it was way too convenient that this started happening after I started falling for one of my female friends - the same aroace cis girl, actually, who ended up being part of the reason I stayed in MOGAI hell for as long as I did.
It's not that I don't think my romantic feelings for her were real. It's just that, well, they were different. Practically every woman I see is pretty and several times a week I see women so beautiful that I get flustered and have no idea what to do with myself and anyway I love being sapphic. Women are like light in the darkness. They're a gift to this world. But I've only ever fallen in love with one.
And I do daydream a lot about a fairytale romance, at least in terms of actions. There are guys I've thought about having something like this with, but I just...have a hard time opening up to men. There's like seven of them who I'd trust not to manipulate it into something other than what it is; with three of them it's because I think of them sort of like brothers because I've known them for so long, another three are gay, and the seventh one is history class boy (who I haven't seen since our high school graduation). So I'll describe this in terms of being with a woman.
Getting up early to make her breakfast in bed, then kissing her awake when I give it to her. Cuddling. Buying her a beautiful necklace for her birthday. Lighting candles together for a solstice or equinox and kissing over the firelight. Eventually, picking out the perfect place to take her when I ask her to marry me - and growing old with her by my side, years after she says yes.
I want all of that, so desperately. But...it sort of feels like I have a limited capacity to actually feel the things associated with it. I have a hard time differentiating between romantic love and strong platonic love, I get burned out easily when doing romantic stuff, and I have empathy issues that make romance hard for me - even though I still crave romantic intimacy and want to pamper the fuck out of someone.
It's like I'm a hopeless romantic, but (mostly) without internal, personal romantic feelings - I know how that sounds, but romance is like onions...no, I'm kidding, it's like sarcasm.
For some reason (ahem), I'm really bad at reading body language and picking up social cues, including sarcasm. Despite that, I'm a very sarcastic person. So romance is like sarcasm, sort of. This analogy will probably be lost on you if you're neurotypical, but it's the best I could come up with.
Eventually I stopped identifying as a-spec, sick of the rampant homophobia coming from the ace and aro communities and not entirely sure whether I'd been repressing my romantic attraction to women.
And now, I think I might be. A-spec, I mean. More specifically, grayromantic, but I'm not a big fan of that word so I'll probably just say I'm arospec or aro or aromantic if necessary.
Part of the problem is that I'm afraid I'm internalizing 'gals being pals'. Remember when Kristen Stewart came out and the media was just "Kristen Stewart Kisses Good Friend Alicia Cargile" and shit, but with m/w couples they'll actually give them the dignity of being called boyfriend and girlfriend? That kind of thing happens to wlw constantly, and it's rooted in devaluing women's sexual agency and seeing sga love as inferior. So am I subconsciously seeing my own sga love as inferior?
Another part is that the model of attraction that the media gives us is cishet male, and they're not expected to put emotional labor into relationships the way women are. This hypermasculinity and misogyny is a good part of the reason that aros who aren't ace are assumed to use and abuse their sexual partners and not give a shit about them as long as they get off. But wlw don't have that cishet male gaze, and if I had a nonromantic sexual relationship with another woman you'd better fucking believe that not only would I treat her like a queen, both inside and outside of the bedroom, but I would want to give her emotional intimacy as well as physical, and I would be very clear about the boundaries of the relationship and not lead her on so I wouldn't hurt her.
In the media, butch wlw are only ever shown as predators, strawmen, jokes, and parodies intended to make femmes seem "normal" by comparison, so the idea of an aromantic butch, especially one who's nonbinary, caring for their female lovers emotionally is something that never occurs to most people. And the possibility of it, how it's viewed in our culture, how I as a butch am viewed in our culture, is really hard to navigate.
I'm afraid to approach the aro community with questions because I know from experience that they will throw a million different microlabels at anyone who thinks they might be aro, and that they will especially salivate at the chance to potentially convince a young, neurodivergent wlw that they're not sapphic, they're really demiquoilithromantic and bingbongshamalamadingdongsexual or whatever the fuck they're coming up with next. MOGAI hell was more than bad enough the first time, I am not getting sucked in again.
I've been talking to aro wlw (while also being very careful to steer clear of MOGAI types), especially neurodivergent aro wlw, about it, and they've said that my experiences with romantic attraction sound a lot like theirs and that it really just matters how I feel comfortable labeling myself. Right now it looks like I'm probably arospec, but I'm scared of getting hurt by the aro community's sapphobia again and also of being viewed as predatory when that's enough of a struggle for me already.
It's extremely hard for me as a wlw, especially as a neurodivergent butch, to access affection - straight women don't trust me, aroace women call me shit like "allosexual", femmes are somehow intimidated by my masculine clothes and purple hair, men don't realize how much emotional labor goes into female friendships and can't relate to me the way other women and woman-aligned people can, I don't trust nonbinary people who aren't woman-aligned not to tell me that being butch is a privilege and that lesbians are evil, and other butches are just as emotionally fucked-up as I am.
There's my friends, of course, and four of them are butches themselves, but while we talk about sexuality and whatnot, there are a lot of things that we're just lowkey afraid to get into and the most physically intimate I've ever been with my friends is occasional hugging. Plus, with work and school I haven't seen most of them in person in forever, and Facebook messaging just isn't the same. And it isn't enough. Do I really want to identify with a sexual modifier that will make people assume that I don't want affection and can't be affectionate? One that will make people assume even more that my attraction is inherently nsfw, one that people associate with being predatory and cold and unemotional when those are assumptions I deal with enough already?
And on the other hand - if I'm aro, I would love to be part of the aro community. But as long as they vilify me for not cushioning their homophobia and validating them when they insist that amatonormativity is a real thing, I refuse to be involved in something that once hurt me so much.
So that got way deeper than expected. Ahem.
As for questioning my sexuality (because arospec is not my sexuality; it doesn't tell you anything about who I'm attracted to), I know for sure that I have a very strong preference for women.
And with that, I feel like I should remind everyone that just because my attraction to women is sexual does not mean it's nsfw. For all you know, I could be sex repulsed or celibate or saving myself for marriage or just not interested in sex right now. I could also be having wild orgies with about ten women per week, or be involved in a friends-with-benefits relationship, or anything in between. Not everyone who doesn't identify as ace has the same relationship with sex.
So as I was saying, I have a strong preference for women - maybe 90% exclusive? Sometimes I'll just see a guy and be like "oh, he's really hot" but I think that's mostly a combination of heternormativity and what I've called butch envy - basically where I'm not attracted to a guy, or I'm not sure if I am, but I just really like his outfit and am like, mentally saving his image to use later for fashion tips and it's like a really strong holy shit where did you get that jacket. And besides that, anyone can appreciate human aesthetic. But sometimes, like maybe 30% of the time when I do find a guy attractive, it's genuine. It's generally weaker than my attraction to women...but it's there.
I largely feel the same way about women and men emotionally, which is part of what makes me think I might be aro.
I do also find nonbinary people attractive, and I'd be lowkey willing to date a nonbinary person who isn't woman-aligned if they were interested, but I don't, like, daydream about having a maverique or neutrois partner the way I do about having a girlfriend or wife (which makes this so! much! more! complicated!). Also, you can't tell if someone's nonbinary just by looking, which is a pretty big concern to me as a nonbinary person myself. And not every nonbinary person is perfectly gender neutral - just look at me, or at some of my friends. There are sapphic nonbinary people, and I've been attracted to some of them before.
I also fucking adore love songs and romance movies and stories, which feeds into my confusion about whether I'm aro because when I listen to them, I think of the girl I fell in love with. Especially with sapphic love songs - the only ones I really get excited about, outside of Disney. Which also makes me wonder: do I not want to date because I still have romantic feelings for her? Do I just like the love songs? Is it just residual affection and fond memories of my first love?
But anyway. As far as sexuality is concerned, I'm mostly going with sapphic or wlw for now but also lowkey, and sometimes highkey, wondering if I'm a lesbian. I figure if I still feel this way on my twentieth birthday, and consistently until then, I can rest assured that I'm a lesbian.
But I that's
ten and a half months away and I don't have that kind of patience, so I'm stressing out about it a lot.
And also my life would make a good TV show. I mean, think about it:
- There's representation. The main character is a disabled, nonbinary butch wlw with mostly LGBT friends AND there's also a blended, interfaith, multiracial family with adopted kids and a pair of gay uncles on one side (several members of said family are conservative as hell but this would still be good for viewers, I mean it's not like the Lightwoods are fantastic either and yet...)
- There's a good setting. I went to the weirdest high school ever - we had Modern Family Fridays, a teacher who brought her dog to school (it wasn't a service dog), a teacher who auctioned off candy, a kid who breakdanced in the hall during lunch, and we once watched The Incredibles for no particular reason. Now that I'm in college, we have a Starbucks in the cafeteria, a biology teacher who goes on ten-minute rants on why corn sucks, and I've heard there used to be a class on witchcraft (I know for sure that one of my teachers has a dead grandmother that was a witch - she told us so. The teacher, not the grandmother). Also in my town we have a winter festival where they turn on Christmas lights on all the stores and everyone gets free cookies.
- There's paganism and sometimes some new agey/witchy stuff, how cool is that???
- I have a neurotic pitbull who's terrified of cats and thinks she's the size of a Chihuahua
- The trope about falling in love with your best friend is a classic for a reason
- Overall theme of self-love and community
- wlw coming of age stories because fuck yes
- the LGBT and a-spec communities wouldn't be able to fight over whether I'm aroace or a lesbian because I might be an aro lesbian so they'd both be satisfied hopefully. Compromise is always nice.
- Freeform or Netflix should pick this up I'm not kidding
So yeah, thanks for listening to my confused ranting on my sexuality. Bye.
