#a lot of my kinks are actually divorced from gender tbh

[babsaros]

How did you know you were gay?

ah, couple reasons i guess. some that only became obvious with like 15 years of hindsight, and only after pulling myself out of the deep dark pit of compulsory heterosexuality.

like. classic symptoms of lesbianism include shamefully staring at the floor when you pass the women's underwear racks in the department store, even though you're not quite sure why you're uncomfortable. that sort of thing.

i have memories from early elementary school of accidentally glimpsing down a girl's shirt at recess and then bottling up that feeling and refusing to think about it. any time i had a crush on a boy, it was from an extremely idealized and safely non-actionable distance. the one time i did have a boyfriend, it was just my guy best friend from middle school, we dated for barely a school year before i ended it and the most physical intimacy i was ever comfortable with was holding his hand when we walked to class. i went to a different school's prom because a guy i was kind-of friends with asked me, and spent the whole night uncomfortably avoiding eye contact.

basically i started questioning my sexuality towards the end of high school, when i noticed myself getting like. jealous about my guy best friend's girlfriends?? like. i wanted to date them. i wanted to steal them from him lmao. i thought girls were pretty and soft and nice and cute and i was too afraid of being a predatory creep to do anything about it besides have far-fetched daydreams, but there was no heterosexual explanation. like, i hugged a girl i thought was pretty one time and it did things to my brain. that memory got locked in for life.

i identified as ace/pan early on, but again- compulsory heterosexuality. the idea of being with a guy romantically or sexually was never actually appealing. i had just been told that was what i was supposed to want my entire life, and the movies do a great job of selling that fantasy. but really i was just a lonely depressed helpless romantic teenager that wanted to be loved lol.

a large part of why i identified as asexual was because i was so sex-repulsed by the idea of penetration, honestly? (which i have since gotten over, but specifically Only with girls. the idea of having sex with a man still icks me out, and my preference is definitely femme-presenting ppl) a bit of it was probably also because i hadn't unpacked gender yet either. it made it very difficult to actually imagine myself having sex with anyone ever lol. this is gonna sound so cringe to say, but reading gay smut did awaken things in me.

in conclusion, tldr, i just like to think about tits and kissing women sometimes, idk. thanks for coming to my tedtalk.