Ever since I was old enough to have crushes I (24F) have always been attracted to men - this was never something I had to even think about since our hetro-normative society had me believing that's how I was 'supposed' to be. It's what I saw in all the movies, tv, media in general and which is why I'm so glad that queer relationships are gaining more common representation in media. My family always been supportive of the LGBTQI+ community so there was never any pressure there, I even discovered later in life about my mother's own attraction to women. My family assured me, before I had even considered my sexuality, that it would be "okay if you like girls, we will love you all the same" when I'd shown a bit too much (for my age) of an interest in my dad's adult mags that I happened across.
In grade 8, at age 12, I had my first and only "girlfriend" (and first relationship). It was initially proposed, after a bit of "what if we kissed" kinda 'joking' around, as a "social experiment" to see how fast word would spread around the school of the first 'out' same-sex couple in our school. Prior to this I'd never genuinely considered my own attraction to women because I'd never had any reason to question. But through this short-lived "relationship" both her and I realised that there was a little more seriousness to it than just "joking around" and a "social experiment".
I'd come to realise the difference in how it felt to kiss/touch a woman compared to the following boyfriends, and in my senior years of highschool (grades 10 - 12) after 3 serious (1+ year/s) and 4 non-serious (under a year) relationships with men, I'd begun missing that feeling. However the idea of doing anything more than kissing and touching scared me, and still kinda does. I've never been more intimate with a woman than that and I'm not sure if I fear it just because it is unfamiliar or because I'm not interested in it. I've found myself wondering if my attraction is even genuine or whether it's just a symptom of conditioning (by the over-sexualisation of women in media) to associate the female form with desire.
The "bisexual" label never felt right to me, nor did any of the other specific identity "labels". Until a therapist explained the "queer" identity label. Now, 24 years into my life, I've learnt that questioning why I feel the way I feel towards women or whether or not my attraction is "enough" to be considered anything but straight does not matter - that how I feel is how I feel regardless of why, and that there is no defining level of attraction required to qualify as a member of the queer community. I don't have to belong to any one specific "identity" or "label". I am who I am, I don't have to fit to the preset ideas of sexual identities. Sexuality is a spectrum and where I fall within this rainbow no longer matters to me.
