Realisation
Most of my writing will centre on the theme of coming out, my experiences of doing so and people’s reactions to it. But coming out for me has been a journey that started fairly recently, and I feel the need to explain how I actually came to this point. My next few posts will deal with how my life had been before I decided to come out, and how I came to terms with my bisexuality during this time internally at least.
I've known I wasn’t straight from
around the time I was twelve or thirteen. Unfortunately, it all started with the
Internet and porn, rather than something sweet like falling in love with the
boy next door. We were living in Asia, and if I remember correctly, I was
twelve when we got an Internet connection in our house for the first time. I want to be clear – it
wasn’t like my life was suddenly saturated with porn. We had a dial up
connection (which in itself should tell you how much porn I could've gotten my
hands on...), and the computer was kept in my parents’ bedroom.
But still, sometimes I managed to
sneak in when no one else was there and used the computer to look up porn. I already knew
about heterosexual sex from school and from friends. It was actually the only
kind of sex we knew about: homosexuality didn't really exist for us then. And
while the word gay had on rare occasions been used as a slur at my previous school in
Europe, its meaning never completely registered in my head. So at first, all I
looked at was straight porn, and it didn't even occur to me that there might be
anything else out there. But at some point, I decided I quite liked
the men, and I’d quite like to see more of the men. It was never a fully articulated
thought, even within my own mind. Consequently it never occurred to me this
was a gay thought, let alone a wrong thought. So I saw more of the men. Then I
saw the men together. It wasn’t some kind of revelation. I just thought hmm,
that’s interesting, I would have never thought that you could or would do that.
Then my imagination took over. And
that
was the true revelation.
