Community Rainbow Waves

Confusion

I came out to my parents two days ago as bisexual. I am still not sure if I am bisexual, pansexual, or gay. I guess the best I can do is say that I am queer. Writing those words is hard but it is a significant milestone for me. Dominique Provost-Chalkley made me realise that and I am so grateful for her example. I have had a boyfriend for nearly five years, but we are taking a break at the moment because I need to figure out my sexuality. I cannot go on suppressing the fact that I am really attracted to women anymore. I began watching Wynonna Earp last week and seeing Waverly and Nicole together brought up all the feelings I have been suppressing. Seeing how natural and incredible their love is on-screen has helped me to face the truth and grapple with who I really am. I have been denying who I am for so long because I was scared and because I had a boyfriend who I couldn’t face hurting. I really love him, but I am just so much more attracted to women than to him. In the beginning I was very attracted to him which is why I think I might be bisexual or pansexual. I really just don’t know though. It is all so confusing and it hurts so much. I cannot be inauthentic with him, however, as it is not fair on him nor am I able to take the strain anymore. I have depression and I think a large part of my most recent episode (which I am only just emerging from) was about suppressing who I really am so that I didn’t have to face the truth and break-up with my boyfriend who is the most amazing person I have ever known. I hate putting him through this but I can’t deny the truth anymore.
I went to an all-girls high school. I had a few crushes on other girls there but I told myself that it was just because I wanted to give my love to someone and I wasn’t around boys much at all. I was terrified and I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt. I thought I was perverted and I was deeply ashamed. I have always had problems with my self-worth and apart from being too scared to come out, I didn’t think that if I told the person I was in love with that I loved her that she would ever be able to love me or that she even should. I still don’t think I deserve love although my boyfriend of the last almost five years has been so loving and helped me develop some acceptance in myself that I might be worthy of love. I am still not sure though and I don’t know how any woman will ever love me.
My sister came out as gay about five years ago and seeing how brave she was and how normal it actually is helped me overcome most of the shame. Lately, the main reason I have been denying my sexuality is that I have been in a loving relationship and he has taken care of me throughout my depression so I feel incredibly guilty admitting to myself that who I want to be in a relationship with might not be him. I am still trying to figure it out and I am going through a lot of pain trying to do that. My depression is still in the background and the punitive voice in my head is relentless. I am having trouble seeing the future as worth living for. I have always grappled with wanting to be dead and not wanting to have been born in the first place. But Dominique has showed me the strength in living out your truth and how joyous that truth can be. I am trying to live up to my values and be who I really am and a good person at the same time. I am trying to keep living. I don’t know how long I will manage and I can’t help feeling that my suicide is inevitable but for the time being, Dominique, you have given me something to hold onto and I am so grateful. Thank you.

A human grey area

My coming out journey has been closely tied to my mental health and trust me it hasn’t been a linear journey. As a person with borderline personality disorder, I’ve never felt well aligned with anything whether that be my gender, sexuality, or even my own personal identity and it took me 28 years to figure out why.

Throughout my life I have always been uncomfortable with grey area’s they make me feel uncertain and I don’t understand them well; and I struggle with thinking in only black or white. This has caused me to come out numerous times throughout my life by avoiding those grey areas as much as possible. So, growing up in a small rural town where everyone knows everyone made this harder. Exploring my gender and sexuality was (and frankly still is) frowned upon and received a lot of pushback from my community, friends, and family.

First, I was bisexual, then a lesbian, and up until recently a trans man. All never seemed to fit quite how I’d hoped, and honestly, I was avoiding what I already knew.
It took me 28 long years, to finally accept that I’m a nonbinary queer person and that maybe just maybe being a human grey area isn’t such a bad thing.

While coming to terms with this has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, it feels right to acknowledge these parts of myself. I finally feel like I’m honoring who I am and who I love. I’m still working on finding the courage to be out and proud but I feel like this is the best step to take. So regardless of how scared I am, I want to be me, and this is me coming out.

Lesbian

I’ve been out for a year and a half now and it feels so freeing like I can be myself. All my life everyone ! Has said that I’m into girls and just come out but did feel it yet but at the same time I dated guys but didn’t feel much with them either. At the time I found out I was in a really bad place I had no friends no job and my ex friend stole all my money from my account I was planning on ending my life while my mum and lil sister where at work the next day.The night before I was in YouTube and wayhaught came up and I started watching a few videos fans had made I instantly feel in love with them so the next day I started watching Wynonna Earp and from then I was hocked so Wynonna quite literally saved my life and I have no made it to my 24th birthday that I recently just celebrated on 4th of March and have been out for a year and half now and have been dating a beautiful women for 2 months nearly and I’ve never been happier if it wasn’t for the 2 beautiful souls who play Waverly and Nicole (Dominique and Kat) I wouldn’t be here today. Last year back in November on 29th of September I was fortunate enough to meet Dom and was totally amazing experience being around so many people souls. Unfortunately didn’t get the chance to meet Kat due to work commitments. So I really hope to meet both of them again as well as the rest of the cast to thank them even more !

Rachel N.

I knew I was queer from a young age. I remember watching Willow’s journey on Buffy and seeing that on screen just felt right. But I was young, and terrified of that feeling. I grew up in a city in Massachusetts, went to church every Sunday with my family, sang in the choir, went to CCD and was searching for a strong connection with my faith. At times I found it, but other times, I felt like I just didn’t fit there. As I grew up, I became more obsessed with the feelings I was having about my sexuality. I would stay up all night looking up things like “how do you know if you’re gay” and on message boards trying to find people who might feel the same way I do. Middle school and high school was hard. My friends were talking about cute boys and “hot” male actors. But I liked the female actors, and I didn’t think the senior on the soccer team was the most attractive thing on two legs. But I pretended I did. And honestly, there were a few boys I thought were really nice and cute, and I would talk about them. But in reality, I was much more interested in the senior girl that played soccer. But I couldn’t admit that; to my friends or myself. These feelings of being different and knowing my sexuality wasn’t status quo ate at me for a long time. I ended up coming out my senior year in high school….via twitter…..to impress a girl. (it wasn’t the best idea. I wasn’t ready, and my friends weren’t ready to talk about it with me). Honestly, it just made me feel like even more of a freak, and in that time where I am suppose to be happy and finding myself, I lost myself more and more. And it took a long time to get back to the person I knew I was. Ten years later, I’m still not there.
About a year after that I came out to my parents (again to impress a girl, I wasn’t ready), over the phone on a cold night in February. They weren’t exactly thrilled. It came out of nowhere and they didn’t really know what to do with the information. And honestly, neither did I. We didn’t talk about it more than twice. The first time my dad told me to keep this to myself, and the second, when my mom told me not to tell people when I went to study abroad in Ireland. I talked about it a little bit with one of my sisters, but never felt fully safe to with the other because she would always make homophobic jokes and comments, specifically to the lesbain community.
For most of my life since coming out, my sexuality was looked at as something to mention or comment, not to accept or embrace. And that made learning how to love myself and feeling like I am worthy of love quite difficult. I spent almost every weekend in college black out, or close to that drunk trying to find someone who might find me pretty enough to kiss or have sex with. I didn’t care who it was, I just wanted to feel something or fit in. For years, no one found me pretty enough. No one wanted to love me. There were a few times someone kissed me or went to bed with me. But no one who wanted to let it be known. I was always a secret. And all through college, when I was suppose to be finding myself and figuring out who I was and where I fit, I spent getting drunk and absolutely hating myself. And trying not to let anyone know how deeply these feeling were.
When I was a senior in college I got my first girlfriend. Finally, someone who wanted to love me, someone who was willing to tell other people that she loved me. We played on the soccer team together and although our relationship was brief, I am so thankful for it. It was the first time I believed that someone could love me and all my weird. After we broke up, I didn’t feel that way anymore, but it got better. After years of working on it, she has come to be one of my best friends. We both agree we never should have dated, we are WAY better as friends. But I am thankful for that special time we shared. About a year after that relationship, I fell Wildly in love with a beautiful woman who was just coming into her bisexuality. We started dating and almost 5 years later we are now engaged. By allowing myself to be loved and finding a safe space to grow I finally feel safe enough to step into my truth.

What I have come to realize is that I spent SO long trying to fit in, trying to make sure I had pretty friends, and accepting that I was just the fat ugly queer friend that they kept in their circle for good measure that I never learned who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. Now, after cutting off ties with people who made me feel like shit, and having a supportive partner who supports me in everything that I attempt and explore I am starting to let myself be free. I am starting to allow myself to love me. I still struggle with it. I am more unkind than kind to myself. But I am working on it. I am learning to love my queer self and letting all my colors show.

Lesbian

When I was about 11-12 I started to feel a little different from the other girls. They started to have crushes on the boys and I didn’t really have that. There was boys that I thought was good looking so I just thought that meant that I had a crush on them so that’s what I told my friends when they asked. I realized I didn’t really have a crush on them pretty quickly so I thought to myself “maybe I’m gay”. So went online and took 2 or 3 “am I gay?” quizzes. When I took them it said something about that I could be gay or bi. I then thought to myself “it could just be because I just hadn’t gotten to that age yet and it would be stupid to make a fuzz about it, so I kept on trying to be straight. When i was 14 about to turn 15 I got a crush on my best friend. I knew exactly what it was. I was no longer questioning if I liked girls since I now knew exactly how I felt about her. I chose not to say anything about it to her because she is the best friend I’ve ever had and I didn’t wanna mess that up since I thought she was probably straight. 6 months after I still had a crush on her and it had just grown and was stronger than ever and one day we talked and she came out to me and said she thought she might be bi and I said “me too” and explained that I had this crush on a girl, so I could just sit there and talk about all the feelings I had been hiding from her without revealing that it was her. I felt better for a few weeks. One day I had a meltdown(as I sometimes have) and ended up mentioning the crush because it had been stressing me out they said something about “the dude” and I said something like “it’s hard because it’s not a dude” and they understood. So that’s pretty much how I came out to my friends. I feel even more proud now than ever. I wasn’t ashamed before, just scared of everything changing. I’m still not out to my parents because I know exactly how they feel about homosexuality and everything in between. I haven’t really hid it I’ve just never said “I’m gay” straight to their face and I’m not planning on it for a long while and I’m okay with that. I’m out to my sisters because I know that they’d understand. I’m feeling great, proud and i feel free to love whoever I want at the pretty early age of 15 with my entire life ahead of me.

No rainbow without the rain – Queer sunshine

My story isn’t the saddest or the most unique one to tell but it is my story. And in the LGBTQIA+ community it is all about representation, so here I go.

Lucky enough for me, when I first discovered that I liked girls it didn’t scare me or terrify me (at first). It was just the way I felt – I recognised it as a part of me, like an inherent puzzle piece of mine. I didn’t judge it as something that needed to be addressed or spoken about, rather, I didn’t think of it much. Almost like breathing: you breath without thinking – in and out – every day, every minute, everywhere. That’s how I felt about being interested in girls, it’s just a part of my nature.

I was about 13 years old. And part of why it came to me so easily, without struggling about what it may or may not mean, was due to the Russian band t.A.T.u. Okay, now, we all know it was for show, BUT and that is the important part: I felt represented, I felt like I wasn’t the only one, and even though it was a controversial topic back then, most people discussed it in a very open-minded way. The topic was present in the media. With 14 I had my first girlfriend, and my Dad was totally cool about it. We never needed to talk about it or address it any way – just like me, he never needed to wrap his head around it.

My mom, however, was different: She somehow suspected something, so she went snooping through my things and found a letter of my girlfriend at the time. It was after her telling me that she was disappointed in me, that no child of hers would behave in such a way that I realised being gay or being queer, or whatever label describes you best is maybe not just like breathing. It was the first time that I felt ashamed of myself, that I started thinking about what it meant to be different, that I didn’t feel accepted for who I am. It was within these struggles that I broke up with my girlfriend and that I didn’t have any kind of relationship for the longest of time.

After high school, I went abroad to Canada: learning about myself, working for the first time, living in a foreign country, speaking a different language, and just trying my best to find my authentic and true self. And it was the way people openly accepted me and my queer ways, that I understood that whatever I feel, whomever I feel something for is okay, is valid. I’ve never in my life encountered people who were more open-minded than Canadians, like ever! I’m forever grateful for my Canadian (host) family, for making me feel at ease with myself, for accepting me with all my queeriness.

Today I’m married to the most wonderful woman in the world, we are proud of our relationship and of our love. That doesn’t mean that we do not struggle anymore, or that everyone just accepts us. On the contrary, even though my mum was at our wedding, she does not accept us 100%, she still thinks that the way I live my life is wrong. BUT I know that nothing about love is ever wrong. I know that love and human beings can have a million different colors, and another million different shades of these colors – and that is beautiful. Maybe, just maybe, the more we are willing to stand up for ourselves, to be loud and proud, the more people see that, indeed, love is love, that this precious feeling, the truest of them all, is a wonderful thing and that instead of being ashamed of it we should embrace it with both arms as strong as we possibly can. And when there are moments – and we cannot deny that there are – when people do not accept us, say that homosexuality is a sin, call us names, then we must remember that it is exactly this rain that, together with our inner sun rays, becomes the world-encompassing rainbow we all want to see one day.

Queer!

i first realized that i wasn’t quite straight when i was 12. it was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me, and i tried to suppress my feelings for a couple years before i realized that i couldn’t live my life like that.
a couple months before i turned 17, i decided to stop pretending and stop hiding. it was both the most daunting and most relieving thing i’d ever done. i was extremely lucky to have friends that graciously welcomed me into their arms, and i am so incredibly thankful for them.
people that i grew up with were forced to see that lgbtq+ do exist, and that their existence is normal. my coming out may have been uncomfortable and scary at the time, but now, i’m so proud of myself for being open and true to myself, as well as opening the eyes of people that had previously held negative ideas about the lgbtq+ community.
i’m here, i’m queer, and i fucking love people.

My coming-out journey : 20 years old lesbian in France

I have turned 20 only a few months ago, but it took me some time to identify and accept who I am: a proud lesbian.

When I was around 12, I talked with a girl who were a few years older than me and who was bisexual. My first question (once I learned what it was from her), was: “How did you know?”
For me, who didn’t even know that heterosexuality wasn’t the only sexuality existing, it was a chock! Her answer gave me the final electroshock I needed: “I just know”.
She just knew! What an answer for the young girl that I was! And from this point, I started thinking. I remembered all the times were I looked at girls, all the times I wanted to be close to them, all the times I had feel things that I didn’t know how to interpret when I looked at some of my friends… And then I compared it with how I was reacting to boys, especially the ones that I dated (even if, well, dating at 12 years old isn’t much more than holding hands and playing video games). The more I thought about it the more I realized that even the fact of holding the hand of my boyfriend was something that gave me goose bumps, and not the right kind.

A few years passed, and when I started high school I still didn’t accepted myself as a lesbian. I had only decided to hide this, even if I didn’t really know about homophobia and all. I wanted to be like everyone else, not different. And it wasn’t exactly as if a lot of cartoon characters were queer when I grew up, so the only person that I knew was queer was the bisexual girl from when I was 12! What a great representation of diversity!
But, one day, I just couldn’t hide the truth to myself anymore: I was having a mega crush on my best friend! Very soon I told her, and even if it was a little difficult for me to live with that, she totally accepted me. And it was the first step of my coming-out.
At first, I still didn’t really accept that I was a lesbian, so, I decided to tell my friends that I was bisexual. Like that I could still hide the part of me that loved girls… and I started dating boys again. Not my best idea since the few kiss that I had with them made me so mentally sick that I couldn’t be close to a guy in the next months without frowning ! (Yeah I must have been dramatic too, but hey, what do you expect from a queer artistic woman?). Anyway, I quickly realized after that, that boys weren’t at all what I wanted.

From there, I decided to tell my friends that I was a lesbian. They all accepted me and supported me. And it was so freeing to finally admit it! It didn’t mean that I was really “proud” of it. My friends knew it, but I didn’t want other people to know.
Then, I told my parents, who were totally supportive, and I’ll always remember my mom saying: “Yeah, I never pictured you coming home with a guy. I guess I just knew”.
I was 18 and my friends and parents knew who I was, they supported me, but me I had still issues with this. I had to wait to enter to university and to meet with new friends, who were all queer, to really admit and be proud of my sexuality. I met with all kind of person who had other genders and sexualities than what I had knew my whole life. They accepted me, and seeing them this free and proud just made it easier for me to feel the same way.

I’m 20 now, and I’m a proud out lesbian. Well, out, yes and no. I don’t really fell like my coming-out is really over, because they’re still two people at whom I haven’t said anything: my grandparents. I know that they’re homophobic and absolutely non-supportive of difference. We already have a complicated relationship, and I’m afraid of telling them this about me, because I’m pretty sure that it would mean the end of our relationship…
So yeah, I’m proud of who I am and don’t hide it anymore. I’m glad to be in the light and to be out, but I know that I haven’t really finished my coming-out journey. Telling my grandparents will be my last step in order to completely be honest about all this.

If I have learned something from all of this is that no matter who you are, if you aren’t ready, you don’t have to come into the light. All that matters is to do it at your own rhythm, step by step. Coming-out is the most freeing experience of my life, and I’m glad that I had to do it in order to be who I am today, but it isn’t something that must be forced on you: you just have to take your time and do it when you’re ready.

I’m a little strong rainbow in a grey world

I think I’ve known I’m a lesbian since I’ve been a little kid, but it never occurred to me, because it wasn’t the norm? I was always told that I’d find my prince, I’d marry a beautiful man, get some kids one day and all my scars would fade away the second I’d give my heart in the hands of a guy. I was confused and overwhelmed when I got into a relationship with a guy, because everyone did it with 14, so we thought we should do it too since we were good friends. It didnt last long. I broke up with him after a few weeks because I’ve noticed that I dont want this. I didn’t want to hold his hand or kiss his lips. I was scared, I thought I’m not capable of feeling those shiny colourful emotions. Till a lesbian character showed up in my favorite soap opera when I was almost 15 and that’s when it hit me. She showed me that there’s a world besides those stupid stereotypes and it’s okay to like girls. I started to figure it all out, opened up to my closest friends and at the end I told my mother about it. Even though I can say it’s definitely better to share this with anyone if you accept yourself. I didn’t love myself back then, because I was scared of being different. I was never confident so to realise that you’re “different”.. let’s just say it wasn’t easy, so when my mother didn’t accept me i went immediately to a big black hole of hatred. But I fought my way through it and I’ve never been happier. Once you’re truly yourself, you start to see life with a positive attitude and since then I’m doing everything I can to support other people who have the same struggles, I had back then.

A genderqueer Rose.

Well, I realised I was in the community when I was 15 but I’m still figuring out myself. I started coming out when I was 16 and now I just don’t really care who knows cause I love myself and that’s all you need.