Community Rainbow Waves

Lesbian/gay

I started coming to the realization that I was gay in high school. I was dating a guy at the time and I realized that I didn’t actually like him, but rather the IDEA of him. I wanted someone to like me; it gave me BUTTERFLIES! It made me feel happy; but I knew that I was not. I didn’t ever feel love for this boy. So after I broke up with him, I began to notice how attracted I was to girl, specifically my best friend. I fell in love with her and got my heart broken, but I am blessed for the experience because it helped me figure out who I am. I didn’t tell anyone in my family or school because I was afraid of the responses and repercussions. There weren’t many people openly LGBTQ+ in my area/life that I could use for support. In college, I fell in love with a girl who loved me back. It was the most amazing feeling! I started becoming way more confident in my sexuality and even told my close friends and parents about it. Over my college years, I became PROUD to be gay, proud to be me, and proud to love who I love. I continue to meet more and more LGBTQ+ people and increase my pride in the community. I hope to come out to the rest of my family and friends soon! I don’t want to live in fear any longer. Life is too short to hide your true authentic self!

Bisexual or probably pansexual?

I am not fully out yet. Sometime, I still need to shield my sexual identity for several different reasons. First, maybe because I don’t really want to be labelled. Second, perhaps just simply out of fear.

Hi, I am from Indonesia. I am at my 40s, and I am a single mom. I had came out as bisexual in small circle of my friends & fam a long ago, but it wasn’t because I was feeling anxious or “awaken” to my queer side. It was purely that time out of curiosity and adventurous sense.

I was in highschool when I read Freud’s. I came to conclusion that somehow everyone born with both male/female potential in them. I began to notice my own, and tried to explore that part by admitting that my past attraction to the same-sex was not mere platonic or so so. It was the same kind with my attraction to the opposite-sex. It also brought me to revisit my childhood girl crush when I was in 2nd grade junior high (12/13 y.o.) which I did not fully aware that I was making a courtship attempt toward her that time.

In highschool, after opening the lock to my universal self – and let me free to identify myself as sexually fluid, I started flowing with same-sex crush, though not doing anything about it.

There was no different, come to think about it now, between my feeling to girl before I am aware of my sexuality and after admitting it. The feeling were the same, but by making a name on myself, I then know how to name the feeling as well. “I had crush with girl”.

Despite so, I did not make any attempt to experience. It was pretty rare for me being bisexual in my small city, with no meeting of the same type of peer, and honestly I didn’t feel comfortable either to be involved or being identified marginal in society.

I am an aquarius, my choice is not to be identified with others, I am just being honest with myself and simply being me. So my sexual identity is MY identity, my choice, my own – yet I didn’t feel the need to act on it.

Later in my life, after my first divorce when I was in my early 20th, I decided to explore the notion of love. I was thinking that I had never experienced feeling in love before, as my head was focused on goal and success. But being a divorcee revealed the need for me to understand love. So again, I made my exploration and adventure. Brought up in conventional and religious environment, I started to experience the pre-marital sex with few men, and I also embraced the feeling of falling in love for the first time with my female friend. Nothing went well (nothing last).

Then in my late 20, I got pregnant. A consequence of my wild free spirited. The guy wanted me to get an abortion as he was married and with me it mere a fling. But never crossed in my mind to take that journey. I was ready to be responsible so I refused. I asked him to marry me instead for the sake of the future born child (as it was mere for legal sake) – he did, for a while, before then he ran away when I was 8 months pregnant.

My course of life changed of course being a single parent. Wanted to build my future success again, I also took a shift in career-wise. I moved to a village as a general practitioner (medical doctor), a stepping stone to collect fund to continue education. I left my son with parents. This decision, would be the milestone of my love life as a queer.

There I met a colleague. A “straight” wife. We found the attraction quite instantly. Divorced her abusive husband, we started “living together”. We had an affair during that time in a scrutinized village environment. I was not scared, I even brought her to meet my family and admitted her as my lover to my best friends. I met her family too, but everything was mere an “unspoken truth” to them.

Not like me, she was not fully embraced her sexuality. To her she was not ready to live truthfully within bigotry society. She chose to leave and marry man.

It was the first time that Love trully changed my life and forced me to go on self journey to find out more about who I am. It was also the first time I realized that I may love woman more than a man. My sexual exprience with her was off the chart. I never felt it before with men. I never realized this before.

When Dom (before coming out) shared her opinion the difference between intimacy with male vs female, I relate to that 100%. It was exactly how I said it a long ago, it was also later how I felt when I finally being sexual with same-sex.

Now, I am just a Self. Enjoying my singlehood. Still looking for my truelove/soulmate/twinflame. Not yet decided for sure if I want to be identified publicly as queer. And fully occupied in planning for my future career as again I make an “adventure” toward it after many defeats.

Nevertheless, I want to send lots of love to people who is unique and marginal. Who are unable to see themselves fit the norm or societal tagged. I believe that we all one, the spark of the Universal Mind, the spark of the Divine Love. I believe that we all chosen to learn and to let others learn about love, inclusivity & diversity. I believe that love is love and that love is “God”.

I wish one day, I gain the opportunity and time to join the “wave”. Be part of the community who fight for the values I mentioned above. For now, I am happy within my shell, watching you guys creating your momentum in life.

Love, light.

Confused

Hi , I’m a 17 year old girl and I don’t know really what I am or who I like .I guess I haven’t lived a life full of experiences yet and to be honest I’ve never experienced love . But not knowing who I am has caused me to be severely stressed , I feel like I’m holding this constant weight and judgement on my shoulders . I am constantly aware of what the people around me think in regards to what I am watching or reading . It’s so tiring and frustrating . And I feel guilty for not having the same bravery and courage as many others . I am basically unsure as to who i like and I guess what label I should put upon myself . Ive liked boys in the past but I’ve recently starting liking girls . Even now writing that sentence made me feel like I should instantly delete it , exit the tab and move on. I am in this early stage of my life where I’m just not ready or happy enough to tell this truth to myself and the people I am surrounded by.
How can I understand life and all it’s treasures if I can’t even learn to understand myself . I wish i just didn’t give a shit about what anyone else thinks but i think being self critical and utterly indecisive has been woven into genes and I’m just not sure on to break the thread .This is my first time talking about this to anyone and wasn’t really sure as to whether or not post it. But what the hell , let’s start a wave .

Lesbian

I am now 23 but my coming out process started when I was 13, and to be perfectly honest, it will probably never stop. In today’s society I am constantly having to ‘come out’ to new people as no one ever assumes you are gay if you don’t look a certain / stereotypical way. I always knew I liked girls since I was in primary school at the young age of 6 before I even knew it had a label. I suppressed this as there was not any same sex representations to normalise these feelings I had. But at 13 I fell in love with a girl and started my relationships with girls from this age, forcing me to identify as bisexual only to this girl. However, once that relationship ended I forced myself back to being ‘straight’ in my own mind, maybe because all of the hiding made me feel different and therefore ashamed. But when I was 15 I met another girl and convinced myself it was only her I liked and no other girls and that I was still ‘straight’. But at 16 I decided to come out as bisexual to my football team as this was my safe place since a lot of the team identified as bisexual / lesbian also. It was only when I turned 17 that I came out to my very religious friends and non-religious family who all embraced me as well as I could have expected. There was awkwardness around my first relationship and I hated this, and I refused to withhold my affections with my girlfriend for my family’s sake when I knew they wouldn’t have felt this way if she were a boy. They soon came around however and are now very accepting. I only came out as bisexual because I wanted to feel more ‘normal’ and admitting I was a lesbian made me more different than I was comfortable with. However, just before I turned 18 I decided that I needed to fully accept who I was, and not seek acceptance or validation from anyone. This was the best thing I ever did, and I’m now so happy with who I am and I am proud of it.

When you feel like there’s no way out, love is the only way.

I believe it all started when I was 11. I was at the mall with my family looking for fornitures, and as a child would do, I decided to explore the store. As I was looking around, I saw a huge TV that was passing this super colorful music video of a bunch of girls in school, they were also cheerleaders and seemed so happy, they even had a choreography, they got me hooked.
I couldn’t take that video from my mind so the first thing I did when I got home was try to find that video again, and I did! I found out it was from a South Korean girlgroup called Girl’s Generation and ever since I never stopped looking for more, I started to search everything about all the girls and it was love at first sight. I found a fanpage that had a chat in which I got to know more fans, and I made friends there (I still talk to some of them now, and I’m 20!).
It was a matter of time for me to find out about more and more groups, boygroups, groups with girls, and one or two coed, and as you might guess, I was more interested in girlgroups. It was also a matter of time for me to find out about ships. The girls where shipped between themselves, and even between other groups. Some of them were ships with boys from other groups, but it was never my cup of tea.

It was just natural for me. I was little, the reality was different, but when I got home and turned my laptop on… I saw girls from the other side of the world holding hands, cuddling, just being affectionate with each other in general. They never kissed, they never had to. It was pure, innocent love (we’ll never know, but I have my doubts!)… Beyond everything they had a connection and it was so beautiful to witness; many times it was entertaining, skinship, because the kpop industry used to have this to “please the fans” but you often felt like it was more than entertaining, you know? And that was my case.
So I lived happily in my online world until I was 13, and that’s when I started question my sexuality. I liked boys (or I thought I did), but I also wanted to “be one of the korean the girls”, or at least have what they have. It took me a while to realize because of compulsory heterosexuality that I didn’t want to be like them, I mean, not only that, I wanted what they had, the relationships that could’ve been more than friendships.
Besides what was happening in my own little world, I didn’t had my first kiss (spoiler alert, it only happened last year). I had a “boyfriend” when I was 8, but I used to run away from him to hide in the bathroom, because he wanted to kiss me, and when I was 16 a classmate pecked me, I did not want it, it was a surprise and I was so, so embarrassed I didn’t know how to react so I just pretend it never happened. Despite my looks, one or two boys used to hit on me. Around that age I thought I was bi.

I am a very lonely person, I never really had friends until I finished high school, my life started improving in 2018. I got into an university and it took a while, but I made friends and that’s when I fully embraced my sexuality.

I’ve always behaved as a queer girl on social media, ever since I was 14, I wasn’t afraid because those who know me, like my family, ex-classmates and etc didn’t have access to my accounts so I could be 100% myself. During senior year I promised I was gonna study and wait to watch all shows I’ve heard of, so when I graduated I started watching tv shows with queer representation, such as Wynonna Earp, Orphan Black, The Fosters, The Bold Type, Jane the Virgin… And I had the same interest for them as I had for the girlgroups back in 2012… I felt alive again. I had something to hold onto. They gave me strength, they made me understand that I’m deserving of love, that a woman can love woman and don’t be ashamed for that… It was just incredible. And that’s when I found out about Start The Wave.

College and the internet were a safe place. No one knew me and I saw many people of the lgbtq+ community being unapologetic themselves, and it helped me to finally let it out. One day jumped the gun and came out to two classmates; it went so well that I lost my fear and two weeks later the entire class knew I was a lesbian. Ever since, I’ve been so happy about it all that in 2019 I finally started going out, I even had my first kiss. My friends always encourage me too, and the best news is that during pride month last year I came out to both my mom and my dad! It was insane, in a good way. I have a better relationship with both of them now, I can finally say things without worrying about them finding out my sexuality and disowning me… Little by little I’m getting comfortable with and allowing myself to wear what I want, to say what i need to say around others, to express my love for women out loud.

I’m not ready to shout it from the rooftops yet, but I know I’m loved just the way I am, and there’s nothing better than that.

Proud Bisexual

I knew when I was a freshman in high school. I was in love with my best friend. We never tried a relationship. I was torn. It was a hard process for family acceptance. It’s been a constant struggle. I continue to be out and proud and love who I love. I’ve been in a relationship with my girlfriend for 2 years. It’s my first same sex relationship. We’re slowly coming out to everyone and being proud of who we’re with.

Lesbian

I realized I was a lesbian when I was a mere twelve years old. It wasn’t a huge moment. I remember sitting on the couch and suddenly thinking “I like girls”. I’ve been lucky enough to grow up in an environment where being LGBT is accepted. My parents are accepting, my friends are accepting, and my community is accepting. My story isn’t dramatic, but it’s a piece of me.

Work in progress

Firstly I would like to say to Dom, I am so glad you have found your truth and I wish you all the happiness in the world.

I believe I have also found my truth but I’m not sure if it will ever be uncovered but i’m working on it!

I grew up in the 80s & with parents who didn’t talk about “that sort of thing”

When i was at high school which was an all girls school, I played a lot of sport (& still do) & I was always trying to impress the girls (& still am lol) but I always came back to thinking it was wrong and that it was expected to find a nice boy and get married etc. But that never happened!

I’ve always been very body conscious & so I wasn’t very confident in speaking to men and I wasn’t one for going out much either.

A couple of years ago I came across “Wynnona Earp” & I loved it from the very 1st episode but especially Waverley and Nicole. I’m a little bit obsessed with their relationship & i often think that I would love to have a relationship like that. Think turning 50 also made me realise it was time to think of myself and what I really wanted.

However, I still haven’t told anyone & if i am honest I am scared to. There have been a couple of times that I’ve thought about discussing it with a friend who is gay & also a couple of my best friends but i always chicken out. I am thinking that i will when/if i meet that special someone but until then just keep quiet.

This is the 1st time I’ve really opened up about my feelings & it feels good & I have Dom, Kat, “Wynona Earp” & the fandom to thank for that.

Attending my first ever con last year and being amongst such an amazing community made me realise that this is the right path for me.

HUMAN (Human Experience)

At the age of 12, (I’ll start with something that marked my life) in school I was beginning to notice discrimination from children my age. It was the age when everything around me began to affect me emotionally, shyness consumed me, I was silent for a long time, in the face of what I saw and what I heard (This was also because I grew up in a family with economic problems, communication problems, problems of home stability, (problems that exist in many families) this did not allow me to have friends, not for long).
In school, I began to experience this nervousness when someone who was attracted to you (boys and girls) would come up to you and point their finger at me (mostly because of the girls), talk behind my back. Children can be very cruel sometimes and I let that get to me.
I grew up having a different view of human beings, I grew up knowing my older brother’s sexual orientation (to label him would be gay). In my small family of my maternal grandparents, my mother, my younger sister, my older brother and I, his orientation was only a topic for my grandmother, something she found difficult to accept. This was the second thing that marked my life. My mother always saw it as something natural, it was never a subject for her. What I remember most is that she told us that we had to be who we wanted to be, and she would support us. Going back to my grandmother, what terrified me the most were her comments and her look I can’t forget, her look of disgust and rejection, I didn’t want them to look at me like that, and that’s why I decided to keep silent. And just go with the flow that was driving society. To be “normal”. But I always wondered what that meant.
Since I can remember, 4 years, I always felt different, I was very attentive to what was happening around me, but I did not remember that people were so cruel until I was 12 years old. I just felt like a little human being, living in a place that didn’t fit but I was trying hard to understand and learn.
At the age of 16 I confessed to my mother about my taste in both men and women, she looked at me, smiled at me, kissed me on the forehead and hugged me. And she told me that everything was fine. I remember walking with my sister on the way to a supermarket and we were talking about the freedom of tastes by different genders, and we are both very open-minded, we never confess or label ourselves personally.
But 3 or 4 months ago I don’t know exactly, my sister confesses to us that it is part of the non-binary genre, I already intuited it, but I never asked her because I think that it shouldn’t be a subject, I think that in all of us we should be free.

In my last years I have learned to observe and analyze more the behavior of the human being. And I don’t justify anyone’s bad behavior, but I think there are many people who live in fear and that’s their behavior.
In short, in order not to do this so long, today at 26 years of age, since this pandemic began I have rethought many things about my life and the society in which we live. And I have decided to RECONSTRUCTION myself emotionally, mentally and in many other things. RECONSTRUCTION and ACCEPTANCE. Some time ago I started with meditation and yoga and I discovered many things about myself, I realized that everything that happened in my past had to be like that, it took me to make the person I am today. I constantly have conversations with myself that give me the answers I need. I have never been emotionally dependent on anyone and I have moved away from the attachment of those emotional things that don’t allow you to evolve.
I have a core of friends who are wonderful in many ways, they are few, but, they are the kind of people that you need to have in your life, that show you how different we are in many things but you can learn from it and it would be a bit boring if we were all the same and with them I can express myself freely without getting a strange look back.
With them (my friends) and my family, I can express myself freely regardless of a person’s gender or sexuality. And so it should be. Hopefully, at some point mankind will realize that, we would all be better off as a society.
I would like to share much more, but I think that’s enough, the message is understood.
Tomorrow, September 4th, I’m having a birthday party and I decided it was already a good time to free myself. I mean, I’ve been here for a long time, but I wanted to share it.

Yesterday an acquaintance told me that Love does not exist, and I answered him with a “how can it not exist” and there you realize how damaged we are as a society. My life was also somewhat stormy but I never let myself fall, I always understood that this was only a human experience and that I had to accept it or fix it, personally.
I’m not going to label myself with respect to my tastes, I just leave it as a human experience. I didn’t know how pleasant it was to write, I wouldn’t give it up. But I have to keep going, right now I am sitting looking at my beautiful Andean mountain range while drinking an herbal tea.
It was a pleasure to share a little bit of myself. Most likely you have forgotten something.
(Sorry for the length of my story)

-Katherine, Chile.

The Sovereignty

Trigger warnings: physical and emotional abuse, suicidal thoughts.

The sovereignty I inadvertently created for myself that held me back for so long.
If you’ll catch this tumultuous wave with me, we’ll ride this journey of love, growth, and happiness together.
Note: All humans are extraordinarily amazing and your sexuality is valid. This is simply my story, my experiences/preferences, and my growth.
Growing up in a Roman Catholic household had me seeing church twice a week due to the private school I attended. Button up shirts, plaid skirts, and rosaries in hand. I knew nothing of the LGBTQ+ community nor did I think it was possible to love someone of the same gender.
It wasn’t until I went to a public high school where everything changed for me. I remember this so vividly: I was sitting in the quad with friends and across the way, I saw two beautiful women being intimate with each other. I asked my friends what they were doing and they looked at me so sympathetically. “They’re together,” my friends said.

And that sparked a fire within me; I felt like I might be…different. Back then, there was hardly any positive representation of queer relationships in the media. So I grabbed at anything I could find. I couldn’t turn to my parents because they wanted a “happy life” for me which meant a husband, a career, and kids birthed from me and my future male spouse.
I struggled for the next 4 years. And though I made friends in the LGBTQ+ community, I still felt I couldn’t have the same love they had because ingrained within me (through religion and my parents) was that a happy life was with a man.

I had a boyfriend. It was the worst.
I had a girlfriend. It was the best.
That was when I knew. I was lesbian. I couldn’t fight it, as much as I tried to for the next 8 years.
Then I was outted.
The part of me I was still figuring out was unwillingly thrust into the hands of my parents. They were heartbroken. They didn’t know how to handle the news because they were like me: they didn’t know anything either. They didn’t understand that I was still their daughter, a human being capable of so many things in life. Except, maybe love. At least, that’s what it felt like. My mom would come to my room every night since the news and ask me if I was going to marry a man, if this was a phase. My dad stopped talking to me altogether.
So I ran away at 18. Still a baby. Still figuring out who she is.
It was hard to leave everything that I had ever known — a family who loved and cared for me despite their own struggles. I was grateful but I couldn’t watch the pain flash across my mom’s heart and the disappointment surface on my dad’s face. So I left.
I moved in with my girlfriend at the time. It was a struggle. I was fresh out of high school and still going to college. We couch-surfed for awhile. We were completely homeless for a couple weeks until we had enough money to get a place of our own.
Just when I started to feel comfortable, things actually turned for the worst.

After moving out, my uncle met with me and proceeded to tell me I was the “devil’s spawn and I would never be granted access into heaven” in front of a Coffee Bean. I haven’t been to a Coffee Bean since then. And then, all my close friends moved away from my hometown.
I lost my family, lost direct contact with my friends, gave up on the faith I had grown up with my whole life, and was still figuring out if being a lesbian was even okay.

Then she hit me.
In her drunken stupor her mind would cloud. Her hands would meet my face in fists instead of the gentle, soft palms I once knew. Her nails scratched at my cheeks and the back of my throat instead of down my spine in ecstasy. Her legs met my stomach instead of intertwining them with my own. Her fingers pulled at my hair instead of softly running them through tangles. Her body propelled into mine to push me onto the pavement, into the bathtub, onto the floor instead of embracing me with warmth. Her eyes, wild with rage instead of the love I once saw.
I thought about just giving up. I felt as if I had no one to turn to, no one to help me out. I tried twice, she caught me every time and wouldn’t let me escape. Unknowingly, I’m grateful she didn’t let me because I wouldn’t be who I am today.
But I didn’t know any better when I was with her. I didn’t know that this wasn’t the love I deserved. She was the only love I knew at the time. She accepted me when no one else did. So I stayed but I can still feel the remnants of her every action.
It took me two years to finally have the courage to leave; to finally realize that this wasn’t right. Luckily, my parents came around and they accepted me back into their home with open arms. It was still a struggle with them but it was also two years too late. The damage was done.

I was 21 when I met my next girlfriend. And she was amazing, completely opposite of HER. Because she was there for me when my wonderful grandfather passed away. She was there for me, period.
Or so I thought.
See, abuse can take many forms and all I had ever known was the physical manifestation of it. I didn’t see that it could take a mental and emotional form as well.
Within the 3 years that I was in this relationship, I continued to lose my way. I was limited in how I acted, in what I could take interest in and in my hobbies.
Book-binding was a “waste of time.”

Hanging out with family and friends couldn’t be done “without me.”

Following and shipping new queer relationships in the media was “weird and you should stop.”
And I stopped. I wanted to keep this love because it wasn’t physically negative.
So I changed myself once again.
Unaware, I built my own sovereignty. A force within myself to govern my actions, words, my own identity. It grew and grew until I couldn’t control it anymore.

When I was accepted into nursing school at 24, she raged at me. Jealous of my successes and treated me like a verbal punching bag instead of a human being. We broke up. I was torn. Less than a month later, I found out she was cheating on me. She was too scared to break my heart to tell me there was someone else and instead used my own success against me, making me feel like getting into nursing school wasn’t a feat of its own.
I was 25 when I realized: I deserve a wholesome and pure love. When I knew that the sovereignty I built needed to be dismantled. But it had to start somewhere.

So I started with myself.
I began to finally accept that being lesbian was just as valid as being straight.
It helped when more positive LGBTQ+ relationships surfaced in the media. It helped when my mom told me that she wanted to come to Pride with me wearing a “I’m proud of my gay daughter” shirt and when she said I could “always visit them with my wife.” It helped when I got my family back. It helped when I got my best friends back. It helped when I opened up about my journey to my clinical group and finally admitted to my mom the abuse I went through.
It helped when I discovered a community capable of unconditional love and acceptance.
I’m 26 now and I’m still growing. I’ve come to realize every feeling is valid, every human is valid. Everyone is capable and deserving of an entirely pure and healthy love. I chose to fight against everything I experienced.
I choose myself. I choose love.
Ea: a Hawaiian phrase meaning a sovereignty where no one, absolutely no one can hold you back.
(inhale, exhale)
I am a lesbian.
I am a human being.
I am here and I stay;