Community Rainbow Waves

Bisexual

i think i finally actually realised i was bisexual last year but i was into girls many years before that but just thought of it as a phase i guess. i actually once said to a friend of mine in school probably about three years ago that i would “mess around for a year or so and then get married properly with a man, just so i could get it out of my system” and when i think back to that it seems so mad to me that that was my mindset and as the years have gone on i see more of a chance of me starting a family with a woman even though i still haven’t came out to my family. my friends all knew but it wasn’t like a big secret because i thought nothing of it in the beginning so i never kept it from them. i’m 18 this year and i haven’t been in a relationship since i was around 14 which was with a boy. i’m scared to come out to my family because although i know they love me endlessly, there is still something in my mind that holds me back. i wish coming out wasn’t such a big thing and although it should be celebrated i also think it shouldn’t be expected. i would like to come home one day and introduce my girlfriend to my family without anyone thinking anything of it.

I identify myself as a lesbian

I came out as a lesbian to my mom when I was 13, she took it well at the beginning but she didn’t want me to tell other people and she wasn’t friendly to the idea of having a lesbian child, She didn’t want me to wear rainbows or other stuff that could let people think I was lgbt I disagreed and still told my friends and family (except my grandparents) and was finally accepting myself for who I am.

Always questioning Bisexual

I realized I wasn’t straight in the 8th grade. It was Saturday and I had just woken up. I had seen a dream that I was dating one of my friends who also was a girl. It had been a really nice dream. In it we had done some things like straight couples in my school, e.x kissing in the stairs and walking hand in hand.
Then when I was playing there on my bed it dawned on me, I wasn’t straight. I panicked a little because I didn’t want to be gay or anything else. My parents were(and still are) homophobic, but in few weeks I was completely fine with my sexuality ( even tho I still am questioning if I’m actually just gay and not bisexual).
I “came out” kinda differently then my other friends. When I went to high school I just openly said what I was and stopped hiding it.

Christine

When it comes to coming out, there is no such thing as “too late.”

For me, the time came during my sophomore year of college (only two years ago, though it feels like a distant lifetime ago now). Up to that point, I’d scarcely given a thought to my sexuality, let alone my gender. Sure, I’d had friends who’d come out as bisexual and/or nonbinary, I’d had 3 a.m. conversations with these friends about gender and related topics, and I supported those friends and tried to learn about the LGBTQ+ community as best I could, but as far as I knew, I was a cisgender heterosexual guy, and that was that.

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

Coming out, for me, took breaking away from so many of society’s expectations and perceptions of transgender people especially.

In the early months of 2018, the questions started to gnaw away at me, lurking in the back of my mind, ever-present even as I was just trying my best to make it through the rest of the school year in one piece.

Slowly, the questions shifted from “is it possible that I might be a girl?” to “is it okay for me to be a girl?” to “how much do I stand to lose from living my life as a girl?”

As if that struggle weren’t enough, I had to contend with one extra train of thought that complicated matters that much more: “I’m probably a trans girl… but I still like girls.”

There are so many stigmas that society places on transgender people, and what society had taught me was that if you were a trans woman, you had to have figured it out when you were young, you had to be into men, and you had to be as stereotypically girly as possible.

And so I held back. I suppressed as much as I could and tried to go on with my everyday life… until, finally, I couldn’t. The end of sophomore year came, and with nothing else to preoccupy me, the questions drifted back to the front of my mind, and I had no choice but to face them head on.

So, as many of us tend to do in this day and age, I took to the internet looking for answers. Slowly, I started to learn that everything I knew was wrong, and those answers I found smashed through the mental barriers that had held me back.

YES, you can be a trans woman and a lesbian. YES, you don’t have to figure out these things so soon in life. YES, you don’t have to adhere to society’s expectations. YES, you are valid.

By the end of May, I’d come to terms with my transness, though the goals I set for myself changed rapidly. At first, I’d thought I would hold back on coming out and transitioning until later in life… before long, that changed to “within a few years,” which soon gave way to “I’ll come out after I graduate.”

Eventually, I realized time was of the essence, and the last thing I wanted was to look back into my past years down the line and see nothing but regret. Living my life as my true self was the only way forward.

And so I started to make plans. I was going to come out by the end of that summer, and nothing was going to stop me.

I planned my coming out meticulously, because I worried endlessly that my parents, my family, wouldn’t accept me for who I am, that they would try to hold on to their perception of me as their 19-year-old son. I needed to be prepared, and so I took drastic measures. I wrote letters, and I made plans to leave them at home one day and then drive away for a few days to give my family time to take it all in, because I was so scared they would take out their emotions on me.

I remember leaving the letters and a poem explaining all the feelings I’d dealt with over the past months one afternoon in early August, and I remember how long that 90-minute drive to the next state over to stay with a friend felt.

It. Was. Terrifying.

My family’s panicked reactions that first night only made me more scared. I remember the frantic yelling over the phone, I remember the shock my family felt, and above all, I remember the fear I felt, with very few things to take my mind off of it. There was a part of me that worried I would never be able to go home again.

But to my relief, things got better. Within a few days, my family came around. I was able to go back home to a family that resolved that no matter what, they would learn, love me and support me (even if there were things they didn’t quite understand — I still remember the confusion in my dad’s face as he realized I was now a girl who liked girls, which, yes, made me a lesbian), and in the year and a half since my coming out, that hasn’t changed.

I’ve had the chance to well and truly find myself, and I am unabashedly proud to be who I am today. I finally feel like the woman I’m meant to be, and I am so much happier for it.

The road to finding yourself can be a long one, and oftentimes, it can be fraught with struggles, both internal and external. But as I look back at who I used to be and think of how much things have changed for the better in my life since then, I firmly believe traveling down that path has been worth it, and I hope that so many more people will get the chance to take that journey in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead.

The age of love is short, there is no limit to oblivion… But this is the value of love.

Since childhood. But the awareness and acceptance of self came at a more conscious age. Now I am happy about it. I have been living with my beloved person for several years now and the most wonderful thing for her is that I was a discovery of her sexuality and an opportunity to realize that the world is not only black and white. I live in Russia, the country that patience and understanding of such I am not very different, here still slips the foundations of the past, and there is probably a disadvantage in this, but there are a lot of people like me who are gradually me attitude towards us)

Gender-fluid Gay

Well my story startd when I was little but I just sorta pushed my feelings down until when I was in year 9 (13/14) and i came out to my best friend that I was gay and in no uncertain terms i was told that I was gross and disgusting and should never tell anyone about this, I can happily say i don’t talk to her anymore. But it took about a year to get over this and tell my mum who after i told her asked to get her a cuppa. She was very unphased, my dad did think i was joining a cult be he had no idea what LGBT meant and went with me and my girlfriend to London Pride. Coming out to my friends well that was hard and easy as i had somw openly homophobic friends. I still to this day have some homophobic family members but I’m getting there with them.
Coming out as gender-fluid (GF) was so much harder (at 18) and something I still after almost a year if being out struggle with. To come out as GF I spoke to my parents seperately and it took them a while but they are coming round I think. Apart from my parents I put it on my social media as I didnt feel the need to tell people. This severly backfired but I am dealing with it. I also found things like wynonna earp helpful in my coming out process as when I first came out as I was more feminine back then, now i do dress more masc and use they/them pronouns. Well yeah thats most of my story..

Larissa

I’m a 30 years old queer cisgender woman that knew from a very young age that I liked girls. However, I didn’t really know that I was a lesbian at that time.
As far as I can remeber I had crushes on girls, but as a kid growing up in the northeast of Brazil (a very “tradicional” region) I had no queer references whatsoever. I just knew that girls were suppost to like boys, so I faked it, throughout my entire adolescence. I dated boys and kisses a lot of them so that no one would suspect that I was actually in love with a girl friend.
It was only when I went to college in another state across the country that I had the courage to try to kiss a girl. In a traditional Brazilian festivity, carnaval, I kissed a girl for the first time and that made me realize how much I wanted to do that for my entire life. Since It was a party and there was a lot of alchool involved none of my friends said much about It, and I actually ended up with some other guys for almost an year before finally having the guts to admit first to my self, that I was definitely not into guys.
It was watching shows with queer characters that helped me build the stregnth to come out, in special Naya Rivera’s Santana in Glee. I related so much to her that I started to feel the need to be honest with myself, to stop hiding who I was, that’s when I leaned on my first openly gay friend to start going out more, meeting girls and telling people around me that I was gay. I then came out to my childhood friends who still lived in my hometown and it was such a releaf to hear them say that they loved just the same. It was time to tell my family. In a visit to my parents house, on a long weekend that my dad was way I told my mother. Her reaction was as far from undestanding as it could possibly be, she didn’t speak to me again for several months. As I left the very next day, heart broken, I didn’t really know what to do next. My mother told my older sister who called me and said that my mom was devasted, crying all the time and not eating, begging me to go to a therapist. I knew that they were expecting me to be “cured” by this therapist but I went anyway to try to make amends. It turned out the therapist was a really nice woman who knew my sister and their intentions and told me at the first session that she wasn’t there to cure me, but to help me cope with everything I was going throutgh. My father was the real light for me at that time, he asked me to have patience with my mom, that she was taking it pretty hard but was trying to be better for me and that he would love me for the both of them until then.
A lot of scars had to heal before I started to feel whole again and be proud of who I am, but as I was going through all of this with my mom I kept reminding myself that I needed to treat her with the same love and acceptence that I expected to get from her. Now, eight year later, she has come a long way. It took patience and love, but most importantly I knew I wasn’t alone.

Kimberly, Cisgender, Lesbian, she/her

I first realized I might be gay when I was in middle school, though it was not something I was ready to accept. I have always been a tomboy, and was very aware of gender growing up. While I had an incredibly supportive family and felt that I could live my life without limiting myself to what society had dictated someone of my gender should do, there were times when it was incredibly stressful. I avoided using public restrooms for fear of someone thinking I was a boy and trying to kick me out, I hated when activities were separated based on gender and even lost a friend because he thought I was a boy until we were separated in an activity, and I had another friend tell me he wouldn’t believe I was a girl until I had boobs. Despite all of this, I never changed how I dressed or the activities I was involved in until I thought I might be gay. I felt I was different enough as it was, I did not want to add the stress of being gay on top of everything else. My greatest fear through high school and college was that someone would think I was gay and I wouldn’t be able to deny it. I successfully avoided any formal events in middle school, but in high school I started wearing dresses for the first time since my parents dressed me as a very young kid. I avoided any physical contact with women and didn’t allow myself to get too close to any woman for fear of developing serious feelings I couldn’t deny. In the moment, I didn’t think too much about it, but reflecting back, it was pretty horrible. This lasted until my senior year in college, when my best friend started breaking down all of my barriers. She started hugging me, holding my hand, and cuddling, and for the first time I realized how touch starved I had been. This was great, but also super confusing. I had never had a super close friend or a partner and I did not know how to interpret my feelings for her. She was also in a relationship with a man and was pretty vocal about being straight. Eventually I just had to accept that I had fallen in love with her, and this helped me to start on my journey to accepting my sexuality. It was not until the next year, after we had moved in together and had been living with each other for a couple of months, that I finally felt ready to come out. I told my family first, and they were amazing, and then I told my best friend, who was also amazing. I thought that after I came out, everything would just fall into place, which did not happen. It has been almost 2 years since I came out, and I have struggled a lot. I spent the majority of my life trying to convince myself I wasn’t gay and the deep sense of shame, fear, and anxiety that I had been living with doesn’t just disappear. But I have also grown a lot in those two years. The shame, fear, and anxiety don’t rear their heads as much anymore, and I am starting to get to a point where I can actually have pride in who I am. I even told my best friend that the reason I came out was that I had fallen in love with her, which is something I had been hiding for so long and was a huge relief when I finally released it. There is still room to grow, but I am incredibly happy with where I am now, and for the first time in my life I feel like I can love who I truly am.

I’m a women who is in love with all women

I guess I’ve always known but at the age of 15 I gave in to the idea that I was really into a girl that had been my online friend for about 3 years. I met her when she pretended to be boy on twitter, which really hurt me when I found out because I thought I fall for a pretty boy and in the end he turned out to be a pretty girl. That’s really fucked up but It took me some weeks to get into the idea that I actually had feelings for a girl, and it was okay. It was not until 2018 that I came out with my friends, which was really hard because we went to a very religious high school and they were pretty conservative; but it turned out just fine. For sure the most difficult thing was to come out to my family, which took me another year and on November 2019 I told my father that I was into girls, it turned out okay too. Though it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be coming out, I’m still finding out how to have a conversation with my mother about it, she has heard it from my sisters and my father, and she really struggled to accept me, but still I can’t bring up the courage I need to just speak to her.
For me, sex or love the same sex wasn’t as hard to accept as the idea of a mother not loving her child for choosing what really makes her happy. To all the parents out there, it’s not you business who your child fucks or love as long as it make them happy.

My favorite human once called me Real Life Waverly

For almost 18 years, I thought I would never find love because I considered myself as too picky. I thought that I didn’t deserve to be with anyone because I could not give them what people called “love”. I thought I was not interested in anyone and thus, I did not deserve anyone’s love.

The truth is, I was not looking in the right place. Society had taught me that I needed to be with a boy and I had never felt anything for boys ever since I was little. Sometimes, I wondered if I was gay but then I looked around me and I could not find any queer woman I could relate to.

Representation of queer couples on television is the reason why I have been able to figure out who I was and who I loved. I think it is fair to say that Sanvers, a queer couple on the TV show Supergirl, first helped me to figure out my sexuality. I realized I wanted what these two women had. I realized I would love to be in a relationship like this one.

After discovering Sanvers, I was still very unsecured about the fact that I loved girls. I was still closeted.
Then, I discovered that TV show named Wynonna Earp and it helped me even more through this journey to accept who I was. The fact is, I did not only discover an extraordinary queer couple on television, I also discovered an extraordinary woman named Dominique Provost-Chalkley. I found out that this woman was not only a bloody talented and gorgeous woman playing a queer character on television but also a lovely human being defending lgbtq+ rights in many ways. I felt and still feel connected to this woman as I never did with anyone before. She helped me to be proud of who I was and she made me feel heard. She always manages to make me feel special and to make me feel appreciated.

If I am where I am today, it is thanks to representation. That’s why reprensentation matters. I am thankful for all those new queer couples on television. But, of course, I am hoping for more. Where are the queer characters in the cinema industry? I dream of a world where a Disney princess could be with another princess, where a Disney king could marry another king, where a Disney prince could become a princess. I try to be optmistic but I am not sure I will live long enough to see those kind of things happen. We really have to support every art productions giving a fair and beautiful representation to lgbtq+ people and hope that it will bring a new rainbow wave into all the arts.

If I speak up the way I speak up today, it is thanks to Dom because she started this. She said “out is the new in” and well… I really think out should be the new in.

Let’s start the wave to make the world a better place.

Emma.