Community Rainbow Waves

I identify myself as a lesbian

Deep down I knew I liked girls at a very young age; but I didn’t know that it was a normal thing…that it had a name for it. I was probably in preschool about five or so when I had my first crush. It was on one of the ladies that worked at my preschool. I remember being on the swings and her pushing me. And I remember thinking Oh my what is this feeling? I really like this girl. My little five year old self just confused not knowing what it was just let it be. Now going through elementary I had “crush’s” on a few boys thinking yeah I like boys. But now looking back on it I just wanted to be them because it was normal for them to like girls. I wanted to be “normal” so yeah I tried to like boys. In the fourth or third grade I was playing outside at recess when my older sister came up to me and introduced me to her girlfriend. I was confused and asked her what she meant so she explained. After doing so I had so many questions wondering is this okay? Is this normal? Is it wrong? What are people gonna say? Knowing more information then I did before on sexuality’s I still didn’t think anything of me liking the lady from preschool. So I kept thinking for some darn reason I like boys that I was straight. I guess I was scared of people judging me and that no one would want to be my friend. Then middle school came I was doing great, back with my old friends after moving schools for the millionth time. A few months in and then again I was going to a new school. Yep the new kid yet again like always most of the boys came rushing towards me to ask me out. As always I said no because I wasn’t really ready for any of that. So I’m in the sixth grade and I’m with my new foster family watching Camp Rock in the living room and then I see Demi Lovato. Thinking wow she’s amazing I want to be just like her. I admired her so much that I start to watch camp rock like all the time. Finally I realized omg I have a crush on Demi Lovato. Still scared of what people would think I told no one. Seventh grade came around and I had a crush on one of my best friends now. We weren’t friends at the time but we shared a friend so we hung out together at recess. Me being the flirtatious person I am started to doing things that I guess got people questioning. One day I heard from our friend that we shared that she was starting rumors about me being about me being a lesbian. I was very upset and even though it was true I denied it. I cried that night and prayed to be straight because I was scared of what others thought of me. Now when the eighth grade came I only told a few of my closest friends that I liked girls. When they found out they were very supportive and I was glad. Later towards the middle of eighth grade I hinted to my siblings and foster family that I wasn’t into boys. They eventually figured it out and were supportive as well. During the summer I kissed that best friend and a lot of people found out about it. I was nervous and people asked about my sexuality and I just told them I didn’t feel comfortable telling them. But then later on freshman year I told people. Now a junior in high school I’m proudly out, I mean I’m still a little anxious of telling people but I’m happy to be me. To live life and love who I want to because I know that there are others who support me and love me for who I am.

I am a queer non-binary individual that believe in love!

I knew that i liked more than one gender when I was 12, but i had no concept of sexuality and even gender at that time. Now, as a 15 year old, I am still figuring out who i am and who i want to be in this world. Sexuality and gender and fluid and beautiful things that anyone should be able to freely express. I am so glad to be a part of this community, and I hope that I grow more and more.

Nat. W.

I was 15. Had a “boyfriend” but was more attracted to his best friend who was a girl. As she and I got closer, my family began to notice. My aunt duringblack friday shopping, asked me if I were gay. Having only the knowledge of just gay and lesbian, and what it meant, I replied..”I think so” I was also very afraid to speak of anything more because she was very into bible verses and Church Sundays. My parents would ask questions about her and I would tell them truthfully. But my father had a huge problem. He would forbid me from hanging around with her, going places with her, and just speaking of her. She had a beautiful smile, a smile.which would brighten my day in an instant. One day my dad caught us in a small kiss and threw her out of my house. Grounded me and took everything away from me. I couldn’t see or speak with her unless it was at school. We tried to make it work, but as in most relationships, things go wrong. People change. Feelings change. My dad and I had the worse relationship for almost 10 yrs and it caused me so much pain and often thought about just putting an end to all of it…and end to me. For some reason, I never let it happen. I wrote a small screenplay about it in college as I went away just to be on my own for a while. My professor hand picked mine to be read to the class because he got chills when he read it. As I grew into the changing world, I worked on reprogramming my mind and my heart to be able to love me. I worked on finding myself. The moment I said to myself, before you can love anyone, you must love yourself, in came the girl who “whoa-ed” me the second she walked into the building. Not really looking for a serious relationship, it just grew from there and 5 years later I asked her to be my wife. Just last week we celebrated out 4th year being married and i have to tell you….she is the only thing I have ever been sure of. My wife and I are happytogether and she just gets me. I wrote a screenplay just recently on reflecting on my hardships growing up to what I worked hard to just become and how I wish I could tell the kid back on that day where I almost went through with it…that your life is going to be so much better than it is now if you can just be patient….my dad and I have a better relationship than ever. He loves my wife and he treats her like his own. I work with teens who often are discovering themselves just as I was at their age…and I try to be the person I needed when I didnt have anyone….in hopes that the suicide numbers go down….to anyone who needs it….

Be patient. It does get better.

21 years to find her truth

I came out to my family and friends at age 21. I am 30 years old now, but I came out in college. I didn’t come to the realization that I was truly gay until then. Now looking back, so many things made a lot of sense and pointed to this truth long before I even knew myself. I always had intense emotional relationships with my guy friends, but I never wanted it to go any further. I was always attracted to women, but I think I pushed that down for quite a while. I thought that maybe I didn’t want to be with anyone if I didn’t want to be with a guy. I realize now that it just wasn’t the right fit for me to be with men. I have incredibly close friends who are guys, but I didn’t and don’t want the physical intimacy with the opposite sex. I met a girl in college who gave me the feelings that I always wished I had for guys. It just fit and felt so right, and I then realized what had been missing all along. I wasn’t waiting for the right guy after all… I was waiting for the right woman. The woman I met in college wasn’t the right woman, but it opened the doors for me to find love in its most true and authentic way someday. For that I am forever grateful.

I’m an elementary teacher now, and I encourage my students to be who they are. We talk a lot about loving ourselves for who we are and celebrating our uniqueness. I want to encourage them to be their own unique self and that they should be proud of who they are. Being kind to others is what matters. I want to help them see how incredible they are in hopes that they take that with them throughout their lives. If I believe in them, then maybe they will believe in themselves too.

Thank you, Dominique for inspiring me to continue live my truth. You are an incredible human.

I’m an out and proud butch lesbian

I could, and regularly do, tell the story of coming out as a lesbian in the age of Section 28. I tell it because, mostly, it’s relatable, and it’s got some funny bits, and has very clearly defined parameters that say “This was the moment I was not out; this was the moment I was out.”

I’m not going to do that; instead, I want to tell you about what was, for me, a much tougher journey, one which took a lot longer and a lot more questioning, a journey which is no where close to being finished. I want to tell you about being butch.

It isn’t a popular word, nowadays, even in the LGBTQ+ community. But it’s an identity that helped me verbalise my own gender when I didn’t know how to, and gave me the comfort that I wasn’t the only woman trying to find her way through the world when the trappings of femininity felt increasingly like a cage.

I had always been a tomboy, more interested in climbing trees and getting muddy than in playing dress up and dolls (the barbie dolls my mum bought me spent more time rescuing each other from hideous fairytale monsters than they ever did swooning over Ken). Which is fine, when you’re young. It gets less fine as you get into adolescence, when the expectations of society become more restrictive, and the struggle to fit in, to be normal, comes to the forefront. I was a shy kid, bullied because my family were working class in a middle class neighbourhood, and my parents were catholic and somewhat strict; the thought of standing out any more than that made my stomach churn. So I wore the skirts, rolled shorter at the end of the road so our mothers wouldn’t see, and applied the colourful eye shadows which we’d be marched to wash off after first period, and I felt like I would never be happy again.

Skip forwards 8 years, and I was living away from home for the first time, in a foreign country, with no one to define me but myself. It was an opportunity, not just for learning, but for becoming. I found myself around people who wouldn’t bat an eyelid when I cut my hair short, or tentatively started adding “men’s” clothes to my wardrobe. It gave me freedom to experiment with my name and my pronouns, and start to uncover the layers of my attachment to womanhood that I had long since hidden in shame. I still felt anxious about it; there were still confusions and unkindnesses as a result of my outward appearance, but more clearly than any of those, I remember standing in front of the mirror with my waist length hair shorn for the first time, the strands lying around my feet, and crying because I finally felt like I was looking at myself.

It took another 5 years for me to exclusively start wearing “men’s” clothes, to stop disguising my mannerisms to appeal to the wider society who still demand performance of culturally mandated gender roles. It helped that I had found, online and offline, a community of women like me who enabled me to map out the words I needed to explain this huge part of my identity, and a woman who made me believe I was ‘handsome’ – not ‘pretty’ and certainly not ‘strange’. It took two thirds of my life and that unwavering support to fully accept myself as a woman, a lesbian, and a butch, and I’m still learning.

No, butch isn’t a popular word, nowadays. For the wider world it carries too many of the negative connotations attached to it by the narrow feminism of the 1970’s, but for me, it’s the key descriptor for who I am. I found an affinity with it, and it helped me – is helping me – on my journey as I dig deeper into what that means. It’s true that labels are just words. They’re just words we use to verbalise who we are, and our feelings towards them are based on our own personal experiences as we travel through life, constantly evolving or cementing as we ourselves grow. To the world at large, I’d ask you one thing: be gentle with other people’s labels, and the words they choose or do not choose to give their identity form. Invalidating them is a form of invalidation for the many roads they travelled to find them.

And to the masculine of centre women – the gender nonconforming women – the women getting called out in the ladies’ loos and receiving the side eyes as they pick up their groceries – stay strong. Stand tall. Keep on holding your own. And hold onto your swaggers – we’ve earned it.

Zo, Birmingham UK

Lesbian and human

I knew I was different, in elementary school, but I didn’t know why. As I got older, I started learning about things that were never spoken about in the Mexican culture. I learned about sex through classmates when I was in elementary school. When I came home, I told my mom some of my peers told me about sex. My Mom immediately got upset, she told me they shouldn’t have revealed to me what that was, and told me to never speak to my school mates again.
As I grew older and entered middle school, I was looking for music on a computer. I found a folder that had a name thinking it was a music file and well it wasn’t a music file. As you can imagine, that was a bit of a shock. I shamefully closed the window as quickly as I could. However, curiosity got the best of me and I opened it again, several times. Finally, embarrassed and fearing being found out, I closed everything on the computer. These feelings that I stumbled upon, continued to grow throughout my formative middle school years. I began to realize how much more I noticed girls and not boys.
When I started high school, I knew that I liked women but I dated boys, because I was scared to come out to my parents. I did what I thought I should have done. I lost my virginity to a guy sometime in high school, although I didn’t feel any emotional connection. I did eventually find a great group of friends and we would remain close throughout the rest of high school. I had crushes on two of the girls in my friend group and I was still afraid to come out. The one crush was particularly devastating, as she was taken by my other male best friend. He wasn’t upset but it was still scary to come out because I wasn’t sure what the reception would be. I didn’t want to lose my friends. Not only that I was still questioning myself. I eventually lost touch with my high school friends unfortunately.
I did eventually come out to my parents near the end of high school. I told them after coming back home from a church retreat. I came out and told them I was bi ( I still wasn’t sure of myself at the time) my mom proceeded to call her church friends so they could pray the gay away from me. I complied with my mom’s wishes. I kneeled down and pretended to repent while crossing my fingers behind my back. My mother at one point screamed at god asking why she had been punished by having a gay child. After this we didn’t talk for a while.
Around the same time, I came out to my brother on the same day that he was going to give me a guitar as a christmas gift. I cried and I told him about my situation with Mom and Dad as well as my fear of losing people. He embraced me with the warmest hug and told me that I shouldn’t care what others think or worry about the religious factor. He told me he loves me no matter what. I was relieved and happy.
I was much more nervous to tell my sister, oddly enough she already knew. And we also never spoke about it again.
With Phoenix job corps came many new experiences and new crushes. I felt like I could finally be myself. I came to grips with the realization I am a lesbian and not bisexual. And today I finally find the courage to come out to you all as a Mexican American lesbian and I am authentically proud to be me.

I don’t identify, I’m just me.

I knew I was part of the community when I was young and I just never really knew what “gay” felt like so then I got older(16 now) I finally got the courage to tell my parents, but first I told my friend by passing a note, then she said she was bi too and then I came out to my mom but couldn’t tell my dad because I feel like he had a whole other perspective on it, but my mom secretly told my dad and he is cool with it. I told my sister and she is very supAI’ve always known I was part of the community, I’ve always thought other girls were pretty and that eventually I’d fall for one and that’d be it. What was shocking to me was that it wasn’t common to feel this way. At a very young age I’d thought, “But girls are so pretty! How can you not like girls?” I never felt a need to come out, I came home one day and said “Mom, I have a girlfriend!” I could tell she was surprised but she was calm and hugged me and told me how proud of me she was. Our community can be such an accepting place, that’s one of my favourite things about it. I’m still very young, I don’t exactly have very many years on me, but I’ve always known who I am and what I want.portive of it and we have a closer bond together and we always joke around and pick out my “future girlfriend.” My whole family is supportive of me, including my grandma, and doesn’t think any different of me and I can’t wait for what the future holds for me!

I am Queer AF!

I honestly don’t remember when I knew I was queer. I struggled a lot to suppress my “queer thoughts” because I grew up with a very religious mother. I was always told “gays go to hell,” “being gay is a sin.” My mother always put that mentality in my head and I started to believe that for a while.

I guess it was the end of middle school or the start of high school when I started to develop feeling for girls. I was so confused. I was like “what is wrong with me?” “I shouldn’t have these feelings, God make them stop.” I remember watching Pretty Little Liars and watching how open Emily was about her sexuality and it was awesome to see a female character to open and proud. I used to go to my room and talk to myself and saw “God please get these thoughts out of my head, I can’t be gay.” I had that mentality of thinking being gay is wrong, so I tried my hardest to suppress those thoughts.

Then in junior year of high school, I cut my hair and had an undercut and rocked that hairstyle lol. I honestly didn’t give a fuck about what other people thought, I had my haircut and was really confident. I later started to understand that being gay was okay. I didn’t have to hide my feelings. I came out to my sisters friend for by writing her a message and having her read because I couldn’t say that words out loud. I started crying when she was reading it, and she told me it was okay and she didn’t think differently of me. I wave of relief washed over me. Then a few days later I came out to my two sisters the same way, I wrote them a ”letter” in notes, and had them read it in front of me. They told me that they already had a feeling I was gay. But still love me the same way. Then a week or two later, I told my brother, again the same way lol. He as well told me he loves me not matter what.

The only person I haven’t told is my mother. Oh boy, I have no idea how to approach the situation. She’s still very religious and I have no idea how she will react.

As of now, I realized that I am Queer. I’m not just gay anymore. I like all human beings. I used to think that I only liked girls but I kinda also like some guys, not all, just some lol.

I am not afraid to be my true authentic self. One day I will come out to my mom and when that day comes I will be prepared and willing to tell her the truth about myself.

Jenna

I have never posted anything serious on social media and I do not like to post for all to see, but I wanted to get my story out there somehow. When I saw the video that @dominauep_c uploaded I thought I might be able to help others with my story. I understand there is a certain limit on characters with these social media outlets, but I think my story is pretty crazy and actually inspiring for anyone willing to listen. Some days I don’t even know how I am still here and still sane. The story I am about to tell isn’t for sympathy or pity but it is for hope. It’s for others to realize that things can get dark but there is always that glimmer of hope at the end.

I was born in an upper middle class family. I was the middle child and probably the cutest out of my siblings. From what I can recall I had a great childhood and a loving family. When I was 13 my family decided to take one more camping trip before the school year started. Little did I know then, but that day my whole life would change.
My mother ended up having a heart attack on the vacation and would never come back home. My father being the man that he was ended up remarrying 3 months after my mother’s passing to a abusive drug addict with 6 kids. With my fathers decision to remarry our extended family fell away. My life went from a loving family of 5 to a family of 11. Life was terrible for me and my siblings. I was constantly physical and verbally abused for years by my step mother with my fathers knowledge. At the end of my ropes, I finally fought back. My father choosing his new family kicked me and my siblings out. My grandparents took us in but only to a certain extent. We lived in their garage and could only bathe in their pool. My sister during this time was to young and had to move back in with my father and my brother ended up moving away to college, leaving me at the hands of my grandparents. Once again physically and verbally abused, my only escape was to go to college.
Going into my freshmen year of college my father decided he wanted me back in his life. He divorced his wife and got a small apartment for us to live. On my first semester break from college, I went home to his apartment to find it abandoned, no note nothing, my dad once again left me and moved in with his new girlfriend. With no where to go, I moved into my car.
When the semester break was over I returned to college and actually became good friends with a girl from my hometown. Telling her my story, her family took me in. I had a loving family again. It was great and awesome until one day I fell in love with that girl. We hid this relationship from her family, and our closest friends for 11 years. We played the straight life in public, but behind closed doors we were in love. Through those closeted 11 years together we went on dates with men to keep rumors of us together at bay.
At the age of 25 I finally saved enough money to buy my first house. My hopes were to have my girlfriend move in with me and actually come out to our friends and family. Like everything else in my life things did not go as planned. We immediately became estranged from my girlfriends family and also mine. It was hell for 2 years for us. I was getting death threats on the regular from her family that I ruined their life and I turned their daughter gay. I was an abomination to society and shouldn’t be loved for what I am. Despite what we were going through we got married in those two years. My wife’s father did not show and her mother the day before decided she would come. My family ended up coming but only a handful and our wedding was mostly celebrated by our friends who supported us.
We bought a house shortly after our wedding and in hopes of starting a family. I am going to fast forward three years and cut out more heartache of miscarriages to current day.
I am 33 now, I have my own family. I am married to the woman I fell in love with 14 years ago. We have a beautiful 16 month old spitfire and one on the way. We have a beautiful home and finally some hope of happiness and peace.I no longer talk to my family for they believe being gay and brining children into this world is cruel. My wife’s family accepts/tolerates us/ me.
I am telling my story to bring hope to those going through dark times and for those who feel alone. We are not alone and we can bring change and we need to bring change. It is important to fight and keep fighting for what we believe in no matter how dark times may get. Fight for yourself and fight for love.
I will end on words that have kept me going “happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn the light on” – Dumbledore

I am a free loving,heart guarded, til the end friend

I knew I always liked woman a woman’s eyes the stories their lips tell I am just in awe of it. I am one of those old fashion people when I am with someone I am with them strong morals. Been through hell but got gonna give her hell life that is I am not ever gonna let my rainbow fade love all