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For years i tried to hide it as i was attracted to both men and women, i came out as lesbian at 17 as thats what i guess i thought i was as no talk or bi sexual or queer, i then wasnt happy so started dated guys, then Got very confused for years , im now finally ok with just being sarah at the age of 33 and loving Just humans, im still getting called a lesbian but hey ho.
I can’t wait until we’re living in a world where it is safe for everyone to be who they truly are without fear of judgment or persecution. I was raised by two loving but homophobic parents; so while they’ve made me feel like I could be myself in most regards, there’s one place they’ve made me feel like I have to continue living a lie. But even if I have to stay closeted in my everyday life for the time being, I don’t wish to stay fully closeted anymore.
I am a bisexual woman; and honestly, I’m proud of that.
When I was in high school, I started questioning my sexuality. I found myself starting to feel attracted to girls at my school and not just guys. But because of the home I was raised in, I did everything in my power to push such feelings aside, telling myself they didn’t mean anything. I refused to acknowledge them. And eventually, I was able to convince myself they never existed in the first place… Fastforward to college; and the feelings came back again, this time stronger. I found myself attracted to other women; and I knew it was something I couldn’t fully deny. I think deep down I admitted to myself that I wasn’t entirely straight; but I wasn’t ready to admit what that meant.
Over the past year or so, I started discovering myself more and more. It actually started when a friend suggested I check out this show called Wynonna Earp. This friend knew I preferred supernatural sorts of shows with powerful female leads (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost Girl, etc.); so of course I was fully on board with checking out this show. Little did I know, it would change my life for the better. Becoming an Earper, I now found myself part of one of the most accepting and supportive fandoms I’ve ever been a part of. Between that and being introduced to one of the most kickass casts ever, I started feeling more comfortable in my own skin with everything from my anxiety to my sexuality. Even though I still never admitted anything aloud, I started to feel more and more comfortable admitting to myself that I was, in fact, bisexual.
I hope to one day be able to share this fact with those closest to me, to one day feel as if I am safe enough and truly ready to do so. But for now, having a platform like this to announce who I truly am, it’s a blessing. Thank you to Dominique and everyone at Start the Wave for all the constant love and positivity. It means so much; and I am proud to be part of this community.
And one day, I will be proud to come back on here to say I am 100% out…
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.
I’m fourteen and not fully out to my family. I’m gay and I live in a small town in southern Louisiana where church is everything. There’s not much I can do physically in my community, so I help out through the internet. I use the internet to educate myself and learn strategies to fight against prejudice and cruelty against the community. I love to write so I write stories of inclusion and happy endings for LGBTQ+ people especially when I enter writing contests. I use my artistic abilities to depict non stereotypical people of the community. I try hard to unify and support others when I come across them on the internet. I support and reach out to other, especially younger, people in the lgbtq+ community. I’ve had several people come out to me because I was the only gay person they knew. I tried my absolute best to reassure and to give hope to them and point them in the right direction. Being that person, the person who others feel comfortable to come to with such an important part of themselves, is one of the highlights of my life. A lot of the time I feel alone, but helping others makes me realize that I don’t want others to feel that way, I want to be the person that changes that for them. I’m proud of the person I am and the people I’m helping others become. The internet can be a scary and cruel place, but I hope to make it a little bit better one step at a time.
I’m currently 28 years old and my journey started in the form of a great internal storm when I was 16 years old, I was studying in a religious school and to be honest Colombia in those years was not a progressive and comfortable environment to talk about issues such as diversity and sexual orientation.
I grew up in a catholic family, my school was catholic, and my training was guided by the principles of a catholic family, so anything that came out of that pattern was labeled taboo or people just made offensive jokes about it. During high school my friends always talked about boys, all my close friends had a boyfriend in the same classroom or in the same school and in the meantime I saw the boys only as friends, the idea of having a boyfriend never crossed my mind, in fact it always seemed irrelevant to me. With the girls it was very different, I felt that “something” that was absent when I saw a boy, but I always kept silent because, due to my ignorance, I thought it was something irrelevant and temporary, perhaps simple admiration.
At university nothing changed, I saw a girl and I still felt the same but this time with a little more freedom to obtain information I was able to find too many articles and LGBT content that helped me to know that something real was happening to me. When I finished university, 6 years had already passed and what started as a storm inside me became an authentic apocalypse, it was many years where the silence had wreaked havoc. What was stopping me? My family. I imagined a situation where I would tell my family and terror would take over because I could hear their voices saying “What have we failed at?”, So to release some of that destructive anxiety I started by telling my closest friends and they gave me that warmth and understanding I needed to keep myself sane at least until I told my family. It took me another year to gather all the strength to tell my family that it only consists of my mother and godmother that I’m a lesbian. The terror I felt when I told them is indescribable, my lips and throat were dry, I could not formulate a coherent phrase and my body was blocked but I could do it and I could feel free, that was…like 4 or 5 years ago I don’t remember well and I still feel that my mother has not assimilated it 100% because she is also the connection with my father’s family and I know that no one in that circle knows it, only my godmother’s family knows it.
I am an only child, perhaps that is why my mother still doesn’t fully assimilate it because she expected from me what almost all parents expect from their children: husband/wife and children but it doesn’t matter because my mother already knows and she will not see me with masks and lying to her, she will understand it 100% someday. Right now I’m calm, there are not storms inside me anymore.
I live in Poland – country where we have „LGBT free zones” in over 100 regions/cities/counties (almost 60 of them enacted „resolutions against LGBT ideology”), where president said „LGBT are not people, it is an ideolgy”, where important people from catholic church said (after Pride Parade) that people have to clean up the streets after rainbow plague, where some politician said that LGBT are not like normal people, where children’s ombudsman said that sex educators give children at schools “gender-changing” pills.
So it is not verry happy place to live.
If I was a teenager nowadays I would know I’m gay somewhere between 12 and 14. But I was a teenager in late ’90s and I didn’t know that being gay even exists. It was 2009 when I saw gay women on TV (or in the Internet to be specific) for the first time in Grey’s Anatomy. At that time I was 23 and in collage. Shortly after that I found The L Word and was like “oooh, this is a real thing”. I was in a long distance relationship with a man and was going to move with him to the big city. I was dreaming Jenny’s story was mine – I’ll move and I’ll meet a girl of my life. Reality was I moved and didn’t met any girl. I had a hard time accepting my sexuality. I still was in a relationship. I had severe depression. I went through different stages – “I have to stay with this guy because it is not normal to be with a woman”,“I can’t be with him but I will be alone for the rest of my life”, “I don’t want to be with him, but I don’t want to be alone eighter”. And finally my minds reached the point where I was thinking “you can’t be with him because it is unfair to him and to you, I don’t know what is waitng for you around the corner but you will be okay”.
We broke up and I moved back to my hometown.
It was 2012, I was 26 and feeling completely lost in life. I moved back with my family and started a new job.
Same year I came out to my best friend. Or I was forced to come out to her. She had some doubts, she tought she is “not safe” with me and I had to answer like a billion questions. But she came around very quickly. A month later I decided to come out to my other best friend and she was wonderful.
Today I’m 35. Unfortunately I still live with my family. And my family is conservative, catholic, huge supporter of polish government and homophobic. My mother uses the F word referring to gay guys (she doesn’t know any bad words for lesbians).
For years I was school psychologist and now I’m a vice principal in public high school. Our school is great. We have a lot of LGBTQ+ students. There are more and more every year because the word that we have very supportive environment is spreading. We always react if they are bullied (but those situation are very very rare). LGBTQ+ students are safe in our school, they can be out, they can hold hands in the hallways, they can go to the prom with their partners, they are stars in school theater and choir, we had outed gay student as the student body president. Unfortunately all those situations are not very common in polish public education system.
I always wanted to be the kind of teacher I was looking for as a teenager – kind, supportive, not being right all the time, respectful, ready to listen and not judge. For obvious reasons a have a soft spot for LGBTQ+ students. Since I’m not out and can’t lead by example I consider my support for them as my contribution to LGBTQ+ community.
I know I still am on a journey. I’m out to my little world but I’m not ready to come out to the big world out there. I don’t think I would ever be. I’m afraid of losing my job (because of the system not the people in my workplace) and roof over my head.
I don’t get support from my family but I’m lucky because there are some amazing people around me. They are my chosen family. I feel safe around them and celebrated by them and they love me. The real me. And I love them back 🙂
P.S. Dear beautiful people please remember if your family doesn’t choose to support you, you can choose your own family.
P.S.2 I was writing my rainbow wave for a few days now reading it over and over again. It is the first time I’ve seen how far I got and honestly I feel weirdly hopeful (it is not the feeling that I’m used to).
I think I’ve always known I preferred girls to boys from a very young age, but didn’t know I was gay until October of 2019 (I’m 16 btw) when I was around 10 I remember seeing a girl in my school who was a few years older than me and thinking “wow her boyfriend is lucky” that’s the earliest memory I have of that. Except for the obvious early signs of always wanting to be the boy when my friends and I played games, and obsessing over girl bands. When I was 12/13 I became infatuated with female celebrities, at the time I thought I just wanted to be them, but of course then I began to imagine myself being with them. But I just thought I felt that way because they were just ‘celebrity crushes’ that everyone had. I never really had any crushes on boys, but I’d pretend I did just to fit in. I’ve never kissed anyone because well I knew if I did it would have to be a boy since well no one knows I’m gay.
Now here’s the good part. I never realized that I was gay because like I said I only had crushes on celebrities…until October 2019 when I began to crush on a girl in my class. I still remember the exact moment, I had made some joke with her in class and she started to laugh, and her smile was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I got an odd feeling in my stomach and my chest felt fluttery and I just froze. “You like her” kept repeating in my head. I went home that night and just sobbed (and I usually don’t cry) because I had realized that I was gay and didn’t want to accept it. It was so overwhelming. Well obviously a few months have passed now and I’ve tried to suppress my feelings for her (which have increased massively) but that hasn’t worked. So here I am, a 16 year old closeted gay, in love with her friend :/ yes no one knows I’m gay and I don’t know when I plan to come out. I’m really scared to but it’s people like Dom who make me feel less scared!! She has helped me massively, along with Kat and many other women. Watching them on Wynonna Earp and how normalized their relationship is really makes me feel at ease with myself, and in a sense makes me feel safe. Watching Dom, and especially reading her story makes me feel that little bit more comfortable with my TRUE self. And I’m so so thankful for that, so that’s my story I guess 🙂
My whole life, i Love girls but i didnt know that. I denied. I dont being happy, all the time i was bullied and i just on my 18th birthday i kiss for a girl and this show me my truly inside. Today i’m free and happy with so many lgbtqa+ representacions and so proud about me, today i love Who i’m. (Sorry about my terrible inglesh) love and thanks.
Hello !!!!! I’m not one for labels , but what is fitting is transgender bisexual. I had my bisexual realization early on, I was in kindergarden and kissed a girl on the playground. My transgender one, however , came later in my life, around the time of middle school. I wasn’t feeling comfortable in my body, around my friends and family, or even whenever no one was around. I wasn’t happy anymore. I looked in the mirror, closed my eyes, and asked myself what would make me happy. I saw myself as a boy. And that surprised me. I talked to a friend, and they told me about the term transgender. That is when I figured out who I was.
Now I didn’t really have the chance to come out much. I only came out to a few people, but then the news spread like wildfire. My friends at my school were all accepting of me, some of them wished I told them myself, others were glad they new. But then it got to my parents, and they didn’t accept me at all. It was rough. Everyday I would cry just wanting my home life to be better. I almost took my own life. But then I found a “secret gay club” at my school. A bunch of lgbtq+ people came together after school on Friday’s to talk about their problems their stories and even just how they were feeling that day. I found a home there (even though I only went to about 3 meetings). They helped me learn to accept myself for who I am, labels or not.
Now it has been about 3 years since I have come out. Things have gone up and down but are gradually getting better. I have had a few people who have supported me throughout, and I couldn’t be more grateful. My home life is slowly but surely getting better, and even if it doesn’t I still have a few people who love me for who I am.
For anyone struggling to figure out who they are, finding what labels works for them, or are struggling with acceptance from themselves or others, THINGS GET BETTER !!! I PROMISE THEY DO !!! You have your whole life to figure out who you are. You don’t have to have a label if you don’t want to, you can just be you. Overtime, you will find acceptance. Whether it’s through someone you meet, people warming up to the idea of who you are, or even through sites like this, there will always be a community that will accept you. You just have to breathe, give it time, and never give up on yourself.
Hi, I’m Helen and I knew I liked girls to a different level probably in my 7th grade. I knew something was off and fell in love with one of my close friends during high school. At the time I didn’t know the word lesbian (I’m from Cambodia and only knew the word ‘gay’ which I thought can only be use for boys who love boys). So during college I met with my first girlfriend, we met through Facebook. We were together for two years then I broke up with her because I was too scared to get caught and also my parents at the time was forcing me to get married to a guy and I was fucked up inside the head. And I gave in to my parents and agreed to get married at the age of 25. I wasn’t happy, not at all. I lived my life in pretending to be happy. Then I got pregnant and gave birth to a beautiful boy. I got divorced when my son turned 3. I couldn’t stand living with a man anymore. My parents didn’t say anything to me but they are embarrassed that I became a widow. Through all these years I still don’t have the courage to come out. I’m now 28 years old and still living in fear of rejection and judgment from my family if they found out that I’m a lesbian. I don’t know if I will ever be brave to come out. I don’t think I can have a happy ending in this life. This is my story.
