I grew up without much concept of queerness being real, and as a result, not much of a concept of myself being real. It’s difficult to capture the corporeal dissonance of living for a long time by default as a cis straight girl without knowing I was real. I remember getting dressed and feeling like a doll in an awful way––like anything I wore was involuntary drag. And I remember getting into relationships with all the right ingredients that would never come out right. Things felt jangly inside me. I remember the words always falling short of the feeling.
When I first started realizing I was queer, I felt like I needed to prove it to myself with empirical data before I confided in anyone about it. I pieced together a jagged timeline of gay moments in my formative years and let them soak into my consciousness. My first kiss with a girl at the Greek Festival in middle school; biking to the park to meet my girlfriend who lived in the next town over; past crushes on friends that went beyond “girl crush” vibes. I somehow buried all of this stuff and let myself forget any of it ever happened. Any part of me that knew I was gay before had been doing a lot of work to suppress and deny it.
I was on a break with an on and off boyfriend who I thought I might marry (lol) when I went on my first actual date with a girl, a Tinder match who’d been DMing me for weeks. We had drinks in the back of a Williamsburg bar on a snowy night. I remember hazily deducing while she was in the bathroom that we’d just be friends, and then I remember her kissing me goodbye at the L train and kind of instantly realizing it was different.
“The cultural concept of “coming out” to me implies this idea that you knew all along and you were waiting for the courage to explain. But I don’t think that’s how it works most of the time.”
And on my walk home I started feeling how “I think I’m gay,” felt in my mouth. Looking back, I think I came out to my roommate first, right after that date. Sitting in his bed while he smoked weed and watched the Knicks. “Dude, I think I’m gay.” He responded, “That’s hot.” I almost wish that’s when the switch flipped and I just let the feeling take me, and that was the happy end. But the universe had much messier plans for me. I would go on to reconcile and go to Paris with my boyfriend before reaching out to that girl again. And then on a separate trip to visit a friend a few months later I’d realize, yet again, in a gay bar in Madrid, that I was probably actually… you guessed it… gay!
It took so much time for the truth to settle into my body and for me to stop fighting it. For me, it wasn’t a secret I was keeping from others, it was a home I had to find my way back to. And it finally began to click why I so vividly remembered kissing a girl under a green strobe light on a crowded dance floor years prior. And why people passed my best friend and I notes in our elementary school cafeteria with “your gay” scrawled on them in marker. And why my boyfriends and I would consistently fall into essentially platonic best friendship till we eventually accepted the obvious and broke up. And why I would make out with my high school best friend all the time.
The cultural concept of “coming out” to me implies this idea that you knew all along and you were waiting for the courage to explain. But I don’t think that’s how it works most of the time. And I think the idea of one big “coming out” is generally a misnomer––to me it feels like I’m coming out every day, and that the bigger coming out moments matter so much less ultimately than brief flashes of feeling seen.
The real beauty is in those moments where love and connection and my body finally feel real. In the way my first relationship with another trans person gave us both worlds we’ll always get to keep; in the way I could believe in who I was when they looked at me and they could recognize their chosen name when I said it to them. In my mirror image in a candlelit bar bathroom with a flat chest for the first time, on my girlfriend’s recommendation I try out her binder. In shaving a friend’s head in my kitchen.
“I remember her kissing me goodbye at the L train and kind of instantly realizing it was different.”
Of all the things I have now that I openly navigate the world as a non-binary gay person, the story of my coming out is fun, but it’s almost the least interesting to me. I think there’s value in owning the non-linearity of it all. And in giving ourselves compassion for all the wrong turns we took along the way. But the “coming out” portion of my life was kind of where the story just started getting interesting. And on the other side of that chapter, I don’t think I’ll ever really be done coming into myself.
