“Lesbian”

My classmates erupted with laughter after hearing the grade’s cool girl say this word. Piqued by curiosity, I drew closer to the group. Whatever the meaning of this word was, it must be pretty funny.

“Lesbian”

My classmates erupted into laughter again, even harder this time.

“Lesbian”

My classmates fell into hysterics. I laughed along, too, influenced by crowd psychology despite lacking a concrete reason to laugh. After the exchange, I asked the cool girl what that funny word meant. “You mean lesbian? It's when two girls like each other like a boy and a girl do.” The final piece of an unfinished puzzle fell into place, and I soon realized that I was gay.

My awakening wasn’t very momentous; it was simply something I came to know after recognizing that being gay was a possibility. That summer, the summer after 4th grade, I decided to come out to a close friend of mine at a sleepover. "Oh...That’s cool," she replied, her reservations unbeknownst to me. After chatting for a few more minutes, we decided to go to sleep and say goodnight. A few hours later, I woke up and realized that she was no longer asleep next to me. I sat up from the bed and glanced around the room for a little bit before falling back asleep, assuming she had gone to the bathroom. It wasn’t until four years later that she told me that she "felt weird sleeping in the same bed as a gay person" and had slept on the floor instead.

Though I accepted my queerness without hesitation, when I returned to my small Catholic school, it became clear to me that the people around me did not hold the same perspective. One instance that stood out to me was when I came out to some of my other friends at a group hangout. Taking a second to register what I just said, their facial expressions morphed into looks of distaste, and they backed several steps away from me. "You don’t have a crush on us, right?" one of them asked, not masking her disgust. I suddenly felt self- conscious, and my insides formed a million little knots. I swiftly took back my words, explaining to them that I was probably just confused. "Thank God. You really had me worried," one friend muttered. Another noteworthy occasion occurred while talking about my sexuality with one of my friends at the lockers. "What did you just say?" a voice from behind me interjected. I turned around to see a group of three boys standing directly behind me. Unsure of how to respond, I told them that I was gay, and their faces contorted to the same mixture of disgust and apprehension that I had seen earlier with my friend group. "Ummm okay... How are you gay if you’re only in 5th grade?" one asked. "That’s kind of gross," another remarked. The third replied, "I’m not really into that." I stood there with a lost expression on my face, again unsure of how I should answer. I opened my mouth to say something but was cut off by the teacher calling everyone back into the classroom. For the rest of the school day, all I thought about was how I should have kept my orientation a secret.

Though I didn’t think much of these experiences at the time, they were my first lessons on how the world saw my sexuality. It wasn’t so much a feeling of rejection as I hadn’t yet taken on queerness as a part of my identity. Rather, it was similar to telling a joke that nobody laughed at and taking a mental note not to tell jokes like that again. I began to act as if the whole "gay phase" had been a joke, and my new label as the class "lesbo" was forgotten by most.

Being closeted opened my eyes to the possibility that my sexuality may never be accepted. I began to fear that queerness designated me to a life of secret-keeping and that I would never be able to come out without disapproval. I felt that it isolated me from other people, and I almost felt guilty that it was a part of me. I decided it would be better if my queerness did not exist at all. By the end of 5th grade, I had shifted from merely concealing my gayness to denying that it existed. I took countless online "Am I Gay?" quizzes and retook them when I didn’t get the answers I wanted. I stayed silent at homophobic comments because only a gay person would be offended. When watching TV shows, I picked out the most conventionally attractive man and convinced myself that I found him attractive. I eventually took this further by "choosing" boys in my class to have crushes on, even though I felt largely indifferent towards them.

As I progressed into middle school, my school’s homophobic culture further reinforced that queerness was unwelcome. Phrases such as "that’s so gay" and "ew, she’s so lesbian" were synonymous with "weirdness" and further solidified that queerness was not meant to be shared with the world. Some of my classmates, including those I was close with, even championed the saying, "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."

I came to learn that the majority of my tight-knit extended family also held homophonic sentiments, as they believed queerness was weird, something to make fun of, and intrinsically disordered. The "funny uncle'' made one too many jokes about the "girls who liked to kiss each other." The cousins gossiped about the weird gay kids in their classes, who they were afraid might have crushes on them (solely on the basis that they were gay). The older members of the family even explicitly told my siblings (one of whom is, ironically, also queer) and I that if any of us were gay, they would not attend the wedding.

The times I came close to accepting my identity, I was met with the anti-gay rhetoric of the faith I had grown up with — the gays would burn in Hell. Numerous articles and preachers proclaimed that there was no way for “the homosexuals” to be saved from hellfire and deemed them as Sodomites, sexual perverts, pedophiles, and an abomination to the Lord. Others preached the milder but ultimately still harmful rhetoric "Love the Sinner, Hate the SinTM." Though I found some articles about a loving God who accepted people of all identities, slews of comments denounced their authors and all those who believed in their rhetoric as "false prophets." Many even sent warnings of the wrath of God that would await them in hell. To prepare myself for a fate of fire and brimstone, I spent hours searching the internet for everything humans knew about hell and stumbled upon sketchy websites with information like a woman who claimed that she saw Micheal Jackson in Hell and YouTube videos with "REAL AUDIO TAKEN FROM HELL.” I begged God to treat me with His compassion — the compassion that some conservative Christians seemed to forget about when addressing the issue of gay rights.

One of the most defining aspects of my experience in the closet was the pervasive fear of being "caught." One occasion that was particularly jarring occurred at the 8th-grade lunch tables during a conversation about which classmates were most likely to be gay. "Moira is definitely lesbian. She’s so weird!" one of the girls exclaimed. "Drew is probably gay, too. He’s in Choir!" another girl added. A friend of mine (the one who I had come out to at the sleepover in the summer before 5th grade) decided to join the conversation and chimed in with, "Alina told me she was gay." Stunned at what I had heard, my throat closed, and I felt my nails create tiny crescent-shaped indents on my palms. I tried to suppress the heat that was beginning to rise to my face and did my best to keep a composed expression on my face. The surrounding chatter faded, and the girls began to look at me, awaiting a response. I reassured them that what I had told my friend had been a joke, albeit one I had made the summer before 5th grade. Watching the expressions of my friends carefully, I noticed that they looked at me with uncertainty. I suppressed the rising lump in my throat and continued to do my best to emulate the look of an innocent person. My eyes locked with my best friend, and in an instant, she interjected, "Oh yeah! She DID say that in 5th grade.” My case was put to rest. All of the muscles in my body relaxed at once, and I gave my friend a look of gratitude.

Later that year, I finally decided to come out to my best friend. Over the years, we had told each other almost everything (except that I was gay, of course): both trivial details and "big secrets." I felt as if a mutual acceptance of the authentic parts of ourselves existed within our friendship. Though I still wasn’t certain of her stance on gay people, I was optimistic that she would understand. To add, at that point in time, I was able to confront my queerness to a greater extent than I had been able to previously. Living a lie grew more suffocating day by day; I wanted nothing more than to kick the closet door into a million little wooden shreds. I was gay, and nothing I could do would change that.

"That’s cool," she responded.

I was appalled. Why was she so nonchalant? Didn’t this make me weird, perverse, and someone who should be an outcast? For the first time, I felt as if at least one person wouldn’t distance themself if they knew who I really was. For the first time, I felt as if my sexuality could be treated as normal. For the first time, I felt as if queerness did not diminish my worth as a person.

Shortly after my first successful coming-out, the COVID-19 outbreak cut my 8th grade (and thus middle school) career short, and I was finally released from the environment that kept the pillars of my internalized homophobia intact. A few months of at-home learning helped me to uncover that the majority of the "confusion" I spent years grappling with was actually the anti-gay sentiment of the people surrounding me. In fact, it wasn’t until I wrote this piece that I fully realized how much it had clouded my perspective. I finally embraced queerness in my identity because I wanted to protect and nurture the aspect of myself that had been damaged. I soon became comfortable enough to come out to more of my close friends and family members, and though some did not accept me, I now felt as if I was more equipped to deal with homophobia.

By far, the most important person I came out to was my mom. She had never indicated holding homophobic beliefs and is a kind and accepting person. I found it difficult to believe she would ever say anything to hurt me. However, there was still the very real fear that she would be disappointed that I was not the child she wanted. I decided I wanted to tell her when we were on our way to pick up tacos for dinner. The whole way there, I stayed silent, ruminating over the ways I would tell her and the ways she could react. I paced as I waited for the tacos, and my legs shook as I walked back to the car. For a while, we resumed driving in silence, my throat clenched shut from nervousness. Finally, I said, "I’m gay. Is that okay?" She paused for a second and said, "Of course, honey. You know I’ll love you no matter what."