llleighsmith:

i grew up in the late 90s, early 2000s, i grew up somewhere that considered itself “liberal.” but there weren’t any lesbians. when i was in elementary school we used to wait for the buses in the gymnasium in lines and i remember i was six and i had seen the most beautiful person i had ever seen. it was a girl. she had long brown hair with the sides shaved and she played basketball. i didn’t know what it meant to want to look at her. when i was seven michael cassidy called me a lesbian. i didn’t know what that word meant, but i knew he meant it as an insult. his best friend alex told me that lesbian meant i was disgusting. when i was ten, i overheard my mom talking to my dad about my aunt sally. i loved my aunt sally, she lived in california with her friend pat and they walked dogs together and she called me every week and always sent me a big birthday present. when we talked on the phone she asked me what i dreamt about and what i loved most. my mom told my dad that my aunt sally was a “freak” and a “nutcase” who used to “stalk” women. my aunt sally is a lesbian, pat is her longtime partner. when i got to middle school, i started liking boys because my friends did, the first time i was kissed it was at my friend amanda’s house in the summertime, this kid ryan who later got expelled for bringing a knife to school put his tongue in my mouth and it felt like nothing. i kissed as many boys as i could to try harder to like them, but one year when i was thirteen, we were doing pretty well and we had cable tv, and i found the independent film channel. after everyone had gone to sleep, with the volume turned all the way down, i watched films about lesbians. i was afraid, i knew i would be in trouble if anyone heard me and i kept the remote in my hands with my index finger on the switch channel button just in case anyone woke up. the first film i saw was high art, then the incredible true adventures of two girls in love, then but i’m a cheerleader. i felt something. excited, heart blooming, curious, mesmerized, afraid afraid afraid. i remember adults telling me, if a boy is mean to you that means he likes you, we all remember that one, and i remember looking at how the men / family in my life treated me, my emotionally distant father, who meant well but i don’t think told me he loved me once, my abusive older brother who had sexually abused me when i was a toddler, who had grown up to verbally and physically harass me at every turn, who would later shove me into a wall and crack two of my ribs, even my mother, who is a story all her own, how she would berate me and emotionally manipulate me, choke me, and call it love, to me, abuse was love. abuse meant that i had to work harder love harder to receive love and kindness back. but that’s another story. i was drawn to “damaged” boys, aggressive boys, manipulative boys, boys that said their home lives made them cruel and selfish and i poured myself empty for them. but when i was fourteen i fell in love with a girl. her name was caitlin and we rode the bus together every morning. one day she came and sat next to me and without saying a word she handed me half of her headphones and we listened to music together the whole half hour ride to school. every morning after that she would sit next to me and we would switch off showing each other music. my skin was on fire sitting so close to her, a bed of nerves and honey and her hand was resting on the space between us, so i put mine next to hers and she didn’t move away and our skin was touching. a week later i let my pinky lace with hers and she didn’t move away. a week later she kissed me and i kissed her back. the next day she didn’t sit next to me. i told a friend we had in common about it and our friend told her what i said and she told them i was “lying” and a “freak” who was “obsessed” with her. i learned that to like girls was to be an outcast, to be unnatural, a sex obsessed freak. even as i looked on at the boys who would tease and touch and berate girls without their permission, as i watched my classmates and myself sexually harassed by the boys at school, one mutual kiss meant i was a pervert. so i didn’t look at girls at all. i dated boys, especially abusive ones, at the time my previously unaffiliated parents had become born again christians and i learned about atonement and punishment, and subconsciously, these boys were the punishment i had given myself. i saw all my friends crying over boys who hurt them and i wanted to be “normal” so badly. everyone in my high school thought my best friend and i were lesbians together and i had to prove them wrong. truthfully i loved her more than anyone, but never in a romantic way, she was a sister to me, but i had to burn that label that was haunting me. so i let boys burn me. i joined GSA though, and i learned it was okay to support gay people, especially the five out gay boys at my school, as long as you weren’t gay yourself. my friends and i went to the county wide gay prom and so many girls hit on my best friend and i remember thinking “she’s not even gay!” and then thinking, smaller, quieter, unsure, “neither are you.” when i was seventeen, i met a girl like me. she used to go to the same high school as me, and she was in her first year of college. she came back for a day and was visiting old teachers, but she was famous in my school. her name was louisa. louisa was a lesbian. everyone knew this because she and another girl dated all four years of high school and sometimes they would walk down the hallways holding hands. everyone would whisper about how they were freaks, spreading rumors about their sex life and how wild it was. she came into my latin class and i felt a light in my heart. i found her on facebook and i started talking to her, i had so many questions, i wasn’t in love with her, but i wanted to be her. she was in college and she was free. she was gay without hesitation and that terrified me because i could not imagine being that comfortable. a summer passed and i went to college. my first week at school i met my first girlfriend. we became fast friends, because she was so funny and cool and beautiful, she was just so easy to be around. one night we were hanging out and we were talking about how her best friend was a lesbian and we joked about how everyone at our school thought we were both lesbians and how god it was so untrue we both liked guys okay. a week later it was my eighteenth birthday and she bought me a bottle of wine. we were drinking it with friends in her dorm room and we all went outside to smoke cigarettes and i asked her for a birthday kiss, and then she gave me another one, and several more throughout the night, i slept in her bed because i was too drunk to walk back to my dorm. then she asked me out on a date. and soon we were kissing all the time, we were taking photobooth pictures together of us kissing, she called me over and in her hands was a mini cheesecake with “will you be my girlfriend?” written in frosting on top and she became my first girlfriend. she taught me how to have sex with a girl, we were clumsy and crazy about each other, sleeping over at each other’s places every night, going home to her parents house and secretly kissing each other and when her dad knocked on her bedroom door i’d be terrified and she’d laugh and say he thinks we’re just two friends laughing about boys, holding hands on campus, laying on her heartbeat watching movies, she held my hand through my first tattoo, we got lip piercings together. i fell in love with her but i wasn’t ready, too much of me was trained to believe that love was heart smashing and draining, that to be straight was to be safe, and i broke her heart. i broke up with her but we’d keep colliding into one another and she didn’t deserve the way i was too afraid to choose her. i spent the next two years dating men and timidly holding onto a label “bisexual” and every boy i dated laughed at how i “experimented” with girls, but i didn’t experiment, i loved them, i loved her. when i was 21, my last relationship i would ever have with a guy again, ended. he is a good person, and a wonderful friend, but i was exhausted. my lying and hiding had caught up with me. i was tired of spending half a lifetime having sex that i hated, carrying the emotional weight of every “love” relationship, i had finally drained my energy, i was finally realizing how afraid i really always was, and how much it was killing me. i fell in love with my best friend, and she didn’t love me, but i knew finally knew out loud what i had known all along, i was gay. the first person i told was a lesbian too, and she told me i couldn’t be a lesbian because i had dated so many boys. but i was determined, i told more friends. i slowly shed the skin i had grown in a lifetime of hiding, i started dressing how i always wanted to but was afraid of because i thought it would make me look too gay, i stopped wearing dresses (not that you can’t be gay and wear dresses, but i was wearing them when they made me uncomfortable because i was masking myself), i shaved my head for the first time, i started using my middle name as my first name and shed a lifetime of familial abuse and unfamiliarity with my old frightened life, and i was reborn. i am leigh and i am a lesbian. i am turning 25 next month so i have openly been living as a lesbian for four years now. i just want you to know, however young you are, however old, you are never too young, never too old, to realize you are gay. if it’s not safe for you to come out, if you don’t want to come out, if you have to keep dating men for safety reasons or any reason, if you are uncertain, if you are the only lesbian you know, if you are not ready to face yourself, you are not a freak. you are not disgusting. you are not abnormal. you are real. you are valid. you are brave. you are loved. only you know who you are in your heart. if you know you are a lesbian, then you are one. people will try and tear away at you for every reason you can think of, but that burst in your chest, that glow in your heart, that is you, and you will come to know yourself and your path and that is enough. if you ever want to seek solace in community, lesbians are here. we are real and we are here and we are loving and we may be safe in loving and uplifting one another, in listening to one another’s stories, in holding each other close by weaving nets of connectivity. what you feel is real.