When I was around eleven or twelve I started to question a bit. I was a little surprised to find myself starting to notice girls. I had assumed that I would just be attracted to guys. I am still ten times more likely to be attracted to a guy but I am attracted to both. I was lucky in that I had a grandfather who talked to me about it all.
I see a lot of questioning youth in my job and they occasionally talk to me about it.

I like that happy-ending-ness of your coming out and being with smurf. ^_^ Happy endings FTW!

Do you mean she lives on the street next to you now?! lol. Ironic-ness indeed!

My realization that I was gay didn't start out with questioning, actually. I can remember as far back as grade 1 or 2 (6 of 7 years old) when I had an attraction towards guys. Back then, it wasn't sexual. It was when coodies were a big deal, the girl game was jumpsy, and guys played tag during recess. Back then, I was an incessant daydreamer. I'd spend most of the day thinking about things and a frequent train of thought had to do with guys. Namely, it was about a couple male teachers I had and it was almost like a son-to-father attraction, which I later realized was really just plain, old attraction. XD I'd think about how cool it'd be to have them as a parent or this and that.

It wasn't until grade 4 (10 y/o) that there were male peers that caught my attention. It still wasn't sexual then. I'd just have a hope of playing with them, or talking to them, or just having some sort of contact with them.

In retrospect, one of the primary reasons I was quickly able to accept myself as being gay was because of these memories. Back then, it felt normal and a natural to have these hopes and dreams, these silly vague attractions. I never told anyone, but it was more because these feelings felt normal rather than exceptional that I didn't tell anyone. You don't usually tell people what you think is usual and uninteresting, and these were just that.

It was grade 5 that I started hearing sexual references. It wasn't until grade 6 or 7 that I started to piece things together. There's was a thing called a faggot and a quality called "being gay" and they were negative in the vulgar context that schoolmates would use them in.

The identity crisis really came around grade 7/8 when I finally connected my attraction to guys, which was full-blown and sexual and everything, to this thing of homosexuality. Before then, the attraction had no label, no grouping, no restrictions. It was my personal dream that I'd visit during the day, thinking about how nice it'd be snuggle with or play with a particular him.

I don't remember how long the identity crisis lasted. I wouldn't even call it a crisis, as it wasn't some overwhelming event of confusion. It was more like a "hmm.." moment, later followed by an "oh, I see" moment when I became alright with who I was. The crisis didn't have too much of an impact, because I was already comfortable with liking guys then. The problem was in reconciling my attraction with what seemed to be a systemic hatred towards such a quality.

Still, long before I could admit to myself that I was gay, my body was already doing it for me. It was well into high school when I finally felt comfortable knowing I was homosexual. In retrospect, I may have always been comfortable with the concept. The hang-up was with the labels and the negative associations such labels had.

After all, porn basically irrefutably confirmed my attraction towards guys. And then there was this guy in high school. XD (There's always a person, eh?) There was a lot of daydreaming and hoping and wishing and such. He actually inspired some of my greater written pieces in high school. In retrospect, the whole experience can be wrapped up as intense adolescent infatuation. In the end, what I liked about him became really a mental image of what I would like an attractive guy to be like, and he became the person and object I aimed those hopes and dreams at.

There were no interesting scenes with him. He never found out much about me. I was too shy to even be friends with him, but he was a nice guy. Really smart. But there was not substance to my infatuation, so after high school, it faded away.

Meeting alphy online in grade 12 definitely helped. XD By the time I met alphy, I was pretty settled in being attracted to guys.

Hmm, I feel like my story is so short in comparison to the last post. =P Hmm, I remember not really noticing a shift until high school. I guess that's when I really started to notice others in any way other than as a friend. Maybe I was just really naive? haha. It was in those high school years that I began to notice signs, but it wasn't until my freshman year in university that i was able to make any real progress in finding my identity.

Only after moving away to university was I able to deal with these feelings. It was then that I was finally able to accept that I was one of these "gays" lol. Fortunately, I had a few online people that helped me through the transition. I'm really thankful for that. So yeah, coming out to myself took until my freshman year of university, and by the time I finished my BA, all of my friends knew!

The End....for now...muah... 

I like the ending to LG's story. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy and not bigfoot fuzzy either. 

So yeah for me it was a rather smooth self-realization. Cause at the end of 8th grade, I thought I liked this girl, but I wasn't quite sure cause I was digging on this one guy and like yeah. She was my friend, and I just thought they were you know regular friend feelings.

Fast forward to freshman year of high school, I've got a full blown crush on my friend, and yeah that ended tragically. But like in that coming out period, I came out as bi, and then decided "I have found the promised land and boys are stupid." So I told all my friends and they were so cool about, and I really wigged out on that cause coming from middle of nowhere VA, you're bound to think they'd disown me and tell everyone.  

So all in all it was a fairly easy self-realization process, and after a few not successful relationships, I'm with someone who's everything to me. But a word to the wise, while in the questioning phase be careful with your feelings, because it's devastaing to get your hearbroken and at the same time have no one to talk to it about because you don't know what you are, and you're not out, and no one else knows. It's a real depressing thing...so be careful

-DJ

  hmm, i think i started questioning myself in about seventh grade, when all my friends kept bugging the crap out of me to tell them who i liked, when i really didn't know. middle school seems to be when most people start becoming aware of liking people in somewhat of a sexual way, and i wasn't noticing the boys in that way. it didn't seem all that weird to me because i had always been the tough tomboy chick that wore guys clothes and could beat the boys at just about anything. when i really started to look at people in a more than just friends kinda way, i got this huge crush on my friend liz that i played volleyball and softball with. of course i never told anyone because i was supposed to be the "good little mormon girl". then we moved to idaho for a while, and i had A LOT of time to myself to think about things, and boredom and curiosity brought me to find OM, which helped me figure out who i was and all that good stuff. so when i moved back i started hanging out with different people,and i started really accepting the whole "gay" thing my freshman year. 

since then i've had a couple of relationships, and i've been pretty content with my life so far since i've been out.

I started questioning after one of my friends came out of the closet as a lesbian.
I was SO sheltered that I didn't even know what gay was, or if it was bad or good. it wasn't spoken of in my home.
I came home and asked what a lesbian was and my mom told me not to talk about it and that lesbians and gays were disgusting, etc. I was crushed because I didn't find my friend disgusting at all for liking girls, because deep down inside I liked them also.
I slowly started developing a crush on said friend.... and for a while it was great and I kept myself a secret still because I was scared but I could tell she knew I was gay because we'd always flirt with each other... by the time I finally told her I was gay she had a girlfriend and yeah that was the end of that.... we're still friends, kinda...
I have fallen for girls, but I've never been in a relationship with one yet :(

I'm a little surprised all our realizations have been relatively smooth. I mean, there were bumps - even big bumps, but it doesn't sound like anything excessively dire happened when we came out.

I remember being very worried about telling anyone. Sometimes the fear would be so fierce that I fell into that kind of paranoia that the wrong move might "give it away".

It's always interesting to hear about how people came to terms with their sexuality or came out to others. ^^

my story starts when i was like seven years old and i meet this girl named Ashleigh. Most amazin girl i had ever met....we became good friends....at a party one night we were doing the kid things and playin games like truth and dare...spin the bottle and 7 mintes in the closet....well it was my turn i picked Dare and they were tryin to make me turn down something so they were like make out with Ash. i looked at her and she looked back we told them whatever and kissed....that kiss was the most amazing feeling i had at that time but it also took me 3 years to tell her how i felt....with in the three years we kissed a lot but when i told her how i felt about her she told me that she felt the same and we proceded to go out for 3 years untill she died.....


when i came out my mom was like well i already knew that....tell me somethin i dont know.....so yeah when i told my dad he told me it was a phase.....yeah sorry daddy still like this.....so ha!


thats my story

Well, my generastion had a lot of horror stories for coming out and I was one of the lucky few. I've seen some pretty bad situations but over the last couple of decades I've watched the percentage of horror stories go down and the nice stories go up. That give me a lot of hope. In my adoptive family I have one sibling who is still in the closet and who is about to be 50 years old. When I was a teenager what would happen to my friends was often hideous, now I work with a lot of teens who have a much better time with it.
But the fear is always there. Even my own son was afraid that some of our family wouldn'ty be able to accept him. And he has me and an older sister who actually founded the GSA in our town school. But the fear was there and some of his friends actually contributed to that fear. When an internet troll went after him I had to tell him that I knew and he was very affraid as i tod him what was happening. He saw how angry I was and had a moment of irrational terror that I was angry at him.  He had to sit down and calm down and he realized that I was so angry at the troll who tried to hurt my kid.
I think about it now and It still pisses me off. I did track down the fundies who were doing it and messed up their operations on a couple of youth lists where they were trolling for kids. The idea that someone contcted me to let me know that my teenage son was gay and that he could be cured sent me through the roof at them. But I wonder how many kids who have only started coming out have been outed to their parents by these nasties.
Imagine that you are questioning or just starting to come out and some nutcase contacts your parents and then offers to help them with a program to cure you. Ultimately trying to hunt these nutballs down was how I ended up on OM in the first place. (BTW OM was one of the youth sites that they had not been trolling) And that is why I bitch so much when I see someone being careless with personal info.
When a person is questioning they need room to think and move with no pressure to conform or confirm to any particular ideal another may have. When a person has started coming out he or she needs a lopt of room to do it as is most comfortable.

Sorry to hear that Sambone. I never really know how to deal with hearing about a death. I've been lucky to not have gone through the experience of someone close to me passing away.

I've been thinking a lot about how to communicate Internet safety to OM folks here. We're still relatively small, but safety notices is definitely something imperative to have in a place like OM.

I'll have to talk to alphy more about the public/private status of various pages here and how to get the message across about safety.

Personally identifiable information should never be posted openly on this forum as it's accessible by all members and our membership only requires a working email address. There's some more subtle safety advice, like not using your usual nickname if you're not out to everyone yet. Or not posting your photo (or just blurry out identifiable parts of the photo).

Safety's certainly a big concern for open Internet communities like this, but it's comforting to know that it's increasingly safer for people to question and learn about their sexuality.

for me it was weird. I had my first huge girl crush when I was like four... this beautiful teenager that lived down the street named kelly rose... god I loved her. after that I was just like, GIRLS! I don't know how I didn't realize it till I was like twelve, and my friend told me, Jasmine, I'm Bi. what about you? I was all, Me too..
I have no idea how it didn't hit me sooner. It was like the next day I realized I was in love with my best friend, and I thought about all my past girl crushes. It was only so obvious.