My story

I'm a fan of this page on Facebook called Love is Love. The more I read the posts on this page, the more I am educated. And the more I think even we, the people who have the most reason to be against prejudice, still have it. We want everyone, or at least everyone within a group, to be like us.
If I'm understanding the book I'm reading rightly, this isn't our fault. In literature, it's called postmodernism. The evil of our time is prejudice, but it's very difficult to be free of it in all forms. I have only met one person who I felt was completely free of it, and she happens to be the girl I'm in love with.
Many GLBT people complain about how everyone tells them it's a choice. But others have more interesting stories to tell. One believes he did choose to be straight. Another tells how he grew up feeling straight, and over the next several years simply started losing interest in the opposite sex.
Even in our community, people are different. So I thought I'd offer my view.
One person says that the majority of people are bisexual to one degree or another. I'd agree with this in terms of myself. I'm not going to say I've never looked at a guy and wanted to kiss him. I have. It's just never been to the forget-how-to-breathe intensity I've gotten with more than one girl, none of whom have ever been interested in me. I've never wanted a guy to anywhere near the extent I've wanted a girl. That's not to say I'd be completely repulsed by kissing a boy, or further. It's not to say that it's completely impossible that some day I'd find the 'right guy'. It's just really very unlikely. Not living in a community where no one would bat an eye no matter who I dated, or make assumptions about who I wanted to date, saying, "I'm gay" is the clearest way to explain to my friends that the likelihood of finding a man who was all that to me is so low that I'm not looking for it. If it finds me, great. But there are girls who I like now, girls who I could be happy with, girls who take my breath away. So that's where I'm looking. That's where I probably always will look. 'Cause I sit next to a sleeping girl in the car, and spend what feels like hours just concentrating on keeping my hands off her. I spend time with my first love, and find myself experiencing something similar to a two-hour adrenaline rush. I look at the girl of my dreams, and I want nothing more than to take her face in my hands and kiss her. But with a guy? Even the ones I crushed on didn't turn me on like that.
I'll call my first love Audacia. Because she is audacious. She is my wild child. When I was ten years old, I fell in love with her. I asked her to marry me, without blinking an eye. She loved me so much, as a friend, that she said yes, and we went through with it. I touch her and I feel an extension of my soul in her. We are the same person, two halves of one whole. I still see her, and I still want her, and part of me still loves her and always will.
Then I fell in love with the girl I'll call Allegra. Not the medication, the happy one, from allegre, from Maggie Grace's character in The Jane Austin Book Club. I came out to her yesterday, and she told me that although she's straight, she doesn't plan to stop hanging out with me. I fell in love with her three years ago, the nineteenth of April, at my birthday party. I've been spending the better part of that time going through a cycle something like this: try to get over her, almost get there, get so close, see her again, and fall right back to square one. I was raised to think for myself, and I try to. I question everything. Yes, my sexual orientation. Also my faith. My sanity. Whether it wouldn't be better if we just let humans kill each other off so that the world could reassert itself. I can think of nothing (except the realms of the absurd, such as penguins ruling the world) that I haven't questioned. But most of all my faith. Occasionally it falls out from under me, like losing the floor beneath my feet. And when that happens, I take a deep breath, and start over, beginning with my Allegra. Her I am sure of. She may not be everything to me, but she's right up there with food. I don't need her to be my girlfriend. I just need her to exist. There's one memory I have, and maybe I was just a fanciful kid, but this is how it seemed to me. I was lying on my bed, and I felt my love for her drain out of me. And I prayed, I prayed to have it back. I liked loving her. I wanted to be in love with her. And it came back. That's what I mean when I say maybe I did choose it. I chose her. But there was Audacia before that, all of this before I applied 'gay' to myself.
You know how that happened? The same year I fell in love with Allegra, I went to a friend's wedding. I came back and told my mother about how I was planning my wedding now. She said, "Who's the groom?"
"No groom," I replied uneasily. Something in me knew this was unusual. "Just [Allegra]."
She bought me a book a few days later. GLBTQ: The Survival Guide for Queer and Questioning Teens. I thought, Gay? Is that what I am? Huh.
It was never about being gay. It was about loving girls. It was my mother, society, who put the label on. Not that I blame her. Perhaps if I lived in a different community I'd cast it off and say, I date who I date, whoever may come along. Unfortunately, I'm part of a community where the possibility of dating the same gender, or a genderless person, doesn't even occur to anyone. Since I'm not dating anyone, allowing them to assume I'm straight, as I know they do, only makes me feel more isolated, because I believe they love me for who they think I am, not who I really am. So I take it. The label is for society. It files me away into a neat little pigeonhole, just like we've been doing for years. Slaves and free, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Men and women. Gay and straight. And there is so much more between. People of mixed race, for so many generations that they can't claim one nationality. People without a fixed gender. And such fluid sexuality. People are people. Everything else has holes in it somewhere.

It Gets Better, In the Aftermath

Lately, what's been on in the car is the album For Your Entertainment by Adam Lambert. My favorite song on the album? Aftermath.
As soon as I read the lyrics to this song, I said to myself, "This is about coming out." It never says that explicitly, but if you're LGBTQ, you get it.
According to Wikipedia, Adam co-wrote the song (with whom it doesn't say). This makes sense. Adam is gay. If you were watching Glee tonight, you might have caught a glimpse of him in the latest It Gets Better video. Which is also an ad for Google Chrome. :) I chose to ignore that part.
Watching the video, you can see the titles of the various YouTube videos of the It Gets Better project. I am constantly amazed at the number of people who have put these videos up. Lady Gaga. President Obama. The people who work at Google and Facebook. And Adam. I must say I don't like his phrasing when he says "who I choose to sleep with". Of course, it's true. Who you sleep with is a choice. It just misleads what feels like most of the world into thinking that wanting it is a choice, that falling in love is a choice.
But back to Aftermath. Every word in it is about feeling overwhelmed, about feeling like the rest of the world sees only a mask, about moving forward, and mostly, not being alone. As far as I'm concerned, the very best cut is the version that you buy, but a not-half-bad YouTube of it is here. Or, if you prefer, a remix that won an O award.
"Don't be afraid of what's inside/ Wanna tell ya, you'll be all right/In the aftermath."
There are so many people out there just waiting to welcome you to the wonderful world of being LGBTQ. Just do a YouTube search on It Gets Better.