Things That Could Happen After Coming Out, Sexuality Edition

The millisecond after you tell them, most of your friends will roll their eyes and say “duh, you like girls.” Those who have seen you at parties won’t say anything but will nod sagely. You won’t have the heart to tell them that all those girls who kissed you for male attention actually set back your coming-out process.

After you tell her about it, your best friend will look at you a bit askance and blurt out “So do you have a crush on me or something?”

Your male friends will suddenly expect you to start “getting” the mainstream porn that they enjoy. You will in fact find that mainstream porn makes even less sense to you than it did before.

The adamantly self-identified bicurious woman you met that one time will ask you out for coffee. The words “Do you use a dildo or is it all just foreplay?” pass her lips and it takes every iota of self-control you have not to tear her a new one.

Wannabe male suitors will proposition you using their girlfriends, wives, and female friends as enticements. They will expect you to describe your “type” by chopping women into body parts the way that they do, KFC style. Do you care more about chicks’ legs, breasts or thighs? Do your prefer white or dark meat?

Men who have rejected you in the past will try to curry favor with you in the hopes of scoring a threesome with you and a woman much, much hotter than you.

Your first boyfriend will email you and tell you all about how sad he is that you didn’t come out to him when you were together. It is very important to him that you know that he is both a Kinsey 1 and decidedly not a homophobe.

You will secretly thrill the first time someone yells “Dyke!” at you on the street instead of the usual “ay, mami.” The money you invested into straight-leg jeans and sweatervests has clearly paid off.

Your first queer dance night, a gay man will bound up to you, squish your breasts as if he were testing melons for ripeness, and say “nice” as he bounds back away again. Others will explain to you that he’s too gay to have enjoyed the experience and insist that his lack of titillation made it okay.

Your first big queer club night, you’ll finally get the nerve to ask a girl to dance. She’ll turn out to be a straight girl who sneers at your attempt since she’s just here to dance with “all the cute gay boiz~”.

You’ll feel like an interloper in straight spaces since the way that straight girls flirt, touch, and stare at each other leaves you flushed and breathless when it’s the right girl or combination of girls. You’ll feel guilty about all the women you’ve desired who didn’t know that you were capable of desiring them.

You’ll feel like an interloper in spaces for women who love women since you don’t hate men any more than you used to. You’ll try to swear off men but find no women who will have you. You’ll feel guilty about all the men you’ve dated and fucked.

You’ll feel guilty about nothing, will feel nothing but hatred for everyone instead. You’ll meet someone when you’re most taken by the hatred and he’ll tell you that it’s okay if you “play” with other women, but not with men. You remind him that, before him, it was mostly women you cared about. You remind him that, if he insists on being afraid of you running off with someone, he ought to fear women. He’ll leave you for a more beautiful, more deferential woman.

You’ll make a dysphoric girl feel like a woman and realize you don’t ever feel like a woman, but neither are you a man.

You’ll stop coveting homophobic slurs from random men on the street. You’ll grow and cut your hair as you please, leaving the grays to shine or cover them with purple. You’ll wear nothing but dresses yet shave nothing but the pills from your vintage fabrics. You’ll wear pedicures but not manicures for bare fingers that slip more easily into orifices. You’ll wear bright pretty colors on your lips and dark shadows on your cheeks.

You’ll stop running from yourself, stop trying to prove that you’re queer, and you’ll finally be happier than you’ve ever been.

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Things That Could Happen After Coming Out, Sexuality Edition
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10 thoughts on “Things That Could Happen After Coming Out, Sexuality Edition

  1. 2

    Since coming out as bi:

    -I’ve had evangelical Christian friends tell me they loved me, but God said “one man, one woman.”
    -My first boyfriend said he was going to end my “addiction to pussy.”
    -I still get people mislabeling me as gay.
    -I feel like I still have to prove my queerness.
    -I confused my friends again by adding, “By the way, I’m also genderqueer and prefer they/them pronouns.”

  2. 5

    When my wife came out to me as bisexual she was worried about how I would take it. She felt guilty, like she had married me under false pretenses. This was just in the last couple years, while we have been together for 12 years now, married 8. I told her that I would never want her to hide who she was, and I would never force her back into the closet. We went from monogamous and vanilla to poly and kinky, and our relationship is as strong as ever. I am not particularly interested in pursuing other partners, but I know the option is there if I ever was.

    She doesn’t have to hide anything from me, and while this road has taken us to some unexpected and sometimes painful places, I wouldn’t want to go back. I think ultimately my equanimity with her coming out and us opening our relationship stems from my feminism– I’m her husband, not her owner. Marriage doesn’t give me any special rights to her time/body/sexual desires. If she wants to date other people and still stay with me what right to I have to demand that she not do that? Her bisexuality is not a threat to me, she has needs that I cannot fulfill and that is fine. It’s not a personal failing on my part, so why should I be threatened? I trust her.

    This is pure awesome too:

    If you want to be sassy, you could always reply with “God said Adam and Eve, not Adam or Eve. It’s the Bible, not the Straightble.”

  3. 6

    You’ll stop coveting homophobic slurs from random men on the street. You’ll grow and cut your hair as you please, leaving the grays to shine or cover them with purple. You’ll wear nothing but dresses yet shave nothing but the pills from your vintage fabrics. You’ll wear pedicures but not manicures for bare fingers that slip more easily into orifices. You’ll wear bright pretty colors on your lips and dark shadows on your cheeks.

    This is a really lovely paragraph. Truly. I’m so glad that I’ve been able to read voices like yours, Heina, thank you!

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