More questions...

I will get to the how we met/fell in "lurve"  story in a bit (thanks, Nutella, for making me blush!)...so I am skipping that part for now and moving on...e asked...

I guess I have the "it gets better" videos on my brain, but I always do love a
good coming-out story (especially if it is blush-worth)...I feel incredibly lucky to
have a very supportive family and to have grown-up in the bay area so never
experienced any bullying (I started dating girls in high school), but what was your
experience?

Since I've been digging into the memories, this is a good place to continue.  So, clearly I "dated" lots of boys in high school in college.  I had a good amount of lusty action with girls, too... but only straight friends-- or, at least friends who were very invested in their straight identities-- so dating (as in sustaining some kind of romantic relationship) them was never really on the table.  This mostly mental separation did not stop me from falling hopelessly in love (though I could not have named it) with my (decidedly straight) best friend in high school, and having a long-standing on-and-off fling with a friend of mine in college, which lasted well beyond the college years. 

The boys I was with were never quite suitable.  Some were sadistic, some were just weird, and all were sort of... random... I now think that is because I didn't really have strong preferences with boys because at the end I didn't really like them that much, so it was all kind of...meh.  Sex was a tool I used to get and maintain relationships that were somehow validating, but I don't recall actually enjoying it very much. The boys themselves were irritating or embarrassing or appalling in their own ways and never lasted very long.  Three months, most of them, though there was a three-year (I accidentally wrote "tear"-- but there were many more than three of those) thing in college that was just awful from the get-go.

I was 26, in grad school #3, and just beginning to venture into lesbian cafes and bars, and go out to clubs with a lesbian friend from the program (never actually admitting aloud or to myself that I, too, maybe had a little of the gay), when I met the woman who became my first girlfriend.  And I fell promptly, madly, un-self-consciously, in heart-on-the-floor, bleeding-out-my-soul-for-her love.  And then, of course, was equally swiftly and unceremoniously dumped and left heart-broken and crying out my left-over love for her on the kitchen floor, where I remained for months.  (Incidentally, we are friendly these days.)


But in between the epiphany of falling in love with a woman and getting dumped by the same, I managed to make a number of intemperate phones calls to my family and friends announcing my new-found sexuality (it was Pride Month, after all), much to their unblinking unsurprise.  "Yeah, and..?" was the usual response.  I did not lose a single friend in the process, and while my parents, I think, still struggle with it (my father 100 times more than my mother) it is not a huge issue.  I thank their godless ways for that. 

So, no I was never bullied unless you count my internalized homophobia that probably cost me a decade if not more of relationships and wanton lusty teenage sex with the right gender.  But I do want to make an "It Gets Better" video because I know there are those out there who are not out, who are not bullied, who are nonetheless steeped in self-doubt and self-reproach, not knowing that a fully realized life is entirely possible.