Am I Gay?

Have you ever been really worried to ask a dumb question? I’m seventeen years old so I’ve had seventeen years of my life to ask really dumb questions and believe me when I say growing up in a family of seven you hear a lot of dumb questions. I heard my eleven-year-old sister one time ask if the Chinese lived in Russia. Naturally, I said “Maybe some do but, no they live in China”… She then just kind of stared at me and asked, “Well where do the Russians live?” So when you’re younger and naive it’s easy to ask dumb questions, but, that doesn’t make it a bad thing to ask them! I remember when I was her age. I had just got my first phone and a news article popped up on my phone. Now I knew nothing about the presidents but I did know they were a big deal. The news article that popped up said that President Obama legalized gay marriage! So of course one thing led to another. I searched up what gay marriage was and I found out, it’s when one gender is attracted to the same gender. It confused me because I didn’t know that was a thing. So I did a bunch of deep searches of: “Am I gay?” “What is gay?” “How do I become gay?”

But nothing was really coming up, just a bunch of BuzzFeed quizzes. (I took all of them and all of them told me I was gay.) I knew there was only one way I’d get a ‘straight’ answer (Haha get it?) and it was if I asked my parents. It freaked me out so much to ask them if I was gay because I didn’t have a full understanding of what it even was I just knew that some people hated it and some people didn’t care. So it took me about a week to build up the courage to talk to them. A whole week’s worth of random web searches and talking to my friends about gay people to get me to man up and talk to my parents. I had to ask if I were gay. I remember standing in front of my parents bedroom (They didn’t have a door it was just a blanket) But I stood in front of that blanket, quivering. I knew some people didn’t like gay people so I was worried that if I ask them about being gay, they would said yes and get rid of me! Looking back at it now it’s all stupid because they had no way of knowing if I were gay. But I was eleven and my lack of knowledge and how naive I was made me so worried. I almost felt like I was going to throw up. I remember going to the bathroom before talking to them just to try and clear my conscious.

I went in there (dramatically throwing the blanket open) and I looked at my mother, tears streaming down my face and I asked “Am I gay?” My mother was shocked and my father just looked up from his game… and then after staring at my silent parents (fear brewing inside me.) My mom laughed. She looked at me, and said “No. You’re not gay. And if you were that’s something for you to figure out. Now please, go play.” Turns out about 4 years later my mom was right it was something for me to figure out and I am gay and trans (that would blow my eleven-year-old mind) but that question I was so worried about asking wasn’t a stupid question it was just one I didn’t have the answer to. So always ask the tough questions because if you don’t how are you going to know if you’re gay?

“Rainbow” by miri695 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.