“I always thought you were a faggot.”

For my entire adult life…wait, no. Not even just my adult life. Even as a young kid when some of the older members of my family were intentionally harsh and mean to me under the guise of “toughening my skin”, I haven’t had a single conscious moment of my life where people didn’t assume one specific thing about me.

That I’m gay.

When I was young, it genuinely bothered me. Maybe it was that I thought David Bowie was the dopest human ever for being intentionally ambiguous with himself and maybe it’s just that, historically speaking, I have just always enjoyed the company of women more than I have the company of men. Maybe it’s that all of my best friends throughout my life have, at least most of the time, identified as homosexual. To be honest, I haven’t ever really known specifically.

But I do believe it’s why I lost my virginity so early in my life. I remember the (and I hate this fucking term, by the way) “alpha males” of my school constantly bloviating about all the women that they were sleeping with. All throughout middle school, it was fucking rampant. At the same time they were calling me a faggot, they were bragging to one another in the lunch line about some imaginary sex that they 100% were NOT having. And so, come one Friday in the seventh or eight grade, as I listened to those idiots talk about shit they had no idea about, I secretly plotted a weekend of depravity.

And it worked. My sister’s friends made an appearance and I ended up losing my virginity to one of them. I was so unequipped to deal with the reality, though, that I foolishly thought that something was to come AFTER the orgasm and I raced to the finish line only to be incredibly disappointed.

I was too young to have been having sex. I’d been fourteen for just two days. But, in my mind at that specific time, I could go to school that next morning with a REAL story in a whole school of assholes that made fun of me and weren’t doing anything that I had the balls to actually seek out and do.

In my own naïve, adolescent bravado, I felt real good about myself. But looking back with the glory of retrospect? It’s because those kids suggested I was gay. And I hated them for it. Turns out, it made no difference. When I went back to school that following Monday with all that lost virginity formed as a puff of air in my otherwise sunken chest, those same kids still went at me. Still called me a faggot. The only difference is that they had the balls to call me a liar about something I was being honest about and I didn’t have the balls to call them out on something so ridiculously false. So the result had inasmuch the opposite effect as what I’d intended it to: instead of feeling good about myself, I was jealous that these kids could have such conviction in their lying and that none of them would believe me for my truth.

That statement would end up becoming a regular thing in my life as I aged. Even today as I type this, without proof (and sometimes even with it), there are people that don’t believe things that I say and things that have happened to me. At 32, it’s just easier to swallow (there’s a gay joke in there somewhere, I’m sure of it).

I mostly get mad at myself when I look back on this. Why did I view the suggestion that I was gay as an insult? Gay people are my favorite people. My history of friendships are evidence of this. The very first thing I ever heard about NIRVANA (arguably the band that formed my personality and style more than any other) was a small flyer inside of a CD jacket that said the following:

“If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”

And the photo next to that insert was one of Kurt Cobain wearing a flowery dress and eyeliner. I don’t believe I had ever before then or in the time since thought a single human exuded such a level of cool. He was my generation’s David Bowie but he wasn’t only ambiguous, Cobain pointed a middle finger at all those assholes that called me a faggot. And in a way, he pointed one at me for being offended at the insinuation.

Back when MySpace was a thing, I intentionally chose to leave my sexual preference on there as, “Not Sure”. Because honestly, at that point I wasn’t. There was a part of me that actively hoped I WAS gay. My identity would have made a lot more sense in a stereotypical way if that was the case. My desire to paint my fingernails, or wear tight jeans in an era where all my peers wore JNCO jeans, or the fact that I could have a cognitive ability to see an attractive man and say something like, “Yeah, okay, that guy is good looking.” I envied my women friends for hyping one another up and I loved to see them say things that men have never been able to say openly (though in the last few years, has in fact gotten a little more relaxed).

“Hey girl, your ass looks fucking phenomenal!” I would hear them say. And I would get jealous that my friends would be too busy farting on one another and coming up with new and exciting ways to bring one another down. It’s true, in fact, that women are more evolved. They just are. They just always have been.

But I remember my dad catching wind of that whole “SEXUAL PREFERENCE” thing. And I remember him calling me from work and demanding I come to talk to him. And I remember him asking me specifically if I was gay. And I also remember how offended I got, again as if it the designation is something to ashamed of to begin with, but it’s true. I did. And when I told him that I wasn’t, and when I put my tail between my legs and told him that it had to have been some kind of default thing I didn’t even notice: I again became part of the problem.

So why am I writing this? Well, there is actually a point to it.

A week or so ago, I bumped into somebody that was dating a girl I’d had a one night stand with. The details are irrelevant, but there was one point in the conversation that caught me off guard.

“You know, I always thought you were gay.” He told me.

“You have the tight pants, and the painted fingernail, and your voice is kind of high-pitched, and you’re artsy and shit like that. The idea you slept with her is actually kind of crazy to me.”

And again, just like the days of my adolescence, I got angry with him. But why? Why did I still feel the need to be masculine in a world that I knew I was never going to be masculine in? Why did it bother me so bad? And, conversely, if I really cared that much, then why did I go so far out of my way to be ambiguous about myself? Did David Bowie give a shit when some redneck called him a faggot? Did Kurt Cobain feel hesitance when putting the liner notes of his record out to those same people? Hell no. And yet, it bothered me enough to tell him I didn’t want the free shot he was offering me.

What a douche move on my part honestly.

I am writing this so that I can change a very specific characteristic of myself. I am so sick of being offended when somebody refers to me as a term that I don’t find offensive when it’s applied to literally anybody else on this planet. And if I truly want to be evolved, if I want to move beyond my own ego and into a world of real understanding and acceptance, then I can’t call myself an ally and still get offended when some random person refers to me as a thing I say that I accept.

Fact is, I do accept it. But I have built-in and inherit prejudice from a youth where the words gay and faggot were used to bring people down. I remember seeing RuPaul on television as a kid and watching an entire room of people squirm. Now, my best friend on this planet does drag and half of those same people go to his shows and cheer him on. It’s not all bad. We ARE evolving as a culture.

But I have to evolve faster than I am. The motivation for this writing is as such. The next time that somebody asks if I’m gay, or insinuates that they thought I was or that I have always been; rather than getting offended at the idea, I’m just going to say this:

“I’m not, but I’m also not mad that you think that I am.”

It’s a small gesture, but it’s a step in the right direction. And Rome wasn’t built in a day.