Juno Valente
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

I was eight when I kissed a girl for the first time. No, I didn’t kiss her, rather she kissed me. We were playing house and suddenly her lips were planted on mine.

At such an early age, I already knew kissing someone of the same gender was a thing that destroyed people. Ruined them. Tore them apart.

And that kiss left me with an open wound that wouldn’t heal for years to come. It bled and hurt constantly, I even got used to it’s putrid, stale smell of rotten flesh.

Was I a girl who liked girls?

I asked my mother exactly that when I was eleven, the conversation went a little like this:

“Mom, am I a lesbian?”

“I don’t know, love. Only you can know that for sure.”

“What if I don’t know for sure?”

“Then you don’t have to know right now.”

My mom is a kind woman, who loved me way too well, but that answer didn’t satisfy me. I needed someone to put me in a box, tell me what I was. Categorize me. I needed to know what kind of human I was and why I felt so damn inadequate.

Alas, I covered my wound way too well. For years I was able to feel only a dull ache. Almost forgettable. I loved boys quite a bit too, so I labeled myself as straight.

I knew of gay people and heterosexual people, but someone who liked both? That was uncharted territory, it was a place altogether too scary to be. So I stuck with boys. But boys didn’t like me and girls made me terribly nervous. So like many before me I resorted to internalized misogyny.

It’s easier to hate women than to fall in love with them.

After a relationship with a kind boy, who like me, wasn’t that much of a heterosexual, I finally came out of the closet.

I liked girls, no, I loved girls.

I couldn’t hold that back any longer. So I decided to kiss as many girls as possible. It was wonderful and terrifying. And I was fine in my little gay journey until I finally fell in love with one of my kissing partners.

I really, unwillingly fell in love with her. And I still am, till this very day.

After I realized that, I began wondering if I was a lesbian, not bi, not pan, but totally gay.

You see, loving her was easy. As easy as breathing. And loving boys was war. And war was hell.

For a long time I thought I was gay. Why should I ever go back to boys if all they did to girls was maim us? Hurt us. Kill us. I had realized that boys didn’t protect girls, like society would want us to believe, but quite the contrary, they drained us, murdered us, striped us of our humanity.

Even though I was very much in love and in a healthy relationship I still found myself finding a boy beautiful here and there. And that scared me and shamed me to death. Liking boys felt like a horrible step-back, a weakness the patriarchy had poked inside me.

Until a very pansexual friend of mine, asked me so kindly what was so wrong with not being gay, if I was bi or pan or queer. I didn’t know exactly what made me so afraid of not being a lesbian.

“I guess I just don’t want to be stuck in the middle.” I said gloomily. She smiled.

“Oh honey, liking all genders is nothing like being stuck in the middle.” She told me patiently. “It’s like being above gender completely. So, men are dicks most of the time. There are some good ones, though, and other people that don’t fit in gender at all. Do you think they’re stuck in the middle of gender norms?” She asked.

I shook my head no. Of course not. I didn’t even think people who were bisexual or pansexual were stuck in the middle, I just felt the uneasiness of feeling like I was stuck in the middle.

“You’re not undecided, see, you know exactly who you are, you like people and it doesn’t matter what genitals they have, or what they identify as. And I think that’s pretty magical.”

She doesn’t know how she blew my mind that day. I knew all that, but I still needed someone to tell me, someone to allow me, to give me permission.

Today

This day

Every day I wake up by my beautiful wife’s side

Every day I find myself attracted to a girl, to a boy, to a non binary person

I am now pretty damn sure how magical I really am.

    Juno Valente

    Written by

    I know who I am but I don’t know where I’m going.