Courtney
How I Erased My Sexuality
My first same-sex crush was on a girl named Courtney in my sixth-grade class. She was an exceptionally pretty eleven-year-old, with shiny hair that always looked soft and clean, never frizzy or tangled like my own mess of braids and ponytails. People said she was really mean, but she always smiled at me and said hello, and that small piece of her attention gave me a rush of affection for her every time I sat down across from her in class.
I told my mother about it, and she laughed. “Honey, you liked Peter last week.”
I had liked Peter last week, and I had liked Tyler the week before that. I was eleven. I liked a lot of boys. But Courtney was on my mind a lot that week, and she made my heart beat a lot faster when she smiled, and at eleven, that was really my only criteria for crushes.
My mother shook her head. “You like boys, sweetie. You can’t like both.” And that was the end of that.
Only it wasn’t for me. Because after Courtney it was Jamie, and then it was a different Peter, then the same Peter from before, and then Alicia. My hormonal little heart did not discriminate by gender; I would daydream about kissing boys like every other girl my age, but I’d also daydream about kissing girls, about holding their delicate hands, about brushing their soft, pretty hair behind their ears…
I was so confused. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as bisexuality. I thought I was just very, very desperate to kiss someone. It was a weird time for a while; I’d develop feelings for a girl, and I’d be afraid to say anything because I thought I was going crazy. I’d watch movies with my family where the main characters kissed passionately and I’d imagine the male protagonist was a girl. You like boys, I’d tell myself whenever I pictured myself kissing Courtney like they kissed in the movies. You can’t like both.
By the time I got to high school, I had successfully been able to push down every feeling I had for girls until I felt quite sure that I was straight. That all changed one lunch period my sophomore year, when a friend confessed that she was bisexual. This was the first time I ever heard the concept of being attracted to both men and women, and immediately I shut down the idea.
“Don’t you have to pick one?” I said jokingly to another friend, later on, when we were discussing the coming-out.
She gave me a very strange look. “Of course not. Don’t you know anyone who’s bi?”
I had heard of women who kissed other women in front of men to get their attention, and I had seen girls who did the same on a less intimate scale to woo the underdeveloped boys in our class, but that was about it. I’d always dismissed them as attention-seeking, not people with genuine attraction to both genders. But now the proof of genuine bisexuality was in my hands. I wasn’t crazy for liking Courtney one week and Peter the next. There was finally a positive word for what I was feeling.
Instead of rejoicing in the idea that I wasn’t alone in my feelings, I recoiled. I had spent too much time convincing myself that sexuality can only be black or white, straight or gay, feminine or masculine. I had erased my own sexuality.
If I had been educated about the full spectrum of sexuality, I think things might have been different. I might not have been so ignorant of my own feelings. I might not have hated myself for my apparent confusion. Today, I’m comfortable knowing that I am not crazy or indecisive for experiencing attraction to both genders, but I wish I had known sooner that the Kinsey Scale exists, or that there’s a B in the gay community’s go-to acronym. Maybe then, I wouldn’t have thought of myself as being strange for thinking about Courtney.
Maybe when she smiled at me across our tight circle of desks, I would have smiled back.
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