I’ve Masked as a Straight Man All My Life — Now I Don’t Have to Any More
Celebrating and embracing my aceness this Pride Month
Masking: a word associated with the neurodivergent to describe the process of trying to fit in for the benefit of everyone except the person being socially expected to mask. It’s also a useful word for how queer people are expected to do just the same.
We too experience compulsory heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and weaponised homophobia. Many of us go or went through life feeling that we’re broken because we didn’t fit what society expected of us.
We make adjustments to our words and/or our behaviours in order to become acceptable to others and centre their comfort and expectations in how they think “normal” people should act. We retreat into a shell because we don’t want to say what we’re really thinking for the fear of repercussions.
I masked even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.
I had no concept of demisexuality or asexuality until relatively recently. When I was young, I publicly feigned interest in all the girls I was supposed to be interested in as a straight boy. But, in reality, I wasn’t interested in most of them — possibly I lacked interest in any of them. To express indifference or to verbalise that I was consistently failing to see what is supposed to be hot about the prettiest girls in school was a fast track to having my sexuality questioned.
I came to question my sexuality myself until I fell in love for the first time. She was a friend, and it was intense. Those feelings left me breathless and anxious. I wondered if this is what everyone feels when they fall in love. I didn’t know what was happening to my body and my mind. Was it just painful because her feelings were not reciprocated?
Then it happened again with another friend. At that point, I was more emotionally mature that I handled it better. But it was still painful when she too rejected me.
Why did I have this habit of falling for friends? I know why now, but I didn’t then. I didn’t want it to happen again, but it did. I wanted to be like everyone else and get to know a stranger and realise we had chemistry and take it from there.
I fell for friends several more times and each time the same outcome — intense romantic feelings that I learnt I had to repress to avoid them overwhelming me completely.
That’s not to say they didn’t overwhelm me again, because they did. But I repressed as much as I could. I retreated into myself every time I felt the first stirrings of a crush.
Naturally, it became easier to do when I entered my first long-term relationship. I did catch feelings for some friends after that point. It just made it easier not to do anything about it, sit back, maybe enjoy those feelings a little, and wait for it to pass.
That was my second mask.
Both masks began to drop in September 2022 when I found the definition of demisexual. I had an answer for why my romantic and sexual attraction history had gone the way they had, especially the painful habit of falling hard for friends.
This month those masks finally fell off. I’ve finally stopped feeling ashamed of catching feelings for women I knew would never be interested in me.
It wasn’t a huge explosive revelation; it was more of a quiet crossing of a border into full self-acceptance without even realising I’d crossed it. It’s a bit like travelling through the Schengen Area and someone needing to tell you that you just left country A and now in country B.
No, it was the removal of those masks and finally understanding that I don’t have to pretend anymore. Freeing myself of the masks freed me of the guilt, the repression, and so much more.
Finally, it was accepting that crushes, and even falling in love with friends is going to happen because that is how demisexuality works for me.
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