Harlot Overdrive

I was reading an article over on SameSame, which shares the stories and tidbits from their readers and Facebook followers on who they first came out to.

So of course I got to reminiscing about my own ‘coming out’ tale, and I thought I might share it here.

I was in my first year of high school – a Catholic girls secondary college that I had begged and pleaded my parents to not send me to – and I was slowly making friends with shared interests. Shared interests mostly meant finding other people who were into the same music as me, but soon I had a small group of friends who I liked, including one Very Cool Girl who I craved validation from.

I was an early experimenter, ‘dating’ boys and snogging girls in primary school. I think I went further with girls than I did with boys in primary school. So when I started high school, I wanted to keep exploring this side of me. The side that listened to Madonna’s Erotica and wanted to be her AND be with her.

So, in my very 12 year old kind of way, I spoke to the Very Cool Girl (on whom I was developing a small crush, that I would never pursue unless she wanted to as well. Which I figured she wouldn’t, simply because she was a Very Cool Girl and I was bumbling and chunky and shy), and I told her that I wanted to tell her something, but was too nervous to just come out with it. So I told her that the clue was ‘Jill Sobule’. She figured it out soon enough, and was disgusted and afraid of me from the moment she figured it out.

We fell out – she wanted nothing to do with me. No more sleep overs, no more swimming in our school uniforms together, no more niceness – she turned mean. She told other students that I was a big lesbian. It was primary school all over again (Primary school had seen me cop the token gay girl flak as well. In fact, in their infinite wisdom, my classmates had seen me in a New Orleans Mardi Gras shirt and confused it with the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, because ‘Mardi Gras’ was, at that time in Australia, synonymous with ‘gay’ amongst my totally worldly fourth-grade peers *eye roll*).

I was devastated (and I still have books full of angst-ridden adolescent poetry to prove it). I had wrongly assumed that just because these girls were into the same hip, edgy music I was. Just because they loved the same hedonistic rock and roll that I did. Just because they had developing interests in animal and human rights like I did… it didn’t mean a thing. Because gay, especially in a Catholic community, is still so other, and they were taught to fear that.

I learned my lesson. I didn’t talk about my sexuality any more after that. I kept experimenting, a little, with girls. But I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t be upfront about it. Even when I made friends with fairly-out (and rather outspoken) bisexual girls, a few years above me in school, I couldn’t join in their reindeer games – the fear of rejection and otherness was still so strong. It took me *years* before I could comfortably admit to anyone but myself that I was into girls. Until I ended up on the other side of the country, and in the bed of a girl who totally got me. But that is another story for another time.

Who was the first person you told?

xx Harlot