Brahmacharya

I'm gay. I want to have sex with other women.

This is relatively new to me. I'm in my 30s and I've been in a relationship with the same man for over 10 years. But coming to this understanding of myself has helped some things click into place. Many things, actually seem different now, through this lens of better understanding myself and my sexuality. When I first started reflecting on this, it felt like it couldn't be real because I'm not a teenager, I'm in my 30s and I've been in a loving (albeit sexually difficult) relationship with a man for quite some time and everyone's just so used to thinking of me as straight (including me).

This seems both a long time coming and completely sudden. I've been thinking about this idea for several years, not actually being gay, but that I wasn't completely straight (and probably I'm not completely gay either, but that's closer to the truth). I actually even told my partner at the beginning of the summer (it's the beginning of fall now) that I thought it might be true, but it didn't feel true until Saturday, and today's Tuesday.

It feels important to me to list some things that clicked into place:

• I often had intense relationships with my women friends, and they would eventually find them too intense. This is not only an effect of gayness, I think, but also just an effect of my general emotionality and intensity, but I think the gayness played a role too. And actually, now that I think of it, the women friends who stuck around were the gay ones.
• I was elated when gay marriage became legal in the US. I expected to be happy about it, given that I had several close gay friends, but I was crying happy tears for a long time. They were for me too. 
• Similarly, I was devastated when the shooting in Orlando happened. I am devastated and horrified whenever there is a shooting and this was an especially large one too, but it felt so personal, in ways that the other ones didn't feel personal
• A big one for me: my inclination to sometimes hide my partner's gender suddenly made sense. He's a man; he's never identified otherwise and he prefers to use he/him, etc. But I often (confusingly to me, and to him) would sometimes refer to him as 'them.' It was this particular realization that really let me see my little gay self and how I'd been denying her for so long. When it happened, I was sitting in zazen and I was overwhelmed with sorrow and grief that I'd denied her for so long, rejected her, tried to hide her, and it was this noticing of her yelling to be seen that was the clincher for me. I wanted to be seen as gay. That's why I hid my partner's gender, so that people wouldn't  know I was with a man. 
• My own identity as a woman felt sturdier and more confident. I've never identified as anything other than woman, but it was as if I knew part of me was queer, but not which part and when I noticed that it was the gay part more than the gender part, I could settle into the gender part more easily. 
• As soon as I really let myself see myself this way, I felt lighter, more relaxed, open, available, lighter, freer. It is amazing, the weight of denial. 
• I also wanted to look good for the first time. I wanted to feel attractive, sexy in my clothes. This is a new sensation to me and I am both relishing it and confused by it. Up until a few days ago, my primary desire for clothing was that it fit reasonably well and that it was comfortable. Now I want to look good in it too, and not only my clothes -- I just feel more driven to attend to my appearance. This has popped up a few times before, but it's always been sort of just a quick desire and then I get overwhelmed and think, oh well, as long as it's comfortable and fits reasonably well... but now I want it, and I think it's because I thought I wanted to attract men with my appearance, but actually I don't and now I know who my target audience is, so to speak, I want to feel good and sexy and appealing. And I didn't want to do that for men, even though I thought that I did. Does that make sense?
• It has also made me question my relationship and patterns with my body. I've always been chubby and always expect to be, because that's just sort of what my body is like. My body has changed considerably over the past several months -- it's gotten leaner, which is due to a variety of other things, mostly unintentional. But, it was clear in my house growing up (and in the culture I grew up in) that men are not attracted to fat women. And I (on some level) did not want to attract men, and I was chubby. This was often a cause of deep pain for me, because I did not think that I would attract men as my chubby self, and I desperately wanted to because I desperately wanted to be normal (more on that later) but I remained chubby, for a variety of reasons, and maybe unconsciously not wanting to attract men was one of them
• I often felt lonely in high school and college because I did not think that men were attracted to me or wanted to date me. But I remember a particular conversation with my mother in which I was complaining about this and she pointed out that there were some boys who wanted to date me and I dismissed this. And at the time, and for a long time after, I told myself it was those particular men I was not interested in dating, and perhaps that was true, but I liked them well enough -- perhaps there was more not wanting to date men at all going on than I thought. 
• I've always found women more attractive and more interesting to look at and I've always been more drawn to look at them than men and it seemed to me that this was just sort of objectively the case, that everyone likes to look at women more than men, and certainly our patriarchal culture encourages this, but still. 
• Since I've been with a man for a long time, there's several things about our relationship that clicked into place too, but since they also involve him, I'll be vague and just say: When my gay doula (who also came to her gay realization well into adulthood) said that she never thought that romance was real or that she would have it until she came out to herself and started seeking out relationships with other women, I was floored. 
• I've been happy. I've been undeniably happy since I let myself notice this about myself. It feels good, it feels true and it makes sense. It will be difficult, maybe, this transition, and I expect (fairly, I don't know) questions about how my current relationship will change and the answer is, I don't know. I know I'm gay and I know I'm committed to the person I'm with right now and I also know that commitments can survive changes, even when they're big and messy and look pretty different on the other side. But I'm not ready to deal with all that messiness yet, which is mostly why I haven't come out to real people (except for my partner and gay doula) even though I've been wanting to introduce myself as gay and tell everyone about it, but the messiness of currently being in a straight relationship (and loving the man with whom I share this relationship) is getting in the way of that. Hmm.