Not Everyone Is Straight?

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I've thought that maybe those who are maybe around my age group might relate to this more? I'm talking about generation X, those of us who were legal adults before we heard anything.com. As a teenager I often heard the word 'gay' or 'queer'. I really didn't understand the meaning of those words. To me it just meant weird. Some of my peers thought it described me but to me it didn't. I thought everyone was heterosexual. I didn't realize that guys could be attracted to guys and girls to girls. I have thought I was attracted to girls, even though I didn't have what could be considered a girlfriend until I was 19. It was a relationship that lasted a little more than a half a year and has been the only one I've ever had. I was raised Catholic, more of less by my maternal grandmother, who only lived a few houses away. In my childhood what went on at Mass became my obsession. Through middle school and high school if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say that I wanted to be a priest. There is an ex-priest who was the pastor of the parish just down the street from my home from the time I was 11 until 17. We became close friends, and I would visit him often at the rectory. I remember about the time I was 15 asking if he had a girlfriend when he was young. He never really answered the question. It wasn't until 9 years later that I figured out he was gay. Has anyone else had some experience that it wasn't until adulthood that you came to realize that not everyone is heterosexual?

I'm a gen x-er.

You know, I remember being a little kid and one of my friends asking me if I was a lesbian. I think I must have been in 2nd grade or something. I had never heard that word before. I asked what it meant and my friend told me. I was like, hm, no, I'd had a boyfriend before so I figured I couldn't be gay. *shrugs* I didn't know bisexual was a thing until I was in my 20s. Pansexual? Never heard of that until my 30s. Now there's asexual to. I learned a bit about that in my 40s and still have tons to learn on that topic.

I knew people could be gay. My mom had a few gay friends when I was coming up. But it wasn't 'real' to me... I say real, but I'm not sure if that's the best fitting word. It was more an abstract concept to me that some people lived that way, but they were like these mythical creatures to me... not regular people, but people living their own reality on their terms. Though it was muddled up in some other realities... my mom was dysfunctional and so was the company she kept. These gay men were not pillars of stability or sanity, you know? They seemed unreal to me in a way.

So in a way, yes? Gay was a thing to me, but not a thing regular people could do. It was more like something famous people did or crazy people did. It wasn't something that made me go, yeah, I could embrace that side of me because it's a thing people actually do. It was more like this alternate reality to me for a while there...unobtainable to 'regular folk'.

I figured that not everyone is straight at elementary. That people are not only attracted to opposite sex, that people are attracted to same sex or even people who are attracted both sexes exists.

What I hadn't realized until late teenage years is that people who are not attracted to anyone or anything exists... And I'm one of them.

That I can easily grasp the fact that sexual attraction and romance can be a separate thing, and so forth before my peers if they ever did.

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