How did you know you were gay/bi?

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I guess for a long time I was attracted to both genders but when I was 14 there was an incident when I came out to my classmates. I got bullied a lot. Now I'm glad I came out because I've made a few good, close friends along the way. I'm 19 now and I've had a few very good relationships with both men and women but I will also like women over men. There's just something about us that is special. I like it. I'm with a guy right now and he understands that I'm bisexual and I prefer females, but he's just so great I can't cut him loose.

My first ever crush (when I was about 7) was on a girl, so that's when I figured out there was something different. As I got older I had a pretty equal amount of crushes on boys and girls, then I heard somebody use the word "bisexual" in a conversation and I went home and looked it up to see what it meant, and realised it described me.

It was difficult for me to tell. I'm bi, but just a little bit. Like one step away from straight on the Kinsey Scale. Just as well, I lean towards asexuality. When I was younger I used to get a little bit attracted to males. I used to stress about it at the time. Kids at school had been bullying me verbally and psychologically by telling me that I was gay because I wasn't super-attracted to girls. I began questioning whether or not I was gay and my mom would comfort me and tell me I wasn't. I'd obsess over it. She told me that it was a combination of the bullying, the medicine I was taking at the time, and the fact that I was going through puberty. I stopped worrying and eventually started to really like girls for a while. That died down. I later on began to think about it again. And, I guess I don't know. Being a furry kind of helped because the largest group in terms of sexual orientation in the fandom tends to be Bi and a lot of them seem(the competent ones) to be decent people. In fact most of the fandom falls under LGBT and stuff with only like a quarter identifying as straight.

I tend to have very, very minor crushes on people who are at least decent-looking, are likely or known to be gay or bi, and who are modest about that kind of thing. I don't like flamboyant people. I like for people to act rather normal. Another criteria is that we have to share a lot of interests and that they kind of need to be as competent and intelligent as I am or in that neighbourhood. Personality is the biggest factor for me for both males and females. I'm not sure if I'm terribly interested in same sex intercourse, though. However, since I'm not 100% bi, I'm easily more attracted to women.

I have known my whole life that I find females way more attractive than males. But, I was very closeted up until a few years ago and I dated only men. I hated it and wanted to date women but I live in a small town. Now, I'm out and so happy with myself and life. I'm single, but happy to be a proud lesbian and no longer be lying to the world about who I am.

I know I am bisexual because my first few crushes were on girls, even from a very young age. I have been out with a girl before and it was very comfortable for me. I sometimes prefer women to men.

I never even considered myself as anything other than bisexual. I noticed that I liked girls and guys in equal measure when everybody else started to notice the differences between the sexes.

The signals I admit that my brain gets when I start sneaking glances.

It took me quite a while to figure it out actually.

I grew up in a very homophobic city, which I luckily no longer live in. At 13 like all 'normal' boys I knew I was attracted to girls. At 13, all the boys I knew seemed to want to do nothing but find a thousand and one reasons to label each other 'gay'. I never knew how to deal with this 'insult' (or at least intended insult) except by telling then no, I was not into guys. But no; apparently because I didn't talk or think about sex the same way as the other guys, this made me gay. (Secretly, I knew I was far more sexual than they could ever be, because they could conceive of nothing more than vanilla, male-initiated, male-focused sex). In an attempt to fit in, as I was already very 'different' as an aspie , I pretended to share their homophobic attitudes for a few years. (I remain very ashamed of that to this day, but it would not be honest to leave this part out).

At 18, I moved to a different city, and started university. Around the time of my nineteenth birthday, a female friend asked me if I would ever kiss a guy. For the first time, I decided to search inside myself honestly for an answer, which was 'yes, sure, I wonder if it's any different to kissing girls'. At this point in my life I had only ever kissed one girl anyway, and never had sex. I didn't specifically see guys as attractive and worth pursuing sexually, but just wondered what it felt like.

Fast forward one year to April 2010, around my 20th birthday. At this point I was ready to consider myself properly bisexual, having kissed a total of eight people, three of which were male. I had watched The All-American Rejects' video for Gives You Hell and thought to myself, damn, Tyson Ritter is just as hot as the girls in the video, if not more so. I think this realisation was finally admitting to myself that yes, I like both sexes. I also recognised that there may have been an element of (repressed) attraction to two guys I had known earlier in my life, as well as the admiration I had for them. One was a 30-year-old American new-age musician that had stayed in my parents' house a few weeks when I was 18, and the other was a friend roughly my age that I had known for a few years - he was so incredibly good at computer games when we had LAN parties that he, to me, represented the ultimate 'win'. In retrospect, I can say that at least one other male friend that we LANned with felt a similar way and would often make 'gay' jokes with him.

I am currently 21 and have kissed 16 girls and 8 guys, so the trend continues....

I knew because I had sexual attraction towards women for years but tried to deny it. I would look up videos of sexually explicit content of women and become aroused and had dreams of having sex with other women( which were fun by the way!) and when I like a girl it shows because I'm not afraid to check out girls now and I smile a-lot too and people notice. I still have sexual attraction towards men too. No one in my family is bisexual but there is some gay and lesbianism in my family, which all in all tells me I was born bisexual!

I don't know how I knew. An older girl in my neighborhood used to show me her tits all the time and have me rub them. It disgusted me but I don't think it did so in a gay way but in an abused way, I didn't want to do it. Also no girls were every responsive to me and I was constantly bullied by straight guys. I had real sex for the firs time when I was 15 with a guy. I wasn't attracted to him but I loved the sex. I kept having sex with him. Then I went to college and all hell broke lose. I was tormented constantly on being different and gay. I didn't know I was and I had a girlfriend who slept in my room with me when my roommate went home every weekend.

I left that college and went elsewhere to a more liberal college. I was still afraid to come out to anyone but the safest people. It was in my hometown but very separated. I also worked full time so I didn't have many friends there. I am still some what of a loner and want to be more open but I think it isn't open as much as knowing how. I have really bad "gaydar." So I don't pick up on signals too well. Also I hate to be touched in some was so that makees it harder

But I think I have always been gay.

I am bi (I'm married to a guy after all), but have always desired a relationship with a female. Perhaps I'm too scared to do it? Doesn't matter now unless something happens since, again, I'm married.

When I was little, I was a SUPER tomboy - wanted to be a farmer when I grew up, never brushed my hair, played with guys at recess. But I got crushes on females in my class and would obsess over them quietly or try to be their friend. I think I remember kissing a girl on the cheek in 3rd grade and getting a real rush from it though not knowing at all what it meant. My stepsisters and I also "pretend made-out" when playing house (I was ALWAYS the father) and it would really get me going (something I felt guilty about). I also humped the hell out of my My-Size Barbie and wanted her lips to be real so badly. My relationships, however, have almost always been with guys (and almost always been unfulfilling).

I've entertained the idea that I'm actually more of a lesbian and just never got enough confidence to pursue it, but AGAIN, I'm married.

TL;DR - I've been attracted to females past a friendship level since I was very little but never knew to pursue it until it was too late and I was too embarrassed to have a relationship with anything other than a male.

The other kids at school told me in the 1980s.

Well, this took a long time to actually define. I always felt "different," & all my life I've favored a very androgynous look. I grew up in the '50s-60s in a rural area. I think I first became aware of "something" that drew me to athletic women in junior high with our strong, very athletic-looking gym teacher--I still remember her name, all the details of her appearance. In high school I was mostly obsessed with fitting in, i.e. I dated boys--but without any real attraction. This hung on at university. It helps to understand that in these decades homosexuality was all underground, closeted, illegal. I was also lucky in that my mother never "prescribed" the marriage path for me, & was an early feminist. I came to acknowledge my own preferences as a result of defending gay men in a couple of work places in the '80s & '90s. I lived in a very rural area, where most gays/lesbians were not open, even if out. I also have Asperger's, so social connecting has always been tough. But, it has been a relief to come into knowing myself, just that is empowering.

When I was a preteen, I was rather focused on wanting to fit in with the other girls. Which meant pretending to have crushes so we could all talk about such things together. I'd always figured that I would have crushes on guys in the future and that I simply hadn't reached that stage of development yet. Personally, I never went through a 'boys are icky' stage, I saw this as immature and reasoned that "we will all like boys in the future, so why hate on them now?" words which later proved to be ironic.

I didn't know what to expect a crush to be like and I often wondered how I'd know if I had one. They sounded exciting to me and I really wanted to experience a crush. Occasionally I'd meet a guy and get on with him, then I'd wonder if such feelings were a crush and I'd tell others that I had a crush on someone. I'd ask the internet how to tell if you like someone or if you like like them. When I was eleven, I met a guy who became my best friend at the time. He was just so easy to talk to and get along with that becoming friends just made sense. The other girls around me didn't believe our friendship and peer pressured us to date. So we complied. I figured, hey, if anyone's gonna be my first crush, then it's gonna be this guy. My expectation was that I'd develop feelings for him as we dated. After all, we got on well enough. So if figured it was a given. However, neither of us were particularly comfortable with this situation. We kept putting off doing couple things, telling others that we wanted to take things slow. The most that happened was hand holding and a kiss on the cheek. We'd try to take things to the next level, but it'd always go along the lines of "Hey, wanna um kiss?" "I don't really feel like it" "Yeah, me neither, wanna just hang out instead?"

After our break up, I was minding my own business in class when I found myself crushing on a girl. It felt different from the times I had questioned if I had a crush on someone, it made me realise that those times weren't really a crush but that this definitely was and so I began internally panicking. Unfortunately I couldn't avoid her because she was in all of my classes. I didn't want to like girls. The word gay was often used as an insult around me and it was not something I wanted to be associated with. So I told myself that I just admired her.

Which spurred me to get back together with that guy. Hey, wanna get back together because I like you and not because I'm avoiding an identity crisis? Predictably, it didn't work out that time either. I entered a "I'm not like other girls" phase and told myself that I just understood guys better. That I was writing from a male perspective when gushing about women in my stories and poetry. I liked women because I understood men so well, duh, no other reason.

Around twelve and a half I realised that I liked women. I started identifying as bisexual. My logic being that I dated a guy, therefore I must like men as well. I always figured that my attraction to men was just a given. Back then I thought I was so cool because I didn't even get nervous around guys. Yes, you fool, there's a reason for that.

I started questioning if I was a lesbian when I was thirteen. Plenty of "Am I gay?" tests were taken at this time. I kept switching between the lesbian and bisexual label. A part of me wondered "What if I have a crush on a guy in the future?" or "What if I just have a very particular taste in men that I haven't found yet?" or "What if I'm just a very confused straight girl?"

This lasted for a year. Unfortunately, a coming out backfired when someone overheard me come out to someone else and it was spread around. People hurt me physically. So I decided to jump back in the closet and lock the door. The only person I told after that was my ex-boyfriend. His response was "Me too!" then I responded "Well, that explains a lot!"

We laughed about it after that and it strengthened our friendship. Yet we were both closeted, so we played the role of "I hate you for breaking my heart, you heathen!" in public, but went back to being friends and spamming memes to each other as if nothing had happened. I'd get people demanding to know more about why we broke up and despairing "But you two were such a power couple!" to which we'd exchange glances and try not to laugh.

I was outed to a small group at the very end of high school by a girl who kept pestering me to 'admit' to being gay, but I moved to a different area of the country shortly after so it didn't matter too much. Coming out was difficult for a while because of the trauma surrounding the physical attack I experienced. My throat would dry up and I'd forget how to speak. I'd see images of the event flash through my mind and I'd panic. Especially if I felt trapped. However, it became gradually easier with time. I finally had a group of accepting friends. This was when I was sixteen. I came out to my family at eighteen though. However, it did take a while to fully move on from my trauma and for the flashbacks to stop. Returning to where the attack happened years later and making happier memories there definitely helped me. For those wondering, the guy I "dated " now has a boyfriend and they're happy together. I hope I have a relationship some day.

Honestly, I just found out recently that I'm bi. I first thought I was gay because of my current relationship with a man, but after talking to a friend who is gay, I figured out that I did love my ex girlfriends, it just didnt work out due our own personal problems but I did love them, I still think about one in particular once in a while.

However, I love my current boyfriend the most because it does fit so well, even with our struggles. He loves and accepts me for who I am, helps me with stuff and I help him out with his disabilities.