Scarleteen

So I'm almost 14 now and I've been questioning since I was 11. I know that most gay people say something like, "I always knew I was different," or, "I knew I was gay before I had the words for it." I just don't understand how I could question my identity for nearly 3 years and still end up farther away than where I started. I've never had any crushes, and I still haven't so I basically have nothing to go on. I've looked at every manual, how-to, yahoo page, etc. on how to figure out who I'm attracted to and I just can't figure it out.

WARNING: I'm about to pour my deepest feelings out to a bunch of strangers on the Internet. You have been informed. Proceed with caution. So I guess I started to question my sexual orientation around the same time I started to really learn about sex. And not in the abstract way, but all of the mechanics and the like. This was when I was 11, and I was in 5th grade. I can't pinpoint an exact point where I became unsure, but I think that it popped into my head one day and it kept recurring more and more frequently until I was "officially" questioning. It was this nagging feeling I had, that I didn't quite fit in with all my friends' swooning over boys. And then, once I was in middle school, suddenly LGBT+ issues were in the limelight. They were talked about at the beginning of the day, we were shown PSAs about bullying, and we would have regular assemblies about Ally Week, the Day of Silence, and the school's GSA. And don't get me wrong; I had never had an aversion to being gay. My parents raised me to be accepting of everyone, and I believe they would be totally okay with me being gay or bi or pan or ace or whatever the hell else. I don't know if I'm in a state of denial or if I just genuinely have no idea.

I guess I have a few questions. I've never experienced a crush, I think. But how do you know if it IS a crush? How do you know you're sexually attracted to a person if you've never felt attraction before? How do I know how to identify it if or when it happens? Secondly, could it just be that my sexual orientation hasn't "kicked in" yet? Or is it possible that I'm asexual? And lastly, how can you be sure without experimenting? I know it sounds like a silly question, but I don't mean it just for LGBT+ people. I mean it for anyone who isn't ace. How do you know you're straight or gay or bi or pan or something else, what have you, without being with a person, even if it's just a kiss?

I think what I'm trying to say is, how do you KNOW? Thanks in advance for any advice.

Hello! Those are important questions and I am not surprised you're thinking a lot about all this.

Unfortunately, I don't think there are any simple answers. These are very personal and individual issues based on people's perception of their own feelings and thoughts and I don't know how one would go about generalizing them.

How do you know you have a crush on someone? When you think you have. Sorry I can't give you a better definition, but I really genuinely think it's different for everyone. When I had my biggest crush, the whole room seemed to light up when that person was there. Every little accidental physical contact felt special and meaningful. My thoughts revolved around the person nearly all the time and I saved things like a shirt button or a chewed pencil as relics. It was beyond healthy and I certainly hope it isn't the same way for everybody.

How do you know what sexual orientation you have? Well, I guess you look at whom you are attracted to and what kind of people and images populate your fantasies and then you try to match that to a given concept. You could also find out that there is no word for what you identify as and go with "I am just me".

Honestly, I don't quite understand why categories are so important. I think they're oversimplified and create an illusion of uniformity where there's actually just a multitude of different experiences which can't really be compared because we can't know whether the next person feels like we do. I mean, "straight" people aren't attracted to all the same individuals, are they? One women might think Brad Pitt is totally hot and the next won't even want to look at his face on a magazine cover.

I am confident you will find out how you fit into the crazy world of sexuality in time. It might take a while, though, and if you need a label for yourself right now, how about "questioning"?

Sunshine says some great things here, so I only have one extra thing to say That's to address the point about "most gay people say something like ...", because I don't think it's actually true. I know it's a narrative that we hear in the world pretty frequently, but it's absolutely not the only common story for how people discover or grow into their own non-straight sexuality. I'm not sure if there are even any useful, reliable numbers for this, but going anecdotally (from a big number, not, say, 3 friends), there are considerable numbers of non-straight people who don't fit that mould. I'd guess we hear that particular narrative more strongly because it can be used as a kind of evidence for the "born this way" "we don't choose our orientations" arguments against bigotry.

For sure, there's a good number of the "always felt I was different" folk, And there's plenty of folk with a different kind of story: just because someone doesn't feel like the first kind is their own story, that doesn't mean they might not be queer or they're less queer or less "legitimately" queer. There are not-straight people whose stories are "it never occured to me I was q/l/b/g until I had a crush on someone of my own gender in my late teens, and it was a total surprise"; "I was straight and had great relationships and then I met my same-sex now-partner in my mid-twenties and they rocked my world like woah and everything changed"; "I was in GSA all through school and I always thought I was a straight ally until I finally figured out that I wasn't straight and ohhh there was a reason I'd been so into GSA"; and many more.

I understand it can feel frustrating or disconcerting if you're unsure of a thing about yourself that it seems like many people around you are sure about in their own selves, especially if you've been thinking about it for some time. But it makes sense that you're still unsure when you haven't yet experienced the attractions that would give you that information, and you're very, very far from being alone or odd in that. There's no manual that can give you the answer to what your orientation is (as simpler as that would be, sometimes!): the answer lies in whichever range of people you'll experience attractions towards. If you haven't experienced any or many of those attractions yet, then your orientation is like the open, unwritten pages of a book, and you're right there with pen and ink poised to write it as it happens.

And, an extra bonus thing here: out of all the people around you who seem to be sure, a not-insignificant number will discover in the future that their orientation is broader, or different, or has shifted, than what they now experience it as.