Nickname: LM
Born: August 26, 1985
Current Residence: Sacramento, California, USA
7/29/03: I'm pansexual and pangendered--bisexual and gender-neutral, if those terms work better for you--and biologically female. I've been queer since early 2000. Until recently I believed that it was not a choice, but reading the journal of this site's founder, Gayle Madwin, changed my mind. At first I was just pansexual, and then I suddenly discovered that I was in love with two of my friends. So now I'm poly too, and the three of us have been in an open triad for...well, pretty much about 3-4 months after I turned queer, so let's say August 2000? And late in 2003 I decided not to be exclusively female. So sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I'm male and sometimes I'm something else entirely.
My queer choice experience was not that of a conscious decision. It was years before I even realized I had made a choice. Since I did, I've done a lot of research on it, and that seems to me like the only *logical* conclusion that anyone could make. This is not to say that people who have come to other conclusions are being irrational or willfully ignorant or anything. I'm just saying that it seems like once I stepped over the line into conscious queerchoice, that was the only thing that continued to make sense for me.
I was 15 when I decided to be queer. It happened something like this: the year before, I became close friends with a gay man. Through him I met lots of really great queer people--lesbians, bisexuals, trannies, people without labels and people still sorting things out. Before I knew it, all of my friends were queer. I was the only one that was very adamantly straight. And I was, too. When people introduced me they would say, "This is LM. She's straight," right off the bat, because I was very concerned about people getting The Wrong Idea. I had been raised in a very homophobic environment, and although I never remember *hating* queers, I do remember thinking of them in terms of stereotypes, and thinking that intergender sex was really gross.
But then one day there I was in a room full of queers. And I thought, "Hey, maybe this means *I'm* queer. It'd sure make things a lot more fun for me if I was." But I struggled with it for a while. My friends were willing to help me figure things out, so I did experiments. I kissed a girl in public. I'd spend a day at the mall and check out girls and see if I got a physical response out of it. And lo and behold, before I knew it, I was queer.
I didn't believe my sexuality was a choice for a while, for many reasons, even after I'd heard Gayle's story. I asked myself, "Why would I choose to do something that would destroy my relationship with my family? Something that could affect my life negatively in so many ways?" But what I've realized now is that I'd already done that once before. When I was 12, I decided not to be Catholic, despite my family's deeply-held beliefs. I went out and became pagan even though I knew it would make my life quite a bit more difficult--and I did so because I knew it would make my life more *fulfilling,* if not more easy. So now I look at sexuality much like I do religion. It's something that can influence your life on many levels, for good or for bad, but if you choose the path that's best for you, all the hardship will be worth it.