When did you know you were straight/gay/whatever?

I never really considered it an option, I guess, or a decision I had to make but then I grew up in an earlier time. I “went steady” with a boy in 5th grade but there was no sex involved. My girlfriend and I played fantasy games of being teenagers and there were fantasy boyfriends involved. We grew up on farms so there were also lots of outdoor physical activities like ice skating, swimming, tree climbing and bike riding without supervision so I never felt particularly trapped in a gender role. Even in high school, I wasn’t particularly aware of there being gay students although it later turned out that two of my best guy friends have been lifelong partners.

I guess most of my awareness of homosexuality when growing up was from movies and fiction. Now, I live in a very gay friendly city and most of my male friends are gay in addition to my having some lesbian couple\ friends. Ain’t no big thing but my awareness wasn’t really there in a positive or negative sense growing up.

Honestly, it never clicked. I was straight identifying in the beginning because it made sense, then gay because it made sense, but now who cares? I never “realized” who or what I was, I just kinda did it, because that’s who I really am.

I haven’t had a “click” experience regarding my sexuality.
I don’t feel I am one or the other.
I love to feel one with the person I am with.

I knew I was different early, and when I was nine, I had an experience that made it obvious that I was gay. At that age and in that time, I did not know the word gay. I just knew that I was different.

I knew about 5th grade when I fell in love with a towhead boy named Mark.

Around ten or eleven when certain things specific to girls got me interested.

@Hawaii_Jake I knew the word “gay” because kids used it as an insult as early as 3rd grade, but I don’t think even then many understood what they meant when they said it. To me it was another way of saying “girly”. It was only later that I connected the word to what I was feeling.

@Demosthenes I never heard anyone referred to as gay or demeaned for that, or anything until probably middle school by my peers. Honestly it really took me by surprise and I had a talk with my mom about it, as I was pretty upset about my friends (family friends) being considered ‘fags’ or ‘homo’s’ by the kids at school. It was one of those moments you never forget, being so disappointed in the human race.

When I was born.

@ragingloli I thought you were hatched.

@Demosthenes That word was not in the vocabulary of a child at the age of nine in a small town in Oklahoma in the late 1960s. The word sissy was in use, and I was frequently called that. Fag came later.

Born, hatched, same thing. Both ways you violently burst out of your vessel, leaving it completely destroyed.

I have always liked boys but didn’t really crush on any until middle school.
Back then, I wasn’t really thinking about sex/sexuality.
Later on, as a few friends and family members came out it wasn’t a huge surprise but then I didn’t (and still don’t) think about their sexuality much.

Even as a kid and thought girls had cooties, I secretly always thought they were pretty, I just knew I liked girls over guys, but never really started chasing till my late teens early twenties because I was more of a motor head, I lived for off road dirt bikes.

I’m mostly hetero, but I realized how fluid my orientation is, when I was about 25.

When I got a hard on seeing the new English teacher.
I was around 9 or 10 & it felt natural until she asked me to hand books around to my classmates.
Then it felt awkward, very very awkward!

Exactly what @janbb said. I thought many boys were cute. Had a crush on half the boys in school! I never felt attracted to girls. There was no “click” moment for me either.

When I was little “gay” referred to being happy. I also had a baby sitter who was named Gay.

I was sweet on a girl in the third grade! (In high school she was Midvale, Idaho’s, Junior Miss.)
When I was 13 I spent a day hanging out with a girl I knew in the first and second grade. At 13, she was drop dead gorgeous and had a figure that some 18 year olds would kill for! I was stupefied! (When she was in high school, she was Boise, Idaho’s, Junior Miss.)
It seems as though every girl I ever associated with while in elementary school later became Junior Miss or a rodeo princess.

What were you stupefied about?

Her beauty and outstanding attributes.

First time I had my jeans off with a girl. There was no going back.

When I was about 7 I realized that there was something special about girls. I felt no attraction whatsoever to other boys.

@Demosthenes When did you know you were straight/gay/whatever?

Relatively recently I became firmly whatever.

Not so much a wtf but who gives a.

I had long suspected that interest in the binary 1 and/or 0 ( for the mathematically inclined) would dwindle with the strutting of the stuff.

Just the other day

When I was 3 I had a crush on one of the teens in the neighborhood. I remember I would start clapping and jumping up and down when I saw him, because I couldn’t hide my happiness. I also was a member of the David Cassidy Fan Club when I was about 4.

I never heard the word “gay” until I was at least 10. When I was 9, we lived outside San Francisco and there were two men who shared an apartment next door. My mom and the superintendent were making a comment to each other about the two men living together, but to me, it wasn’t anything other than roommates like Felix and Oscar the Odd Couple.

I had heard the word “sissy” but I thought of a boy who was a sissy as being one who cried like a girl, nothing more.

So I never had a realization of being heterosexual, I didn’t know anything different until I was about 11 or 12. If I had to guess, I first might have learned about “gays” from a TV show like All in the Family or Jeffersons or one of them that discussed popular topics of the time.

@jca2…..the other day 4 year old Cooper walked up to me, leaned on me.and said “I think I love you.” LOL!

When I was very young we lived in New York and in elementary school we didn’t talk about dating, it was a more grown up thing that high school kids did in my mind. At that age I didn’t know about homosexuality really. At 9 years old my parents moved us all to Maryland. In Maryland the kids talked about having boyfriends and girlfriends, and it was odd for me. Growing up there was more than once I was doing something I didn’t want to do or wasn’t really ready for. Like at one party in 6th grade the kids decided playing spin the bottle was a good idea. I did not want to do it, but that sounds up being the first time I kissed a boy. I kissed two boys that night. I was ahead in school, so I was very young for my grade.

My family always commented on the beauty of women, so it was normal to find women attractive.

Boys asked me out, and society was sending me the message that couples were heterosexual and I went along with it.

Kids around me did use words like fag, faggy, or faggot, but I associated it with being girly or being an asshole.

In my mid teens I was steady dating a boy and we started going out dancing in DC, many of the clubs were gay clubs, and that’s when I learned about being attracted to the same sex. My boyfriend, who was older than me, who already knew a few gay people, just said things like, “he likes men,” when he introduced me to a gay man he knew, but with zero judgment or malice. That was a good set up for me not to have any judgement about it actually. My boyfriend set a good tone.

The idea of kissing a girl never disgusted me, but I wound up dating boys and now that I am older I definitely know I am straight. I don’t think about having sex with women, I never really did. When I watch a hetero couple having sex, I identify with the women, when I watch a lesbian or gay couple it’s not even much of a turn on to me really.

I think if a girl had made big advances on me when I was very young that maybe possibly I could have been bisexual, especially if I had lesbian examples in my life, I’m really not sure. I don’t feel lesbian at all though sitting here now. I don’t have any inclination to date or be intimate with a woman.

More than one gay man I know had very early gay sexual experiences, and I can understand why some people think being gay can be a choice or influenced by society. I do think some people know from a very early age and it’s like they are simply born that way. I also think there are people more open and fluid about their sexuality and early experiences heavily influence who they are attracted to sexually, and what feels normal and comfortable. I know probably a lot of people will disagree. I personally know more than one gay man who were as young as 8 when a teenage or adult man lured them into sexual behavior. Were they targeted because the older person could see the younger boy was gay, was the boy already knowing he was gay? Was the young boy unsure about sex altogether and the early experience influenced him? Some of the men don’t feel they were abused, and some of them do. Other gay men I know had very early experiences with boys very close to their age and more like a typical teenager experience.

I think maybe I didn’t think much about it because I naturally lined up with the norm in society, which was being straight. I can think of some sexual tension with one boy when I was about age 10, but I didn’t even know what it was. Once I was around age 14 I started thinking more about sex and assumed boys were who I would pair up with. I never was interested in dating any girls.