A+ Roundtable: Internalized Homophobia and Other Endearing Forms of Low-Key Self-Hatred

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Internalized homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, lesbophobia, misogyny, and all the rest of it is a motherfucker! We get feedback from readers asking for us to “talk about” this somehow very frequently, and it’s been one of the most difficult things for us to accomplish. In part this is because sometimes when readers ask that, it seems like they’re imagining that by virtue of being staff at a professionally gay magazine, we must have figured out how to overcome this phenomenon and we’ve totally exorcised all our internalized stuff, and can teach others to do the same. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as you will find out in this roundtable, but hopefully our experiences can be helpful or affirming in some way!

Laneia, Executive Editor

This is so hard to talk about! I’ve recently realized that my internalized homophobia plays out mostly during sex. I didn’t know I was gay when I was younger, but I did know that seeing women topless in movies made me feel weird and that I loved it. I thought this made me a pervert, to be honest — and not because anyone specifically said so! I just gathered that this was the case. When I was living as a heterosexual person and having sex with men, I put my own feelings and desires on the back burner — actually no, I buried them in Earth’s core — and let the guys do whatever they wanted, and did whatever they told me to do or whatever I thought would make them like me the most. The only pleasure I got out of sex was knowing that I’d turned someone on and impressed them somehow. I was good at heterosexual sex in that way. I started when I was young and had lots of practice and read lots of teen magazines and watched plenty of movies, so I knew what I was doing. I was used to sex being a performance where nothing turned me on (except my own imagination) and I was there for his entertainment.

So now when it comes to lesbian sex — the kind of sex I actually want to have and really love — I choke. I (still!) feel like I don’t really know what to do, but more importantly, I don’t know what I want or how to ask for it, because I’m (still!) not totally used to sex being something I could want. My internalized homophobia makes me somehow ashamed to admit that I want anything? This is so hard to talk about! If I don’t go through some pointed mental exercises beforehand, I’ll still perform sex the way I did when I was living as a heterosexual, which is TERRIBLE! For everyone!

So I don’t have a problem talking about my job or this community or A-Camp — I actually like the confrontational underpinnings of talking openly about queerness and our community — and the only reason it can be hard to say “my wife” is because it makes me feel old, but the one thing that does trip me up is being honest with myself and Megan when it’s just the two of us. Like I’m still afraid of being a lesbian. That is really sad and this is really hard to talk about!

Rachel, Managing Editor

For a long time I didn’t think I really dealt with internalized biphobia, at least not in a way that was really affecting me. Partly this was because I think I had a very specific idea of what I imagined internalized biphobia to look like based upon what I saw externalized biphobia as looking like from non-bi people — I didn’t think I was “not really queer,” I didn’t think of myself as a faker or greedy or untrustworthy. Sure, I hated myself in kind of a constant lowgrade way, but who doesn’t? And besides, I wasn’t one of those bisexuals where it was like, a whole thing; it wasn’t a big DEAL or anything. (If that internal monologue sounds, itself, like internalized biphobia, you are not wrong, my friend!)

It’s only been fairly recently, after starting to look more intentionally at my relationship history and failures and the behaviors and beliefs I learned from my family of origin, that suddenly it felt like a lot of waving red flags came into focus for me around this. I realize now how many dynamics I had with other people were really unhealthy, and how I didn’t see them as that at the time because of my internalized biphobia — I thought that was natural for me or someone like me, and all that I could reasonably expect or should be allowed to want or have.

Suddenly I felt acutely aware of how often I was someone that a girl fooled around with briefly while she was in the middle of a “straight girl” phase — because that was how she thought of me, as a “straight girl,” even though I was out, and she assumed I would safely never be interested in more than a hookup. Or how many girls that I had genuine feelings for were only interested in me late at night, at parties in the dark, or in texting me at midnight; the same girls were interested in actually dating — you know, during daylight hours, in public — other girls, usually lesbians. And how when those things happened, I didn’t even feel affronted or angry; I just accepted it. Like oh, of course; why wouldn’t they. Why would anyone want me as anything other than a friendly hookup buddy — you know, a sexually available but emotionally undemanding fun time? When I was in long-term relationships, I often felt like my partners (who were, generally, not bisexual) were making the noble sacrifice of being with me in spite of my sexual orientation, like it was something they were charitably choosing to look past or make peace with. In my interactions with those partners, I like to think I was fairly unapologetic about being bisexual; at the same time, I wouldn’t have had to make a point of being unapologetic if there wasn’t an underlying implication that some apology was necessary. Despite this, I stayed in these relationships for a very long time! And on some level I agreed with those partners — I have a blurry memory of one of them trying to convince me that we should date, that we would be good together, and how I kept repeating “no, you should be with a real girl, eventually you’re going to want a normal girl.” “Do you mean a straight girl?” he asked. I did, I think, mean that.

One of the hardest ways this has shown up for me — and honestly even talking about it makes my teeth hurt it’s so uncomfortable! — is when I’ve dealt with advances, particularly unwanted ones, from other women. I was in a long-term monogamous relationship with a man for, oh, 5-6 years. During that time I was of course harassed by virtually countless men, but there were also not infrequent instances where other women — often friends or acquaintances, often in a place of questioning their sexual orientation, often when drinking — would make a move or start kissing or groping me. Every time I felt almost paralyzed with shame and self-loathing in a way that I never was when men did the same; I felt sure that I must have done something to lead them on or think I wanted that, and that the whole interaction was my fault. I also felt like I couldn’t tell my partner because he would (I imagined) be angry and hurt and assume the same thing about me I did about myself, that I had somehow instigated something or cheated. Even though all these people knew I was in a monogamous relationship and I knew objectively I had done literally nothing to invite it, on some level I think I believed about myself that consent or autonomy over my own body didn’t apply to me in the same way as it did to other people because I was openly bi — that just by existing, or having any level of interaction or relationship with other people, I was letting them know I was open to sleeping with them.

Ahhh just thinking about it makes me want to take an hour-long shower and never speak to anyone ever again!

Which is the worst part — the fear that I was somehow inviting this kind of thing from other people in a way that was unintentional but still felt extremely my fault led me to not want to be around other people at all, and avoid those kinds of social gatherings and friendships with other people altogether! When I think one of the best and maybe only ways of overcoming internalized stuff is to really engage with community and have connections with other queer people who see who you are and love you for it! I hate how our internalized stuff encourages us to isolate ourselves and treat ourselves and others poorly!

Riese, Editor-in-Chief

It was internalized misogyny that prevented me from realizing I was gay for so long and it was internalized homophobia that stopped me from even considering homosexuality as an option. I grew up in a liberal feminist environment but it wasn’t enough, I guess. Even though I was told at home that women could do whatever men could do, I wasn’t always at home, and even the politics I learned from my parents didn’t always square up with the dynamics I witnessed between my parents. We heard something else out in the world, like how the media treated Marcia Clark and Anita Hill, how women deferred to men on TV, how magazine advice was about contorting yourself into appealing to men. But it was more than that — men wrote the books I read and men made the movies I loved. I remember when I was packing for boarding school and my Mom pointed out that I wasn’t bringing any books by women authors and I was like, “ugh stop being a feminist.” My favorite teachers and bosses were men. I had incredible female friends I loved dearly, and we’d sit around late at night reading poems out loud to each other and they were all by men. I wanted to be a filmmaker or a writer and I wish it hadn’t taken so long for me to become the person I am now, whose bookshelves are probably 75% women authors.

Messages from the mainstream about lesbians and feminists being gross and women only mattering if men had validated them sunk real deep into me. Even “girl power” was all wrapped up in sex appeal. So that was the problem to start with — I didn’t appreciate or value women enough to consider a women-centric life, because who would ever choose a life without men when men are so important and made all the things! My relationships with men were often just terrifying exercises in compromise, but I thought the problem was with me, not them, I just needed to figure out how to be better at being a girl.

The more male friends I had, the more validated I felt as a person, and having a boyfriend was the most important accomplishment of all. Then I met Natalie, my best friend throughout college. She was beautiful and cool and also a proud feminist who valued her female friendships over boyfriends. I started taking classes, like Sociology of Gender, where I began to understand how I’d been manipulated by the media into believing certain things about feminism. Things began slowly shifting for me.

But then there’s the internalized homophobia / lesbophobia. In the progressive, left-leaning, open-minded town I grew up in and high school I went to, it was kinda cool to be bisexual but being a lesbian was the most uncool thing of all. Being a bisexual who actually wanted to date a woman wasn’t very cool either. My gay male friends made fun of lesbians, and I laughed along with them, wishing I was a gay man. Lesbians were unfashionable and ugly and hairy and political and annoying. It sadly took a terrible TV show (The L Word) to make me consider the possibility that you could be both gay and cool, and I guess the saddest part of that is that I so desperately needed to feel cool in order to feel okay not just about hooking up with girls, but being in relationships with them, too.

Like Laneia talks about in her bit, I still struggle in sexual relationships to express any wants or desires at all. Growing up, sex was a thing I enjoyed, but the point of it was to get a guy off, which I was very good at! It’s still hard for me to relax and let a girl just do things to me, or ask for things to be done. I’m 36! Female desire is just so stigmatized, especially in this context. Read “Appetites” by Carolyn Knapp and you’ll know what I’m talking about — there’s something that still feels so unseemly to me about wanting, desiring, etc.

For a long time, and sometimes even now, I’d feel a kick of insecurity and deep sense of inferiority in the moment I’m forced to come out to a stranger. I’d say “girlfriend” or “gay” or “website for LGBT women” and something inside me shrunk, feeling I’d just dismissed myself from the realm of mattering at all. I worried, and sometimes even now worry, about offending people by being physically affectionate to a girlfriend.

This is why I’ve dedicated my life to building a world where young women don’t grow up feeling the way I felt, like they’re “less than” because they’re female or gay.

I love the world I live in now, though. I’m proud to be a lesbian and to do the work I do and I think the queer community has a lot of faults but in general is way cooler than everybody else is. I was so wrong about everything when I was younger. I should’ve read more books by women.

Heather, Senior Editor

I understand now about the evangelical Christian church — Southern Baptists, specifically, is what I’m talking about — and how fucked up it is and how it has caused more damage and harm around the world than it could make up for in ten thousand years. But when I was a little kid and a big kid and a teenager and a young adult, I really did love Jesus. Not the Jesus of the pulpit or of Sunday School, but the Jesus who came alive when it was just me and my Bible and my ceaseless prayers.

I was a very sensitive child with a very tender heart who grew into a very sensitive adult with a very tender heart. If you believe in emotional empaths, then you will believe me when I tell you I am one. I experience other people’s pain. I have for as long as I can remember. If I know you even a little bit, I can often feel when you’re sad or anxious or angry or overwhelmed (especially when you’re in the same space as me), and even if you don’t tell me that’s how you feel or tell me why you feel that way I will probably know it. I feel it with animals too. And if I love you all I want to do is help you. My impulse is to take your pain away, even if that means taking it on as my own pain.

I have had a lot of therapy and I have read a lot of books and I have a much better handle on not literally taking on the world’s sadness now that I’m nearing 40, but it’s never just easy. I have always been this way, and the only person who ever understood that was Jesus. People were always pushing in on him with their sicknesses and sins and heartache and hopelessness, and he felt it like it was his very own emotions, and he did miracles for those people. He was radical in his kindness and in his politics. He believed the craziest shit and he wasn’t afraid to say it. My favorite thing he ever said was actually just a thing he read; it was from the prophet Isaiah and it’s how he announced his public ministry:

“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me… He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion — to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”

My life as a young person was brutal in a lot of ways. I needed my broken heart binded, and my main desire was to offer that kind of healing to other hurting people.

Which is why I absolutely positively could not no way no how be gay. Literally the only thing the churches throughout my life were convinced God couldn’t forgive was being gay. It was hammered at me, generally, when I was very young; and then, specifically, once I started walking like a tomboy and talking like a tomboy and dressing like a tomboy and never having a boyfriend. After I hit puberty, every pastor I ever had sat me down and talked to me about how it was: I needed to dress more femininely because I needed a boyfriend because people were talking. And I mean talking.

My internalized homophobia wasn’t about hating or fearing gay people; it was about the terror of being cut off from Jesus. Gay people didn’t love Jesus. And I super loved Jesus. And therefore I couldn’t be gay.

I tried everything, I really did. I bought feminine clothes. I wore jewelry and makeup. I said yes to dates with boys and even though I was mostly bored by them and often genuinely physically nauseous when I was trying to be intimate with them (emotionally or physically). I kept trying to make it work. I dated a jock, I dated a nerd, I dated a musician, I dated a mountain man, I dated a sensitive scholar, I dated someone who loved Jesus even as much as I did. When I saw women kissing on TV or in movies, I said “blech!” and turned it off or walked out, and if no one was around to hear me say “blech!” I repeated my disgust as many times as I could to anyone who would listen. There was an openly bisexual girl in my graduating high school class and despite being the friendliest person in Hall County, GA, I never once spoke to her. There was a lesbian on my college basketball team and I wouldn’t even change clothes in the locker room in front of her. I repeated gay jokes I’d heard, even though I didn’t think they were funny, and I even pretended to hate my own body so no one would get any ideas about my capacity to like the way a woman’s body looked.

It’s weird to type all that out now, when I truly believe being gay is the best thing that’s ever happened to me — but I was just a little scared and lonely kid with too many emotions and no idea what to do with them. If only Tumblr had existed when I was in middle school! Fan fiction would have been my emotional vessel and my internalized homophobia would have been eradicated in an afternoon!

Yvonne, Senior Editor

There are obvious instances of internalized homophobia I’ve experienced fairly recently and it’s like wow, ok, I thought this shitshow was over. Like when my grandparents’ celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary a couple years ago and my extended family threw them a huge, fancy party. I was finally comfortable enough to bring my partner Gloria with me to the party and introduce her as my partner to all my aunts, uncles, and cousins at the party. I was nervous but I did it and everyone was nice and welcoming to her! We were having fun at the party until Gloria reached out to hold my hand and I swiftly moved my hand away, without missing a beat and exactly how I use to do as a closeted teen when I was out in public with my secret high school girlfriend. It’s like I had practice! Gloria was really upset and hurt that I didn’t want to hold her hand at the dinner table but I felt so overcome with shame, I wanted to hide. My relatives and family friends had never witnessed any PDA from me so I felt like gay PDA would shock them, that they would gossip about me instead of focusing on celebrating my grandparents. I was also worried that I, a gay daughter and granddaughter, would look bad on the behalf of my parents and my grandparents in front of their guests, like I was bringing dishonor to the family. As I examined these feelings on the drive home, it was a unsettling feeling, one that I thought I had conquered years ago but was I staring straight at as an out lesbian, who professionally writes about LGBT rights and issues.

Then there is the deep-seated, even more insidious internalized homophobia that I’m just now realizing that has fucked with me for so long, I don’t even know how to process it. Because I discovered my sexuality when I was a closeted teen, internalized homophobia is all twisted up with how I view sex and has manifested into my present day sex life. As a teen, I was so good at lying and sneaking around with my then girlfriend so we wouldn’t get caught making out or having sex. We would make out in school bathrooms after school or in my car in secluded parking lots, and have sex in my room when she slept over because my parents thought she was just my friend or in her room when her parents weren’t there. I constantly looked over my shoulder and stifled myself because I had to compose myself in a split second if someone walked in or heard us (which, indeed, happened a few times.) We lied and lied and hid and hid and I had a real fear of getting caught and being found out that I was gay. I didn’t want to be gay, I didn’t want to be deviant; I was a perfect student, I never got in trouble, I was always the “good girl.” I think these experiences really have shaped the way I feel during sex now. I still carry a deep-seated shame from finding pleasure in sex with another woman so I stop myself from fully having fun and being present with my partner during sex. It’s like everything’s fine and great one moment and then in the next, I freeze up and zone out and then I get squirmish and then I ruin the mood and I have to stop. It’s a giant bummer and something I’m still working on!

Erin, Staff Writer

What if I was just like, “Hmmm, can’t relate.” Ha. No, it’s true that I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m fine with myself and fine with who other people are and want everyone except terrible people to thrive (and also know that is coming from a place of privilege, like having a supportive family, having access to a community, having a gender identity and presentation that happens to match the cis-heteronormative norms laid before us all, etc., etc.), but no one is ever just always completely without any biases. I would say the one I’m most relieved I knocked out was this idea that I didn’t want to be one of “those lesbians”, as in a didn’t want to be aligned with the stereotypes often (at least at one point in time) associated with lesbians: frumpy sex-less buzzkills. Oh, you don’t want people to think you’re “too radical” because you LOVE THE ENVIRONMENT AND WANT THE BEST FOR IT, FOR EXAMPLE, or that you’re “unfashionable” because MAYBE SOMEONE ELSE’S EXPECTATIONS OF HOW YOU SHOULD LOOK AREN’T FOR YOU, or that you’re “boring” because FOSTERING INTIMACY OUTSIDE OF THE REALM OF SEX IS ALSO HEALTHY? Good for you, you dumb bitch! It’s hard being a person, but it’s especially hard being a person who feels set up to fail, and so I get why it felt necessary at one point to make sure I was the opposite of that. But I am so, so glad I was able to let that go and embrace an actually very important lineage of people who made it easier for me to do whatever I want today. Love you boos.

Molly Priddy, Staff Writer

Internalized homophobia was all I knew when I realized I was gay. I grew up super Catholic, and there wasn’t even a question about if gayness was good or bad.

It was bad.

That was my outlook for a long time, and it made me really hate pieces of myself, you know, those pieces that would feel my stomach squirm and my heart thud a little faster when a set of clear, blue lady eyes winked at me or when I watched a love scene and only cared that the woman was happy (this is still true, though for different reasons).

By the time I allowed myself to be comfortable with being a lesbian, I was coming to terms with how hard it is to be queer in a heteronormative world. Life wasn’t fair. I couldn’t walk around holding hands with a woman without drawing sneers and stares and yells, but my straight friends didn’t have a care in the world, messily making out with dudes in public and getting nothing but applause and whistles in return. It was bullshit.

The beautiful part of it all, though, is once I got over this extremely me-centric way of thinking and opened up to the possibility that — gasp! — people can form their own feelings and narratives and sexualities and it has absolutely nothing to do with me, I chilled out a lot. My own internalized homophobia also chilled out, because once you accept that other people can be whoever they are, you also realize the same is true for yourself.

KaeLyn, Staff Writer

The last bastion of internalized homophobia that I’ve contended with or, at least, am actively acknowledging and working on is femmephobia. I identified as femme for a while in college when it seemed like everyone was doing this butch/femme dichotomy thing. And it’s true, I was attracted to butch women, a lot. I moved away from identifying as femme, though, because those super traditional butch/femme roles can be steeped in heteronormative misogyny and, like, I wasn’t down for those gender roles.

I came back around to femme identity eventually when I realized I could define it for myself and it had nothing to do with anyone else. And I thought I did it. I was done. :wipes hands: I overcame femmephobia. So, uh, NOT TRUE. I’ve always been attracted to people who play with and gender expression, whether that’s a stone daddy butch or a glittery femme boi or a stud with swagger or a 90’s alt rocker in black eyeliner. I used to say, though, that my primary attraction was to masculinity. I only realized in the last few years or so that a) I was not telling the truth and b) my lack of open attraction to feminine-presenting people was about my own internalized femmephobia. KABOOM.

I didn’t think I was “gay enough” or “hot enough” or “queer enough” or whatever, as a gendernormative feminine woman, and thus I couldn’t allow myself to view other femme women as hot. WTF KAELYN. I was complicit in my own femme erasure feelings. I don’t know how I just let this live inside me, but it is 100% about how I felt about myself and how I saw myself in relation to queer identity.

What I’d tell you now is that I’m attracted to confidence regardless of gender, which is really the gawd honest truth. And guess what? Masculinity does not equal confidence. I KNOW THAT’S OBVIOUS, but I guess I had this festering internalized femmephobia living so down deep in me that I have to express it plainly. Femininity can be powerful and sexy and can be completely outside of the male gaze. And I have a huge femme-4-femme crush on my own femme-ness and yours. I SEE YOU, FEMME.

Alyssa Andrews, Cartoonist

Where. To. Begin.

For one, I grew up in hospitals. Beyond classic feelings of internalized homophobia, I was beyond trapped in being treated like (and ultimately believing that) I shouldn’t be sexual at all. Once I broke that barrier, the last thing I could really come to grips with was that the sexuality I’d developed would be considered another thing that was “wrong” with me — yet another thing that people who loved me would have to put up with in having me in their lives.

Every step of my personal growth has been a shedding of some sort of internalized bullshit. Most of it rooted in this fear of being “too much” of anything. I once overheard my mom telling my brother that she was okay with my being gay, because it’d be hard for men to be attracted to me with all they’d have to put up with. It sucks how much things like that stick even when you know it’s gross and untrue.

I’ve had a hard time taking up space. I’ve had a hard time doing what I want and not taking on the emotions others may have about my choices and actions — feeling like I need to be sure not to ever make things harder on other people, as I’m hard enough to deal with already. But, babes, that is WAY. TOO. MUCH. to live up to. It’s also bullshit.

So, I guess the light at the end of the tunnel is that I’m thirty years old. I’m committed to forever working to remember that I’m nobody’s burden, and (regardless of how anybody wants to try and make me feel about it) I’m way too gay to be anything but a raging homosexual.

Mey Rude, Staff Writer

I have a hard time feeling like I really belong in women-only spaces. Or even in spaces that are for women and non-binary people and trans men. A big part of me will always see myself as a man in a dress who’s forcing himself into the women’s spaces. To be clear, I don’t think of any other trans women this way, just me. But I feel like I’m taking up this spot that a “real” woman should be taking. I feel like my voice isn’t as valid as other women’s voices. I feel like my voice and actions are seen as more violent and sexual and aggressive and, well, manly.

I do sometimes feel that by bringing a penis into women’s spaces I’m triggering some women. I feel like when they hear me compliment them in a voice that sounds like a man’s voice, they might wince or shudder. I’m afraid I’ll be seen as a sexual predator whenever I go into a women’s bathroom or whenever I’m wearing revealing clothes or especially when I get turned on in a women’s space. I get really self aware about how my body reacts to that.

It takes a lot, and I mean a lot to make me feel safe in women’s spaces, and that’s not really the fault of the women in them. It’s because of the baggage I bring into that space. In my mind I’m making people uncomfortable and that makes me uncomfortable and then that makes others uncomfortable. I’m getting better, and most of the women I know are great at making me feel the opposite of all this. I know I’ll get there one day and just be able to feel like one of the girls.

Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor

I have something terrible to admit and I hope you won’t judge me too harshly for it. I’ve written a lot about my extended struggle with internal biphobia when I first realized that I was attracted to women. I spent years hating myself for being unsure about who I was, how I might label myself and what that might mean for my future. It was nothing short of a revelation when I emerged from the other side giving zero fucks about what to call myself, reasoning that I’d just live my life and the rest of the world could fucking deal with it.

I’d love to say I got through it all without carrying any of that baggage along with me, but you know what? I’m gonna be honest with you: I noticed a LOT of it when an ex girlfriend started dating a man.

It sounds terrible, right? I found myself wondering if she’d ever taken me seriously, if she’d ever really wanted to end up with me, if I’d just been wasting my time – things I would be miserable to hear that someone was thinking about me. I caught myself completely invalidating another person’s sexuality based on the gender of their current partner – something I personally have extremely strong feelings about. I had to splash some cold water on my face and take a long, hard look in the mirror regarding all of this. If I spend this much time justifying my own sexuality to myself, how is it even possible that I could somehow be so dismissive of someone else’s, even someone I know and love? WHY AM I CARRYING THIS AROUND WITH ME DESPITE KNOWING BETTER??? That’s PREPOSTEROUS.

Anyway here I am, the Worst Bisexual. Am I fired?

Tiara, Staff Writer

I remember talking casually to my Form 1 (7th grade) class about really liking this girl in primary school who actually was my academic rival. They called me ‘LESBIAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNN’ and all I really knew about that term was that it was a bad word. This was during the height of the Anwar Ibrahim scandal in Malaysia where the Prime Minister at the time tried to defame his former Deputy by claiming he was guilty of sodomy. I didn’t quite understand what it was — nobody ever really talks about sex in Malaysia — but somehow I picked up the notion that anything that wasn’t straight wasn’t OK. (Hell, even being ‘straight’ wasn’t really OK because having a sexuality wasn’t OK, but if you’re gonna have one make it hetero and wait till marriage.)

I had a lot of crushes on random students, mostly seniors, in my all-girls school, but I couldn’t come to terms with identifying as any flavour queer. I was a major radio listener (mainly Singaporean stations like Perfect 10 98.7FM and Power 98FM) and would send song requests with dedications to favourite people, almost always prefaced with ‘I’m not gay BUT’. I found one of my old teenage online journals some time ago, a gothy version of LiveJournal, where I talked about things that fascinated me: ‘female-female friendships’ was one of them. I was able to write long screeds about how I identified more as ‘androgynous’, loved Mx as an honorific, and wished ‘geek’ was a gender, but my sexuality? I could barely acknowledge that I had one. I thought I was pretty much asexual. Sex just seemed so messy and pointless. I have better things to do.

The year I turned 16 I became very involved with Channel [V], an Asian music TV station that was a competitor to MTV. This started when they picked my song request (not to a school senior this time; I was rejected from an exchange opportunity and wanted to cheer myself up) and called me up to be part of the live show; I was so enamoured that I did what I did at the time with everything I was a fan of and made a fan website for them. They LOVED it and started making me their Big Name Fan, having me be a regular on the show (and other shows on the channel, even) and corresponding with me on the regular. One of their VJs, Asha, quickly became a close friend and penpal, and I was smitten… except I couldn’t acknowledge it at the time.

Dreams that were subtly erotic that I didn’t understand. Very confused fanfic with weird metaphors. Long, long journal entries about how Asha was the coolest person ever and how she was so nice yadda yadda yadda. I couldn’t shut up about her.

Then Channel [V] had a major restructuring. Asha disappeared. I saw her pop up on other channels but I had no way of contacting her. I was heartbroken. But again, I couldn’t acknowledge the heartbreak for what it is. Everyone else (mainly people who followed me online) could see that I had fallen deeply in love with her, and maybe if I recognise that it was a crush very early on I could have saved myself some grief. But I had these strong feelings for her, I missed her terribly, I was probably one step away from being a scary stalker. I had barely any handle on my emotions, I couldn’t reconcile them, couldn’t acknowledge the truth.

Nine months later, out of the blue, Asha got back in touch with me again. I was elated. We resumed contact — and that’s when I had to finally realise that not only was I Not Straight, I was also in love with the woman. I was very scared opening up to her — I had a test run with my mum and she said if I told her she’d run away. But I steeled myself and came out to her (probably the first person I properly came out to) — and she thought it was very sweet. She was straight (and also I was a minor still & there’s a significant age gap so it was best that she didn’t indulge my feelings! Not that I would have recognised that at the time!) but fully supported me. Wished me a wedding with a lovely lady and lots of fine china, even.

It’s been 15 years since that coming-out conversation. I’m more comfortable with being queer (well obviously, I write for this site) and Asha and I are still close friends. Sometimes I jokingly suggest she marry me for visa purposes now that I’m in a country where marriage equality is a thing, and she just laughs. I feel sorry for my teenage self, struggling so much to deal with the truth of her desires that she fumbled onto every other way to explain them, make excuses for them. Maybe if my introduction to ‘lesbian’ wasn’t as a slur, wasn’t as a way to mock my first time expressing my latent desires, maybe if I wasn’t in a country where accusations of homosexuality were used as political power plays — maybe then my teenage self wouldn’t need to claim she was anything but who she was.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer

Whew, I can really relate to Yvonne’s story about moving her hand away from Gloria’s. I’m still getting used to the idea of letting my family see PDA between me and Brandi, but I also subconsciously try to hide that insecurity from Brandi because I don’t want to hurt her feelings. She recently met my Indian grandparents, and I’m not out to them yet, so the whole experience was just so anxiety-inducing. I was scared I’d slip up and say or do something #GAY and scared that Brandi would, too. And then I felt bad for putting Brandi in that situation even though she handled it so well.

Anyone who follows me on social media knows that I am basically always talking about being gay. Sure, sexuality doesn’t define you. And yet, sometimes when I’m meeting someone new, I have to fight the urge to be like “hi, my name is Kayla, I’m a lesbian, nice to meet you.” Because I hid who I was for so long (from myself, too!) due to internalized homophobia that now that I’m here and queer, I just wanna be a lesbian LOUDLY. When you don’t say something for so long, it can be so freeing to finally say it.

I still do struggle with internalized homophobia, and I think that surprises a lot of people I’m close with precisely because of the way I behave Online. But I struggle with the fact that I’m not out to an entire side of my family. And even though I’ve dated other girls before Brandi, she’s the first girlfriend to meet my parents and siblings, and it took me a while to be comfortable with how affectionate I was toward her around them. And like others have said in this roundtable, sometimes my internalized lesbophobia does get in the way of how I express—or don’t express—myself during sex.

Alexis, Staff Writer

Whoo buddy, what a question. So! Internalized homophobia is like the staple of my childhood. Like, black skin, brown eyes, black hair, internalized homophobia? That’s me!

So you know that quote by Nancy Napier, “Healing occurs in a spiral. We swing around again and again to the same issues, but at different turns of the same spiral. Each time we confront a similar feeling or reaction we have yet another opportunity to learn and to heal. Each time, we bring with us whatever new understanding we have gained since the last time we cycled through this particular difficulty.”? That’s how I feel about unlearning internalized hatreds.

I come back around to internalized homophobia when something queer happens around my family and my dad stays stock still and won’t look me in the eye. Before, I used to tell him about all the boys I liked. Then, I cried about how he’d never love me for being gay. And now, I just keep moving even though I’m uncomfortable. I’ll find someone in the room who will look me in the eye and listen. I let my dad stay stock still and I count the people who still love me as gay not in spite of my gayness but in addition to. Before, I started with my sister, my best friend. Now, I start with myself. There was working around the spiral to get to that.

The internalized transphobia is… harder. I used to explain to people that “as cis people, we are inherently transphobic. There is no way around that and we’ve got to do the work to get to a place where we’re more understanding and empathetic and stop fucking hurting people.” It would be one way for me to explain to the white people in my life how they are inherently racist, because, even though I don’t believe in explaining everything to every white person ever (because I love myself), I do believe that if I’m in a place where I really love these people and want them to love me to the best of their ability, I’ve got to make them aware of the work that needs to be done and make sure they hold themselves accountable or else I’m dippin. So, all that is to say, I would say, “because we’re cis, we’re inherently transphobic” so that I could be like, I’m not saying the work needs to be done because I’m better than you, I’m not, I’m saying it needs to be done so we don’t keep fucking each other up. But now? I don’t really think I’m cis. Which is really difficult for me to unpack and that’s connected to internalized transphobia. I’m never sure if nonbinary falls under trans (for some people it does, for some it doesn’t?) and though the ambiguity of the gender is what has me loving and feeling it in the first place, it’s hard for me to unpack what I’ve got in that regards just because I’m not 100% sure what it looks like. Like, black, I know what that looks like. I can unpack my antiblackness. Lesbian, pretty sure I’ve got an idea on that too. I can unpack my homophobia. Nonbinary? Feels like a totally unknown space except for what’s true to me, makes me feel like I’m constantly stepping on everyone’s toes even though I just want to get over to the other side and lean against the wall out of everybody’s way. I’m less comfortable talking about it, because I don’t know if I’m doing this wrong. That makes it harder to unpack.

I think I got distracted so I’m gonna try again. Growing up, I wasn’t sure when I came out, what that meant about being attracted to trans women or trans men. I didn’t know who to ask because there wasn’t anyone I was comfortable asking, and there wasn’t anyone I trusted enough to give me an answer that was right. Like, now, of course I know trans women are women and trans men are men. Of course there are people in the gender binary, outside the gender binary, and who don’t give a cat’s good kitty about the gender binary. Of course that’s true and they’ve always been here. It’s just I didn’t know it and back then, there was no one I knew who could’ve told me this truth. So much of my family and the people in my community were focused on body parts as the definition of gender and only in the strictest parts possible, that I didn’t even know how to properly go about figuring out which shit was really fucked up and what wasn’t, you know? And with trauma, it felt extra tricky. Like I knew there was something wrong with me, but was it a result of gender or sexuality or both or neither? Did not knowing mean I could make the right decisions in regards to gender and sexuality? Did that mean I could trust myself? If I couldn’t trust myself, who was someone I could trust to help me learn? And then with sexual assault and rape being kind of my only experience/education in intimacy (as I understood it back then), body parts were very important to me. Because I didn’t know growing up when you see a person, your first thought shouldn’t be if it’s going to hurt when they fuck you. That’s something I had to unlearn (and am still unlearning) and that comes along with internalized homophobia and transphobia. I’ve still got to work on calming down when I see people who aren’t men that I’m attracted to and not chastising myself for “sinning.” Same for when I think about the clothes I want to wear and how I present myself to everyone but my family. I thought if I could control the language around people’s bodies I could control the conversation their bodies had with mine. I thought if I pared down my body to the simplest, least offensive terms possible, my body couldn’t hurt or betray me anymore.

Back to the spiral thing, most of the unlearning just comes from absorbing new information, listening to my body this time, and going back and integrating that understanding with things from my past and working to use that understanding to better shape my actions in the present and future. I try to be kinder about the learning thing and forgive myself for not knowing any better back then. I repeat what Dr. Maya Angelou said: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” I didn’t know better back then but now I do, so I’ll act accordingly.

Valerie Anne, Staff Writer

If you had asked my teenage self if she was a lesbian and/or feminist, she would have assumed you were actively trying to insult her, and would have gotten very defensive. Which is hilarious since now I’m an out and proud lesbian/queer/feminist/killjoy/misandrist/nerd. But back then I was trying to hard to fight the thing I feared was inside me that all I wanted to do was blend in, and in my very Catholic school, that involved being straight, obedient, and, turns out, misogynistic. I always had a flair for the feminist — I remember once in 8th grade protesting the fact that that only the boys were ever asked to volunteer to bring the milk crates down to the cafeteria on gym days, after we ate lunch in our classroom. My teacher just laughed at me; boys do the heavy lifting, girls don’t. I also remember being upset when they told the girls they weren’t allowed to use the basketball court anymore, because the boys were “too rough” to play alongside the girls. They were not playing well with others, so we were punished for it. Even though we had a basketball team, same as them. That’s just the way it is. And even at 12, I knew it wasn’t fair.

But even then if you had called me a feminist I would have scoffed at you. “Feminist” was a dirty word. “Feminist” implied “lesbian” which was an even dirtier word. Feminists were women who hated men and looked like men. Feminists were angry and loud and impossible to have a conversation with. I didn’t want to be associated with either word.

I remember once when I was a young teenager, maybe 15, I walked through a fair with my dad. We stopped at one of the carnival-style games and played a round, and then the short-haired girl working the booth, who wasn’t too much older than me, smiled at me a lot, and gave me a prize even after I bombed the game. My dad nudged me with his elbow on our way to the parking lot and said, “I think she liked you.” “What?!” “She was flirting with you!” His tone didn’t give away any negative feelings on the matter (and having the hindsight of knowing how chill my father would be about my coming out, I doubt there was anything but teasing because ANYONE was flirting with me, not specifically because it was a girl) but my immediate reaction was a resounding, “EW!!” It was the way I had been trained to react to such things, by my mother, by my peers, by my school, by my church. Not always through explicit teachings (though sometimes at school/church) but by their own reactions and the way they spoke. The fact that I still remember this story so vividly should be clue #1 that “EW!!” was not actually how I felt about that situation.

I still feel things like this creep up now and then. I’ll see someone eyeing my undercut and immediately start talking about how long the other half of my hair is, or someone will ask if I’d ever shave the full thing and I’ll say that I wouldn’t as if they need reassuring that I will never be “too butch.” And it’s not something I think or say about other people; I dig it when girls shave their heads, or rock a short ‘do. But my whole life I’ve been afraid of seeming too “butch” and I don’t know if it’s internalized homophobia or internalized misogyny or both or what. Before I came out it made a lot of sense — every time someone told me my brother and I looked alike, I panicked. I put on a leather jacket in college and my friend told me it made me look butch, her tone implying she meant it as a compliment, but I never wore that jacket again. I don’t know if I was afraid to look “like a boy” because I was hyperaware that the feelings I was starting to have toward girls were the kinds only boys were supposed to have (according to The Church), and I was afraid that people seeing masculinity in me would reveal the queer feelings, too? But why do I feel that way now? Why didn’t I fight back when someone told me I didn’t have a “butch energy” as if it was a compliment? Why did I take it as a compliment? That was years ago, but would I react the same way now?

I don’t know, there’s so much. I’m STILL working out trying to figure out how I actually feel; I finally realized last year that I don’t hate dressing up, I just hate wearing dresses, and that that’s okay. I’m finally starting to realize that the only “right” way to be a lesbian or a woman is to figure out how to best be myself, because I do happen to be a lesbian and a woman, and therefore the truest form of me will also happen to be one of the many correct ways to be a lesbian and a woman. And so I’ll continue to try to suss out which of my feelings have been programmed into me and need to be flushed out. Because I do truly believe that anyone of any gender can dress and act and wear their hair however they want to, and they should be able to label those outfits or actions or styles however they want to, and I’m not sure why I’m the last person I apply those same allowances to.

Reneice, Staff Writer

I’ve never thought about this which means it’s highly likely that I’m avoiding thinking about it at all costs because there’s no way it’s never come up in my life before. I am incredibly afraid of showing my ass and so tend to be silent about/around things that I haven’t done the work of unpacking.

In terms of internalized homophobia as a black queer woman, that’s a beast I battle daily. I recently watched the episode in the reboot of Queer Eye that centers on a black man and I was squirming in discomfort the entire episode because he exuded so much internalized homophobia it made me want to cry. He was so concerned with looking, sounding, or being “too gay” and it made me want to turn away because it felt like facing a demon. I’d been just like him for a very long time. I identified as bisexual rather than a lesbian for years when I first started coming out despite knowing that I wasn’t attracted to men because it felt “safer.” There was still “hope” that I could end up with a man and not have to outwardly present as gay, just keep it my little secret. It was wrong on so many levels, especially because the practice of using the label of bisexuality as a shield is incredibly damaging to the bisexual population. I still carry a lot of guilt around that. I did it because I hated the idea that I was “fully gay.” My community, church, family, black culture, all of it taught me that homosexuality was to be shunned and vilified. It took a long time to work through that. It would be naive to say I’m not still working through it. I feel like crying now so I think this is where I’ll stop.

Laura M, Staff Writer

I identify as bisexual, but I find myself making value judgments about other bi people’s partner’s genders… often. Specifically, when bi women date men, my reaction is usually, “gee, what a waste.”

On the one hand, I feel sort of unrepentant about this impulse, because I find misandry both cathartic and very funny? But on the other hand, I’m pretty sure this sentiment springs from a place of internalized biphobia. Like, “pick a side already, and it better be the side I picked,” because I want other people to validate the choices I’ve made for myself. That’s a shitty reason to say hurtful, judgey things, and it’s antithetical to some of my core beliefs as a activist to hold bi women to this weird standard where they don’t have the freedom to date people based on gender.

But I still do it.