Words and concept by Radha Rai; art by Julia Hopkin
Transcript
When I first discovered LGBT+ it was great! All these other people who think differently to everything else I see!
But when I started to learn about it, some things still didn’t add up.
(Wow, I can finally buy jeans with pockets guilt-free – wait, just because I want to wear men’s jumpers, that doesn’t make me a guy! Why are they always talking about sex all the time? Does bi mean 50:50?)
And even when new words were discovered…
(non-binary; demi-sexual)
A lot of people still never mentioned them so I didn’t really know if that counted…
…and if that meant I wasn’t LGBT+ after all.
I didn’t really know the difference between what I had been taught to believe, what I thought I felt and want I wanted to feel to fit in with the community.
I didn’t really feel ‘normal’… but I didn’t feel comfortable with any of the LGBT letters.
Didn’t some guy called Kinsey say it was a scale? What percentage did I have to be to qualify?
All in all, all this box-checking was frustrating.
So I chucked al the sticky labels in the bin…
…went to the local LGBT+ night…
(Hi! My name is…)
…and stopped caring about words for now.
I tried that. All I got was “Are you a lesbian?”, “Are you a lesbian?”, “Are you are a lesbian?”, “Are you bisexual?”, “So, what are you?”. Me; “Why do you want to know?”. Answer; silence. Guesses; often interested in dating me if I was not straight, or not bi … Or not liking people who weren’t lesbian. On to – lots of discussion with various women about how it was impossible for me not to know if I was a lesbian or bi or not, or not to have a label.
It was the early to mid 00s…