Why I Was In The Closet For Thirty Years

I wanted to do a post explaining why it took me thirty years to come out.

I think being ‘closeted’ can mean two different things. It can apply to people who know they aren’t straight but are too afraid to express this openly for whatever reason, or it can apply, as in my case, to people who don’t know they aren’t straight at all (or at least, don’t know what the hell they are).

There are two reasons that I didn’t know I was asexual for most of my life.

The first is lack of education, and the second is the complete saturation of allonormativity (especially heteronormativity) in our society, although this second reason could also be perpetuated mostly though lack of education.

So basically, I didn’t know I was ace because of

1) My lack of education and awareness.
2) Everyone else’s lack of education and awareness.

Even now, when I tell someone that I am asexual, I then have to explain what that means, and to be honest that’s a slightly uncomfortable conversation. If I was gay, I could just say I am attracted to or not attracted to whoever. But being asexual, I could still be attracted to people, so I have to specify that I mean I don’t experience ‘sexual' attraction. And when was the last time you had to discuss your SEXUAL feelings with someone you don’t know so well. Or in fact, people you do know well. I don’t want to discuss the state of my ability to become aroused with colleagues, acquaintances, family or even close friends particularly, as I’m sure they probably don’t either.

I didn’t know what asexuality was until I researched it online. So I kinda wish everyone else would do that and not make me explain the difference between a sex drive and sexual attraction. Because I have one but not the other.

But here goes anyway: I am asexual (ace). This means I don’t experience sexual attraction. I am also aromantic (aro). This means that I don’t experience romantic attraction. It is possible to be one or the other on its own, but I happen to be both. I am still perfectly capable of loving or falling in love. I also have a sex drive, but I have no interest in having sex with other people since I am not attracted to them and to be honest physical intimacy kind of grosses me out, but again, this is not necessarily how other asexual people might feel. You’d have to ask them. Also, just so you know, because this term is going to come up, ‘allo’ is the opposite of ‘ace’ – it means people who DO experience sexual attraction. (Also, not hugely relevant to this post, which is about sexuality, but I do mention it briefly, so regarding gender, I am agender, which means I don’t identify as having any gender (my preferred pronouns are they/them), and ‘cis-gendered’ means people whose gender matches the sex they were born with (male/female).)

Sometimes I try to look back and remember what it was like growing up and not knowing what my sexuality was. It is hard to remember things accurately any more now that everything is filtered through hindsight and makes so much more sense than it did at the time.

Education.

I don’t remember sexuality being taught at school at all.  I don’t know when or how I learned about homosexuality.  I guess through movies.  I only recall it being mentioned once in health class, and that in connection to STDs.  Certainly nothing outside of hetero or homo were mentioned.  I guess I learned about reproduction at school, but I think I had already learned it myself from a book. Health class in the little school was just about the changes the body goes through at puberty, mostly relating to having to wash more. Girls learned about periods and also that it was okay to masturbate and also to not masturbate.  Boys learned about the changes to boys and girls, but girls were not taught anything about boys.  In senior school, health class dealt with safe sex – which meant how to use a condom.  That’s it.

So I grew up with a sexuality I didn’t even know existed, let alone that I was it.  I don’t really know how to describe it to someone who has never gone through that.  If you’re straight, chances are you are raised to believe you are, and you never need to question it.  If you’re gay then you’re going to grow up confused because you don’t fit into this ‘norm’ that society tells you you should be.  If you’re bi or pan, then it could be even more confusing because sometimes you think you are this norm and other times you’re not and it could take a long time to realise that both pulls are legitimate and not confusion.  Being asexual, you just assume you are that norm and that everyone else feels the same way as you do and because your idea of normal somehow clashes with everyone else’s view of normal, nothing makes any sense. There’s no ‘I’m attracted to that person’ revelation there’s just ‘the way I feel about that person must be what attraction is’ so you kind of redefine your understanding of the world through this filter without knowing you’re using a filter.

I really hope that schools have better sex education now. Because there is so much more to sex than just the act itself and what it is used for. Literally, at first all you are told about sex is that it is for reproduction, and then later you’re told ‘try not to do that part though’. Nothing about who you might be interested in having sex with, which is surely kind of a really important part in the whole thing, because without that first step, you would never even get around to the sex, with or without the reproduction. We never even covered CONSENT for God’s sake. The only thing I ever remember our sex education teacher telling us besides learning about contraception was that you shouldn’t have sex on the sofa where your parents might catch you because sex was special and not to be rushed. Super useful.

I can’t even remember when I first learned about asexuality as a concept. Possibly after reading an article in my late teens. I think that even then, I was only vaguely aware of the term itself rather than what it actually meant, always a term of derision. I never realised that asexual people still had a sex drive, so I didn't think it applied to me and I didn’t take much interest in it. (It's a shame I didn't understand what it meant properly, because when I did learn more and realised it described me, everything, everything I ever remember about love, attraction and dating suddenly made sense, but at the time I thought I was straight but shy.)

Allonormativity.

Like I said, I think that a lot of allonormativity comes from genuine ignorance and not from hatred and deliberate oppression. If I didn’t know that people could be asexual, then why should I expect anyone else around me to have known either?

But, unfortunately, because they didn’t know, they enforced allonormative expectations on to me that made some of my life difficult and painful.

First there is the simple stuff that seeps into your brain from a very young age. The idea that romance and by extension marriage and reproduction are the most important goal in life. I grew up on Disney movies, I loved The Little Mermaid etc. And these mostly are romances and end with the characters getting married. Many fairy tales end this way too. And these were the stories we were told as children.  (I will point out here that my favourite characters in those movies were NEVER the romantic leads. I liked the put-upon sidekicks.) Then of course there’s just the basic human nature of children imitate their parents. I had two parents who were married, so therefore I assumed I would grow up and do the same thing. It was from an early age just accepted that finding romance and having babies was what you were supposed to do with your life. I don’t feel like there was very much attention put on to aspirations and careers and how you wanted to affect the world.

Next, and my gender comes into play here a bit too, I liked boys and girls. As in, I saw no difference between people who might be my friend. Which meant I spent my entire, ENTIRE, school life being questioned about my opposite-sex friends. Being told by other children that boys and girls can’t be friends. Because if boys and girls get together, if children are allowed to mix outside of same-sex environments…. Then… what? Do you think they are going to leap into orgies? I was even punished by teachers sometimes for spending time with children of the opposite sex. I’m still talking about infant and junior school at this point. By the time I got to senior school, I was constantly being questioned as to whether my best friends were my siblings or my lovers, because obviously they couldn’t be my friends, obviously I must want some kind of romantic or sexual relationship with them. I once got into an argument with The Mother because I wanted two opposite-sex friends over for a sleepover (she let us in the end). I can remember being so frustrated by these attitudes and yet the really sad part is that eventually I fell for it. I did start to think that my platonic feelings for people were ‘crushes’. By my mid-teens, I genuinely thought that I had a crush on every single one of my friends. This leads into the next point.

There was an allonormative assumption that as teenagers, we all have crushes on someone. We would constantly ask each other, because we thrived on gossip I guess. Therefore, my friends encouraged me to have crushes. Because if you said ‘nobody’ that was a lie. I must like somebody. So I started to interpret my feelings wrongly. Because I was told it was normal and essential and impossible not to have a crush, that I MUST have a crush, I thought that the feelings I was experiencing were these crushes everyone was talking about. And so, I had crushes on EVERYBODY. (And since I thought that what I was experiencing were crushes, I also perpetuated this pressure of assuming everyone else had crushes and teasing them about it. I couldn't comprehend that someone might not have a crush since as far as I understood 100% of existence was now having a crush.)

This then extended so that whenever I talked to or about anyone that I liked or admired, I was told that I fancied this person. And I don’t just mean other teenagers told me this. Everyone did. People who were close to me, people who barely knew me, people who were my age, people who were younger and even people who were older, who should have been trustworthy role models, constantly teased me and goaded me and basically told me I was lying or wrong if I denied it, until I started again to believe that when I admired someone that I must sexually want them. This I think was extremely damaging. Not only did it damage some of my established friendships by confusing me and them about what I wanted from them, but it made me afraid to meet or address people I admired because I felt embarrassed and ashamed that I just kept fancying all these people who were in some cases totally inappropriate for me. I do think that held me back and stopped me forming genuine rapport and friendships with a lot of people I potentially cared about. Sometimes I even found my opinion invalidated, because it was insinuated that I was only talking about someone (real or fictional) because I must fancy them (at university a mature student accused me of always writing creepy wish-fulfilment romances, even though I was writing about completely platonic characters). Everything was reduced to a sexual interest, and this prejudice must affect allo people too and that’s really sad, but in my case, because I felt the same way about everyone, it affected 100% of my relationships with everyone I knew.

Leading on from that, is peer pressure and the guilt that rape culture places on people. That is to say, while on the one hand I think I damaged friendships by thinking that they were romantic when they weren’t, similarly I misinterpreted romantic encounters by thinking they were friendship.  I’d chat with someone, and suddenly I would discover that this was considered flirting, not just by the subject, but by other people around us, and since I was not interested in them, because I felt no romantic or sexual attraction towards them, I was told that I was leading them on and I was a bad person for doing that. I found there was a constant expectation of me that I didn’t understand or recognise and it terrified me, for years. I would be afraid to be alone with people in case they expected something of me that I was in no way prepared to give. And my friends had no sympathy for this. A guy once kissed me, and I let him because I was afraid it was my fault for leading him on, and when I was upset about it afterwards, one of my friends told me ‘It takes two to tango.’ Thanks for that. Really helped.

The older I got, and less inclined to think I had crushes on people because there was less pressure and expectation as we moved out of puberty, the more my friends would accuse me of being uptight or prudish because I wasn’t into physical affection and I didn’t like talking about it or watching it either. The more people would say either with irritation that I should just go and have sex, like it would fix me, or refuse to understand why I was not having sex with someone I clearly loved, because you can’t really love someone if you’re not banging them right? At this point, I was starting to get very worried about myself because the more people asked me about sex, the more sure I was that I didn’t want it, and I knew that wasn’t normal and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I really thought there was something wrong with me and I tried all sorts of explanations to explain it, but I failed because no one had taught me the actual answer, that some people are just asexual and that’s normal and okay.

Most people close to me knew that I didn’t go around getting into romantic situations and didn’t ever have any physical affection. To an extent they accepted this, and even that could be frustrating, because I couldn’t accept it because I didn’t understand myself. I knew I was ‘frigid’ and I knew everyone knew I was ‘frigid’ but I didn’t know why I was that way. I needed answers. Instead, I was just ‘weird’ or questioned about / accused of being gay or, and this is the one that followed me for the longest time and is so dismissive and full of allonormativity, told that I hadn’t met the right person yet or that I’d change my mind later. Instead of being told that I was valid as who I was, and that I knew myself better than anyone else, so I shouldn’t have been questioning myself all the time or being undermined and questioned by others. I have had so many friendships, deep, meaningful, loving friendships brushed aside by an acquaintance who can’t understand why I’m not sleeping with this friend. And why do virtual strangers feel it is even acceptable to ask those sorts of questions of someone?!

A lot of my perception and understanding of my own feelings was warped by what other people told me or insinuated I was feeling. The culmination of all this low-level allonormativity, all this you can’t just be friends, you must like them, why don’t you just have sex, you’ll feel differently when you meet the right person, you’re such a prude, you’re leading them on, is that it mounts up to bullying. Even though the people saying these things don’t (necessarily) mean them to be negative, the problem is this is seeing someone who doesn’t act like you or how you think they should, and trying to make them conform.  Only I didn’t know it was bullying.  I believed them and I thought I was broken.  FOR THIRTY YEARS.

Gender

I guess there is also an unfortunate third reason for the 30 year closet, which again comes down to lack of education. And that is that I knew I wasn’t cis-gendered. I didn’t know that term of course. But from a very early age, I knew I was different, and I loved myself for it. My gender has never scared me the way my sexuality has, even though it too led to distress and bullying. Somehow in the case of my gender, I knew the bullies were wrong, whereas with my sexuality, I thought I was wrong. As I said, I never saw a difference between girls and boys at all at first, then as I was ‘educated’ that girls and boys were different, I started to a) reject my assigned gender because it felt like a prison and b) get incredibly angry that people were mistreated or separated due to their sex. I didn’t think about it much more than that as a kid, I just wished we had equality, but by my late teens I was really focusing on how I didn’t feel like other people. This was not just my gender, in fact it may have had a lot more to do with my sexuality, but I was a lot more aware of transgender issues than I was of asexuality, so I thought my disinterest in sex with other people was because I was confused about my gender, and I spent such a long time focusing on trying to work out my gender (I am agender although I have only recently started using that term), that I didn’t think about my sexuality at all.

Eventually I figured them out around a similar time (agenderness and asexuality do go together quite well). I think it was after I liked a guy, and I just couldn’t make myself feel anything sexual for him, and I was really upset, I felt like this was my last chance to be ‘normal’, and I started looking on dating sites again, and I found all these options for gender and sexuality when you made a profile and so I had to look them up on Wikipedia, and eventually I started researching asexuality properly, from reputable sources.

Thirty Years Later

Discovering I was asexual was such a relief. Learning about what it meant and realising that I had a completely warped view of my own feelings and being able to adjust was like freeing my mind from shackles. Now I can talk to anyone I like, and admire anyone I like, and know why and not be afraid that I am blindly stumbling into something that I don’t understand or want. And also, if anyone ever bullied me for my life choices NOW, I would kick their ass. But once you get to your thirties, people seem to stop bullying you quite so much.

I just hope that asexual teenagers and young adults these days have access to better sex education and can escape some of the peer pressure and bullying that was just considered totally normal when I was growing up, and I hope too that allo people are given the same opportunities to learn and understand more about any of the LGBTQIA+ community, because everyone deserves to know who they are and be treated with respect for it.