signs of being gay
The story
I don't know how to start this so I'll just say what happened. Last Friday my sister put on one of those rom coms where the guy finally shows up at the airport, and I cried. Not a little. The kind where you have to pretend you're getting water. I'm a 24 year old guy who has watched every action movie ever made without blinking, and I lost it over two people kissing at gate B12. At 2am I did the thing I swore I'd never do and typed "signs of being gay" into my phone.
I'd like to tell you I closed the tab after one article. I read maybe nine. Most of them are garbage lists, like "you care about your appearance" or "you have close male friends," which describes every guy I know. But a couple of the questions landed harder than I wanted. Like whether I'd ever felt that airport scene feeling for a real person, and the only honest answer involved my friend Caleb, two summers ago, sitting on the hood of his car, and I had to put the phone face down on the mattress.
Here's what makes it confusing. I've dated girls. Three relationships, one of them 14 months, and none of it felt fake. I wasn't performing. But I also never once cried about any of them, and I've now cried twice in one week over fictional men at airports, because yes, I rewatched it alone on Tuesday to check, like an idiot. The second time was worse. I knew it was coming and it still got me.
I haven't said a word about this to anyone. My sister just laughed and said "since when are you soft?" and I said "allergies." In October. My roommate would be fine with it, I think, he has a gay cousin he talks about all the time. My dad is a different story. Not hateful, just the kind of man who has never once said the word out loud, and I can't tell if that silence is a wall or just how he is.
Part of me says I'm overthinking a movie. People cry at movies. Allergies exist. The other part says I've been very good, for a very long time, at not asking myself one specific question, and the movie just asked it for me. I keep going back and forth, am I gay, am I bi, am I just a guy who got ambushed by a soundtrack on a Friday night, and none of the online lists can answer that because they definately weren't written about me.
So I'm asking people who've actually been here instead. Were there signs of being gay that you missed or explained away for years? What finally made it click for you, was it one moment like this or a slow thing? And how do you tell the difference between a feeling that means something and one that just caught you off guard?
