I Was Completely Sure I Was Gay Until This Happened

So the first time it happened to me, I was really completely surprised, a little bit shocked actually. I was confident with my sexuality. I was gay, and I never had any doubts about it. I didn't have any secret fantasies, no secret life. But then it happened. I met a woman who had something that I couldn't define, but that I found very attractive. It was not about her body or the way she dressed or the way she did her hair. It was the way she occupied a room. The way she moved her head when she listened to something or the way she smiled when somebody said something to her. The whole package was super attractive to me.

There was nothing that really happened, I didn't think I was bisexual all of a sudden, and I didn't feel any doubt about the decades of my life that I had been gay. I simply confirmed that I was feeling that attraction, and then I just carried on with life. There was one other time it happened, years later, but that is all.

Ever since I was 12 or 13 or so, I have considered myself 100% gay. All my relationships have been with men, and except for one, all my sexual experiences have been with guys as well. All my fantasies have been about men, and if you ask me my sexual orientation, I would tell you that I was gay. Gay! But sometimes life reminds you that reality has a way of going around how we define ourselves.

A lot of people talk about sexual orientation as if everyone fits into some neat category: you're gay, straight, bisexual. These days, Gen Z has a whole lot of labels for a million different genders. That can help us find our community, and it can help us explain how we experience ourselves. They make the world easier to understand, but in reality, they are just labels. Reality still comes first.

You see, orientation and attraction are not the same thing. Orientation is the sort of pattern that shapes the way you live your life. Attraction, on the other hand, is what can sometimes surprise you. Most of the time, orientation and attraction are aligned, but sometimes (surprise!) they are not. Of course, that doesn't mean that your orientation has changed, but it leaves us with a strange question: if I was sure I was gay, what exactly was going on?