TheSugarcubeSaga

6-21-15

Seeing as I recently came out IRL, I figured I should do a coming out chapter. Basically:

How to Come Out Like a Fucking Dumbass: A Summary by Hope Marie

Okay, so before I get into it, a bit a background: I've been out online as demiromantic/demisexual ever since I really came to the conclusion, which was January 18, 2015. No one I know IRL knew my Twitter, WP, or Tumblr account urls, so I was safe, they'd never know a thing, and I only had one person on Twitter that I talked to frequently at the time (hi Shani), but nonetheless everyone I saw in the fandom truly didn't give a shit about sexuality (obviously).

Anyways, I figured since the beginning that no one at my overly religious private Christian school would ever be accepting of queer people [of course, my school is microscopic student-wise, having only around forty kids from Kindergarten to 8th grade. There were only seven eighth graders including myself, and all of the classes were combined, so 7th and 8th had the same teacher, 5th and 6th were combined, etc. (side note if anyone asks me to explain wtf kind of school this is don't even bother, I really don't feel like getting into it, it was just really fucking tiny, and it's not a weird California thing, everyone finds it weird)]

Anyways, before eighth grade, the subject of queerness almost never came up. The first time I ever heard the word "lesbian" was when I was seven, watching that dumb TeenNick movie Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, and it briefly came up when the main girl wanted to get rid of some guy that liked her, but I didn't understand the context so I went out into the living room where my parents were and straight up asked,"What's a lesbian?" (have I mentioned I have no filter?)

My dad promptly left the room. I took that as a bad sign, but I figured it just meant that he knew I was watching someone that wasn't "appropriate for my age" (he likes to think I'm five sometimes but I was seven watching a fucking shitty movie so whatever) and not because of what some word meant. Anyways, my mom sat me down on the couch and told me quietly that it's when a girl likes another girl, the way they usually like boys.

The first time I heard the word "gay" was years later, when my grandma briefly brought it up (she's all for equal rights so whatever she said was good, I just don't remember).

The first time I heard "bi" was when an acquaintance of mine (more on her later, she's important) sarcastically asked three other girls and I in sixth grade(!) if we'd still be friends with her if she was bi. I'd never heard the term before, but I got the gist of it, understanding that it meant liking boys and girls (I know now it means liking two genders regardless of which they are, but as you can tell, I didn't learn shit about sexuality and gender for a long time, meaning I didn't even know that there were more than two genders until very recently, and I was twelve, so please excuse the innocent ignorance).

All of the others said no, as if it were obvious. I just shrugged, and none of them noticed my silence (this was around the time that I first started to suspect that maybe there was a reason queerness was never brought up).

I got really into reading a few months after this, and one of the series first big popular series I read the summer after sixth grade was The Mortal Instruments. As almost anyone who's somewhat familiar with the series knows, one of the main couples is Malec, or Alec Lightwood and Magnus Bane. It's not even a spoiler, they're just really fucking gay for each other.

It was kind of a surreal thing to read at first. Not because I had a problem with it, necessarily, but because it was this subject that everyone sound me was so secretive about that it felt like I was reading about this forbidden thing. It felt like I was doing something that I should be ashamed of, just by reading about a gay couple.

At the same time, I thought they were great together. Magnus is one of my favorite characters (popular opinion) and Alec is literally my favorite character (not-so-popular opinion) and they were cute and not annoying or ridiculously cliched and asked from the Shadow World, it was an accurate portrayal of what I'd seen so far about gay people/relationships in general. They were one of my OTP's, though I could've never told anyone IRL that, so I just kept quiet about it on my trashy Instagram fandom account and stalked a few too many accounts.