My experience with internalized homophobia

Hello I am sitting here at my computer at 6:23 am. Another night I couldn’t sleep well and feeling more alone than any soul on earth should feel. I turn to the presence of my cats for company and my new found shamanism beliefs in nature as I slowly look at the devastaing effect traditional religion has had on my brain in not accepting myself.

I once was a lesbian as if I once was a child, but I grew up and went back to being the kind of woman society accepts, that men find attractive, and that my son would admire. Sad thing is I didn’t admire me. Not only did I not admire me, I chose men who would hit me, use me, cheat on me, and worst of all not make me feel a thing in bed. I always thought if I could just find the right man, my body will respond like theirs does to mine. But no no no, year after year after year I defaced my own emotions with endless numbness offering my body to a man as if it was my only ticket to being straight. I had to pick despicable men for the cruel and endless punishment for really being a lesbian!

54 years later, 5 years of being unattached to anybody or anything, I realize the lie I have been living has cost me my life.

No I didn’t killl myself like so many gay and lesbians have from the 1950’s in the small town where I grew up. But I slowly have been committing suicide by trying to be something I am not. I even have found religious counselors telling me when I heal over the hurt my 2 fathers put me through, that I will naturally want to be with a man once more. As they flaunted their “straightness” in my face like their lifestyle was the only one worth living, I fought countless vain attempts to fit in with their image of me instead of being the person I really am to myself.

I got hypnotized by religious shows one after another after another on t.v. by heterosexual preachers who’s only mention of a “homosexual” was one of a person who needed serious changing to be accepted by God. I am glad the young people of today have more choices and more options to feeling good about themselves than the terrible homophobia my small town put on me. I know it is still hard for a person who is attracted to their own sex to find a feeling of comfort in today’s world. I hate being thrown into a “gay” corner of the world like a bunch of cattle being herded away from the main trail.

No I won’t go over to my assigned back seat on the bus to make the heterosexual people more comfortable with who I am. I can sit up in the front of the bus just like they can. I can take my place on this earth and demand all the respect and rights that “they” can. I can pray to my God and ask for all the love and success I want in this world just like they can and even get an answer YES, you can have it all too.

I no longer want to waste another breath of my life trying to fit in where I don’t belong. You can take all the jobs, people, groups, religions, and show business expressions of heterosexuality being the number one way to be and throw them all in the ocean for all I care. I have got to be me and I will be me and if it takes me to write essays like this 100 times a day to convince myself I am ok just the way I am, I will. Hopefully some other lonely soul out there can turn into their spirit and know without any approval from another source, that they too are ok just the way they are and there is a reason for being alive on this planet at this time.

Be free, be yourself, forget the narrow mindedness of others, and seek to be like the wind, passing through the trees, not needing to cling, but just passing by-be free! Love from your lesbian sister, Breeze.