My best friend of 20 years just can’t accept that I like women. We pretty much knew she liked girls our entire childhood, while I maintained that I was straight or "heteroflexible" until age 20. I always had an appreciation and admiration for women, not realizing that it was so much more than “appreciation”.

I’ll never forget a dream I had when I was 5. We’d just finished lunch in the school cafeteria and had to line up to go back to class. So we line up against a wall leading to the doors and I stand behind my classmate. She had pretty blue eyes. I remember dream-her turned around and looked at me a certain way. It was so weird but I could feel what was about to happen. She leans in and I lean in and obviously we kiss. Then I wake up literally sitting up in my bed reflecting “wow…girls kissing girls. Ha! How ridiculous. Girls kiss boys!” I laid back down. “But maybe if I close my eyes I can go back into that dream to…check that out again. 3,2,1 SLEEP.” This was before I met my bestie so I actually did not even understand the concept of homosexuality yet, clearly. So funny I dreamt about this classmate instead of my teacher! I swear she was my very first woman crush. If you peep my taste in women it's got her all over it.

When I was 16, I fell in love with a boy. 10 years later we are still together and living under one roof. He is aware, of course, that I'm not heterosexual and has known since we got together. I've come a long way and he's been with me for the ride through and through.

Well, last week bestie and I were on a group facetime call with another friend. Bestie slipped up and called me "straight", to which I corrected her promptly but the conversation remained light-hearted afterwards. Okay. The two of us had a phone argument last night over something totally unrelated. Suddenly she decides its the right time to say "...and bestie, I know you wanna be lesbian or whatever it is but you've never done anything with a girl and..." I stop her dead in her tracks. I can visualize her face and her shrug while she's saying it and I suddenly see red. So I blurt out that I actually DID have my very first full on experience with another woman 2 months ago, finally at age 26. Now she's pissed at me cuz I never told her (I have my reasons for waiting to tell her but its a long story and a separate conversation).

That right there; the whole idea that my alleged lack of experience with women somehow made me heterosexual. That really bothers me. It's kinda sick if you think about it. Like there's some unspoken physical rite of passage, initiation thing you have to go through in order to be part of "the club". I can't help but think of people who live in countries where it is strictly forbidden to engage in homosexual acts. Say you have a man from one of these countries. He fantasizes about other men, pleases himself to gay porn, and has 0 interest in women. So, by her logic, because he's never been intimate with a man, the guy is not gay??? He's straight as a ruler? Somebody make that make sense.

This girl invalidates me in so many ways, but i think this specific genre hurts the most. It's as if she wants to remain the "gay friend" so bad. And it's sad. She's so much more than the gay friend. It hurts me because she's allowed to go on and on about her experiences with women, but when I bring up a fantasy I've always had or a woman I'm really attracted to, I'm met with "mhmm" and "yeah whatever". Like she doesn't wanna believe me or something? The one person I should be able to go to for tips and questions about pleasing another woman and stuff just seems so unavailable to me because she doesn't seem to take me seriously. Whatever. Apparently I'm in the club now since I've been initiated. It's so gross to me to think about it that way though...