Those Kissing Strangers

I learned about lesbianism while waiting in line for the Ferris Wheel at Disneyland. I must have been seven years old or so, and happened to get in line behind two (aggressively) PDA-friendly ladies. The line took about an hour, and throughout the entirety of that wait, I watched two girls French, with one question on my mind — “Are they sisters?”

I couldn’t wrap my lil’ head around it. Kissing was something that girls did with boys; heck, I thought it strange to give my mom a peck. What were these two doing? Why were they doing it? And, perhaps most importantly, why was there a strange, tingling sensation happening deep down in my Limited2 shorts? (I have a hazy memory of asking my dad this exact question later that evening, and him responding, “That’s weird,” and walking out the door.)

Years later, I was sitting in a friend’s backyard. “Do you know what an orgasm is?” She asked. “It’s when you have a tickle… IN your vagina.” I immediately thought of the two women at the Ferris Wheel. “FUCK,” I thought. “My first orgasm took place in line at Disneyland!” I tried to focus on this aspect, rather than the fact that my “orgasm” was brought about by the sight of two women.

I brushed this experience and all of its sensations under the rug. I was embarrassed and horrified when my middle-school self realized that the first (and ONLY) time I had ever been sexually aroused was that day in Disneyland, in public, a child at the sight of two women… nothing about this was what I considered to be “normal.” Boys at school wanted to kiss me, I had seen hetero sex on TV and in movies… nothing other than those two women could produce that tickle. I was so ashamed by these “scandalous” thoughts that I never told anybody, not a soul, about those kissing strangers until I was 21 years old.

I’ve been thinking about those kissing strangers a lot, lately. I thought about them as I cried, telling the boy I was dating this past summer that I wanted to be with a woman. I thought about them as I told my best friend that I had feelings for her, and lost her forever. I thought about them after my first kiss with a woman who would soon become one of my greatest loves. Those kissing strangers had been alluding to the truth, long before my coming out.

Sometimes, we create a version of ourselves that feels, at the time, valid. This is because we aren’t ready to explore our identity, or express it to the world — let alone, to ourselves. Sometimes, we don’t know who we really are, until everything that we once thought to be true suddenly slips out from underneath our feet.

And that’s absolutely okay.

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