Nadia Bokody: How I realised I was gay at 36 – New Zealand Herald

OPINION:

A few months ago, I couldn’t stop crying.

My perpetually effervescent personal trainer had innocuously asked how I was as I walked into the gym, and I promptly burst into tears.

“Oh no! Do you need to chat?” she asked.

I shook my head silently through watery eyes.

My world had fallen apart, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Which says a lot, given I playfully refer to myself as “the internet’s queen of TMI” (an acronym for “Too Much Information”) and am often cautioned by my mum to “tone it down”.

The problem was, I couldn’t articulate what was happening to me. All I knew was, I’d just told the man who loved me unconditionally for the last four years, I didn’t want to be together any more.

There was no dramatic fight, no affair, and no lost love. I just felt … different. Like a switch that had been inside me my entire life had finally flicked on, and I was seeing everything in colour for the first time.

About a year ago, I came out as bisexual, which wasn’t particularly surprising to my closest friends. I’d been “experimenting” with women since I was a teenager, though the shame and stigma around it (and indeed, the fallacy that what I was doing was the result of casual curiosity) meant I’d been clandestine about my experiences.

There was something about no longer having to treat my feelings for women as a dirty secret that began to slowly nudge that switch inside me awake …

A few months before our relationship ended, I approached my boyfriend about the idea of an open relationship. He was pleasantly relieved when I told him I was only interested in sleeping with women.

Heteronormative conditioning had taught him the same thing it had instilled in me: that two women together were less legitimate than the alternative, and therefore less threatening.

Though having sex with women wasn’t new to me, being open about it was. I felt a strange thrill come over me with every date I went on, and began to let myself imagine what it would be like to one day walk out of a bar proudly holding hands with a woman I loved.

Meanwhile, my relationship was following a familiar trajectory.

The chaotic intensity of desperate desire and seemingly bottomless pit of my need for male validation had dissipated, and in its place were nights of sexlessness that stretched on into weeks, and eventually, months.

“You just haven’t found the right man yet,” a friend had told me after I announced the breakdown of my marriage, some years earlier.

That relationship too, had been marred by tumultuous emotions that had faded into indifference.

“It’s like nothing I did was ever enough for you. I don’t know what you need to be happy,” my husband had said, as he’d packed the last of his belongings in what we’d planned to be our forever home.

I didn’t know, either.

With the Band-Aid of his steady love freshly torn off, the unresolved wounds of my past were suddenly exposed, and I was plunged into grief – not at losing my marriage, but at losing the first and only stable male figure I’d had in my life.

Unable to spend a night with the thoughts swirling in my head, I preoccupied myself with men. Their beds offered temporary relief, and what felt like a kind of sexual liberation from the monotony of my marriage.

And yet, there was an emptiness inside me no man could seem to fill.

Some months later, when I met my now ex-boyfriend, I waited for it to dissolve. It didn’t.

Instead, I repeated a familiar scenario: one where I became obsessed with the idea he would leave, and addicted to the chaos and torture of trying to prevent it from happening.

This was love, I told myself. Love was something that felt agonising and all-consuming, just like the romantic movies I’d grown up watching, and most of my parents’ marriage.

Unfortunately, the agony of what I perceived as love came at a high price.

I self-harmed in private, floating in and out of psychiatric facilities, attempting to fix what was broken inside me. If a man could just love me the way I’d missed out on as a child, I’d finally be happy, I told myself.

Except, I’d already been with men who’d loved me with the full breadth of their hearts, and I wasn’t any happier. Still, in the intimate moments I shared with women, I snatched at something that tasted like peace.

By this point of course, I’d written about my sexual experiences with men on the internet, concealing my increasing discomfort around them. I’d made ostentatious YouTube story-time videos about my crushes, and the hilarious lengths I’d gone to to garner their attention (including flying 500km for a Bumble date who tried to guilt me into giving him oral sex an hour after meeting).

Then, while swiping through a queer dating app one day, the switch flicked on.

Like a firework illuminating a pitch-black sky, it lit up so spectacularly, I couldn’t avert my eyes.

I burst into tears and shot a text to my boyfriend.

“I’m sorry for being a coward and not doing it in person, but I can’t do this any more,” I wrote.

“Do what? Us? What’s wrong???” he messaged back.

“I’m more attracted to women than I am to men,” I answered, still unable to fully articulate it.

Having grown up in a Catholic household on a steady diet of Disney films that promised life began when a man chose to ride off into the sunset with me, I was still grappling with the idea my sexuality didn’t actually include men at all.

“It’s not like I’m a lesbian!” I joked nervously with a friend a couple of weeks later.

Yes, I’d had romantic feelings for women. Yes, I’d had sex with women and enjoyed it way more than being with men. Yes, the porn I watched was exclusively focused around women and my TikTok algorithm was basically just lesbian content, but I’d had sex with men (like, a lot of it!) and I still noticed good-looking guys.

Then, as if cognisant of my internal anguish, my YouTube home page offered me a video about something called “compulsory heterosexuality”.

It featured a woman who had been in a long-term relationship with a man and identified as bisexual before coming out as gay.

She talked about heterosexuality being presented as a kind of default, and the ways women are conditioned to covet male validation and sexual attention. Then she explained the difference between finding men attractive, versus actually being sexually attracted to them, and everything came into focus …

I often joke my entire sex life is on the internet because I have no concept of TMI. And yet, this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write – in part, because I felt I owed it to the readers who’d followed my story to see it out; that I didn’t have a right to change the plot line of the narrative.

But my life isn’t a snappy sex column. It’s messy and nuanced and entirely unedited.

And that’s okay. It’s okay to say that, actually, it might have taken 36 years and writing about sex with men on the internet to elucidate it, but I’m gay.

It’s okay if your story doesn’t unfold the way you thought it would, either. You’re allowed to change course. I promise, it’ll be okay on the other side, and worth every bit of pain and discomfort when you get there, too.

As someone who’s done it, I’m here to tell you, it tastes a whole lot like peace.