The First Time I Called It Love, I Meant Her.

An ode to living, loving and wholey being a proud lesbian.

I’m writing this on a moderately gloomy Sunday morning, after saying I was going to clean my flat before I write this but being way too eager. With Pride Month being over, which for my community it never really is, I’ve been reflecting on how much I truly love being a lesbian, and even when I have been told to have such distaste, guilt and shame about it, I am so severely proud.

I grew up around an environment that always insisted that you chose to be a lesbian. Often demonised, mostly condemned and always questioned. Although it never feels like that for me, I felt as if I have been chosen. I didn’t just wake up one day and decide ‘you know what, I think I’ll be gay now’, as much as that would probably make more sense to most, if that was the case. It was more than instinctive, more than natural, more innate, more inborn, more familial. It was ever-present, it is perpetual.

Every-time I’ve been asked ‘so, how did you know? - if you didn’t choose and society doesn’t deem your love holy, how did you know?’, I smile, because the feeling can only be described so poetically as it feels, and even then, I can never encapsulate it all. Loving women is what brings me so close to truly believing that there is a heaven, somewhere. It is not dirty, nor is it sinful. It is not guilt-ridden, nor is it unnatural. There is no distaste that lives in me, when it comes to loving women, only a sweet disposition. Only blissful elations and joyus glees, knowing that my being was made to be loved and to gently love another woman. It’s terrifying, but love overwrites the fear that has only every been installed by other unlike me a thousand times, over and over. There is no feeling that has ever replicated my 9-year-old self, unknowing of the meaning of crushing on the rough-around-the-edges, blonde haired tomboy that I ran around the playground with, pretending to be in Twilight (which, by the way, I was always Bella). As my Justin Bieber, One Direction and JLS crazy friends hyper-fixated on their crushes, I found myself forcing myself to pick something I liked about those boys, while rewatching Rihanna, Alexis Jordan and Avril Lavigne’s music videos, engrossed in them… and the music, of course. There is no moment that encapsulates watching Hayley Kiyokos’ Girls Like Girls music video wide eyed and nervous, infatuated by her character in Lemonade Mouth, never for a second questioning it until something or someone reminds me that a boy has a crush on me and I must be excited by that, for some reason. From being outed in the girls toilets at my Church of England secondary school (Holy Trinity, you will pay though, that was a bleak time) to my best mate randomly coming out to the trio in a snapchat group-chat after us telling her we knew she was into girls too, being a lesbian has always been so sacred, so second-to-nature, so wonderful to me.

There was, of course, the tedious and traumatic parts which felt inevitable, and I may of had to reduce myself to the confinements of a very glass closet for the pleasure of others, but this never disheartened me. The fire only really burned brighter in those times, honestly. I always found myself back home. I still closed my eyes and dreamt of a wife to a wife, to being a mother with a mother, to attending Pride Month and having gay friends. I still crossed my fingers and toes, counting down to the day where I could just be out with it and say ‘actually, I have a girlfriend’, whenever my aunties would ask how dating was going, where I could hold hands with my partner the same way my cousins could with their boyfriends. As I sit and write this, I realise that all of that has come to fruition (or at least is in the making), and that makes me whole. 8 - year - old me would absolutely lose it, knowing that I live alone in London and my parents are asking for pictures after dates and weekend aways with my partner. That I barely have any straight friends actually, that I’m immersed in the sweetest parts of community and am restored. That I don’t have to come to some contractual agreement with a man I can just about tolerate because he is cute to marry me but to never actually touch me or even emotionally invest in me when we are alone but can play along when in public (yes…you read that right…) because against the odds, I can fall in love and experience the blissfulness of it all with a woman. That religion did a big number on me but not big enough to oppress me forever. That I am … me! So wonderfully made. The inner child in me beams so brightly nower days and it only gets bigger, as time goes.

My biggest act of resistance, my most beautiful form of intimacy, my most authentic community, my honest identity. An ode to having the honour to be able to call myself a lesbian, to carry on the line for the lesbians before me, in and out of ancestry, blessed so gracefully by God. Oh, how I adore it all. Oh, how heavy is the heads that wear that this crown, in and out of the closet that was built by the hands of a rigid society. To the gender conforming, and those who rebelliously return to a deeper self by non - conforming, to the butches, the femmes, the studs, stems and unlabelled, to the trans, to the tittyless, to the accepted, the unaccepted, the unknown, the younger and the old, to the black girls and folk in spaces that don’t allow your wings to spread wide, to the girls sitting in the back of every Sunday service wondering if you’ve wronged the Lord, if you’ve wronged your God, in which I must let you know that you haven’t, to the wondering, the those who definitely know, to those who may know, to those alone, to those all together - I absolutely adore you, to my absolute core, I carry you everywhere with me. Let not the fear that the world puts onto us waiver us, but let it bring us together, in a sapphic rage. Let us grieve together as we do dance together. We are here, have been here, will always be here. We are not the abomination ‘saints’ paint us to be, so let us continue to disrupt with our love. We will be teachers, engineers, scientists, politicians, writers, historians, mothers, wives, doctors, activists, doulas, philosophers, pilots, nurses, spiritualists, preachers, activists and artists. We will continue to forge culture, create, create, create. We do, we will, we have. Our fight is worth it.

I grew up around an environment that always insisted that you chose to be a lesbian. Although it never feels like that for me, I would of chosen it if I could anyways.

I love being a lesbian, and I love you. PG x