When I Came Out As Bisexual, I Had A Second Coming Of Age

Photo by Farhan Monir Hussain/EyeEmIf I’m being honest with myself, I realised that I was queer when I was very young. Or I realised that I like girls when I was very young. The first utterance of “I’m bisexual” came at 17, drunk on cider in a dodgy pub in rural Hertfordshire, but it was a watershed moment nonetheless. Seventeen is supposed to be the time for a person’s archetypal coming-of-age moments. Judaism celebrates the coming of age through a bar or bat mitzvah, South American culture through the quinceañera and Catholicism through the confirmation. For a non-religious person like me, however, these moments included first dates, first kisses and first sexual encounters.Significant though it is, the coming-of-age trope is heavily romanticised. One simple definition labels it “the age or occasion when one formally becomes an adult” but when I was a teenager, it felt much more significant. I grew up during the heyday of Tumblr: GIFs of Emma Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, riding in the back of a pick-up truck with her arms to the sky, dominated my timeline. I spent years chasing that teenage euphoria, wishing I could come into my own as everyone else…
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