The Gay Gene: a poem

I sat on it, heavily, for years:
from dreaming of rescuing Andrea, Kayla, Cati,
of wearing hero's armor-
to shrugging off osh kosh b'gosh and levi brand for
skirts that sparkled.
"Well, looks like she's straight after all," harmless mom jokes
to friends, partners, softball team,
yeah it was probably harmless but maybe I was listening from within my book, after all?
and god it sucks to be told that gays should keep their private lives to themselves,
when I knew, at twelve, already graduated from rose-tinted glasses to the 12th grade reading level,
that a lumpy girl-child with glasses and braces and two mommies needed to become someone boys noticed.
If you want to look at heteronormative look no further than my constructed, collaged walls, a reality cut from teen magazines.
I did genuinely like boys. I liked dogs, too.
I never lied. So, maybe all it took was for them to like me first, but people have built
far more of far less.
Dating, dating, dating, a high school joke, and when you get to college you hear the punchline and it's you. Making out in movie theatres, cars. If it had ended there I might still not know.
Three years of wondering why sex meant tears.
I sat up. I looked around. I breathed, and kissed a girl, and pierced my nose, and lo, it was good.

I do not know if my sexuality is a matter of brain chemistry or construction. I do not know if it came from my mother or my turkey baster dad or my vegetarianism and over consumption of Sylvia Plath's poems.

I do know that high school happiness can't touch the way it feels to lead you, when we dance.

-Eliot