And while I knew a few boys who were gay, there were no girls who were out that I knew of.īut I remember every close encounter, real or imagined, from my teenage years with startling vividness. Gay kids were bullied, and it was the norm. There weren’t any young cool gay characters in movies or TV. We weren’t taught about gay people in school. But even so, there was a major disconnect. In the early aughts, though equal rights were limited, queer people were starting to enjoy regular lives out in the open.

I was born in 1989, the daughter of progressive New York City–born Jews I am one of three daughters, and we were raised lovingly and openly. The realization that shocked me to my core, two weeks after my 19th birthday, was that other girls-well, one girl in particular, first-could be attracted to me. That had always been part of my internal landscape it was the land itself, upon which everything else was built. So when I finally came out, it was a revelation, but the revelation wasn’t that I liked girls. And when I realized they didn’t-that what I felt was very different from what my friends felt-I withdrew into myself, hiding the desires that defined my thoughts because they didn’t seem valid unless they were returned. I’d felt an attraction to other girls for as long as I could remember, but up until I was a teenager, I thought everybody did.

But her coming-out story is a reminder that affirmation is about much more than external validation it’s about that clouds-parting feeling of Yes, that’s it- and it’s okay. This essay by Gabrielle Korn, adapted from her book Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, captures that moment when one’s longing is finally seen and shared by someone else after being hidden away for so long.

Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn