Do I Want to BE Her, or Be WITH Her?

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"If you can, it would be great if you gave some advice for girls having trouble telling if they want to be like a girl, just want to be friends with her, or if they actually want to be with her.  I know I'm having trouble figuring that out and I'm sure that other people are having that problem too."


Awesome! First off, I want to thank the brave young lady who wrote in with this question. You're 110% right that this is a common problem, and I'm so glad to address it here. If anyone else has any questions, please feel free to shoot them over to doodled.rainbow@gmail.com and we'll see what we can do! 


I'm sure that you're no stranger to hormones and the idea of romantic "chemistry". When you are attracted physically to someone, it can actually feel like there is heat & electricity zapping between the two of you! While there is so much more to crushes and relationships than physical attraction -- we'll go into all of that later in this post! -- it is important to remember that your hormonal chemistry can be a great way of gauging how into a person you are. 


My first girlfriend and I had very little chemistry, and in a lot of ways our relationship was more like an intimate friendship. However, since I had always been with boys before, and since I wasn't attracted to them physically at all,  I had never truly experienced what chemistry felt like when it went wildly right. Thus, I thought that our relationship was normal & romantic & physical. It wasn't until I got involved with another girl, one who made my whole body feel alive, that I realized what I had been missing. Zap. Boom. Wow. 

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That's physical attraction. To recap, if you don't feel those fireworks when you're sitting next to the girl in question, it's safe to say that you either want to be like her or be her friend. However, there's a lot more to liking someone in a romantic way than just being physically attracted to them. In fact, I would say that there are two other "tests" you can run to see if you want to be someone, be friends with someone, or be in a relationship with someone. These have more to do with how the person acts than how their body is put together. 

To be blunt, being socially attracted to someone is incredibly important to forming a healthy relationship.  Even if they're totally rad when the two of you are alone, relationships have to brave the outside world in order to grow & evolve healthily -- and if the way that they treat their friends or family makes you feel squicky, it's a good bet that you aren't into them as more than a friend. After all, love & lust & romance is about more than sex!  Even if your body is attracted to them, your brain has to be equally engaged, right? Right! 

Equally important is how mentally, emotionally, and intellectually you're attracted to them. This is how you feel when you're alone together. How do they act? How do you act? How do the two of you interact? If you don't click when you're solo, then it's hard to build a relationship.

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To review, there are three main concepts to consider when you're trying to decide how you feel about someone. They are:

• Physical attraction
• Social attraction
• Mental, emotional, and intellectual attraction

It's worth noting that if you're simply trying to figure out if you like someone as more than a friend, physical attraction will probably tell you all you need to know. After all, it really is our bodies that determine what level of desire we feel for a person, and romantic relationships do require desire to function properly. However. If you're trying to figure out how to proceed in a situation, it's of paramount important to consider the other two areas of attraction. The bottom line is that building a relationship is about more than desire, even though that is a necessary element!

Also worth noting, when you're coming from a same-sex perspective, is that the orientation of the girl involved makes a huge difference. Chemistry, sad as it may be, can be one-sided. I've felt mad chemistry for straight girls before, only to find out that they felt nothing but friendship for me. Massive bummer, but it happens. 

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Recap time!

• If you want to be like a girl, you'll probably find yourself socially and/or mentally/emotionally/intellectually drawn to her, but you won't be physically attracted to her
• If you want to be friends with a girl, you'll probably find yourself socially and mentally/emotionally/intellectually drawn to her, but you won't be physically attracted to her
• If you want to be intimate with a girl, you'll find yourself physically drawn to her
• If you want to pursue a relationship with a girl, you'll find yourself physically and socially and mentally/emotionally/intellectually drawn to her

(The same goes for you young men out there too, by the way! I used the female pronouns through this article because of the wording from the original question, but the advice still stands regardless of gender.)

I hope that helped! If anyone has anything to add, the comment section is open for your thoughts and opinions, and we would love to hear from you. Also, as I said before, if you want to ask another question, doodled.rainbow@gmail.com is your space, baby! Rock on. 

The Scariest Question: "Am I Gay...?"

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Earlier today, I wrote about coming out and told my story. If you read that article, you'd know that when I came out, I was sixteen and heavily involved in religious community. For that reason, or because I lived in the midst of rural Alaska, I regretfully didn't have a resource like this blog to go to for advice, solace, community, or support. In fact, I had relatively few known LGBT resources -- a handful of Tumblr sites were in my arsenal, but that was about it! I spent hours browsing LGBT Laughs, but since people from church followed my tumblog, I didn't feel comfortable reblogging anything. As far as I knew, I was the only gay Christian on the planet, and thus probably the only person who had ever felt so damn alone. 

As a direct result of this lack of information, I remember spending long nights awake freaking out over whether or not I was G-A-Y. In my mind, being gay was probably the scariest, biggest thing you could be, and it made me nervous to even consider the possibility. I thought endlessly about how my church might reject me. Even though my family is super-liberal, I even worried that they might reject me! If I came out, would I have friends? Would I have a house? Would I have a life? What about kids...? I had always wanted kids! There were too many questions & not enough accessible answers. 

Obviously, in the end I did realize that I was gay, and though at first I had terrifying moments of doubt, now I have settled into my role as a gay woman & feel quite comfortable with it. Not only have I always had feelings for women -- even since childhood! -- I find that I am more alive, active, & vital since I came out! The relationships I've had with women have been so much more fulfilling, honest, open, & real than my relationships with men ever were. The queer community that surrounds me in my home state of Alaska is wonderful. Of course, there were complementary bumps as I skidded my way out of the closet, but I would never dare to say that I regretted coming out, and if given the opportunity to live life again, the one change I would make is I would have come out even sooner! (Maybe. It honestly is incredibly hard to come out, and I think doing so younger might have been even worse.)


(A side note for all you rockin' AK queer kids: the community does exist! Regretfully, prejudice is still running wild, but I have the pleasure to know incredibly lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender people in many areas of the state. Check out Alaska Pride for a starter. I attended the October 2011 Pride Conference in Anchorage on a scholarship, and it was the best experience I've ever had!)

An important thing to know about being a human, especially a young human, is that being madly in love with a person of your same gender does not automatically mean you are a flaming homosexual nor does it mean that you have to immediately come out of the closet as one. It doesn't even necessarily mean that you're bisexual! Bottom line is, people are sexual creatures with strong urges for emotional, mental, and physical intimacy, and sometimes you'll have wild chemistry with a person who you wouldn't normally be into.


Need examples? Several of my straight friends have had crushes on girls. Totally normal! I certainly have had crushes on boys. Again, totally normal! It doesn't make me any less of a lesbian when I daydream about Davey Havok, does it? Didn't think so! In that same vein, I'm not less queer because I've been in relationships with men, or because I am open to the idea of being in one in the future. Similarly, your crush on your straight BFF doesn't necessarily make you less straight yourself. Also, don't listen to what society might say -- you can definitely identify as straight and be in a relationship with someone of your same gender.


(Another important thing to recognize is that it can be pretty difficult to distinguish between undying lust & affection, and a basic platonic crush. There are people you might want to be, and there are people you might want to be with, and the line can get fairly blurry. I know there are women who I respect & admire greatly, and that admiration can feel like lust or love sometimes.)

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Labels aren't worth suffering for, end of story! No one person is able to be categorized entirely by one word, one phrase, or even one paragraph. Our unique experiences, wants, needs, etc. are often categorized by society, but there is no need for us to stick labels on ourselves. I have lived 18 years on this bizarre & adventurous planet and my stories could fill 18 encyclopedias of anecdotes, definitions, scanned photographs, and hand-scrawled tidbits doodled on napkins.


What does that mean? It means I am more than queer. Not only that, I am not only queer, and I am not always queer! There are desires in my life that are completely heterosexual & I accept them as part of the unique, funky, weird creation that is Kayte. No problem! Being queer, while it is a label in and of itself, is largely about rejecting stereotypes & living life how you want to live it. It means that I can be a man one day and a woman the next. It means I can be with a man one year and a woman the next. If you feel the need to label yourself, try to suppress that sensation. That's crazy-difficult to do, but such a rad & freeing feeling when you inevitably succeed!

Sometimes, people will have known their sexual or gender identity since childhood, but with others -- like me! -- that hasn't been the case. Looking back at my childhood, it's pretty obvious that I liked women, but I was oblivious to that fact at the time. I mean, normal girls raised in Trekkie families might want to be starship captains, but lying awake thinking about Captain Janeway before falling asleep is probably a bit... Well... Gay. Don't you think?  


When I was trying to determine if I was gay or not, I realized that picturing myself married to a woman someday felt absolutely right, where as picturing myself married to a man felt just plain weird. I also realized that how my friends felt about guys they liked and how I felt about guys I liked were two totally different emotions. My relationships with men always felt stilted, one-sided, and odd. Instead, I was totally enthralled by the way my girl friends were growing into their bodies. So, for me, it was a gut feeling & came from a lot of self-reflection and long, introspective walks. 

Every queer person has a different story, though! For example, some people don't know they were gay or bi until they fell for a beautiful person of their same gender. Some people never thought they were different or unusual until they realized that not everyone felt the way they did about sex or gender. When it comes down to it, people are people & love is love & every person has their own fairytale ending to find. 

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In the end, the decision to come out is yours to make. I can't honestly tell you how to know if you're gay, bisexual, transgender, or any other variation on the gender and sexuality spectrum. If you're unsure as to whether or not you're queer, my advice is to give it some time. Love who you want to love, kiss who you want to kiss, dress how you want to dress, use whatever gender pronouns sound right to describe you. High school and junior high can be super-difficult times to be questioning or queer, but remember that someday you'll graduate & jet off to a big exciting new world where anything can happen. You can be whoever you want & whoever you are, and hopefully you will be free to do so without the threat of discrimination or violence. I totally see that happening, by the way, and I look forward to the day that it does -- for the both of us!