Knew, or should have known

Since it’s Pride weekend -

When did you know you were queer? Or when, looking back, should you have figured it out?

Some people say they always knew; others figured it out later in life, very suddenly; some of us took a little while to get it all sorted.

I should have known one night when we were at home, for reasons I can’t recall watching the Grammies; I think that my grandmother wanted to see them, and we watched a lot more TV back before the Internets were around.

And then there was this video.

I vaguely remember my family arguing about whether it was a man or a woman – this was the Rust Belt in the 1980s, people, not exactly a hotbed of genderqueer awareness – but I wasn’t paying them any attention. I knew that I was enraptured by the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, even if it took me a long time and a lot of wasted effort to figure out exactly what that meant.

You?