I was bewildered and repulsed at the thought of female anatomy. I felt pressured to pick a label and stick with it, and for a long time “gay” worked because I didn’t think about it much. With “Born This Way,” she became the most high profile person in pop culture to say, “Don’t be ashamed of your sexuality because it’s a natural part of who you are.”įor me, the “Born This Way” narrative made it difficult for me to accept that my own sexuality could develop and change over time. She was responding to the still all-too-common rhetoric which characterizes sexuality as a choice. Obviously, Lady Gaga didn’t write “Born This Way” to advocate for the sexualization of children.
#I AM I GAY I THINK I AM FULL#
Why, then, do adults who knew me as a child insist that I was gay all along? How could they have known, when I myself didn’t know it until sometime during 2011, a full 13 years after I was born? So you can see why I have a complicated relationship to “Born This Way.” When I was six years old, I wasn’t a ladykiller. With all of the journalistic sensitivity I can muster, I’d like to ask: what the fuck? The heteronormativity so deeply ingrained in our society raises its ugly head, and we assume that baby boys are lady killers and baby girls are saving themselves for their daddies to give to their husbands. Now, we often assign a sexuality to newborn children - straight until proven otherwise. Kids are not gay or straight, they’re just kids. That’s because people are not born with a sexuality. They still had a good few years left to develop. Bullies teased me for being gay when I was younger, but when a six-year-old boy calls another six-year-old boy gay, he means “weird” or “gross,” not “has sex with men.” Sure, it wasn’t a very nice thing for that boy to say, but it didn’t make me question my sexuality or think about my romantic and sexual attractions, because romantic and sexual attractions did not exist when I was six. It was not something I thought much about before middle school. Those boys made me realize that I was queer. Then it was Joseph, a boy in my choir class who kissed me a few weeks before eighth grade ended. Then it was Jackson, the nerd-jock crossover of my wildest dreams. I had a crush on Christian, a charming boy in my grade with mischievous eyes and a perpetual smirk. “Born This Way” also came out around the same time I did, at least to myself. It’s also a monumental LGBTQ anthem in which Gaga embraces her bisexuality and affirms other LGBTQ identities, singing “I’m beautiful in my way / ‘Cause God makes no mistakes / I’m on the right track, baby I was born this way.” Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” is a bop - it topped charts in 25 countries and became one of the best-selling singles of all time.