This is it, the final episode of Terra goes to Hell. In another essay, I unload a lot of things that have been on my mind about religion. In this essay, I'm going to talk about being gay.
I'm not gay.
But I could have been.
I realized this when I was around 14. I was in junior high. Some girls in one of my classes were bugging me to tell them "who do you like?" meaning, what boy did I like. I kept saying "nobody," which was the truth, and they kept accusing me of lying. Eventually I picked a guy I barely knew, pretended a crush, and they left me alone.
But, in the privacy of my own head, I wondered about it. I wondered why they were so unwilling to accept the "nobody" answer -- did they know something I didn't know? I thought about my mother, who talked about how I couldn't go on a "car date" until I was sixteen, as if she just assumed I would want to do such a thing. I thought about other girls I knew, many of whom had been annoyingly boy-crazy since they were ten or eleven.
And I wondered --
Was I normal?
Was I -- could I -- possibly be gay?
I convinced myself that I wasn't, because I didn't have any crushes on any girls either. But on some level I knew that I hadn't resolved the question yet, I had merely put it aside. Until I actually had a crush on somebody, and that somebody was male, I didn't know I wasn't gay.
So, I didn't turn out to be gay. But what if I had?
That's pretty much the origin of Terra's story.
