For 33 Years, I Thought Something Was Wrong With Me. Then I Faced The 1 Possibility I Hadn't Considered.

Of all the people I thought I might grow up to be, a lesbian wasn’t one of them. I never fantasized about women or imagined loving them. I didn’t have crushes on women or crave their attention.

I was born in ferociously Catholic Ireland. My mother was very religious. Before getting married, she almost became a nun. I have only one photograph from that time in her life, a novice habit framing her kind, questioning eyes. I imagine her living in the echoey rooms of an old convent, among a colony of young women, their days punctuated by prayer, their heads bowed in reverence toward the god that guided their lives. Her days were embroidered by women, their rhythms and interests, the way women think and talk and feel. That sounds heavenly to me, though not in the way the church intended.

By the time I was born, she’d left the convent, married a man, and both started and sacrificed a career to raise her children and manage a home.

It was the late 1980s, and Ireland was a profoundly conservative place. Married couples were encouraged to procreate, though sex itself was often considered shameful. “Homosexual acts” among men were criminalized. Homosexual acts among women were considered so contrary to nature that they weren’t even part of the legislation. Children screamed “gay” in the schoolyard as an epithet. To be gay was to be stupid, pathetic, worthless.

By the time I wore a virginal white dress on my First Communion day, I had already been sexually violated by an adult man. Aside from the perpetrator, nobody knew. I tucked the secret away and continued what everyone told me was a normal, happy childhood.

I repressed the sexual trauma I experienced and set about becoming the kind of girl my mother wanted me to be.

One evening