Hi. I've been browsing through threads all evening and this seems like one that could be useful to me, and that I could hopefully help people out in.
I've mostly been lucky when it comes to gay rights and such. Both my parents have gay friends and such, so I've never seen it as anything unusual. I think the only time I've ever reacted to it was when my mum told me that her friend was going to live in Mexico with her girlfriend, and I asked if the friend's housemate knew (I was about nine so sexuality wasn't really mentioned to me, and I wasn't aware that the friend was a lesbian. I also thought that she was in a relationship with her housemate. He's also gay, apparently. They found it hilarious).
I'm pansexual - could possibly be bi, but I identify more with pan. I think ever since I started liking people, and my friends have had discussions about sex and stuff, I've always said that 'I don't really care who's doing stuff to me, as long as they're doing it well'. I got thinking about that, around February of this year, about whether it would actually mean anything to me to do stuff with a girl. That turned into deciding I'd like to experiment - my boyfriend was pretty pleased with that, as one might suspect . . . I had a plan to try and see if one of my close female friends might be open to doing stuff while we were on holiday together, but then I decided I wasn't interested in her enough that way. I think when I actually realised I was pan, I was in a discussion with my boyfriend about experimenting. I'd been researching stuff to pass the time, and pansexuality just made sense to me. Looking back, there's a lot of times when I've started to look at a woman and told myself not to, and times where I've had crushes on girls and just ignored it as me being a weirdo.
My friends and the people I mix with in general tend to be the misfits of the world, so I'm surrounded by quite a large community of gay-and-other-sexuality- people. My boyfriend has a friend who's asexual, we have several bisexual friends, my best friend is gay and came out when he was 13, and so on, so I never even considered hiding it from my friends. I just started more openly mentioning stuff, and it's never even been questioned.
It took me a while to come out to my mum, partly because I just couldn't be bothered - me and my boyfriend are pretty serious, so I decided if I was ever going to bring anyone else home, I'd tell her. I just went for it one day, and explained what it was. She makes pan jokes sometimes (not especially derogatory ones, and she'd stop if I asked her to, just ones like 'that's your restaurant' when we went past the Pan Asian Kitchen, and the usual 'so do you get off to pans and stuff, then?'. There was a guy I mentioned it to, and he asked if it meant I could cook things in my v****a >.< wink but mostly she doesn't mention it. She has become a little weird about it occasinally, by implying that maybe I'm straight and I've just misunderstood what it is.
There. Sorry for rambling . . .