Question for gay and ?ing aspies 29 years old and older?

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When you were younger, as a teenage, did you know what being gay or queer meant? I honestly have to say that back then I really didn't understand what being gay or queer meant, because we were, in a sense, socially isolated and/or disabled and didn't have the resources we do now, I had no idea what it was all about.

I did know what being LGBT meant as a teenager. I grew up in the San Francisco area! Well, my dad did his best to put me down for what he considered "effeminate" mannerisms, and I used to have lots of Bible studies with my very religious grandmother when I was young, so my early associations with anything remotely LGBT-related were quite negative. However luckily when my older sister was in high school (my being around 10-12 at the time), she did a lot of volunteer outreach work with the Filipino-American community and AIDS awareness. This invariably led to exposure to people of other sexualities, and that exposure did considerably to dispel all the stereotypes and misinformation surrounding what it meant to be LGBT.

Then while in college as an older teenager, I used to do a bit of volunteer work, delivering groceries to people with AIDS. Some of them were LGBT, and I would casually talk to them about their lives and interests and stuff. They were always really appreciative of what I was doing for them, and it was great to see really how LGBT folks are people with the same joys and worries as straight folks.

It took me nine years (from the age of 10 to 19) to realise that what I was feeling was "being gay". I'd been called names at school, but for the most part was asexual. However, I'd never looked at women in a sexual way and thought "I want some of that".

It was only after high school that I internalised what being gay meant, and then I accepted it. It was a very short period of "this is what it means -> oh, right, I think that's me -> yup, no question about it -> well now that explains a lot."

That said, I knew theoretically what it meant, while still younger, but the thought never crossed my mind that I might be gay. It took someone at college coming out the closet for me to make the connection.

Incidentally, I think accepting my feelings about homosexuality helped me accept my AS diagnosis more easily. It was an identical process to the one above. Interestingly, a gay doctor friend of mine suggested I might be autistic, one evening when a whole group of us were having dinner. He kept spinning a coin, and I couldn't stop looking at it. The rest, as they say, is history.

I was well aware of my sexuality very early--by age 12 or so.

I did not understand what the social implications would be, and I blamed much of my social ostracism on being gay, rather than only my AS (which did not exist as a diagnosis when I was a teen).

So if, "did you know what being gay or queer meant" refers to sexuality, then yes, I knew. If it refers to the social elements, coming out, coping with discrimination, confronting HIV and safer sex, then no, I didn't--but I doubt any of my peers understood a lot of that about their emerging sexuality, either.