“Why Did Gen Z Lesbians Forget They Were Gay?”
By Anna
Publishing by Mel
Credit: Galanda, Mikuláš
One late night, I came across a TikTok that hit a little too close to home.
“To the girls who realized they were gay at like 7 and forgot about it until they were 16,” it read.
Not only had creator @tovalavesson distilled my entire childhood into one simple sentence, but, judging by its likes, over 180’000 others along with it. Naturally, the comment section was a blissful chaos of happy tears and all caps.
“this is so real 😭😭”
“THANK YOU”
“J’ai trouvé mon peuple 💃💃”
And then, somewhere between all the excitement, one comment stood out:
“idk if forgot is the right word”
They were right. “Forgetting” makes it sound accidental. Like misplacing your carabiner with all your keys on it. But that’s not what happened.
Credit: Boston Public Library
I remember sitting on my bedroom floor at seven years old, mapping out my “ideal future.” We had talked about it at school that day. The girls and I dreamt of owning a farm together with chickens, horses, kids, and… our husbands.
I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the last part, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. As I kept drawing, somewhere between stables and chicken coops, a thought popped up:
What if I’m a lesbian?
Immediately followed by:
Even if I was, I’d pretend I’m not and marry a man anyway.
Then the thought was gone. Looking back, it sounds deliberate, as if I consciously decided to bury a part of myself. But that moment never felt like a choice. This disappearance of my queerness felt automatic, like something that happened to me out of my control.
Trying to understand that contradiction, I spoke to seven sapphics between the ages of 16 and 24—five lesbians and two queer people—who had commented on the TikTok.
First, before we could forget, we had to realize. Between the ages of seven and twelve, we noticed small differences in ourselves. We cared a little too much about certain female friends, wanted to impress girls, or just felt strangely unenthusiastic about the husbands we were supposed to happily imagine into our futures.
That’s when the wondering began: Is it possible that I like a girl? Or, more straightforward: What if I am gay?
And almost immediately after came: “This is bad in this society and I am fucked,” asone person remembers thinking. Another was “terrified of being different,” afraid she “wouldn’t be loved anymore.”
Sitting with our questions, let alone exploring them, therefore wasn’t an option. Instead, we distanced ourselves. We took “Am I Gay?” quizzes just to prove we weren’t. We “hoped it would just go away.” We “pretended.” We “persuaded ourselves.” One person described it as “subconsciously forcing myself to like boys and be normal.”
Normal.
The world was very good at teaching us what that meant.
Sometimes the lesson was explicit: homophobia at church or slurs on TV. But more often, it appeared quietly. The gay aunt we technically had but nobody ever mentioned. The teacher, whose queerness existed only as a rumor. Or the fact that every story we were told ended in a man and a woman riding off into the sunset.
No one needed to outright tell us not to be lesbians. Cultural messaging had already done that job perfectly fine. Of course we stayed quiet about something no one talked about. Of course we dismissed feelings that were never reflected back at us. Of course we recoiled from what the world framed as dangerous.
What we call “forgetting” was neither an accident nor an active choice. It was social conditioning working exactly as intended. Long before we asked ourselves, what if I am gay?, the world had already prepared the answer. It had built the farm with its stables and husbands as a package deal to growing up. By the time the question came up, the response had been clear all along:
We would match the absence in the world with our own.
Credit: The Metropolitan Museum
And life would’ve gone on that way if we hadn’t encountered different worlds.
One girl moved to a bigger town where queerness was more visible and accepted. Another heard her older sister react positively to a queer character in Pixar’s Onward. Someone else discovered edits to We Fell in Love in October and “had a breakdown about it lol.”Personally, I made one single queer friend.
These moments shifted something in us. During our childhood, queerness was something unspoken but quietly implied to be wrong. So that part of us disappeared. During our teens and early twenties, we got access to different environments, which gave us permission and a sense of safety to return to our initial question: what if I’m a lesbian? This time, instead of rejecting it, we were ready to explore that thought.
Just like our forgetting had been external, our remembering was too. And when we finally got to remember, one person described it simply:
“I just felt more like myself, and I didn’t even know that I wasn’t myself before.”
