Welcome to this spin-off edition of Interviews With My Ex-Girlfriend in which Autostraddle writers get back in touch with their ex-girlfriends to ask them Five Simple Questions. In honor of Bi+ Week, we are mixing things up!

Christopher and I met our senior year of high school and were a mess at each other for a few months. We were precious repressed 17-year-olds in Dallas-adjacent suburbs (ish) who both grew up to be queer. We made each other mix CDs with The Strokes and The Format on them. We’ve managed to stay friends across time, states, and countries, and I think of our brief, never-official relationship with great fondness. I have always believed that Christopher and I were longing for something we couldn’t name and we found it in each other, in a way.  Christopher shares my penchant for nostalgia and introspection and graciously agreed to speak with me for this series. We talked about being repressed teens who made out in several parks and grew up to be super queer.

Between the untimely demise of my family’s desktop and the fact that it was 2008 and we didn’t have smartphones, I don’t actually have any pictures from when we were dating. This, from the following spring, is a fairly accurate representation. P.S. yes that IS a rainbow striped dress why do you ask?

Adrian: Ok so we met at The Max, right? Which no longer exists RIP

Christopher: We were there for a local show, I was there with Zach to see a band we had gotten to know because we were also in a band, and I guess you were there for the same band?

Adrian: Criminal Shift! Was the band.

Christopher: Yes! And I was helping Doug with the merch table and we were playing a Steel Train song on a ukelele and you came up and started singing with us.

Adrian: Wow that’s precious. Yes, and I knew Douglas through Marisa who was in your band, so basically the world was shrinking in on itself. Ok so we met and then did we talk on AIM?

Christopher: No, I think we texted, I had a cell phone at that point.

[Reader, I did some follow up research and in fact we mostly talked through Facebook messenger because I had a prepaid cell phone without text messages because it was 2008!]

Adrian: Right, so we just kept talking. And then we hung out!

Christopher: You came over after church and we went to the grocery store on Lover’s Lane and bought a $1 loaf of bread and took it to Curtis Park to feed the ducks.

Adrian: Right, and it was my first date ever! I was a late bloomer in all sorts of ways. Also wow you have an extremely good memory??

Christopher: I remember stuff that’s important to me!

Adrian: Omg wow um ok that’s sweet!!! Anyway so we hung out a few times but we were never like official. Like we watched Eternal Sunshine at your parents one time. Your parents were really nice to me!

Christopher: They love you! Right and then we went and laid in the grass because there were randomly so many stars. Wow that was really romantic! And then there was the time we went to the haunted house with your friends and also we went to Chili’s. And then we went to the park by your house and kissed on a playground structure.

Adrian: They really should make a teen movie about us. Ok so like, this was fall of senior year. At that point, how did you understand yourself?

Christopher: The way I always defined myself from like 13 or 14 when I had an awareness of libido was like, straight but open. I had erotic experiences with guy friends at sleepovers. Which is like, normal for adolescent boys. I always contextualized them as like, discovery-based encounters that were fun and I never felt any shame about them. I did that throughout high school but I never really let myself imagine them romantically. I was like, straight with some bi-curious leanings at that time. All of my dreams were exclusively homosexual. My subconscious was telling me like, this is really what you’re wanting. I was really good at ignoring them or discrediting their validity to myself. When we were meeting I was a straight guy but with compassion for not-straightness.

Adrian: Wow, that resonates so much. In high school I was like very outgoing and had friends in a lot of different groups. I had the experience of wanting to be close to girls but I genuinely liked boys so I figured I was straight. There was no visibility or safety for queer kids at my high school, and it was just like, beyond what I could conceive. I like, wanted to be really good friends with certain girls, and it was not the same as regular friendship, there was longing there. But it was different than I felt about boys too, and I tried to date boys but it never really…worked.

Christopher: Haha yes! My whole high school experience I was desperately in love with and in denial about it with… Zach. And I thought I just really wanted to be really good friends with him and wouldn’t let myself play with the possibility that it could be more than that. It’s one of those open secrets that if I said he’d probably be like ‘obviously.’

Adrian: What made it so hard to come to terms with it? Was it like, your family, or the environment, or just that it’s hard to be a person?

Christopher: Those all probably relate. This is a rich question that I haven’t really processed so I’m glad we’re talking about this! There was nothing violently oppressive in the Park Cities, it’s not like guys who weren’t super macho were getting beat up or anything like that. I never felt like expressing a queer or gender non-conforming personality would make me a target of physical violence. But growing up in Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, you would say gay or faggot in a derogatory way. I don’t think The people who used those words used it as a way to spew hate on gay people, but it still had the force of the underlying homophobia. There was this understanding that being queer or gay or bi is just not a preferred way of living. I was never very introspective, I was a social butterfly who was always wanting to be around other people as a way to disappear and not have to be my own self. Throughout high school I was a little bit incomplete, a black hole of a person, never doing that much internal examination. I was afraid of what I would uncover, that I would have to come to terms with the fact that I was not straight and queer. For like Zach in particular, I felt like disclosing my feelings would ruin the friendship! I think about the brave few souls who were more forthcoming and out and loud and more certain in themselves,  and like within our community, those kids didn’t have a tremendously hard time, but they weren’t seen as completely part of the rest of us.

Adrian: Well, and when you’re a teenager being part of the ‘us’ is the most important thing!

Christopher: Right. Well, what about you?

Adrian: I mean, Coppell was kind of a quintessential suburb. It was a horrible place to be different. Like it wasn’t safe and no one cared, that’s how it seemed. Not very many kids were out and those who were, and even those who were seriously suspected of being gay or queer, were bullied. Tons of my friends came out in college but not in high school. It was horrible. We weren’t allowed to have a Gay Straight Alliance or anything like that. I didn’t know anyone who identified as bisexual, it was just outside my frame of reference completely. I owned SO much rainbow shit and was like earnest about being an ally but that was as far as I could go. I wasn’t closeted, I was repressed as fuck, which I think is probably just as harmful in a different way. I wasn’t afraid to stand out or be weird, but that was about what I wore or what I did, not something central to who I was. That wasn’t really conceivable.

Christopher: I remember sitting at the “goth table” sometimes and they were like, outwardly gender non-conforming and some of the girls were bi. So like, the LGBT contingent also coincided with the fringe counterculture rule-breaking crowd. Which makes sense!

Adrian: Wow, I  think a lot of our goths were queer too, I’m thinking about whether that functioned as armor in a way, or marking themselves as different outwardly so no one was surprised.

Christopher: Yeah, or like a disguise.

Adrian: Ok, so, we ended things after a couple months because you were super flaky. You kept breaking plans and the last straw was when we were supposed to watch Rocky Horror Picture Show in my friend Bethanie’s front yard, and I think I was super embarrassed because you were supposed to meet my friends and you stood me up!

Christopher: I can’t remember specific things I missed or reasons I gave for flaking, and the reasons probably weren’t false but they also probably weren’t, like, necessary. They were excuses. I was not confronting the real truth which was that I liked you but I didn’t want to engage in a dating relationship like this. I think that’s probably what was happening. I’m sorry I was a flake 12 years ago!

Adrian: Finally, the apology I’ve been waiting for [a joke]. Ok so but then like, in college you came out pretty much right away, right?

Christopher: Within the first quarter of college I was pretty, pretty, pretty, yeah, pretty out. The summer after high school before college there was a meeting of Stanford students in Dallas, and Alok was there, who was actively out and proud at that point. We became friends and when we met on campus and continued hanging out and through them I met their other friends and started to meet more LGBTQ people and I guess I had more examples and role models, peers, that were braver than I was and more developed in their sense of who they were. That inspired me to confront my feelings and own them with more pride and joy. I think that happened at the same time that I let myself develop feelings for a guy and affirmed for myself that those were feelings I wanted to have. That unlocked something! It was a slow, amorphous development ever since. I remember coming out that winter to all my friends as bi. Now I just like to say I have predilections and tend to be with men. It’s in flux. I don’t like trying to pin myself down when I’m a moving target in a lot of ways.

Adrian: So, I am thinking about when I visited you at Stanford junior year, spring 2012, and I hung out with you at your co-op and we saw Modest Mouse with Alok and it was just like sunshiny and queer and good, and like, I think about that trip and the ways that something felt possible. I was still identifying as straight them but being in a new place with people who didn’t know me, I didn’t have to map myself onto who anyone thought I would be and it set something free

Christopher: Wait really?

Adrian: Yeah, that trip was really important for me. I had broken up with my kinda long-term boyfriend a couple months before and was about to embark on a spree of dating mediocre boys while being in love with a friend and like, I was getting ready to come out to myself! Just in the most chaotic way possible. But being around a bunch of queer people who didn’t know me was really powerful. And I guess I should say that obviously since I was visiting you in another state we had managed to stay friends.

Christopher: Yeah, we started hanging out fairly soon as friends! We would argue about trying not to spend too much on lunch and then go to Half Price Books and drop $40. I think you turned me onto D.H. Lawrence…

Adrian: That’s the gayest thing that’s ever happened

Christopher: …so I bought The Rainbow. Oh that’s too much.

Adrian: There’s nothing subtle about that.

We spent a lot of time in the poetry section, and I once posted this on his Facebook wall because I missed him, back when people wrote on Facebook walls.

Christopher: It was hidden in plain sight! But yeah the the pressure was off once we weren’t trying to make it work romantically.

Adrian: I couldn’t really stay mad at you. I felt like I needed to know you, there was something very deeply held that drew me to you, it felt like we were supposed to be in each other’s lives. Is that too deep?

Christopher: No, I felt the same! I was eager to know you. There was an inexplicable, ineffable magnetism. What you said resonates.

Adrian: You always really mattered to me! So we’ve managed to see each other every couple years.

Christopher: Right, and I came to visit you in Nicaragua. That trip was really intense and important to me. And we talked there about how we don’t keep in touch frequently but when we do talk, I always feel very grateful. Picking up where we left off seems like a cliché but it’s true.

Adrian: You know, I was never annoyed that you were gay! I was just glad to know you. If it were the 1940s maybe we would have had a lavender marriage. Instead we’ve gotten to have this weird, beautiful long distance friendship for over a decade. It really feels like we grew up together even though we’ve only ever lived in the same place for a year.

Christopher: And in Nicaragua when I was there you were also like at the very beginning of naming your gender and your queer politics were evolving. So like, what happened between the Modest Mouse concert and that trip?

Adrian: So like, 2012 was a mess like I said and I made some questionable decisions. I remember when this girl started dating a girl after we had both been closetedly in love all summer, I was so jealous. I guess the jealousy was a big enough feeling to make me interrogate it. That was also the Halloween I dressed as Bob Dylan and people thought I was a guy and that was thrilling, but I didn’t think about that very hard for several years. But yeah so I dated a bunch of guys and then I came out as queer and bi at a poetry show — of course haha — and then I fell for a girl and then I moved away. In 2015, which was the last year I was living in Managua, two big things happened. I went to A-Camp and was around a ton of trans people for the first time and saw just like ALL these ways to be. And then I went to an LGBTI conference in Costa Rica and was around a ton of trans people again, and people started using -x ending pronouns and terms for me without me asking for that, they just like made the assumption which in this case turned out to be a huge gift. And then a few weeks after that, you visited with Rob and Dana and we went on that completely ridiculous hike up a mountainside that like wasn’t fully cleared? And we talked about being queer adults and all the things we were still figuring out. And it was perfect.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!