Being of fundie upbringing in a rural area myself, I didn't know that male homosexuality was something that was practiced in modern times (as opposed to being one of those 'dead' sins that no one did anymore, like idolatry, and why yes, I do see the irony there) until I was 14, when a more worldly acquaintance of mine intimated on one memorable school bus trip that another student who hadn't been to school in a while had been shipped off to boot camp by his parents after having been caught in the act of buttsex with another guy. I didn't have the words 'lesbianism' or 'bisexual' in the sense of an orientation in my vocabulary for another year or so after that.
Having discovered my own occasional same-sex lusts at age 12, you can imagine how upsetting this was for me - if I don't have the words for it, I can't think about it coherently. Fortunately, I never got a 'slut' reputation, and the one person who accused me of lesbianism in high school acted like it wasn't a particularly big deal - more a social faux pas along the lines of ridiculous hair or having the wrong accent, rather than sins against God and Nature. If anything, she probably did me a favor in the long run. But I suspect that if I'd been male, it'd have been far, far worse.
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Having discovered my own occasional same-sex lusts at age 12, you can imagine how upsetting this was for me - if I don't have the words for it, I can't think about it coherently. Fortunately, I never got a 'slut' reputation, and the one person who accused me of lesbianism in high school acted like it wasn't a particularly big deal - more a social faux pas along the lines of ridiculous hair or having the wrong accent, rather than sins against God and Nature. If anything, she probably did me a favor in the long run. But I suspect that if I'd been male, it'd have been far, far worse.