By Kori Nicole Williams, June 6, 2021
Like so many other people in the LGBTQ+ community, I grew up feeling like I had to be straight. Being straight is treated as the “default,” for lack of a better term, and I had always been attracted to guys as a teen. It was only when I got to college that I realized I could be attracted to other genders—and that realization overflowed into questioning all my other kinds of relationships, including nonromantic ones.
When I started to question and understand my sexuality, it led me to question the other relationships in my life as well, why I prioritized them as I did, and why I felt the need to do so.
I belong to a family, like so many others, where everyone is just assumed to be straight and cisgender and expected to get married and have kids. Nothing else was ever even talked about. So during my time of self-discovery in college, I was too scared to speak to my family about my sexuality because I didn’t want to be judged or shunned by any of them. On top of worrying about what my family would think, I identified as pansexual, and I doubted anyone in my family had even heard that word back then.
