The Zetsu Mail [June 2023 Edition] (Patreon)

Henlo! Welcome to the 4th edition of the gayest monthly mail on the internet~

What do you know, it's June. You know what that means? It's the gayest time of the year! I hope everyone has a wonderful pride month. Since I have a YouTube channel dedicated to making the least straight videos imaginable, might as well celebrate it. We're kind of in a scary time because the pushback on the LGBTQ+ community has been really increasing lately....which is weird because we already fought to have certain laws in place but now they're like oops nevermind?

Ah well, I don't wanna talk much about politics here. Let's narrow the scope a little.

Why don't I talk about my journey with my identity? After all, I didn't discover that I wasn't straight for most of the 20 years I've been alive for.

I was raised in an environment where I was taught that being homosexual was wrong. My mother said it wasn't right, the teachers at school were against it, and religion obviously plays a hand in this. I can't say for sure if it was the factor, but a trend that I observed was that the more devout of a follower they were, the more homophobic they got. However, I wasn't really exposed to much regarding the topic so I never saw or developed much of an opinion on it. Thankfully, my household was rather lax on religion so I wasn't drilled with extremely conversative views at an early age. While I used to be neutral on the gays, I definitely wasn't like that on trans people at the time. As a young teen I used to be caught up in the "facts don't care about your feelings" and "owning SJWs" nonsense, but thank god I grew out of it.

So there I was, a 15-year old just going to school and enjoying life...until I met my first IRL crush. Before that, I hadn't found myself attracted to men. I found feminine men kind of cute, but at the time I had hardly got any exposure to them. But for the first time, I found a guy (who wasn't an anime character) cute. I'll spare the details, but basically he wasn't into guys but he was okay with still being friends. My crush on him didn't disappear for the next couple of years, and everyone in my friend group knew and liked to tease us about it. Obviously, we were kind of uncomfortable with that...but by the time we finished secondary school, I totally moved on from him. I'm still in contact with him today, and I still find him attractive, but he's not on my mind anymore and I've put my energy into other people now.

In between the crush thing and graduating school, I stumbled upon more and more femboys as I watched more anime. And yes, Astolfo was and still is my favorite. Because they were likeable characters in their respective shows and I was in the middle of experiencing gay energy, I fell in love with them more and more. By the time I was 17 years old, I had pretty much accepted myself as a bisexual.

However, as time went on and I started growing out my hair (because they wouldn't let me at school so might as well try now), and I kept getting mistaken as a girl sometimes, I realized that I...felt good about being called a girl. I knew I was a boy, but it didn't bother me at all if anyone called me a girl. I started to wonder if I was bigender or genderfluid instead. My love for boys and girls at this time became more of a love for people in general, and I felt it was more accurate to say that my sexual orientation was pansexual, and so it stands to this day.

So my romantic and sexual preferences were sorted out smoothly, but I was still struggling with putting a pin on my gender. I felt like I couldn't rest easy if I didn't find out. This was around the time I switched my preferred pronouns from just he/him to he/they to reflect my identity better, but realized pretty quickly that I kind of just disliked he/him after all and ditched that entirely. Other than displaying it on the internet, I've only told my best friend about my pronouns and to no surprise (because he's awesome) he respected those wishes and actually made an effort to use they/them when referring to me which makes me really happy! I haven't told any of my other friends yet because...honestly, I'm kind of scared of what they'll say. It's a little irrational because they're all good people (for the most part) but I find it hard to take that extra step. But I digress.

With my pronouns and orientation figured out, I had a MUCH better idea about who I was and settled on the fact that I'm agender. I just couldn't be bothered to keep up with the gender thing, so why not discard it entirely? I am who I am, and if you want to categorize me in some ways, that's your thing and is totally irrelevant to me. Once I realized that, it felt like a huge weight was taken off my shoulders and I felt really free and more complete as a person.

I'm still experimenting with different things today, because you never know if you'll like something if you haven't experienced it first hand. But I'm very confident in my queer identity right now, and I hope it stays that way.

Whew, this was a bit longer than usual, huh? I hope the story wasn't a bore, it's a pretty long and nuanced process but all I put here are the main parts. Before I announce the theme for this month's audios, I just wanted to ask: What are your experiences with your sexual orientation/gender? I'd love to hear in the comments :3

Now, I know. This probably doesn't come as a surprise....but the theme this month is pride! What's rainbow month without the rainbows, eh? Get ready for some extra gay content~

As always, if you're a Couch Council or higher tier, you get to know what the audio titles are gonna be before they come out and get to vote on the release order.

Until next time!