Since I was a kid, I failed so hard at being a guy. I've always been hopeless at athletics. My body type has always been pretty meek (let me not doxx myself and say more). I hate any sort of competitive environment. I can't hold my liquor for shit. I have a very high pitched voice and an expressive way of talking. Friends have described my voice as a "gay twang". My mum probably assumed that I was gay from day one, as I got a lot of "it's OK to be gay" from her growing up. Sadly I had too much soy or not enough soy, because I grew up attracted to women.
Maybe you old comrades remember, but schools in the 90s were full of homophobia. "That's so gay" criticised any action that deviated from some masculine ideal. I got this multiple times a day, and I learned to stifle my personality to avoid the rebuke of my male non-friends. I'm not even complaining, there's so so many that had it way worse than I did.
Nowadays it's great being a flamboyant straight dude. I can be as sweet, as empathetic, and as expressive as I want. I have cute and colourful clothing. I get really ecstatic around animals. I cry. People like me for being fun and engaged with stuff. Nowadays if some guy colleague says that's "gay" it's like 
"are you alright mate??"
I did go some LGBT events and actions in the past, but not a lot. If I do anything positive, it's to enforce no homophobic language with my students, which guys has gotten a lot easier in the past 20 years. Really, the kids nowadays are much better than we were. OK, I have hooked up with a few dudes here and there, but it feels like stolen valour to call myself bi.
So thanks a whole lot to all the queer people who have made my life much easier, when I've done so little.
TrashFuture once described school in the 1990s as one kid announcing that if you don't drink from a puddle you're gay and then every other kid lining up to drink from the heterosexuality puddle. I distinctly remember that puddle. Even as a cishet guy, that casually reactionary environment was so repressive that at best I could hope to be in an arms race with the other boys to prove I can drink the most puddle water. My grandparents bred flowers and even that- being two generations removed from liking flowers- was a puddle for 90%~ of the other boys who knew me. They just assumed I was gay and lumped me in with the female cliques, who also assumed I was gay because I must like flowers.
But now I'm a plant scientist with a home full of flowers who's good with women. They're probably still desperately drinking from the puddle if they didn't also find communities which radically break from cis-heteronormativity. Nothing threatens me more as a cishet male than masculinity.
We really should've taken advantage of that. Say "Do X or you're gay!" Where X is every step of building a proletarian revolution.
Normally I just tell people to read theory because it will help them reach a clearer understanding of the world and themselves.
But...
I remember in middle school the popular girls were trying to trick the stupid foreign girl (me) into thinking various english words for stuff like genitals or poop were the english words for things like chocolate and other fun things.
Are you in Dogtooth?
I don't know what that means.
Dogtooth is a movie where abusive parents raise their children in a complex they're not allowed to leave, and they teach them the wrong meanings of words. There's a scene where one of the daughters asks her parents what a vagina is and the mom tells her it's a chandelier or something to that effect.
no my parents are immigrants so we didn't speak English at home.
yeah its insane how far its come. I commented this on another post here but: Im straight, and I had to do therapy to accept it because I got bullied so intensely for so many years a deep, deep part of myself was convinced I was in denial. It was brutal, I would get followed home and beat up for like, wearing shorts (gay to have your knees out?)