I Thought I Was a Lesbian - David Bowie Made Me Discover the Reality

During 2011, a couple of years prior to the acclaimed David Bowie display opened at the renowned Victoria and Albert Museum in England, I declared myself a lesbian. Up to that point, I had only been with men, with one partner I had married. By 2013, I found myself approaching middle age, a newly single mother of four, living in the America.

At that time, I had commenced examining both my personal gender and romantic inclinations, searching for clarity.

My birthplace was England during the dawn of the seventies era - before the internet. When we were young, my companions and myself didn't have Reddit or digital content to reference when we had curiosities about intimacy; rather, we looked to celebrity musicians, and during the 80s, everyone was experimenting with gender norms.

The iconic vocalist donned boys' clothes, Boy George adopted girls' clothes, and pop groups such as Erasure and Bronski Beat featured performers who were openly gay.

I craved his slender frame and precise cut, his defined jawline and male chest. I wanted to embody the artist's German phase

In that decade, I spent my time operating a motorcycle and dressing like a tomboy, but I returned to traditional womanhood when I chose to get married. My partner moved our family to the United States in 2007, but when the marriage ended I felt an undeniable attraction returning to the manhood I had previously abandoned.

Since nobody experimented with identity quite like David Bowie, I decided to spend a free afternoon during a seasonal visit visiting Britain at the museum, hoping that perhaps he could guide my understanding.

I was uncertain specifically what I was looking for when I walked into the display - maybe I thought that by submerging my consciousness in the richness of Bowie's gender experimentation, I might, in turn, stumble across a insight into my true nature.

Before long I was positioned before a small television screen where the film clip for "that track" was continuously looping. Bowie was strutting his stuff in the front, looking sharp in a slate-colored ensemble, while positioned laterally three supporting vocalists in feminine attire crowded round a microphone.

Differing from the drag queens I had seen personally, these female-presenting individuals failed to move around the stage with the self-assurance of natural performers; instead they looked disinterested and irritated. Placed in secondary positions, they chewed gum and expressed annoyance at the boredom of it all.

"Those words, boys always work it out," Bowie sang cheerfully, seemingly unaware to their reduced excitement. I felt a fleeting feeling of empathy for the accompanying performers, with their pronounced make-up, ill-fitting wigs and too-tight dresses.

They seemed to experience as uncomfortable as I did in feminine attire - frustrated and eager, as if they were longing for it all to be over. At the moment when I recognized my alignment with three men dressed in drag, one of them tore off her wig, wiped the makeup from her face, and unveiled herself as ... Bowie! Shocker. (Of course, there were additional David Bowies as well.)

In that instant, I was absolutely sure that I desired to remove everything and transform like Bowie. I wanted his slender frame and his defined hairstyle, his angular jaw and his masculine torso; I aimed to personify the slender-shaped, artist's Berlin phase. However I found myself incapable, because to truly become Bowie, first I would need to be a man.

Coming out as gay was one thing, but personal transformation was a significantly scarier possibility.

I required further time before I was willing. During that period, I made every effort to adopt male characteristics: I abandoned beauty products and eliminated all my skirts and dresses, cut off my hair and commenced using men's clothes.

I changed my seating posture, walked differently, and adopted new identifiers, but I stopped short of medical intervention - the possibility of rejection and remorse had caused me to freeze with apprehension.

Once the David Bowie show finished its world tour with a engagement in Brooklyn, New York, following that period, I went back. I had arrived at a crisis. I found it impossible to maintain the facade to be something I was not.

Standing in front of the identical footage in 2018, I knew for certain that the challenge wasn't about my clothing, it was my biological self. I wasn't a masculine woman; I was a male with feminine qualities who'd been presenting artificially all his life. I desired to change into the man in the sharp suit, moving in the illumination, and then I comprehended that I was able to.

I booked myself in to see a physician shortly afterwards. It took another few years before my personal journey finished, but none of the things I anticipated occurred.

I maintain many of my feminine mannerisms, so people often mistake me for a queer man, but I'm comfortable with that outcome. I wanted the freedom to experiment with identity following Bowie's example - and given that I'm comfortable in my body, I have that capacity.