Leaving the Country Helped Me Accept My Queer Identity

I often forget that I was only 19 when my flight from New Orleans first touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport — an American teenager hell-bent on navigating the unfamiliar streets of a storied metropolis by herself.

Armed only with a three-month work visa and two enormous suitcases, I followed signage to the London Underground, silently congratulating myself for making it this far. Once the Tube began its chug into the heart of Great Britain’s epicenter, I watched from the window as the city unfolded before me on a characteristically gray June day.

I sat still, already electrified by a place unlike anywhere I’d ever known. That wasn’t a bad thing. Behind life’s immediate thrills, I had been unwinding what went wrong with my coming out experience in the back of my mind. A change of scenery couldn’t hurt.

Push and pull — that was my relationship with the region that raised me. In my beloved and bewildering Louisiana, time moves slowly, and traditions die hard. Catholicism makes up the bedrock of New Orleanian society, and my urban suburb sat well within its grasp.

In the 2010s, most gender norms still wouldn’t budge, even under the weight of modernity. Boys donned camouflage for hunting season, jerseys for football games, and khakis for fraternity rush. Meanwhile, schoolgirls were required to wear plaid skirts — fingertip length — regardless of their enrollment at public, private, or religious institutions. I learned how to waltz, set a table, and sit “like a lady” in extracurricular cotillion classes.

Like gingerbread, girls were eventually pressed into certain shapes: wife, mother, homemaker. I both loved womanhood and despised the cookie-cutter mold assigned to me. In a family of strong personalities, I developed mine immediately, with a running joke that I mirrored my father with his willful, driven ways and anti-authoritative streak.

It was only inevitable that I’d buck whenever I saw fit.

In high school, I tried almost every sport: soccer, gymnastics, cheerleading, pole vaulting, powerlifting, powderpuff flag football and distance running — both track and cross country. A long run on hot asphalt is where I met my first girlfriend.

After-school practice made us fast friends, laughing and racing in the heat of early fall. Eventually, she made an emotional confession: she was gay. It made no difference to me, but, in 2011, few students were out and proud. We carried on as usual until another secret came to light: she loved me. Without hesitation, I loved her back.

But over eight disastrous months of dating, sweetness was swiftly poisoned by judgment as words were whispered about us in classrooms. Instead of exploring my newfound queerness, I defended and denied. No longer welcome at my lunch table, I busied myself by passing notes to her and planning schemes to furtively meet.

Before our paths decidedly uncrossed, we naively dreamed of anywhere else together — maybe Paris? And here I was, three years later, running away to London.

My budding journalism career became my only constant in the dynamic transition from high school to a university upstate. The nasty initial response to the first tendrils of my then-bisexuality largely silenced me in this new, small town where difficulties would unfailingly arise if I opened up.

Instead, I joined the pinkest, preppiest sorority on campus, socializing with many women intent on marrying soon after graduation. I met a handful of other members of Greek life who I suspected were queer, too, but they also remained quiet until they earned their undergraduate degrees and left for greener, more accepting pastures.

During my sophomore year, I joined an international internship placement program. As fate would have it, PinkNews extended me the chance to spend the summer chasing stories about LGBTQ+ issues across the pond as a reporting intern, which I eagerly accepted.

On my first morning, I was greeted with a gift: a golden, sparkly Lush soap bar, with the words, “Gay Is OK.” I counted as the sole member of our small team who identified as a woman, but promptly relaxed into the staff of queer men. With his big-city style and direct manner of speaking, our editor-in-chief epitomized English poshness. Meanwhile, my bespectacled direct editor had a quiet, pensive demeanor, and habitually advised me on British vs. American spellings — grey instead of gray, for instance. My easygoing coworkers lit up the office with quick wit and laughter. I soon fell into their banter. I regularly accompanied one on his daily cigarette break (although I blessedly never learned how to inhale properly), while another taught me about his native Liverpool through a thick Scouse accent. In turn, I showed him rap from the Dirty South — a cultural exchange.

My superiors quickly threw me into action. On June 26, 2015, I sat in front of my computer with a plastic cup of cold beer — our office’s afternoon treat. That’s where I found myself when same-sex marriage was legalized in my home country. I cried in a bathroom stall, overwhelmed by joy and other emotions I couldn’t quite pinpoint.

The next day, I celebrated my first Pride in Trafalgar Square. Admittedly unprepared for the festivities, I still tried to look the part, applying rainbow eyeshadow and wearing my sole piece of floral clothing. Two of my flatmates and I excitedly weaved through the crowded sidewalks toward the heart of the city and were given small Pride flags to wave. Our group joined in the celebrations, watching the parade and snapping photos. I picked up my media pass and worked up the gumption to interview event-goers for a story, feeling more emboldened as the hours marched by.

Back in the office, a coworker later asked me how I identified. It only took a beat before I admitted that I was bisexual at the time. He smiled and turned back to his work, but the normalcy of the interaction shifted something inside of me. This is how it should be.

My 20th birthday came and went in London, with much fanfare made by new friends. For their part, my coworkers greeted me with a signed birthday card and a mini chocolate cake. And in the final days of my internship, we shared one last jaunty night at my first male burlesque show.

But those men introduced me to more than that. They gave me a glimpse into the relative simplicity of queerness: it could be proud, easy, and even boring. To me, they embodied surety in themselves, and their effortless recognition of my sexuality coaxed that part of me out from the shadows. It kicked off the gradual process of laying claim to what was rightfully mine: my identity.

After college, I started to shed my atypic shyness about this piece of myself. In 2018, I moved to Phoenix for a graduate program. There, I opened up to others and was rewarded with supportive — and even blasé — reactions. I gleefully realized that queerness was transitioning into a social norm. By 2020, in Washington, D.C., I worked full-time in a newsroom and took the leap to serve as the co-chair of our company’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group, paralleling my time in London as the sole woman on a small board of queer men.

Last year, I found myself at Pride again. A pansexual flag was draped down my back at the Denver event. At 28, I’m free — but I never could have done it without a little help.

Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton is an award-winning reporter covering Denver’s neighborhoods at The Denver Post. She previously reported on social inequities in business, agriculture and trade policy, the Venezuelan refugee crisis in Peru, socioeconomic issues in Guatemala, parliamentary affairs in England, White House press briefings in Washington DC, and the cannabis industry in Colorado.