I'm a Unicorn Prince.

At my 10th birthday party, that was 1996, there were four girls. Me (duh), Katie, Faven, and Becky. That morning I was a nervous wreck for no reason in particular except that I was turning 10 and was about to have the biggest birthday party that I could remember, three whole friends spending the night at my house. Eventually, they came. I say eventually because I have very clear memories of being up around 6-ish that morning seeping anticipation from every orifice that my body had to offer. Katie, who had been my best friend since 1st grade, was the first to arrive with a package. Let it be noted here that I never really intended to make that big of a deal about my birthdays but presents were a whole other thing. Packages with my name on them were, and usually still are, a very good thing. Becky was next to arrive, also with a package, and Faven, despite living almost directly around the corner from me was an hour and a half late and sans a package.
I had a choice about the food; mom would either buy a cake and fix dinner or buy dinner and fix a cake. My mom is a fabulous cook so either would have been wonderful but I opted for the cake. She made a chocolate cake called a Black Beast, I don’t remember the entire recipe but I do remember that it calls for three entire sticks of butter and pretty much nothing else except crap-loads of unsweetened and semi-sweetened bakers chocolate. It was so amazingly dense and rich that if you cut yourself a slice that was more than an inch wide you were not likely to finish it. So we shoveled one and a half extra large pizzas into our young gullets and proceeded, unhindered by the grease of Pizza Hut, onto the cake and ice cream after which we laid on the living room floor and watched a movie, no movement required. Once the sugar started to kick in we played everywhere and made a mess of everything that we touched. It was a typical ten-year-old’s birthday party. Here’s an off-hand point for ya, I was born and raised in Atlanta and I hate hot weather, those don’t mix well for those of you who weren’t aware, so I have always considered it a blessing that my birthday is in November, when our weather starts to cool off, otherwise all of my birthdays would have been completely miserable. Anyway, my mom eventually kicked us out of the house and into the back yard. We sat idly on my back stoop for a while before Katie said, “Let’s pretend we’re unicorns.” So we did, for hours we pretended to be unicorns in my back yard, constantly interrupting each other with “and pretend…blah blah blah”. Anyone who has kids or pays attention to the swarms of kids that seemingly come out of nowhere and into the daily lives of many, will recognize this phrase. However, I was removed from the game because while we had been making up the basic plotline for our nice little unicorn adventure I had an epiphany shoved down my throat.
We decided, in our own miniscule 10-year-old fashion, that there was going to be one unicorn price and three female unicorns that were all vying for the prince’s affections. I was the prince unicorn.
“Why am I the unicorn prince?” I was confused.
Faven responded with, “Because, uh, you’re the most boyish.”
“What?” You can insert a mental image of a very confused 10-year-old girl here if you like, but you probably get the idea. “Why?”
“Well you do have the widest shoulders and all good unicorn princes have wide shoulders, duh.” This was Katie piping in her two pennies.
So I went along with it. I actually have pretty slender shoulders for someone my size but then I probably did have the widest shoulders of the bunch. What did I learn? Well for one, I make a very handsome unicorn prince. Secondly and most important to my future was the fact that I was really okay with being the boy and liked the idea of having girls vying for my affection and that had it, under some strange twist of events, been that I was playing a princess and all of my friends were playing boy unicorns I would not have been okay with it. As a matter of fact that idea of having boys chasing after me, or even waiting patiently for me to cross their paths, made me feel, well, icky.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first point at which I can remember taking the time to sit down and really consider my sexuality and where I fit into the scheme of things. Thankfully, I have the most amazing mom in the world and therefore had a book called “A Kid’s First Book About Sex” and from that book I learned that I was not freak, just a lesbian.