I am honestly not sure I had any experiences a a child foreshadowing my sexuality. Or nothing as obvious as you see on TV at any rate.
I do remember getting angry with Dad over a Saturday lunch about him equating gay men and paedophiles, or at any rate him agreeing with the radio news doing it. I think a scout leader had been touching children in the News.
I always thought that women were beautiful in a way that did not suggest I could conceive of myself becoming a woman. Beautiful women still seem like a separate species to be honest.
My female friendships as a child don’t really seem to have presaged anything other than friendship. I always found it easier to have male friends and in adulthood slept with them in pretty casual ways so I suppose the easy friendly sexuality of my twenties was presaged by the good friendships of my teens?
When I was at school there were three kids in my class, me, Victoria and Hedley. Hedley, when given any excuse to do so would dress in women’s clothing, his favourite character to dress as was Norah Batty, he was definitely in the Les Dawson school of comedy drag though later I seem to recall he slid towards Lily Savage.
I don’t really recall Hedley getting bullied although I suppose he must have done. I do recall an adult at some point talking to us about it being fine that he dressed in girls clothes and that if he decided he was a girl in the future that was fine too – but it was understood he probably wouldn’t.
I guess that didn’t presage my own sexuality really but it did mean that very early on I was given the message that gendered clothing wasn’t a thing and men dressing as women wasn’t even something you should bat an eye at. This was 1980s rural Lincolnshire.
That was reinforced by any amount of drag (in both directions) at village pantomimes and my secondary school’s Miss Snowdon competition.
I guess feeling comfortable in groups of three you could say was foreshadowed by my primary school class but I think that’s a bit of a stretch frankly.
I was always one for having crushes on older girls. I definitely recall being told that whole girls just have crushes on girls thing. I still don’t really know if thats straight culture denying queerness or if it says something about how girls are expected to socialise.