The reality comes to me in bits and pieces.  It first sets in in a classroom  full of women discussing the nature/nurture debate  as it applies to homosexuality.  The professor, a feminist in plant pathology,  asks for the social implications of scientific research  suggesting that homosexuality is innate,  biological, genetic.  Hands raise and she goes around the room  taking answers,  "They may try to find a cure for it,"  one woman suggests,  "genetic screening," another adds,  "selective abortion," a third replies  and suddenly it hits me full force,  the realization that there are people  who think I never should have been born  and it hurts worse somehow  than thinking of Chinese baby girls  drowned in the rivers  and the rest of the history of female infanticide,  maybe because it's so close, so real.  Half my blood has its roots in the hills of Ohio  and I know the Eugenics movement  never had much use for poor Midwestern hillbillies  but that too is distant.  Hitler gave Eugenics a bad name and nobody will admit these days  to wanting to selectively breed  out the blood of the poor.  I spend the weekend engulfed in tears  reading Leslie Feinburg's Stone Butch Blues and I can barely stand her descriptions of the abuse  those butches and femmes of the 50's and 60's  endured at the hands of the police, the world,  men walking down the street day by day  all too willing to wield their fists and more  in the direction of difference.  I don't want to leave my apartment  not because I'm afraid,  the reality hasn't bitten its way that deep  into my skin yet,  but because I don't want to face a world  that is so hateful to people like me.  I'm used to understanding that because I am a woman I am in danger once darkness falls.  I am used to understanding that because I am a woman  I am somehow less than human to some people.  Those understandings didn't shake me to the bone  this way because they came so slowly  like they had always been with me  deep in my heart, in the curves of my flesh.  But the sudden realization  of what it means to be queer  rocks me, rocks me worse  than the first time I took pen in hand  and filled in that blank spot  of my identity in the privacy of my own journal  writing the words, "I am bisexual."  For those first years I faced my shame,  my fear of what it meant  but I didn't yet fully grasp it,  only now, when I accept what I am,  and say words like queer with pride  do I understand why I was really so afraid  to admit that truth of my identity even to myself.  I understand why I swallowed the words  like some terrible secret  which would push away all those people I loved  and put me in danger  the way I once felt like I was in danger  walking the halls of my highschool  where the wall above one of the urinals in the front hallway's boys' bathroom  said I was a lesbian  just because I challenged the  homophobes in my health class.  The fact that I can pass for straight is of little consolation  since the last thing I want to do  is keep locking away pieces of myself  that do not fit what I'm supposed to appear to be.  I am queer, queer in my blood,  queer in the choices I've made.  It is my reality and I wear that reality  even in the face of the new realization  of what it may mean.