What Do You Mean, I Always Seemed Like a Lesbian?

I've been warming up to the idea of writing a post about what it was like to come out while married to a guy. While I am not quite ready for that post yet, I thought it might be fun to share some red flags (or, well, rainbow flags) I now see as clues that I was a big ol' lesbo. My DXH says that the only characteristic that gave him pause was my habit of keeping my wallet in my  left rear pocket, and when I was about to pay for something, reaching back with my left hand and whipping the wallet out of my pocket, “like a guy.”

I have a friend who came out while married to a woman.  Now he lives with his partner in the Bay Area, and collects little Wedgwood dish sets from the "Peter Rabbit" collection.  I told him that the collection had to be his gayest characteristic.  It turns out that he began building his collection while he was married.  If you can believe it, she didn't suspect a thing!  While my DXH and I might not have been quite that clueless, in retrospect we can both see  many characteristics that were… perhaps a tad dykey.

1. My enduring penchant for fleece vests.
2. In college, I joined the rugby team.  Shortly thereafter, I quit in part because I felt slightly uncomfortable being around so many lesbians. Even back then, I was big on gay rights, but that didn't mean I wanted to be tackled by a bunch of butch women.  Denial, anyone?  (Hmm...  I wonder how much I would pay now for exactly that opportunity.)
3. Most of my crushes, from high school through college, were on men who later turned out to be gay.
4. As a child, my favorite Halloween was the year I got to be a knight. I wore a mustache and carried a shield and sword. Awesome!
5. Until I started dating women, I never really understood flirting. It always seemed a huge waste of time.
6. For a couple of childhood years, there was nothing more I wanted in the world than a skateboard.
7. Avoiding premarital sex never struck me as all that difficult.
   
8. Two words: granny panties.
9. L.L. Bean.
10. REI.
11. At one point in college, I joined a coming-out group—not because I thought I was gay—but because I  was dating a much older guy and felt like I needed some “relationship support.”  (What?!)
12. I always wanted to shop in the boys' department, especially if it presented even a remote possibility of obtaining cargo pants.
13. In high school, I was a member of various teams.  This sometimes involved traveling and staying in hotels. I hated having to share a bed with another girl. I would wait to see if she slept under the covers, or on top of them, and then I would do the opposite.  I was totally grossed out at the possibility that her leg might graze mine.
    
14. I always found the idea of heterosexual sex fairly gross, the idea of gay male sex kind of hot, and the idea of lesbian sex unthinkably disgusting.
15. My aversion to makeup, dresses, skirts, lace, and similar frivolity.
16. I  hated purses, and stated this with clear, uncharacteristic rudeness whenever someone bestowed one on me as a gift.
17. My complete obsession with major league baseball, which began at age five, and lasted until age 15 or 16.
18. An inability to discern the romantic intentions of the opposite sex. In high school, I used to hang out with this guy, M. We would go to movies on the weekend, and even went to a couple of dances together. One Valentine's Day, he took me out, then at the end of the evening, gave me some scented bath stuff as a present, along with a Valentine's Day card that was signed “love, M.” It was only at this point that I began to wonder if he was interested in me romantically.  Before leaving, he leaned forward, and I gave him a big bear hug. At school the next day, he was cold to me, and I couldn't figure out why. Finally, one of his friends said to me rudely, “Would it have killed you to let him kiss you?” I was flabbergasted.
19. In college, wanting to express my support for gay rights, I put a pink triangle sticker on my dorm door. Later, I learned that some of my dorm mates had taken this is a coming-out signal. Again: flabbergasted.
20. As a kid, I was always insulted when someone called me a “tomboy.” I hated this term, because it suggested a stage—something fleeting—and I was sure that this was simply the way I was.
21. Periodically, someone would tell me that I “walked like a dude.” This generally didn't bother me, but I was a little perplexed.
22. Though I idolized my mother, I never wanted to learn anything that I saw as stereotypically female—cooking, sewing, etc.
23. When I was a little kid playing house with other little kids, I always wanted to be the dad. 
24. In third grade, we were given the opportunity to dress up as any character in a book we had read that year.  I chose an obscure character—one of no particular note, except that he always wore a tie. I was super excited to wear one of my dad's ties to school.
25. I never wanted to play with dolls. People gave me Barbies, but instead of dressing them up, I would spend my time meticulously constructing houses for them out of cardboard.

Were there any bright rainbow "flags" in your life before you came out?