[Editor’s Note: This piece is a part of the ongoing series on the Lesbian Day of Visibility for the month of April 2018. The series is an attempt to create discourse on topics that often do not appear in mainstream conversation. To visit all pieces under this theme, visit : https://gaysifamily.com/tag/lesbian/.]

“I wanted to be the man of the house” is a fictional comic in response to the universal, post-coming out question, “When did you first realise that you were not straight?”.

I was always very intrigued by this fascination to know details about a person’s moment of realisation of being gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans. So a few months back, when I was asked the very same question, I realised that I had no clear answer. And obviously, that made me wake up and take notice of the void created by that question. Some people remember their big Aha! moment while some don’t. Some describe it as a feeling that has been with them since forever. In the process of sorting through blurry, old memories and trying to over-analyse them, I found the answer in a game that most of us played when we were kids, “Ghar Ghar”.

So much fun it was to walk around in dad’s oversized shoes, turn mom’s dupatta into a saree and save a teddy with your miniature doctor kit! It always made me feel like a grown up who had a beautiful family and a house and knew a lot of things in life! I don’t know about you guys, but I would always end up playing the boy’s part because I had short hair. And unlike most girls, I didn’t mind playing the husband or the man.

I was glued to this one observation I made about myself. I realised that maybe it was this act of pretending to be a grown up and building a family with a ‘wife’, was something that probably felt natural to me back then. The idea of being the man/husband while playing that innocent game of house wasn’t as off-putting to me as it was for most other girls and it definitely wasn’t because I felt like a boy but probably because it meant that I could be the girl’s partner in the story.

This comic is an attempt to offer a different narrative of a story we all loved to enact as kids.