Growing Up Outside of the Queer Community
Hearing that J. Edgar Hoover was gay as a side comment from my high school history teacher was about the extent of queer history education that I received in my 13 years of K-12 education. I remember my ears perking up every time I heard the word “homosexual” or “gay” during my middle school and high school years. Even as a young elementary child, before I knew what being queer was, I had gender envy over my favorite male presenting cartoon characters like Danny Phantom and Beast Boy from Teen Titans. Of course, I didn’t recognize what gender envy was, much less did I recognize my feelings for my same-sex best friend because I was never formally introduced to the queer community. In my small town, being gay or any form of queer was not okay. It was also never talked about.
The first time I discovered the queer community was in 6th grade. I had just begun watching Adventure Time, a popular animated show on Cartoon Network. It quickly became my favorite show because of the great adventures Finn and Jake would go on. Once I entered the 6th grade, I received my first touch screen device; an iPad. And so, I set about on Google Images to find a background for my new iPad, and of course, I chose Adventure Time. I started Googling my favorite characters one by one and then two by two. And then I typed in “Marshal Lee and Prince Gumball” and my eyes lit up with excitement at the images of these two male-identifying characters kissing. This also happened while I was in church. Of course, looking back at this moment was quite cringy, but as a little kid, I was absolutely amazed that this was a possibility. My heart felt like it bubbled up and I was filled with the warmest feeling. At that moment, I learned that being queer was a possibility.
Before this, I had never been exposed to the queer community. This lack of exposure made me completely oblivious to the feelings I was experiencing for my best friend Correna. I had begun to have feelings for her in 5th grade and I had not consciously realized it until 8th grade, because although I had been introduced to two male-identifying couples, I still did not have any representation to the rest of the community.
Not only was there a lack of queer representation in my community and education, but there was also a lack of queer representation in the media around me. The shows that I watched during my elementary and middle school years extremely lacked any queer representation. I remember that the most queer representation would be the smallest comment made by a character in the entirety of a show, or an elongated look shared between two same sex characters that would last a little too long. Most of the queer representation was made up of conspiracy theories or a confirmation Tweet by the content creator that was never actually represented in the show. It wasn’t until I began surfing the internet that I found more queer representation, formed mostly on cisgender homosexual relationships.
It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school that I vaguely learned that one could identify as a gender that differs from their assigned sex at birth. And even then, I didn’t believe that option was available to me because I only had this representation on the internet. Every character in my television shows and media had identified as cisgender and so I didn’t think it was possible for someone to be anything but cisgender.
The lack of queer representation severely stunted the realization of my queer identity. And although this was the case for me, in recent years I have seen a flood of queer representation in children’s and adult’s media. Through shows such as She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Steven Universe, we are seeing an implementation of queer folx into the narrative. If the media stays on this path and we as queer folx continue to fight for our right to be recognized and heard, I believe that there is hope for the future, even if we have to make it ourselves.