#But also OP is a “Queer is a Slur” Lily Orchard stan so honestly the bad take is probably mild af compared to everything else

[konkonvt]

It's not even been a decade since we had to remind people to not get angry about Gravity Falls "queer baiting" because Alex Hirsch had made it explicitly clear that he wanted to have openly queer characters but the censors had pulled it so the only thing he could do was to queer code.

I'm not saying you can't feel frustration over the way queerness was handled in "older" shows, I still to this day feel deeply frustrated by the bi erasure that was just constant in OITNB but I do so with the understanding of just how monumental the show was for putting a black trans woman in front of a mostly cishet white audience and making them not just like her, but sympathize with her unique struggle (among the rest of the cast at least.)

Glee was many young Sapphic women's first experience with openly queer women in a show aimed at them. Yes it had a LOT of problems with it's depictions of queerness (among so many other topics) but I cannot express to kids how monumental it was to be in high-school and feel seen by a popular teen show at the time, to look at Kurt and Blaine or Britney and Santana and see yourself, to realize that queerness was finally pushing into the mainstream, before that we still had queer shows, we've had them since the dawn of TV but most shows with openly queer casts were only ever about being queer, were often short lived, aimed at adult audiences and usually much more niche. Queer as Folk might be fondly talked about now as the community can more easily share influential media for whole generations of us but I didn't know it even existed til I was in my mid 20s.

When we urge baby queers to learn our their history this is why! We've come a long way in the acceptance of some of us in media, media aimed at young audiences especially but it's not been a long time since we got here, we need to know where we came from so that we can appreciate where we are and so when people try to force us backwards we know what we're fighting against. People like Rebecca Sugar are the reason you can have an openly queer Owl House, she's important to our history!

Steven Universe: Eh, I don't really feel like saying "girlfriend" or "wife". Maybe they're together. They have a special connection...

(gets violently shoved aside)

The Loud House/Craig of the Creek/The Owl House: Pfft, amateur. "My GIRLFRIEND Sam and I..." "I'm texting my GIRLFRIEND, mind your business." "Luz's new GF showed her..."