#and I don't want to discount the queer narratives and representation that people fought so diligently for before now

[disabled-dean]

Listen. If you were not a child of the 90's, I don't think you can fully comprehend how fundamentally bizarre and life changing it is to see so many queer love stories just blossoming in mainstream media.

I know that in a lot of ways it is a fully shit time- and there's a very valid media literacy component to the type of queer representation we're getting- particularly as our rights are stripped away.

But you have to understand that for a lot of us, growing up, this kind of content was totally unthinkable. We absolutely did not see our identities represented on TV- unless it was as a side character (often a stereotype played for laughs) or some kind of over the top melodrama (ex: queer as folk & the L word) with SUPER questionable characters and storylines.

And the 90's were supposed to be progressive! But the specific period-typical homophobia and transphobia was so subversive. It leeched in everything, and I think a lot of us kind of thought it was normal- that that was how things were and they weren't going to change.

Growing up in a small, conservative town, I remember illicitly scanning the public library for any type of even vaguely queer books, obsessing over queer-coded tv shows, and delving super deep into fandom and fanfiction without ever really understanding *why* I was so hyper-fixated on queer representation- assuming that I was straight and that my gender identity matched my assigned sex.

Not only was my highschool super conservative, but our town didn't get high speed internet until I was 18. I had "liberal" but strict parents, who eventually figured out how to check the history on the family computer, stumbled on fanfiction my sibling had been reading, called a friend's mom to talk about how concerned they were, and sat my twin and I down to have a serious "talk" about it.

I wrote in my journal "sometimes I wish I was a boy" and had no fucking idea that that even ment anything.

I didn't meet another nonbinary person until I was 21 years old, and then in a couple of weeks I had broken up with my shitty boyfriend, and come out as transmasculine and bisexual. Because of the way my folks continued to control me as an adult, and medical complications from my first attempt at HRT, I was finally able to start surgically transitioning when I was 27, and at 30 I have just passed my 1 year mark on very low dose T.

Obv there's a lot pent up here, and I could go on- but it's so fucking important that people are growing up today with access to specific queer vocabulary and queer narratives.

I know it isn't perfect, and I know that the current national backlash of homophobic and transphobic hate margenalizes people in very real and scary ways that I've never lived through before.

But we're seeing more and more stories told, and I just think that if that had happened when I was younger, my life would have been so, so different.