When The World Suffocates Us, We Make Our Own Spaces
When I came out (at least, as myself, more on that below) in October 2005 to my best friend A, I did it through Livejournal, in a post just locked to her. Her comment was, “I know. Birds of a feather and all.” I’ll never forget that, because as I was wildly in love with her at this point in our lives, I couldn’t tell if she meant that she was also a-shade-of-queer or if she meant someone else in our friend circle. I spent a lot of time dissecting that. That I overanalyze everything will surprise no one who knows me, and A least of all.
I didn’t have queer friends in high school. I wasn’t out. To my knowledge, no one in my entire high school was out. No teachers, no staff, no students. In college, that changed. Partially because I think it isn’t uncommon to explore sexuality and intimacy in different ways in college, and partially because I came out two months into my freshman year. I became friends with people in Queers & Allies club, I had friends who were trans, gay, asexual, and bisexual, and I was out. And still, my friend circle remained relatively cis and heterosexual.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which we invent and create spaces. Not just the spaces we want, but the spaces we need.
The world is not a kind place to smart girls, to not-conventionally-pretty girls, to girls of color, to trans girls, to bisexual girls, to asexual girls, to lesbians, to disabled girls, to sad girls, to fierce girls, to fat girls, to ambitious girls, to dreaming girls. We like to think that girls don’t need to fit into neat, pretty little boxes anymore, but there are still boxes. There are still expectations, from the micro-level of family relationships and friendships, to macro-level of societal and cultural expectations.
In retrospect, I didn’t have the space as a teenager to even consider my sexual orientation might be anything less than heterosexual. I did not know any teachers who were out. I don’t remember any confirmed out students (there was plenty of bullying and use of slurs against ‘suspected’ queer students). Most of my family’s friends are cishet (cis, meaning their gender aligns with the gender with which they were assigned at birth, and het, short for heterosexual.)
I’m a Millennial, meaning that I grew with the internet, and as the internet grew, so did I. When I discovered the internet could connect me with other people, I was like a desert wanderer who stumbled upon an oasis. I couldn’t get enough. I discovered fandom (Harry Potter and Wheel of Time), horse forums (where I met some of my best friends including A), and talked to people all over the world on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I started online journals (some of which still exist!), built websites on Geocities and Angelfire (which also still exist. Thanks, Internet, for saving everything.) I wanted to see and do everything.
In retrospect, this makes sense. The lack of space for exploring anything other than a white, middle class cishet normal in my life made me desperate to find a space where my internal experiences matched my external experiences. I threw myself headfirst into every community I could find…and still came away empty-handed. I found wonderful, smart people in each community, many of whom are still in my life. But while the internet was certainly weirder than real life, it was not queerer than real life.
The only place queerer than real life, than my real life, was fandom. Fandom, where straight and queer women united together in common spaces to write slash fiction. Fandom, where a character did not need to adhere to canon sexuality and thus I did not have to adhere to my real world—my canon—sexuality. If my real world—or rather, my offline world—was my canon, then my canon sexuality was straight. There did not appear to be any other option. But in these spaces we made online, on Livejournal and Fanfiction.net and Sugarquill and proboard forums and Xanga, we wrote slash fic, and we wrote queer characters into our fandoms, and in doing that, we blurred the lines between online life and offline life.
I told A I (then) ID’d as bisexual on Livejournal, but in truth, I did a trial run ten months earlier on a forum where I roleplayed Wheel of Time characters. My hot-blooded female character who bucked gender norms from her society, cut off her hair and went to do a “man’s job” woke up in bed with another girl. I wrote the entire gamut—from surprise that a drunken hook-up was with a person of the same gender to anger to denial to acceptance to desire and back into bed—and the first person I said ‘that character’s feelings are my feelings’ to was a fandom friend who roleplayed on the same forum with me (my male character and her female character were in love.)
I created a safe space online. I could have walked away from that world had it gone wrong. It would have hurt, of course, and I would have cried for days, but I wouldn’t have been in any danger. I created a safe space, trial ran it through a character who was well accepted by other players both in character and out of character, and then came out myself. And when that went well, I began to move my experiences inside of fandom, in how I changed the canon existing in that world, into changing my own canon in my own world.
Fandom’s critically important to people of all ages. While it is not always a safe space, I believe that teenagers in particular increasingly use technology and fandom to create and mold their spaces into being supportive, affirming places when their offline canon is not. We make our own spaces when the world suffocates us. We are capable of surviving even when we do not believe we are. As my character’s girlfriend told her, you’ve survived every day thusfar. You can survive today. And tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that. It was my message to myself, and now I pass it onto every other queer girl making her/their own space.
Make your own space. You are the heroine of your own story.
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