By Lace Grant | Staff Writer
Growing up as a lesbian was such a different experience compared to my heterosexual peers, even if I didn’t know my sexuality at the time. Sure, you can point at the stereotypes, such as my enjoyment of overalls and the fact that I actively advocated for the removal of men from my elementary school when I was only six. Like come on, it was obvious! But really, where it differed the most for me was how I consumed fiction and media.
I would sit on the floor of my friend’s house at a sleepover, staring at the TV as one of the many classic movies of my generation played on the screen, normally a random Disney Channel special. There would be women in short skirts and just “typical teenage” clothing, and my young eyes were glued to the screen and entranced. My friends would just talk about how cute the actors were or how they liked the outfits of the women, but for me, I liked the outfits of the women a little too much.
And don’t get me started on shows and films with the whole “girl power thing” going on. One of my earliest memories was of watching Tokyo Mew Mew, an early 2000s anime centered around a group of unlikely friends who gain powers based off of animals and fight justice. The main character had a love interest that I remember just being horribly written and bland. So, as any closeted twelve year old lesbian does, I yelled “F*** YOU!” at my television and created an elaborate fantasy world in my head where the protagonist just spent the rest of her life with her gal pals doing things I didn’t process as homoerotic at the time.
Where am I getting with this? Well, when you’re a queer person trying to consume blatantly heterosexual media, it’s tricky to really see where you fit in. Heterosexual people are fed heterosexual romances, some better written than others, from a very young age. Young girls get to see Cinderella and imagine themselves in that sparkly blue dress, dancing with the prince, where I, a young lesbian, find myself wanting to dance with Cinderella instead. I wanted the high school romance where I was not the preppy popular girl in love with the jock, but the close nerdy friend of the prep, who had “no real interest in romance” according to the heterosexual, Disney Channel approved gaze.
I was forced to make my own spaces in the media I consumed at a young age, and I interpreted media to represent myself as opposed to taking it at face value. There’s a lot of ways that one can do this- for me, it meant blatantly ignoring the male love interest to focus entirely on the female protagonist’s interactions with other female characters. As a kid watching Sailor Moon, I would literally fast forward through the scenes of Tuxedo Mask just to get back to that girl power action that closeted me loved so badly.
That is why I’m writing the lesbian’s, or really the any LGBTQ+ person’s, guide to projecting yourself and your identity into media, even when you seemingly don’t belong. Obviously you can’t change what happens in the media, but that doesn’t mean you’re unable to rewrite it or interpret it in your own way.
1. Latch onto the SLIGHTEST bit of gay coding you see.
Growing up watching Disney Channel, you couldn’t convince me that Harper from Wizards of Waverly Place wasn’t bisexual. I mean, come on, the coding was right there in her alternative methods of dress, artistic expression and her friendship with Alex that sometimes was very, very close. The average viewer obviously wouldn’t pick this up, but when you’re a young gay person looking for anything that resembles you, it just happens!
When everything is straight, the only real solution you have is to just take the smallest gay symbol that likely isn’t even meant as a gay symbol and to LATCH ON as tight as you can. The moment you see the mom jeans, the bisexual bob, or just a single glance towards the same gender, you claim them for the gays, the lesbians, the bisexuals, the trans, or any other group that’s open to claims.
2. Fall for the obvious queer baiting.
Obligatory Supernatural super-hell joke here.
For those unfamiliar, queer-baiting is the practice of teasing and hinting at LGBTQ+ characters and relationships within a piece of media to pander towards LGBTQ+ fans, and then to never go through with actually making their media queer. The most notable example of this recently was in the television show Supernatural, where a character confessed his love to another man and proceeded to literally go to super hell.
No, not normal hell, but SUPER HELL. Like come on, that’s just excessive.
They aren’t the only media guilty of this as well- this has happened in a variety of reason shows ranging from animations such as Netflix’s Voltron hinting at a relationship between two of their male leads only for one to marry a woman in a move that didn’t make sense to fans, to author and infamous transphobe J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, where she confirmed many characters as gay years after the book was published. And obviously, these were met with very differing reactions. Some people embraced the representation, no matter how shallow, while others completely rejected it and understandably called out the producers for tokenism.
Whatever your opinion is, hey. If you’re trying to project into media, queer baiting is a painful yet easy way to do it!
3. Give up and just look at intentionally gay media.
This isn’t a joke- honestly, save yourself the pain. This is coming from someone who has spent years navigating their identity by trying to visualize themselves in the media, and the projection honestly just isn’t healthy. It’s hard to force spaces for yourself to exist where there just aren’t any. Producers and even other fans of media have shown hostility towards those who interpret their media “incorrectly,” or for those who view characters as queer-coded or trans-coded.
Living in the age of the Internet means it is so, so much easier to access LGBTQ+ media safely. Not only that, but there is a very large, healthy variety too. I will say that a lot of my “coming of age” and accepting my identity as a lesbian was through reading yuri manga such as After Hours, which is about a romance between a night club DJ and a first time guest, and by watching shows such as Revolutionary Girl Utena, which features a lesbian couple as the main characters throughout the entire series while tackling gender roles and some darker themes as well, such as self worth and abuse. I didn’t have to project or force myself to view it from the queer-lens, and that made the experience that much more enjoyable.
It was a story that I could relate to for once: a story that a younger me needed in order to feel secure. Projecting into media is no longer necessary to view ourselves in media and art, and the options are now seemingly endless for LGBTQ+ people looking for a more personal experience.