In late May, the Visit Las Vegas Campaign released “Now and Then,” a glossy vye for queer tourism depicting the marriage of two women. The ad has since reached over 7.8 million YouTube views and the reception is overwhelmingly positive. At first glance, this might seem like a win for a culture unfamiliar with mainstream depictions of women loving women. Yet as I watched, my stomach sank. The ad felt like a cheap, performative grab for my queer attention. Ultimately — and regardless of the many rainbow emojis brightening the comments section — my feminist killjoy alarm went off.

Here’s the down and dirty overview: Beautiful Lesbians A and B are deeply in love and vacationing in Vegas. A wants to get married. B does too, but she’s tormented at the thought of her parents’ disapproval. A cajoles B while they both enjoy Las Vegas’ various amenities, until finally surprising B with a gorgeous ceremony. All the couple’s friends are there, but B is going to shut the whole thing down until she realizes her parents are in attendance. B lets out a high-pitched, “Let’s get married!” then moves towards a beaming mom and dad.

“Now and Then” is shamelessly soap, moving in for every queer person’s soft spot with heat-seeking precision: the homophobic parents, the shame, the emotional release of seeing accepted the little dyke we all root for. It seems like an important step for lesbian visibility in popular culture. So what’s the problem?

Dear Straight Allies, Please Don’t Forget The Harassment Of Queer Women
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The problem is that tolerance is a trap, and the Visit Las Vegas Campaign wants to sell it to you.

Suzanna Walters’ book The Tolerance Trap exemplifies how media like “Now and Then” — with its liberal attitudes towards gay tolerance, depictions of gay marriage, and rainbow capitalism — actually sabotage gay equality while seeming to advance it. Though the high-sheen production value can mask this, the plot of “Now and Then” is clear: If queer folks conform to heterosexual norms like marriage and wait around for societal approval, we’ll be rewarded, Vegas-style. Walters points to the sinister nature of (eventual) acceptance when she writes:

“The tolerance mindset offers up a liberal, ‘gay-positive’ version of homosexuality that lets the mainstream tolerate gayness. Its chief tactic is the plea for acceptance. Acceptance is the handmaiden of tolerance, and both are inadequate and even dangerous modes for accessing real social inclusion and change… The ‘accept us’ agenda shows up both in everyday forms of popular culture and in the broader national discourse on rights and belonging.

‘Accept us’ themes run the gamut: accept us because we’re just like you; accept us because we’re all God’s children; accept us because we’re born with it;…The ‘accept us’ trope pushes outside the charmed circle of acceptance those gays and other gender and sexual minorities, such as [transgender] folks and gays of color, who don’t fit the poster-boy image of nonstraight people and who can’t be — or don’t want to be — assimilated.”

“Now and Then” exemplifies the performative tolerance politics that the straight and cis majority thrives on. By capitalizing on classic — yet very real — tropes of disownment, rejection, and secrecy, the commercial asserts that queer happiness is achieved by hinging your actions on heterosexual opinions and values. B clearly orients her self worth to her parent’s unwillingness to tolerate her. “My parents aren’t proud of me,” B tells A, who feigns incomprehension:

A: “But you’re so beautiful, successful, funny!”

B: “I don’t think it’s my sense of humor they have an issue with…”

Then later,

B: “We can’t get married today, my parents will never forgive me.”

A: “For getting married without them, or for who you’re getting married to?”

Both scenes cut away, leaving unnamed not only the validity of B’s fears, but also the clipped-wing desire to finally have the legal right to marry and feel unable to because of intolerance. Note that the edited version of the commercial (rather than the full length version discussed here) is purged of this dialogue. Instead, the edits imply the parent’s issue is with elopement, not B marrying a woman. With this, Las Vegas give queer people two, and only two, impossible options: Hinge your life to hetero acceptance, or pretend the trauma of being queer never happened.

The dialogue is haunted by B’s apprehension. But with the sound off, “Now and Then” tells a completely different story. Strategic cinematography distracts from the lovers’ conflict, instead panning the best of Las Vegas’ attractions. The women laugh in the gorgeous Nevada dessert, take in the bustling nightlife, kiss in a neon-lit hotel pool. It’s all G-rated and aggressively cliché, but “Now and Then” offers up a rare moment of visibility to lesbian viewers starving for the scraps of representation.

Why ‘Tolerating’ Your Queer Loved Ones Is Dangerous
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When A leads B to the surprise wedding, the venue is candle-lit, elegant, but not ostentatious enough to annoy. This is supposed to be the emotional climax of the story, but instead “Now and Then” proves its own disconnection with queer lives by revealing that B’s perceptions of intolerance are baseless — her parents are there, smiling and happy. Surrounded by supportive friends, family, and — here’s the important part — the city of Las Vegas, the commercial seems to say See, aren’t you silly for thinking homophobia still exists? The irony of “Now and Then” is that it tries to signal the end of intolerance when in fact its star is driven by the fear of it.

Visit Las Vegas’ commercial is dangerous because it “short circuits the march toward full equality and deprives us all of the transformative possibilities of full integration,” by depicting fully-realized queer joy as dependent on heterosexual acceptance. Even more alarming, “Now and Then” offers convenient vindication for any homophobic person ever. B’s parents are not held accountable for their prior actions; when they enter the wedding venue they are absolved of any wrongdoing. Given that B’s parents are brown-ish, and that both women have foreign accents, the commercial reinforces racist perceptions of foreigners as regressive. The ceremony is a racially-coded, apology-free mess.

Whatever the good intentions Visit Las Vegas had, “Now and Then” is a money-driven advertisement, released at a time when Vegas has nothing to lose from marketing to gay people. Note how it’s taken them until 2018, when a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, to make an ad like this, rather than tout Vegas as a destination for tolerance and fun in the ‘90s. Make no mistake, the motivation behind all “queer-friendly” media is to profit from, not defend, our community. “Now and Then” targeted a market, and now eagerly awaits the pink money and gay tourism that will surely follow. Don’t let the thrill of seeing yourself represented mask this.

Here and now, it’s 2018 and I’m not satisfied with lesbian representations in mainstream media. Even the commercial’s title, “Now and Then,” implies a degree of separation from the bigotry “then” and the tolerance “now.” The commercial is a joke its creators don’t seem to get. Supposedly “post-gay,” “Now and Then” can’t even imagine a present unburdened by the “air kiss of faux familiarity” that defines mainstream understandings of queer people.

Show me the queer love that’s hard to look at, the kind that makes its own rules and does what it wants regardless of approval or pride. Show me the most intolerable among us front and center: trans folks, gender deviants, queers of color, the undocumented, the deeply transgressive. Show me two fat, middle-aged bull-dykes madly in love, deeply amused by the ironies of gay marriage, and getting hitched anyway. Then maybe I’ll visit your damn city.

HA, age 30, Abuja

“I had to remember to change the pronoun of my lover so nobody could tell she was female … making up pictures and stories of how we met and why I couldn’t introduce ‘him’ to any of my friends. It was exhausting.”

I grew up in a normal northern-Muslim household in Jos. My parents were well educated and worked government jobs. We spoke Hausa and English interchangeably in a five-bedroom house with my three siblings and four cousins. Each room had a double bunk and people running in and out, so we learned early in life to share everything, especially personal space. We woke up every morning at 5 a.m., we ate lunch at 2:30 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m. and were in bed at 8 p.m. I attended an Islamic primary school, returned home to extra lessons, then attended evening Islamiyya school to learn to read the Qur’an and write in Arabic. Our lives had a comfortable routine and life was easy.

I attended the same school as my siblings and I remember having a crush on my teacher Ms. S___ when I was in Primary 3. She was pretty. She was female. She was political. I don’t think she did anything different or special, I just enjoyed being in class and watching her while she taught. I loved going to school. I excelled because I was super attentive and always trying to please her. As an adult, I learned that my reaction wasn’t unique as most people have a crush on their teacher at some point. Mine just turned out to be female. This was mildly disappointing; I thought we had something special.

As much as I loved school, I was severely bullied because I was young, small and generally easy to pick on. People knew what was going on. There was this tall girl who had a little clique. I can’t remember her hitting me but I was deeply afraid of her and if she ordered me to do anything, I quickly obeyed. When we had a test in class, I would crawl under the tables and my classmates would make space for me. I would give her my paper to copy off, then crawl back to my own seat. She would ask what I’d brought for lunch today and if she liked it, she would say, ‘Okay, I’ll have that one. You have mine.’ She told me that if I ever saw her carrying anything, I should come take it. So, if she had a bag on her, I would take it to her desk.

Most people have a crush on their teacher at some point. Mine just turned out to be female.
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One day in Primary 4, when I was about 8 or 9, I was sitting on the windowsill in class. She was late. Her car drove into the school compound. I could see it from where I was sitting. She got out with her bag so I jumped out the window and went to take it for her. Unknown to me, the teacher was there and wondering what the fuck was going on.

All hell broke loose. There was a whole lot of trouble for everybody — most of the people in class, her and her gang, and other teachers — for not having said anything. They started watching me and it became annoying. I became that person that everybody knew was being bullied so I convinced my parents to let me stay home and write the Common Entrance exam. They bought me the form and put me in extra lessons. I wrote the exam and got admission into the same secondary school as my sisters. I was very excited!

I really loved secondary school as everybody was friendly. After being brought up in such a regimented household, I was used to going to bed early. In school, I would get punished often for sleeping during prep. The punishment was to jump for thirty minutes or so to wipe the sleep from your eyes. But I was so notorious that I perfected the art of sleeping while jumping. So many nights were spent in front of class, jumping and sleeping. After prep, I would not even remember walking from class to the hostel. Immediately I got to the hostel, I would sleep, half the time in the clothes I wore because I was so tired.

I can’t point to the first time I liked a girl. I have memories of so many women who drew a strong reaction from me. From Ms S___ to these older girls who took care of me and whom I was attracted to. There was a rotating number of women whom I had a thing for.

In boarding schools in Nigeria, women are allowed to show affection and love. There was a kind of coupling up that was generally allowed. It wasn’t a big deal. A chokkor or a lifey was just someone special to you. Sometimes the person was in the same class as you and sometimes they were in a higher class. And the relationship was romantic in nature. There was even a whole economy around Valentine’s and buying gifts for your chokkor.

So, we grew up accepting that it was okay to love another girl. It was even celebrated. In our uniform, there was a code. If you tied your belt backwards, it meant you were in the market for a chokkor. A person would be like, ‘Okay, I like this girl.’ Her friends would go and talk to you or your friends and ask if you had a chokkor. You would say, no and they would reply, ‘Okay, we’re going to connect you with someone. Thursday night, you’re going to wear your best outfit, and we’re going to come take you from your room to your chokkor’s room.’

Sometimes, you would have no clue who she was. Other times, you knew because she was sort of picking on you or gave you extra food or said hello to you one too many times during assembly. They would take you to your chokkor’s place and leave you there for the night. That was totally normal. There was drama when some girls were snatched from their chokkors. We would hear things like ‘Amira was just going steady with Nneka and the next thing, Bola came into the picture and now Amira no longer hangs out with Nneka. They stopped going for break together and now she goes for breaks with Bola.’ We would all be scandalised that such a thing had taken place.

We grew up accepting that it was okay to love another girl.
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Throughout secondary school, almost everybody had a lifey but there were only four people who had girlfriends. They were not just in love but had kissed, made out or had sex. They were all known of course. You’re teenagers, you talk to your friends and nobody can keep a secret. When I was in JS3, there was this huge outrage about two girls being lesbians. One was in SS2 and the other was in JS3. They spent all their time together. At some point, they kissed and someone found out. They told somebody who told somebody who told the school administration. They were both suspended.

I thought it was weird that people were allowed to be in love, but never to take it to the next stage. Years later, people who knew me in school would tell me how homophobic I was. I wasn’t homophobic but people around me were and I didn’t do anything to speak up. At school, I was so sure that I was not a lesbian. To be a lesbian, you needed to have held a girl’s hand, kissed a girl, made out with her or had sex with her. I had done none of those things. Then secondary school finished.

My childhood passed really quickly — one day I was a kid and the next, I wasn’t. University was fun. I found studying a breeze. But socially, few girls played any kind of sport at that level so I kind of stood out. It also didn’t help that I liked to wear men’s clothes. Everyone I knew became super feminine and conversations became about clothes, parties and boyfriends. I wasn’t into clothes nor did I like any boy but in my bid to fit in, I decided I needed a boyfriend.

H___ was the first boy I kissed. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was almost exciting, but not quite. I would talk about the fact that we were not really compatible and he always told me that my expectations were built around watching too many Bollywood movies and that, actually, we were fine. I had doubts but I didn’t want to rock the boat because I was very comfortable in the relationship. He was a good friend, he lived and schooled in another city, and we saw each other once or twice a year. We relied on writing each other letters as no one had cellphones then. After about three years of this, we broke up when he started dating another girl in his school. I was relieved and moved on quickly.

Around that time, I was coming into myself and trying to figure out what was different about me. I knew I liked girls but I was still convinced I wasn’t a lesbian. I concluded that there must have been something wrong with H___ and I just needed to find the right boy.

This led to the beginning of my wild stage. I started partying every weekend, hanging out with a lot of boys and I had no problem kissing anyone and everyone. I was determined to find the right person with just the right chemistry. I made out with a ton of boys. There was tons of heavy petting and that was it. And my friends were fascinated. They would joke about it and help me keep score.

We only stopped counting after about a hundred. In all those hundreds of boys and men, I never found anyone mildly exciting and I never dated. But it made me feel normal to have a boyfriend and be out there kissing everyone. I was slowly realising that I was only attracted to women, but I was in deep denial!

It was around this time that my family went on hajj. I remember trying so hard to pray away the gay. It might have even been my sole aim in hajj. I would include it in salat, during tawaf around the Kaaba, during my walks on Safa to Marwa, and it was my consistent prayer when I stood on Mount Arafat. I prayed every day, deeply, sincerely, that I would no longer be in love with girls, that I would no longer be a lesbian. I wanted nothing more than to be straight, to meet a man, fall in love with him, get married and have a family. I just wanted to fit in, to be a good daughter, to be a good Muslim.

Then I met this girl on the website Hi5. My status had ‘interested in girls’ and hers had the same thing so we started talking and flirting. She told me she had a boyfriend, she had dated girls before, she was fascinated by northern girls and she would like to meet me. I told her I would definitely like to meet her too.

Her name was N___. She was schooling and living in Ghana. We decided to meet when she was in the country. I went to Lagos because she was there for one night before flying to Kumasi. We hung out that night and the next morning I flew back to Abuja. I was so excited: Oh my God, I can’t tell anybody. I met this girl and she’s cute and she’s also into women and she likes me and I like her and we are going to date. When she got back to Ghana, we had a conversation and decided to date.

We would talk on the phone all the time. I told my friends I had met this boy named Nathan. After about three months, I bought a ticket to Ghana to visit her. We had agreed we were going to take everything slowly but after three hours at her place, she asked me, ‘So, can I kiss you?’

The world stopped. If I said yes, I was going to be committing a sin. If I said no, all of this was kind of useless. I would never find out if I really like girls like that. She kept on asking, ‘Can I kiss you?’ I told her, ‘If you keep asking, I’m never going to answer you.’ So she reached over and kissed me — then we had sex.

And … the sex was awful. It was awkward and very weird. I was too into my head and watching myself have sex with her. I was overthinking everything, and I was riddled with guilt. We had sex a second time and just cooled it off. We would write long emails to each other and talk all the time but that was it. I went to Ghana on three different occasions. We would kiss but we never had sex again.

Then Facebook came along and destroyed Hi5. We all moved to Facebook and stopped meeting people who could put ‘interested in girls’ as their description. Internally, I was settling into self-acceptance. I had already had sex with a girl. I knew I was completely into women and no man was going to change that.

At the age of 26, I fell in love. I was sooo in love, I wanted her to meet everyone. I wanted to shout from the top of every building how much I was in love with her. She was the first person I could walk with on the streets holding hands. We would talk about everything, anything and nothing; honest, frank conversations. We were friends and we were lovers. For the longest time, it was perfect.

I knew I was completely into women and no man was going to change that.
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I experienced the awesome freedom that was the ability to love myself, to love another person and be okay with it. I didn’t know where it was going but it felt good. I wanted to keep going and figure it out whenever. Shortly after she and I became official, I moved out of home and started living with a flatmate. I knew in my heart that I could not live in the closet. I was flirting with the idea of coming out, and I knew that I was likely to lose friends and family if that happened.

I was already living a double life: free and out when I was with my girlfriend, hidden and sad when I was back home or at work. I felt like I was choking. I couldn’t take the pretence any more so I started to cut ties with a lot of people. I stopped spending time with friends and buried myself in work. I would tell them I was too busy. I would travel without telling anyone and spend weeks away. I had decided that I would shut out everybody before anybody alienated me. I even stopped communicating with my family and told them I needed to be an adult.

One day in 2012, I sent a message to my mom saying, ‘I want to introduce you to my girlfriend and don’t you dare act surprised.’

With my heart in my mouth, I waited for her reaction. Deep down I was ready for the absolute worst. She replied saying, ‘Where’s she from? And are you girls getting married?’

I said, ‘Slow down woman. I said girlfriend not fiancée. Do not try to U-haul us.’ I was flabbergasted. I took a screenshot and sent it to all my queer friends. I was shocked, relieved, happy and convinced that my mum was the most amazing person on the planet.

I had decided that I would shut out everybody before anybody alienated me.
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Then fast forward to 2014 after the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill passed. I was so angry that it had passed into law that I wrote an article about being lesbian in Nigeria, stating how the law couldn’t criminalise sexuality. Immediately I published it, everything changed. There was a lot of abuse, a lot of online bullying and a lot of threats. Some type of stupid semi-hisbah board from my state put out an APB to find and prosecute me.

My mum went crazy on me. ‘How could you? How dare you? How could you say you’re a lesbian?’

‘Why are you acting this way?’ I asked her. ‘We had this conversation years ago and you were fine with it.’

‘I regret the day I had you,’ she told me. ‘You’re a disappointment to me. In fact, you’re not my daughter.’

My sisters said, ‘Why are you doing this thing to her? Are you trying to kill her?’

I asked them, ‘What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to take it back? Lie? Just say what you guys want to hear? Because it’s not going to change anything.’

The entire family went ga-ga. Everyone was calling me, trying to ‘talk sense into me’. All they wanted me to do was take it back and tell them what they wanted to hear. They sent me all these preachings and scriptures to get me to change.

I stopped picking up their calls and replying to their messages. But to put their minds at ease, I told them I was a lesbian but I had never dated anyone. I thought it would be easier for them if they thought I had never had sex with a girl.

Throughout all of this, it was just my baby sister who was supportive. She asked, ‘What does this mean? What has this meant for you all this while?’ I told her, ‘Well, that’s it. All these lies, the pretending and faking. I’m tired. I am a lesbian and that isn’t going to change.’ She asked me why I never told her, and then just listened to all my experiences as I ranted about how hard it was. She stayed on the phone and cried with me and I felt very guilty. She was barely 21, all her friends were talking about it and there was nothing I could do to protect her from the outpouring of hatred that also came her way.

Picture a life: the small apartment full of sprawling plants, music, and low, moody lights; there’s a refrigerator stocked to adequacy, a couple of oil paintings and candlesticks, some stacks of books. There are dirty sneakers and cheap wine in the front hall — the kind of life assembled out of air by two people in their early thirties who decided some time ago to throw their lots together. No flash, no easy money, just a little respite from the world. Caesura from anonymous cruelty.

We think a lot about the future, the past. We’re big dreamers we two, which like love is one of the things that binds us. Every day when the sun hammers out across the blue steel bowl of the sky we resume the thread of what might have been, who we may still be. We pick it up, rearrange it, and see where it might lead.

We play that game: Where will we live in 10 years, where would we raise children, would we do it at all? A house in California or a cheap Berlin cold water flat? Will this be the year we finally buy a Christmas tree?

I should add perhaps, or is it obvious, that this game is both an implicit promise we make to each other and a kind of construction; it is a baffle against the world.

This game is both an implicit promise we make to each other and a kind of construction.
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And it’s in thinking along these lines lately that something else occurs to me; there’s a threat I should have seen before and many have seen before me — something written plainly enough. It surfaces now and again, dull and prehistoric.

It’s something we don’t often think about, something we don’t often feel. It occurs to us only when it occurs sharply — as a painful afterthought — often as a stranger’s observation intruding upon the plainer reality of home and being known to one another.

One of us is black; one is not.

We Can’t Avoid Interracial Relationship Talk In Trump’s America

Incidentally, people we meet are often unable to conceive that this optical difference is not a point of regular, if not daily thought between us. This is a phenomenon we find both amusing and, maybe, symptomatic, but is in any case one that fills me over and over again with a gray, vague sadness.

Yes, one of us is black; but that isn’t what muddies the dreams.

What muddies the dreams is wondering what might happen when we leave the house, where else we might live safely, what odds we would accept as an appropriate level of danger in getting in the car and driving, oh, anywhere.

One of us was crossing a San Francisco street on the green light — this was shortly after the San Francisco Police Department shot and killed one unarmed black woman and shortly before they shot and killed two more — crossing, as I say, on the way to the market (wearing a burgundy lambswool sweater and jeans) when a fat white cop in a cruiser sailed through on a chancy left-turn and shouted, get out of the fucking way. Then they stopped, and shouted again.

It can happen like that: banal but lethal, a cracking-open of the eggshell-thin reality between life and the chance of becoming an item in the news — someone else’s story. How easily it can happen!

This memory is only one of many, ours and other people’s, a bitter tide that never quite recedes.

So like many we’ve learned to be these clever, amateur meteorologists of violence. We’ve crossed the street, we’ve decided who steps out of the car to pump gas based on how good the odds seem. We’ve made this decision, moreover, unspoken.

Anyone with a passingly moderate intelligence can understand that this reality is so, that the blanket cultural brutality against blackness is real, that it’s wrong. The last few years in the United States have been instructive, for those who didn’t already know it, in the unique, pervasive, and sophisticated American architectures of racism: how certain people are made and kept poor, how life is stolen from them and how, exactly, that deck is stacked — who gets to die without reason.

Like many we’ve learned to be these clever, amateur meteorologists of violence.
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Strides against this are rooted in a sweeping American tradition of violence against brown bodies, of containment, commodification, of pointlessness and bullshit.

And from the insistent, repeated, indelible footage of violence, to the language we use to talk about it, this fact is visceral. This fact is physical, its lingo intimate, a lovers’ tongue for everything from hatred to disgust to anger to fear, language for us and them, for me and you.

But in the language about bodies and guns and violence and the videos of bleeding and dying there is one other missing fact.

Yes. Something is missing from this language of the body, something that (like understanding, like compassion), I have been longing to hear. It’s implicit, not yet spoken, but it’s also the crux of it all: a cry for more, for everything, for something so small — space and time enough for love.

“Do you still like me?” either of us will ask, a few times a day.

“I guess I still like you,” gentle shove, smack of the head, a few times a day.

You Don’t Have To Like Me — You Just Have To Believe I’m A Human Being

We fix each other mugs of tea; we buy flowers simply for the reason that it’s Wednesday, or Thursday, or Sunday; we keep plums in the icebox. Either of us would kill for the other, a joke we make, but it’s also true.

Home, its music and lights and the small, familiar constellation of daily tools — the intimate heart, the space for dreaming — is in its own way another kind of promise, a vow we make every day to keep each other safe. And it’s occurred to me lately to wonder, as we sit at home watching the reports come in from Ferguson and Chicago, from Baltimore (ain’t it hard, just to live), from Charleston and North Charleston and Baton Rouge and San Francisco and Falcon Heights, whether after all I’ve been making promises I can’t keep.

We’re conditioned — all of us, everyone who is or knows or loves or encounters black women and men — to curtail futures. To hedge bets. We’re taught to shorten imagining, extinguish possibility, put our dreamings to bed.

Last week some time, I can’t remember exactly when, I stood in the kitchen to fix another drink and watched the clouds sail in across the broad and lovely town — or was it filthy and drab. I stood exactly as though I could bear, again, to hear the news. It was hard, the way it often is here at twilight, to tell whether the light was about to rise or fall.

It came then like a flash — predatory, surfacing — the knowledge that without thinking about it I have adjusted my expectations, cautioned myself against loss. I’ve lost ground. Like all of us I have given up a little of the dreaming, and want it back.

When I was a little girl, I had an obsession with Robin Hood — the character in general, but the Disney film in particular. You know the one; every character is an anthropomorphic animal, with Robin Hood and Maid Marian portrayed by red foxes. Robin was everything I wanted to be — dashing, heroic, and genuinely good, placing himself at risk to help people with nothing, and doing it all without the brooding and snark of other movie heroes. I loved Marian, too, with her patient kindness and utter grace.

I wanted to marry Robin. I wanted to be Robin. I wanted to marry Marian. I wanted to be Marian.

I suspect a lot of gay kids have felt this sort of conflict. There are characters we loved, but they were never quite right. I wanted to be Robin, but I couldn’t be, could I? Robin was a boy. All the characters like Robin were boys. I wanted to be like Marian, but I never could manage that much quiet femininity either. Instead, I was the kind of girl who ran in the woods with my best friend, and, when I cut my finger while sharpening stick “arrows” with her brother’s pocket knife, told my parents I’d sliced it on a thorn.

By the time I was in my late teens, I’d been called a dyke by more than one person, and more than one friend had innocently assumed I liked girls, only to be rebuked by me. I dressed in boys’ carpenter jeans and shapeless t-shirts, almost never wearing makeup, but I had crushes on boys, never requited. I didn’t understand the rush toward dating, sex, and love my peers were feeling. I wanted to date, but in my own time. I felt almost no pull toward sex.

By the time I reached college, I at least knew I was attracted to girls. I was a theater major, after all, raised by classical musicians — it’s not like I was some sheltered country kid who’d never come across gay people before. We were friends with couples named Susan and Kari; Bruce and Jason. I had gay and bi friends in high school, and in college, of course, I was surrounded by musical theater actors and costume designers. I had begun to see this difference in myself, too. While acting at a Renaissance faire for a couple of seasons, I’d make out with boys at cast parties fueled by underage drinking, and once or twice, a girl would join in. I congratulated myself on being bisexual. I still dated no one.

When a long-time friend confessed she was in love with me, I told her the feeling was mutual, and finally got to feel the swell of relief and joy that comes from loving and being loved. I moved across the country to be with her. It was not a good experience, to cut a long story short. Four years later, a different person entirely, I moved home again to my little Pennsylvania town. I watched romance movies sometimes, but it took years before I ventured tentatively back into the dating pools.

I dated only men, once bitten and twice shy of women. Nothing lasted. I enjoyed their company, but when it came to sex, that was the line at which I tended to end the relationship. I felt no draw toward it, and told myself these were simply the wrong men. It’s not like I had no sex drive, merely that these particular men didn’t activate it.

And then, sometime in the midst of all this, one of my closest friends persuaded me to watch a cartoon show.

I’m not averse to watching kids’ shows. I have depression, and when I’m in the grip of a depressive episode, sometimes that’s all I want to watch. The show my friend turned me on to was Steven Universe, on Cartoon Network. Within five minutes of the first episode, I was hooked.

Here was everything I could have wanted from a cartoon when I was a child. Here were all kinds of women, not just The Girl, that archetype that had no room for me, with her flowing hair, impeccable makeup, and personality that revolved entirely around the men surrounding her. Here was Garnet, the mysterious and powerful loner who still fiercely loved her found family. Here was Amethyst, the irreverent and impulsive troublemaker. Here was Pearl, the insecure perfectionist who could be grating, yet ultimately so vulnerable and heartbreaking. Here was Rose Quartz, their lost leader, fat, beautiful, and inspiring loyalty and love in everyone she came across.

It wasn’t just the gems, though they and the titular Steven are the focus of the show. There are so many good female minor characters, too — Sadie, the kind doughnut shop girl, and Barb, her butch mail carrier mom. The Pizza twins, Kiki and Jenny, and their grandmother, Nanefua. Vidalia, the indulgent, artistic mom with a wild past. Dr. Priyanka Maheswaran, the overprotective, ambitious, but loving mother of Steven’s best friend, Connie.

And then, of course, there’s Connie Maheswaran, a girl who is everything I was as a child: bookish, anxious, lonely, afraid to get in trouble, but filled with a desire for magic and adventure, fed by the books she’s devoured. She’s Steven’s equal, not in magical powers, but in loyalty and bravery.

Even the villains of Steven Universe are a diverse group of women, from the buff and sadistic Jasper, to the obsessive and abrasive Peridot, to the looming threat of the matriarchal Yellow Diamond. Then there are the fusions (I won’t spoil the surprise), and Lapis Lazuli, and the flashes we’ve seen of other gems. It’s a dizzying array of women, so rare in popular culture that I’m left groping to describe how meaningful it feels.

Most importantly of all, some of these women are in love with each other, in a way that’s outright stated rather than hinted at. Pearl loved Rose. Rose loved Pearl, in her own non-exclusive way. Ruby and Sapphire are a loving, stable couple. I could count on one hand all of the same-gender relationships I’ve seen portrayed on American kids’ TV, and all of them are from this show. None of them, of course, are from when I was a child, when I could have benefited from seeing this representation the most.

Just last week, during a panel on the show at Comic-Con, the show’s creator, Rebecca Sugar, came out as bisexual. During her talk, she explained why the relationships she created were so important:

“These things have so much to do with who you are, and there’s this idea that these are themes that should not be shared with kids, but everyone shares stories about love and attraction with kids. So many stories for kids are about love, and it really makes a difference to hear stories about how someone like you can be loved and if you don’t hear those stories it will change who you are. It’s very important to me that we speak to kids about consent and we speak to kids about identity and that we speak to kids about so much. I want to feel like I exist and I want everyone else who wants to feel that way to feel that way too.”

Steven Universe definitely made me feel that way, too. In fact, I felt very nearly electrified by the show, when it was new to me and I was devouring the existing episodes as quickly as I could. It was brand new, this feeling of looking at a screen and feeling represented by what I saw there. When Pearl cried over the memory of Rose, I cried with her. When Amethyst broke down, feeling her past made her worthless at best and dangerous at worst, I ached for her. When Garnet struggled with expressing her feelings and moments of weakness to the other Gems, I knew precisely how she felt.

None of these women were exactly me, but they all felt like someone I could be, or would want to be. None of them felt like placeholders marked “The Girl.” They felt like people. I was invested in their romances, their feelings for each other, in a way that I never had been before in watching straight media. For once, a man wasn’t the character I identified with most.

It’s almost embarrassing now to admit how much it affected me. I was so moved by these cartoon people. I was 32 years old, a business owner, crying as cartoon women hugged each other, for heaven’s sake. It opened a floodgate. I started seeking out lesbian media. I read Sarah Waters’ books for the first time. I read Fun Home. I sought out the movies and shows that most lesbians were watching in college, when they were just figuring out who they were. I figured out who I was. I wasn’t bisexual. I had never reacted to men, or stories about men and women, the way I was reacting to this show, these books, this representation. I was a lesbian.

It hasn’t been all that long since I had this revelation — less than a year, in fact. I’m 33 now, and seeing a girl I love, and who loves Steven Universe, too. We’ve talked, often, of how much this show would have meant to us as children. I don’t think I would have had to wait until I was 32 to figure out basic truths about myself if I had just had something like Steven Universe to look at, through which I could see myself reflected back at me. I might still have wanted to be Robin Hood, but I could also have wanted to be Pearl, a noble knight defending my leader and lover. I could have wanted to be pugnacious Ruby, or her serene and cool Sapphire. I could have dressed up as Rose Quartz for Halloween, instead of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

For LGTBQ kids, the value of representation is not just in feeling validated and valued by the media they consume. It’s also in seeing a possible way to be, and exploring different ways to feel beyond the heteronormative. It’s maybe the most direct way to understand what makes you, yourself, tick. We are the only storytelling species in the world, and the stories we absorb and that we tell ourselves are what make us who we are. We owe it to kids like us to make sure they have stories all their own. Maybe they’ll know who they are before they’re grown.