a curious, but beautiful oddity

grrrlvirus:

when i was thirteen i identified as gay. i had known this about myself and been in the closet since grade five. by early grade nine, it was wearing on me heavily and i was really depressed from living a double life. (i ended up coming out the next year, grade ten.) at this time, grade nine, thirteen years old, first semester, i had an online diary that i kept for a few years. no one in my ‘real life’ knew about it. it was on diaryland and totally anonymous. this was before the times of facebook and tumblr. the internet was relatively new and there was still the possibility of being anonymous online and getting away with it.

the internet was my saviour, my safe haven and the only place i could be myself. i poured my guts out to my keyboard on a regular basis and let my sadness and loneliness drift into the abyss of the internet. it turned out to be a positive thing. i met other girls. other gay girls (!) and other girls confused and questioning. for the first time since i’d known, i didn’t feel like a freak. i felt like there was hope. and the possibility of even meeting a girl one day to fall in love with. i was a serious hopeless romantic so this really mattered to me. (plus the loneliness of closeted life was unbearable.)

at the time i read, and there existed, a feminist teen girls magazine based out of toronto called ‘reluctant hero’. my mom had bought me a subscription and i devoured it every time it arrived. like the internet, this magazine showed me that there were other girls like me out there. other gay girls, other girls who felt different, other girls who thought about more than what was popular, other girls who didn’t fit in. reluctant hero was amazing.

one day,  something totally random and really super cool happened. i was online, as i was whenever i got the chance, checking my email. there was an email from the editor of reluctant hero, my favourite magazine. my jaw hit the floor. i opened the email and read. the woman (i can’t remember her name now) told me that she was surfing online diaries of teen girls because she writes a magazine for teen girls and wanted to know what was on our minds. she had stumbled across my diary which was full of all the trauma of being a thirteen year old closeted gay girl. one entry in particular, she said, had stood out to her and she asked me if she could publish it.

this was more than a dream come true for me. i was a writer and dreamed of being a *published* writer. this was my favourite magazine, randomly contacting me and asking to publish my work. i was terrified, however, because of the topic at hand: my closeted queerness (i didn’t know the word ‘queer’ then). i thought and thought about it. what if my mom read the article and could figure out it was me? it was huge risk, but this was a huge dream.

i wrote the editor back and told her, yes, you can publish it. i asked her to publish it anonymously and she said it was no problem. i eagerly awaited for my next issue of reluctant hero to arrive in the mail, this time even more than usual because i knew it would include my piece. unfortunately, the new issue never arrived. my mom told me that reluctant hero was having financial problems and was going under. i assumed my piece was never published. i was disappointed.

fast forward to age seventeen. i am now a totally out queer grrrl living in toronto on my own. one day while chilling in the gaybourhood, as i used to frequently do in those days, i decided to head into the glad day bookshop (an lgbtq bookstore). i was browsing the shelves and i noticed a section in the back that was full of zines and old magazines. being a zinester i was immediately drawn to this section and started browsing a great selection of random, dated and DIY texts. and then i saw it, reluctant hero magazine! i was like “omg! this was my favourite magazine when i was kid! they went under!”

i started flipping through the pages in reminiscent bliss when my eyes landed on words that were written by my thirteen year old hand. there it was. my article. it had been published. i just never found out. i cried reading it, because i had come so far. i had come out, moved out, dated grrrls, immersed myself in the downtown toronto queer scene and all of this, i knew, was thanks to the strength and courage of that closeted thirteen year old girl i used to be. for any of you in the closet right now, for any of you dealing with homophobia, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how lonely you are, there are people in this world who will love you for you, just exactly as you are. it’s a hard journey, but it’s so worth it.

here’s the article. closeted clementine at age thirteen. - clementine cannibal

inspiring, and so incredible that the publication resurfaced! as someone whose experiences of ‘coming out’ and coming to terms with a queer identity coalesced with experiences of the internet becoming more accessible and usable in forums and chat, this makes me think of a lot of experiences in online environments that i had at a relatively young age that really expanded my community and impacted my teen years. were all of these opportunities of connectivity healthy for me? definitely not… but that’s a many a longer blog post for a different day. 

tl;dr? looking at development of identity in relation to community, communication, and media is crazy.