At my middle school, kids could either play outside during recess or study in the library. My athletic abilities were limited and I hated being pegged during Running Bases, so I often chose the latter. But teachers soon caught on that I was hogging the study pass and encouraged me to socialize outdoors. It makes me wonder if they also noticed that I didn’t like being picked last for sports, had poor vision but sat in the back of the classroom, and mostly ate with girls at lunch.
Looking back, I think my goal throughout the day was to make myself less visible. Writer and activist Alexander Leon recently characterized the experience of growing up queer in a way I immediately recognized. “Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves,” he wrote on Twitter, in a viral thread he later adapted into an essay. “We grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we’ve created to protect us.”
It reads like a pained entry ripped from the diary of any outsider who’s lasted long enough to be rewarded hindsight. How did I “sacrifice authenticity” growing up? What if I’d been able to see myself represented in movies that validated my existence? Because while I did make myself smaller and mask my individuality, I also went out on goosey night and played manhunt and ate at diners and saw 13 Going on 30 with friends.
Queer people still lack what I needed back then: films about friends on the cusp of puberty who are beginning to understand their differences, even if they have not yet figured out their sexuality. Movies that aren’t overtly focused on bullying, coming out, or other established themes of queer upbringing — that can instead be a love letter to our childhood friendships and the creative tactics we employed to “minimise humiliation,” as Leon writes. How eye-opening might it have been to see a buddy comedy for queer kids, even a bubblegum, broad-strokes, so-contrived-it’s-ludicrous one like the ones my straight peers got in Sleepover, The Sandlot, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, and The Little Giants?