What to Do If You Relate a Tad Too Much to Brittany and Santana; Or, Some Unsolicited Advice for Queer Teen Girls

Q: Does the fact that you find Naya Rivera hot mean you’re gay? A: No. It means you have EYES. HELLO.

So, like any good obsessive blogger, I keep an eye on what search terms people are using to land on my blog.

Lately my search terms have included a lot like these:

“Going through the same as Santana.”

“I can’t tell if I’m lesbian or just love Brittana.”

“Have the same issues that Santana and Brittany had.”

So, I figured, if you’re looking for that info, and you’re desperate enough to come all the way to my blog, I might as well try to help you out.

Brittany and Santana are actually going through quite a few different things, though, and since I don’t know which ones you’re looking for, I’ll take them in turns. [Btw, in case you have no idea what I'm talking about: link]

Disclaimer: Everyone’s experience is different. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you; neither will what works for your best friend, or that girl you met online, or your high school guidance counselor. Or, for that matter, Brittany and Santana.

Now, let’s dig in, shall we?

Issue #1: Am I gay? Bi? Something else? ARGH.

“I don’t know. I made out with a mannequin once. I even had a sex dream about a shrub that was only in the shape of a person.” — Santana

For a lot of people, especially a lot of girls under the age of 25 or so, this is the hardest part of all.

Let’s take, as our example, the Googler who doesn’t know whether she’s gay or whether she just really likes Brittany and Santana.

It’s an understandably tricky thing. Naya Rivera and Heather Morris are both really hot.

Hey, do you know who else is really hot? Darren Criss. Or Mark Salling, if that’s more your style. Or Harry Shum Jr.

Also hot? Dianna Agron. Jonathan Groff. Lea Michelle. Apparently even Cory Monteith has people drooling over him.

There is a theme here. Wait for it:

Famous people tend to be really hot.

And therefore: Which famous people you find hot usually has nothing to do with your sexual orientation.

The people you find hot in real life will offer you a better clue. But that’s not definitive, either. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between sexual attraction and friendly affection, or respectful admiration, or straight-up loathing.

What sucks about all this is that there’s no magic formula for figuring out where you reside on the sexual orientation spectrum. Your only option is to figure it out for yourself. And what sucks even more is that often, figuring that out takes a long time.

In my opinion, Glee’s writers (who all happen to be guys ― I’m just saying) rushed Santana into claiming a lesbian identity too quickly. Unless she was lying to Holly Holliday (which she could’ve been), Santana was conflicted about her sexuality only a few weeks before she was putting on that “Lebanese” T-shirt.

It generally takes longer than that to figure yourself out. It takes a lot more introspection. And it often takes a lot more life experience.

Eventually, your feelings will fall into place. There’s no way to know how long that will take. And there’s no way to know what your final conclusion will be. Some people never come to identify with one of the three most common sexual orientations (straight, gay, or bi) ― because sometimes, sexuality is just more complicated than those arbitrary labels allow. And that’s fine. Those people still live perfectly happy lives.

So I can’t tell you when, or if, you’ll know the answer to that question that I know seems so important to you right now.

But what I can tell you is that you can’t force it.

You can think and think and think. You can talk and talk and talk. You can tear your hair out waiting to have a prophetic dream that explains it all to you.

Or you can suck it up and wait for it to work itself out on its own.

It will. Someday.

And here are some things you can do while you’re trying to figure it out:

• Write about your feelings in a journal. This can be especially useful if your feelings change from day to day, because then you can come back later and remember how yes, there really was a time when you considered inventing your very own sexual orientation so it could revolve entirely around James McAvoy.
• Talk to a trusted friend. Someone who will listen to you and help you try to sort out your feelings. Not someone who will try to impose their own feelings on you. You’ve got enough to deal with already.
• Talk to a trusted adult who is familiar with how gayness works. Sadly there are still a lot of people who aren’t yet informed about this stuff.
• Talk to other LGBT teens who are going through the same stuff you are, through groups in your community or on sites like Oasis or Scarleteen.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re thinking you can take a shortcut to figuring this out by having sex with a bunch of people of various genders? Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. When you’re having sex, no matter how you feel about the person involved, there are a ton of hormones flying all around that make it hard just to tell your left from your right, much less which gender you prefer. And the rarely-discussed truth of the matter is, sexual orientation is a lot less about body parts than it is about feelings.

By all means, sleep with whomever you want; I’m not here to judge. I’m just saying, it’s not going to help you with this particular question.

And no, to answer another question that apparently people are Googling like crazy ― you don’t have to have had sex to know what your orientation is.

Issue #2: Coming out.

“I can’t go to an Indigo Girls concert. I just can’t.” — Santana

Ah, the eternal debate.

Who to tell? How? When?

Not to repeat myself, but: Only you can answer that. Everyone’s situation is different. Blah, blah, blah; I know you’ve heard all this before.

I will offer some advice based on my own experiences and those of some of my friends, but please take every single word of this with the biggest grains of salt in your vicinity:

• Don’t start with your parents. At the very least, you need some practice before you go there. Start with a friend, or an adult you trust not to turn around and tell your parents without your permission.
• Until you’re ready for your parents to know, don’t come out to everyone at school (i.e., don’t walk around the halls holding hands with your girlfriend, or show up in math class wearing an “I Heart Pro-Choice Girls” T-shirt). You might think there’s no chance your parents will ever hear your school gossip. But you might be wrong. And it’s not a chance worth taking. Your parents deserve to hear the news from you, not some girl in the checkout line at Old Navy.
• When you do tell your parents, plan it in advance. Sit down and think through every reaction they could have. Tears of joy? Tears of despair? Tears accompanied by shouts of “You are no longer my daughter”? Think through every single realistic possibility, and think of what you’ll say in response to it. Write and memorize a script if that helps you. Your goal is to approach this logically, not emotionally. Your parents will already be emotional enough for the both of you.
• No matter who you’re telling, remember that coming out isn’t just a one-time thing. Anyone you tell will probably have questions for you in the days and weeks and months that follow. If the person asking questions is someone you care about, then answer their questions respectfully. Don’t make them feel stupid or shitty for asking you. Remember, you’ve known who you are for a long time, but they’re adjusting to a whole new reality.
• Unless they ask you if the lesbian experience is just like the Katy Perry “I Kissed a Girl” video. If they say that, then throw something at them, please.

Issue #3: Girl trouble, of the unrequited variety.

“Please say you love me back. Please.” — Santana

What if your concerns are less about identity and more about a particular girl?

Well. I wish I could say that’s easier. But if I did, I would be a big lying liar who lies.

I can say it will probably be less time-consuming in the long run than the identity questions. Both relationships and non-relationships tend to last months, not years. Not so much for that other stuff.

But I promise, no girl trauma is insurmountable. Your goal in all things romance, though, should be to avoid screwing yourself over whenever possible.

So, let’s say you’re in Santana’s situation. There’s a girl you like, and she likes you back, but not in the way you want her to. What are your options?

1. Have a screaming fight and swear never to see her again.
2. Keep hanging on and hope she changes her mind.
3. Give up on the romance and resolve to just be friends.

I suppose these options aren’t mutually exclusive. Though for your own sanity, they should be.

Option #1 is for the drama queens among us. Some of us, in fact, might follow this pattern over and over again. It’s exciting. Like living inside your very own soap opera.

But it gets old. Very, very old. And I promise, your friends will get sick of hearing your stories about your latest girl drama way before you get tired of telling them.

Option #2 is probably the most popular choice. Hey, it’s what Santana picked. And after all, you never know, right? Maybe your wildest dreams will come through in the end, and she’ll come back to you. And in the meantime, you get someone to talk to, and maybe to snuggle with, and maybe more too.

Here’s the thing, though. If you like her more than she likes you, and she knows that? Then she’s the one who holds all the cards. And that way lies heartbreak, sweetie.

It’s always possible that she’ll come around, change her mind. But it’s not likely. Much more likely is that she’ll find someone else she does feel just as strongly about as you feel about her right now.

And when that happens, do you want to be the friend watching from the sidelines while you cuddle with your new GF, the one who likes you too? Or do you want to be the girl who gets the awkward text messages reiterating what she tried to tell you back when you first talked about your feelings?

Option #3 is by far the hardest. It will hurt. A lot. But the sooner your heart gets broken, the faster it heals, as they say. (Wait, do they say that? Well, they should.)

Also, the girls you were once in love with make the very best friends. I know that probably sounds cruel, but it’s the truth. Those girls know you better than anyone. And when you do fall in love again, they’ll be thrilled for you ― and they’ll be the very best shoulder to cry on, when you inevitably need one.

I’m about to go all Lima Heights now.

OK, so here is the thing.

I wish there had been someone like Santana, or Brittany, or even Kurt, on TV when I was 16. Instead, all I had was Ellen DeGeneres and Melissa Etheridge. Which was more than the girls who came ten years before me got.

But when I was a teenager, if there had been teen girls making eyes at each other on primetime soap operas, I probably would’ve tried to emulate them in every possible way. I know I would have, because I did the same thing with the straight characters I related to. If there had been gay girls on my TV, I would’ve convinced myself that my situation was exactly like theirs. That I was going through the same problems they were, and that if I did things the way they did them, the outcome of my story would look a lot like theirs.

And I’d have been wrong.

Because TV shows tend to tie things up into unrealistically neat little packages. That’s just the nature of the medium. But it’s not the nature of real life. In real life, relationship issues don’t need to be resolved by season finales, and people’s sexual orientations don’t change just because someone wants them to.

It would be nice if the world really did work that way. But, alas.

So by all means, look for examples of your experience in the images around you. But don’t expect your life to go the way those fictional people’s lives do. Because yours is going to be a lot harder.

But it will be OK in the end. Really, it will. You can trust me on that one.

*hugs*

On the Sudden Depth of Brittany and Santana

Last night’s Glee continued in a major way the storyline I waxed on about in a post last fall, In Defense of Brittany and Santana. So I feel compelled to wax on about this episode too. Warning: this will be long.

Here is what Santana said last night.

“I’m a bitch because I’m angry. I’m angry because I have all of these feelings. Feelings for you, that I’m afraid of dealing with because I’m afraid of dealing with the consequences. And Brittany, I can’t go to an Indigo Girls concert. I just can’t.”

When Glee was new, it always annoyed me that in the press, the writers and producers always described Kurt as “dealing with some identity issues.” Kurt was never doing anything of the kind. Kurt has always been completely sure of himself. His problems all stemmed from how other people felt about that.

Santana, on the other hand, is dealing with identity issues in a deep and fascinating way. She feels things. She knows she feels things. But she can’t go to an Indigo Girls concert. She just can’t. And to her, that is the most serious thing in the world.

I’m angry because I have all these feelings.

It’s been clear ever since the Brittany/Santana relationship was first outed halfway through season 1 that Santana had mixed feelings about her sexuality. That fact was made much clearer earlier this season in “Duets,” when Brittany, mid-makeout, tried to get Santana to sing a Melissa Etheridge song with her, and Santana doth protest way too much about how she wasn’t a lesbo.

Jessica Spotswood and I were talking on Twitter last night about how we were confused about the significance of the song “Landslide.” The thing was, when the girls first sang it in the ep, I thought I understood what they were getting at, to the degree that I was almost crying along with Santana. But then in that climactic scene by the lockers it became clear that my interpretation had been way off, which is a big part of why the locker scene shocked me so much on first viewing. But now, having listened to the song a few more times, I get it.

The key lyrics are the chorus:

Well, I’ve been afraid of changing
‘Cause I built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Children get older
And I’m getting older too.

When I first watched the episode, those lyrics combined with Santana’s tears caused me to interpret the song as Santana saying that she was sad and afraid to let Brittany go, because she’d been such an important part of her life for so long, but that they were getting older now, and it was time to put aside childish things like making out with your best friend because you’re lonely, and it was time to embrace change and look to the future and to adult relationships. I thought this song was about Brittany and Santana breaking up, and I was crying too, because that made me sad.

It was not about that at all. The same lyrics actually meant something entirely different.

I thought the key line was “I’ve been afraid of changing, ‘cause I built my life around you.” But it’s actually “Time makes you bolder, children get older.” It’s about Santana growing up and realizing she’s been wasting her life being bitchy and chasing guys she doesn’t like, and that she needs to grow a pair and go after the one thing that will really make her happy. Which is Brittany. And that makes her cry, partly because she doesn’t like the way she’s been acting, but also because of what she tells Brittany later in the hallway: “I’m afraid of dealing with the consequences.”

Has Santana’s bitchiness throughout the entire series really stemmed, as she claims, from her unacknowledged love for Brittany? Maybe. Santana has been bitchy since before she delivered her first line. And she’s been making gay jokes at Kurt’s expense almost as long. It’s easy enough to buy that those are the direct result of her own issues; we’ve already got another character who’s been doing the same thing (albeit in a much less interesting way) since the show began, too.

It’s strange and often unpredictable how these issues manifest themselves. High school is a confusing time when all your feelings jumble up together and cause you to do weird, weird things.

And whatever the reality of their situation, I can definitely buy Santana thinking she’s in love with Brittany. Close female friendships are confusing enough even when there isn’t sex involved. When someone else is your entire world, especially because you think everyone else in the world hates you, all your feelings get mixed up and…

And that confusion and big mess of feelings is why it’s so much fun to write about high school. For me, anyway.

Gay Kids on TV; Or, Why Rickie Vasquez Could’ve Changed My Life But Didn’t

Today I was on a plane experiencing mildly traumatic turbulence and I distracted myself by reading an old Entertainment Weekly that I had asked my mother, who subscribes, to save for me, because the cover had this on it:

Um, yeah.

The issue came out several weeks ago, cleverly timed to coincide with Chris Colfer’s Golden Globe win and the sudden dramatic ascent of Darren Criss into cultural relevance. (Speaking of which, a prediction: By this time next year, Darren Criss will have five times as many Twitter followers as Chris Colfer. Just reading the tea leaves here.)

But the article itself (which I don’t think is online, but you can see their walk-through of 25 significant gay TV teens from years’ past here) focuses a lot on Rickie Vasquez from My So-Called Life, which is a subject that is near and dear to my heart.

I watched My So-Called Life when it originally aired on ABC, which happened over the course of my sophomore year of high school. In many ways it felt like I was watching a TV show that was about my life precisely as it was happening at that moment. Angela Chase, who was also a sophomore, dressed like me, acted like me (yes, I was that much of a brat), had her first real boyfriend at the same time I did (she didn’t later realize she didn’t actually like boys that much, the way I did, but hey, the show only lasted that one season, and it ended before she got to see what a bore Jordan really was). My best friend at the time even started doing her hair and dressing like Rayanne, in homage to Angela’s best friend.

I was Angela. My best friend was Rayanne. Sadly, we didn’t have a Rickie.

But back to Rickie. He was the one aspect of the show that was completely alien to me when I first watched it. There was no one at my high school who remotely resembled Rickie. At least, not to my eyes.

Worst of all, most of Rickie’s storylines went completely over my head when I was 15. I didn’t realize there was any significance to the sight of a boy putting on eyeliner in the girls’ bathroom. I had no idea he was anything but straight until Angela, in the pilot, announced to her parents that he was “bi.” And I took Angela at her word on that point until the show’s final episode, in which Rickie, for the first time, used the word “gay” to describe himself. (Hence, that whole storyline in the last few episodes about Delia being attracted to him because he was unavailable? Yeah, I had no idea that was what was happening the first time I watched. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a Rickie-dates-Delia arc, right up until the scene where he came out to her.)

I had no idea Rickie had a crush on Jordan, either. But watching it now, it’s really obvious. Even the oblivious Angela figured it out by the end of the show. But for the duration of the show, it never occurred to me that Rickie might be interested in any boys except the hipster artist kid (and I’m not sure I even knew Rickie liked that guy until Rayanne specifically pointed it out).

The Christmas episode, when Rickie’s aunt and uncle kicked him out after he came out to them? I had no idea he’d come out to them. It wasn’t shown or explained, so I was totally clueless. I thought the physical abuse was all there was to that story. I didn’t realize the coming out had happened until way after the show ended, when I read a magazine article that at long last explained it all to me.

And the really obviously gay drama teacher, who agonized about how to help Rickie and finally took him into his home? The one who the female math teacher threw herself at, only to collapse in mortification when she realized why he wasn’t returning her advances? I had no clue that guy was gay until we saw him at home with his partner, talking about the fact that they were gay.

The truth is, I knew nothing about gayness at all at that point in my life. And My So-Called Life didn’t really illuminate that much for me. Though I guess it did introduce me to the concept of the fag hag. Which is a concept I think I’d have been better off knowing less about, actually.

The summer after MSCL went off the air, when I was 16, I went away to one of those smart kid camps, with various smart teenagers from all over the state. And that was where I met the first openly gay people I’d ever encountered. And that was what made me see what this whole gay thing was really about. Because this was 1995, and I hadn’t had the Internet. I hadn’t had books like the ones the questioning teenage girls of today read to understand themselves (which is primarily Keeping You a Secret, I gather, with a side of Empress of the World). (Yes, I could’ve read Annie On My Mind, if I’d known it existed. Though I doubt it was available at any libraries or bookstores in my hometown, and I had no other way to get books if it wasn’t in one of those places.)

Nope. All I had, up until that summer, was Rickie on My So-Called Life. And I had no context for understanding Rickie.

As the EW article points out, after MSCL was canceled, five years passed before another gay teenager showed up on network TV. And those five years made up what was left of my own teenagerdom. By the time Willow and Tara started exchanging Significant Looks, I was already in college and was convinced I knew everything I needed to know about girls and gayness (ah, naiveté).

Now, I did, after all, manage to figure this stuff out as I went along. It’s not like there was ever a time when I was sitting around thinking “If only I had gay pop culture role models to emulate!” or anything like that. And hey, I did have Ellen DeGeneres. Except that she was annoying and everyone made fun of her, so I didn’t want to emulate her. (And to this day she continues to annoy the hell out of me.)

But getting back to Rickie. I think it’s worth noting that the reason I didn’t pick up on all that stuff during the show’s initial run wasn’t entirely that I was dense. It was also because most of his storylines were never actually explained on a textual level.

I mean, nowadays we have Glee, on which an on-camera scene showed an openly gay teen character requesting that his father read up on gay sex techniques (which is absurd and completely unrealistic in and of itself on a story level but for the purposes of this blog post I’m just focusing on the cultural implications). And we also, according to EW, have the show Degrassi, which has an openly trans teen character, plus seven other LGBT teen characters (and I can only assume Degrassi has one of those massive rotating casts like on Law & Order or something, because seven? Seriously?).

But most of the significant stuff with Rickie on MSCL either (1) happened offscreen or (2) was implied but left unsaid between characters who were starting out with a greater grasp of the situation than I was.

If I’d actually seen Rickie come out to his aunt and uncle on TV? I would’ve understood that. It would’ve made a difference in my understanding of gayness. It would’ve made a difference in my straight friends’ understanding, too. The impact of a scene like that would have been overwhelmingly positive for everyone I knew at the time, even though the scene itself would’ve been really sad.

But I didn’t see it. It happened off-screen. We never even got to hear it described. And I’ve never heard anyone involved with MSCL talk about why that is.

Now, I’m sure one could come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation of why it made story sense to start with the aftermath of the coming out scene. One could say that what really mattered was how Rickie coped with it and how it affected the other characters, and that special guest star Juliana Hatfield’s contract required that she get a certain amount of screentime, and that viewers really just cared about whether Angela and Jordan were going to kiss that week, and whatever else.

But I’m pretty sure the ultimate reason we never saw that scene was because the creators and writers of MSCL knew the network wouldn’t have allowed them to show it. They could touch on the gay stuff, but it had to be on the periphery; it couldn’t be too obvious to the audience what, exactly, was going on. I suspect something similar was at work when Angela described Rickie as “bi” in the pilot, even though it was very clear that the writers knew from day one that Rickie was gay. Using that word might’ve bought them some leeway with the network. But it confused the hell out of me as a 15-year-old viewer.

And yes, things have evolved since 1995. Now we have Kurt, and everything is good with the world and la la la (or the EW article certainly seemed to think that was the case, anyway).

But speaking of Kurt, I’m just going to point this out: Yes, we now have a mainstream show on which gay-related storylines have been prominently featured for the duration of its run, and which features three LGBT regular teen characters (I’m counting Santana and Brittany, so there) and two significant LGBT recurring characters. But the fact remains that we have seen exactly one same-sex kiss on the show. And that kiss was nonconsensual.

Of course, I’m sure if you asked the people involved in creating Glee they would say that that was done entirely for story reasons too. As was, undoubtedly, the censoring of the word “transsexual” from the Rocky Horror episode. (ETA in April: I now retract my criticism of the lack of same-sex kisses on Glee, as that clearly was being done for story reasons; however, the Rocky Horror criticism still stands.)

Which is all to say that I’m glad there are a fairly decent number of books published each year now for YA audiences with LGBT protagonists.

Except for the part where it’s still hard to get LGBT YA books published. And the part where when they do get published, it’s hard for them to get serious promotion or distribution, and it’s not at all uncommon for them to be challenged. Meaning that often, the first time a kid hears about a LGBT book, it’s because that book is being taken away from them before they’ve even had a chance to read it.

So I don’t know what the solution to any of this is. But I knew examples of both fictional and nonfictional gay teens are incredibly important to kids growing up, whether the kids themselves are gay or straight or something else.

And I know I’m going to keep coming back to my My So-Called Life DVDs when I can. Got to make up for lost time.

In Defense of Brittany and Santana

[ETA: My updated take on Brittany/Santana as of exciting new developments in March 2011 is here.]

It’s been almost two weeks now since this episode of Glee aired, so I’m late to the party here. But I feel like I keep reading more and more columns (and hearing more and more people talk) about how “inappropriate” it was for Glee to show two girls making out.

This is the clip in question:

Most people, aside from the “family” groups, aren’t phrasing it quite like I did above. Most of them are complaining that the scene is just too “explicit” or “exploitative” for “a show about high school kids.”

I’ve said before that I think it’s important for visibility purposes for the show to not shy away from showing scenes like this ― because there are so few images out there for teenage (or preteen) girls who are gay, or bi, or questioning, or whatever else, that represent them.

But I also think the storyline itself in which this scene played a part is good.

Some people seem to think this scene was put in the show just to boost its ratings, because poor poor Glee is obviously in danger of cancellation, or something (um, it’s not, not at all), or to stir up “controversy” (like this didn’t already take care of that for the week) or just to seem “edgy” (because up until now Glee has always been thoroughly pure).

I’ve also heard quite a few people say they felt like it came totally out of left field. These are people who either didn’t remember the split-screen phone scene from last season or assumed it was in jest: