Well, I’m stranded in the bookstore after hours due to pouring rain and no umbrella, so I suppose I have some time to report in about the absolutely wild life-altering epiphany I had today

So towards the end of the shift, I get a small group of teens in the bookstore. Having been an Alternative Teen earlier in the century, I recognized the style of this group as nowadays’ Alternative Teens.

I did the shopkeep thing, directed them to the nicer-smelling of our group of hand sanitizers, etc

And then, as they mill around, there’s this little moment: one mentions they would’ve been in sooner, except one of their comrades insisted they had to watch the She-Ra finale

I have the social graces of a goat, but there are some signals I get immediately. In this case, it clicked because I’ve been doing these exact two checks this girl just did since I was younger than she is:

The “are you also into geeky shit” check and the “are you queer” check

I immediately enthuse over the She-Ra finale, careful to include how it about burst my little lesbian heart

Reader, the crowd went WILD. The teens light up. Everyone is talking at once. This bookstore is now 100% queer geek girls and we are all freaking OUT

I show them how they’re making She-Ra books for very small children - how kids a fraction of their ages will get to see a story where two girls fall in love. We all have a second with that seratonin.

“I didn’t know about lesbians til I was 13,” says one. “Not because I went to Catholic school - I think that was just because I’m dumb.”

I tell her I didn’t know that gay was something you could be in real life until the same age. I thought it was just a thing in fanfiction.

(We have a joyful moment there too. Two of us may have read the same 300K LOTR Frodo/Sam fic. They gasp at the idea that I printed it out for frequent reading because we only had one computer in the house.)

Ultimately, one of them shows me a note on her phone. It’s full of books she picked out because they were both high fantasy (“I’m really picky!”) and had some sort of queer content. We get her absolutely all of them. I pick up a few for myself.

After a solid hour of browsing and chatting, we part ways friends, and I sit in the happy warmth of the encounter we all just had.

This bookstore is in the same town where I grew up. There was not someone like me for me to see when I was the same age as those teens.

It’s a very typical midwest suburb in many ways. Explicit homophobia would be unacceptable, but inclusion of queer people is still seen as somewhat radical.

(Just earlier today, one of the other owners told me we would be holding off on stocking a YA book because “more parents were up in arms that we had it than anything.” This, despite the sexual content in the book being totally in line with an average spicy YA, just gay.)

But it doesn’t have to stay that way. It’s already changed so much since I grew up here. And I realized just by openly existing in this place - by making sure those teens I used to be have a visible adult in their lives who is also queer - I can help that change move along.

Storm’s cleared. This could’ve been a scene in a movie. Shit’s crazy like that sometimes. Anyway, support queer midwestern teens, those little guys are out there kicking ass despite everything