poneezi:

For people who don’t think LGBTQ+ people need representation in the media

For the first 18 years of my life I was too afraid to even question my sexuality, only after seeing Santana come out in Glee, a beautiful and feminine girl who wasn’t labelled as creepy or a dyke after doing so, was I able to even QUESTION my sexual identity.

I grew up beliveing that if I liked girls that made me unfeminine, and a predator to women or a sex object to men. And this is somebody who grew up with a very close lesbian aunt in a extremely accepting family.

I needed someone I could identify with, somebody who had to figure everything out and understood the shame that I felt, not just a random lesbian couple or a butch girl in a highschool drama who everybody avoids because she is a “dyke” (I fucking despise that word) who is never given any real character development beyond a bad dress sense and longing glances at other women, and I didn’t need incredibly straight women hooking up while drunk for the experience. I needed to see myself on screen and not feel ashamed.

It was so powerful to see Santana come out that an 18 year old girl who couldn’t admit, even in my mind, that I might not be straight, came out to my mother and a few friends three months later.

So please don’t tell me that homosexuality is inappropriate for children’s movies and that people shouldn’t be taught about sexuality and gender in schools because I fucking needed it. That is why I get so pissed off when I hear movie critics chastising ParaNorman for a single gay sentence, maybe there is a little boy out there who needed to hear it.

Maybe if there was just one lesbian or LGBTQ Disney princess that I could look up to as a little girl maybe I wouldn’t have hated myself for such a long time for something I can’t change.