Written by: Claire Stockwell | She/Her | Age: 16 | IG: @stockwellclaire.

Many of us queer folk know that rare but exciting, fulfilling feeling – your favourite TV show has a character who is like you. Queer representation in mainstream media has increased drastically over the past few years, with many shows introducing their first queer character, with their stories gradually increasing in diversity as well. But why is this representation so important?

Well, I’ll use my own story as an example of just how important LGBTQIA+ representation is in mainstream media. I grew up in a remote area, meaning that my parents pretty much had complete control of what TV and movies I watched. It was also the mid-late 2000s, which did not have the representation that the 2010s onwards does. The combination of my location, the lack of representation in mainstream culture and my parents’ attitudes meant that I didn’t even know what being gay, let alone any other identities were a thing, until I was 12 or 13. The earliest I can remember learning what it was, was when there was news coverage for a same-sex wedding album. Soon after this I started watching Glee on Netflix and discovered more queer characters, showing me what gay was. You want to know what happened once I learnt? I started questioning my sexuality pretty much straight away. I landed on lesbian relatively quickly, but this was 2018, and I only figured out that I was asexual as well at the beginning of last year, after seeing a friend head-canon a character as such. I’m quite lucky that I’m living in a time when LGBTQIA+ identities are not hidden, so that I could learn about it relatively young. However, there are people who didn’t know they weren’t straight, or cisgender until well into adulthood, and it’s not until they see someone on TV or something similar that they do realise.

Now that I’m comfortable in my orientation, I have managed to find queer role models and comfort characters, such as Ben Platt, Alex from Julie and the Phantoms, and Santana Lopez from Glee, that speak to me and are just out there living their best life. They fill me with hope, which I didn’t have a lot of when I first started questioning. However, it’s not just including these stories in the media – its what their stories are about. Some of the first queer storylines in TV shows I found were about the struggles of coming out and not being accepted by friends and family. Obviously, this is very real to so many people, but we need positive queer stories in the mainstream media as well, because I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who feared coming out to my friends, despite knowing that they would probably be accepting (and a lot of them also ended up being queer – who’d have thought?). But also – what comes after? When a queer storyline is present, it often ends with the individual’s coming out. As Kenny Ortega said, “I had no role models, no characters on TV or in movies… telling me ‘hey Kenny, it’s okay’” (2020) – so he had the character Alex in Julie and the Phantoms be exactly that. He became reassurance for viewers like me that it would be okay, that there is a story after coming out. Queer people are still the people they were before they came out – they have interests, hobbies, things that make them who they are. We don’t become one-dimensional as soon as they announce who they are to the world, meaning that the media should not portray us as such.

Hindsight is 20/20. I’m sure I’m not the only one who looked back on my childhood and suddenly noticed a few things that should have tipped me off (it had gotten to the point that people at school knew I was gay before I did). If I had characters like Cyrus in Disney’s Andi Mack, Alex in Netflix’s Julie and the Phantoms, or so many other characters, growing up, maybe I could have known a little earlier. Maybe I would learn that coming out is not be the end all be all. Having this community represented in mainstream media is not something that should make news headlines – it should be a given. Having diverse, queer stories needs to be normalised, so that everyone in this diverse community feels seen. It was already hard for me to figure out who I was after discovering this media, but I can only imagine how hard it is for those who grew up with nothing. Huge steps have been taken in the past few years in terms of representation, but there’s still a long way to go.