The Town Where I Grew Up

I grew up in a place where everyone knew everyone, which sounds like warmth until you understand what that means for a queer kid. It means every adult has a relationship with your parents. It means the pastor knows your family and the teachers know your family and the families of everyone you might confide in know your family. It means the network of connection that provides genuine community in small towns also functions as a surveillance structure for anything that deviates from the expected. I knew I was queer before I had language for it. What I didn't know was that there was a world where being queer was ordinary. I had no evidence that such a world existed within reach. The internet changed that.

What Discovery Actually Looked Like

The first time I encountered queer community online I was fourteen and using the family computer in a room with a clear line of sight to the hallway. I had stumbled onto a forum—not through any particularly intentional search, but through the way the early internet took you from one place to another through associative links. The people in that forum were talking about their lives in ways I had never seen modeled. They were out. They were funny. They were making plans for weekends and complaining about their jobs and describing relationships that sounded like things I might someday want. They were present in a way that proved the world I couldn't see from where I was actually existed. That was the whole thing. Just proof. Just evidence that there was somewhere to go.

What Isolation Does to Identity

Growing up queer in a community with no visible queer life creates a specific developmental challenge. Identity formation in adolescence is partially mimetic—you figure out who you might be by seeing versions of possible selves in the people around you. When none of those people represent the identity you're developing, you build from nothing, which is possible but much harder. Research from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that LGBTQ+ youth in rural areas reported significantly higher rates of suicidal ideation than LGBTQ+ youth in urban areas, with the discrepancy largely explained by social isolation and lack of access to affirming community rather than by any intrinsic feature of rural life. The geography matters because community matters, and community is not evenly distributed. A study from the Trevor Project found that LGBTQ+ youth who reported having at least one accepting adult in their life—online or in person—showed dramatically lower rates of suicidal behavior than those who reported no accepting adults. The intervention didn't have to be significant or sustained. Presence mattered.

The Internet Was My First Mirror

What online community gave me before anything else was reflective function—the experience of being seen by people who were like me, which made it possible to see myself more clearly. The shame that had accumulated around my identity began to have somewhere to be placed that wasn't just inside me. Other people had felt it. Other people had moved through it. Other people were on the other side. That is not nothing. For many queer people who grew up in small towns, online community is not a substitute for the real thing. It is the real thing. It was the first place the identity could exist without being hidden, and for some people it is what kept them alive long enough to eventually be somewhere else.

The Town I Now Live In

I live in a city now. I have queer friends and queer community and the ordinary experience of being visible without it requiring courage. I am aware that this is not universal, that in many places in the world and in this country the situation I grew up in is still current reality for many people. When I hear adults dismiss online community as less-than—as a pale substitute for real connection, as something young people use because they can't handle the real world—I think about fourteen-year-old me in front of the family computer, and what proof looked like, and what it cost to not have it, and what happened when I finally found it. The internet was my first community. It was more real than most of what surrounded me, because it was the first place I was actually there.