When I was younger, before iPhones became popular and Netflix existed, I was one of those kids who would spend every spare second that I could reading. I would sit for hours on sun-heated swing seats or under my covers at night, yellowed pages illuminated solely by a single thin torchlight, and fall into other universes. I would live in that moment, devouring tales of far-off adventures, of wizards defeating great evils, of magic rocking chairs and of pirates who sailed the seven seas, until my eyes ached and it seemed as if I only existed between those pages.
But as I grew older, I subconsciously began to feel alienated; amid all these fantastical worlds, the most unrealistic aspect of all the books I devoured was the idea that, to get my ‘happily ever after’, I had no choice but to fall in love with a man.
Realistically, the relationships I was seeing were nothing new to me. Boys and girls falling in love was the norm that was reflected in the world around me. In my family, in films and in the Disney channel shows I adored. Despite this I began to feel shame – perhaps for the first time in my life – for something I could not put words to. Why couldn’t I see myself in these books? Was there something wrong with me?
That all changed one summer in the thick, humid air of one of my city’s book shops, rich with that new book smell that I often found myself so at home in. As I searched for a YA book that I had not yet read, one title seemed to keep drawing my eyes back to it: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth.
Drawn in by curiosity, I knew I had to buy it. Cut to a week later, and it was like my world had been thrown into chaos yet simultaneously shifted into balance. It all started to make sense. There was a name for what I was feeling; there were other girls who were feeling, and had always felt the way that I did about girls; and most importantly, it was there, physical and written in front of me. So much of what the main character, Cameron, narrated within the book all seemed to be thoughts that I wanted to say but could not yet put to words. A single quote seemed to sum up the confusion I had been feeling for so long: “Even though no one had ever told me, specifically, not to kiss a girl before, nobody had to. It was guys and girls who kissed—in our grade, on TV, in the movies, in the world; and that’s how it worked, guys and girls. Anything else was something weird.”
It was in this feeling that the knowledge that there were other girls out there who were also that “something weird”, drove me to devour any literature about gay women that I could. Unsurprisingly, in 2013 it seemed almost impossible to find any books showcasing sapphic relationships in the simple, understated way that ‘regular’ YA did, and so for a year I found my solace in poetry which was written by, although not necessarily about, gay women.
I read collection upon collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry, whose words about the beauty and joy of nature and life itself became embedded in my mind, along with another realisation. Here was a woman who was with another woman, and she had existed and written and created and been happy. I came out to my Mum at 11, Cameron Post’s narration standing with me and a Mary Oliver quote bouncing around my head: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life”.
I knew then that the only way to live fully was to accept myself.
After sharing those hidden parts of myself to my Mum and some close friends, breathing became a bit easier. I had accepted that my sexuality was a normal part of myself and that I was still loved because of it. Despite this, I still was only out to a select few people in my life and so became invested in stories that ran parallel to my own. I saw my adolescence fly by, seeking solace in pages which helped me accept myself in a way that I then could not say out loud to more than a few people.
Nina LaCour’s Everything Leads to You was the first book that I had ever read where a story about gay women did not revolve around homophobia or a hidden sexuality. It was a fun contemporary story that finally reflected the love in those YA stories that I adored and showed me that the love I would come to experience was as beautiful and complicated as any other.
When I look back, I think of a younger me, a scared and confused 11-year-old holding that book like a lifeline, not realising the impact it would have on my life. Nowadays, anyone can walk into a bookshop and find a hugely diverse range of LGBT+ stories, written both by and for us. There are high-fantasy romances that span over 800 pages such as The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, to historical novels that follow a Chinese-American girl finding love in 1950’s San Francisco as seen in Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, to a Hollywood Golden Age actress talking about the true love of her life (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid).
This accessibility to sapphic literature gives me hope for little girls who could find themselves standing in a bookstore, searching for answers in a way I once did. The difference, however, is that I know there are now stories, still packed to the brim with magic and adventure, that show them they do not need to fall in love with a prince to have a ‘happily ever after’. They can love a princess, and that is more than okay.
