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I did Jewish youth group for my first couple years of high school, and I was in one of those Facebook groups of just, like, the whole class.
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Probably a couple of people in that group were out at the time. I was not — I wasn't even aware, so it wasn't like a thing I connected with anybody over.
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And then after that, I was on Tumblr a little bit, on fanfiction websites a little bit.
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It was mostly like, I'd be reading a Ghostbusters story, and I'd say, 'this is really good and really sweet' and they'd say 'thank you.' I guess it wasn't really like we were bonding over anything except, I guess, it was a pairing of two women, so I guess that's why we were bonding.
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If I care enough about something, like something moves me enough that I want to say 'this was really nice, it meant a lot to me,' then I probably want them to know, like, 'I'm a young queer person, and your work is helping me.'
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It's not that I go online looking for queer people. I go online and, like, if I go on Tumblr, I'm probably looking for fandoms. And then my perception is colored by whoever is in that fandom.
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Generally, it's people with a lot of strong opinions. And I think also, a lot of the queer experience online, especially on Tumblr, is probably pretty intersectional.
So, for example, there's a lot different going on in just the yuri fandom. If you're in autistic yuri fan you have very different thoughts from a non-autistic yuri fan, or if you're a queer fan of color, you have very different thoughts from a white yuri fan.
So I think a lot of opinion like that definitely colors the discourse a lot. In addition to just the fact that people are attracted to something, at least in part, because we want to see female ships, I think that's why we're all there in the first place.
And also, because I read a lot of fanfiction, there's like two people — there's the ones who know a ton about sex and the ones who don't. So that's two different groups entirely: It's the ones who know everything, and the ones who are like, 'I'm going to be single for the rest of my life, help me.'
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And if you're in fandom, you probably have some very strong opinions on it. You have a lot of opinions on whether or not it's good representation.
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On, like, Tumblr, or wherever it's not like you can find much about their real identity, I think people are a lot more willing to share their thoughts and their feelings about anything LGBT-related.
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Pretty much everything I learned about the LGBT community — especially in high school, beginning of college — I learned almost entirely online. So it was just a whole lot of scrolling through social media and scrolling through news sites... a lot of Buzzfeed.
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So lately I've been wondering if I've been getting any of the right information.
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But yeah, I think it's mostly just good that we have the Internet now, because it's a good resource if you want to learn stuff, even if I'm not sure if it's an accurate resource.