Rebecca Sugar is a modern-day icon. When she created Steven Universe, she was the first woman to have her own show at Cartoon Network. (Sugar recently came out as a nonbinary, but still uses she/her pronouns.) And her show is equally historic; it features a diverse cast of queer women, nonbinary characters, and queer relationships.

Steven Universe focuses on a young half-human, half-alien boy named Steven, and the Crystal Gems who raise him while protecting Earth from Homeworld, the planet where a race of sentient beings called “Gems” intend to colonize the universe. All of these Gems are nonbinary women; on the show, many of them are in romantic relationships together. Two of them, Ruby and Sapphire, love each other so much that they are almost always fused together into one Gem named Garnet. They recently unfused, and in a revolutionary set of episodes,the two got married in the first same-sex wedding in a kid’s cartoon.

In short, the show has radically changed paradigms for who and what children’s TV programming can represent, and it has vastly broadened LGBTQ+ representation on TV, no matter how you slice it. It’s Sugar’s ongoing mission to explore the frontiers of queer identity in her work, and several upcoming episodes and a recently-announced movie mean she’ll continue to push toward those frontiers for a long time to come. We spoke with Sugar about coming out as nonbinary, how her own life and experiences influenced her groundbreaking show, working to make space for gender-expansive kids in all-ages programming, and what’s next for Steven Universe.

One of the main things people love about Steven Universe is that we get to see people who look, act, and identify like us for the first time in all-ages media. Was that a goal you had when creating the series?

My goal when I created the show was just to be very honest. It was always supposed to be based on my relationship with my brother. I didn’t have a huge circle of friends at school; I was really introverted, and he was always there to be my best friend when I came home. And I didn’t realize until later that having someone who really understood me made a world of difference in my life, and a lot of that had to do with maybe not feeling understood by anyone else.

So many of my married LGBTQ+ friends told me they sobbed after Steven Universe’s recent proposal and wedding episodes. They said that these were hugely important moments in their lives, but they never thought they’d see that reflected in a show like this. What do you want to say to them?

You deserve it! You deserved 20 years ago! You deserve it now, you deserve it 20 years from now! There should be hundreds of these!

Were you scared to pitch this wedding idea, or was Cartoon Network on board pretty fast?

Oh, I was pitching this back in 2016. It’s been a very long road. It really goes all the way back to 2011 — when we started the show — and 2014, when we were pitching the episode “Jailbreak.” The more material I would pitch about Ruby and Sapphire and their romantic relationship, the more visible the ceiling of what we could do became. And it really made me realize how critical it was to have LGBTQIA characters in G-rated media. I began to realize how quiet I had been about my own story and my own life, because I had internalized this idea that there was something “adult” about these stories. And there isn’t! These themes were a part of my childhood and they were a part of the childhoods of many people on my staff. There is nothing more “adult” about Ruby and Sapphire than any other couple on the show. So I became very driven to make sure that we could tell the most wholesome love story you’ve ever seen on television.