There were all sorts of reasons for that. Some of us were working-class, most of us were queer, almost all of us were twitchy weirdos emerging from the special neurosis of lonely intelligent children everywhere, namely that we thought far too much and far too little of ourselves at the same time. And we were all fans. There was Alex, who introduced me to Firefly, prog rock, and heartbreak. There was Liz, who introduced me to Tori Amos, George Eliot, and intellectual rigor, and Jen, Liz's instant soul mate and one of the most brilliant writers I have ever met. Once, during a memorable night of experimental substance abuse, Jen calmed me down by explaining slowly, patiently, over the course of five hours, the entire plot of the '90s space epic Babylon 5, why it was the most structurally ambitious TV drama of the decade, and why we would all make it off the planet to the exodus ships someday.

Our shared vice, though, was Harry Potter. Harry Potter fandom was where a generation of young writers cut their teeth. On sites like FanFiction.net and LiveJournal, Draco and Harry got to make out, Sirius wasn't dead, and Hermione wasn't white. Warner Bros., the studio behind the movies, tried to crack down on all the fan fiction, bombarding fansites with threatening cease-and-desist letters; it took entertainment giants a long time to realize that fandoms actually generate enthusiasm (and therefore revenue). For the most part, nobody was trying to make money off J. K. Rowling's intellectual property. It wasn't about fixing or correcting the Harry Potter universe but adding to it, having fun. The media theorist Henry Jenkins, a great champion of fans, nonetheless describes them as “poachers” on the property of established authors—except we weren't stealing, only borrowing. We broke into Rowling's garden, but only so we could play there with our friends. Fan fiction was and remains an act of love for the original work, as well as a longing for everything it isn't.

That sort of excitable nonsense didn't figure in the official Oxford syllabus, which made an implicit distinction between cheap mass-market storytelling and real literature—literature that was important enough to include in the official canon of great works. The writers we studied were all white, overwhelmingly male, and mostly dead. We were free to focus on women writers if we chose. We were also warned by older classmates that if we did, Oxford examiners would take this as a sign we weren't serious.

Women's stories, just like women's lives, have long been assumed to be less serious. We'd already learned that in fandom. In fact, one of the reasons fan fiction is so sneered at is that a major part of it has always been women, often young women, writing sexy stories about men. It was mostly women who wrote those schlocky homoerotic romances between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, two tortured souls trapped in elaborately contrived situations where they had to have sex or die. These stories were painstakingly carbon-copied and sold at conventions, and the reason they mattered was that, even at the height of the so-called sexual revolution, there was little room within popular culture for women to imagine a kind of eroticism outside the stories we were told about ourselves. In her seminal 1985 essay “Pornography by Women, for Women, With Love,” Joanna Russ, author of the sci-fi novel The Female Man, suggests that if young women wanted to fantasize about an erotic relationship of true equality, it might have to be between two men, in space.

The original Star Trek fan fiction was mostly women writing schlocky homoerotic romances about Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, two tortured souls trapped in contrived situations where they had to have sex or die.

It was through fandom that I learned a more visceral vocabulary of anti-sexism and anti-racism, in literature as well as life. In LiveJournal and other fanfic communities, I learned the lexicon of privilege and structural oppression. I learned that there is a profound connection between the way a person sees the world and the stories they read and write. If you believe that Western imperialism is a net good, you will write one kind of epic space drama. You'll write a very different kind if you recognize the need for safe spaces and trigger warnings—terms that function not as censorship but as an in-group signal: These are places where trauma is discussed, where we care about others, where everyone has been through something and escaped through the backlit bolt-hole of online fandom to find people just like us.