Growing up with four older brothers, I learned to spit, swear, and swing. My family members called me a tomboy because I wasn’t interested in traditionally feminine things. I dressed in my brothers’ hand-me-downs, hid my hair under beanies and bandanas until I chopped it off in high school. I only wore makeup when my friends gave me makeovers. When I was forced to wear a dress for school dances, I felt embarrassed and grotesque no matter how much people told me I looked prettier, better, and like a girl for once. When I came out at age 15, I thought Of course, that finally explains it! I don’t look like other girls because I’m gay.

I grew up in rural Louisiana, where my town seemed stuck in another time: Pop culture took longer to reach us (top 40 songs didn’t hit our radio waves until a year after their release); the community was close-knit and closed off (few people moved into town and even fewer moved out); the internet was only accessible in one-hour intervals at the local library (and I didn’t dare look up queer stuff there).

When I came out, the only other queer people I knew were on television. Something as simple as queer representation in pop culture kept my head above water between the ages of 12 and 15 as I struggled to accept my sexuality. It gave me hope. But, according to television, queer people didn’t live in small southern towns — they lived in one of two places: California or Canada. Places that existed in an entirely different world from my own, a world I thought was either unreal or unreachable. And there was another problem, too: None of them looked like me.