On a recent episode of HBO’s Euphoria—currently one of TV’s most talked-about shows, a Skins-esque teen drama about... angst, basically—I watched as a cartoon Harry Styles went down on a teary, sweaty cartoon Louis Tomlinson. Then I asked myself: how did we get here? And how has Internet fandom won? It’s not as though I hadn’t seen the former One Direction members locked together in (fictional, but beautifully rendered) agonizing, sweaty ecstasy before. I’ve seen Photoshopped images of splayed legs and tangled muscles; Styles’s and Tomlinson’s faces convincingly superimposed onto the bodies of gay porn stars. I’ve seen a lot (the work of a scholar is never done). But this was the first time I’d seen such a thing on a major television show watched by millions, one executively produced by Drake, one that airs back to back with the prestige drama Big Little Lies. And it’s all because today, queer fans have taken over television.

Several years ago, my Tumblr feed, and Wattpad, and Livejournal, all had me desensitized to horny depictions of Styles and Tomlinson; Harry Potter and Draco; Sherlock and Moriarty; even Cinderella and her wicked stepmother. But it took a strong, untapped desire, and hundreds of hours worth of lonely after-school nights, to find them. Just as I’d once played “mommies and daddies” in my schoolyard in an attempt to explore and perform the adulthood I felt destined for, once adolescence came, I found myself playing with my true, and mostly hidden, desires in the form of fan fiction.

I was among many. Unable to fulfill our desires through representation on the streets or on screen, we took heterosexual-identifying characters and stars and made them puppets of our latently gay desires. It’s a practice known as slash—or more accurately in my case, femslash—and it’s existed long before me. And it’s changed the TV landscape for good.

What you probably know as fan fiction takes established heterosexual characters from TV, movies, books, and warps them into alternative universes and situations imagined by the titular fan. Slash fiction takes canonically straight male characters and rewrites them into a homosexual romance. Likewise, femslash, a later iteration of the form, converts canonical gal pals into girlfriends.

Slash and femslash differ tonally and substantively from straight up fan-fiction. Compare Fifty Shades Of Grey, which originated as Twilight fan fiction, and the Euphoria scene I mentioned, and you’ll begin to appreciate slash and femslash as an altogether more intense genre. Fem/slash takes yearning to the point of urgency—where just a kiss can feel like the difference between life and death. Fan fiction needs whips and chains and a whole playroom full of torture devices to even come close.

Scholars tend to pinpoint Star Trek as the beginning of TV’s relationship with slash; femslash came a few decades later with the arrival of Xena Warrior Princess, a show that was pivotal in shifting the fan/producer relationship from non-existent to collaborative. Airing from 1995 to 2001, Xena’s rise ran concurrently with the mainstreaming of the Internet and web forums, where fans immediately seized on the opportunity to encode their queerness onto the show’s female characters.

Most encouragingly of all, it didn’t exist purely in the fans’ heads. Producers of Xena, according to Ohio University’s School of Media Arts & Studies associate professor Eve Ng, acknowledged fem/slash writers for the first time “in a friendly, positive way,” as the show’s producers were often known to lurk on the Xena fans—also known as ‘Xenites’—web forums, and actively encouraged fan fiction.