I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but when I was about twelve, I fell in love with Rogue of the X-Men, specifically the film iteration portrayed by Anna Paquin. I’d seen X-Men several times and enjoyed it and her, but it was X2 that really kicked this obsession — because that’s what it was, an obsession — into high gear for me. Maybe that makes me uncultured, but I didn’t have siblings to steer me, and not many of the friends who influenced my interests were superhero-focused at this age, so I hadn’t read the comics or seen the cartoons. I just knew that I adored Rogue in all of her sad girl glory.
Mind you, I didn’t realize then that I was in love with her. I was at least a decade off from even being out to myself, and gayness* was something that even my socially progressive artsy charter school friends thought to apply to flamboyant boys who liked to dance or, like, adults. This is pretty funny to consider, because at least a dozen of the kids who overlapped with me in junior high (i.e. attended the school at least one of the three years that I did) are some variety of queer, and our junior high was about 50 kids per grade. Honestly, that 8% estimate actually feels low, but I haven’t kept up with most of them, I couldn’t say for sure.
(I was also, uh, obsessed with Rogue, in a very definite autistic special interest way, which was another thing that I didn’t figure and neither did anyone else. I knew about autistic people from a Baby-Sitters’ Club book that featured one of the girls sitting for an autistic girl. Ann M. Martin actually worked in a professional capacity with autistic kids and kids with learning disabilities and stuff, so it was, from what I call, a pretty sensitive and legitimate portrayal, but the girl in question was a very specific type of autistic, i.e. nonverbal and a piano prodigy and used a Temple Grandin-style hugging machine. The book may have explained that autism is a spectrum, but I didn’t retain that fact, and since I’m a verbal piano amateur who likes regular hugs, I didn’t think to apply autism to myself. I’m also fairly sure that our small, art-focused charter school also had more than an 8% autistic population, but literally none of us knew that about ourselves then, and I’m not totally sure anyone but me knows it now.)
Full story here.