I was a Baby-Sitters Club kid in a pretty big way. I can’t say I read every single book, but I read a lot of them (mostly checked out from my local library, where there were multiple long child-sized shelves filled exclusively with the series that I still remember fondly), often multiple times; I watched the original TV show whenever I could and my dad taped the movie off of TV so I could watch it on VHS over and over; I had the PC game, which had, among other things, an interactive map of Stoneybrook and a stationery design center (which installed fonts on your computer, something I adored). I kept on reading the series long after it was “too easy” for me because I just really loved it and cared about the characters. It was also my first exposure to a lot of real-life stuff (including diabetes, autism, Down syndrome, scoliosis, dyslexia, Kwanzaa, and Japanese internment) and I remember the books being fairly progressive for the time they were written in.
I think it should probably go without saying that I “was” a Mary Anne. Like with most children’s media, it was a pretty common practice for fans to call dibs on the character they most closely related to, either actually or aspirationally; honestly, this might be part of why I do this with most media to this day. Mary Anne is the club secretary, the shyest of the bunch (and while my parents, for example, would laugh if I aligned myself with shyness as a kid, it’s pretty accurate these days, and back then, well, I was kind of a shy kid masquerading as an outgoing kid in order to get more people to like me, which is its own situation), and an unapologetic nerd. (Mary Anne was also the only one of the girls to have a steady boyfriend of any significance, which I did not relate to even though I didn’t connect those particular queer dots as a kid, but I allowed it because Logan was mostly unobjectionable.) While I occasionally wanted to be glamorous like Stacey or eccentric like Claudia or just plain cool like Dawn, I knew I was Mary Anne with as much certainty as I knew that my eyes are hazel.
Honestly, my childhood personality is basically just Sailor Moon and The Baby-Sitters Club put in a blender, and this is also a pretty clear explanation of who I am to this day. I was raised on stories about large and supportive groups of girls with varied interests who were joined by common goals of taking care of people and being awesome, and occasionally there was a boy there too. (And just for the record, Claudia is Sailor Moon, Mary Anne is Sailor Mercury, Kristy is Sailor Mars, Dawn is Sailor Jupiter, and Stacey is Sailor Venus. Maybe I’ll expand on this someday, I don’t know, but these are the facts.) The stories were about girls supporting girls, though, and working through adversity and being awesome friends and doing cool things. That was the important part.
(In retrospect, it’s a little sad how much I obviously longed for female companionship as a kid. I had a reasonable collection of friendgroups over my school years, but in retrospect, they largely ranged from “friends by default” situations, banding together because we shared an activity or class or small commonality or at least friends-of-friends, to downright unhealthy situations where I put in way too much effort to befriend people who weren’t interested or to mediate between people who really shouldn’t have been friends. This is not to say that my individual friendships weren’t sometimes valuable, because they were, but it’s pretty clear that I wanted a magical social supergroup, that I genuinely believed in the transformative power of female friendship, and that I didn’t know when to stop trying to wring that out of an arbitrary group of people. Oh well.)
As an adult, I learned that BSC creator Ann M. Martin was a queer person, at which point everything about me sort of came together. I didn’t notice anything queer about the books when I was a kid, because I didn’t notice anything queer anywhere if I wasn’t explicitly told it should be there (i.e. Uranus and Neptune), but when I reflected on the books later in life, there was always a lingering queerness that I couldn’t quite place. The dynamic between the girls, maybe, or just the characters themselves (Kristy, for example, gives off serious gay* vibes and she always has), or maybe it’s just inherently there because the author is queer. Whatever the case, it makes sense. The two most fundamental collections of media from my childhood are the essence of queer.
The 2020 Netflix adaptation wholeheartedly embraces this (although I have to admit that I was hoping they’d canonize at least one of the girls as some kind of queer; maybe if/when there’s a season 2) and they do it in a way that’s just so damn organic and lovely. There are just queer people in Stoneybrook and it’s no big deal. There are brown people in Stoneybrook and it’s no big deal. There are all kinds of people in Stoneybrook and it’s no big deal.
Oh, spoilers.
Full story here.