Long before representation became a talking point, queer kids were doing what they had always done: reading between the lines. Finding themselves in the margins of stories that were never written for them. A villain who refused to be diminished, a sitcom character who didn't care about fitting in, and a teenage girl with a secret so big it bent her whole life out of shape, none of these characters were queer. But the kids watching them were paying a different kind of attention — the kind that is less about what's on screen and more about what it unlocks inside you.

There's a particular kind of queer childhood literacy that develops in the absence of direct representation: an ability to locate yourself in subtext, in metaphor, in the negative space of a story. You learn to find the feeling even when the story doesn't name it. A secret that changes everything, and a person who exists just outside the edges of what's considered normal and survives there anyway.