I Was Doing Research
On the queer media we weren’t allowed, the scraps we survived on, and what we get to enjoy freely now
The thing about Charmed was that I was technically allowed to watch it at home, because my Mum didn’t see anything wrong with it - she wasn’t a part of the church.
Not forbidden exactly. Not a banned item, not a show that appeared on any explicit list of things that would corrupt me. It was just present in the house, available, something that got turned on and soon became one of my all time favourite shows.
Yet.. there was still a thing I was doing when I watched it. A specific kind of watching. Half in the show, half monitoring my own reaction to it. Not because anyone was checking. Because something in me had learned, without being directly taught, that certain feelings were the kind you needed to keep track of. The kind that required management. The kind that, if they got out of hand, might mean something about you that you weren’t ready for anyone, including yourself to know.
So I watched Charmed with a part of my attention reserved for surveillance. I couldn’t have told you what I was watching for, exactly. I just knew that the Halliwell sisters were doing something to me and that the something needed to stay internal. I couldn’t bring it to church, obviously. I couldn’t mention it to the friends I was only allowed to be certain things around. I watched the show and I felt the thing and I filed it immediately under; admiring their strength, loving the female solidarity, being interested in the power dynamics.
This is what conditioning does that direct prohibition can’t. It doesn’t need to ban the thing. It just has to make you ashamed of your own reaction to it.
I was doing something wrong. I didn’t know exactly what. I just knew that the way I was watching was the part that mattered and that part had to stay quiet.
The Contraband Catalogue
I’m too young for the Ellen episode, but that was somebody else’s contraband, the thing my slightly older queer siblings in religion remember with the weight of a cultural earthquake. Mine came later and it was somehow both more and less obvious.
Charmed.
Three sisters with powers, living together, wildly devoted to each other, consistently uninterested in male authority structures, running their own lives with a kind of casual competence that had no business doing what it was doing to a teenager in a religious household. And they were also very fucking hot. But, I told myself I was watching for the spells. Watching for the demons. Watching because the writing was compelling and the 90s wardrobe was extraordinary and the female friendships were extremely emotionally intense in ways that I found very relatable and also absolutely did not examine. Now I still do love and watch for all of those reason, I just wan’t allowed to admit any of the others.
Prue was the one who made decisions. Piper was the one who held everyone together. Phoebe was chaotic and uncontainable and somehow always right about the important things. I had opinions about all three of them that I would now describe as feelings. At the time I described them as having a favourite character. This is the specific alchemy of queer media before you have language for it because your body knows, your brain files it under something adjacent, and you carry on watching.
Glee.
This one is almost unfair. Because Glee was technically fine? It was on mainstream television. It had won awards. Most parents had probably heard of it. And then Santana Lopez was on the screen, and she was angry and brilliant and hiding something, and her whole arc was something I felt way too connected too, and yet had absolutely no framework for why watching her feel what she felt made my chest tight in that particular way. Queer representation in otherwise-acceptable media is its own specific genre of exposure. You couldn’t even build a defence around it. It found you. In the middle of a show choir competition. You didn’t stand a chance.
Lady Gaga.
She was, in the churches and youth groups of that era, frequently condemned; too provocative, too strange, too much, spiritually dangerous, the kind of artist who would open doors you were supposed to keep shut. And yet. “Judas” was inescapable. “Born This Way” arrived and did something to a lot of people who weren’t ready for what it did to them. I listened to her in the way you did everything back then; fully, and with one eye on how I’d explain it if asked. What’s interesting, looking back, is how specific the feeling was. Not just enjoying her music. Something more like recognition. Something that, if I’d had the language, I might have called she’s singing to me. I didn’t have the language yet. I just kept the volume low and pressed play again.
RENT.
A musical about queer people dying of AIDS in New York, which I watched, listened to and memorised entirely without fully understanding why it hit me the way it did. Here’s what I think it was; RENT centred people the church had written off, explicitly, theologically written off and made their lives and their loves feel enormous. Worthy of song. Worthy of mourning. It said these people mattered, completely, their whole complicated messy beautiful lives mattered. And something in me knew, even then, that the framework I’d been given was wrong about them. Not in words. In the chest-tightening, throat-closing way of something that matters before you know why it matters. I cried at it in a way I couldn’t fully explain to anyone. I cried at it because it was correct about something important and I felt that correctness before I had the theology to argue it. RENT was and is still important - I have a line from their hit song “Measure your life in love” tattooed on my arm.
Twilight.
Well, because vampires are hot. That’s honestly the whole analysis here. I was always going to end up here from witches to vampires. Sometimes the representation pipeline was just “immortals with complicated power dynamics and nobody adequately in charge” and I watched all of it and asked no questions and I’m not going to start now. These are still some of my favourite comfort movies.
The Art of Finding Yourself Sideways
Before there was language, there was subtext. And queer kids in religious environments became extraordinarily good at finding it.
The specific skill was reading female friendships in otherwise straight-coded media and locating yourself in the intensity of them. Any story where two women were extremely devoted to each other, regardless of whether the text confirmed anything, regardless of whether the showrunners intended anything became material. We all got very good at this. You became, without anyone teaching you, an expert in narrative weight. You knew when a friendship was coded as something more. You knew when it wasn’t but you were going to sit with it anyway. You developed opinions about fictional relationships that were, in retrospect, not really opinions about the fiction.
The other thing that happened was finding each other. Not through grand declarations or support groups. Through the specific intensity of a friendship that didn’t have a name yet. Through the person at youth group who also knew every Lady Gaga lyric and listened to them in that particular way. Through the girl who cried at the same parts of RENT that you cried at and you both nodded and moved on without examining why. The coded recognition between queer people before language arrives is not subtle if you know what to look for. You probably didn’t know what to look for. You just knew that certain people felt like something. You filed that under kindred spirits.
But here’s the honest part underneath the humour; you could never just watch the thing. The enjoyment was always impacted by the monitoring. Half your attention on the screen, half on yourself watching; am I feeling the right amount, can I explain this, will my face give something away to a room I’m alone in. The pleasure was always muffled. Always arriving through a layer you didn’t choose and couldn’t remove. You got genuinely skilled at enjoying things sideways. At finding yourself in material that wasn’t looking for you. You didn’t know, then, that you deserved more. You do now.
The Glow-Up: What We Get to Enjoy Freely Now
Schitt’s Creek.
David Rose’s pansexuality handled with warmth, zero tragedy, complete normalcy, and a happy ending so genuinely lovely that watching it as an adult who grew up without anything like it is a specific experience I don’t have a precise word for. The closest is retroactive gift. The queer character gets the full love story. The complete arc. The ending. You can watch it with your whole chest and not manage a single thing about how you’re watching it. That is not a small thing.
Still Lady Gaga.
She was contraband then and she is joyful now and she is ours in a way we understand now that we didn’t then. The continuity of loving her from before you had language to after is its own small reclamation. She was singing to you. She was always singing to you. Now you get to know that while you’re listening.
Still the Halliwell sisters. Still hot vampires
Vampire Diaries has entered the chat because we’ve upgraded our infrastructure, but the essential thing has not changed. I was apparently always going to be someone who watched women with power and felt something about it. The Piper-and-Prue devotion, the Elena-and-Katherine complexity, the whole genre of women who are extremely much to each other yeah I was always going to be here. The difference is now I know what the something is.
Smutty queer books.
The specific pleasure of buying the book. With the queer cover. In a physical shop where someone rings it up and you don’t have to clear your browser history afterward. The queer romance section of a bookshop is a reclamation site and I will not be taking questions. You can stand in front of it as long as you want. You can read the back. You can buy all of them.
The content hasn’t always changed that much. Some of it is the same content or the same instincts finding new content that it always was. What’s changed is the experience of consuming it. The absence of the guilt loading before the credits finish rolling. The capacity to be fully present in the enjoyment. Not watching yourself watch. Just watching. That’s the reclamation.
What We Were Actually Doing
Here’s what all of it was, underneath the chaos and the volume settings and the tabs ready to close.
You were doing what queer kids in environments with no representation have always done; finding yourself in the margins of available culture. In the female friendships that ran too hot. In the artists whose queerness was encoded in the music before it was ever named. In the fictional women whose power and desire looked like something you recognised even when you had no framework for the recognition. In the shows you were technically allowed to watch and the ones you weren’t and the ones that found you in the middle either way.
It was resourceful and creative and sometimes genuinely impressive in retrospect, the way you built a whole interior life out of the available materials, the way you found yourself in the negative space of content that wasn’t looking for you.
It was also real deprivation. The humour of the contraband catalogue doesn’t cancel the fact that you deserved more than scraps. That you deserved to see yourself without having to decode anything. That the years of watching cautiously were years spent managing your own enjoyment rather than having it. Both things are true simultaneously.
Turns out you were always going to love exactly this. You just had to wait until you were finally allowed to know it.
Looking for more?
I offer therapy for those holding religious trauma, queer folk, and cult survivors in person at my Goulburn, NSW location and online Australia & New Zealand wide. Reach out here.
I also create resources for both survivors and practitioners around religious trauma, high-control systems, recovery and queerness.
I also host a podcast called Beyond the Surface, where I get to chat to the most wonderful humans about their own stories of religious trauma, faith deconstruction and leaving a cult. Its available on all major podcast platforms.
I am also a co-founder of The Religious Trauma Collective (Aus/NZ), a space where you can find support, resources and community.
For a one stop shop for me and my work head here → Anchored Counselling Services