When I was in first grade, I pondered something for a long time: Why I couldn't like boys and girls. I felt as if I had discovered something that nobody else had thought about. I turned the idea over in my head again and again until I eventually decided that I shouldn't tell anyone. I had never seen or heard of the idea before, so I just pushed the thoughts down. As I grew, the idea seemed to flicker out in my mind.
Until I was about thirteen. As I faced the world around me, I found myself with unlimited access to the internet. Then, I stumbled across a website which many young tech-savy kids find themselves in their teen years: Tumblr. This was the first time I was exposed to the word "bisexual." I heard about homosexuality in my health class, but I knew that that word wasn't meant for me. At this point I knew that I liked more than one gender, but I didn't have a label. I felt like a freak, or like a monster.
When I found out about the concept of bisexuality, I was more than curious. I read as much as I could find, I looked at the blogs of people who were bisexual, and it felt like something had finally clicked. Something had finally made sense. It was this moment that I realized that I wasn't a freak.
This is the story for countless members of the LGBTQ+ community. We don't know what we feel, and we live in silence until, after who knows how long, we find people that show us that we're not broken. But what if I had known about bisexuality from the start? What if I had seem a bisexual Disney Princess, or a bisexual action hero? Maybe I could've grown up knowing that I wasn't a monster.
It is an absolute necessity to start including LGBTQ+ characters in media. And not simply token characters. We need a variety of characters who label themselves as different things, just like in real life. Show children that we exist in real life, we can be superheroes and we can be princesses and we can be real.
No child should grow up thinking that they're a monster.
