Our stories don't just end with getting the girl - and they shouldn't

Lonely girl is closeted and feels as if she is the only queer person in her school/neighbourhood/town. Girl meets attractive and enigmatic girl. They have a connection. They hook up. Someone discovers and outs them. Attractive and enigmatic girl rejects her queerness. Girl, once again, is lonely.

Sounds familiar? That's because it is.

Almost all of the YA fiction that I've read on queer teenagers follow more or less the same trajectory as what I've described above. Let's be honest, it's pretty depressing. Book after book, movie after movie, telling you that you'll always have a tough time for not liking a boy.

And if an author does write a happy ending, it usually ends with kissing the girl. No relationship up and downs, no cute/romantic dates, no sharing preparing for the prom drama together... Kissing the girl is merely denouement after chapters and chapters of Gayngst.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment, but I no longer get excited about queer YA fiction.

This excellent post on Tumblr says it all about the pitfalls of having Gayngst-saturated media, and the messages it sends to queer teenagers (emphasis mine):

The point of your story is not to fall in love. The point of your story is to struggle. Your story begins with a lie and climaxes in a truth and ends with a kiss. In the movie of your life, forty-five minutes are devoted to you figuring out how to say that you want to kiss girls, and another half-hour is devoted to people’s objections, and maybe the last fifteen minutes is you kissing the girl. Maybe you don’t even get to kiss the girl. Maybe she tells you that she’s flattered, but she doesn’t bat for your team. 

The critics swoon; it’s realistic, they say, so realistic, to depict the struggle of the modern teen, the heartbreak of irresolvable incompatibility. Isn’t that always what celebrities cite in their divorces? “Irreconciliable differences.”

And so you’re lying on the floor of your bathroom, your knees curled to your chest, or you’re on your sofa with a pint of ice cream, or you’re in bed watching your favourite sad movie on Netflix, and the collective weight of all that you consume settles on your shoulders, leans in, and whispers, “You were never meant to fall in love.” 

You were never meant to fall in love. Your story ends in tears or it ends in death.

Being queer is a struggle. We get that. However, there is more to our lives than coming out and getting the girl. So, why isn't it in our books and in our movies? If anything, it gives us - and the ones we love - hope that while it may not be easy being queer, there's a shot at happiness after all.