msmayhem1515:

I never knew what it meant to be represented until I saw Lexa from ‘The 100’ on my TV screen.

This is not a story about me, but by telling this story, I hope you can understand why she mattered, and why I write these stories.

For over thirty years, I had read and watched stories about other people. Good stories, entertaining stories, with wonderful characters, but never once was I able to say I saw myself reflected within the page or the script. And—like so many others—when I did see a character nearly like myself, they were never Just Right: hollow caricatures or even villainized. And no matter how many times I watched, the LGBT ones were always doomed to heartbreak or death. So I gave up on ever seeing myself, and just accepted the fact that I would always be watching stories about other people.

And then I met Lexa.

I held back for so long. This was a ‘stupid show for teenagers’, I told myself. ‘The lesbian always dies’, I reminded myself. ‘You’re too old and should know better.’
I peeked through my metaphorical fingers at clips and online interviews. Maybe, just maybe, this would be different. They said it would be. And so I watched.

And, for the first time ever, I saw myself on the screen.

Lexa was a warrior. She had known death, and loss. Her hands were stained with blood and there were ghosts in her past. Duty weighed heavily on her shoulders as people looked to her. But she was a lover. For all her intimidating martial bearing, she wanted nothing more than peace and to share her heart with another. She was open in her sexual orientation, and struggled against others who told her that love was a weakness.

I have known war. I have known loss. I have stood at the graves, and said the words to the survivors, and deep down wished that I had been the one that died. My hands have blood on them. I have made mistakes, and been afraid that they were fatal. I have people looking to me, expecting a leader, expecting perfection. I have had the nightmares, and the flashbacks, and the dark whispers of ghosts within my mind hounding me. And I have struggled with my orientation. I have been threatened, and abandoned, and persecuted because of it. I have been told I needed to be fixed, that I was broken, that I should die. I had to hide who I was for years in order to serve my country. All because I love.

But here, on my screen there was someone who, as deeply flawed as she could be, was me. Lexa could fight, and was respected by her people, and made the tough decisions and sacrifices. She had been to war, and had somehow not lost herself because of it. And, while others told her she could never love, and that her hands could only hold a sword, she was realizing that they were lies, and that she could love. That her hands were capable of love, and not just death.
If she could find a way out of the nightmare of death and darkness and be loved, so could I.

And so I found myself in her. She wasn’t real, but she was a touchstone and example for me. In the back of my mind, I waited for the other shoe to drop, but I began to trust the creators of the show that maybe—just maybe—this time was different. I watched others who felt like me congregate online, and we laughed and marveled at our good fortune to find someone like Lexa.

And I began to write again. That spark, which died when I became a soldier, came back. The words bubbled up inside me, shiny and new and full of that life which only creating something can give you.

And so I decided to watch an episode of TV with a lesbian in it live, which I’d previously refused to do. Because I trusted them, and they asked us to. They said it was important. Episode 307 was going to be game-changing.

I had flashbacks when her advisor told her that love was weakness, and that she needed to be alone in order to be a leader. I was no longer on the couch in my living room, but instead an 18-year-old girl signing an oath that said I could never love another woman if I wanted to serve my country. I was no longer listening to my TV, but instead I could hear the words of my commander asking me about my home life as I sat in a chair in front of him and threatening me with legal action, and my own invoking of my Fifth Amendment rights. I was no longer watching the dialogue, but remembering the straight lines of the knife and the curve of the pill bottle on the dining room table in front of me the night I decided I would rather live as a disowned daughter and closeted soldier then die because I was gay. When I heard those words on the screen, I was no longer in that same room.

I literally snapped back into myself in time to cry as Lexa found her love, found her forgiveness. Found that her hands could love a woman and not just kill.

And then, moments later, they killed her.

It felt like watching myself die.

Much has been written about the events that occurred after that episode. Dead Lesbians on television, and Bury Your Gays, and just how badly the LGBT audience was manipulated by not only ‘The 100’, but other shows that year.

I cannot find the words to describe what those first weeks after that event was like. I remember fans, but particularly LGBT women, reaching out to help one another. For every person that faltered, another reached out to help. There were credible stories of substance abuse, and relapse, and self-harm, and thoughts of suicide. At one point I was messaging at least four young women who said that if this is how the world felt about lesbians, maybe those around them were right, and they should die too. I told them to stay alive, that we older queer women wanted to see them fight, and thrive, and stay with us. Because I know what it’s like to give up and stand at the precipice, and I don’t ever want to see another queer girl or boy stand there if I can do anything to pull them back from the edge.

If this all seems improbable to an outsider, remember what Lexa was to us. A light in the dark, the hope that perseverance and love would win out, that bright spot in lives often surrounded by hate. And it was gone. I thought then, that once the crisis was over, we would all melt away, going back to that nomadic way of consuming the next story Not Meant for Us, and picking up the pieces each time we died on screen.

Instead, something amazing happened: we grew stronger. We didn’t go away. Instead, we got loud. ‘No More!’ we shouted. We changed the conversation. We forced media to confront what they did, and to educate themselves on how those careless tropes could affect real-life people. We made billboards, and protest signs, and global hashtags, and media of all kinds. Friendships were made within the fandom. I—who had believed that the younger generations did not care about the struggle for LGBT rights and representation in the era of United States v Windsor and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—realized that the younger generation knew their history, their rights, and would fight to make life better for all of us.

And, through it all, I kept writing, even as I hit rock bottom. I wrote because I had realized what I’d been denying for years: that I needed help with the memories in my mind, and my guilt at surviving, and all the other ghosts that follow you when you’ve been at war for too long. That it wasn’t normal to be afraid of a gun in a crowd, or drink to forget during fireworks, or hyperventilate and cry in a museum display. It took the death of a fictional character for me to realize the truth behind the words: “Life is about more than just surviving.”

I wrote for me, trying to find the way out of the darkness. I wrote because it gave me a place to be myself. I wrote because I knew Lexa still had stories to tell. I wrote to soothe the hurt that losing her left. But along the way, others came. With their stories, their hurts, that similar Lexa-shaped hole in their lives. By talking about fiction, we ended up talking about our lives. Our loves, our hurts, our dreams. We picked each other up when we fell. And despite all of that ugliness, despite all of the hurt and the hatred, we found a way back into the light.

And so now I don’t always write because I am angry, or hurt. I write because our stories matter. I write because we are the best ones to tell the stories that mean the most to us. I write because I like to think that in a few years, I won’t be writing these stories alone, in a little corner of the Internet. That there will be strong LGBT characters in our books, and our TV, and our movies, living and breathing and loving as we do in the real world. And they’ll be written by LGBT people who saw Lexa’s death and said “I can do better.”

Because the stories of our lives are about more than just surviving.