#1: very, very, very slutty: stephenie meyer wanted to make me feel shame, instead she made me horny (and gay)

welcome to no one asked for this, a newsletter of stories that are sometimes true. here, we will talk about pop culture and queerness and lavender lattes, which not enough people are currently drinking. welcome.

I had no idea what lust really felt like until I finished the Twilight saga in 2008, my freshman year of high school, and realized that what I wanted most of all was to fuck a vampire. Or: I finished the Twilight saga in 2008, and realized that what I wanted most of all was to want to fuck a man who would never fuck me.

I, of course, would not come to find out what it would be like to fuck a vampire, even though Stephenie Meyer teased me for an entire 2000 pages, more pages than I’d ever read before (excluding, potentially, A Series of Unfortunate Events, the arguably much better series that I was gifted by my librarian neighbor on Christmas in elementary school and got paper cuts from due to the aesthetically torn pages from the first book; I bled all over them and it made me feel powerful and alive to just keep bleeding) and yet I got no sex. I did, however, get a leg hitch.

And, thanks to the first Twilight film years later, I also got a very slow kiss that would come to teach me that I liked, best of all, to be kissed slowly, teasingly, and with an air of uncertainty that twisted into something needier and caused my makeout partner to launch themselves back against my early-2000s decorated bedroom walls, breathily offering an apology for how badly they wanted me.

On a desperate search for sex, I learned about fanfiction. It became my entire life. I would rush home from school and I would read Twilight fanfiction on an Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net and Twilighted.net, the latter of which required a login to be able to enter into the world of mature fanfiction, the only fanfiction I was going to read, obviously. I wanted the messiest of it, or so I thought, but in truth my desires were so, so pure. I didn’t actually want blood and guts and BDSM and anything kinky at all. I wanted those slow kisses. And, I wanted Bella to kiss Carlisle, but as an adult and in an alternative universe where Edward maybe didn’t exist and neither did vampires. It came to overpower, even, my love of sex gifs, which had been introduced to me by my beloved Tumblr, and taught me to think about sex in 3-second, repetitive, reliable intervals.

When I reread the series last month in preparation for Midnight Sun, I was shocked at how little I’d realized about Stephenie Meyer’s true goal. She didn’t want me to lust after Edward to the point that I came to lust for his entire family. The books weren’t meant to be a lesson in lust; they were meant to be a lesson in shame, one in which I would put on my long khaki skirt and feel bad and guilty about wanting to fuck my super hot vampire boyfriend right on his massive bed—bought only for this purpose— with iron roses at our heads, their thorns turning to black dust under his fingers.

I didn’t grow up religious. I still know next to nothing about Christianity. It’s something I’ve always felt strangely about mostly because I don’t feel strange about it at all. In high school, the youth group kids became the cool kids, and the hot boys would judge me oh so harshly for how I 100 percent, did not, at all, want to come to youth group. It was what kept me from the cool club. I made out with the right boys in the movie theaters, I had the right dELiA*s graphic tees, I had the clogs from American Eagle and the middle part with the clip at the side. But I had no sense of any real god (though I did go through a phase with a ghost), and I definitely didn’t understand the roots of their own faith. I tried to imagine myself in a large room with wooden, circular tables and games and snacks like I saw in the back of their fuzzy selfies on Facebook, a thing we were all just getting acclimated to on our newly possessed personal computers, comment after comment with inside jokes offering that “omg you had to be there.” I had no god, and so I could not come.

Given this absolutely aggressive lack of understanding of any sort of church or religion, I didn’t see what Meyer was weaving in every narrative. Where she saw a marriage clause, I saw a romantic forever. Where she saw almost-sex, I saw basically dry humping, which was all I was particularly interested in, anyway.

It only worsened when the films came out. I heard the conservative Christian parents panicking about vampires or whatever, and I got a vague sense of the pearl clutching, but then I saw Edward and then, and then and then, I saw Kristen Stewart beneath a thick purple comforter, a small light providing the right combination of shadows and highlight to her narrow face, her body pulling itself up via an elbow to her pillow and the way that a single curl slid across her cheek. She was fully clothed and nothing sexual was even happening and yet this girl on this screen was making me yearn more than any boy who’d ever shoved his hands up my shirt, more than, somehow, Edward. I watched the scene again and again, in my family’s living room via the DVD my grandmother bought me and my younger sister at a grocery store on sale for $5.99, and then I watched it again on my friend’s massive television in her living room, wishing I could somehow watch it alone and in the dark so that there was nothing but me and Kristen Stewart but also Bella and the way her face looked, and the way her hair looked, and the way that a young me was so certain that her skin would feel beneath my fingertips as I pushed the curl from her eyes and asked her what was causing her sleepless night.

I was still making out with boys, then. I did that for years of high school, finding it impossible to understand the ins and outs of what I didn’t like about kissing them. The boys I liked kissing most were almost frail, scrawny skater boys with long hair they wore in their faces; they were a range of races and heights and personalities, and yet they always had that soft thing about them, this soft thing that made me feel like I was the one in charge, even when I wasn’t. I went through entire friend groups, leaving them confused and probably hurt. I danced with them at school dances in sticky cafeterias and I tried to get in touch with that place that lived deep within me that could take over at any given moment, the one where I was hardly a person but was just a flesh ball of heat, reaching its sparking limbs out for other warm bodies to pull within itself to grow warmer still.

I craved it, the sounds they made and the way they smelled, deodorant and soap and toothpaste, their chapstick and their hands and their gum and their surprise when I was unafraid. They always thought I would be the delicate one in this little moment we were attempting to make; wasn’t that what they’d been taught? The girl was the one who would say no? But it was always them, stopping things and asking if it was okay for them to kiss me again, and it was always me, craving and wanting and not even sure how to define it but very much sure it was a yes.

It makes more sense, now, knowing that I’m gay, gay in the sense that I haven’t wanted a boy that way since high school but bi in the way that means that maybe I will, or would, one day, in the right way. Maybe if an Edward walked into a room, dazzling and fan-blowing, and looked at me like he would risk death to soak in my warmth, I would feel something like that again. But until then, I am on a constant loop of reaching for the loose curls of women who smile at me like maybe they can’t sleep.

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similarly

• Into the Twilight, a Twilight podcast, let me yell about Edward and Kristen Stewart’s upcoming lesbian holiday movie.

• Morgan Sung wrote about why smut fics are so popular in the LGBTQ community for Mashable.

• Constance Grady reviews Midnight Sun for Vox.

etc.

• I liked this: Christina Tucker wrote an advice column for Autostraddle about getting your friend to go to therapy. It’s good.

• I’m reading these: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett + The Other’s Gold by Elizabeth Ames + Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.

• I’m watching: The Game (with my girlfriend), Moesha (also with my girlfriend), The Umbrella Academy (solo), Steven Universe Future (solo).

• I bought this: lavender latte pour-over.

i exist here, and across the internet, as @rachelcharlenel, always. (because there is no leaving the internet, so we might as well exchange memes and scream together.)