Arts & Culture | Television

What an Over-the-Top, Teen Cable Drama Taught Me About My Sexuality

I didn’t know—or think I knew—any visibly queer women, and watching these fictional women half-existing seemed both comforting and lonely.

Before

I remember the brown suede couch and the damp chill in the basement air. I had a favorite corner, the left side when you looked at it facing the TV, and I piled pillows on my stomach ostensibly to prop up the remote, but really to have something to hold on to.

It was 2012, and like many suburban teenage girls at the time, girls whose houses I could see from my basement window, I was watching Pretty Little Liars. The first time I thought I might like girls, the first time I wondered if something might be different about my relationship to stress, I was watching Pretty Little Liars too. A scene with Emily and her girlfriend kissing brought out something in me I’d repressed; scenes with Spencer’s breakdowns physically hurt to watch. It was proto-representation. I was seeing myself on screen before I knew what any of it all meant.

In between realizing these things about myself and acting on them, I kept watching Pretty Little Liars. Sure, I did other stuff—went to school, became a teenager. But mostly, I watched a lot of Pretty Little Liars. There’s a sort of cultural amnesia that comes with PLL now, but back in its heyday, the show was woven into the daily life of many suburban high school girls like me. The fancy New York kids had Gossip Girl; PLL’s creator I. Marlene King told Cosmopolitan that she wanted the show to be “grounded in a way that people between New York and LA could relate to.” I was one of those people—at our peak, just under four million viewers.

Despite the prestige-television-induced denial that we all used to obsess over such an absurd show, in the beginning seasons, the characters were formative, a central part of Tuesdays. Everyone I knew had their PLL analogue. Friend groups of four and five mapped themselves onto the central characters. I was always a Spencer—Spencer sun, Spencer moon, Spencer rising. Classic type-A, thumbing the sharp edge of a breakdown.

But, unlike some of my friends, I related to them acutely, in a way that almost stung. I envied them. I studied them. In some ways, the show seemed a blueprint for what my future would—must—look like. Spencer represented my anxiety and how I thought it would play out; Emily was a stand-in for my feelings about girls.

The author of the books on which the show is based, Sara Shepard, once attended school in my suburban Philly school district. She occasionally returned for alumni events, and I perked up when I recognized her as a guest star on the show. I wanted to map Downingtown, my home, onto the infinitely more interesting, fictional Rosewood. In that way, too, it felt aspirational—the drama, the clothes, the relationships.

Episodes stuck in my mind as turning points, times when I saw something of myself on screen, even if I couldn’t quite understand it yet. I found elements of myself in these images, my anxiety refracted and my queerness reflected. At the time, it felt like a sucker punch. Now it feels like the almost-pleasant ache of a nearly healed bruise.

During

I was thirteen and watching two girls kiss for the first time—Alison and Emily, on the floor of the library, books in hand. Emily, gay and just starting to become aware of it, kissed her beautiful best friend on the musty carpeted floor of the Rosewood High library and immediately regretted it. But before the regret, the kissing had felt quiet, so intimate it didn’t need to be overly physical. The kind of kissing you did when you loved someone but hadn’t known the shitty parts of love yet.

When I didn’t know yet what love felt like, I looked for it everywhere, and didn’t know what it felt like to have found it.

Once, later, at a house party, swimming in the musty air of an unventilated basement, emboldened by cheap beer, I told my best friend—a beautiful, bubbly blonde not entirely unlike Alison—that I might’ve been in love with her, or something. I remember, as I said it, I knew it wasn’t really true anymore. That maybe it never had been true at all. It wasn’t regret exactly, but vocalizing it just felt wrong, weird—now a stale memory. We lay on the old tan carpet for a while then went outside.

That night and countless nights after, somewhere in my head, repression commingled with truth. Self-denial became self-loathing, blurring in and out at the edges. But now I know about therapy terms like displacement and projection, and I realize I was, as ever, a little confused. It was easy for me, just coming into my own queerness, to misdirect the intimacy that comes with friendship: the whispered conversations, the early-morning coffees, the text messages sent under the table in class.

When I didn’t know yet what love felt like, I looked for it everywhere, and didn’t know what it felt like to have found it. And seeing Emily on-screen with that same confusion and depth of feeling resonated, painfully. As I saw her, I felt seen for the first time—not watched, not judged, just seen. It felt like a reckoning.

When I eventually told someone about me being queer, I was a junior in high school. I idled with a friend in my black sedan in a cul-de-sac and I refused to turn the car off lest I lose the momentum. After the first telling, it got easier by increments, halving itself until it was almost too small to feel anymore. By the time I left for college, I felt okay telling just about anyone.

Emily’s coming-out was accelerated by a first love and a seemingly omniscient cyberbully, who sent her mother pictures of her kissing a girl. Her coming out was borne out of necessity. Mine came at my own pace, and thus a little more slowly, giving me time to parse the differences between love and friendship, admiration and obsession.

*

I was six months off from starting high school and I curled on the brown suede couch in my favorite corner to watch the newest PLL. It was a ritual my friends and I often observed alone, knowing we’d commune about it at school the next day. These Monday nights we’d begun to hold sacrosanct.

In this episode, Emily invited her on-again, off-again girlfriend Maya to dinner. The meal combusted in a wave of homophobia, and afterwards, Emily and Maya went upstairs—much to the chagrin of Emily’s conservative mother, Pam—and began kissing.

Just as Emily’s parents always seemed to do on screen, my father walked into the basement at exactly the wrong moment.

“What are you watching? Turn that off.”

I felt like I’d just seen something I wasn’t supposed to—probably because I had. The two girls pawing at each other’s torsos, kissing the way I’d seen straight couples kiss on television, it felt weird, wrong. I didn’t want to stop watching.

Even worse than me seeing something I wasn’t supposed to, someone had seen me seeing it. I’d turned it off immediately, but as soon as I was alone again, I darted to the remote to turn it back on. The scene had passed.

But I still think about it all the time—the jolt in that moment of realizing what I was seeing, the trepidation and disgust, the wondering if something was wrong with me, confronting the reality of two girls kissing on television.

I knew this wasn’t allowed, that it was taboo, and I wondered what it said about me that I found it so unspeakably hot. I turned the volume up and kept watching in an attempt to quiet the confusion. I didn’t know—or think I knew—any visibly queer women, and watching these fictional women half-existing seemed both comforting and lonely.

I felt embarrassment the way you feel after you’ve just been hit in the stomach—hard, and then the echo of hardness. Back then, it didn’t seem like a turning point—nothing ever does. But I think that was the first time I really knew I could be with someone who wasn’t a man, that I didn’t have to feel badly about it, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still think about it. A lot.

*

My anxiety, always reductive, told me that Penn was what would fix me. I thought that the accomplishment would make the constant hum in my head worth it, that it would ascribe some meaning to the misery.

The day of college acceptances, I stayed out of school for a doctor’s appointment on Penn’s campus. I still have a selfie saved, tagged with Penn’s location, my face contorted and scrunched as if to protect from a coming blow. I’m not good enough.

Can’t wait to get rejected later, the caption said.

My imprinting on Spencer felt natural because of her type-A personality, preppy style, and her studied air of trying just a little too hard. I’d always wanted to go to Penn—it was the most prestigious school near my house. And as much as I fantasized about life halfway across the country, I knew I needed to be close to home.

Somehow I’d seen high school as a holding pattern. If I just got into a good college, my life would come together, fall into place. I’d be happy, smart, accomplished, and more importantly, labeled as such. Spencer seemed to feel much the same way, because her family told her to.

Spencer’s anxiety was a plot device, something to be deployed when convenient and ignored when not. But that wasn’t how mine worked. It was always simmering, vibrating, threatening to push its way out. She wasn’t spending inordinate chunks of her life crying in closets or biting her nails until they bled. And I didn’t know what was wrong with me, so even though we both had this thing, I figured mine was even more wrong.

The panic attacks didn’t stop when I got to college. They changed venues, making guest appearances in third-floor bathrooms and on the corner of 40th and Walnut Street and tracing the routes I once walked on the campus tour.

I’d moved from the pressure cooker of high school to a different kind of stress—the liminal space of college, somewhere between being a student and being a person who had to cook dinner, wake up in the morning, exist independently. Somehow, that necessity of existence helped—I couldn’t just watch TV; I had to make a doctor’s appointment. I couldn’t stew in the hot air of my own anxiety as much as I used to—it came with me when I ran errands and went to classes and ordered dinner. Sometimes, I even forgot about it. I had to be a person in the world.

I remember laughing when the show revealed that Spencer ended up at Georgetown, a school that rejected me. We’d gone our separate ways.

After

A year or so ago, I went away for the weekend for a friend’s birthday. That Monday, people trickled out of the beach house, leaving me and two queer couples behind. In the morning, while we cleaned up and prepared to go to the beach, one of the guys turned to me and said, “You’re the odd one out!”

He meant it in jest, that I was fifth-wheeling. In that respect, he was definitely right. And then he added, “Yeah, you’re the straight one!”

Four years prior, I would’ve been grateful to pass, to not have to confront what I knew about myself. A year before, I’d have happily let it slide. But I knew I had to say something; I knew now I was okay with people knowing—my family, my friends.

“Nah, I’m queer too. Bi, actually.”

“Ah, right. Cool.”

And finally, years after Pretty Little Liars, I realized, it was.

Of all the teen shows, I’m not sure I can say why it was Pretty Little Liars. Right place, right time, I guess. And once you started, the self-destruction on-screen provided an effective blueprint. A doctor told me once to think about ingrained behaviors as grooves in your brain, thoughts tracking the familiar route. I used the show to find the paths.

As I saw [Emily], I felt seen for the first time—not watched, not judged, just seen. It felt like a reckoning.

Other shows, books, music, anything to distract and refract, helped—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vonnegut, sad girl icon Sylvia Plath. But something about knowing that Pretty Little Liars could’ve been me, that this town was some reflection of my own, that these girls could’ve been my friends (all of which required a massive amount of self-delusion), solidified my imprinting on the show.

And the series treated high school problems with weight, even when they weren’t all that weighty. Though I know now that my first misplaced love and my obsession with college weren’t defining moments of my life, it sure as hell felt like that at the time, taking up prime real estate in my journals and text conversations, occupying the forefront of my mind for four years.

Even though I can’t really remember how it ended or who betrayed whom, certain images stick in my head, indelible. They come out unbidden—the squelch of a leather glove, the cascade of ice around a stolen body, a water bottle filled with muck from a lake, blue eyes piercing a black hoodie.

Even more indelible were the relationships—interpersonal and personal—that I saw on-screen. I couldn’t tell you who “A” ended up being, but I could remember the music that scored Alison and Emily’s first kiss. I remember watching Spencer stare at herself in the mirror and shake and how often I’d do the same.

Rather than trivializing the experiences I was going through, PLL validated them by reflecting them and treating them with the same weight as, say, a crazed stalker with a single-initialed-alter ego. I now have the language, the identity, to know more about myself than I did in 2012.

My queerness is not Emily’s. My anxiety isn’t Spencer’s. Instead of looking up to them, I’m now swimming in this space between the age of the high school characters on the show and the actual ages of the actresses playing them.

I sit on my bed in New York City now, curled around a pillow leaking cheap stuffing, and watch PLL. That’s when Netflix notifies me that it will soon be unavailable to stream. I weigh my options: mainline episodes for hours after work every night to finish my re-watch in time, or spend my nights with friends, wandering around the city, and living life.

I close my computer and head outside.