Stardoll Made Me Gay

Vogue

14 hours ago

It can be difficult to identify the very moment of one's gay awakening; most of us in the LGBTQ+ community have more than one. I didn't come out in earnest until my mid-20s, but a potent mix of Tegan and Sara, everyone on The L Word (especially Shane McCutcheon), and Casey Novak from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit had, over time, helped me to figure out that there was possibly something, well…not quite straight about the way I thought about women. But now, looking back on my youth from my very gay early 30s, I realize that perhaps the queerest thing I did with my time in middle school was spend hours and hours dressing up cartoon avatars of celebrities on a little website called Stardoll.
I haven't revisited the Stardoll website since I was about 13 years old, and as of now, it's not loading for me (maybe because I'm old enough to contribute to a Roth IRA, and that's reflected in my IP address? I don't know!), but back in the day, it was a pink-hued paradise where I frittered away my ample free time putting cute little outfits on drawings of Rachel Bilson, Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, Amerie, and other famously fashionable women who were represented on the site in—gasp!—little more than their underwear. To my memory, this wasn't quite as perverted as it sounds; the point, after all, was to get these celebs all dolled up, not to gawk at them in their skivvies. But closeted tween multitasker that I was, I was richly capable of doing both.
If you'd asked me back when I was a frequent Stardoll flier, I would have hotly denied any Sapphic undertone to my fascination with the site. Weird, solitary kid that I was, what I really liked about Stardoll (besides being able to go 'shopping' without having to wheedle yet another $20 bill out of my mom) was the platform it created for me to mentally craft stories around the women I was dressing. Had I actually jotted these stories down, they might count as early attempts at 'writing,' but instead I kept them confined to my mind, content to mull over plotlines I'd made up about Kate Winslet going undercover to research a role as a scuba instructor or Lindsay Lohan becoming a champion equestrian. (I'm telling you, some of the Stardoll-provided outfits for these celebrities were weird.)
The link between staring at bra-and-underwear-clad representations of famous women and eventually coming out as queer might seem obvious, but the ogling was not really the thing. I love Ocean Vuong's reading of queerness as a stoker of creativity, something that pushed him to 'make alternative routes.' While my experience as a privileged white Upper West Side tween was worlds away from Vuong's, what I now know to call queerness has occupied me in my loneliest moments and forced me to create stories out of nothing in order to keep myself company. I learned to do that, at least in part, by spending time with gorgeous femme Stardoll avatars instead of kids my age—kids who might have made fun of me even more, had they known just how outrageously gay my thoughts about those avatars were. (Gayness aside, those kids likely would have also made fun of me for surfing Stardoll at all, given many of my peers were already using fake IDs to buy cases of Smirnoff Ice to chug in parent-free Park Avenue apartments before attending to the all-important business of kissing boys named Trent.)