To All The Canadian Lesbian Vampires

I´ve struggled my whole life to fit my little puzzle piece into the grand scheme of things. Belonging was a half-hazardly-hatched dream that often led to more frustration than anything really concrete. It´s not that I didn´t have friends, but they were spread out. It´s not that I didn´t have family, they were just on the other side of the world.

I found pockets of community wherever I could. Added myself like tooth-filling to cracks that needed a bit more lovin´. But that also meant that too often I´d be filling into a rotten spot. And even more so, I´d get impacted by the rot.

But where could I find a safe place for myself? Where could I find a space to take refuge and truly feel like I belonged?

I grew up in half-baked environments that fit like a shirt that shrunk funny in the wash. Grew up in an Israeli-Canadian home, but am Pro-Palestine. Grew up in a secular Jewish environment; but don´t believe in god. Grew up in a very white, heteronormative, cisgender community; but am a trans* queer af individual who quite frankly hasn´t lived in a white-dominant place in years (thank goodness).

Growing up I had to create the spaces I longed for, and to be frank, I didn´t have almost any representation or role models. I didn´t really have someone to look up to or who I wanted to be like. I´m a 90s kid. The internet wasn´t something I always had access to as a kid. My media intake was highly monitored. It wasn´t until high school when I had my own laptop that I could access the internet indepedently. And even then, my life was so sheltered and heteronormative that I never really had the opportunity to question my gender and sexuality.

I remember at the end of Grade 10, I fell for my best friend. Super cliche. But I barely even knew what that meant as I had no prior knowledge or representation of same-sex relationships or feelings. I had tons of crushes on females growing up, as early as four years old even. I was a typical tomboy. I wanted to be one of the boys (and even more so, I wanted to be a boy, and not just because they liked and got the girls). But it was around this time that I did what many gaybies do: I googled "how do I know if I´m gay?"

And then I googled lesbian movies and stumbled upon the beautiful and super cheesy lesbian films of the early 2000s. From You and Me, D.E.B.S., I Can´t Think Straight, and more, I found love, and confirmation that the butterflies in my stomach around female crushes were valid. In Loving Annabelle, I found a lesbian teenager who wasn´t stick thin who felt all the intense emotions for a woman that I did. In the L Word (maybe a year later), I found lesbian adults that had whole lives! I saw lesbians who were becoming parents, had all types of jobs, who struggled as couples, and who had really hot sex that wasn´t just porn!

I gobbled up as much lesbian and sapphic media as I could. (Genderfluidity and gender non-conformity wasn´t quite as popular yet).

But it was when I was in university that I truly started to come into my own. If I couldn´t find the space, I created it. Yet I still struggled to find representation. Sometimes it´s tiring to be the representation (even though I wasn´t afraid to be loud about it). And then I found Carmilla.

Carmilla was a queer Canadian Youtube web series starring Elise Bauman and Natasha Negovanlis. It was based on the novel with the same name written by Sheridan Le Fanu. The web series premiered on the Youtube channel, Vervegirl (now known as KindaTV), in August 2014 and ran for 3 seasons, each episode spanning from two minutes to eight minutes. And it was all about a lesbian vampire falling for her human female roomate.

Vampires. Lesbians. Canadians. Corny AF. My kind of thing.

To be honest, when I was first thinking about how to approach this story, I struggled to think of the icons or media where I felt represented. It´s hard to feel represented when even your identity is fragmented, left unacknowledged, and underrepresented in day-to-day life.

But I stumbled upon Carmilla when I was starting university, at a time when I really began to grow into my identity; while also exploring so much of it. Seeing cheesy characters, geeky, nerdy, super tall, super androgynous, fit/unfit etc. characters, really showed me a wider queer-er world of possibilities. And the web series was so dorky! Like I was! (The Doctor Who references were a bonus).

And while the show was quite short in a sense, it still impacted me in a huge way. I don´t think the creators expected the show to go so viral, but it did. And people still talk about it today; ten years after it aired.

I think about how many people finally saw themselves represented, where young queer adults weren´t so focused on body image or trauma, or homophobia. If anything, the show truly normalized queerness for me- and that´s pretty damn rad.

I hope the creators and actresses know that they´re still making a big impact today. Because even today, I´m grateful for Carmilla.

#creampuffsunited

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A/N: Now I could have added the whole first season link, but I want you to experience the thrill and frustration at having to wait for another three minute episode. So take ´em one episode at a time.