Rowan Blanchard Is Queer: 14-Year-Old “Girl Meets World” Actress Comes Out On Twitter
The future is bright, dear friends! On the heels of Amandla Stenberg powerfully, poetically coming out as bisexual on Teen Vogue‘s Snapchat last week, Rowan Blanchard came out as queer last night on Twitter. The 14-year-old actress is best known for her role as Riley Matthews on Disney Channel’s beloved Girl Meets World — course Cory and Topanga’s daughter was going to be queer; of course she was! — but she’s also making a name for herself by penning remarkable essays on feminism. Like this one from Rookie Mag from just a few days ago, in which she refused to apologize for being a woman who won’t apologize for her existence:
My codependent relationship with self-blame and self-deprecation, as a means of self-defense has held me tightly since I can remember. It has felt safer and less terrifying to silence myself to a degree, than to actually engage with people, and make them take responsibility for their own actions. I have treated, specifically, male feelings and ego as superior to, and more fragile than my own. This practice dates back to elementary school, where it was first embedded in me and my female classmates, that our feelings, bodies, and minds would be used as weapons against us—mostly, but not exclusively—by our male peers.
No wonder Elle magazine named both her and Stenberg Feminist Celebrities of the Year.
On Girl Meets World, Blanchard’s character, Riley, has a rich and wonderful relationship with her best friend, Maya Hart. Speculation about whether or not Riley and Maya are more than friends takes up about 40 percent of all Tumblr’s server space, and it’s that relationship that prompted Blanchard to come out last night. One of her Twitter followers tweeted: BisexualRileyMatthews2k16. Blanchard respond: “would really be here for this! if not Riley- its vvv important to me, being queer, that there is representation on our show.”
https://twitter.com/rowblanchard/status/688193447614746624
UPDATE: Since posting her original tweet, Blanchard has updated Twitter to say that while she has only ever been attracted to boys, she doesn’t want to identify as straight or gay because she’s open to liking any gender identity in the future, which is what being queer means to her.
https://twitter.com/rowblanchard/status/688462817310081028
https://twitter.com/rowblanchard/status/688510489962254337
Blanchard co-sang the Girl Meets World theme song, has starred (and agreed to star) in a dozens of family-friendly film and TV projects, has spoken at the UN Women and US National Committee’s annual conference, and has now become the first Disney Channel star to come out as queer while still starring on an active Disney Channel show. The Disney Channel didn’t even feature a queer character until two years ago when Good Luck Charlie introduced a pair of lesbian moms as guest stars for a single episode, a decision that caused huge backlash among conservative viewers. Kind of drives home the point about the urgent necessity of all-ages queer representation, huh?
Stenberg and Blanchard make me feel so excited about the queer future of the world. Seriously: What a time to be alive!
You can follow Rown Blanchard on Twitter and Instagram, and watch Girl Meets World on Fridays on the Disney Channel.