Oh, to be 13. What a time, what a time! Was it good? Was it bad? Who can say! (Okay honestly it was pretty bad, but perhaps that… wasn’t… universal? I dunno, you tell me!)
Whether it was good or bad though, we were all definitely 13 once, and wow, what a time it was. Something fun to do as a queer person is look back on our lives and recognize the things we did that were oh so gay that we didn’t even realize were so extremely gay at the time. Take all of Kayla’s baffling fashion choices, for example. GAY. Take my inexplicable choice to make duct tape wallets for a girl I was “just friends” with, photocopy pages out of Jewel’s book of poetry (yes, Jewel wrote a book of poetry), cut certain love poems up line by line, and then paste those lines all over the duct tape wallets. For a girl I was just friends with, remember!!! Suffice it to say, we were doing some gay stuff when we were 13. I bet you were too. I want you to tell us about it!
We’ll publish a list with all your contributions next week, much like our esteemed and celebrated Pandemic Sex Dream list we put together many moons ago. All contributions will be anonymous and it will be great fun to look back on how extremely gay we all were as baby 13 year olds and giggle and reflect on the ways in which some things change, and some things stay very much the same. Help us celebrate Autostraddle’s 13th birthday and our fundraiser we’re hosting in honor of the event by participating in this nostalgic community project! Can’t wait to learn all about the gayest things you did at 13!
Submit to this list by filling out the form here. Submissions are open until midnight PST on Monday, March 14, 2022.
Oooo this is gonna be good
Love it, thank you, can’t wait.
I could just post a picture of me wearing my brother’s old clothes and standing with my arms crossed.
What if my submission is just this picture
Your outfit is amazing but the cactus background just sends this photo to another level. A++++
It was a standard school photo background in AZ where I lived at the time. Truly a look 😂
This contest is over, but I have to add my entry.
John Lennon died in 1980, and the entire world lost their collective minds with grief. Wanting to know what all the fuss was about, I started learning about the Beatles to the point that I became a 12-year-old Beatles fan in 1980, and a walking encyclopedia of Beatle Arcana by the summer of 1980. My best friend also was a huge Beatles fan.
I don’t exactly know how this happened, but somehow, she and I ended up…acting out fanfic during our phone calls, where she’d pretend to be her favourite Beatle, and I’d pretend to be mine. And being that we were horny 13-year-old girls who were probably queer (definitely in my case), but were afraid to say anything about it, we would have *phone sex* with each other, with one pretending to be the other’s favourite Beatle. You know. Because girls couldn’t have sex with girls, that was DIRTY and WRONG in 1981. But it was totally okay if she was pretending to be, say, George Harrison.
This went on for the better part of *2 years* until she got a different friend group that I didn’t fit in with.
Do I win?
This definitely deserves a gay trophy.
I’m reminded of the elaborate fantasies my friends and I would weave for each other over various boy band members, and though we never quite veered into phone sex (probably because they actually were straight), it still felt thrilling and subversive to me in a way I wouldn’t have known how to articulate at the time.