Or how I discovered that I’m queer.
This is how it started. I watched The Legend of Korra.
You may not know what that is. If you don’t, here’s a primer. The Legend of Korra is a children’s cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon (mostly) from 2012 to 2014. It is a sequel to the children’s cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA), that was also on Nickelodeon. Both are excellent, with high production values, good writing, and storylines that are at times funny, touching, and thrilling. It’s good stuff.
Both delve into more serious topics than you might expect in children’s programming, but Korra much moreso than ATLA, including a strong arc exploring PTSD.
In 2014, as Korra was winding down, it became important to the queer community, as two of the main characters, Korra herself and Asami, began having moments that could be considered close, even maybe loving. They are both women (and both had previously had a relationship with one of the male leads, Mako) and the possibility that a relationship between women was being created in a family-friendly cartoon, in 2014, was groundbreaking.
There’s a lot of virtual ink that has been spilled about this, about the difficulties Korra‘s creators had with Nickelodeon to get even minor hints of this on air. The final seasons got shunted around on cable channels, and final episodes ended up online.
The Korra and Asami connection is an example of what has come to be known as a ship, a relationship that fans create, that may or may not have been intended by the original work. In this case, Korra and Asami were shipped as “Korrasami.”
It is hard to overstate the impact that this had on the queer community, especially the bisexual and lesbian community. Even as recently as 2014, those kinds of relationship were rarely seen on TV, much less two non-white characters, much less without the character relationship trauma that same sex relationships always seemed to carry on screen. They were best friends, fighting together, growing together, and loving each other.
Fans read a lot into the briefest frames of the two of them looking at each other. There was a great desire for Korrasami to be real. And then, in the final episode, in the last few minutes, Korra and Asami have a scene where they decide to take some time away, together. The show ends with them holding hands, and turning to face each other. No kiss, but there didn’t need to be one.
There are reaction videos out there of people watching this final scene for the first time, and the joy in those videos is lovely to see.
After the show aired, the creators announced that yes, Korrasami was canon, that Korra and Asami were bisexual, and that they were in love. Their story has continued, with an actual kiss and a full relationship, in the official comics.
The fan community continues to celebrate this moment every year with Korrasami Day on December 19, the day the final episode aired.
That’s The Legend of Korra and some of the backstory. Now back to me!
(Note: Today is the two year anniversary of when I finished watching Korra that first time. I drafted this post about a month later, so almost two years ago. It’s taken that long for me to finish it. I’ve had a lot going on! :)
I knew the backstory of Korrasami when I decided to watch The Legend of Korra. It was May of 2020, and I was consuming a lot of media in the pandemic lockdown. Korra had been on my list for a long time, because of Korrasami. At this point I knew I liked stories about women in relationships with women. I’ve always preferred the company (the energy) of women over men. I ascribed it to growing up in a house full of women.
So I knew what Korra was, and I was excited for it, though I didn’t anticipate how it would make me feel. I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix first, because I thought I should see it before Korra. (You should.)
At that time, Korra was only available on Nickelodeon’s streaming service, so I paid for a month and I binged it like nothing else. There are four seasons, roughly 12 episodes each. I watched every one, impatient for the hints of a relationship. It didn’t really start until the third season, and even then, there are only a handful of scenes that involve just Korra and Asami. But I devoured them. I put work aside to watch. I watched before and after dinner. I would stay up later than I should to finish an episode, and then I’d watch another.
When I finally got to the end—I was…sad…it hurt, almost physically. The feeling had me in a daze. I described it to myself as heartache, my heart ached after I saw them go, hand in hand, not quite kissing, but in love.
I was… struck by my reaction. This physical ache was… not exactly surprising? But unexpected? It felt like love, like loss, like the wonder of falling in love and the loss of knowing life won’t ever be the same again. I’ve felt that way, and I recognized it. It’s both lovely and awful, and you never want to stop feeling it.
Sally Tisdale has written a book about living, Advice for Future Corpses, in which she says, “The trick comes in planning next summer’s vacation while knowing that next summer is not promised to anyone. This impermanence is the key to our pain and our joy.”
That’s how it felt. Acknowledging the impermanence of our hopes, while still fully embracing them feels like heartache. I felt that way, like what I was feeling was meaningful.
So I got the comics, I searched out fan fiction, I read everything I could find about Korrasami. There are testimonials from people, bi, gay, trans, not, about how this story, this relationship, this children’s cartoon, gave them the strength, the hope, the will to hold on, to be brave, to make it another day. They talk about how Korrasami saved them. That’s not exactly what happened to me.
Korrasami upended my life.
I think best by writing, and I’m an avid journaler when my life is a mess, but it took me a week to put something down about this. I didn’t want to analyze it, I wanted to keep feeling it. I didn’t want that heartache to end.
So I kept going over it, and over it, and over it in my head. Why did this story, this cartoon, affect me so much? What was it about my life that needed this? Was there something I could do that would let me keep feeling this way? Was there something even better?
And so, I stood in the shower one day at the end of that first week, and I went through it piece by piece. Clearly, there was something about the relationship between these two women that was important to me. It wasn’t just Korra and Asami, relationships between women is something I’ve always been attracted to. But here I am, not a woman. Oh, sure, I’ve always been sort of gay-coded (I get hit on by a lot of lovely men), but also: not a woman.
I remember standing there under the water, making a checklist of sorts. First on the list was, what if I am more feminine than I have thought? Check. That seemed pretty clear to me, once I had given myself permission to think it.
What if I wore more feminine clothing? Also check. I’d spent my whole life bemoaning the incredibly amazing clothes allowed to women, compared to the t-shirts, jeans, or suits allowed to men. (Note: yeah, I get that this is not actually true, but it was how I had lived my life up to this point.)
What if I didn’t look like a man? Check… but this was a little bit of a stretch. I mean, I had a beard, a bald spot, a belly, and lots and lots of body hair. I just didn’t see how that would happen, really. It felt more like what I was talking about was some sort of sci-fi brain swap with an actual woman. But sure, if I could look like a woman (ahem, be a woman), I’d jump at the chance.
And that’s when I crossed the rubicon. What if I didn’t have a penis? And more than anything else had, that settled comfortably into my brain. That was the moment I was sure I wasn’t a man, because I was so sure about that. It wasn’t that I hated the body I’d been born into, it was that I wanted to be female. It wasn’t that I hated what was between my legs, it was that I wanted something else. That was who I was.
It was… like a bolt from the blue. It explained everything. It explained who I was, how I was, my approach to sex, to relationships, to my family. It just felt right. I talk about it as a discovery, rather than a realization or an acceptance.
That next week was the best week of my entire life. I felt like I had discovered the key to life. To happiness. I felt like I wanted to do everything intentionally. I was able to turn down the temptations that had ruled my life: planning without following through, eating my feelings, swallowing my disappointment in myself, loving without understanding. It was a feeling of euphoria like I had never known.
I told my wife a week after that moment in the shower. That’s a story I’m not ready to tell, mostly because it’s not just my story. I spent the next few months wrestling with a lot of emotions, rediscovering depression, and for the first time, elation. I made some decisions. We made some decisions, and I knowingly threw everything in my life up in the air, unsure of where or how it might land.
All because I had felt what it was like to love the idea of my life. Because I had seen that the only way to love my life is on purpose.
The Legend of Korra didn’t make me queer. I was already queer. Korrasami showed me that it was possible to feel this way, and once I understood it was possible, I knew I could never go back. The feelings I had watching Korrasami come true were so intense, so personal to me, that I could not let them go. I needed the awesome possibilities of Sally Tisdale’s next summer, promised to nobody.
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