In our popular culture, and in many of our families, there have been very few examples of trans and queer identities. My first exposure to anything non-heterosexual was reading “Rubyfruit Jungle,” by Rita Mae Brown, in the 1990s when I was a teenager. I can still recall the feeling of reading about this totally “other” culture: lesbianism. I simultaneously felt excited and ashamed. I knew I was like the lesbians Brown described, but I had no idea what to do with that information. Eventually I was able to come out to others and myself; first as lesbian, then gay, and finally the more fitting term of queer.