GLR January-February 2026

far more compelling than being someone’s worst nightmare. Additionally, the larger body of work to which trans smut belonged went a long way in presenting embodiment as a muta ble characteristic. Within this broader context, kink was proof that diverse, nonconforming bodies could be subjects of desire rather than taboo objects. Morgan Fisher, a fan-artist who gained a following for drawing popular characters as fat and trans, de scribes the feeling more articulately: “[W]hen the sum total of media representation for people like you consists of cruel jokes, fear mongering, and niche fetish porn, it’s easy for your desire to become about three things: desire to destroy yourself, desire to be someone else, and desire to please others no matter the cost to yourself.” For me, the idea of a self-defined, body-positive erotic was life-altering, opening not only my perception of gen der but my sense of sexual attraction. I had long suspected my self of being bisexual, but my hang-ups around my gendered body made a stable notion of sexuality elusive. Kink, via fan dom, normalized sexual and gendered ambiguity through excess, paving a wide path for those who followed. No product of queer fandom paved a wider—or more con troversial—path than the Omegaverse. Originating within the Supernatural fandom, Omegaverse content imagines worlds in habited by Alphas, Betas, and Omegas, categories that come with their own sexualities and even biological structures. Typi cally presented as an exaggeration of dominant-submissive dy namics, the Omegaverse is one in which anyone can become pregnant, regardless of primary gender. Those who impregnate are Alphas, their desires driven by animalistic breeding cycles. Omegas, functionally mega-bottoms, are generally meeker and give off pheromones that incite the Alpha’s attention. For a generation that grew up in a world with little access to queer spaces, there is little distinction between the online and off-line worlds, especially when it comes to queer identity. Older members of the community may see the idea of digital queer ness as depressingly immaterial—a reality inextricable from the reported demise of queer physical spaces. Wrote critic Colin Keays in his 2020 article, “After the Gay Bar: The Uncertain Fu ture of Queer Space”: “If encounters between LGBTQ + people are now more likely to happen from a network of [digitally] inter connected bedrooms than in communal spaces, queer people ironically retreat back, behind the screen and into the closet, re versing decades of activists fighting for visibility. Moreover, queer space is completely depoliticized when a once vibrant cul ture is mediated by a private technology company and flattened to the surface of a smartphone.” But while spaces like Tumblr were far from perfect, the dig ital spaces I encountered in the 2010s also were far from anal ogous to the closet. Growing up online, anonymized and primarily queer spaces like Tumblr allowed me to explore queerness far beyond what would have been possible offline. Shielded from the judgments and prescribed roles imposed through in-person structures, I could more easily access sides of myself that would have been subsumed by more unforgiving conceptions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment. This was es pecially true given that for much of high school I was solely male-presenting and dating a woman, qualities that summarily invalidated me in the eyes of my few queer peers. Online I was not beholden to my appearance or my relationships, free to imagine myself flitting between categories like male-female,

butch-femme, and top-bottom without allowing these terms to solidify and define any aspect of my being. In her manifesto Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell shares similar reflections on art critic Gene McHugh’s sentiment that “for many people who came of age as individuals and sexual be ings online, the internet is not an esoteric corner of culture where people come to escape reality and play make-believe. It is real ity.” To this, Russell adds that “IRL [in real life] falters in its skewed assumptions that constructions of online identities are latent, closeted, and fantasy oriented (e.g., not real) rather than explicit, bristling with potential, and very capable of ‘living on’ away from the space of cyberspace.” Thus spaces like Tumblr function as a sort of queer laboratory, a space in which identities can be tried on, altered, and scrapped as if they were outfits being prepared for a night of clubbing. I gravitate toward Russell’s description of digital space be cause it evokes the power of queer nightlife and community that has been rendered all but non-existent for young people by forces like gentrification and the Covid pandemic. Her words evoke the sense of power gained through anonymity and the charge gener ated from being plugged into the overwhelming solidarity of queer community. There is something undeniably powerful about reading 200 pages of gay werewolf erotica and knowing that nearly half a million other freaks have been down the same path, to see defiance and erotics celebrated rather than culled. While these worlds have suffered over the past few years, and continue to do so under the constant threat of censorship, I have faith that depraved queer joy will continue to exist across all corners of the internet and circulate intractably into the world beyond.

January–February 2026

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