#simplebackground

When I first started listening to WTNV, I was 15, just coming into my queer identity. I knew I wasn't straight, had been dating my now fiance for a few years, but I had been so intentionally disconnected from LGBT+ communities and only could exist in circles that were actively hostile to me. As I started coming into my gender identity, realizing that I couldn't lie to myself anymore and pretend not to be trans, I felt so incredibly, isolatedly othered.

Then I got into Welcome To Night Vale. Right out of the gate, Cecil fell in love with Carlos, and I felt for the first time in my life, like I wasn't alone. That somewhere out there, there was a friendly desert community, full of people just like me, who loved and supported each other.

This was in 2012, same sex marriage wasn't legal in the US yet and I had started counting my pennies to fly to another country to one day marry the love of my life, something that was "just the way things were" then. I stayed up so many nights listening to a world I was told that just didn't exist- not for the monsters and unreal happenings, but because a gay man not only was open about his love, but beloved by his community. I had been raised as a fundamentalist, isolated and told the world would hate me for what I was, I would suffer and die like a tragedy. But Welcome To Night Vale gave me a hope, a refuge from the hatred my grandparents (who raised me) tried to instill into me from the second I realized that I wasn't cishet.

Night Vale connected me with other people like me. Outcasts, "weirdos", people who didn't fit into the society I had been raised up to believe I would need to make myself smaller to find my place in. I learned that our stories don't need to end in tragedy, that we have hope and vibrance and life and history together. That we had a future together. And suddenly, I found myself having room to flourish, to grow and breathe. I found my home, and I found that in a way, Night Vale was real in our hearts. Not universally, but it was my in- the way baby Melons conceptualized a world that, despite its horrors natural and unnatural, didn't see me and my love, my identity, as one of those horrors.

It's been nine years since then. Cycling through labels and identities, until I've settled comfortably here. I'm bi, I'm a trans man, I'm GNC, polyamorous, queer. I've moved states away from the people who would rather see me in the ground than proud of who I am. I live with my partners, our cats who do not float, in our little slice of the world. The world is full of horrors, and wonder, and most of all, love. And listening to Welcome To Night Vale the other night, washing dishes and taking in the last few weeks before my 25th birthday (a personal, extremely significant milestone), I felt like I was coming home.

I'm a different person than I was when I first listened to Welcome To Night Vale. I'm not a child anymore. But that child only grew up into the man I am now because of Night Vale, because of its safe and strange community, and its connection to the community I found myself in.