The worst thing about my English courses growing up was that nearly every book we read in those classes were written by old or dead cisgender, heterosexual, white men. Aside from the occasional Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, my high school English curriculum was made up of Charles Dickens and George Orwell. I didn’t even read Toni Morrison until I picked up Jazz on my own in college, which should be illegal. 

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I understand the importance of literary history. I even occasionally enjoy the works of Shakespeare and Thoreau. Learning where the language and clichés of modern and contemporary texts come from is fascinating. Even with all of that, these books are always missing something for me. There’s only so much I can gain from reading stories about men, stories set in times where women can’t own property, where their husbands own them. My favorite types of books have always been the kind that felt like I could reach in and grab the main character’s hand, books with villains who felt real enough to frighten me to my core. These are books with young female protagonists, written by young authors who inspire me to pick up my pen. Or they are books with characters who are flawed in the most relatable ways. Even more so, I’ve always loved books that I could connect to on a deeper level, those stories where there was just a special something that drew me in, that wrapped me in a tight hug and refused to let go. 

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No matter how briefly I felt that reaction to texts in my English courses, like Jane Eyre and her journey of self-discovery, it was short-lived and felt only because the protagonist happened to be a young girl or there was a particularly endearing side character who spoke in rhymes. These stories were never about girlhood or queerness or anything that I found relatable in any sense; these subjects were on the periphery. It wasn’t until college that I found these themes at the center of academia. 

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It was not that I couldn’t enjoy classic texts. Some of my favorite books I have ever read are those written long before I was born, written by authors like Audre Lorde and Margaret Atwood. It just so happens that these authors were mostly avoided in my literary education. And I was tired of it.

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It wasn’t until my spring semester at UMass that I declared my English major, despite all of those shortcomings of my English career up until that point. That semester I also chose to take my History General Education requirement to get it out of the way, alongside an Intro to Shakespeare class. The class was called the History of Race and Sexuality in the United States. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was hoping that it would make the usual blandness of the English Renaissance language of my Shakespeare course into something more interesting. I was immediately astonished at the kinds of history that we would be learning about in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 286.  On the syllabus were all kinds of actually important historical events and moments that I had never actually been given the opportunity to study. We learned about intersectional politics, slavery and mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and the idea of the nuclear family. I had been learning about the American Revolution over and over again for the past ten years of my life, and this was the first history class I had ever taken that actually taught history from the perspective of the general public, of the people whose voices were getting silenced in all of those earlier classes. 

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I had never even imagined being able to openly talk about queerness in an academic setting. I was thinking back to my reading of popular literary texts in high school that I was sure had queer-coded undertones but didn’t feel comfortable talking about. I thought about The Great Gatsby and A Separate Peace. I thought back to all of those books by dead straight white men and couldn’t believe I had become an English major despite all of that monotony. 

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By the end of that first Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course, I had added a WGSS minor and was enrolled in two more classes for the following fall. One of the classes had an English designation but counted not towards the English major but for the WGSS minor. I was confused as to why the one English course that actually discussed topics of gender and sexuality didn’t even count towards the major. Not just confused, I was angry. 

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But I was also excited. The class was about gender and sexuality in speculative fiction. We read both classics and contemporary novels. We weren’t just reading books by old, cisgender, heterosexual, white men. I read Octavia Butler for the first time. We watched an episode of Star Trek about an alien species that had different gender structures than our own world. We analyzed Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer album and collection of short films. We got to write our own speculative fiction short stories and share them with the class. We watched Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale. I was surrounded by women-led media and literature in an academic context for the first time, talking about queer identity and gender politics in a literature class, and I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I had the opportunity to add a WGSS minor to my degree. 

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With every WGSS course I took throughout my time at UMass, I was enrolled in two more English courses where I was sure to read at least one book per semester by a dead, straight, white man. The deeper I got into the English major, the better it got, the more I was reading books written by women of color, the more I was writing papers that were about things more than the literary significance of some boring book about a man on a boat. It still wasn’t enough, but with every WGSS course I took, I was absorbing all of that history, all of that connection between my own identity and those who came before me, that I was able to bring it to the English classroom and apply it to my major in new and exciting ways in every course. 

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That first semester taking my WGSS history Gen-Ed and Shakespeare simultaneously meant that by the time my final project for Shakespeare came around, I felt confident enough to write a paper about gender ambiguity in Twelfth Night. My creative writing projects became fraught with complex queer characters. In postcolonial literature, I read Things Fall Apart and focused on the gendered relationships in a Nigerian context. 

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I also brought a literary lens to my WGSS courses. I enrolled in a queer world literature in translation course, and although it fell under the comparative literature designation, so many of my peers were WGSS students. While those students were bringing queer theory to the classroom, I was bringing literary analysis. We would be reading a novel with the most unbearable protagonist, and I would raise my hand and explain why this doesn’t make the author unskilled, but rather that that character is being tortured by internalized homophobia. This would open conversations utilizing theory by people like Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick that I otherwise would never have gotten to experience.

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It was refreshing, being in an environment where I was surrounded by like-minded peers, studying the same things, existing in the same plane, and understanding each other in a whole new way. WGSS classrooms have ways of morphing into communities. Because so many of us have personal identities that are tied up in the academic content, we are passionate in incomparable ways. 

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I was spending my free time submerging myself in queer culture, history, and literature. What was once only a hobby, became integrated into my university experience in productive and entertaining ways. Every movie I watched, every article I read, every novel I devoured, I was viewing them all through a new lens. 

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Now in my senior year, I feel connected to both my major and my minor in intricately intertwined ways. Both fields of study have impacted my place in the other: my studies in literature and writing lend itself well to my studies of gender and sexuality, and vice versa. 

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Now working on my Honors Thesis, I am taking everything I learned about character development and symbolism in my English major, and everything I learned about queer theory, gender politics, and LGBTQ+ community building in my WGSS minor, and combining them into a project that I am deeply passionate about. I never thought my idea for a thesis about queer-coding in Disney films would even get approved, but now here I am, in my final semester, and I’m making the magic happen. My English major taught me how to think critically and look underneath the text for meaning, and my WGSS minor taught me to look for queerness within those same texts. As Eve Sedgwick famously said in Tendencies: It is her job as a queer theorist “to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled.” I’m making it my mission too, smuggling queerness into every English course I take.