Dark Art as an Access Need

When I was a much-younger, more-naive little Ada, I used to worry that I would hurt people by being queer. Not because being queer is inherently, directly harmful – I’d gotten past that already – but because someone might be upset or in distress or lose their relationship with me if they knew I was queer, and isn’t that in some sense me hurting them? Did I have the right to upset other people and make them distressed about their own morality, just so I could gratify my own desires? That didn’t seem right.

I think about this a lot when I think about dark content in queer stories.

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