the books offered a navigable system for belonging—alluring, perhaps especially, for a person who didn’t entirely feel like she belonged in the real world. Which describes a lot of preteens, and especially a lot of preteens with a dawning sense of their own queerness. Harry Potter fan-ship twined with the growth of the Tumblr platform, which in turn twined with the growth of a new kind of LGBTQ+ movement…kids who found solace in un-embodied community, whether it was Hogwarts or online. It wasn’t quite telepathy, but it was the dream of telepathy.
