I treated the release of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way as ceremoniously as any teen girl without her driver’s license could: by begging my mom to drive me to the mall to buy a physical copy. The record came out on May 23, 2011, the day before my fifteenth birthday. The timing was a cosmic coincidence, but if I closed my eyes, I could almost convince myself that the CD was a birthday gift from Mother Monster herself.

I’d hardly admitted I was queer to myself, let alone to anybody else. I carried a giant backpack stuffed with textbooks every day, but it was my identity that weighed on me as I walked through my high school. At the time, I viewed my sexual orientation as an inescapable curse that would alienate me from my friends and family.