'Glee' Made Me So Angry As A Teen. It Took Me Until Now To Realize Who I Was Really Mad At.

Though the Ryan Murphy series ended 10 years ago, I'm still learning lessons from it.

I didn’t realize I was gay and queer until I was 14, years after first watching “Glee.”

I was in the sixth grade when Ryan Murphy’s musical teen dramedy debuted in 2009. The ambitious and boundary-pushing musical series explored what it meant to be an outsider, a nerd, a geek in teenage Middle America. “Glee” was a profound step forward in the modern representation of teendom in all its messy glory.

It was also an acquired taste.

I became a fan of the show once the titular glee club started doing entire episodes dedicated to the music of Madonna and Lady Gaga. The fast-paced, quick-witted adult humor was often still lost on me, but the show’s hook for me — and countless other teens watching it live, I can imagine — was its believable, realistic teen characters. The series was sometimes a lamplight showing me the way just before I entered high school.

My attention gravitated toward glee club member Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), whose gender presentation spoke for itself from the pilot episode. Four episodes in, when Kurt boldly says the words “I’m gay” for the first time on the series, it awakened something in me that I didn’t have the language or confidence to express for several more years. I briefly stopped watching it soon thereafter.