When I was in junior high, a friend and I wrote Hanson fan fiction that featured a makeout session with Taylor Hanson in a Gap dressing room.
I had a florid LiveJournal entry about wanting a boyfriend who looked like he cut his own hair, just like Josh Hartnett in Halloween H T-shirt with a book over my face while Devon Sawa and Jonathan Taylor Thomas looked down upon me from the Tiger Beat poster on my wall.
But my LiveJournal was filled with confessions of how much I feared being a lesbian β so those feelings would have to stay buried for years to come. Until then, my heart only had room for Hollywood hunks. This crush involved the kind of hyperfixation only a closeted gay boy could come up with. As with others interviewed for this story, last names have been omitted to keep semi-cringe teenage behavior from forever following them on the internet.
I watched it every single day after school for probably three months. Moulin Rouge! This is my ideal woman. The sparkling diamond from the Moulin Rouge, ever heard of her?
For Brendan, a year-old New Yorker who grew up in Marietta, Georgia, his crush on Topanga Lawrence Danielle Fishel from Boy Meets World came up at a fourth grade sleepover when everyone decided to share the celebrities they had the hots for, most of whom were on the Olympics gymnastics team. Topanga just had her glow-up on the series, so she felt like a passable choice. For Chrissy, who is 26 and bisexual, picking a crush was less about waving the flag for heterosexuality than it was about participating in the social rites of her middle school in South Brooklyn.
