I’m Totally Gay. I Still Love My Fake Celebrity Crush.

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 H20. And there’s definitely a picture of me asleep in a D.A.R.E. 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.

What I didn’t plaster all over the internet were the crushes that felt a little confusing: the tingles I got when I watched Madonna writhe around in the “Take a Bow” video, my zealous admiration for the geometrically perfect planes of Jessica Alba’s face. But my LiveJournal was filled with confessions of how much I feared being a lesbian — so those feelings would have to stay buried for years to come. Until then, my heart only had room for Hollywood hunks.

During a fraught, hormone-infused time filled with an onslaught of societal pressures and feelings we don’t quite understand, it’s not unusual for young LGBTQ+ people to claim an opposite-sex celebrity crush to fit in. And that special bond may just follow them on into adulthood, well after they’ve come out. My college group chat still teases our friend Bradley — who describes himself as “hard gay” — about his teenage crush on Nicole Kidman. This crush involved the kind of hyperfixation only a closeted gay boy could come up with. “Moulin Rouge! had just come out and I saw it in the theater three times,” he says. (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.) “When it came out on DVD, I got it for Christmas. I watched it every single day after school for probably three months.”

Bradley, now 38, didn’t have a lot of male friends in his Ohio high school, but he had a lot of female friends — and they were starting to crush on him. Moulin Rouge! offered easy deflection. “They’d be like, ‘So this person has a crush on you, what do you think?’ I’m like, ‘Well, she’s not really my type,’” he recalls, laughing. “‘I like red curly hair, milky smooth skin, and an Australian accent. This is my ideal woman. The sparkling diamond from the Moulin Rouge, ever heard of her?’” The specificity of this crush baffled his friends, but for Bradley, it was the best way to avoid the mess of dating girls without outright lying (or confronting his furtive interest in other guys).

“I’m like, do I want to be Joe Jonas, or do I think Joe Jonas is hot?”

For Brendan, a 37-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 1996 Olympics gymnastics team. Topanga just had her glow-up on the series, so she felt like a passable choice. “I really think that the world and the show were telling me, ‘This is a hot woman, so you should be attracted to her,’” he says. “I do think her journey on the show, from being that nerdy girl who was putting lipstick on her face to then being what a fourth grade boy views as hot, was also interesting to me.”

Topanga had qualities that he valued — intelligence, humor — but, in hindsight, she was just a vessel for feelings about his real crush: Shawn Hunter, the floppy-haired “bad boy” of the series played by Rider Strong. And though Bradley is still a die-hard Nicole Kidman stan who recites her AMC ad every time we go to a movie, he’s realized the one he wanted wasn’t the sparkling diamond herself, but charming down-on-his-luck poet Christian, played by Ewan McGregor.

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. In her friend group, everyone had to be “romantically interested in someone at all times in order to remain interesting,” she says. So she picked a safe, communal target: the Jonas Brothers. “All my friends were like, ‘Well, everyone has a favorite Jonas Brother,’” Chrissy says. “I remember thinking it’s either Kevin or Nick out of empathy, because no one liked Kevin, and Nick was diabetic, and they acted like on the Disney Channel that he was on the verge of death all the time, but he wasn’t. I think I ended up going with Kevin because Nick got enough empathy for being diabetic.”

“My friends and I were chanting ‘JTT is hot’ on the way to see one of his movies. My mom still makes fun of me for saying that.”

There’s also the gay-ish straight celeb crush, when an opposite-sex celebrity signals an aspect of queerness that calls out to the crusher like a rainbow lighthouse in the dark. Ema, 33, describes herself as a “lapsed Deppist” who had such an intense crush on Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Caribbean that she started a whole religion based on him in seventh grade. She was 12 and getting into emo and glam rock, so Jack Sparrow’s guyliner schtick felt transgressive and exciting. After she and her friends came across an illustrated Bible for kids, they came up with their own Depp-themed version. “We decided that God would be Johnny Depp, and from that, we created a religion called Deppism where we actually did write a Bible,” says Ema (who is no longer into Depp for obvious reasons). “It was very short. It was a retelling that might have gotten kind of sexual, but we were 12, so we were limited in our idea of that. And I remember Orlando Bloom was the archangel Gabriel, because we had to give the Orlando Bloom girlies something.”

When the group of friends started giving out their Depp Bibles to classmates at her New York City junior high, though, Ema says she got disinvited from playdates and banned from other friends’ homes. They grew out of their obsession by the following year. But Ema notes that most of the people involved in the Depp worship have since come out as queer or as a lesbian — even the “popular girls who were in Juicy outfits.” And she recognizes now that she also had a crush on her best friend, whom she started the whole thing with; perhaps a large part of Deppism’s appeal was that it gave her an excuse to talk about and express desire alongside her actual crush. “I understood that I could safely be attracted to this character,” Ema says. “But that I wasn’t going to be questioned about [using Depp] to create this feminine space that was sort of like a proto-adolescent sex cult.”

Bradley, too, reports that most of the girls who had “crushes” on him today identify as queer or lesbian. Sometimes the rituals of having a crush bring queer people together before they can even recognize it.

Though she didn’t try to start a religious sect, Kaitlyn, a 36-year-old lesbian from Boston, wore the public performance of a crush on her sleeve — er, wall. After watching Jonathan Taylor Thomas on Home Improvement and in Wild America, she covered her bedroom with posters of him. “I think maybe I was more vocal about how much I loved him and decorated my room that way, just so it seemed like I had a crush,” she says. “I remember sitting in the car with my two friends and we were all just chanting ‘JTT is hot’ on the way to see one of his movies in theaters. My mom still makes fun of me for saying that around the house.”

“I love a woman with a sword and stand by that.”

But when Kaitlyn thinks back to her obsession, she realizes that perhaps there was something else about him she was responding to: JTT wore a lot of flannels; she started wearing them, too. Her current haircut is a flowy, pretty-boy ’90s ’do — not unlike the one he had in his Man of the House heyday. Maybe, Kaitlyn realized, she was looking for a style icon more than a crush. It’s a question queer people often grapple with: “I’m like, do I want to be Joe Jonas, or do I think Joe Jonas is hot?” she asks. “It’s that fine line of, ‘He’s got this vibe. Do I want to take some of that?’ I remember getting a Starter jacket because Jonathan Taylor Thomas was wearing one in Teen Beat.”

The idea of a celebrity crush as a form of early gender envy rings true for Jae, 24, a trans woman who went heart-eyed for Keira Knightley after seeing her in Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean. She’d get into fights with people who said Knightley and Natalie Portman looked alike. (Jae concedes now that they absolutely do.) And Jae’s Bend It Like Beckham fandom eventually turned into a love of women’s basketball.

Because Jae was living publicly as a guy, and now identifies as a lesbian, her crush on Knightley was both legit and useful to reference among her male friends while growing up in Texas. “I could kind of code switch how I talked about the crush,” Jae says. “I’d be with my guy friends and be like, ‘She was so hot in Pirates of the Caribbean.’ I love a woman with a sword and stand by that. And then I’d be in my diary writing about how her beauty is never-ending. I’m pretty sure I wrote ‘Mr. My-Dead-Name Knightley’ at one point.”

Yet there was something about the crush that ran deeper than others along similar gender lines. “The fact that I got into women’s sports because of her and was so amazed by all these incredibly strong athletic women and all these things, I think it kind of shaped what a woman could be for me,” Jae says. “Coming out as a trans woman, that was one of the first things I had to grapple with — I didn’t have to be an Instagram model girl. That wasn’t the prescription of what I had to be.”

Ultimately, Brendan thinks that these crushes show just how resourceful LGBTQ+ people are — and passionate about the things that matter to us. “What makes queer people so special is we had this whole experience when we were young people having to play the game and adapt and figure out how we exist in a way that will make people comfortable until we’re ready to be out,” he says. “My crush was about me surviving the night at this sleepover, but you can bring that into the broader sense of how queer people have to exist and survive.” He still looks up Fishel on Instagram sometimes — like checking in on an old friend who was there for you when it counted.