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But CosmoGirl! doesn't just throw out representations of queerness and leave their readers to draw their own conclusions. The magazine mirrors its audience back to itself as well; in an August 2006 survey on friendship, 60 percent of CosmoGirl! readers revealed that they have a friend who is gay or bisexual. These issues are also addressed in articles that not only inform, but also act as training wheels for girls interested in taking a stand but who are not yet ready to argue the points on their own. No one has to feel alone or like they have nothing to say.

“I remember watching the news that summer,” Shoket says, referring to the summer of 2004 when the debate over gay marriage was particularly heated. “Everyone was talking about gay marriage, but no one was looking at it from a youth point of view. And yet, when I looked at the people who were out there protesting, they were mainly young. This was a big issue for young people, but no one was seeing it from their perspective.”

CosmoGirl! remedied that with “Should Their Love be Legal?” by Jessica DuLong, which was published in the June 2004 issue and was later nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. The article looks at gay marriage from the point of view of an 18-year-old girl who wanted to marry her girlfriend in San Francisco, but didn't make it there before the weddings were ordered stopped; a 20-year-old couple who did get married in San Francisco but who worry about their rights now that the marriage has been invalidated; and a 15-year-old girl with lesbian parents, who worries that one of her mothers, who is not a U.S. citizen, will be deported since her parents cannot be legally wed.

The article cites a CosmoGirl! website poll in which 63 percent of readers support gay marriage, and offers a sidebar on the differences between civil unions and marriage, as well as the position of each of the then-presidential candidates on the issue. The article never actually endorses one point of view over another, but makes it clear to readers that being denied the right to marry is painful for many young women and is relevant to their lives in more than one way.

Suddenly she came up and put her arm around me — she didn't have to say anything. I could tell from that moment there was a connection. Later on, after a long talk about my feelings, I told her I felt comfortable with her and had never felt that way with a girl. Then she kissed me.

Shoket says CosmoGirl! receives both positive and negative responses about their inclusion of lesbian and bisexual girls and LGBT issues. For the most part, the negative responses — mainly the complaint that it is “inappropriate” to include these things — come from the younger, 12-to-13-year-old girls. This suggests that girls either come to accept queerness as a part of life, or start reading other magazines.

Although CosmoGirl! is clearly giving young lesbian, bisexual and questioning girls visibility within its pages, some problematic stereotypes remain. The love story we've been following, for example, appears in the Guys: Love Stories section of the magazine. In the same friendship survey, out of the 17 percent of girls who have kissed a female friend, 47 percent did it on a dare. A quote accompanying the stat reads, “At a party, a girl friend and I were dared to kiss. Both of us are outgoing and like attention so we went for it. It was fun that it turned the guys on, but no big deal.”

The fact that queerness is presented to young women as nothing out of the ordinary is wonderful, but at times the quiet, queer minority threatens to be subsumed or objectified by the boisterously hetero majority represented by the bulk of the magazine's readers.

Shoket realizes that there's a disconnect, but demurs, saying that for the moment, “there's no elegant solution to those problems.” CosmoGirl! does plan to continue weaving gay girls into the magazine in a variety of ways, including specific stories about gay-related issues such as coming-out stories and having gay parents.

CosmoGirl! is a magazine for all girls, and because most girls aren't gay, CosmoGirl! is mostly about straight girls. But the fact that young teen readers of the magazine — which has a circulation of 1.35 million — have a source for evenhanded information about queerness is a small but steady step in the right direction.

I almost pulled back, but I stopped myself and put my hand on her face. I never wanted it to end, and I knew at that moment I'd never forget it, because it was my first kiss with a girl.

Visibility politics aside, I know that when I was a 12-year-old girl, I would have swooned over a love story like that.

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