I Wanted to Be a Hanson Brother So Bad It Might Have Been a Clue
- Megan Neff
- Mar 24
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 25
In 1997, I was 11 years old with a bedroom full of Hanson posters and a feeling I couldn't quite name.
It wasn’t a crush. My friends had those, and they looked different. Giddier. More screaming involved. What I felt was quieter. I didn’t want to date them or be them, exactly. It was more like… they made sense to me: three boys with hair like mine, singing into a single microphone, existing slightly outside the normal rules of cool.
Something in that landed, though I couldn't have told you why.
Misfiled Feelings
The thing about growing up queer before you have the language for it is that you're constantly misreading your own interior life. The feelings are there. The recognition is there. But you file it wrong, over and over, because you don't yet have the folder they belong in.
So those feelings just sit in a pile on the floor of your mind, labeled intense feelings about Hanson or a really close friendship, or I just think she's super cool, until one day you're in your early-twenties and the pile is too tall to ignore.
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Soft Boys, Loud Signals
What I was responding to, I think, was their in-between-ness. They were boys, but soft. Popular, but weird. I was a kid who felt things intensely and learned to be careful about showing it. Hanson had not learned this. Or had learned it and decided not to care. They were out there on national TV, touring malls across America, being completely themselves, and the world loved them for it.
Seeing that gave me a kind of permission I didn’t realize I needed.
It wasn't about gender. It wasn't about wanting to trade lives. It was something simpler and stranger: they were free about it. All of it. And somewhere underneath all the posters and the CDs and the basketball shorts I wore everywhere for reasons I did not examine, something in me knew that I wasn't. I just didn't know yet what I was being careful about.
The Long Way Around to Yourself
I came out in my mid-twenties. By then I'd accumulated a lot of misfiled feelings and an impressive ability to be confused about things that were, in hindsight, not that confusing. The Hanson identification was just one entry in a very long list of signals I had ignored or explained away.
When I finally fell in love with a woman for the first time, the main thing I felt was relief. Not surprise. Just the strange, quite comfort of something finally fitting after years of feeling slightly off.
There's a specific kind of queer longing that looks like fandom from the outside.
It's not about the object of the feeling. It's about something in you reaching for connection, or freedom, or visibility that you can sense but can't yet name. The feeling finds the nearest available shape and borrows it for a while.
My parents made room for my feelings before they needed them to make sense. I didn't know how rare that was until I got older. I had love, and I had space, and even with all of that, I still found the words the long way around.
Back then, the map didn't exist. The internet wasn't there yet as a mirror, full of people naming their experiences out loud.
You couldn't stumble across yourself in a reel, sitting in your childhood bedroom wearing basketball shorts for no reason. You just had to wait. For the right moment, the right person, the sentence that landed and suddenly described you.
The Map Exists Now
That's the thing that's genuinely different for kids today. The mirror exists. The language exists. Someone out there has already named what you're feeling and posted it. For a kid sitting alone with a pile of misfiled feelings, that's not a small thing. That's everything.
Which means the job of being a parent has quietly shifted. It's less about providing the explanation and more about making sure your kid knows they can come to you before they have the words.
So if my kid develops a deep, inexplicable identification with someone: a musician, a character, a person who seems to be living in a way that resonates before he can explain why, I want to be the kind of parent who pays attention to that. Who doesn't rush to label it or explain it away. Who just says:
"Tell me more about what you love about them."
Because sometimes that's the question that opens the door.
MMMMBop still slaps, by the way. That part requires no reexamination.
JOIN GAY MOMS CLUB
Gay Moms Club is a welcoming online community for LGBTQ+ moms who want real connection, honest conversations, and friendships that fit into real life.
You shouldn’t have to explain your family before you can make a friend.
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