Geek culture of one, that was me - rural Australia, so not just no cable, but no commercial TV, no cinema and no bookshop (no internet then, either)! I found some other geeks - all male - and was really into that brand of confused proto-feminism where girls are as good as boys and girly stuff like pink and romance is GROSS. You're very right that our geek culture is not presented to the mainstream, and I think straight white male geeks get very upset when - after an adolescence being excluded from "mainstream" - they are confronted with the idea that they *are* mainstream.

But I am white (though all five Chinese students in our school were also geeks), an English-speaker from an English-speaking country and had middle-class parents who encouraged reading and computer games, gave me a book allowance, and were happy to let me travel alone at the age of 13 to the big city (three hours away on the twice-daily train) to buy books.