For a long time, if an LGBTQ+ character appeared in an otherwise straight and cisgender cast, their presence served as a sprinkle of diversity. The assumed audience was straight people who might know someone who is gay or a lesbian but are distant from the broader queer culture.
Recently, however, something has changed. It is a shift especially visible in teen dramas. As Gen Z people identify more and more as queer, fiction starts to reflect that reality. New television series aimed at teen and YA audiences propose a new portrayal of teenage queerness — one without extraordinary drama about the character’s sexuality or self-hatred, YA contemporary fiction made for modern teens, made with a queer viewer in mind. Without a straight lens, these TV shows can explore queerness without the burden of tired formulas, and can entertain an almost radical question: could it be that being queer and young could be joyous?
Majorly played by cisgender and straight actors, queer characters fell into one of two categories: either they were uninvolved with their community, very straight passing, and homonormative — firmly in one identity of the acronym, monogamous, yearning for married life — or they were flamboyant and promiscuous comic reliefs, and in the stark majority, they were white gay men. Think Will & Grace: you could be Will (Eric McCormack) or Jack (Sean Hayes), but nothing in-between. Both are removed from any queer movements or communities and are always ready to name a straight woman an icon, but never caught dead at a Pride event. Even fewer options were available to essentially anyone who was not a gay man. Transgender characters were usually portrayed either as threatening or as so sad that they were only suitable as tragedy porn. Women who transgressed gender roles in their appearance and behavior would not sell to audiences as well as flamboyant men.
If it was their sexuality that was transgressive, they would be portrayed as titillating, such is the case of 2009 Jennifer’s Body. The horror film focuses on a friendship between shy Needy (Amanda Seifried) and Jennifer (Megan Fox) as the former develops feelings for Jennifer while the latter turns into a man-eating succubus. While the film is now going through a period of rediscovery and is held up as a feminist piece that shows a lot of nuance in the portrayal of teenage girls’ sexuality, at the time when it was released it was primarily advertised as a trashy flick where the girl from Transformers gets some girl-on-girl action — so come to the theater boys.
LGBTQ+ characters were not unsympathetic, but they were often quite boring. They symbolized one model of LGBTQ+ individuals that was created for the straight palette: one in which queerness was simultaneously all-defining — for example Eric Van Der Woodsen (Connor Paolo) in Gossip Girl or Damian from Mean Girls who is alleged to be “too gay to function” but never shows off attraction to anyone — and yet devoid of anything other than just sexuality or gender. Being LGBTQ+ was in a way an empty label, it meant you were gay or transgender, and so on, but it rarely carried the cultural part of being queer. Some parts of it, ones visible from a straight perspective such as coming out to your parents were present, but rarely there were the parts that do not relate to straight people.
The plotlines focused on queer characters were not really about them, but rather how straight characters relate to them. It was an easy and safe formula: a character is queer and comes out or is outed. Their friends and family assure them they still love them, and so the queer character carries on to get married and have two point five children because all they want is to be just like everyone else.
13 years ago, Kurt (Chris Colfer) in Glee was coming out to his dad with tears and fear in his eyes. The scene concluded with the almost comedic line: “I’ve known since you were three,” making it seem like all the fear and anxiety Kurt was feeling was just all him and his insecurities, and not because of the very real possibility of violence that queer kids face from their parents but in 2009 it was a primarily straight audience watching a gay kid, and they should have probably not be made uncomfortable by that reality. This trend of portraying the fear of queer people as insecurity, rather than a response to living in a queerphobic society is still very much alive in works such as Anne with an “e”, set in the 1890s. In it, the titular heroine is, of course, a kind and tolerant soul who is ready to embrace her teenage friend who comes out to her as gay. This narrative is comfortable. It takes off the pressure a straight viewer might feel: they do not need to work to make themselves more open or work to make their spaces more accessible to people of different identities. One can just comfortably consume television convinced that if they were a resolute 1890s orphan, they too would be very nice to hypothetical gay people.
This fantasy, while containing the subject of minorities, is one devoid of them. It is not about the queer characters, it is about the straight characters being good people because they accept them. It puts queer viewers in a position in which they need to fit into a narrative as the side characters of their own lives. That is why it is so refreshing to see those stories now start to be written for queer audiences.
It is impossible to write a queer story without the presence of the straight society and culture, as it is the water we all swim in. However, it is possible to decentralize the cis-het experience, and that is what recent teen dramas do. What I loved about Heartbreak High is how all of its characters are just open to, and about, experimenting. They try on different gender expressions, are open to having a threesome with people of different genders, and there is plenty of queerness, but no drama because of it. It’s just a part of the characters’ daily lives. It is normalizing, but not normative or prescriptive. Being straight among these teenagers is not a norm, just one of many modes of being, and one that does not put you in a rigid category you cannot leave.
You can label yourself, but you do not have to, there is no need to justify and explain yourself to anyone. The tortured queer has no place in this world: it’s hard to be conflicted about being queer if everyone is too. Stepping away from the focus on palatable queerness allows the show to include so much more diversity. It includes non-binary characters, and asexual characters (who are very rare on TV), and insists on showing intersecting identities, and how a character’s race, ethnicity, and neurotype inform their characterization just as much as their queerness. For example, Quinni (Chloé Hayden) is queer and autistic, and it is the autistic part that produces the most problems for her, as her romantic interest struggles with understanding Quinni.
It makes for a story that has not been told before — because queer people have, for so long, been allowed to inhabit maybe two marginalized identities at most simultaneously. It also simply gives the characters more depth and dimension, as they inhabit many identities that shape how they move through the world. Heartbreak High also celebrates friendships and communities that are built among queer people, something still rare in media that is not made specifically for queer audiences: Quinni is not a detached, lone, queer girl in a straight school. She has queer friends, she gets a girlfriend, and all together they get to go to a queer minor-friendly club and a drag show.
Portraying this sort of queer collective might seem tricky when writing a show for teen audiences: teenagers cannot engage with the greater queer scene or move to “The Big City.” However, what the screenwriters of Heartbreak High, as well as the author and writer of Heartstopper, understand is what many of us know from experience: queer kids tend to find each other, even long before they realize they do not fit in with the straight majority. Heartstopper perfectly captures this experience.
The show follows Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick’s (Kit Connor) budding relationship, as they meet and fall for each other in a British high school. Charlie’s a long-time friend of Elle (Yasmin Finney), a trans girl who he knew long before her transition. Elle changes schools, and the first people she befriends turn out to be a lesbian couple, one of them being Nick’s ex. The characters, while on the outside, are a typical teen-assembly cast, interacting uniquely with each other. There is little space for jealousy over people’s time, and no performativity, because there is no concern to keep up a special social status. Instead, there is a sense of understanding that can only truly be achieved when interacting with people from one’s own culture. While Heartstopper’s characters might not typically engage with queer culture as it is, they function in their own microcosm that has one.
Heartstopper’s depiction of queer adolescence seems saccharine sweet, unrealistic, and delightful. Charlie’s and Nick’s relationship is defined by their gentleness towards each other, built from dog walks and milkshake dates, and so distant from the pathos and tragedy of the popular model of suffering teenagers in Euphoria. The series has a quality of “fluff” — a type of feel-good fan fiction — that is comforting with its relatable reality and low-stakes drama. Teenagers doing drugs and porn might be interesting and edgy, but it is teens who fawn over schoolmates they share a desk with who reminds most of us about our teenage years.
What Oseman proposes in Heartstopper (and in all of their work in general) is a radically kind version of the world, in which being queer is a doorway to an embracing community rather than a cause of pain. Some obstacles might arise in the shape of an aggressive ex, and there might even be a threat of queerphobia, but love and community prevail and all is good again. Charlie had been bullied, but he gets to have friends who will not only protect him but also be with him when he does not need protection, just to share his joys. There might be tensions between him and Nick, but arising from them being kids, new to a relationship, and figuring themselves out, in so many more aspects than sexuality. That is what makes their fluffy romance relatable, more universal, and simply more pleasant to watch. The boogeymen of violence and ostracism are constantly with us, so when we watch ourselves on a screen, it is a soothing balm to see ourselves not concerned with them.
That is not to say that this fantasy — even though pleasant — is the ultimate way to tell queer stories. It is rather a symptom of a change in sensibilities from writing for a straight audience who comes to learn about LGBT people from the outside, to writing in the close circuit of queer creators writing towards queer audiences. That is especially visible in how television now approaches prejudice. Queer teens here no longer struggle with self-hatred, but instead with their surroundings, and they no longer take it. Don Mancini’s horror series Chucky is far cry from fluffy teen dramas, and not only because it is the latest installment in the Child’s Play franchise that follows the murderous possessed doll Chucky, but also because it deals right in the open with the violence queer teenagers face.
The most striking example is the very first episode. The central character, Jake (Zachary Arthur), starts the series off as an artistic soul raised by Lucas (Devon Sawa) — a father who drinks and struggles financially after the death of Jake’s mother. Lucas is an abusive father and one that doesn’t accept that Jake is gay. In a particularly heated argument, when Jake calls himself a slur, Lucas hits him and threatens to kill him. It is a terrifying moment, one rooted in the reality many of us face. A traditional narrative would have Jake protected now by a heterosexual protagonist, but there is no one. He is the main character, and it is his fear and anger, but also powerful defiance (it is significant Jake does not call himself gay but reclaims a slur), that the audiences sit with. It is this defiance that I find unique to the queer lens of Mancini. It is not supposed to be inspirational, but wish-fulfilling. The series lacks the sense of voyeurism shows like Glee used to have, shows like Sex Education still have: one of looking at something secret, sensational. It has a casual approach to queerness. It is not normalized, but it is normal, it is every day.
If there is hate or prejudice it comes from the outside, and it is bashed immediately. Especially well-handled are Glen and Glenda (Lachlan Watson) in season two, Chucky’s non-binary teenage children. Representation of non-binary people is still very scarce. They are usually dressed vaguely masculine, with their characters focused mostly on their gender identity (looking at you Cal from Sex Education), or on the physical dramatical brutality their bodies seem to go through with their transitions. Glen and Glenda look fantastic — their wardrobes, make up, and hair is rich in color and patterns, instead of oversized men’s clothes they are just wearing half a department store. They are campy and ride in a pink car with “They/them” as a license plate. When the stereotype is that all them kids these days all they care about is pronouns, Glen and Glenda take the stereotype and run with it. Something that is so rarely permitted to trans and non-binary characters still, making fun of one’s own identity.
This is what it all seems to come down to, the freedom of playing with queerness. It is now a greatly versatile toy, that those three shows play out in different and beautiful ways. It is a breath of fresh air, that pumps new life into the stale stereotypes, and brings forth new stories, and popular stories, that are loved and rewarded. I hope that as we see now, with queer creators honing their unique sensibilities to change how queer characters are written, we see similar steps going forward for other marginalized communities. We already see the budding start of that with Quinni, played by one of the first Australian autistic actors. Let’s get trailblazing.
