"Heartstopper and Queer Optimism" Transcript

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(This transcript was created from the original script uploaded as closed captioning. Differences where James skipped overdiverged from the script are highlighted.)

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So I’ve been reading a lot of queer YA books over the last few years. I didn’t know the genre even existed until the movie Love, Simon came out. I ordered the book its based on, Simon and the Homo Sapian Agenda, from Amazon and then suddenly my suggested feed was filled with gay YA from authors like Rainbow Rowel, Alex London, Shaun David Hutchinson, and Caleb Roehrig.

So, I started plowing through this small library of queer YA books, diving ever deeper into a world where amazingly complex thriller-type plots happened in the lives of gay teenagers. Ah, what an uneventful life I had led.

Of course there were plenty more… “slice of life” books about queer teens discovering themselves and going on to have these perfect little relationships and these perfect little lives. Which I’ve become unable to read lately because my brain just can't process that amount of fantasy anymore. Witches, warlocks, and magic rings are one thing. But perfectly happy queer people? My suspension of disbelief can only go so far.

And while becoming an expert on gay YA, Amazon continually recommended I read Heartstopper by Alice Oseman. But I couldn’t bring myself to order it because I just had no interest in reading graphic novels that weren’t about superheroes. I have nothing against comic books, I have a shelf filled with thousands of dollars worth them, but I just didn’t see how anything but superheroes, and maybe the odd Saga, could work as a comic book.

And then I discovered manga. And so thanks to the black and white art of No. 6, Demon Slayer, and Attack on Titan, my appetite for comics not trying to look like Jim Lee drew them began to grow. And then I saw the trailer for the Netflix adaptation of Heartstopper and gave in. I went to my local bookstore and bought the three volumes they had in stock. Unbeknownst to me that a Volume 4 exists, which I couldn't find anywhere but stumbled across at Toys R’ Us of all places.

So what is Heartstopper? It’s a comic book, originally published as a web toon, about two queer teenagers, Charlie and Nick, who find themselves falling in love with each other despite Nick being presumed straight by everyone in their school. He’s bisexual, by the way. Dorky Charlie gets to date rugby-playing Nick… which is beyond a gay wish fulfillment fantasy… but I couldn’t stop reading it because it was just so damn cute and innocent.

Spoilers ahead, by the way.

Like I said, I’ve read a lot of gay YA. But plenty of those books dealt heavily with homophobia, conversion therapy, violence, and even murder. Like most of the books I read.

So I was honestly caught off guard by the simple purity of Heartstopper. It’s a testament to Oseman’s writing that they managed to make a story as innocent as this, and yet completely un-put-down-able. I think a big part of it, as least for me, is that the characters aren’t obsessed with jumping into bed together as soon as they start dating. A lot of queer YA features some very horny protagonists, which is fine, but I never got laid as a teenager so it just comes across as forced, at least to me. While Charlie and Nick get their kicks from just hugging and kissing each other.

This may come from Oseman being aromantic and asexual, and so they’re not trying to make up for their lost years as a horny teenager who missed out on all the sex that we’d been promised by shows like Gossip Girl and 90210. Do people even know what 90210 is anymore?

But the story isn’t completely void^{[sic: devoid]} of tension. Our main characters do deal with real life problems that do effect plenty of people in the real queer community. Homophobia, fear of coming out, being unsure of their sexuality, and even eating disorders.

The main character, Charlie, has developed anorexia over the last couple of years because, while his life seemed to spin out of control after being outed, how much he ate seemed like the one thing that he could fully control. Which spiraled into very unhealthy eating habits, and then barely eating at all.

And while, in Charlie’s case, the eating disorder grew out of a need for a sense of control, in real life eating disorders run rampant in the gay male community. Since all of our role models tend to be actors and singers brave enough to come out, we tend to idolize people who also have personal trainers, dieticians, and talented airbrush artists who can make them look their best whenever they’re shirtless. And who starve and dehydrate themselves for days before a photoshoot to make sure they look as ripped as possible. It’s an ever-growing problem in the queer community, especially for queer men, that I’m probably going to make a video about at some point because I absolutely have body image problems.

One of my favorite things about Heartstopper (the graphic novel) was that at one point our main duo go to the beach with friends and Nick, the rugby playing heart throb, is drawn to have a little bit of a belly. Or at least isn’t shredded like he walked out of an episode of Riverdale. That’s when I realized that, though the author isn’t a gay man themself, they get it. Meaning they understood some of the most prominent issues boiling up in the gay male community besides coming out and homophobia. That, even for queer teenagers, there are a lot more issues they need to deal with. Hell, even for queer adults.

Something else that popped up during the course of the initial four volumes was that you never really get to stop coming out. Once Nick has realized he’s bisexual, he has to come out multiple times for multiple people. Friends, family, acquaintances, teachers. Which is something a lot of queer media doesn’t really deal with. We don’t come out once, have a big revelatory moment of “I’m queer!” And then it’s over and done with. We come out over and over again throughout our lives, and it doesn’t really get easier as you get older.

Sure the big stresses of coming out to your friends and family can be taken care of when you’re relatively young. But every time you make a new friend, get a new job, the coming out process happens all over again. And the anxiety of “How will this person react” continually rears its ugly head. Luckily in Heartstopper, pretty much every coming out situation that we see is a relatively positive one, since we’re only really seeing Nick come out. (Though his big brother is a bit of a dick.)

But throughout we’re not given the impression that coming out is all candy and roses for everyone. Charlie’s coming out was rough. He was accidentally outed by a friend instead of making the decision for himself, and the resulting bullying has left him with no small amount of trauma associated with it. Even going so far as to hurt himself.

And again, Heartstopper manages to remain sweet, while dealing with topics like self harm, because it was, for the most part, in the past. We meet Charlie after things have gotten better for him, though the scars, both mentally and physically, still remain. So Oseman is able to acknowledge these traumatic parts of coming out… the bullying, the homophobia… without the sweet love story of these two boys becoming bogged down with it.

Though, even in the current timeline of the story, it doesn’t entirely back away from dealing with more serious issues. Once Charlie’s eating disorder has been discovered by Nick, he carefully attempts to help Charlie deal with it, but quickly realizes that he’s out of his depth when it comes to this kind of mental health situation. Charlie doesn’t want to talk to his parents about it because he’s convinced that they’ll think he’s just looking for attention but, with Nick’s help, does eventually talk to them and gets the help that he needs.

It’s not easy though. He actually enters a mental health institution once it's discovered that his anorexia has gotten so bad that he’s begun fainting. But we don’t dwell on this negativity. That’s not what Heartstopper is. Oseman isn’t writing a story about trauma, but a story about doing your best to live your life despite the trauma. Saying, yes, these things exist. Homophobia, eating disorders, mental health issues — they exist — and they need to be dealt with. But they don’t drag the reader through hell to establish this. And yet, it’s not sugar coated either: Charlie doesn’t finish his stint in the hospital and then suddenly his eating disorder is taken care of. It’s an active part of the story going forward, but not THE story going forward.

Something else I was surprised by was that Charlie’s whole story doesn’t revolve around Nick, as exemplified by his mental health issues. He’s also dealing with a strained relationship with his parents, especially his mother. And Nick’s story doesn’t revolve around Charlie. Nick is also dealing with the slow progression of his own friend group becoming more accepting. He’s dealing with a father who lives in another country and doesn’t make much of an effort to connect with his son. He’s dealing with a dickhead of an older brother. And both boys are dealing with school work and grades.

Heartstopper really started to remind me of an ongoing British television drama. Something that lasts for years where you can follow the characters across many story arcs, character progressions, and milestones in life. Instead of just being about a secluded period of time where “the story” takes place. Which is something you can actually do with ongoing media like comics or television. Forms of media that can focus more on character than anything else.

Where as^{[sic: Whereas]} movies and novels, for the most part, are focused on plots. Act structure: beginnings, middles, and ends. But comics give you more leeway. They also allow you to explore characters aside from the main pair. Heartstopper has a broad cast of characters including friends, siblings, parents, and teachers. And a lot of them, to my delight, were also queer.

Tara¹ and Darcy are a lesbian couple, and friends with Charlie and Nick. They start out as a safe space - Characters with whom Charlie and Nick can admit to being a couple while Nick figures out exactly how he’s supposed to come out. But as the story progresses we get to learn more about the pair. Tara is smart, emotionally solid, and comes from a loving home. While Darcy is chaotic and fun, but comes from a bad home life, where her parents verbally abuse her because of her sexuality and personality.

There’s also Elle, a trans girl who used to go to the same school as Charlie and Nick before transitioning and transferring to an all girls school. For the most part she’s portrayed as an upbeat, happy character, but through dialogue we do find out that she was mercilessly bullied after transitioning, and isn’t even able to visit her close relatives in Egypt because of the country’s laws regarding trans people.

And then there’s Ben, an asshole who used Charlie to get his gay kicks while being unwilling to come out of the closet himself. Emotionally abusive, toxic, and entirely full of himself, Ben is as close to a persistent antagonist as you get in Heartstopper. Even Harry, who initially bullies Nick and especially Charlie, comes around. But Ben just keeps on being a dick.

Ben actually shows up in other works that Alice Oseman has written as well. You see, Oseman has created their own universe of sorts, with multiple comics, novels, novellas, and short stories all taking place in the same world about different characters. Such as Solitaire, Radio Silence, I Was Born for This, and This Winter. Aspects from each work overlap into the others, but never take over the story.

This kind of reminds of me the many prime time soap spin offs of the 1980s, with characters from Dallas sometimes popping up on Knotts Landing, and characters from Dynasty finding their way into The Colby’s. (I thought the 90210 reference was dated.) Oseman is creating a sort of Marvel Cinematic Universe for queer British youth.

Anyway, all of this is to say that this weekend, on April 22 in the year 2022 to be exact, Netflix released the Heartstopper streaming series. Starring age-appropriate actors Joe Locke and Kit Conner as Charlie and Nick respectively. And trans actress Yasmin Finney as Elle. And the adorable sweetness of the comics has transferred perfectly over to the screen.

And this series, in my opinion, came at the absolute perfect time. Because the bigots aren't even trying to hide their hate anymore. They’re coming back out of their closets. As, I’m sure, you’re very well aware, several states across America have currently gotten into a ‘mood’ and have decided they’d like to go back to the 1970s (please and thank-you) and stop people from acknowledging the existence of queer people around, basically, anyone under the age of consent. And even then they’d like us to keep our queer mouths shut as much as possible.

On a similar keel, the UK is also engaging in heated discussions about trans rights, investing a great deal of political power in exempting trans identities from bills designed to protect other queer people. Why? Because we’re apparently unsafe to have around children. The more backward thinking people even think that we groom kids. That by allowing media to exist in a youth-friendly zone that doesn’t demonize queer characters, we are covertly warping their fragile little minds into thinking that they, themselves, are queer. Reminds me of something…

At a public hearing in Dade County, Florida, parents were enraged. The nation, they said, was in peril, and children were at risk. All because of the increasing rights of LGBTQ people in their communities. Well, not THEIR communities, they’d argue, but communities around them. Action had to be taken, and a campaign to limit the legal rights of LGBTQ people — all in the name of protecting children — was enacted. A woman who spoke at this hearing said it was her right to control “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up.”

The year was 1977 and that woman was Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma best known for her Florida orange juice commercials. Bryant spearheaded an anti-queer campaign of such impact that it still echoesits echoes can be heard in today’s rhetoric.

[Quote displayed on screen:]

“It’s a contemporary version on these older attempts to annul homosexuality,”

said Lillian Faderman, author of ‘The Gay Revolution.’

“In the present environment, you can’t go after homosexual teachers anymore. We have too many allies. And so Florida has found another way to do it by this ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which doesn’t go after homosexual teachers precisely. But the idea is the same. That is, that homosexuality is a pariah status, and it shouldn’t be discussed in the public schools.”

When Bryant began her campaign in 1977, she had four children, and often said she was speaking as “a mother and a Christian.” And while the villainization of queer people was not new, Bryant took the idea of protecting children from us and made it mainstream. Her campaign and the subsequent “Save Our Children” political coalition used the argument that:

“homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit.”

I want to know what pills these people are popping. If we actually had the power to turn people gay do you think for a second we wouldn’t have abducted Chris Evans and forced him to watch Death Becomes Her on a loop, like Clockwork Orange style by now?

[Meme cutaway, demonstrating the above]: “En garde… BITCH.”

Anyway.

Opposition to Bryant’s campaign, and the anti-gay bills across America that ended up passingbeing passed because of it, led to a rise in queer activism.

“The thing to remember is that Anita Bryant won that battle initially, but she did not win that war,”

said the historian Julio Capó Jr.

“It was transformative. It got people to see themselves as a voting bloc. It got them to see that their very existence and their rights were very much under attack in a different way than we had seen in a decade prior.”

Though the times have changed significantly since Bryant’s heyday in the late ‘70s, it appears the views of her kind of bigot have not. From American suburbs to a castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, the close-minded still fight to restrict our rights.

Which is why I think this new Netflix show is so important. But before we get on our knees and praise Netflix to the high heavens for deigning to provide us with queer content, bear in mind that this is the same studio that aired Dave Chapelle’s comedy special that lacked for comedy but was abundant in hot takes that nobody asked for. And after refusing to remove the special, suffering employee walk-outs, and enduring an all-too-short-lived stretch of bad press, they signed Chapelle on for another multi-million dollar deal.

Which puts us, audiences and queer people, in a tough situation. The same situation we’ve been in since about the 1990s, give or take a decade. Is it worth a Dave Chapelle comedy special to get content like Heartstopper, Young Royals, and the relatively large library of queer content on Netflix?

From a business point of view, these queer shows are very popular on their own. Can we even make the argument that the subscribers brought in by Dave Chapelle are what fund these projects? Or are the queer shows what have given Netflix the money to be able to greenlight and buy up his specials? Let’s not forget that Orange is the New Black was one of Netflix’s first big hits.

Are we dependent on bigotry for our representation? Are we okay seeing the money we bring in be used to provide a platform for intolerance? Is Netflix just playing the field? One for us, one for them? Even that thinking is flawed. Bigotry doesn’t have a right to an equal platform with queer representation. Because queer representation seeks to promote and celebrate the existence of PEOPLE — bigotry seeks to limit and revoke the freedoms of those people. One group of people wants to exist in peace — the other wants that first group to not exist at all.

Advancing the progress of queer rights will not hurt anyone. Advancing the rights of bigotry will hurt people. Advancing both at the same time will result in a reduction of rights, freedoms, and safety for queer people — which is why bigots invent arguments that claim that the queer agenda is out to disrupt social spaces.

And this just happens to be the political landscape we’re currently living in. And because we’re giving airtime to both groups, it makes sense that queer rights are losing ground.

And not to be an alarmist, but we ARE losing ground. Conservatives are successfully banning the existence of queer people from anywhere children exist, and people who have convinced themselves that they’re feminists want to erase the existence of trans people from… well, existence. So for a show to come out directed toward teens and preteens that shows queer characters as, not only human beings, but normal human beings… with normal problems. With friends and families who care about them. Gay teens, bisexual teens, trans teens, lesbian teens. This feels like a big deal.

The producers probably didn’t think it would be as big a deal as it is when they first bought the rights, all the way back in 2019, but it is. What could have been just a cute little show about queer teens living their lives has inadvertently become a middle finger to the bigots stretching their arms across the US and the UK.

Heartstopper is sweet, adorable, sometimes painfully corny, and exactly what we need right now. Between this and Our Flag Means Death, I’m actually starting to have hope in Western Media’s portrayals of queer characters. Let’s keep this trend going and put the bigots back in the closettheir closets.