How Good It Can Be, or Watching Heartstopper

As we get ready to see the second season of Heartstopper, I remember how struck I was by my reaction to Season 1 - not least, because it made me joyful that I was (am) aging. 

This is a hell of a show for a middle-millennial queer. I have now become old enough to say sentences like ‘this show would not have existed when I was a teenager’. One of the more irritating criticisms of Heartstopper is that it’s too much of a fantasy. I’ll concede that it might seem fantastical partly because it contains a number of moments that my generation is not used to seeing in a television show, or, in fact, in our real lives. 

You always remember when you were the youngest generation. The thing about being the youngest generation - which millennials have not been in some time, now - is that you are often the most progressive. This is why Heartstopper shows me that it’s good that I’m aging. It turns out, the experience of youth for millennials was not that progressive. It turns out our bar was so low, and we thought it was so high. Sure, I remember when marriage equality was legalized and we thought we’d solved everything for queers in North America. But, I also remember a friend of mine recounting a story he heard in the Gay-Straight Alliance at his university, in which someone in the club shared that upon coming out, their father threw them through the window of their living room. That kind of story was familiar, even in my progressive bubble. 

In Heartstopper, Charlie’s father worries for him, drops him off and picks him up at parties, and holds him when he cries. It surprised me how surprised I was to see a heterosexual dad lovingly touch his gay son, in a show aimed at, and rated for, an adolescent audience. When Nick comes out to his mother as bisexual, among her first words are “thank you for telling me” and “I love you”. She reminds him that he doesn’t have to say he likes girls if he doesn’t actually like them, and asks him how long he’s known. Gone are the questions and comments I’m used to as a bisexual, like am I sure, do I prefer one, which one would I prefer to marry, or my personal favourite, “I just have a feeling you’ll end up with a man” (I mean, maybe, but who cares?) Nick’s mum, by contrast, is just emotionally prepared for the truth. And, she is emotionally prepared not to give her opinion. Parents of Gen Z and below have done some work to raise the bar, as well.

I’ve been podcasting for a number of years with a dear friend who has officially retired from watching sad coming out stories. What he always says is, “show me how good it can be.” Hearstopper shows me how good it can be. I re-watched Nick’s coming out scene over and over like someone who had never experienced dopamine before.

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That’s not to say that homophobia and transphobia don’t leer over the show, two pale, threatening wraiths in the midst of all that pastel. We’ve got Harry (“the lads can see it’s just banter”), a teacher who we never meet (“you know Mr. Reed was still refusing to call her ‘Elle’?” - “yeah, Mr. Reed’s a massive transphobe”), and even Imogen (“I’m not, like, homophobic. I’m an ally.”) to round out the varying shades of these prejudices. (As a side note, I’m-An-Ally Imogen turns out to be a tip-top character).

This is one of the reasons why Hearstopper does not feel like a complete fantasy to me. The knife point of this kind of hatred presses against the colourful fabric of this story. The first time I watched the show, I thought of every uniformed, closeted boy in every grainy novel-turned-BBC-drama I’d seen, ones who’d snuck around and been ashamed, ones who’d hanged themselves, ones who had been repressed and avoidant - and of the men who had written them based on their own experience. All of those boys and young men are in the room with Charlie, Nick, and Ben. I suspect that the show knows this. Charlie even has a Brideshead Revisited poster on his wall. Heartstopper gives these ghosts some love. 

It’s not just Charlie and Nick, though. When we see Elle for the first time, sitting alone in a busy lunch room at an all-girls school, the stakes of being an out trans girl in a girls-only space are in the room with her. When Tara deletes comments on her coming out post on Instagram, these comments say things like “you don’t look like a lesbian” and “you’re too hot to be a lesbian” - but the comments that are more violent and repellant than this are already in our imagination. We know that they’re there. For both these young women, in their different lived experiences of queerness, we understand that the threat of violence is ever-present.

One moment in which the show delicately frames homophobia, in a way that is so true to life that many viewers I’ve talked to haven’t noticed it, is when Tara, Darcy, Nick, Charlie, Elle, and Tao, are walking along the river to the concert in episode six. The gay couple and the lesbian couple are staring at their partners adoringly, but do not touch. They are not holding hands, they are not arm-in-arm. At the back, the two straight best friends, a young man and a young woman, are walking along with their arms around each other - one of them even says I love you - because it is unequivocally safe for them to do this. Fantasy? This moment is practically documentarian.

(It’s important to note that some binary trans folks do resonate with the label queer, and some don’t. I chose, in this example, not to refer to Tao and Elle as a queer pairing. If Elle was a real person, it would behoove us to ask her if she’d apply the word queer to herself. Right? Right).

I suspect that one of the other reasons that Heartstopper is dismissed by some people as a fantasy is because there is no explicit sex. It’s worth noting that casting teenagers as teenagers in a show about romantic or sexual relationships opens up some tricky ethical situations. A number of actors working on Heartstopper are recent adults or still minors, so it is a relief to me that explicit sex scenes are not being asked of them. Television, and the entertainment industry as a whole, doesn’t have the best track record of creating respectful, safe stagings of intimacy for adults, let alone people who are legally children. They’re young: they deserve to explore sex somewhere other than at work, in front of a camera and under the direction of adults, with an onslaught of social media evaluations to follow.

That said, I don’t know that sex is all that absent from Heartstopper. When Charlie and Nick make out on a bedroom floor, they are still, you know, making out on a bedroom floor. When Tara kisses Darcy in the music room, the latter’s response is a breathy “you seem gay enough to me”, as Sir Babygirl bounces away in the soundtrack with she left her name on my lips/I don’t think I’ll ever get over her hips. I assumed, as the viewer, that these scenes had as much to do with sex as they did with romance. These moments do not feel like they preclude sex, and the tone, while soft, does not feel so outlandish to me. Some of us were teenaged squares who moved really slowly, like these characters do, even if our sex drives were going off like an alarm clock left unattended.

Outside of the question of whether or not this is true-to-life, there is also the consideration that queer people are often sexualized in a negative way. Each identity has its own particular debasements attached to it; the gay-people-are-animals trope tends to be the one that follows gay and bisexual men around. Charlie and Nick deserve a dreamy romance, if for no other reason than the existence of that type of homophobia. We all deserve - our youth deserve - as much dreamily romantic media as we can get, frankly.  

It is tragic that we must assume that a show in which queer youth are joyful, mostly safe, and discovering sex and romance on their own terms (whatever those might be), must be a fantasy. If it is fantasy, show me how good it can be. Show me.

But truly, what my hot take is, is that queer youth deserve more than one type of media. They deserve both Heartstopper and Euphoria. They deserve to have media that reflects them back to themselves, with their grittiness, their dreaminess, the threats made to their selfhood, the joys of the actualization of that selfhood. Cishet youth certainly already have these things in spades.

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I had the fun of being introduced to Heartstopper right before its popularity really went wild. It was still a little corner of Netflix that you could stumble upon by happy accident. It was also a unique time for me, personally, because I was quite pregnant.

My choice to become a parent was intentional, and occurred through a known donor, my close friend who is also queer. As a single parent by choice, I experienced most of my pregnancy alone, working remotely in my apartment with my cats, counting down to my parental leave.

Being a nonbinary parent can be challenging. It is tempting to go into the ins and outs of how I feel about my own gender, and how it feels to be in parenthood where the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ don’t quite apply to you. I’ll keep it short: because I haven’t undergone any gender affirming hormonal treatments or surgeries, I discovered how many people in my life either forgot or blocked that I was nonbinary, until they were faced with the fact that I wasn’t a mother. Admittedly, existing with the level of cis privilege I have is just that, a privilege. I was still devastated.

There are lots of subtleties to this but, suffice to say, I was delighted to be pregnant (the slow death by vomiting of the first and second trimesters notwithstanding), and I was and am delighted to be a parent.  But I also suffered mentally and emotionally in trying to dodge the blinding searchlight of other people’s projections. Queer parenthood, it turns out, is still a radical act. It’s unpleasant to be the radical act. This is especially true when whatever it is you’re doing feels normal. I often feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. This sentiment is melodramatic, maybe, but it is nonetheless how it feels. I am often lonely, exhausted, and feel utterly out of place.

And so, it was in this unruly time in my life that Nick, Charlie, Elle, Tao, Tara, Darcy, and Isaac arrived. 

Heartstopper proposes that queer people are normal. It was a good time for this to be proposed to me. 

My late pregnancy and postpartum sometimes come back to me in a Heartstopper-themed supercut. There was the first watch. After being introduced by a friend (my large belly pinning me to her bed as we both watched on her laptop), I went home, gave into temptation, and texted to ask if I could finish it without her. Another snapshot of me, my belly, and my two cats lying in my bed in the dark, basking in the glow of the last few episodes. And then, bouncing on my exercise ball, trying to make myself go into labour, for the entirety of my third re-watch. Then, after being finally cleared to walk after giving birth, strapping my kid to my chest and walking to buy the graphic novels that the show is based on, as my first outing of more than half a block. I read some parts of the graphic novel aloud to my tiny infant, their little eyes gazing up at Charlie and Nick’s faces. Then, the re-watch to specifically help write this essay, in between the baby’s wake periods just before their 4-month sleep regression, hoping the laptop screen wouldn’t wake them up in the dark. Then there was the re-watch when my kid was about seven months old, when Tara saying “I just wasn’t prepared for everyone to treat me like a completely different person” reminded me so strongly of becoming a parent that I cried (there are a lot of parallels to coming out, truly). And then, most recently, re-watch eight or nine to get ready for season two, my 13-month old baby snoozing in their crib at the end of the bed.

One of the most interesting - on balance, one of the things I liked the most - about late pregnancy and early postpartum is how heightened my emotions were. Postpartum in particular reminded me of being a teenager again. I imprinted on media I consumed during this time, in the same way I did when I was in my teens. Heartstopper was there, holding my hand, telling me I was normal - that in our teens, our parenting years, our child-free by choice adulthoods, our chosen family and family-of-origin constellations, our old age, queer people are normal and whole.

I think a common refrain for many adult Heartstopper fans has been ‘this is the show I needed when I was younger’. I wonder how my first experience of dating a woman, of my early experiences of extricating myself from womanhood, would have been different if I’d had Heartstopper then. I wonder if I would have been a kinder, more articulate person.

An idea that was introduced to me - and academic one, I think - that intersects with queers is that of temporal theft. I’m no academic, but temporal theft is basically what it sounds like. Time is stolen from queer people who go through queer self-discovery later, after their adolescent years, either when they have the language or when it’s physically safe for them to do so. Time was stolen from me, certainly. I finally had the chance to confirm when I had long-suspected about my sexuality in my mid-twenties, and finally had the language to express how I felt about gender in my late twenties. 

Heartstopper allowed me to grieve the time that was stolen from me. So, even if I didn’t have this new kind of youth, I hope someone does. 

I’m just old enough to be a very young parent to the Heartstopper characters. Simultaneously, I have grieved and felt new affection for myself as a teenager in identifying with these characters - just as I have felt excitement for my own child’s future, for their youth, and the responsibility of giving them space for joy. 

Again, Heartstopper made me realize how good it is to grow up and watch young people not be robbed of their time for self-disovery - even if the only real change is a television show that gives us a window into what is possible.

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It is not an easy world, still, for queer people. Heartstopper is wise because it refuses the burden of representation: it does not try to be all of us. It exists to show queer joy. That’s it. The creators of the show stay in their lane. This narrative does not try to be every narrative. Nonetheless, it is important to touch on these narratives and realities, because while I think Heartstopper is true-to-life, it is certainly a fantasy in the sense that it is out of reach for many of us. And, what these characters experience is not the end-goal of liberation that many of us are trying to achieve. It is foolish to assume that everyone’s idea of liberation looks the same, because we are not all operating from the same context.

Indeed, the rabid legacy of colonialism has wreaked havoc on the inherent queer identities of many cultures, cultures that had third and fourth genders, and more fluid understandings of sexuality and relationships than European cultures do. In the so-called Americas, Indigenous queer identities survive in spite of the congoing onslaught of colonial violence. In Canada, where I live, despite the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969 and legalizing marriage equality in 2005, Christian conversion therapy only became illegal in 2021. I would hazard a guess that such a service still exists and that it has gone underground. In an increasing number of states in the US, transgender children and teens cannot access gender-affirming medical care or education. Depending on which state they live in, their parents cannot support them in pursuing this, since it will risk intervention by child welfare services on the grounds of abuse. In some states, gender-affirming care is banned altogether, regardless of age. Homosexuality is punishable by death in over 60 countries in the world. Existing as trans is specifically targeted by law in 14 countries, but punishable under other laws (hooliganism, vagrancy) in many - most - others. In the UK, where Heartstopper takes place, hate crimes against people on the LGBTQ+ spectrum are on the rise.

I do not think that these are all truths that Heartstopper should have contained. But we fail to contextualize any queer story if we praise it blindly. This story is worthy of praise - and also the queer experience is not limited to a group of middle class teenagers having the space to fall in love. Nor is that the epitome of queer liberation. 

There are other stories to tell. It is tempting to say that progress will lead us to a world where stories of racialized queer people, of working class queer people, of identities on the LGBTQ+ that are generally ignored in our collective storytelling, are frequently told and heard - but progress is, arguably, a myth. If it isn’t a myth, I would advise you to check in on progress, because she’s not doing great. We have to fight for these stories to be told and heard with the same resources that Heartstopper has at its disposal. For a long time - probably for the rest of my life - it will be too early to go home in the fight for this, just as it looks like it is too early to go home on queer rights for some time to come. 

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There are so many things that I like about this show. It’s been tempting to itemize them all by episode (okay, I did make that list). As I said, for these characters - and I hope some of the real life that they reflect - the bar is so much higher than it is for me. One of the things I love the most about both Charlie and Elle’s characters is their self-possession. Whether it is Charlie taking a deep breath and walking into the boy’s locker room for rugby practice, or Elle taking a deep breath and walking through the Truham gates holding hands with her friends, these characters behave like they have a right to exist. I still struggle with that in my thirties. 

Of course, what I want is for the bar to keep going up. I hope that when my kid (now almost fourteen months old) watches Heartstopper, they think it looks dated, in whatever ways it inevitably will as time marches on; I hope teenagers watching it now will show it to their children and say I know it won’t pack the same punch for you, but this was a really big deal for me. What a relief to know that time marches forward, and, maybe, hopefully, the bar will keep going up. 

But we’re not there yet. For the time that we are in: show me how good it can be.

I wish you all very happy multiple viewings of Heartstopper Season 2.