A LONELY LOOK AT "HEARTSTOPPER"

It filled my heart to the brim, seeing these queer kids find such a happy love.

You can say what you want about Heartstopper. Yes, the Netflix series is a little corny: popular rugby star Nick falls for nerdy gay outcast Charlie. But despite the clichés, Heartstopper has an iron grip on the hearts of queers everywhere. More than a few of my friends are fans of the show. A number of them have seen it three or four (or ten) times over. One even has a Heartstopper tattoo. And who am I to judge? I think Heartstopper is delightful.

I first watched the show over the summer, and I was immediately entranced. Nick and Charlie are precious; they’re doe-eyed and awkward, trying and failing to hide their crushes on one another. It’s the archetype of a sweet, mushy high school love story. It filled my heart to the brim, seeing these queer kids find such a happy love.

But it wasn’t just the cuteness that drew me in; it was the familiarity. When we first meet fourteen-year-old Charlie, he’s quietly lonely. As the only openly gay kid in school, he mills about his life without anyone who really gets what he’s going through. He just wants to be seen. One day, as Charlie eats lunch alone in a classroom, his teacher asks why he doesn’t confide in his friends. “They’re not gay,” Charlie says, defeated. “They won’t understand.”

When I was fourteen, my friends weren’t gay either. We were stereotypical fourteen-year-olds: we wanted to be pretty and popular and, above all, normal. We didn’t talk about queerness, except to make jokes about the few openly gay kids in our school. Two of my friends had an ongoing joke where they would pretend to make out. “We’re lesbian lovers,” they would say, laughing. I knew I was queer by then, but I kept it to myself. I couldn’t tell anyone; It wasn’t worth it. 

While keeping up the facade for my friends, I longed for someone I could be myself around. I fell into deep crushes on people I didn’t even know: a cute boy on the frisbee team, a pretty girl in biology, the mysterious older kids in the musical. I imagined that each of them might be the person who would save me from my loneliness. Who would get me.

Charlie articulates this longing perfectly. When his sister asks about his dream boy, his response is simple: “Someone I can have a laugh with. Who’s nice and kind and likes being with me.” 

This longing is complicated, though. It’s a cruel paradox: you want a partner to cure your otherness, but the shape of your longing is what othered you in the first place. Your attraction is weird and confusing and different from everyone else's. You flounder towards some place of solace, only to find that you don’t know what it looks like. You’re afraid of what you’re reaching toward.

In Heartstopper, though, Charlie isn’t afraid to reach. When he meets Nick, he shows up as his authentic self. He opens himself up to the possibility of being seen. And then, at last, Nick sees him. It’s deeply comforting to watch Nick and Charlie find safety in each other. It creates the possibility of the high school experience I wish I’d had, one where I could be authentic—maybe facing judgement for being queer—and have it be worth it. That possibility comforts a younger version of myself who thought it might never be okay.

But at the same time, the possibility is heartbreaking. It means my high school loneliness wasn’t inevitable; maybe I could have found some peace if I’d been brave enough to try. But in most cases, queer high schoolers don’t find that person who saves them. Most of the time, the cute rugby player doesn’t like you back. It’s an almost-universal condition of queer youth: falling for the straight, popular kid who will never return your feelings. I find some comfort in that inevitability. I know it’s not my fault.

But when it works out for Charlie, the paradigm is broken. It’s no longer universal; now, it’s just something that happened to me. In high school, I didn’t find solace in the cute frisbee boys and pretty biology girls. But in Heartstopper’s reality, I should have been able to. I just… couldn’t, somehow. 

It’s thoughts like this that make me feel lonely. And ironically, in lonely moments, I turn back to Heartstopper for comfort. I watch the sweet, lovey scenes over and over again, studying the way Nick and Charlie care for each other. Letting it wash over me. In those moments, I feel so close to the show, almost superimposing myself over the characters. The more intimately I know the story, the more I feel like I might be able to break off a piece for myself. It almost feels like a big warm bed to snuggle up in. Almost.  

At the end of the day, though, it isn’t. For all the comfort it provides, there’s an equal and opposite disappointment. The closer I get to the story, the more clearly I can see the gap between where I am and where I want to be. I want Heartstopper to soften my loneliness—to rub off on me even just a bit—but that solace is an asymptote. It can’t make me less alone, after all.

So where does that leave me? I’m thinking more about how to maintain a healthy relationship with Heartstopper—how to find comfort in the happy queer goodness without giving it too much weight. I’m also thinking about my relationship with loneliness. Yes, it’s unpleasant, but there are ways to soften the feeling: working on my coping strategies, talking to my therapist, and being more vulnerable with friends. Just talking about loneliness is sometimes enough to lighten it.

But maybe queer loneliness will never go away entirely. Maybe being queer is inherently a little lonely. My queerness will never be exactly the same as someone else’s. The more fully I inhabit myself, the more I can cherish all the little corners of my identity. With a fuller understanding of myself comes a fuller understanding of the ways I’m different from the people around me. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe I can just stay here, sitting with the loneliness.

AUTHOR: Liv Graner
ARTIST: Sydney Chon is a freshman at Brown from Houston, Texas. Right now, she is probably drinking an iced latte and FaceTiming her Pomeranian puppy.