Queer Temporality and the Bittersweet Pleasures of "Heartstopper"

The hit Netflix series is a source of mingled pleasure and pain for many of its fans.

Queer people have a vexed relationship with temporality. Throughout our lives, we’re told our lives will (or at least should) follow a fixed trajectory: find a spouse, have some kids, buy a house, settle down into peaceful domesticity. This is, after all, the American ideal, the thing we should all aspire to. For many, however–particularly in the years before the national legalization of same-sex marriage in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges–that was nothing more than a dream, a phantasm, something that straight people did but which was almost forever out of reach. 

Generations of queer people have existed in this fraught relationship to hetero-reproductive temporality. Some have yearned for it with a desire bordering on pain, looking with naked longing at the life they would probably never have. Others have turned their backs on it, saying in effect: “well, if I’m going to be denied this, then I don’t want it anyway.” And, for many of the latter, this is a political act, a means of fighting back against the tyranny of hetero(and homo)normativity. Even so, there’s often no hiding the pain that comes from this gesture, precisely because it makes so many queer people outsiders, always looking in at a world they can never have.

I thought about this as I sat and watched Heartstopper, the touching, warm, and irresistibly charming teen drama series from Netflix. Based on the (increasingly popular) series of graphic novels by British writer Alice Oseman, it follows Nick and Charlie–a popular rugby player and a shy, self-effacing musical artist–as they strike up first a friendship and then a romance.  With each episode, we see their love for one another grow deeper and richer, even as they have to contend with the usual misunderstandings and angst that always accompany young love.

Like many other gay men of my generation and older, I loved the series, but I also couldn’t help but feel some ambivalence as well. I want to rush to assure you, however, that this has nothing to do with the show itself. In fact, I found it to be one of the most refreshingly honest takes on queer teen love I’ve ever seen, with characters who felt real and authentic. Instead, my ambivalence, as is so often the case, is a temporal one. When I see Charlie and Nick, I think about their experience–finding love at a young age and having that love returned–I can’t help but be reminded that, much as I might wish it were otherwise, that experience will never be mine. 

Much as I might think of myself as essentially a teenager stuck in a 38-year-old’s body, the truth is that I am now within spitting distance of 40. Though I still fall in love at the drop of a hat (my partner likes to say that I always want to marry my friends), I’m not quite the same person I was when I was 13. For that matter, the inescapable reality is this: because time runs only one way, I can never go back and re-experience those moments. There will never be–can never be–a teenage love for me of the sort that Nick and Charlie share. 

Part of this had to do with the time and place in which I grew up. As I wrote a few weeks ago in my essay on the series’ powerful portrayal of queer intimacy, I just didn’t have what it took to come out in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s in my small West Virginia town. More to the point, while I, like Nick and Charlie, had someone that I loved deeply and passionately, I decided not to risk our friendship by telling him how I truly felt. Whether or not that was the right thing to do has haunted me ever since, a perpetual “what if?” that I can never fully shake. 

As a result, I missed out on one of the most taken-for-granted aspects of straight dating life: having a true high school sweetheart. Oh, sure, I dated girls, but I think both they and I knew the truth: I just wasn’t that into them. I dated girls because that was what I was supposed to do, and I even managed to convince myself that I was biseuxal (a not uncommon phenomenon and one of which I am not at all proud). In the end, though, the truth was that I was a young gay man pining after my best friend.

All of which is a long way of saying that I’m envious of what Nick and Charlie get to have. Yes, yes, I know. They’re fictional characters, and it’s a little weird to be jealous of people who don’t exist. At the same time, when I look at them, I see a past that might-have-been but which will never be. It’s a rather curious mental space, to be sure, but I know it’s one that is fairly common among gay men who have found themselves falling in love with this series. Like me, they can’t help but be envious, not only that they didn’t have a series like Hearstopper when they were young but that they, for a variety of reasons, didn’t get to live the life that Nick and Charlie do. 

As a result, many older queer viewers find themselves caught up in yet another strange temporal relationship. While they’re happy for young queer people today–who not only get to experience love but can see themselves represented on-screen–they also can’t help but be aware of what they have lost and which can never be regained. I’ve seen countless stories on social media of those looking back with longing at their past selves, wondering how the trajectory of their lives might have been different had they lived in a more forgiving society or been lucky enough to have a show like Heartstopper to inspire them, to remind them that it gets better. As is so often the case with queer folks, pleasure is always leavened with pain.

At the end of the day, however, I still take a great deal of pleasure in Heartstopper. It is, as many commentators have pointed out, a celebration of queer joy, a powerful reminder to queer youth everywhere–and to their elders–that the future is often brighter than we might think. In these troubled and ominous times, such a reminder is more valuable than ever.