As the second season of Heartstopper begins to reach millions of screens around the world, PatrickStrud asks how many more decades before young people don’t have to come out because the closet no longer exists?
From inside the closet — or the coffin I should say — we hear the voices of bigotry, the assumptions plastered all around about who we should be, and cannot fight back or speak out. If subject to bullying, violence, or sexual violence it ensures our silence and protects our abusers. What a perfect tool for oppression. Yet we’re supposed to cheer that children are breaking out of this? I’ll celebrate when there’s nothing left of the closet from which to escape.is that it’s a heartbreaker.
I’ve been too harsh in the past about what I’ve seen as the moral imperative for LGBTQ people to come out, believing that it remains at this point the most effective tool for changing minds and structures. The problem is this argument places responsibility on the individual. Where is the discussion about the collective responsibility of wider society to start demolishing the closet itself?
If somebody had told me when I came out at my comprehensive in 1991, aged 14, that over the next 30 years we would see an astonishing array of legal and political developments, fromand adoption to the Equality Act, the end of Section 28, a lifting of the ban on LGBT people in the military and in diplomacy, I would have struggled to believe it. Because at the time, all I saw looming was darkness: no chance of marrying, no protection from the state, just discrimination and violence.
But what I did think was that life for kids like me would somehow get much easier. Thirty years on, to witness LGBTQ teenagers still being bullied, still terrified, still suicidal, still having to puncture suffocating assumptions, is to want to scream why is this still happening? You can trace this stasis on screen. In the 1990s, we had coming-of-age British gay dramas like
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