THE LAST OF US
Queer love for a long, long time
NIC CROSARA EXAMINES THE POWER OF LGBTQIA REPRESENTATION ON HBO’S ‘THE LAST OF US’
I’ve always been a hopeless romantic with a bordering on unhealthy obsession with the romcom genre. When I was younger, I’d fall asleep while rewatching favourites: While You Were Sleeping, 13 Going On 30 and The Notebook. My bookshelves are full of tomes of every romance trope, my favourite being grumpy/ sunshine. It’s no surprise that – like many lovers of meet-cutes, grand gestures and confessions of the heart – I’ve always daydreamed about and longed for a lifelong love story of my own. But when your formative years take place in the 90s and 00s, the epic romantic stories that mainstream media reflects back to you are ones of compulsory heterosexuality.
Onscreen LGBTQIA representation has come a long way since I was coming of age. There is now an abundance of queer shows and films at my fingertips and my shelves are filled with queer lit. However, by the time Netflix’s Heartstopper came out, my secondary school days were long gone – my sexuality and gender identity were repressed throughout. Perhaps because of the circles I ran in, The L Word had never been on my radar and so, unlike many of the queer peers I’ve met in adulthood, I never had the queer experience of secretly watching the show in my bedroom. If these stories had existed in my life when I was younger, I know it would have looked very different.