This short story appears in the new issue of Canal, entitled ‘Dark Rooms’, alongside a bunch of amazing writers. Right up my street, and up yours too I hope. You can buy a copy here. It’s launching on Friday with a special show on Resonance FM at 8pm UK time, and if you want to hear me read the story, tune in! Lastly, as this is likely the last issue of ‘Huw Lemmey’s Utopian Drivel’ (wish I’d chosen another name) before Christmas, a reminder that you can buy a subscription as a gift for the friend who has everything, as well as supporting independent writers like myself. You don’t just get all my new pieces, but access to hundreds of essays in the archive. Bones festes to all of you!

What lamentable wretch am I, watching? A sinner, aye for sure. I hold myself to account, but with this cramped madness the fear of God leaves me. Man seems a good deal more fearsome, although I am not faithless. Yet. Each footstep upon the stair has become a fine wire fuse set to light me up like a petard at the city walls. I inspect the creak for familiarity; the lady of the house? The master? Those conscientious young maids, trustable and sturdy, yet not light of foot? The rougher footmen? Yet, thank God, not pursuivants and their men. Not yet.

In Rome, to perform my examen felt like a rich addition of routine to wrangle my disordered life. I was just a young man when I gave myself to the Jesuits, subject to all the sins of young men, and in Rome, where sin is but a quick currency. The streets were fast and busy, the yelling hawkers and vendors rising to the windows of the Collegium Romanum, where I took my study. Once down the stairs and passing among them, I felt opportunity pulling at the cuffs of my cassock. The teachings of our Father General, Ignatius Loyola, were like a balm placed over a furious rash of sin that spread across my mind. It made that rough sea tranquil. But now I ache for a spiritual storm, trapped here in this cold old cage, the north wind beating against its stone walls for now my third winter here.

My hide is a dank and dissolute hole, and it tests me. These brick walls sweat through the summer and freeze in the winter, but in no season betray a chink of light. There are no windows, and the air gets thick with dust and smoke. Yet it is a gift from the Lord to protect me, my armour. I can enter from a small bench built beside the inglenook fireplace. A wedge of wood can be removed from the arm, allowing the seat to be lifted. From there, I can squeeze myself in, dropping a few feet onto the bench on which I sleep. The seat is replaced, and I am gone, like a ghost into the walls. There is a desk, a bucket, a candlestick, and precious little else. It is not bright enough even to read my Exercitia spiritualia, but no matter, for I know it by heart. Above my head the steps lead from the hall to the chambers of my master’s family. It is not safe enough to take my own bedroom; if I am not offering Mass, or talking with them in their private rooms, here I am, in the dark, waiting, praying. Listening.

In Rome, I saw sin, I smelt it, I touched it in the streets, I tasted it in the taverns. But it is only here, in the dark, listening, that I finally got to know sin.

I am a priest, a true servant of our Lord, and there is a bounty upon my pelt. I know my name is written in their books, just as it is written in His. Across North Yorkshire, I am told, these schismatic brigands pace, with writ and warrant, although it might just as well be with dogs and horses. They had heard I, their renegade priest, had made landfall in Sussex. They had word I was travelling north. Their spies say Yorkshire. Well, so much is true, but as I enter my third year with this family, I remain undetained. My liberty is this prison, lodged between chimney and staircase.

That first winter I was awoken one night by footsteps overhead. I know not the time, but it must have been in the middle of the night. The whole house was asleep. The soft padding of the toes against the oak. Creaking. A door latch opening. The master’s chamber. His wife? Surely they are too old to share a marriage bed still. And yet? I stood on my bed and held my ear to the roof. Dust dropped down from between the floorboards, and I could make out the faintest illusion in candlelight. Not the master’s wife, but her maid, Sarah, followed by his lascivious noises. I am a priest, not a fool: you cannot make me doubt what I heard. First kissing, his old mouth against her young breasts. The wanton fool. And the sound, the sound she made when he sank his fat fingers into her cunt. To know sin.

I am here on account of his wife, not him. Does he love her, or humour her? Certainly they seem to live a happy life. Too happy. I can hear the raucous feasting they do on their high days, with guests drunk on wines from Spain and Italy, and music and laughing, and the smell of roasting beef filling my dark room. Too risky for me to come out. Christmas was a miserable time. They all come, my lord, my lady, their children, for every mass and service I lay out on the small altar in the attic room. They do all they are expected to, and take advantage of their regular confessions by filling their copybooks with their own exercises of sin in the gaps between. How can I tell her ladyship, after all they have given me? Our job, I remind myself, is to serve the sinful, and bring them closer to God. So I wait, ear to the floorboards, for him to defile his sacrament, week in and week out. He grunts when he finishes, and I return to sleep.

Some days, when it is quiet, when no guests are expected, my little door to the world is open, and me and my lady converse a while in her chambers. I hold my head to the window, and beyond those little diamonds of glass I see a cavalcade of the creation. Pinks, greens, reds, the world outside so fresh and fine with the spring. From my room I can hear the birds up the chimney. Birdsong, sweet perfumed blossom, and the bleating of lambs, all pass muted through the brickwork. I wish to taste their sweetness on my tongue. I return to my spiritual exercises.

I am glad I didn’t tell her. Spring is the sinner’s season. His Lordship had left for a new Parliament. Desperate to reconnect this dread chamber to the world, I used my knife to bore a hole. A small hole, into the riser of the stair. From it I could peep straight down the hallway on the second floor. Suddenly, a world opened up to me. Before, I had no appreciation of the workings of a house. Like a seminary, it has its rituals and routines, an opening up and a closing down, and from this tiny aperture opened up before me a whole theatre of family life. With her husband gone, the lady of the house turned it over. Footmen and maids and figures from the village I had never seen before were coming and going, sweeping out rooms, restuffing mattresses, fixing chairs and whitewashing walls. It was too risky for me to venture outside; each night, Sarah would bring me a jug of water and a jug of wine, a little food, some meat if I was lucky, and a new candle.

That night I hadn’t even gotten to sleep. Some minor transgression from my past gnawed at my soul, and I was accounting for it. The spring sunshine had released the smell of the oak from the floorboards, I remember that much. I lay there, shirtless, as I heard the unmistakable gait of her ladyship upon the stairs. As I went to my hole, and peered, I saw John, the second footman, waiting at the end of the corridor. I watched her approach to tell him his nightly duties. I watched him stuff his hands between her legs and begin to frig. I watched her drop to her knees and remove from his breeches a fine, stiff prick. I didn’t know it was possible to do as she did, less still that she seemed in thrall to it, bewitched even. He drops his britches and pulls loose his shirt, and stands there like a colossus looking down upon here as she slurps and laps in worship at his rod. His skin is firm and changed by the sun. Mine is white and cold to the touch in the dark. He whispers his secret liturgy to the stars beyond the window. Like an anchoress, I looked upon this black mass, but still, I knelt, I prayed.

They love God, not me. I merely remind them of him. Through a glass, darkly. At least that is my job. But perhaps my presence is as intermittent as his. I wonder if the good Lord took me in my sleep, whether they would ever remember me. Perhaps I am an anchoress. Perhaps this priesthole is my bed and my tomb. But they love God enough to love me, and hide me here, whispering in advance for the eternal repose of their soul, which they say they want, and for the return of a Catholic to the throne of England, which I know they want. That is a love to the point of death: theirs and mine. There is no authority to whom I can report their iniquity except the Lord himself, and as I have said, they are already his lovers.

What could I do? What can I do? I can only stay, and preach, and hope. And listen. And now, look. John again. Mid autumn. The harvest collected, new smells in the chimney, and an apple dropped with my food into my little cell. I am the heart of this home. I know of the sin before I hear the confession. The house beats and the heart feels it. John is addressing my Lordship. I can tell his tone is impertinent. Yet no flash of anger on my Lordship’s face. Perhaps improper? Does my Lord know? Is an adulterer confessing to an adulterer, like I, the confessor, confessed to my own confessor? Forgive me, my Lord, for fornicating with your wife? What is that curl of the lips? The laugh from my Lord. His hand on John’s ribs. John’s hips. John’s cock. I see. So it is; a home containing all the sins of the Decameron. And on the staircase, my Lordship bends himself, his breeches dropped to the floor, and right before my own little hole, a detestable sin of sodomy, the leering face of the lord, a hand gripping his cock, the sweat pouring across his fat belly, between his legs John’s barbarian balls, and through my hole a single shaft of light that illuminates my face as I hear the grunts and smell the sodomy and see the seed spilled on the ground.

But I too am a fugitive from God. A single shaft of light has penetrated this room, so unexpected, and something I tried to evade has found me in the darkness. So here, after mass, after the last fires have been raked out, after the windows are shuttered and the doors barred, in this house of good and faithful Catholic penitents, I lie, and I listen, and I taste, and I sin with myself.

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If you’d like to read more of my work, please do subscribe to this newsletter. It’s been going for five years, so there are hundreds of essays to read. Paid subscribers get access to the whole archive, and subscribing to independent substacks helps writers like me not just produce essays like this one, but realise larger projects like new books (*cough cough*). Why not start with this one, about the hit gay media phenomenon, Heartstopper?

The best thing about having deleted your twitter account years ago is that people just send you the bad tweets anyway. The ones you quit social media to avoid, like this tweet by manospheric titan and alleged people-trafficker and sex offender Andrew Tate, which has been bombarding my inboxes ever since.

“Let me make this loud and clear,” Tate states, “If you’re a straight man with a girlfriend in 2025, you’re gay.” On its face, it is, of course, an absurd articulation: a man having a girlfriend is probably one of the most reliable indicators of heterosexuality we have, although by no means foolproof. But to people who aren’t poisoned by the manosphere, or who aren’t also terminally online, its absurdity is almost funny, and absolutely tragic. Having a girlfriend makes you gay? Ok bro. I sleep in a big bed with my wife.

Yet this absurd formulation of what makes a man gay or not is pretty instructive of Tate’s ideology, and the poisonous appeal it has upon a small but significant number of mostly young men. It also says a lot about how society often uses homosexuality as a shorthand for talking about gender, and perhaps to avoid asking the more difficult questions.

A common response to Tate’s twin obsessions of cartoonish masculinity and violent misogyny is to claim he’s a closet-case. In fact, that’s a common response to a lot of men when they express homophobic opinions, or a disgust with femininity or womanhood: they’re overcompensating, because they secretly nurture their own homosexual desires that they can’t handle. I just don’t think that’s true, however. To homosexuals and to women, the idea that hating gays and women is somehow mutually exclusive with male heterosexuality is almost as absurd as Tate’s tweet. I sometimes think it’s passing the buck, as though homophobia wasn’t in the realm of straight society at all, but rather a gay-on-gay crime.

But it’s not. It’s very much a product of straight fears and preoccupations, one of which is a fear of the transgression of norms of gender expression. That’s a destabilising thing if you live in a culture where those norms seem to be working pretty much ok for you, and where you can see there’s still a long way to fall. Likewise, I think it would be absurd to suggest that the primary driver of transphobia is closeted trans people. These are heterosexual and cis gender anxieties, and nothing new: straight anxiety around shifting sex-gender norms is very much the history of homosexuality. In her book ‘A Short History of Trans Misogyny’, the historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes how, at the turn of the 20th century “in burgeoning cities of Western Europe and the United States, sexuality and gender had no major distinction from each other.” She quotes the contemporary trans writer Jennie June, who wrote that “Androgynes are murdered every few months in New York merely because of intense hatred of effeminacy instilled by education in the breasts of full-fledged males.” The relationship between trans misogyny and gay bashing is an intimate one without always having clearly delineated borders. The course of that long century that has followed has seen many changes around our readings of sexuality and gender, but the relation between the gay man and his proximity to femininity, both socially and in terms of identity, still lingers in both homophobic and transphobic attitudes.

An anxiety around what the presence of trans and gay people mean for your own sex-gender system, however, is not the same as being closeted. Of course, those anxieties can include a fear of identification. My personal feelings are that sexual desire is much more complicated, changeable and fluid than the identities we might adopt for social recognition. I imagine the number of people, both straight and gay, who have felt sometimes significant erotic or emotional drives that might more accurately be described as “bisexual” or “biromantic” are probably very high. I don’t think being a heterosexual who has considered fucking your own sex, and fantasised about doing it, makes you closeted. There’s no reason to think that Andrew Tate isn’t human like the rest of us, and may have reacted badly to the confusing recurrence of one of his gym bros in his midnight reveries. I just don’t think it follows that this makes him any more closeted than the rest of us, or explains how deeply he has invested in the anxiety as the centre of his ideology.

So what does he mean, then, when he says having a girlfriend in 2025 makes you “gay”? I’m sure Tate hates gay guys quite sincerely, but I think he hates women more, and his use of “gay” is a shorthand for something, to him, much worse than sodomy: proximity to womanhood. When he says that having a girlfriend makes you gay, what he means, at its heart, is that you’re a traitor to masculinity. In this ideology, the liberation of women has reached such an extent that, if you are able to attract and form a lasting relationship with a modern woman, you have fatally compromised in yourself what it means to be a real man. A real man simply would not be able to tolerate the damage that a 2025 relationship with a woman does to one’s psyche. And if you are not a real man, then what are you? Gay, so the theory goes. “Gay” here means exactly what it did in the school playgrounds of mine and Tate’s youth. “Gay” means bad, pathetic, exterior, failed, dissolute, and “gay” means “nearly woman,” too.

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The idea that women are sources of contamination for a solid masculinity has a long, noxious history. Perhaps some of the most similar ideological currents with which we might compare Tate’s belief are to be found in the fascist masculinities that emerged in Europe in the wake of the First World War, where a toxic combination of misogyny, trench-bound camaraderie, PTSD, post-war poverty, antisemitism and anti-communism led to new forms of intense masculinist ideology thriving in the rise of reactionary paramilitary movements, across Europe and especially in Weimar Germany. While this masculinism could trace some of its roots into the Wandervögel culture, a youth group movement that stressed nationalist, martial virtues and a return to nature, it found its most murderous expression in the Freikorps, the reactionary, fascist and neo-monarchist paramilitary organisations that emerged in the aftermath of the war. Within such organisations, women were often seen as at best distractions to the male warrior, and at worst contaminants, whose very presence might destroy the solidarity and brotherhood on which their war against modernity was founded. Hans Blüher, an early Wandervogel pioneer, would later write that “a Wandervogel seen with a girl would have been considered a decline in style, which would have spoiled the entire vagabond spirit in one fell swoop. It was as if the female sex did not exist for this youth; it was not even mentioned.”

The German sociologist Klaus Theweleit, whose book ‘Male Fantasies’ critically explores the sexual and gender attitudes of the Freikorps through their fiction and literature, traces the same currents into the Freikorps, many of whose troops had been Wandervögel. In his examination of how the potentially lethal, choking mud of the trenches became a metaphor for the contaminating, destabilising influence of communists, miscegenists, and modernity, Theweleit writes how, for the nationalist author, soldier and former Wandervogel Ernst Jünger, “representing interests, making compromises, negotiating, reaching goals in roundabout ways, planning for the long run, or taking both sides into account: all these methods are contaminated, at once male and female, in short, mire.” That sounds like a mire, a sloppy, filthy mud bath, but it also sounds like the vital qualities of a healthy adult heterosexual relationship: exactly the thing Tate warns his boys of. Theweleit perhaps put their ideology more succinctly a little later in the book when he stated that, for the men of the Freikorp, “Real men lack nothing when women are lacking.”

Tate’s tweet may lack the punch of Theweleit’s prose, but the meaning is essentially the same. An attitude more similar in tone and temperament to Tate is that of Ernst Röhm, the co-founder and leader of the Nazi Party’s S.A., the Brownshirts, a paramilitary group who became the notorious footsoldiers of streetfighting fascism and antisemitism. In a (perhaps apocryphal) comment on the sexuality of Adolf Hitler, he mocked his boss by saying “when they stand in the fields and bend down at their work so you can see their behinds, that’s what he likes, especially when they’ve got big round ones. That’s Hitler’s sex life.” So Hitler loved women with big asses, and compared to the men-only barrack rooms of his shock troops, you have to admit that’s pretty gay. It’s a joke with a long half-life: in 2011, stand-up comedian Steven Hughes took exception to the idea that gay men aren’t real men, aren’t tough. “They fuck men. That’s hardly gay… ‘yeah, you go and play with your girly tits, you fucking gaylord.’”

I should mention here, as chance would have it, both Blüher and Röhm were homosexuals, although neither would claim such a medicalised identity. But masculinism as an ideology isn’t limited to any sexuality, really. Women can be regarded as degraded sexual subjects, or degraded contaminants of a sexual subject. The point is, for masculinists like Röhm and Tate, women degrade men’s ability to be real men. Tate hates women, and he encourages his boys to hate women, to treat and regard them as not human. But whereas Tate might come from a lineage of fascist masculinists, he has developed and altered the ideological programme.

For the fascist masculinists, male-only association and the hatred and disgust of women served to strengthen the bond of the male as a soldier, a defender of European and national identity, and build a brotherhood capable of massive, eventually genocidal, violence. For Tate, hatred and disgust of women serves to isolate the young man away from any sense of community or shared bond. Tate’s model man is not the soldier, but the hustler, the entrepreneur. Where Röhm’s men were only to trust their comrades, Tate’s boys must trust no-one but themselves (and him). He is a pioneer of a new, neoliberal form of masculinist identity in which the only value is financial value, and it is through the stripping of communal bonds that power can be won. Fascist masculinists encouraged brotherhood, even a ‘Sacred Band of Thebes’ sexual brotherhood, using womanhood as one of many enemies over which to bond. Tate demands his boys form a brotherhood of one, a lone wolf Freikorps, with the whole world as his enemy, and women as the seductress and contaminator who will ruin his historical mission.

The reason is obvious. Lonely, isolated, fragile males are his customers. One could look deeper into his motivations, but I think the obvious one is the correct one. He doesn’t want his subscribers to form lasting, meaningful, mutual relationships with women, because men in those relationships have no need to subscribe to his schemes and scams. Sometimes more apologetic writers regard Andrew Tate as merely a symptom of a male loneliness epidemic. Perhaps, but more than a symptom, he’s a cause of it. He needs young men to struggle in isolation, and destroying ties of mutual trust and dependence keeps them coming back. That’s where the money is, and Tate is nothing if not a groomer. He knows young straight men want to have sex with women: so he needs to figure out a way they can do that without the dreaded outcome of regarding women as humans. That’s why it makes perfect sense, in his ideology, to depict having a girlfriend as gay, but to use women transactionally as sex objects is hyper-masculine.

Having dragged you all here with a provocative piece of clickbait for a title, I would feel remiss for not at least attempting to answer it. But I can’t. Is Andrew Tate gay? I don’t know, and I don’t care. What’s significant, I think, is that, from a historical perspective, it would be possible for him to be gay and a violent masculinist without contradiction, and we gay people should bear that in mind. What matters is that, to quote Forster, we connect, only connect. “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

But the more significant question is “what is to be done?” Whenever I hear Tate’s name, it’s usually accompanied by a whole host of well-meaning questions about which models of masculinity are positive ones for the sort of young men Tate is currently grooming. I know the sort of men I would want — for me, John Berger has long embodied a way of being a man in the world, as well as a thinker and writer, whom I would hope to emulate — and the sort of men other people suggest that seem to work to me — Anthony Bourdain gets mentioned a lot. But I am a faggot, a gay man, the sort of man these boys are actively trying to not become, so my opinion is worse than meaningless. But perhaps if we look at the attributes Tate is trying to suppress in his boys when he says “having a girlfriend is gay,” we might find some answers. Tate thrives when his boys don’t experience the opportunity for mutuality, for responsibility, for obligations towards others, for sitting with the discomfort of being different or disagreed with, for taking the world as it comes. Are those actually essentially “masculine” or male traits? Absolutely not, but at this stage, I’m OK with pretending they are if it encourages young men to adopt them and aspire to them. I know I should aspire to them more, and sometimes I am found lacking.

Tate has only found such fertile ground because his ideology shares a huge chunk of its worldview with a wider neoliberal worldview in which obligations towards others are seen as oppressive, and maximising and asserting your rights to individual self-realisation, even at the expense of others, is seen as a real virtue. That’s one reason why today we have a manosphere, but not a Freikorps. Tate can slot his own masculinist, violent, women-hating ideology into this landscape because the ground has already been prepared for it with young men. If we are honest, this is a worldview that exists across society, regardless of political persuasion, and seeps into our brain with every algorithmic scroll. We are in the mire, without any easy answers, which I think makes it all the more important not to trust those who claim they exist.

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If you’d like to read more of my work, please do subscribe to this newsletter. It’s been going for five years, so there are hundreds of essays to read. Paid subscribers get access to the whole archive, and subscribing to independent substacks helps writers like me not just produce essays like this one, but realise larger projects like new books (*cough cough*). Why not start with this one, about the hit gay media phenomenon, Heartstopper?

‘I tell ya, if it’s sex you’re after, get a load of the stuff I’m wearing.’ In a 1994 episode of the BBC teen drama Byker Grove, Gary Hendrix is talking about getting girls. He invites his fresh-faced friend Noddy Fishwick to smell his aftershave as they sit in a cinema, waiting for the film to begin. ‘Well, go on then,’ Noddy says. He leans in, pauses for a second, then kisses Gary on the cheek. A slow-dawning horror spreads across Gary’s face; the kiss, the intimacy, the arm around his shoulder – it’s not what he had in mind at all. There’s a moment where it seems he might just brush it under the carpet, but soon a panic sets in. He quickly gets to his feet and heads for the aisle. ‘You just stay away from us yer hear?’ he warns Noddy. ‘Yer sick man, sick. Sick! Sick I tell yer!’ His words reverberated around the cinema and, for young gay viewers, around the head: in the general atmosphere of homophobia in the UK in the early 1990s, such a response seemed almost inevitable.

Heartstopper, originally a graphic novel written and illustrated by Alice Oseman and now a popular Netflix series, couldn’t be further from the Northern working-class realism of Byker Grove. Set among a group of middle-class grammar school pupils in the Home Counties, the book and show have won plaudits for representing young gay love without the drama – no tortured self-doubt, no violent rejection of advances, no social ostracism. Charlie Spring (played in the Netflix adaptation by Joe Locke) is a boy in Year 10 who was accidentally outed the year before. His life revolves mainly around his friendship group of other artsy teenagers – misfits, but not outcasts – including Tao, a cinephile; Tara and Darcy, a bright and easy-going lesbian couple; and Elle, an emotionally intelligent painter who has recently moved to the local girls’ grammar school following her transition.

By chance, Charlie is assigned a seat next to Nick Nelson (Kit Connor), an athletic boy in Year 11 who encapsulates everything Charlie is not. While Charlie eats his lunch in the art block to avoid bullies, Nick is the boisterous, charming star of the rugby team. Charlie is slim and dark-haired, Nick is muscular and fair. And yet, wouldn’t you know it, between this unlikely pair the spark of romance ignites. What little drama there is comes early on. Charlie already has a sort-of boyfriend, Ben (Sebastian Croft), who is dating a girl yet keeps trying to kiss him in quiet library corners, by force if necessary. In public, however, Ben distances himself from Charlie. Charlie begins to fall for Nick when, catching Ben attempting to kiss him without his consent, Nick intervenes. As they become closer, Nick realises that his feelings for Charlie are more than friendly, and eventually they kiss at a 16th birthday party.

Charlie as represented by Joe Locke in the Netflix adaptation, and in the original novel

After some brief googling, Nick comes out as bisexual. He and Charlie get together; their friends are cool, their parents are supportive, and some of their teachers are also gay. Drama safely navigated by the end of Volume Two (2019), the subsequent books trace the quotidian delights of their relationship: reassuring each other, hugging a lot and kissing occasionally, negotiating trauma, discussing their mental health, listening to each other’s needs, validating each other’s self-worth and never, ever masturbating. You know, the stuff teenage boys do.

In fact, actual sex, sloppy and scary, is almost totally absent. When it does appear, it exists exclusively as a function of romance, a thing you finally do to ‘take your love to the next level.’ This omission might be the key to understanding the make-up of Heartstopper’s audience, for whom the absence of realistic teenage male sexuality is precisely what makes it so attractive. It originated as a webtoon, a serialised online comic designed to be read on a phone, and still premieres for free on Oseman’s Tumblr and webtoon pages. The many tens of thousands of comments on the webtoon give some insight into just what attracts fans to the story. ‘As a sex repulsed asexual person I love how this is shown, it’s not sexualising them for the audience, this is just for them,’ a commenter writes under a scene where, in Volume Five (2023), Charlie and Nick finally have sex, depicted through clasped hands, stars and a cut scene to photos of the boys on the bedroom wall. ‘This scene is so beautiful to me,’ reads another comment. ‘They aren’t fetishised and nothing is shown, just a simple hand squeeze to reflect such an intimate moment of love between two young boys.’

Yet even this discreet sex scene, built after years of romance and rehearsed affirmations of consent, is too much for some. One reader thinks that ‘something has just felt off for awhile now since they’ve started going further with their relationship. everyone’s like “AYY IT HAPPENED” but it feels off to me.’ Another comment hints at a sense of betrayal: “no cuz this is one of the very few comics that i dont spend the entire time waitinb for the smut. i dont feel like i need to see them have sex lol. i dont even know if i wang to see them have sex. they r my adorable wholesome little guys and i love them.” For a book about two homosexuals, a vague sense of disgust for actual homosex – smut! heaven forfend! – lingers both among its fans and in the text itself. ‘I just wanna say I appreciate the author so much for not fetishising gay men,’ another reader writes. What does fetishing mean in this context? Acknowledging that homosexuality is built primarily on man-on-man sexual desire? Sorry, but it is: the clue is in the name.

Kit Connor and Joe Locke as Nick and Charlie

Clearly for some fans the ‘sex’ part of ‘homosexual’ is the problem, and this echoes within the books themselves. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Ben, the only male character who is attracted to men because he finds them sexually desirable rather than lovable, is also depicted as a manipulative predator who sexually assaults Charlie. Nor is it insignificant that the assault is interrupted by Nick, who at this point is still outwardly straight. Sex gets a bad rap in Heartstopper, but romance – and a particularly gendered form of romance, based on old-fashioned models of power and care – is everywhere. Charlie and Nick betray a crude homosexual dimorphism, to coin a phrase, that doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to recognise as gendered when read within the frame of more reactionary romance novels. Charlie is frail and weak, a classic English rose, his relationship with his body complicated by an eating disorder and an unwillingness to be seen naked. He suffers from poor mental health and sometimes self-harms. Nick arrives as a white knight, a man to save him from himself; Charlie stands on his tiptoes to kiss him, and steals his sweatshirts, and relies on him as a protector. Nick speaks for Charlie in public and looks after him when he’s drunk too much. It’s only once Charlie is under Nick’s protective shield that his creativity and sensitivity are allowed to flourish. It’s only once Nick encounters Charlie’s gentle, admiring openness that he is able to drop his machismo and embrace his affectionate side. Ideologically speaking, it’s borderline tradwife.

In this respect Charlie bears a more than passing resemblance to the protagonist of another recent bestseller about young gay men that wasn’t written by a gay man, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015). Like Charlie, Jude St Francis is a gay man rescued from abuse at the hands of predatory gay men by the unpushy affections of a newly minted bisexual, Willem, a bisexual unsullied and untroubled by any prior experience of homosexual touch. Like Charlie, all of Jude’s trauma is written into the past of the narrative, a lingering trace of homo-hypersexuality that haunts as self-harm and mental illness and threatens to undermine the idyll of comfort and wealth provided by the masculine bisexual man in the present. (Not only does Heartstopper distance trauma through flashbacks, but even the internal dilemmas and motivations of the here-and-now have their own handy literary device, being shown through the typing then deleting of instagram messages, rather than living implicit in the character’s behaviours and responses.) In her review of A Little Life for Vulture, critic Andrea Long Chu suggests that Yanagihara gives an impression of being “somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants.” The author betrays a touristic interest in gay men, while also treating them as “perfect patients,” recipients of both her virtuosic cruelty and her “maternal posture of excessive protectiveness.” Oseman and her readers seem to nurse Charlie too, and hopefully not let him fuck.

Antoni Porowski, the eating man’s himbo, in his A Little Life/Experimental Jetset mashup t-shirt

Proust, in what Edmund White has identified as the ‘Albertine strategy’, placed a fictional female character in a relationship with his narrator as a way of depicting his own real-life relationship with a man (his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli). For much of her audience Oseman appears to be doing the reverse, using a loving, consensual gay romance as a stand-in for a dreamed-of heterosexual relationship in which a young female reader might not be objectified, coerced and degraded, but cared for and regarded as an equal. Of course, Oseman could have tried to represent that in a teenage male-female relationship, but some things are just too far out of the realms of believability. For Heartstopper’s readers, gay men are useful avatars for an approachable, unthreatening maleness right up to the point where they display sexual desire detached from love, at which point they become men again, but worse. In its relentless urge to save the ideal of homosexuality from the dreaded hypersexuality of actually-existing homosexuals, Heartstopper might just as easily be titled A Little Life For Teens.

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In theory, young adult fiction is written for readers aged between twelve and eighteen, but studies have found that three quarters are in fact adults, and more than a quarter are over the age of 28. The audience for Heartstopper on Netflix seems to be broadly similar: one study found that 71 per cent of its viewers are female, and a quarter are women aged 18-29. These women have been raised in a world that is often hostile to their desires and aggressive in pursuit of their bodies. They have come of age in the era of sexting, deepfakes, revenge porn and the ascendancy of Andrew Tate and the “manosphere”. One can hardly blame them if, in navigating their own wishes for love and affection, they find comfort in an idealised story in which, for once, they are mercifully not represented. Yet the idealism that makes Heartstopper so attractive to its fans is also what lets it down. It’s heavy on what proper moral behaviour should be, how a Good Queer should behave, and rather light on what to do when messy reality intrudes. How is a young gay man supposed to react when his first bisexual, rugby-playing boyfriend isn’t accommodating of his emotions, or when he finds that other teenagers don’t have deep reservoirs of compassion? Its idealism leaves one with the lingering sense that you’re reading a conduct book, that genre of 18th and 19th century literature that provided young men and women with moral education as to the proper way to behave in society, or perhaps a “mirror for princes,” books that offered young mediaeval aristocrats guidance for proper courtly and kingly conduct. It’s not a reflection of how life is, but how it ought to be, so take note.

Sebastian Croft as Ben Hope

Heartstopper has a very different pedagogical function to Byker Grove, which recognised that teen drama could fulfill the Reithian imperative to educate as well as entertain on issues where schools and parents might fear to tread. Noddy’s kiss, the first gay kiss shown on children’s TV in the UK, was no exception: in addressing both his own sense of confusion and the homophobia he would experience when he confided in his friends, the storyline provided young gay viewers in the Section 28 era with a framework for understanding not only their own sexuality, but the emotions and responses of their peers. It showed teenagers learning, changing their behaviour and maturing into adults.

Of course, depictions of queer life need not be miserable, but the idealism on which Heartstopper is built feels curiously narcissistic. Conflict, unethical behaviour, cruelty and unkindness are things we all do and are all subject to. But Heartstopper belongs to a different political-cultural moment, where a crude concept of ‘representation’ is a moral and aesthetic good in its own right (never mind that literature is one field where white gay men have hardly been underrepresented). When it comes to queerness, “representation” often means “an image of myself I’m comfortable seeing”, and anything else is a compounded oppression. It was described in the Gay Times as “the queer graphic novel we wished we had at high school” and has won its plaudits precisely for its idealistic representation of gay teens. But it’s an idealism that has confused representation for endorsement to the point where even heavily signposting inappropriate behaviour is not enough; good queer characters must remain unblemished innocents who don’t do bad things, and bad characters must remain alien. Despite these signposts towards his innate evil, to my mind Ben remains the most engaging character, despite his abusive treatment of Charlie, because he is the one who feels most intensely the abjection thrust upon teenage boys who desire other teenage boys. He’s driven to cruelty as a way to distance himself from the tarnishing brush of homosexuality. He wants, he desires, but existing in a world that stigmatises those desires makes him cold, anxious and secretive. That’s a real reflection of a complex inner conflict. There’s little empathy in Heartstopper for such a character, only more judgement.

If Heartstopper’s teenage audience require any moral lessons from their literature, it’s surely not that they must emulate these models of queer moral perfection in order to be loved and cared about. It’s hard enough navigating new emotions and desires as a teenager without the fear of perdition for getting something wrong. For its adult readers, it seems to flatter us with a sense that victimhood is a moral good in its own right, regardless of what you do with it. It’s a curiously teenage attitude for adults to take: in reality, while our mistakes and insecurities don’t condemn us forever, neither do our experiences of oppression sanctify us.

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