By Becky Karush
In May 2022, a week after the queer teen rom-com series Heartstopper debuted, I went for a walk.
I went to the meadow near my house in southwestern New Hampshire. It’s not a remarkable meadow. About 100 feet across, it rolls down to a swamp at the far end that smells of defiant wet raccoon. On the south side, a birch tree grows sideways. The land has been forest and pasture, and now it’s hayed for horses, but it’s never seen a bulldozer, a septic tank, or a double carport that covers a broken four-burner grill. The bright, steady grammar of the meadow separates it from the rest of the beat-up, built-up, and crumbled-down land of my everyday New England neighborhood. In this one small place, the whole is old and vital. It belongs.
I try to listen to the birds when I’m here. Off goes the podcast. Out pop the earbuds. “Listen to the crows,” I command myself. “Listen to the cardinals. If you listen to the birds, everything will make sense!”
Ridiculous hope packs into that promise. “Listen to the birds, and the planet will be okay. You’ll figure out what to do about all the plastic. About white boys with machine guns in schools. You’ll see that applying for a home equity line of credit to fix the rotting floor under the tub is a privilege, not the death of youth and art.”
On the day of my walk, I left the earbuds in. I turned the volume up on the lonely song that ends the second episode of Heartstopper—Orla Gartland’s “Why Am I Like This?” I knew the song by heart because, a week earlier, I’d read a gushing review of the show, decided to check it out, and stayed up until 3 a.m. to watch all the episodes under the blankets in my bed on my phone. Then I did it again, seven nights in a row.
Skinless without sleep, I listened to the song in the meadow and saw the scene: Nick Nelson, a popular 16-year-old straight boy, realizes he has an astonishing crush on Charlie Spring, the one gay kid at their English grammar school.
I played the song again, louder. The earbud cords twisted like waterfalls down the front of my blue shirt. I wept. The birch rattled against itself. The chickadees in the little alders chirruped. I felt crazy. Happy. In agony. I didn’t know why, only that something in me changed.
I also knew I wasn’t alone in my zealous sobs. The story of Nick and Charlie has an enormous, passionate global audience, like a queer Harry Potter with less wandwork and better kissing. Originally a series of super best-selling young adult graphic novels, Heartstopper immediately hit the top of Netflix’s charts, getting a two-season renewal weeks after its debut.
Back in 2022, most reviews and fans celebrated the show’s uniquely joyful queer love story. Nick and Charlie fall in love beneath magic British snow. They flirt over a bubblegum-flavored milkshake. Nick comes out as bisexual to a goddess-level hug from Olivia Colman, playing his mom. The first season did balance the sweet with sour, but Heartstopper sticks to happy landings. Here, pain isn’t destiny. It’s part of the show, but not the point. Nick and Charlie’s true love wins.
In the meadow, I pulled a small bottle of DEET from the pocket of my shorts and sprayed myself to annoy the ticks. I sank and lay back, knees bent, and the cool grasses pricked my neck. I blushed, embarrassed to be myself, a 46-year-old woman collapsed over a show. What was happening to me? It couldn’t be this one teen show. That couldn’t explain the world’s reaction to Heartstopper, or my own.
Why am I like this? I put my hands over my eyes.
On the dark screen there, I see Nick ask Charlie a question. The camera in this scene is light and unsteady, close-up on their faces.
Nick moves his lips. “Would you like to go to Harry’s party,” he says, the camera at his nervous half-smile, “with me?”
My breath slows. More scenes play on the insides of my eyelids. Charlie’s nervous, awed smile as he breathes back his answer. “Okay.” Charlie holding Nick while he cries, the boys awkwardly perched on the edge of Charlie’s bed. Nick running into the ocean surf, arms raised, shouting, “I’m your boyfriend! You’re my boyfriend! We’re boyfriends!” In all of them, the camera is soft and intimate. It rocks along with the gentle feeling.
And then I remembered, having spent 27 recent hours watching the show, that each time the camera came close, it also pulled back and showed the broad sturdiness holding the boys.
Here is Nick’s tender, breathy invitation, and there is the plain classroom table on which they rest their arms. Here is Charlie’s quivering smile, and there are the towering rectangular windows. Here is Nick crying, and there is the unchangingly messy bedroom. Here is Nick’s declaration of love, and there is the authority of the blue-green sea, moving on its own.
In the meadow, not asleep and not awake, I moved inside the show, scene after scene. Many weeks later, when my rapture quieted, I found words for the two-part rhythm I felt, rocking from creative, erotic unsteadiness to loving, beautiful stability, and back again. It was a grammar of change that held its queer characters in such caring safety they could fall in love, discover themselves, and be new.
It was as if the lush, jubilant triumph of Heartstopper rode on the back of a turtle, and that turtle was a chosen world—a crafted, stable, tended world—where love was each of ours to give and find.
This visual grammar is a radical achievement. Yes, Heartstopper is a boffo Netflix hit. Yes, the uniquely happy depiction of young queer love is important and liberating for the young queer people who love the show. The show is liberating for middle-aged people, too. For me.
A week or so after my swoon, I told a patient friend what was obvious all along. “I am like this because… I’m queer, too! I’m bisexual! Me! Me, too! That’s me! I’m a bisexual woman!” The revelation took a while because in my hardest times, I couldn’t comprehend how, in a world of eight billion people and the stars, it feels irrepressibly vital to be a “me,” to be an “I,” vital not just to the “me” but to the health and glow of creation. I believe it for other people. When I’m not weeping to Orla Gartland songs, I’m a writing teacher. I see how the kaleidoscope turns for universal good when someone hears their voice, sees their language, at last, on the page.
The first season of Heartstopper did this for me. Held safely, I saw me, heard me, and while I can’t say with empirical confidence that my self-actualization as bisexual is a boon for humanity, my life has since been far more courageous and generous, far funnier and freer, than fearful, cruel, or dull.
Yet it was never only Nick and Charlie’s love story that changed me. It was the nurturing visual language of transformation within stable, loving beauty. This is the language Heartstopper’s proudly, publicly queer creators made for us to learn ourselves.
It’s a controlled world they created, as small as any classroom. But if Heartstopper was never meant to make whole cloth sense of existence, I still read it as a teacher of hope, daring us to believe we have a future where we are marvelous, where we belong, if we give each other what is kind, beautiful, and true in every part of our lives. We can be like this. Such hope may be why so many of us, now inside so many violent extinctions, keep rising up in earnest ecstasy for one television show. What a lesson! What a language to figure out how to live! True queer love can win!
Back in the meadow, the grass itched my neck. I turned and opened my eyes to a tick on a swath of white violets next to me. I stood up and stepped back. I pulled the earbuds away.
Birds sang. Baby cattails rustled. Stopped. Rustled. From the edge of a mucky vernal pool with a plastic bag in its middle, a squat green and black thing crept into the sun. A turtle. Tiny yellow spots starred its shell. Its underbelly was red as a bonfire. The turtle trundled a few inches and stopped. It lifted its head in a tiny arch, and with red and black eyes surveyed as much of the field as it could see. The turtle stood like that for a long time. At last, it stepped forward on thick legs, as if carrying something precious on its back, something heavy and new, to where it knew it belonged.
Becky Karush lives in New Hampshire, U.S., and is a writer and a developmental editor.