with my degree we went deep into queer media history, and thatās exactly why byler makes me so furious. because what the duffers did isnāt just ābad writingā, itās part of a long, documented pattern in film and television where queer desire is mined for emotional intensity and then discarded the moment it threatens the heteronormative centre.
queer cinema has always had to fight for scraps. for decades, queer characters were only allowed to exist through subtext, tragedy, or metaphor. the ācoded longingā era wasnāt an aesthetic choice, it was survival under censorship. filmmakers used lighting, blocking, colour, and performance to signal queer desire because they werenāt allowed to say it outright. that visual grammar became a language of its own.
and the duffers used that language. deliberately. expertly. cynically.
the slow push ins, the pink golden washed lighting, the confession proxy scenes, the emotional monologues framed like romantic declarations, these arenāt accidents. theyāre techniques with a lineage. they come from decades of queer filmmakers carving out space where they werenāt permitted any. they come from a history of audiences learning to read between the lines because the lines were forbidden.
so when people say āit was the 80sā or ārealistically it wouldnāt happen,ā i want them to understand the irony. queer cinema of the actual 80s was already pushing boundaries. already telling stories of longing, rupture, confession, community, and survival. already refusing to be erased. pretending that a queer coming of age arc would be āunrealisticā is not only historically wrong, itās homophobic in the exact same way the old censorship codes were.
and narratively? thematically? structurally? byler made more sense than anything else in the show. the entire premise was āthe outcasts,ā and yet the one queer outcast with the clearest emotional arc gets shoved aside so the creators can maintain a heteronormative status quo they themselves destabilised through their own cinematic choices.
thatās why i call the duffers liars. they didnāt just queerbait, they appropriated the emotional labour of queer cinematic history. they used the tools queer filmmakers developed under oppression, they used the audience literacy queer people were forced to cultivate, and then they pretended none of it meant anything.
they wanted the ache without the accountability. the longing without the love. the queer emotional intensity without the queer story.
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
titsay
dailybridgerton
2087
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
