Sorry to keep fanboying about Young Royals, but this short clip highlights what I love the most about many recent shows with gay storylines: They take place in a world where almost no-one gives a shit if people are gay or straight or whatever.
Simon’s terrible, toxic, alcoholic, loser dad forgot that his son is gay, but when Simon reminds him, he just corrects himself and empathizes with him. We’re not supposed to like this character, and it would have been so easy for the show to make him a raging homophobe on top of everything else, to make us dislike him even more.
But the show skipped that. Not in order to redeem him, but simply because it’s the most realistic characterization choice. We’ve come so far as a society that most people really don’t care any longer, including this terrible, toxic, alcoholic, loser of a dad.
And this is why I love movies and shows like Jongens, SKAM, Love, Simon, Love, Victor, and now Young Royals. They show us that you can still tell great gay stories even though the “being gay” drama has diminished, because it allows you to focus on the love story, and how universally human these stories are.
Simon gets as flustered here thinking about Wilhelm as billions of teenagers before him has been when they were thinking of their crushes, irrespective of gender. There’s no difference. There never was a difference. And our society has come a long way towards finally figuring that shit out.