The Masterpiece That Is Queer as Folk
Well, right before a reboot is set to come out, I finally got around to watching a show I first heard about (albeit without knowing the name) when it came out while I was like, eight years old. I then got in huge trouble for even mentioning to my parents that a friend had told me about a show with two boys french-kissing in a shower (okay, eight would’ve been way too young to see it, but still, fundie Christian memories ✨).
And, I fell hard for this story. I genuinely think this is one of my favorite stories ever, definitely favorite TV show, with writing to parallel MXTX’s levels of wringing the most potential out of every little detail. The writing is of a consistently high quality throughout its five seasons, without a single weak season (although there was the occasional weaker plotline), which is something I don’t think I can say for pretty much any other completed TV series I’ve seen. I love, love, love this story, and those of you know have been following me for awhile know how rarely I say that.
It’s explicit, often gratuitously so, but honestly that’s part of its charm and message: it’s loud and unashamed of itself, even when that makes it crass. It’s tired of being shut up inside a closet and it’s going to make it your problem if you choose to watch (and in doing so, mimic the journeys of its characters learning to feel and love and grow into human beings without apologies).
Brian, Justin, Hunter, Ben, Michael, Debbie, Emmett, Ted–they were all fantastic characters with complexity to boot. It seemed like many of them could be stereotypes–particularly Brian or Emmett–but to call them stereotypes is blatantly wrong. There was just so much intricate complexity woven into each character’s psyche. If anything, it seemed almost like taking back the stereotypes by infusing them with humanity (one of the major themes: learning how to be human). It was existentialist, philosophical at parts, and genuinely moving.
Brian could be seen as a stereotypical promiscuous gay man, but he is really a wounded child. Melanie can seem like a typical “butch” lesbian, but she has the arguably biggest and most sentimental heart in the series. Debbie is the voice of reason and moral compass, but also can get too caught up in her beliefs that she is a good person and hurt those around her. Ted seemed like a typical “loser” character whom I actually struggled to like through the first two and a half seasons… before his descent into addiction, which felt like one of the most humanizing portrayals of addiction I’ve seen. Ben and Hunter are both HIV positive, and neither of them are characterized by their illness or have their arcs primarily be about suffering and death porn.
Admittedly, some parts haven’t aged super well. but without some of those elements (namely, the age difference between Justin and Brian), I’m not sure the story could have pulled itself off with the same poignant psychological insight, the same provocative themes, and the same character depth. So, that one I’m giving a pass on a literary perspective. Other parts that didn’t age super well are that really aren’t any trans or bisexual (although it seems like Hunter is bisexual, though the idea is never really labeled) or nonbinary characters, plus almost everyone is very white. It’s a very outdated understanding of sexuality in some ways (although in other aspects, the show is quite forward-thinking in others–for example, it says “acab” before it was cool).
So let’s break down Hamliet’s thoughts on different themes, motifs, plotlines, and symbolism. I’m going to start with Justin and Brian’s relationship, because it really did form the beating heart of the show in encapsulating, without fail, the main themes of each and every season.
Brian and Justin: Being Human Means Growing and Grieving (Season One)
Brian: Look, I don’t believe in love. I believe in fucking. It’s honest, it’s efficient. You get in and out with a maximum of pleasure, and a minimum of bullshit. Love is something that straight people tell themselves they’re in, so they can get laid. Then they end up hurting each other, because it was all based on lies to begin with. If that’s what you want, then go and find yourself a pretty little girl, and get married.
Justin: That’s not what I want. I want you.
Came in skeptical about this relationship, left convinced.
Through season one, Justin and Brian’s issues build into the tragic finale through the themes of growth and loss that run through each episode of the entire season. Growth is what makes us human, but growing, living, always ends in death eventually.
At first glance, Brian seems to be the character who goes after everything he wants… but he actually is running away from what he wants. Justin is the one who actually goes after what he wants: he is super clingy to start with, to the point where it’s a bit cringe–but also, surprisingly earnest and honest.
Brian has the opposite problem to Justin’s clinginess: he’s dead inside and pushing everyone away from him. Brian acts like he owes nothing to anybody and desperately has sex with every man he can, and makes a “big spectacle of everything” (as Debbie tells him), all in a childish attempt to feel something, anything at all. He wants to be human. He wants to be alive. But he doesn’t feel like he’s either of these things. His refusal to grow up is not so much a rejection of maturity so much as it is a rejection of his life in general: how can you grow, when you were never alive in the first place?
Justin’s clinginess, while initially a flaw, is actually what makes the relationship perfect: Brian would never grow if he was not relentlessly pursued by someone who also asked things of him (Lindsay and Michael, while great friends, rarely ask things of Brian, while Justin does). Justin’s childlike faith in humanity in some ways (and, admittedly less-charmingly, black and white way of thinking) helps Brian experience those things for the first time. The irony of course is that Justin seems like he wants to grow up–have sex, move out of his home, getting a fake ID–while Brian claims he wants to stay young, yet before Justin avoids anything actually innocent. When he finally starts opening up to Justin and his innocence, he’s confronted with what he’s been avoiding the entire season: grief.
Brian needs to grieve his own nightmare childhood and his own issues, or else he can’t ever grow or feel human.
To be human is to accept loss, accept that you aren’t superman, that you can’t control things. Literally the entire season is about the writers handing Brian challenge to grieve after challenge to grieve and him denying it until it smashes into the head of innocence (Justin).
Firstly, Brian is tasked with whether or not to pull the plug on Ted when he’s in a coma, a choice that he thankfully doesn’t have to make when Ted wakes up. Then, Brian’s father tells him he’s dying and Brian finally tells him he’s gay (with horrifying results). His father dies (symbolic again of one symbol of his nightmare childhood passing away), and Brian doesn’t cry, which everyone points out is odd. Brian also ruins his relationship with Michael, and refuses to grieve it, pretending it’s all fine. While they do reconcile, Justin and Michael do more work to bring them back together than Brian does (speaking of, the scene where everyone leaves in disgust, telling Brian off for his cruelty at Michael’s birthday party, but Justin tells Brian “someone’s gotta help you clean this mess” was clearly a double-meaning and a genuinely heartwarming moment). Then, Brian struggles with signing away his parental rights to Gus to help Melanie and Lindsay, and does so in a bold moment without much grief. Brian treats Justin terribly on and off, but doesn’t grieve it because he tells himself that’s just who he is.
However, Justin in season one, despite being a portrayal of innocence, also treats other people pretty poorly. (Brian is largely the exception.) His father is the worst, but Justin is also a brat with an immature understanding of love and people. He does his best to alienate his mother early on. He antagonizes people when he doesn’t have to in order to show off and prove he deserves to exist (like outside of Babylon when he tells everyone he gave Chris Hobbs a handjob, a moment where Brian warns him directly that he’s now “made a real enemy”). Justin’s brattiness is clearly coming from a place of pain and repression, so to be clear there is no moral equivalence there: he only humiliates Chris because Chris has been humiliating him throughout the series.
Justin also tries to convince Brian not to sign away his parental rights at first, which hurts Melanie and Lindsay, because Justin projects his own parental issues onto the situation without considering that Brian is not his father and the people involved are so different the two situations shouldn’t be compared. Plus, if anything, Justin puts too much responsibility on others, and is challenged to accept that he cannot control other people and how they feel or act towards him (Daphne falling for him, Brian, trying to win his father’s approval by considering business school despite his father’s hatred of him, etc.) This idea of putting too much responsibility on others is childish and normal for someone his age, and makes Justin and Brian very similar while also having contrasting ways of handling their relationships (clinging vs pushing away).
This all culminates in the finale where Chris tries to murder Justin right when he and Brian seem to finally be happy at Justin’s prom. It’s only then, when Brian sits bloodied in a hospital waiting room, that we see him finally give in, grieve, cry, in the same place he and Justin named his son in the first episode.
Justin’s lost a sense of innocence. Brian realizes that he is not the island he pretends to be, and that being human hurts.
Justin and Brian: Being Human Means Accepting the Worst of Yourself (Season Two)
Michael to Brian: I think you’re afraid to let anyone know you love them. That you have feelings. That you’re human like the rest of us.
Throughout the second season, Brian hides the best parts of himself (literally not allowing anyone to know that he visits Justin every single night he’s in the hospital). Brian also self-sabotages himself by demanding Justin hide the best parts of himself (loving Brian) with their semi-open arrangement that fails epically, and Justin leaves him. But part of the reason is fails is also that Justin starts becoming more like Brian, even imitating Brian in word and action when he sleeps with a virgin, and… big surprise, neither of them like Justin becoming more like Brian. Justin doesn’t want to be Brian, and Brian doesn’t want to be Brian either.
