Hello! I was wondering if Isak is actually gay because throughout the entire season he never said he was, in fact he frequently denied it. But at the same time he never seemed interested in girls... I don't really know what to think.
i think the biggest thing you have to remember with isak is that those denials come from a place of internalized homophobia. the easiest way to sum up s3 is to say that it’s about isak coming to terms with his sexuality, but i don’t think that’s entirely accurate. isak’s central storyline this season is about him accepting himself as gay, not in a sexual sense but in a social one. he’s not struggling to accept the fact of his attraction to boys–presumably he’s already worked through that over the past year, since he seems to have no issues with acknowledging and indulging in his crush on even right away. he knows he’s interested in even, and he knows it’s on a sexual and eventually romantic level; that’s not an issue for him, and he actually seems pretty comfortable with it.
where his issue comes into play is when it comes to other people learning about his attraction to boys, even just one single boy. and the source of that issue is repeatedly shown to be not isak feeling disgusted by gayness and his own gay attraction, but rather his discomfort with how other people, including himself, perceive men who are gay. he isn’t afraid of feeling attraction to boys, but he is afraid of expressing it bc, as eskild rightly calls out in 3.02, he’s afraid that other people seeing that will think he’s gay. and the reason for that is that, as far as isak’s experience has taught him so far, people perceive gay men in very limited, stereotyped ways: as hypersexual, as hypereffeminate, as weak, as in some sense not “real” men. so much of homophobia against gay men (and women, but that’s its own topic that needs its own discussion) is rooted in a conflation of sexuality with gender, and isak, in his understanding of himself, has internalized that completely.
and we see that, repeatedly and on so many levels. if you look at the things isak says in the moments when he denies being gay, the reasons for it trace directly back to those stereotypes and trying to distance himself from them. he can’t be gay bc he isn’t attracted to all guys he meets, and definitely not to his friends. he can’t be gay bc he doesn’t want to wear tights and mascara. he may like kissing boys, sure, but that doesn’t make him gay. not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, bc of course there isn’t. he’s just not. and the reason for why he’s so insistent about that isn’t bc he feels that gay, as a word describing patterns of sexual attraction, doesn’t accurately describe his experiences with his own attractions. it’s bc, as far as he knows, being gay means becoming a stereotype, and there’s no space in those stereotypes of gay men for people like him.
listen, i get the desire to read ambiguities into characters, and to project into the spaces of those ambiguities endlessly once you’ve found them. it’s as foundational to fandom practice as the basic love of the central text. but for me, there is no ambiguity here. we left ambiguity at the station when isak literally googled “how to get turned on by girls if you are gay” way back in 3.02. isak’s entire storyline this season has consistently and explicitly been about his conflict over labeling his identity, and the label he has been in constant, conflicted orbit around is gay. that’s important. every part of it has been important bc it has been such a new take on the process of self-acceptance wrt sexuality. everything isak has been struggling with, the internalized homophobia and the fear of social perception and the discomfort with becoming just another stereotype, is real. it’s all part of the process of self-labeling, since that whole process is about taking a label that has already been given outside meaning and finding ways to make it apply to yourself.
for isak, that label is gay, and it’s one he’s just started finding himself in. he’s gay, and he’s done a lot of really hard, painful work this season toward becoming okay with saying that about himself. he’s gay, and it’s important that we acknowledge that.
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