stranger things is, fundamentally, a show about the queer experience— and it always has been. (part one)
i’m going to pose an idea, here, and i need you to try and hear me out if recent events have you wanting to immediately dismiss it. (and if you’re reading this from the bus, hello! this is absolutely a post for you, too.)
stranger things…has always been queer. fundamentally so, and intentionally so, and in ways that hinge on more than just how byler interact with each other. because though they are at the core of the show (and we’ll of course be touching on them here, too!), there is so, so much else that surrounds them.
this doesn’t just begin from season one; it begins from the entire pitch and premise itself. and, though you may not believe me, persists all the way through to the end of season 5.
stranger things is not one of the gayest shows i’ve ever seen purely because it has a very prevalent m/m ship, no— it’s one of the gayest shows i’ve ever seen because every single season subtextually centers itself heavily around a different aspect of the queer experience.
(and, no. season 5’s is not what you think it is.)
let’s go back to the very, very beginning.
stranger things, in its simplest form, is about a small, conservative town in the midwest, forced to confront everything surrounding something they hadn’t even thought existed once situations grow too severe to simply ignore.
in stranger things, queerness is the supernatural.
now, before you say anything, no, the show isn’t trying to say that queer people are evil scary monsters. it’s about queer experiences.
because in season 1, who are the people that suffer the most?
stranger things 1 follows a young boy, cast out and ostracized by his town for a difference even his own mother admits she can see in him. he has three best friends, but his relationship with one of them is…different, than it is with the other two. they push him to lie to this friend about something they see as largely inconsequential, and though the boy goes along with it initially, it doesn’t sit right with him. his friend, and the game they forged their bond while playing, mean a lot to him. so he thinks about this feeling, acknowledges it, and then acts on it— though only once the two are alone.
and is promptly thrown into another world in the blink of an eye on the way home.
this new world, though it may look identical to the town he’s always known, is terrifying, and cold, and, most importantly— empty. he sees not a single person also in this terrible place with him, and the familiar people that have always populated his home have been replaced by dangerous monsters, only out for his blood.
will byers has just been trapped in the closet.
if you’ve read this wonderfully written substack article that goes into an interpretation of this in detail, this idea is not new to you— but it certainly is to the people of hawkins.
because though will is trapped, no one really considers the possibility that he could be.
he isn’t suffering, they think, because he’s dead, or he isn’t suffering, they say, because he’s run away, and the notion that a place like this is actively causing him so much pain and anguish is laughable, because how could it even exist in the first place?
will suffers, alone, because the reality of his situation is rendered invisible to anyone that does not deliberately try to seek out and understand it.
a mother’s instincts are are a truly powerful thing. but though joyce understands that her son is actively suffering and in distress enough to hear him when he desperately calls out for her, she still cannot conceptualize the full scope of the place he has been stuck in, and so they cannot see each other. it is her willingness to face the reality of her son’s torment head on that allows her to rescue him from it.
hopper— who initially so very bluntly asked if the opinions held by will’s homophobic father were founded— doesn’t understand what the hell any of this is, or even believes it exists at first. but he does know, intimately, both the pain of losing a child AND the devastation of watching a child themselves suffer in pain, and that is what gets him to initially empathize with and look into a truth that grows more and more apparent the deeper he gets.
jonathan does not want to even consider the possibility of the existence of something he cannot shield his baby brother from. something he possibly could have protected him from, had he only been there to see just where he’d been about to go. it is only when he realizes that something similar could have happened to someone else that he knows he cannot look away from this, and resolves to seek out the truth.
the isolation barb feels at being left behind while her best friend goes and partakes in something she’d thought they both didn’t have very much of an interest in has her ending up in exactly the same world that will has— not that she ever gets to realize that she isn’t experiencing all of this alone. unlike joyce, her parents are unable to forge and force their way into comprehending their daughter’s situation, and she ends up lost forever to them as a result, for reasons they will never truly understand. nancy does try to find that understanding, though it comes too late to help what has already happened to her closest friend.
lucas and dustin learn of will’s situation much quicker than most other people in their town, but their understanding doesn’t quite manifest in the same way joyce’s does. they’re will’s friends, so they obviously want to help him once they learn he’s in trouble, but they don’t quite grasp the true danger and severity of the situation until far later on in the season. their reactions to one specific character are very significant, here, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
mike, though he initially has no ideas as to what could have happened to will, still knows almost immediately that something has to be wrong. he is the first of the party to be able to ‘tune in’ to this other world and hear him, which so far only joyce has been able to do. but while joyce is granted these moments through nothing but sheer force of trying to understand and reach out, mike is…aided. is immediately faced by the inexplicable existence of something the second his desire and need to help will supersede his desire to listen to his mother.
so what exactly do the boys find out in those woods, again?
el, as a character, only makes her first appearance in hawkins upon will’s disappearance. characters first discover the existence of the supernatural through either recognizing the existence of a place that is causing will pain, recognizing the existence of a pattern of something that is causing the same thing to happen to multiple people, or through encountering el. her existence is something the government is incredibly serious about keeping shut away and concealed, and she is made to feel like a monster by the institution (with dangerously close ties to the government) that teaches her to chase after the approval, love, and acceptance of its male figurehead.
when the party come across her, they want to find will, and quickly reason that she would be able to help do so, but they still don’t know quite what to make of her.
dustin, though he isn’t necessarily weirded out by her existence, has an initial fascination with her and her powers that’s slightly akin to staring at a bizarrely unique piece of novelty furniture, and wanting to poke at it until it does a cool trick.
lucas, on the other hand, thinks she should be sent right back to where she came from, since she’s surely far more trouble than she’s worth if they keep her around them. he entertains the idea that she can help, but grows angry when she, nervous about the prospect of them actually seeing the true state of this other world she is so heavily connected to, intentionally sends them further away. goes so far as to call her a monster, which mike, notably, has an extremely negative and angry reaction to.
now, i’m not trying to bash either of them here, because 1) they’re 12 years old in a conservative town in the middle of nowhere, and 2) this is the first time they’ve ever been physically confronted by the presence of something i’m sure you, if you weren’t already aware, are starting to get that el very heavily represents: queerness.
or, where mike specifically is concerned, his own. though that particular realization isn’t due till a few more years down the line.
so what does mike see el as, then?
the funny thing about this is that every single character EXCEPT mike, recognizes el for what she is, and comes to an understanding of her.
while will is incredibly attuned to his own emotions and feelings, and probably knew he loved mike before he even conceptualized that that meant he was gay, mike is a child of emotional neglect (thanks, ted). when he feels an emotion, he simply knows that it exists, but not what it means, where it came from, or even really what it consists of.
el, to mike, is simply…The Emotion I Felt When Will Left. that is when she first appeared, and so that is what he knows her as. he even refers to her by a name he created for her himself.
mike knows that he has An Emotion, but hasn’t put a name to what it actually is. el is The Emotion. when he interacts with el, he is interacting with The Emotion— but that does not mean that he understands it. keep this in mind as we go.
so, mike and his friends come across the subtextual manifestation of queerness in the woods, upon which mike immediately hides her existence away from his family, tries passing her off as any other normal child of the town, and grows angry when her presence wasn’t enough to save will from being pulled out of that lake, and now he’s stuck being aware of her forever while knowing nothing ever came of it.
it’s only when sitting in this overwhelming grief, this terrifying feeling that you are suddenly, terribly alone in a way no one else could ever understand, that he resonates with what will is currently dealing with enough to finally be able to hear him. he’s letting himself be in tune with his emotions— with The Emotion! and she rewards him for this temporary connection in turn. replicating this when in the presence of other people watching proves slightly more difficult, however.
and let’s go back to the fight in the junkyard. though el is general queerness to every character except mike, he does subconsciously have at least some idea of what The Emotion is actually comprised of. so when lucas calls the general idea of queerness monstrous, mike instinctively feels this as an accusation of he himself being monstrous, and reacts with more anger than we’ve ever seen from him so far. once el hurts lucas, mike then pushes that shame and anger away from himself, and directs all of it towards her.
The Emotion is the thing that is wrong. The Emotion is the thing that is bad, and that is hurting his friends. The Emotion is the monster.
but doing this only cements his own shame within himself even further. because The Emotion is still his own.
so do you know what scene proceeds to follow this one? what its resolution is?
mike decides to jump off a cliff. and he keeps this strictly between el and dustin, because we never see him attempt to bring it up with lucas. because he knows that lucas didn’t mean it like that— but there’s still a point to be made here about the words we casually say impacting people who are quietly struggling with things we’re barely even aware of.
so after mike jumps off the cliff, it is the sheer strength of The Emotion, which he knows is connected to will, that ends up keeping him in this world. but though mike comes to think that The Emotion is not monstrous— how can it be, after it’s just saved him?— he still hasn’t really put any work towards understanding what it actually means.
so season 1 is sort of…everyone’s collective homophobia arc, in a way. they all either come to understand the situation of will and other people like him, come to accept queerness itself, or a slight mix of both depending on where their starting point was. as i said before, that second option is largely fulfilled by our party; as will’s closest friends, they will defend him from anything and anyone trying to hurt him regardless, but that doesn’t mean they fully understand what queerness actually looks like. to complete this arc, they’re each given a moment of acceptance or reconciliation with el: lucas shows up when he knows he needs to and gets an apology scene, dustin’s is at the cliff (he hugs mike And el, because a rare, novelty oddity doesn’t need to be comforted but a real person with feelings does), and mike’s is half the cliff, and half a very infamous scene that comes later— as there’s something about all of this that mike still hasn’t quite gotten.
because mike sits with el in that cafeteria, and happily tells her that once they get will back, she’d obviously not have any reason to hide anymore. will would be back, and so The Emotion I Felt When Will Left wouldn’t need to be kept so close to his chest anymore, and he can tell everyone about it and they can all laugh and have fun because isn’t it awesome? look what it let him do!
there’s a very key piece of information missing from this plan. and a very key thing mike hasn’t yet understood nor accepted about just what that Emotion might be.
then, he even kisses el! look, there’s The Emotion! and he just interacted with it! that’s what that means, isn’t it?
only…that kiss didn’t feel like he thought it would. by the look on his face, he seems confused; he swears he liked her. is something missing?
he’s immediately given at least part of an answer.
naive, 12 year-old michael wheeler is suddenly smacked in the face with the reminder that though hopper and his friends have all cleared their homophobia arcs, and though he may have seen the good The Emotion can bring, the same cannot always be said for the rest of the world.
el is hunted down and persecuted right in front of his eyes, and the only way for the danger they’re in to stop is if she removes herself from him and his friends entirely. mike’s queerness— and The Emotion— bids him goodbye, as they’ve both learned that she cannot exist in his life without endangering him.
only…el hasn’t disappeared completely. in fact, her situation at the end of the season looks awfully similar to will’s at the start, doesn’t it? someone disintegrating in front of your eyes isn’t really a sign that they’re still alive, and just now in another dimension. to most characters, this is an indication that queerness simply doesn’t get to exist within hawkins. will was an isolated incident; there’s no way, if this is what the reaction is, that an actual queer person could continue to live alongside them unnoticed. because the party never really saw the upside down, and joyce’s understanding was largely in relation to her son, specifically.
hopper and mike are the only two characters (minus the people hunting her down) that think el is still out there, somewhere. the person who’s already come to understand that terrible suffering can and does happen to children due to things entirely out of their control, revealed the pieces of el’s existence himself, and fully saw the upside down for exactly what it was (so to everyone who thought they could’ve done a homophobia arc through hopper, they’ve had one the entire time! this is it!), and the person who can very easily attest to, though he may not fully realize it, the continued presence of queer people in hawkins.
temporarily losing will brought the inexplicable, undeniable existence of mike’s own queerness, of The Emotion, of his emotions directly to his face, and that is not a realization that can be shoved away or fully disappear from existence entirely.
…and all of that, is just season one.
season two is, i feel, much more outright about its metaphor than season one is.
because did you know that ronald reagan happened to win re-election on november 6th, 1984?
something terribly familiar is coming towards hawkins, and will can feel its looming, imminent presence with every prickle on the back of his neck.
because though he may have physically left this other dimension, pulled out of it and into the arms of the mother that loves him, that says nothing about how he’ll feel while out in the rest of the world, and he ends up feeling like he’s been placed right back inside of it at the drop of a hat.
it isn’t helped that everyone at school looks at him like he’s something wrong. a gross, creepy monster, who will only spread his infection to them if they get too close.
and remember— even to most of will’s friends and family, queerness is gone. no wonder he feels like he barely ever left the closet at all.
and it certainly doesn’t help that he’s sick with an illness not even his doctors seem to understand.
i don’t think i need to pull out an entire powerpoint presentation in order to convey the idea that season 2 is about the AIDS crisis (though doing so would allow me to point out that all of will’s explicitly mentioned symptoms also happen to be ones associated with AIDS. funny, that). once again, though our supernatural force is directly linked to queerness, it’s specifically linked to a hidden struggle queer people face, and the danger and harm that then comes once that goes ignored.
‘a hidden struggle and the harm that comes when that is ignored’ is the name of the game for a lot of people this season, and as the AIDS crisis is the sort of frontrunner of this whole thing, everything that falls in behind it more or less becomes queer-flavored by association.
think nancy, steve, jonathan, and barb’s parents; nancy is tired of the way she and steve are more or less stringing these people along towards an inevitable truth that will only grow harder to process the more it is delayed. and her choosing of jonathan over steve, though heterosexual both ways, is absolutely the option most people would deem as the ‘wrong’ one.
or, take billy; a foil of will, whose ostracization (in a different font, but still, those girls aren’t ogling him because they want to sit down and talk about his personality) and lack of anyone willing to be close to him in a genuine way means that the abuse he suffers at the hands of his father is thrown back at the people around him. this is a will without a mike, essentially, which does make billy at the very least metaphorically gay (and he isn’t the only character who will be).
and hopper is literally keeping queerness hidden away in the woods, and ignoring the way this is emotionally causing her harm!
(also, this is slightly outside of this theme, but i will say: i know everyone hates dustin’s plotline this season, but i do think that this is the s2 equivalent of what s1 was trying to say with hopper, more or less. let me put it this way— in season 1 the demogorgons are the vicious monsters that hunt down people who find themselves in the closet. in season 2, we are introduced to their slightly smaller counterparts, who dustin likens to ‘dogs.’ a ‘dog’ cannot help the way it was trained, or raised, and is just following what it has been taught to do.
so even if something (or someone) you once thought was cute and sweet grows into a monster you’ve seen a million times before, hope is not lost at never reaching any kind of reconciliation or understanding ever again. you don’t have to become its bestest, closest friend, but dustin’s relationship with dart does end up resurfacing, in the end.
(and he does all of this whilst simultaneously forming an unlikely friendship with WHICH thematically relevant character, again?)
yes, even the demodog plot, of all things, is gay. they truly do leave not a single stone unturned.)
so, what is mike up to this season?
well, when he isn’t being a source of grounding and reassurance for will, or being jealous that will appears to like max a lot, he spends a lot of time trying to get into contact with el.
mike wants to know that el is alive, and safe. subtextually— especially with the addition of our metaphorical AIDS crisis and looming second reagan term— mike wants to be assured that, despite what the men in suits tried to tell him, the existence of The Emotion in his life is not dangerous. that he’d be allowed to have her around without people demanding she be permanently shut away.
mike watched el have to hide the second those guys suspected she was there— he wants the reassurance that this doesn’t have to be the case! that he could shout all about The Emotion up to the rooftops in the way that he’d wanted to at the end of season one, and not be told that he was wrong for doing so.
he wants to know that The Emotion is actually there, because he still feels like it is, but— that doesn’t make any sense, right? this is The Emotion I Felt When Will Left. but will is here, now, so what does that mean? why does he sometimes, all of a sudden, feel like he’s right back in season one?
does this…sound familiar, at all?
on halloween night, mike and will have a conversation where will tells him that, though he’s back and everything is supposed to be normal, he feels as if he’s simultaneously still stuck in the upside down.
will has left the closet, but it doesn’t take very much to make him end up right back in there again.
the problem mike thought caused The Emotion has been resolved, and thus it isn’t supposed to be around anymore, but he feels that it is anyway.
an interesting thing about this conversation is that will asks mike to not tell the others about it, because they wouldn’t understand— implying that he thinks mike does.
but what is mike’s reply?
not saying he won’t tell. not affirming will’s assessment of him. even though he goes on to elaborate on what he means by this and how it relates to him, he still does not come right out and say that he would understand.
textually, mike still has two ways he could respond to this, here. he could say “i still feel like how i did when you were gone even though you’re right in front of me,” and this would carry largely the same meaning, but he chooses to go with the example that is Not directly related to him.
(though subtextually, there is zero difference between the two.)
mike does this a lot; rely heavily on el whenever she appears to take his mind off of or avoid having to think about whatever he’s currently dealing with, and this is in both a textual and subtextual way. our boy is so repressed, he figured out how to use the same defense mechanism both literally and metaphorically!
the biggest example of this comes at the end of the season, so i’ll get to that later.
for now, let’s take a look at that reunion scene— the moment queerness officially makes her reappearance to our crew.
i think the reaction mike has to seeing The Emotion again is an interesting thing to zero in on— textually, mike is obviously relieved to know that his friend is alright, and that they can finally be reunited!
subtextually, though, this is mike staring The Emotion in the face, and…looking relieved to see it reappear. so, again, i don’t think this is him fully clocking what The Emotion actually is, despite the scene its reappearance follows. now, his queerness took one look at the shed scene and came in swinging through the door with a steel chair, but that isn’t what mike is thinking about.
since el bursts in just in time to save them from danger, this is mike being thrilled at the proof that the men in suits were wrong. The Emotion isn’t dangerous, or bad, because el has once again done exactly what she did at the cliff— and this time, in front of everyone! it’s a bit of what he’d wanted back in the cafeteria; other people are now able to see all that The Emotion can do. this is his proof that he actually can and should be able to keep it around.
and then, we get to the snow ball.
mike tells will to go dance with someone, immediately regrets it, and— oh, hey, there’s The Emotion, right on time! funny, how that works. but look, he’s up and dancing with it! he’s dealing with it, isn’t he? sure, he isn’t really thinking about how he felt once he was alone, nor why he may have felt that way, but he can confidently say that he does like The Emotion.
does this mean that he now understands the truth of what it is?
…no, of course not. this is mike we’re talking about.
part two will be linked here once it’s been posted. thank you for reading!
