When Love, Simon came out in 2018, its efforts to appeal to a mainstream (read: white and straight) audience were obvious.
“I’m just like you,” Nick Robinson’s Simon says in the opening voice-over, as if to reassure heterosexual viewers they can still relate to him and his suburban life despite the “huge-ass secret” that he’s gay.
Directed by Greg Berlanti, and based on the YA novel by Becky Albertalli, Love, Simon seems designed to present its protagonist and his experience as something close to universal — a choice that likely had everything to do with it being the first teen movie from a major studio to feature a gay lead.
Simon is a quintessential model minority, a character whose whiteness and affluence are coded as everyday and ordinary. I understand the creative strategy: Making Simon aggressively vanilla is a stealth way of reaching audiences who might otherwise thumb their noses at more obvious or diverse expressions of queerness.
But it’s tough to look past how safe and boring the film often plays it, even down to the casting of Simon’s picture-perfect parents. Jennifer Garner and John Duhamel, actors whom audiences are used to identifying with in adult rom-coms, portray an impossibly beautiful and loving mother and father. At times, it feels as though the movie was scientifically engineered to make families weep into their popcorn as they watch Simon’s parents affirm him for who he is.
The second season of Love, Victor, Hulu’s spinoff TV series, may share a lot of the same DNA as its big-screen counterpart. It is set in the same fictional universe and was created by the film’s screenwriters, Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Burger. Yet Victor represents a significant departure from Simon’s storytelling strategy. Rather than presenting anodyne characters as blank canvases for the sympathies of the broadest possible audience, the TV series paints a more granular portrait of young queer life, and has ample room to do so over the course of full seasons. And as if to make up for the movie’s overt equation of whiteness with “normalcy,” Victor and the majority of leading characters in the series are from non-white backgrounds.
When Victor (Michael Cimino) finds himself blurting, “I’m gay” to his parents while still in his prom tuxedo at the top of season two, and the camera cuts to their reaction, we aren’t meant to see them as platonic ideals, or as the quintessential Garner and Duhamel duo. As played by James Martinez and Anna Ortiz, Victor’s parents are, of course, likewise beautiful. But they’re also flawed and feel more human; their marriage is on the rocks and they don’t always know the right thing to say.
Perhaps most significantly for viewers like me, they aren’t white. My family isn’t Puerto Rican like Victor’s, but I hardly need to suspend my imagination to identify with a brown, queer teenager navigating different cultures at home than at school.
As such, Love, Victor provides a welcome break from the mental gymnastics queer, non-white viewers are often expected to perform in order to relate to straight love stories, or even to gay coming-of-age films that center white kids like Simon. The show’s treatment of race is refreshingly subtle, too, bringing truthful specificity to the cultural differences between young people’s coming out experiences.
Season two finds Victor starting a new school year, figuring out how to be open about his sexuality, and managing his shifting relationships with his parents, who decide to separate at the end of season one.
He is also embarking on his first same-sex relationship with Benji (George Sear), who has been out of the closet longer and has more experience with what being gay actually entails, like sex with men and standing up for who you are, even to your own parents.
Benji’s insistence that Victor demand greater respect and acceptance at home is a source of ongoing friction in their relationship. While Victor’s dad winds up attending PFLAG meetings (where Duhamel makes a cameo as head of the local chapter), Victor’s mom follows a more fraught road to embracing her son’s sexuality.
What Benji doesn’t quite understand, Victor tells him, is how fortunate he is to have “liberal white parents.” They’re the sort of parents that Simon has, too — the sort who, in real life, Berlanti might have hoped would take their “sensitive” high school son to see Love, Simon in the theater, so they could all salt that popcorn with their tears together.
There is one character who does understand Victor’s dilemma: Rahim (Anthony Keyvan), the gay best friend of Victor’s sister Pilar (Isabella Ferreira). Although Rahim is younger and not out to his family yet, he seems more comfortable in his skin than Victor does. The two run into each other in the dark room, where all the best high school revelations come into focus.
“I’ve explained to [Benji] that my mom is trying her best with me being gay,” Victor tells Rahim. “And he’s just—”
“White?” Rahim cuts in. “Sorry, I did not mean to be presumptuous. It’s just that most of my friends are white, so they don’t get it at all.”
Rahim has immigrant parents who, like Victor’s, come from a conservative religious background.
“My parents left everything they knew in Iran so that I could have better opportunities,” Rahim continues, adding that while he doesn’t want to give them “a free pass to be homophobic,” he understands that their context for understanding his sexuality is different than it would be for the parents of someone like Benji, or his other white friends. Rahim’s parents’ marriage was arranged, he adds, and they only met twice before their wedding.
“I know it’s gonna be hard for them when I do come out, but I’m willing to stick it out,” he tells Victor. “I have to — they’re my parents.”
“That’s exactly it,” Victor says.
It’s a simple, quiet scene tucked late into the season, but a clear example that the series has different priorities for whom it’s trying to reach and represent. Unlike its predecessor, Love, Victor isn’t courting white, straight audiences with an everyman lead who enjoys a “normal” suburban life aside from one little twist; rather, it’s telling a more nuanced and textured story about queer coming of age.
With any hope, the Hulu series is streaming into the bedrooms of young viewers like Rahim — viewers in the same position as I was when I was Rahim’s age, and had never seen another gay son of imigrants tell a friend about his parents’ arranged marriage.
Sure, Victor is still a star basketball player, and far from the femme icon Ethan (played by Cark Moore in the movie) whose spinoff I’m still patiently awaiting. But the series demonstrates a remarkable step toward more honest and inclusive representation for young queer audiences.
If Love, Victor had been streaming when I came out in high school, I would have watched that dark room scene a hundred times over, eyes wide beneath the covers.
Love, Victor season two is out now on Hulu.
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