On Red, White & Royal Blue, Heartstopper, and the Insidiousness of Purity Culture

In this op-ed, writer K-Ci Williams explores Heartstopper, Red, White & Royal Blue, various BL dramas, and the recent state of MLM sex on screen.

The first time I saw two men having sex on TV, it was Connor Walsh and Oliver Hampton in an episode of How To Get Away With Murder. At the time, I was a closeted 16-year-old at an all boys school, where the extent of sex education was watching my classmates put condoms on a dummy penis. The fiction of Connor’s sex life — and boy was it radical for a TV-14 show — was a world away from my reality, in which I was still coming to terms with my queerness, and my straight classmates were getting on with actual, real sex.

View more

Sex between men has a long, painful history. It’s always been pleasurable, sure, otherwise why do it and risk imprisonment or death? But one need only crack open a history book to find a plethora of sad realities: the AIDS epidemic that started in the ‘80s; the criminalization of homosexuality in so many countries around the world (that continues for many today); the fact that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas — which deemed sodomy laws unconstitutional, since previously anal sex (and therefore gay sex) was illegal — only happened 20 years ago.

Queer culture was born of those circumstances; the ways queer people lived and broke bread and carried on, and the scenarios in which they had sex, which were experienced through otherness, in the fringes, and in all the secret places. That culture is alive, and inherited, today. But so is the evangelical’s calling card, with its “abstinence until marriage” message, admonishing people to do what is perceived as right and healthy.

The past month has had two men loving men (MLM) relationships on screen with Red, White & Royal Blue and Heartstopper season 2. The sex-related discourse — too much sex? Or not enough? — around both points to larger conversations happening around how queer men are allowed to be presented in the media, in the context of continually challenged rights for LGBTQ+ people.

In Heartstopper, Nick tells Charlie that he’s not ready to do anything more than kissing, and Charlie replies that they don’t have to have sex, though they avoid saying the actual word: “If you didn’t ever wanna do it then I wouldn’t either,” Charlie says with all the naivety in the world.

On the surface, the show (and comics by Alice Oseman) seems to operate in opposition to some of the more risqué dramas of pop culture obsessions past. At its best, Heartstopper allows Nick and Charlie to live in their early adolescence a bit longer (and voice their feelings, admirably); at its worst, the scene is being weaponized by parts of the internet that push for purity culture, that denigrate sex as, how queer theorist Thomas Baudinette, PhD tells me, “always and already evil.”

In what ways do we separate, categorize, and hierarchize queer content? How do we define what is worthy of praise? There’s clear value in the rose-tinted innocence of Nick and Charlie’s world, like Love, Simon before it; the stories of older generations being healed, feeling seen, wishing they’d had a love like theirs — all wonderful, valid. But the show’s current lack of sex does not make it inherently superior to queer stories that do feature sex, whether they follow high schoolers or not — to argue that is to enforce the codes of purity culture, to force queerness into boxes of heteronormativity.

It engenders a dangerous precedent. As writer Eli Cugini noted in Dazed, some fans whittled down queer writer Patrick Sproull’s valid questioning of the show’s sexlessness in The Independent to smears of “why do you want to see the teenagers have sex?” But false accusations of pedophilia come straight from the playbook of homophobia and anti-gay movements, and anyone participating in these smears is complicit in furthering those prejudices.

(It’s also worth noting that the latest Heartstopper drop on Webtoon appears to be giving the “teens not having sex is unrealistic” crowd what they want, while starting useful conversations about sex, however mechanical and by-the-book they may be.)

Then along came Matthew Lopez’s Red, White & Royal Blue, starring Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine. It’s rated R for its sexual content, which made López wonder if the rating would’ve been the same if the sex was between a man and a woman.

For those that feel sexual attraction, RWRB can be a hot and horny watch, while also crucially presenting sex in varied ways. I like the language that Galitzine used in our Teen Vogue interview to describe the approach to sex: Hot, animalistic and hungry, but also tender and reflective of their love. It’s about the pacing: a contrast between their more lustful encounters (let’s go polo match enthusiasts!) and their slower, more intimate ones.

It raises the question of what point sex serves in a story. Sometimes it’s just vibes. Sometimes it’s just that two hot men are on screen and they f*ck (cue the “porn with plot” fanfiction tag). There’s nothing wrong with that — especially when there’s an intimacy coordinator on set who can develop choreography and language with the actors. But look a little deeper, and you’ll find that Alex and Henry’s sex is a précis of their relationship; it’s a way of showing how they are with each other, emotionally and physically.

Someone posted a tweet in response to the intimate sex scene that said “it’s not even about the sex.” The thing is, it is entirely, completely about the sex. Alex and Henry didn’t connect despite having sex; the connection was because of, and through, the sex — and sure, symbolically, depicting MLM sex on screen is a reclamation of power, an unabashed taking up of space. Condom wrappers on the floor, important. Lube on the nightstand, also important. Uma Thurman in a Texas accent talking about Truvada and “bottoming,” extremely important. These details in Red, White & Royal Blue are part of what makes the texture of their world, and the sex they’re having in it, feel authentic.

Consider Teen Vogue’s guide to anal sex. It’s seen a fair amount of criticism from people who don’t understand how harmful it can be keeping young people away from well-researched, scientifically-sound information about their bodies and how they work (and homophobes, too). Sex Education is still the only time I remember an on-screen conversation about douching, and it’s why I wrote the line “Did you douche?” for Thai actor Perth Nakhun to perform in my TikTok series, as well as an intimate love scene in silhouette.

There are so many layers to this conversation — and it doesn’t end with English-speaking, Western movies and shows. You can’t talk about gay sex on screen without considering live action BL dramas from Asia. These transgressive, boundary-pushing stories have long embraced sex as a vehicle for desire and love, and a good deal of them aren’t even behind a paywall. (Bong Joon Ho’s words about overcoming the “one-inch-tall barrier” of subtitles spring to mind).

I find a strange disconnect, when Western queer media is lauded as groundbreaking and progressive (and in their own beautiful ways, they are), but the beats borrow from paradigms that have long existed in Asian media, story forms that clearly even influenced Oseman’s work with Heartstopper. The paradox is that, of course, queer relations, rights, and legal protections are somewhat better in the West, but that doesn’t discount the wealth of Asian queer media on the page and on screen, made by creators who are systemically prevented from owning their work in any way other than pseudonymously.

Purity culture manifests here, too, in the falsehood that BL, as Asian media, is grounded in a fetishist view of queerness because its narratives are at times sexually explicit. But Eurocentric experiences are not sacrosanct. By holding up the Western way as the indivisible standard of all that is right, you run the risk of peddling extremely xenophobic rhetoric. BL in particular is divorced from aspects of Western life and has thus become a safe space to unpack queerness and an individual’s relationship to sex. Also, the stories just slap.

The Filipino film Gameboys comes to mind. It has Gavreel and Cairo flip-f*cking, but it’s also beautifully shot. It’s the only sex scene I can remember making me cry, because I felt their love through the sex and the way it was shown. On the flip side of that, I recall a Reddit post in response to my interview with the KinnPorsche lads; disapproval that I was covering a show with lots of sex and mature material for this publication, despite the fact that Teen Vogue’s audience reaches beyond high school.

One of my Best BL Dramas of 2021 picks, I Promised You The Moon (and I Told Sunset About You, which preceded it) does a brilliant job of depicting the beauty of queer sex between its characters, Teh and Oh-aew. We see them as high-schoolers, exploring each other’s clothed bodies, following their desire; later, they have sex before they move to Bangkok for college. A currently-airing Thai series, Only Friends, follows a bunch of men as they navigate the world as college students. But most importantly, (and my favorite part) they’re just absolute sluts. I’ll always champion BL dramas, because they have made me feel seen as a queer person of color, more than anything created in the West ever has.

Upholding the outdated purity culture will rob you of some really beautiful queer stories from all around the world, where sex is depicted in a variety of ways (like Taylor Zakhar Perez told Teen Vogue, you want to see the “different shades”) and sometimes not at all. There is a place for all of these stories. Hopefully, somewhere in all this, from Heartstopper to Red, White & Royal Blue and Only Friends, young people might find content to latch onto, and if it depicts sex, a pace that resonates.

We absolutely can, and should, be critical of how queerness and queer sex is shown on screen — but we also shouldn’t be afraid of it. The fact that we can even have this conversation means there is a range of representation to choose from, and even more to come.

A warning still feels necessary, though: Conservatism doesn’t follow your lists and charts separating the good and the wholesome from the bad and the icky — it’s all in the firing line. Just this month, while people complained online about Nick and Charlie not having sex in Heartstopper, borrowers from the Columbia-Marion County Public Library were calling the books “pornographic,” leading them to be reshelved in the adult section, where minors require parental consent to issue them.

The roots of the discourse are rotten. It’s a drain on every tangible change that’s been fought for, to bring queer culture — one cultivated in the shadows, from love — to the forefront. Is it true that people can only bear to see us in pixels on a screen, but never by our own light?

Forcing MLM sex and queer stories to play by the rules of heteronormativity and purity culture is a losing game. You will never win it, and the cost is high. O’Shae Sibley was stabbed for vogueing to Beyoncé at a gas station; Laura Ann Carleton was shot for displaying a rainbow Pride flag outside her business. Homophobes are not debating amongst themselves the moral politics of our media. Their brushstrokes are broad, and they’re a catch-all — we are wrong to them.

I couldn’t care less what Gen Z (or anyone else) gets up to in their sex life, but I am hopeful that if and when their time comes, the media available to them will put them on a path towards accurate and relevant information that will keep them safe and informed as they have sex — and remind them that it can be joyful, and queer, too.

---