Is Will Byers in Stranger Things gay? We might be asking the wrong question – GQ India
Ever since the last two episodes of the fourth season of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things were released last Friday, a section of the internet has been abuzz with questions on whether the character of Will Byers, played by Noah Schnapp, is gay. The hints, so to speak, were scattered throughout the past seasons of Stranger Things:
“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls!” Mike remarked, in one of the previous episodes when Will was growing apprehensive of Mike’s growing closeness with Eleven; in the trailer of the fourth season, Will was seen working on a project on the famous mathematician, Alan Turing, who was chemically castrated for being gay in the 1950s; Will moves his leg away when a random girl wants to play footsie.
But in the recent episode of Stranger Things, things were more or less spelt out clearly when Will was explaining to Mike why Eleven always feels like the odd person out. Towards the end, he got emotional, almost as if he was referring to his own quandary as well.
“When you’re different, sometimes you feel like a mistake. But you make her feel like she’s not a mistake at all. Like she’s better for being different and that gives her the courage to fight on.”
Is Will “different”? Does he care about Mike so much that even the slightest lack of attention bothers him? I argue that these are minor quibbles that mask deeper questions. In some ways, this also speaks to our fascination with always wanting to know who is what, where, how and when.
If you ask almost any queer person, they will tell you that queerness is not a linear story. You don’t wake up one day to start using the word “queer” to describe yourself. In small towns and rural areas, many queers don’t even have the vocabulary to make sense of who they are. Will Byers is no different. It doesn’t matter if he is gay or not, but his friendship with Mike tells us a lot about how we form early connections, and how we learn to stifle and manage our expectations from even our seemingly close friends because they find it too suffocating. In many ways, it’s a lesson in boundary-setting too, if you will.
Schnapp agreed as much in a recent interview when he was asked if his character in Stranger Things is gay: “He kind of just interprets it like he’s not ready to grow up and he doesn’t really want to move on to dating and relationships yet. He still wants to be a kid and play in the basement as he did in old times.”
Don’t we all? Almost every so often we come across a meme or a song that takes us back to our childhood, to a time when friendships were not based on any ulterior motives and people could just hang out together without having any agenda whatsoever.
The way I see it, Will Byers is a beautiful, flawed, messy manifestation of our collective yearning for a more normal, more intimate yesterday. His character almost seems to tell us that we need to know that our expectations will not always be met, even with the best of friends who have now grown apart due to the passage of time or either of us simply not being able to keep in touch.
So, let’s nurture all those relationships that we hold close, across sexualities, before it’s too late. Let’s call that friend who formed such an indelible part of our childhood but is now reduced to just new year and birthday greetings. More importantly, let us also reassess the dead friendships we might have been hauling all these years.