I’ve been binge watching Love, Victor all day. Much of the writing is predicable and cliche. And the teen angst is literally palpable. That being said, the stereotypical campy plot is oddly satisfying. The story hits every wicket you could want from a coming of age story.
The TV show goes into a lot more of the nuance of a gay realization, coming out, first love, dating, and even discussing sex.
My realization that I was gay happened when I was around 10. There was a really cute neighbor kid that I had a crush on, and incidentally enough, his (also very cute) brother had a crush on me. I don’t know where he found his intel, but even being a year younger he knew more about gay stuff than I did for sure. That was when the experimentation started. There wasn’t much that really happened all told, and eventually one day his brother found us hiding in the bushes. Very quickly after that we stopped hanging out and they moved away. That was the last time I saw either of them.
There was only one kid that had come out in the 8th grade. In my mind, the sea of fish was infinitesimal. I thought I had a crush on him, but I really didn’t. High school wasn’t much better by way of options. My whole school of 1500 students didn’t have more than 10 LGBT students. I remember having a huge crush on a guy named Justin. Man, so embarrassing, I wrote a very detailed letter explaining every facet of this imagined life we would have together.
I didn’t come out until I was almost 16, eight days before I turned 16 in fact. Before that I tried dating in school. I had an on-again-off-again boyfriend where my feelings got stick in the “off-again” setting. My cousin saw me kissing him and it got back to my aunt, then spread to all my other aunts. My cousin’s mom sat me down and told me I had to tell my mom or that she would. It was pretty forced and I remember that night in technicolor.
The aftermath of me telling her was pretty awkward. But she eventually came around. We still don’t talk about any of the details, people I’m dating or anything.
Everybody’s realization and coming out is way different, so the show gets it right a little bit where it shows the struggle of a teen in coming to terms to who he is. The show is very good at making me feel things I haven’t really been in touch with in well over a decade bringing back a flood of memories and feelings, both good and bad. It also allows me the opportunity to better process these old underlying emotions and memories that happened during my formative years with more mature eyes and a more rational mind.
For that, I very much appreciate this show even where it gets things wrong or shifts the story for the sake of TV drama.