What Half Man gets right that most queer media gets wrong

Up until they started cancelling queer TV shows left and right, we were having something of an LGBTQ+ representation golden age. A sweet teen romance with a happy ending? Check. Small town queer representation? Check. Evil twinks and lesbians on a killing spree? Double check.

In the words of Kehlani, it was good until it wasn’t. Even before the current representational backlash set in, something was missing. We had evil gays, we had sweet gays, we had polyamorous gays and monogamous gays and closeted gays and even Mormon “SSA” gays. What we didn’t have were gays who neither in the closet nor quite out of it. We didn’t have queer people so messed up that the mere idea of “coming out” proved a near-impossibility—not because of outward homophobia, but because of something unresolved inside themselves.

Enter Richard Gadd, whose Baby Reindeer probed this unexamined corner of queer existence in 2024. In Gadd’s autobiographical series, we watch our bisexual hero get stalked by an unhinged older woman named Martha, a story that dovetails with the sexual assault he experienced earlier at the hands of an older man. Through his relationship with Martha, Gadd’s character eventually comes to a painful understanding. The relationship he had with his abuser was horrifying, but it managed to unlock the same-sex desire that was laying dormant in him for years.

Baby Reindeer‘s tale of misfit, tortured queer sexuality was painful, but totally recognizable. It underscored something we don’t talk about nearly enough: for too many of us, queerness exists apart from community and buried in shame.

How about we take this to the next level?

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This understanding is the starting point for Gadd’s new series, Half Man. We meet Niall, a teen boy who’s relentlessly bullied at school for his presumed queerness. When his mother’s girlfriend moves in and brings her violent son Ruben, Niall is terrified that the bullying he experiences at school is going to bleed over into his home life. But something much worse happens.

After he and Ruben unexpectedly bond during an awkward night spent in each others’ armsm (yes homo), Ruben becomes Niall’s savior at school. He takes on Niall’s bullies and protects his friend up until Niall leaves for college, where the real trouble starts.

Arriving at “uni,” the closeted Niall tries his best to pretend that he’s straight, but can’t keep it up after meeting the love of his life in Alby, his future boyfriend. But Ruben won’t stand for it. When Ruben commits a horrific act of homophobic violence, Niall finds himself in an impossible position. His lesbian parents keep telling him he needs to lie in court and invoke the notorious gay panic defense to keep Ruben from going to jail. But Niall knows better. On the stand, he’s forced to make an impossible choice: rat out his “brother from another lover” and risk Ruben’s bloody vengeance, or turn his back on his queer community in the most irresponsible way possible.

I don’t have to tell you that this is not the kind of gay story we’re used to seeing. You might assume that, in the current homophobic and transphobic climate, we’d be better off not seeing it. All I know is that I needed the story Half Man is telling. It’s the story of what happens when the only gay people in your life are just as toxic—and homophobic—as the straight culture that’s trying to shame you out of existence.

Niall’s mother is a lesbian, but her actions show us that she has no regard for her own queer community, including her gay son. She forces him to live with a sociopath who she knows has a violent history before he ever sets foot in their home. Instead of protecting her son from Ruben, she forces a bond between them. And when Ruben crosses the line, she implores Niall to put his “brother” first and throw his own community under the bus.

You might call it bad representation, if it didn’t ring so true. We know that there are queer people like this. We see them all the time. They’re the “gays for Tr*mp” who actively fight for their own political disenfranchisement. They’re the “we’re not like other gay people” gay people. They’re the trans creators who sell out their own trans community just for a presumed seat at the table only to find themselves left out of the room entirely (cough, Caitlyn Jenner, cough.) We contend with the dark side of this community all the time, but do we ever take a closer look at who these people are and where they come from?

To do so would be to look deeply at the shame that still follows many of us into adulthood without our even knowing it. Coming out of the closet is seen as one of the most important steps queer people can take toward self-realization. But for many, there’s a huge gap between coming out and actually accepting who you are, finding your community, and understanding your responsibility to that community.

Earlier this year, we talked about the excitement of the miserable misanthropic lesbian trope in shows like Pluribus and The Beast In Me. Gadd’s characters are the next frontier in this streak of good “bad” representation. His complex, painful queer universes force us to sit ever more uncomfortably with gay men who can’t accept their own queerness and queer women who are so committed to their own nuclear family that they’ll play right into the hands of the most anti-LGBTQ+ bigots around. We can ignore the reality of people like this all we want, but they exist, and they are very real.

Personally, I believe that everything that is real must be represented, for better or worse. I’d rather know that not know, and I’d rather see people like this onscreen than push the knowledge of them to the back of my mind. There’s something weirdly freeing about seeing these kinds of people onscreen. They almost become less scary. That doesn’t let them off the hook—it just helps me get around the fear I have of bad faith agents in our community and how they work to dismantle the rights the rest of us have fought for for so long. The Andrew Sullivans who claim that trans people are ruining the fight for gay rights, or the Roy Cohns who sold out their own community and created Tr*mp in the process. If we don’t tell stories about people like this, we allow them to keep their mystery, and their power.

Gadd has spoken before about feeling like an outsider in the queer community. Maybe that’s what makes him so good at showing us the parts of queer life that many of us don’t want to look at. I’m grateful to him for the work he does, and I hope he never shies away from showing us the most painful, sad, and confounding parts of queer life. Somebody has to.

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