I’ve waited 36 years for the sex education Heartstopper’s given me

At 36 years old, as a gay man, I’ve still never really had a proper sex education.

I like to think by now I have a vague idea of what I’m doing but the only ‘sex education’ available at all growing up was from Queer as Folk when Stuart famously rimmed 15-year-old Nathan in his penthouse apartment.

Not exactly the greatest example of sex to look up to but at least I had that, I suppose. Before Queer As Folk was released in 1999 there was literally nothing.

Still, the LGBTQ+ community is used to teaching itself the ways of the world – be it sex, relationships, coming out to family or learning our own history, we’ve leant on each other for guidance when the education system failed us.

Thankfully, LGBTQ+ teenagers today have endless resources for support. Better than that, so many can safely come out as teenagers and don’t need to secretly scour the internet for life advice – they can just ask for it.

And they have Heartstopper, Netflix’s LGBTQ+ young adult series based on the graphic novels by Alice Oseman, which has done more for the community, – young and old – than any series before it. And in just two years since its release.

At this point it’s redundant to reflect on how Heartstopper reminds those of us of a certain age in LGBTQ+ community of things we never had; it’s been said so many times before.

When the first season came out in 2021, so many of us wept thinking about how different our lives could have been to see characters like Nick and Charlie falling in love at high school, like their romance is as normal as anyone else’s on the playground.

That alone was enough to cement its place as ground-breaking television.

But in its third series, there is another gut-punch realisation for us slightly older gays. Another thing we never had growing up. This time, it’s a healthy conversation around gay sex.

Heartstopper is growing up in series three and after eight months together Nick and Charlie are horny.

The Heartstopper books shied away from sex but confronted other complicated issues such as Charlie’s eating disorder and various complexities around mental health.

Oseman didn’t feel like sex belonged in the pages of her literary series, but it serves a greater purpose in the TV adaptation than I thought possible.

Nick and Charlie teach us the greatest lesson there is to learn about sex: vulnerability isn’t just a strength, it’s sexy.

Granted, it’s a tad unrealistic that it took eight months for two teenage boys to even bring sex up at all but Heartstopper approaches shagging in a very Heartstopper way.

Charlie is taken aback by his own sexual urges, even a little bit terrified, pulling away from Nick when their animal instinct takes over, in part due to anxiety around his body (Charlie is receiving treatment for an eating disorder) and partly because he’s so naively unfamiliar with sexual urges.

When he talks to his friends about this new feeling that comes over him when he’s kissing Charlie, they laugh and tell him: ‘You’re ready to take the next step.’

From there, Nick and Charlie awkwardly try and broach the subject with each other until one night after drinking an alco-pop, a drunk Charlie proposes they sneak off to lose their virginities.

Respectfully, Nick declines, suggesting they wait until Charlie isn’t wasted.

But the right moment never arises. Day by day, they’re becoming increasingly sexually frustrated with nowhere to go to get laid.

It’s during that delay though that Nick and Charlie talk about sex like I’ve never seen before.

There’s no urgency to lose their virginities – after eight months together they could have done that ages ago. More than anything they want to connect on an entirely different level.

They share their anxieties – both acknowledging they’ve never done it before – and warn they have no idea what they’re doing, promising to learn together. They share all their thoughts and hesitations, creating the safest place imaginable, far safer than most gay men experience for sure.

Gay sex on television is so often void of any emotion at all.

In Queer As Folk, Stuart was Canal Street’s top shagger. He was the envy of every gay man in Manchester and by his own admission, he’d pretty much had them all.

I’m sure Russell T Davies didn’t create Stuart to be a role model but when there was no other gay character leading a television series, what other role models did we have?

Heartstopper season three is a sex education that goes far above and beyond anything before it, even straight teens could learn a lot from Nick and Charlie.

‘What life could have been if I had Heartstopper growing up’ has been said time and time again by the LGBTQ+ community, but each series gives us another reason to be thankful younger generations have the tools for a better queer life than we did.

I grew up with so much shame around sex, terrified about catching HIV and plagued with internalised homophobia. In hindsight, I never really enjoyed sex at all until I met my current partner.

But Heartstopper gives a much healthier perspective of sex for the first time for all teens, LGBTQ+ or otherwise. It teaches that everyone is just as anxious as you, your sexual partner included, and don’t be afraid to be vulnerable – if anything it will likely work in your favour.

Heartstopper is available to stream on Netflix now.