I call my mother more often than many trans people. The rejection of those who share my demographic starts when we’re wrapped in the wrong-colored blanket, so the mother wound tends to run deep. How do you chat comfortably with the person who gave you a name you’ve rebuked? How does she chat with you? If you’re me, you don’t really talk about that part of things. You talk about work, or the dogs, or sometimes the administration neither of you like, and she calls you the right name so easily now that you no longer blame her for giving you the wrong one. This is a luxury.
I’m in the sunroom of my Minneapolis apartment when she tells me she’s been watching Heartstopper. The raids in my neighborhood have eased for now. I ask her what she thinks, and she gushes about the representation. I haven’t seen the show and know it only by reputation. “It’s so cute!” many friends have said. I believe them.
I don’t gush. This surprises her. I tell her the comfort of the coming-of-age story is beautiful, but doesn’t speak to me, especially not at the moment.
My chosen city is occupied by federal agents, profiling and taking our neighbors from apartments, cars, from the sidewalks. A queer woman named Renee has just been shot dead in her car less than two miles away from my home. Before it’s over, two men, breadwinners, will be taken from the apartment above the one I share with my partner. Homemade signs will come up on neighborhood street corners: “someone was taken, here.”
My mother digs in. It’s nice to believe there’s a world where queer kids can be queer kids. I dig in, too. That’s not the world. My experience growing up was not one of social, or even self, acceptance. There’s a gulf I don’t understand. It gets ugly.
“What do you know about representation anyway? You’re straight.”
She says: “If I had seen this when I was growing up, maybe I wouldn’t be.”
Then she breaks.
I recalibrate, apologize. It’s a different conversation than I’d thought we were having. I was wrong, I say. I assumed a lot. She tells me tearfully about the friend she had in high school, the one who might have been more than a friend if it hadn’t been rural Northeast Ohio in the 80s. She sounds small. She says she shouldn’t be burdening me with this.
No one tells you when you grow up that you’ll someday be the one to tell your mother, “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
◆
The Internet is good for discourse. It may be the only thing the Internet is good for, especially among the gays. The history of Internet culture is written through the tastes and labor of its queer residents. Tumblr Superwholock stans coined “queerbaiting,” and begat Substack think-pieces”1. The language of Black drag queens begat the vernacular of white, straight social media.2 3 Mothers begat “mother.”
Representation discourse is central to these conversations because it predates and cuts through all of them. Who gets their stories told? Who is seen and unseen? Who is remembered after they die, and how?
There are a few stances, but like everything this country produces, the argument within the community boils down to two. Point: representation matters. Counterpoint: representation is not enough. The gay internet talks, as the gay internet does. We discuss ad nauseum on podcasts and on Bluesky. We discourse. Often, the discourse allows us to forget that both of these stances hide within one camp of a far darker argument, which the most vulnerable of us are all too familiar with: Point, queer people deserve to be seen. Counterpoint, queer people should disappear. Queer life should continue. Queer life should end.
Leave such friendly debate to fester, and it becomes a culture war. Leave a culture war to fester, and it becomes law. One day it seems the discourse is whether “men in dresses” should be in women’s spaces. The next, 1,000 trans Kansas residents receive letters revoking their driver’s licenses. How do they reinstate them? Do they drive to the DMV?
Game, set, match.
I don’t need to tell you about the laws. You already know about the laws. You know, as I do, that between the writing and publication of this essay, there will be fifty more laws, and you know, or I hope you know, that none of them will be good.
How far have we travelled from book bans to a world in which 400,000 trans people have relocated to different states within a year, and most of us have considered leaving the country entirely? Remember when it was about representation? Only about representation? When the greatest threat to queer life came from angry community members who “don’t believe in pronouns?” I remember.
“You really should watch Heartstopper,” my mother texts me, a week after our conversation. “I think you’d like it.”
◆
It was a good time for sitcoms and for plague, and we were all inside, if we were inessential. As a writing center tutor, I was not. As a therapist, neither was my mother. Suddenly, everyone needed the both of us, and we were called important, which was nice. This was around the time every soon-to-be defunct online magazine was talking about “Comfort Food TV.” When’s the last time you’ve seen Cheers outside of a hospital room? Probably 2020.
What do we talk about when we talk about comfort food? If I was compelled, I might guess childhood. When we were children, comfort food required nothing of us to eat, and because our world is built on the labor of mothers, it helped that it cost our mothers little to make. Dino nuggets, mac and cheese. Mother stands for comfort. Thus saith Kate Bush. Slay, mother. Boots.
The shows and books and games that got many of us through the pandemic were those that felt like an electric blanket. For me it was the same. I reverted. I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. I played Animal Crossing. From my parents’ sunroom in Ohio, I read the hundred books I’d read when I was young that made me feel like challenges were surmountable, that adventure was out there, and endings were happy. When I went into the world, it was quiet and strange. When I looked online, there were body bags and maps covered in red. When I looked within, I found a horrible feeling that my body was not as it should be. The comfort food felt like the only thing that was real.
Then came the violence. Uniformed brutality, and gas, and men with guns and American flag paint, and somewhere in the middle of it, I decided to transition, and so the laws, and so more, different maps splotched with red, and so, and so, and so I woke from my dream of comfort, and found a different dream in grad school, and four Novembers later woke again, and promised myself this time I wouldn’t go back beneath the blanket.
I debate watching Heartstopper for a few weeks after the text from my mother. I can’t risk it. Who knows what comfort I’ll find there?
◆
In Hanya Yanagihara’s acclaimed and reviled A Little Life, protagonist Jude St. Francis doesn’t have a mother. If “mother” is “comfort,” neither does the book. Famously relentless, the novel traces Jude’s past abuse, his self-harm, his current abuse, his deteriorating relationships with his friends, his abuse (past and current), and his eventual suicide. Then it ends.
Even the title is a cruelty. A Little Life clocks in at over 800 pages, so the word Little is a joke, with Jude’s Life as the punchline. The think pieces wrote themselves in 2015 when it came out, then again in 2020, when everyone read it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that A Little Life became popular during plague. It’s a book engineered for virality. Knowing this, I avoided it for a long time.
A large part of representation discourse encompasses the politics of death. Alongside “queerbaiting” the phrase “bury your gays” came of age on the 2010s internet as a means to criticize the popularity among writers rooms of creating gay characters who cannot help but die.4 5 For a long time, popular media tended to kill off all of its gay characters, either as punishment for deviancy, or as an attempt to garner sympathy from an audience on the fence about our right to be happy, living people. The phrase “bury your gays” comes equipped as a criticism of this practice, with “queer joy” of the kind that exists in Heartstopper framed as the antidote.
There is, however, a brutal truth the discourse often sidesteps. Gays die. Often and young. And then they’re buried. In the 80s and 90s it was of AIDS, a plague allowed to thrive in order to weed out the perverts. Now, the most publicized suffering is of trans youth, who attempt suicide in staggering numbers. The dying continues, and is worse the more hyphens our identities hold, the more our bodies are subject to the long gun of the law. Conversion therapies, housing denials, bathroom arrests. I don’t need to tell you what happens to us in prison. You know.
So the question becomes: when gays die, who buries them?
Jude St. Francis is gay. This fact is established early, and often, in A Little Life. Hanya Yanagihara is straight. This fact is never mentioned, except in the discourse. When I finally got around to reading A Little Life deep in the second dream of 2022, I was expecting to hate it. And I did. But I also found an experience that sat in my stomach.
The pain was liturgical, rendered with precision and care. The Passion of Jude was exquisite the way I grew up experiencing Good Friday. I slipped through page after torturous page, losing track of hours, mainlining the Novocain of queer suffering. It took nothing from me, and gave me trash-fire warmth. A Little Life was comfort food. I over-ate, and came away sick.
Yanagihara’s rendering of gay suffering is nothing new, just the latest float in the parade of queer pain. Her straightness affords her a view of Jude’s death on full display, without the danger of having lived inside it. Absent is the exquisite joy of choosing to live a life in which you are loved by yourself and hated by the powerful. Jude’s life is little, and has no room for peace.
◆
Who gets to bury the gays? Depends who writes the eulogy, and how well.
On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent murdered Renée Good in Minneapolis, several blocks from where a police officer murdered George Floyd six years earlier. She lived close by and, like many Minnesotans, was part of neighborhood response groups.. The think pieces wrote themselves (“Her name was GOOD! WOWIE!”). So did the discourse.
The Passion of Renée Good was picked apart thoroughly, from a distance, with all the comfort nausea of a COVID-era true-crime doc. Her final words were quoted and requoted, captioned, raised on protest signs. Within hours, there appeared a head-spinning number of publicized angles of the shooting online, comment sections full to bursting, a life characterized by the most pertinent detail that verified whatever stance you were predisposed to have. She was a daughter. A paid protestor. A poet. A domestic terrorist.
She was a mother.
Then the angles were clearly AI-generated, because there was a giant dinosaur in a driveway in the background. (No, South Minneapolis is just like that.) The tires were pointing toward the agent. The tires were pointing away. The bullet couldn’t have killed her because it entered at the wrong angle. It was an execution. It was a false flag.
In one of the angles from a nearby porch, Renée Good’s wife Becca says, “They shot my wife. I don’t know what to do.” NBC later called Becca her “partner” and has not corrected this. Look elsewhere, dear viewer. No gays to be buried here. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, Becca Good has chosen a different eulogy. “Renée and I choose kindness,” she says. “We had whistles. They had guns.”
The official eulogy from the United States was somewhat different in tone. You’ve seen it. You know.
After Jonathan Ross discharged his weapon into her head, an agent of the state eulogized her by saying, “Fucking bitch.” This was Ross’ angle. He filmed. Later that day, Vice President JD Vance tweeted: “You can accept that this woman’s death is a tragedy while acknowledging it’s a tragedy of her own making.”
A Minneapolis woman who was later detained testifies that, upon her arrest for following an ICE vehicle, one of the agents told her, “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” Point, counterpoint. Discourse.
Once the occupation has eased, a trans friend of mine who lives a block from the killing ground tells me that the helicopters kept her up for a week. I tell her I experienced this too, after the second killing a few weeks later, which I heard from my sunroom. Online, the dead man was a hero, he was a terrorist, he was a nurse. On the street where it happened, his name is everywhere, his memorial adorned with 3D-printed whistles meant to warn.
To trans life, the word deadname carries potent dual meaning. If Deadname was the title of a 2015 Netflix show, it would be sorted under “tragicomedies we can’t get enough of.” The deadname is dead, belonging to the past, and the new name, the one that was chosen, belongs in the present. (Now I am become Sofie, destroyer of birth certificates.) But the deadname is something that happens to trans people after they die, the indignity of misrepresentation carved into a gravestone, often along with two em-dashed dead numbers, far too close together.
Dead numbers can exist above any queer body, whether or not the body was trans. Dead numbers can exist above any body, whether or not the body was queer. The only requirement for having dead numbers is that your right to live has been the subject of debate, and that you lost.
1988 — 2026. She was thirty-seven.
I haven’t changed my name legally yet, still waiting to see which way the law settles. I assume it will settle badly, and am learning German. On the phone, I ask my mother which name will be printed in my eulogy if I die before her. She pauses, breathes unbearably. Her throat is thick.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” she manages to say.
◆
Eventually, there’s no way around it. The weather is turning, and the sun is rising earlier. The whistles have stopped entirely, so I open up the windows in the sunroom, and can bear to sit there for longer. I call my mother and tell her I’m writing an essay about queer media, and ask her permission to share some of our conversations.
“This means you’re watching Heartstopper, right?” she says.
“Yes, sure, fine.” I perform exasperation.
“You have to. It’s just the honest thing to do.”
I know she’s just happy she’s gotten me to watch a show for once, and she knows I know, and then we talk about her late mother’s snoring.
This is the week the 4th Circuit Court decides that states can ban gender care for adults under the guise of “appreciating their sex,” and the three Missouri bathroom bills pass the state house, and the revocation of “fraudulent” licenses in Kansas, and, and, and. None of us have seen the bottom yet, but the pace of revelation is quickening.
After spending time at work researching the cost of living in Berlin, I come home and feed the cats, and the rat (named Mousey) that my partner couldn’t bring themselves to feed to the ball python, and I put a frozen pizza in the oven. I open my TV. I go to Netflix. I click Heartstopper, S1E1.
My partner comes home just as the pizza comes out. I have the show paused. It’s better than I expected, or maybe it’s exactly what I expected. It’s been getting harder to tell. There’s a special relationship-pain that I didn’t anticipate, which settles in my throat. What would it have been like to have known who I was at fourteen? What would it have been like for the problem of Sofie to be surmountable?
As soon as my partner sees what’s on TV, they say, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen this. It’s so cute! Scooch.”
It takes me to the end of the episode to give in. But once I do, it comes in a torrent. Olivia Coleman’s in this. “It’s so good she’s not a TERF,” I say, and they say, “At least we get one British mother.” By the second episode, we’re shouting, “Girl, he like-likes you!” at the texting gay teens. By the third, my cheeks are wet.
After our German lesson, I call my mom. It’s late, but she doesn’t sleep much.
“Another policy just dropped,” I tell her, then pick one to share. International visas with sex-incompatible gender markers are now illegal, meaning ICE can profile trans people. They never really left Minneapolis.
She says what I hear often: “The pendulum will swing back. It always does.”
And I say what I say often: “Yeah, but it swings through people.”
She sighs.
“Ten years ago, I never expected any of this would happen. None of us did. I’m sorry we failed you. So sorry.”
We’re silent for a while, as we always are at this point in the legislative update.
“Well,” she says. “Anything other than that cheery news?”
“I’m, uh… watching Heartstopper.”
She laughs deep and loud. “What do you think? It’s sweet, right? Even if it’s naïve. No, not naïve. Innocent.”
I want to say there’s a world where Heartstopper is real and there’s the world we live in, and the difference is in inches, not miles. I want to say I’m afraid that in imagining the wave that might be, I’ll lose sight of the riptide that is, and it will drag me under. I want to say she’s right. I do. I really do.
“Yeah,” I say instead. “Innocent.”
And we talk about the traffic, and the weather, and the book that she’s been reading, and a whistle blows outside.
◆
Endnotes
1 Factora, James. 2022 “The Problem With the Internet’s Obsession With Queerbaiting.” In Them. https://www.them.us/story/what-is-queerbaiting
2 Chen, E. (2022). New uses, old words: how Black LGBTQ culture influences modern internet slang. In Columbia Daily Spectator. https://www.columbiaspectator.com/arts-and-culture/2022/09/29/new-uses-old-words-how-black-lgbtq-culture-influences-modern-internet-slang/
3 Crowley, Archie. 2025. “And It Just Becomes Queer Slang”: Race, Linguistic Innovation, and Appropriation Within Trans Communities in the US South.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 35(2): e70008. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70008.
4 Mhloyi, C., Allen, S., Factora, J., Quispe López, & Osorno, A. (2025). In Memoriam: 13 LGBTQ+ Characters We Lost to the “Bury Your Gays” Trope. Them. https://www.them.us/story/bury-your-gays-trope-lexa-the-100-villanelle-killing-eve
5 “Bury Your Gays”: Why are so many lesbian TV characters dying off? (2016). NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/bury-your-gays-why-are-so-many-queer-women-dying-n677386
