Hello! I was wondering if Isak is actually gay because throughout the entire season he never said he was, in fact he frequently denied it. But at the same time he never seemed interested in girls... I don't really know what to think.
i think the biggest thing you have to remember with isak is that those denials come from a place of internalized homophobia. the easiest way to sum up s3 is to say that itâs about isak coming to terms with his sexuality, but i donât think thatâs entirely accurate. isakâs central storyline this season is about him accepting himself as gay, not in a sexual sense but in a social one. heâs not struggling to accept the fact of his attraction to boysâpresumably heâs already worked through that over the past year, since he seems to have no issues with acknowledging and indulging in his crush on even right away. he knows heâs interested in even, and he knows itâs on a sexual and eventually romantic level; thatâs not an issue for him, and he actually seems pretty comfortable with it.
where his issue comes into play is when it comes to other people learning about his attraction to boys, even just one single boy. and the source of that issue is repeatedly shown to be not isak feeling disgusted by gayness and his own gay attraction, but rather his discomfort with how other people, including himself, perceive men who are gay. he isnât afraid of feeling attraction to boys, but he is afraid of expressing it bc, as eskild rightly calls out in 3.02, heâs afraid that other people seeing that will think heâs gay. and the reason for that is that, as far as isakâs experience has taught him so far, people perceive gay men in very limited, stereotyped ways: as hypersexual, as hypereffeminate, as weak, as in some sense not ârealâ men. so much of homophobia against gay men (and women, but thatâs its own topic that needs its own discussion) is rooted in a conflation of sexuality with gender, and isak, in his understanding of himself, has internalized that completely.
and we see that, repeatedly and on so many levels. if you look at the things isak says in the moments when he denies being gay, the reasons for it trace directly back to those stereotypes and trying to distance himself from them. he canât be gay bc he isnât attracted to all guys he meets, and definitely not to his friends. he canât be gay bc he doesnât want to wear tights and mascara. he may like kissing boys, sure, but that doesnât make him gay. not that thereâs anything wrong with being gay, bc of course there isnât. heâs just not. and the reason for why heâs so insistent about that isnât bc he feels that gay, as a word describing patterns of sexual attraction, doesnât accurately describe his experiences with his own attractions. itâs bc, as far as he knows, being gay means becoming a stereotype, and thereâs no space in those stereotypes of gay men for people like him.
listen, i get the desire to read ambiguities into characters, and to project into the spaces of those ambiguities endlessly once youâve found them. itâs as foundational to fandom practice as the basic love of the central text. but for me, there is no ambiguity here. we left ambiguity at the station when isak literally googled âhow to get turned on by girls if you are gayâ way back in 3.02. isakâs entire storyline this season has consistently and explicitly been about his conflict over labeling his identity, and the label he has been in constant, conflicted orbit around is gay. thatâs important. every part of it has been important bc it has been such a new take on the process of self-acceptance wrt sexuality. everything isak has been struggling with, the internalized homophobia and the fear of social perception and the discomfort with becoming just another stereotype, is real. itâs all part of the process of self-labeling, since that whole process is about taking a label that has already been given outside meaning and finding ways to make it apply to yourself.
for isak, that label is gay, and itâs one heâs just started finding himself in. heâs gay, and heâs done a lot of really hard, painful work this season toward becoming okay with saying that about himself. heâs gay, and itâs important that we acknowledge that.
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