#queer intimacy

The Summer Hikaru Died is an anime on Netflix that immediately caught my attention. The trailer clips drew me in with their unsettling horror — the idea of another entity occupying a human body, which often symbolizes how trauma transforms us into something unrecognizable. It reminded me of another cult classic that explores similar themes through sapphic undertones, girlhood, and friendship: Jennifer’s Body.

Years ago, I wrote blogs about how Jennifer’s Body portrays the experience of girls loving each other within a hetero-normative society. Horror has always been a deeply queer genre, no matter what people assume. Carmilla — the vampire story that inspired Bram Stoker and Anne Rice — used horror to explore hidden sapphic relationships within society. The exchange of blood and biting became metaphors for intimacy and desire, though depending on context, those same acts could represent violence or violation.

Like Carmilla, The Summer Hikaru Died doesn’t need to be labeled BL or Yaoi to be queer. It simply is. While BL/Yaoi or Yuri/GL tags often focus on romantic or sexual relationships, The Summer Hikaru Died builds its narrative around emotional intimacy and transformation rather than overt romance. The same can be said for Jennifer’s Body — both works use horror to express closeness and identity through tension, embodiment, and change.

Through physical actions and chosen words, both stories reveal intimacy and even pleasure in ways that differ from traditional depictions. For example, the dynamic between Hikaru and Yoshiki mirrors the complex bond between Jennifer and Needy — love and fear intertwined, identity and desire blurred.

With the anime The Summer Hikaru Died, it doesn’t need to be labeled as BL or Yaoi for it to be queer — it simply is. Typically, BL/Yaoi or Yuri/GL tags are used for stories centered on romance or sexual experiences between characters. The narrative in those genres often builds around the characters coming together romantically or sexually. But that was never the core theme in The Summer Hikaru Died or Jennifer’s Body. What both share instead is intimacy — expressed through physical actions, emotional closeness, and dialogue that carries weight beyond surface meaning.

In The Summer Hikaru Died, intimacy and even pleasure are portrayed differently from standard depictions. One striking example occurs between Hikaru and Yoshiki. Yoshiki, the main character and Hikaru’s best friend, mirrors Needy from Jennifer’s Body, while Hikaru parallels Jennifer. Hikaru, no longer human and now inhabited by a yokai that devours spirits, allows Yoshiki to place his hand inside the slit in his chest — a part of his body that functions as a mouth for consuming spirits.

The scene evokes a sense of vulnerability and trust rather than horror. Yoshiki’s initial hesitation isn’t disgust but curiosity — a careful exploration of something unfamiliar, almost tender. The act becomes symbolic of intimacy: testing boundaries, learning how closeness feels, and moving gently rather than forcefully. Hikaru’s calm acceptance deepens that symbolism, transforming what could be grotesque into something emotionally charged and strangely beautiful.

They repeat this act more than once, often in secluded spaces like a maintenance closet — places that echo the hidden moments of intimacy people steal with those they care about. Yet, because the series isn’t framed as a love story, these details can easily be overlooked or dismissed. Still, they reveal how horror can express connection and desire in ways that defy conventional romantic storytelling.

Just like in Jennifer’s Body, it can be difficult for anyone unfamiliar with the queer experience to recognize that Jennifer is romantically interested in Needy — that she always chooses Needy as her safe space. Even after experiencing the most traumatic moment of her life, being stabbed to death by the band members of Low Shoulder (a metaphorical reference to sexual assault), Jennifer goes to Needy’s house first.

She doesn’t harm Needy. Instead, she’s careful, almost gentle around her. Even in their brief physical, sexual encounter, Jennifer gives Needy space to decide whether to pursue her. I’ve always argued that Jennifer never truly fights Needy. In the end, when Needy breaks the friendship necklace — the symbol of their bond — Jennifer’s resistance fades. That necklace was Jennifer’s heart, the embodiment of their connection. I read that scene as Jennifer allowing Needy to kill her because there was no reason to keep going. But not before leaving a mark — a bite that, like vampirism, represents intimacy and transformation. Jennifer leaves pieces of herself within Needy.

Jennifer’s Body isn’t labeled as romance or sapphic, even though the evidence is there. Jennifer openly says she “goes both ways,” reflected in the victims she chooses to consume. Her possessiveness toward Needy and jealousy when Needy shows interest in boys at school reveal her emotional attachment. Jennifer devours those boys not out of hunger alone, but because they divert Needy’s attention — something she couldn’t control when she was human. As a succubus, she gains the power to remove those distractions.

Some might call that narcissistic, but it’s worth asking why her focus is entirely on Needy. It’s because Needy gives her what she needs emotionally and mentally — something she doesn’t want from anyone else. That dynamic is toxic, yes, but it’s also deeply human. Jennifer isn’t allowed to express her feelings for Needy in a healthy way. She embodies the archetype of the “beautiful girl” who uses social capital to survive, exploiting men for what she wants. She’s never romantic with them, never emotionally invested — sex becomes a form of currency, an exchange. Jennifer understands that and uses it knowingly. But Needy is different. Needy is where she finds love.

When Yoshiki discovers what happened to Hikaru, the yokai inhabiting Hikaru’s body could easily have killed him — but doesn’t. The yokai carries Hikaru’s memories and feelings, which anchor it to Yoshiki. Still, it warns him not to tell anyone, saying something along the lines of, “Hate to kill you.” That moment reveals the yokai’s conflict: it doesn’t want to harm Yoshiki but instead wants to explore the deep connection that remains between them, a bond inherited from Hikaru himself.

That’s why the scene where the yokai allows Yoshiki to penetrate Hikaru’s body — hand through the chest slit — is so significant. It’s an act of consent, vulnerability, and curiosity. It blurs the line between horror and intimacy, showing how closeness can exist even in the most unsettling circumstances.

All in all, I recommend watching The Summer Hikaru Died and Jennifer’s Body and paying attention to those subtle details. Both are narratives worth devouring. Though they exist in different mediums — one anime, one film — they each explore queer intimacy through transformation and horror. Even if anime isn’t your usual genre, it’s worth experiencing both to see how they portray the nuances of queer love: men loving men, women loving women, and the shared emotional truths that connect them.

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Transcript and content warnings available here.

I want to follow up on some points I made in my last post about attraction, specifically how I don’t really experience differences in attraction.  While a lot of discussion about aromantic identity and experience centers attraction, my personal experience doesn’t match this.  I can’t separate my experience of attraction into categories like platonic, aesthetic, and sensual.  I’m either attracted to someone, or I’m not, and the difference in that feeling of attraction itself between different people is minimal, even though the relationships themselves are drastically different.  More importantly, attraction isn’t a key factor in whether or not I choose to be intimate with someone.

For me, being aro is not about defining the nature of attraction, it’s about decentering attraction in relation to intimacy.

For me, intimacy is all about mutual expressions of love, so who I'm being intimate with, and why, and what exactly I feel about them is a core part of the experience of intimacy with them.  The primary factors in my intimate decisions are trust, a history of emotional closeness, vulnerability, nurture, empathy, and what I think will work well in that particular relationship.  Attraction is either a minor factor or not a factor at all, even though I do experience attraction, sometimes quite strongly.  Attraction is just unimportant to me when it comes to making choices about intimacy and relationships.

So while it’s true that I don’t experience romantic attraction, that’s not what matters to me about being aromantic.  What’s important to me is that my experience of intimacy is fundamentally different from how alloromantics experience intimacy, as I mentioned in my last post.  All my different kinds of personal relationships are different from the kinds of personal relationships alloromantics form.  All the normative models of personal relationships, friendship, family, and intimate relationships, fail to be applicable to my experience just as much as the models of romance fail to be applicable to my experience.

Because of this, I reject the idea that being aromantic is a lack of something that alloromantics experience.  My experience of attraction and intimacy isn’t a lack of anything, it’s a fundamental difference in form and structure that extends to all kinds of relationships and intimacy, as I said in my last post.  It’s also misleading to questioning arospec people who do experience some form of romantic attraction to define aromanticism as a lack of romantic attraction.

Anna Calvi - HUNTER