Opinion: At first, I didn’t want to watch “The Last of Us”

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the third episode of the series.

I’m a lesbian, so it’s not every day that I’m forced to celebrate two burly, hairy, middle-aged men.

I first took note of “The Last of Us,” the post-apocalyptic HBO show based on the video game of the same name, when my weird social feeds lit up about a surprise episode in which a gay couple figured prominently. (A CNN shares a parent company with HBO.)

There was nothing in the description of the game or the show – a “ravaged civilization where infected and hardened survivors run wild” – that sounded appealing to me. Still, as a professional consumer of LGBTQIA+ media, it felt necessary to watch.

I suffered through the first two episodes of nail biting but extremely shallow, full of blood and guns and no humanity. Then, in the third episode, the sun came out.

As most of you probably already know, Bill, played by Nick Offerman, is a self-styled survivor who manages to escape his city’s mandatory evacuations, shutting himself off to a more normal-seeming solitary life – one of good wine and backup generators – while the rest of the world turns into fungal zombies or refugees living under totalitarian militaristic rule.

Then he meets Frank, played by Murray Bartlett, who literally walks into Bill’s trap, a hole dug around the property’s perimeter to keep everyone – and everything – out.

The two fall in love and a decade-and-a-half romance ensues, the only on-screen civility to be seen in an errant, collapsing society.

Their story and the episode ends when Frank decides to swallow a crushed bottle of pills in his Beaujolais rather than succumb to a degenerative disease.

In a true “Romeo and Juliet” ending, Bill also takes his own life, claiming that Frank was his purpose and is “satisfied”. Keep the tissue box handy.

It’s easy to overlook how groundbreaking “The Last of Us” is centered on queer love in such popular programming. The on-screen romance features not just two men, but two men who are not in the prime of their youth.

I never would have guessed I would see such a couple celebrated outside of Provincetown Bear Week.

Their on-screen love affair played out in ways that are frankly more tender than any heterosexual romance could have been.

What’s more, rather than being – as in many other narratives – the focus (or target) of the story’s pain, this gay couple’s plot represents the show’s only lighthearted relief from a doomed world.

This is playing out alongside the increasingly popular treatment of queer lives and experiences. Brilliantly, we’re also seeing the integration of actors who don’t identify as LGBTQ playing LGBTQ characters — something that even a decade ago seemed hard to imagine.

It’s the kind of representation that could help move the needle on acceptance of LGBTQ people, and it comes at an urgent time for equality.

We know that visibility increases acceptance of our lives and equal rights.

Marriage equality passed, many posited, because an increasing number of people knew someone who was LGBTQ, a fact confirmed by a 2009 Gallup poll.

If you accept that somewhere between 5-10% of people are LGBTQ (the latest estimate puts us at 7.1%, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, but considering how many people might not feel comfortable sharing, it’s fair to say the number is higher), so it shouldn’t be a big deal to see LGBTQ people in TV shows and movies. It’s shocking to see ourselves represented because for a long time we weren’t.

There have been so many critical moments throughout history that would have benefited from the kind of care taken with the third episode of “The Last of Us” — or shows like “Heartstopper” or the remake of “She-Ra” or “Our Flag Means Death.” ”.

In earlier times in history, perhaps more of this could have helped save lives – during the Lavender Scare, after the Harvey Milk murder, at the height of the AIDS crisis, during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era and the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and state constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex unions.

Too often, even in the recent past, when we appeared on screen played by A-list actors on conventional budgets, we were abused — like Hilary Swank in “Boys Don’t Cry” — or devastated by illness, like Jared Leto in “Dallas Buyer’s Club”.

Either we were withered within ourselves, unable to break free like Jake Gyllenhaal in “Brokeback Mountain”; or else an exponential iteration of every gay stereotype, as in Nathan Lane and Robin Williams in “The Birdcage.”

I don’t recall ever seeing an LGBTQ character on a TV show when I was of age in the late 1990s — other than the occasional transgender murder victim on an episode of “Law and Order” or Ellen DeGeneres being written off when she finally appeared outside.

None of this makes “The Last of Us” my favorite show – I won’t be converting to apocalyptic horror stories anytime soon. But I appreciate my choice to watch it, mostly because it would be true fiction if the display of affection between two men was met with only fanfare from those who love the show, particularly in this hotbed of sociopolitical warfare we’re going through.

The mismatch between the love of “The Last of Us” and the reality of the red state is real. There is a vicious faction of homophobic trolls who have been weighing down the show’s online ratings with allegations that HBO “woke up” tried to trick straight people into watching gay ones.

It makes me wonder if, all this time, all those heteronormative directors and writers were trying to trick us fagots into watching straight people. The nerve!

Watching “The Last of Us” alongside millions of other people felt like we had finally joined the real party.

Or perhaps more accurately, as if everyone has finally entered our big, weird party and can get a glimpse, however fleeting, of the ways in which our love can be as delicate and beautiful – and just as important – as theirs.

Maybe even more. After all, what straight man serenades his wife with just the right pairing of wines, impeccably roasted root vegetables, and rabbit followed by a piano performance by Linda Ronstadt?

Allison Hope is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Slate and others.