‘Stranger Things’ Has Always Had a Gay Character: Will Byers

Stranger Things 3 has a lot of major moments that fans have been waiting for, especially fans that identify along the LGBTQ spectrum. We got a fantastic ally moment between our favorite babysitter and new favorite snarky decoder queen, a moment that gives Stranger Things its first out lead queer character. I love that moment, truly, but there was another moment earlier in the season that resonated deeply with my gay self because it confirmed that the show has not forgotten a key (at least key to me) aspect of one character: Will Byers is also gay.

Okay okay okay–the show doesn’t come out and explicitly address it, and the scene I’m talking about may have left some viewers scratching their heads, but to a gay like me, a gay who was 100% Will Byers when he was 14, I’ve picked up on all of the signs. They’re not signs to me. They’re billboards.

The scene in question is in episode 3×3, “The Case of the Missing Lifeguard.” At this point in Stranger Things 3, Will has been begging his friends to play Dungeons & Dragons again. Instead, Mike’s been making out with Eleven nonstop and Lucas has been alternately charming and annoying his girlfriend Max. Making matters even more hormonal, Dustin returned from computer camp with a totally-not-made-up girlfriend in Utah named Suzie. The party Will held so dear, the party that helped pull him out of the Upside Down back in Season 1, has been crashed by hand holding and make outs and elaborate cross country walkie talkie calls. In Episode 3, Will takes matters into his own hands and transforms into his character Will the Wise.

He launches into a campaign, one set on “a day free of girls.” He forces Lucas and Mike to play along, even though they are totally not interested and barely humoring him. Will’s girl-free day is ruined when Lucas and Mike start trying to figure out the best time to call their girlfriends. Will gives up, tearing off his robe and storming out of the basement. Mike and Lucas try their best to calm him down, expressing sudden interest in the campaign, but it’s too late.

Mike catches up with Will in the garage before he bikes away into a rainstorm. Will accuses Mike of breaking up the party. He spends all his time with Eleven and, as Will points out, Dustin has been M.I.A. since he got back from camp. Mike, angry that Will’s coming after his relationship, claps back, cutting past all the subtext of the previous episodes:

I want to point out that this line–which I’ll unpack in a minute–doesn’t come out of nowhere. It was obviously set up in the first couple episodes of Season 3, the subtext to Will’s constant requests to play D&D. But it’s more than that. It goes back far, all the way back to the very first episode of Stranger Things.

The first time we meet Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin is during a D&D campaign (simpler times). Right after that is when Will gets abducted by the Demogorgon. For the rest of the season, we mostly learn about the largely absent Will Byers through flashbacks and how other characters talk about him. That’s what happens when Joyce Byers drops in on Chief Hopper to talk about her missing son. She points out that he’s a “sensitive kid” and “not like… most,” and says that while he has a group of friends, the other kids in school call him names and make fun of his clothes. And it’s not just the other kids that treat him differently. Before he ran out on them, Joyce tells Hopper that Will’s own father “used to say he was queer, [and] called him a f*g.”

That’s not it, though. Sensitive Will’s other-ness comes up again, at his in-school memorial ceremony of all places. In 1×4 (“The Body”), a bratty little bully named Troy taunts Mike and the others by saying that “Will’s in fairyland now, right? Flying around with all the other little fairies, all happy and gay!”

Eleven makes the bully pee his pants. He deserved it.

So when Mike says “it’s not my fault you don’t like girls” to Will a few seasons later, it’s not coming from nowhere. This is a part of Will’s backstory that show creators the Duffer brothers established in episode 1 and, not to be forgotten, it indirectly fuels Will’s entire character arc in Season 3. The creators didn’t forget about it, and if they’re telling a slow build story of what it’s like to be a gay kid, they’re getting all the beats down season by season. In this Season 3 garage scene, Mike–Will’s best friend since kindergarten–is saying what Will has heard from his deadbeat dad and school bullies for years. Mike addressed it, and the look on Will’s face–a look of betrayal and confusion, like he’s been shoved out of a closet he didn’t know he was in–is heartbreaking. I know from personal experience.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I was Will Byers. I also drew nonstop as a kid, had a ferociously and at times frantically protective mother, and spent way too much time in hospitals and seeing doctors. I was also picked on for being too sensitive and being, well, gay. Mind you, the bullies of Smyrna Middle knew I was gay almost a decade before I did, so it’s not like Will the Stranger Things character is necessarily clued into this just yet. Every story choice regarding Will Byers from him being ridiculed for being different to having his life derailed by illness to having all of his friends–particularly his guy friends–leave him behind for girlfriends hits me in the heart. I lived through all of this, and Stranger Things and Noah Schnapp get all the emotions right.

So to circle back to Mike’s “it’s not my fault you don’t like girls” comment–it is him saying the quiet part loud like Will’s high school bullies, but it’s super important to point out that Mike’s saying it in a different way. Mike’s not saying it like it’s a bad thing (“I’m not trying to be a jerk, okay?”). In fact, I think it’s very telling that the script doesn’t have Mike immediately walk it back (“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls–oops, I don’t mean it like that!”). That’s how that moment would’ve played out on a number of other shows. It’s how it played out in my teenage years, too, when my friends would defend me against people calling me gay and immediately follow it with “also I don’t think you’re gay.”

Mike doesn’t go on that tangent because this isn’t a coming out conversation. Maybe that’s a talk for Stranger Things 4 (or Stranger Things 10 if Will Byers is truly following my timeline). This convo is about their friendship, how the party is growing up and potentially growing apart. It’s about the pain of realizing that your friends aren’t into the same things, things you’re still into. Mike’s specific word choice punctuates the talk and, for a brief moment, makes it about this thing that may or may not be a big life deal for Will later–and then the scene continues with Will admitting he naively thought they were all going to be friends forever, laughing in Mike’s basement. After that, Will returns to Castle Byers in the woods and tears it apart in a screaming, tear-filled rage. In a season that’s packed with neon-colored mall montages and sassy zingers, this is possibly the realest and rawest moment.

Whether or not Will Byers will ever come out remains to be seen. It’s also entirely possible that he’s not gay, or identifies with a different orientation entirely or no orientation at all. I’m unbiased enough to admit that I’m viewing the character through my own personal biases, because I can’t think of another character that is as 100% true to my experience growing up as a sensitive, sick, artistic nerd who was way more interested in X-Men comics than girls. To me, right now, Will Byers is unmistakably a gay in waiting because that’s what I unknowingly was at that painfully awkward age. I don’t know where Will’s going but I’m deeply familiar with where he’s been.

Stream Stranger Things 3 on Netflix