My grandmother used to count the black faces in the Christmas choir on television and there was a time when I looked out for gay relationships in much the same way. Ten years ago, living in England, I’d turn on the television for the Channel 4 evening news and catch the last minutes of “Hollyoaks,” a soap opera set in a small town in the North West and largely about working-class characters. Two sixth formers (high-school seniors) were in love. John Paul had been bullied when he first came out, but he was a tough lad on the pitch. Craig, a slow starter, was still in the closet. I began to tune in earlier.

The representations of gay people in the culture were changing, moving into an era in which terror of AIDS was receding. I rooted for Craig, wanting him to have the freedom to be open that I hadn’t had growing up in white-suburban and black-activist America. The problem with watching entire episodes of “Hollyoaks” was that the straight shenanigans were of no interest to me compared with those of these cute boys, who, because of some morality code, were never shirtless at the same time in either of their narrow beds. Then I discovered that someone was extracting the John Paul-and-Craig story line and regularly posting ten-minute segments on YouTube. One evening session was enough to fill me in on the afternoon when Craig gives in to his true feelings, storms out of one of his A-level exams, and bangs on John Paul’s door. In the clips that followed, John Paul threatens to end things, and Craig promises to tell his girlfriend and everyone else the truth.

Meanwhile, I saw that other gay story lines could be found on the YouTube sidebar menu, where they were listed under the lovers’ names: Luke and Noah (U.S. pioneers of the gay daytime-TV kiss), Roman and Deniz (a German figure skater who bagged a Turkish ice-hockey player). Pilots from Portugal, footballers from Argentina, very dull boys from Finland—YouTube was the day’s end, and love is a fix, like a pint of vanilla ice cream, which I like at room temperature, taken through a straw. The small screen suited the ephemeral nature of the relationships; when one story line went cold, there was another couple in the sidebar.

I’d never read fiction for young adults, but I would watch the gay story lines on television for young adults, so long as they had no vampires or werewolves. Sentimental viewers like me wanted the gay couples to live happily ever after—for young gay love to triumph over parents, bullies, and clueless girlfriends—but the premise of the soap opera is that things don’t work out. For Aaron and Robert, a wild couple about whom every resident in the Yorkshire village of Emmerdale has strong opinions, doom lurks in the fact that Aaron is a big jailbird mess and Robert a total criminal. Often, it seemed that our team was never going to win. Passion doesn’t save Christian and Oliver, the boxer and his bartender from one German series. I stopped watching before Christian rediscovers women and leaves. On a popular Dutch soap opera, Lucas, the obnoxious rich kid, falls into a coma after shy Edwin has kissed him. When he wakes, Edwin dies from the Ebola virus. Their destruction wasn’t camp; it was a pity. After that, I made a rule not to watch if I knew that one of the guys was going to die.

I recently clicked on my YouTube history to find “Isak and Even Part 162”—the point at which I’d left off in a gay story line from a recent Norwegian teen Web series, “Skam,” that I’d discovered on my return to the soap-opera gay sidebar after a long time away. The boys’ story advances in clips that are shorter than thirty seconds; the couple are usually shot in closeup, whispering, gazing into each other’s eyes. One of them is bipolar, and I can’t face the story line that I suspect is coming. These days, most of the gay characters I meet are on network TV and already out of the closet, even admired by their straight colleagues as players on their sexual field. I can’t get into gay soap opera anymore, but YouTube keeps me in touch with the soundtrack of my past, like that audio recording someone posted of a Beatles concert at the Indiana State Fair in 1964, an event at which I was present, screaming my little head off. ♦

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