In episode three of HBO’s ‘The Last of Us,’ we get a love story. The writers press pause on the explosions, the guns and the freaky cauliflower monsters for most of this chapter. Instead we find two middle-aged men who meet by chance and fall in love in the middle of the apocalypse. And (spoilers begin here) instead of the lovers being torn apart by the zombies in the end or having to make some horrible sacrifice, they grow old and die together.
It’s pretty revolutionary. Horror, however, does have a history of pushing the boundaries. Hector Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was the first film to star a black man without it all being about his blackness…he was a human being in a let’s call it a ‘difficult’ situation. But if you think about it gay characters really have got the short end of the stick. They die pretty early in the game or we get Norman Bates. Or more commonly, just not there at all.
On first watch, I watched with a twinge of dread. I worried about the straight male gamers who watch the show and the hatred that would follow from expanding the storyline in this way. In the video game, they mention the gay couple, but their story is not told. I watched the episode as if I were watching a tender green bud emerging from the ground near a crowded walkway.
On second watch, I just let myself enjoy it. I cried not so much because it touched me, but because I thought of the thirteen-year-old boy I was who needed to see this episode. He didn’t know how much he yearned to see two men finding each other and loving and living together for the rest of their lives. To know it was possible. To not have it be just about sex. To see the smallest and the most devastating thing: the way his head brushed against his husband’s hand in the last scene.
I cried for all the other people who needed to see it, who never lived long enough for one reason or another. It could have been there for them in the darkness as a firefly to guide them.
This episode is an artistic counterpoint in the story, a radical brush stroke of bold color on the canvas, and makes me think of the way some black artists play with Afrofuturism in their work. Afrofuturist work creates our own planets and worlds where black people thrive instead of survive, because it seems so many authors have forgotten to add any melanin to the future (Black Panther). We sympathize with the autonomous robot (The Iron Giant) or the misunderstood alien (The Man Who Fell To Earth) who feels, loves, cries, and laughs but is never seen as fully human.
This episode feels like a shout of ‘we will exist, and we will love.’ We will not accept a depiction future where we are silently glaringly absent.