Recently this publication ran a Pride Month list of LGBT movies that aren’t about coming out, partly in response to the impending (now arrived, on Hulu) release of the series Love, Victor. The show is a return to the world introduced in the 2018 hit film Love, Simon, the first-ever studio film about a gay teenager coming out. While that movie was admirable in many ways, in others it left us—or me, at least—feeling a little starved for something else. Sure, this material was new for a studio comedy—but the adolescent realization of self has been depicted in so many ways, in so much media, that it’s often too easy to forget that there is a whole adventure waiting beyond.
So I made a list of movies that were largely about LGBT adults living more sturdily defined lives, exploring all that comes after all that first heralding of self. But Love, Victor is still something worth talking about, even if it covers a lot of familiar territory. The show’s creators, Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, also wrote the screenplay for Love, Simon, and they partly shaped the show around some of the mild criticism the film received: chiefly, that the coming out experience of Simon, a wealthy Atlanta white boy with very loving parents, showed an awfully easy version of what’s often a very painful and alienating process.
To address some of that, Aptaker and Berger decided to focus Victor on a Latinx boy from a more working class background, one whose family—well, extended family mostly, and really only in one episode—don’t seem as receptive to the whole gay thing. Puerto Rican actor Michael Cimino (no relation to the director of The Deer Hunter, as far as I know) was cast to play Colombian-Puerto Rican Victor, who moves with his family from Texas to Atlanta just as he is starting to have some realizations about himself. He spends most of the season ill-advisedly dating a girl, Mia (Rachel Hilson), all while an already-out classmate, Benji (George Sear), has his heart doing backflips.
It’s all very cute, very sincere. There are mild entanglements involving sex and drinking (plus some swearing), but otherwise Love, Victor is a clean, chaste show that glides around on smooth rails. Aptaker and Berger don’t do a 180 away from Love, Simon; they only turn a little, angling the show toward a bit more difference and difficulty but still keeping it mostly bathed in the soothing glow of screen fantasy. Relatively speaking, things are pretty untroubled for Victor and his bright-eyed friends, even as the fraught topic of sexuality tightens into an unspoken knot at Victor’s center.
That the knot is there at all is what makes the show notable. In a more perfect and understanding world, something as anodyne as Love, Victor would seem almost a relic—but we don’t live in that world. Not yet, anyway. Love, Victor’s gestures toward intersectionality—specifically between sexuality, race, and class—advance it further into the progressive discourse than Love, Simon itself tread, yet Love, Simon had a glossy, rarefied position as a wide-release theatrical film. Love, Victor is on Hulu, where it could struggle to find the right audience.
Which is the chief failure of Love, Victor—one that’s not even its own. The series was originally supposed to stream on Disney+, the Mouse House’s stringently family-friendly platform that is largely regarded as a safe place for kids to roam around, gorging on content, while their parents tend to other things. After some discussion between the show’s creators and the studio, it was decided that Love, Victor was a better fit for Hulu (recently acquired by Disney in their purchase of 20th Century Fox), safely removed from the wholesome strictures of Disney branding.