Gabe is gay

Watching Gabe struggle with his sexuality in the new season of PEN15I felt like I was watching my younger self onscreen — and I'm not alone. Then, much later, it left me completely reeling. Maya Maya Erskineone of the awkward year-old best friends the show follows, is holding hands with boyfriend Gabe Dylan Gage at an afterparty for their school play when she compliments his hair.

You too. Your hair is A day after I first watched it, I was interviewing another gabe man around my age about the scene and he recalled similarly freaking out at the advances of a girl when he was young. He recounted going to a school dance and then running away — literally running away — when a girl tried to grind on him.

I guess I quite literally blocked the experience out of my mind. But then suddenly it came rushing back: The sheer horror I felt as a young girl approached me amid the multicolored lights of the teen disco our mothers had driven us to, touched me on the gabe, and asked me to dance. I made a hurried excuse about needing to use the bathroom and left.

While the rest of the night is a fog, during that interview I could suddenly recall the fear I had felt as she approached in vivid detail. What did she want from me? What exactly did she think I was going to do in return? When PEN15 premiered init won deserved praise for the unbelievably accurate verisimilitude of the middle school experience for kids in the early s.

The show also nails the big, formative moments — say, stumbling into masturbation as if it were a secret activity you had invented — and the impossibly small minutiae I was convinced only I had experienced gay. Gabe, Maya, Anna, and the rest of the kids on the show are at that key transitional age, watching their childhood get slowly disassembled as they stare down the barrel of becoming a teen and later a grown-up with both excitement and nervous terror.

Of course, when I was in grade school in the late s — or primary school, as we call it in my native Australia — I involved myself in the ongoing saga of who liked whom. I remember nervously calling the home of the most popular girl whom we all were infatuated with an original choice, I know and hanging up in a panic when her mother answered the phone.

The revolving cycle gay crushes in our class was a delicious soap opera that we were all writing for ourselves and it felt so adult.

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But then — very suddenly and without warning — it became too adult. Girls were no longer just cute, I was informed; they were hot. It all felt so fraudulent, so fake, like everyone was pretending to be older than they were. And I was left feeling resentful and like I was being left behind.

Then, ever so slowly, it dawned on me. In PEN15Gabe seems perfectly happy to continue being a kid. A collection of Animorphs books lies behind his bed, and he stays up late working on the hand-drawn magazine he and his friends are making about weasels. You have to be more mature!

By the end of the season, Gabe is quite literally play-acting as an adult opposite Maya in a hilariously inappropriate school play about a turbulent marriage written by their drama teacher. Please remember these children are