A gay couple who can grow old peacefully: that is revolutionary television

Warning: This article contains spoilers for episode three of The Last of Us.

“I thought I was watching a zombie series, why am I suddenly crying this week over two old gay men?” That’s the question many people asked online about ‘Long, Long Time’, the beautiful and much-discussed third installment of video game adaptation The Last of Us which has been on display since last Monday.

In ‘Long, Long Time’, the main storyline – grieving father and orphan trying to survive the zombie apocalypse – is abandoned for a thematic excursion: a cinematic essay about the importance of love, even after the apocalypse. Cheerful bearded Frank (Murray Bartlett) falls into a trap set by libertarian survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman). Very carefully, Bill allows Frank to enter his self-built fortress, where he has been keeping the ‘infected’ at bay for four years. As Frank showers, gets fed, and listens to Bill play Linda Ronstadt’s fragile song “Long, Long Time” on the piano, tension builds. Will he hurt Bill? But no: what follows is a kiss, and a relationship that lasts sixteen years.

Television director Peter Hoar deliberately tricked the public, he admitted in an interview online culture magazine Inverse. Still, not everyone was surprised. Many LGBT viewers saw the looks, how Frank noticed what wine Bill had chosen, that vulnerable song. A crumb trail of impressions.

Hope and recognition

Particularly for people from minority groups, a storyline or character can come across very differently than for the often white, heterosexual audience to which the media is still mainly geared. What one does not see, is a source of hope, inspiration or recognition for the other. Personal context is all-important.

The boundaries of what was ‘normal’ in Hollywood entertainment had long been sharply defined – and with it the image of what was unusual. The Hays Code, a self-imposed list of rules to prevent the vice squad from showing up at the door, held Hollywood in its grip. Sex, violence, and homosexuality? You had to be careful with that.

It’s tempting to think that those rules were always there. That the increasingly prominent gay characters on television are the result of our recent enlightenment. That is not correct: until the early 1920s, much more was possible in films. The code followed a series of scandals in the 1920s that made filmmakers wary. It did not disappear again until 1968. The learned restraint was released even more slowly.

But film and TV makers did not really accept the code. They came up with a secret language that would go unnoticed by honest, white heterosexual citizens. This gave rise to ‘queer coding’, the use of stereotypes, references, behaviors and visual elements to indicate that a character was gay or bisexual – and possibly in a relationship with another.

Aging peacefully

In 2023, people who learned to ‘read’ queer coding and the mainstream audience still view television entertainment differently. You feel that The Last of Us. Although ‘Long, Long Time’ was written by a heterosexual man (Craig Mazin), the team consists mainly of older gay men.

Without their knowledge and understanding of LGBTI history, this episode would have been less successful. Peter Hoar and his crew knew that the story of two gay men who are allowed to grow old happily, who get to decide for themselves when they die and how, would sound different than that of a heterosexual couple.

After all, Bill and Frank in their fifties are old enough to have experienced the AIDS crisis. The gay community continues to be affected by violence and homicide at an above average rate. Aging peacefully is not a certainty.

“This metaphor is a gift,” wrote AIDS activist Peter Staley. At the same time, other critics commented: some images and themes were very reminiscent of AIDS clichés, and we see them enough already.

Read also: Will ‘The Last of Us’ series break the curse on video game adaptation?

Although the worst clichés about LGBTI characters are less often quoted these days, many viewers underestimate how new truly realistic renditions of queer stories are. How often do we see older men who like men? Homosexual preppers with beards who turn out to have a tender heart under all that toughness? Stories about men who go through the entire breadth of a relationship together, instead of being the sexy young gay couple or the sexless best friends?

Drenched in loss

In-game The Last of Us Bill is also gay, but in 2013 his story was much more cynical. We’ll meet him when Frank has left him. On the way we find out that Frank died after a zombie attack. Some gamers were a bit surly about the changes: the HBO series is a very faithful video game adaptation, and they missed the scenes that Bill has in the game. Couldn’t he have survived Frank like in the game?

Rather not. Stories about LGBTI people are so often drenched in the loss of a partner, the real revelation is that Bill and Frank can choose to hold on to their love forever.

‘Long Long Time’ therefore feels revolutionary: mainstream television about the future, made with a deep understanding of the past, of context, of culture. Or such as online magazine slate says it nicely: “At a time when queer people are increasingly dismissed as ‘sick’ […] is a gay couple here the keeper of civilization, the steward of beauty.”