Will Byers’ “Stranger Things 5” coming out speech is powerful

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 5, Part 2 of ‘Stranger Things,’ now streaming on Netflix.

The biggest show of the streaming era appears to be largely about a young man’s coming-out process.

In the final episode of Part 2, released on Christmas Day, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) realizes he needs to talk to his friends about something. They fight together against Vecna, the evil force that wants to destroy the entire world, but has especially confused Will since the show’s first episode. When he was first kidnapped and turned upside down, Will had been a frail and clumsy boy who was bullied and scrutinized. Now older and more secure, Will realizes that Vecna, the evil being, is manipulating his insecurities. He tries to tear him away from his friends by showing him a vision of himself as abandoned by his friends and totally alone; To make sure this is just a dark fantasy, Will needs to unburden himself.

In one of the episode’s final scenes, Will’s words come in a torrent, painfully earnest and meandering until he finally gets to his point. “The truth is,” he says, “I’m different. I pretended I wasn’t because I didn’t want to.” Anyone who has ever had to give a speech whose content resembles Will’s will recognize the halting, awkward cadence here, as well as the way he announces his sexuality: “I don’t like girls.” He can’t quite bring himself to say what he’s saying do nice, but this is enough for now.

This, a pivotal character opening up about being queer on a show as big as “Stranger Things,” feels seismic — and, strangely, like the culmination of a very long journey. In the show’s early episodes, Will’s mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) says her son was cruelly mocked by his own father for being “queer”; At the time, Schnapp, the actor who played Will, was a young child. (He’s 21 and today a gay man.) Throughout the series, Will’s slight isolation from the rest of his peers has been an observation that the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, have noted from time to time. He was identified as uniquely vulnerable by Vecna, who needed an easily selected outsider to use as a vessel; this connection between Will and a being from another dimension has given Will himself magical powers this season.

In other words, being queer is a kind of superpower — and this season, a boy who used to stare wistfully out the window, waiting for his life to begin, is now actually living it. Among the show’s older Hawkins children are Indiana Robin (Maya Hawke), who is a bit more open about her own desires; she is a semi-out lesbian whose brashness and ability to be frank with Will do not in the least encourage him. (Will asks her how exactly she knew she was barking up the right tree when she started chasing her friend; she told him she could read signals. Gaydar is also his own magical power, honed through practice!)

And this message, that in difference you find strength and not weakness, is central to a show that is watched by many children of all ages. (Numbers may not tell the full story of the “Stranger Things” juggernaut; I was recently at a Christmas party where an entire group of high school students complained about the fact that they had obligations on Christmas Day, like unwrapping presents, that would keep them from getting right into the new batch of episodes.) There may have been tougher times to grow up with an awareness of your own difference — like, say, 1987, when “Stranger Things 5” is set — but I wouldn’t bet it’s on this moment is very easy. The fact that queerness plays such a crucial thematic role in the show’s endgame means that many young people can buy into the idea that their friends will love them for who they really are.

Because after all, Will isn’t shamed or ostracized by his friends; to someone they hear what he says and confirm their support. (You sense in some performances that this news doesn’t come as an earth-shattering shock to some of the characters.) And then they return to the issue at hand. They must save the world so that all of them, differences aside, can continue to live in it.

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