Perhaps most significantly for viewers like me, they aren’t white. My family isn’t Puerto Rican like Victor’s, but I hardly need to suspend my imagination to identify with a brown, queer teenager navigating different cultures at home than at school.
As such, Love, Victor provides a welcome break from the mental gymnastics queer, non-white viewers are often expected to perform in order to relate to straight love stories, or even to gay coming-of-age films that center white kids like Simon. The show’s treatment of race is refreshingly subtle, too, bringing truthful specificity to the cultural differences between young people’s coming out experiences.
Season two finds Victor starting a new school year, figuring out how to be open about his sexuality, and managing his shifting relationships with his parents, who decide to separate at the end of season one.
He is also embarking on his first same-sex relationship with Benji (George Sear), who has been out of the closet longer and has more experience with what being gay actually entails, like sex with men and standing up for who you are, even to your own parents.
Benji’s insistence that Victor demand greater respect and acceptance at home is a source of ongoing friction in their relationship. While Victor’s dad winds up attending PFLAG meetings (where Duhamel makes a cameo as head of the local chapter), Victor’s mom follows a more fraught road to embracing her son’s sexuality.
What Benji doesn’t quite understand, Victor tells him, is how fortunate he is to have “liberal white parents.” They’re the sort of parents that Simon has, too — the sort who, in real life, Berlanti might have hoped would take their “sensitive” high school son to see Love, Simon in the theater, so they could all salt that popcorn with their tears together.
There is one character who does understand Victor’s dilemma: Rahim (Anthony Keyvan), the gay best friend of Victor’s sister Pilar (Isabella Ferreira). Although Rahim is younger and not out to his family yet, he seems more comfortable in his skin than Victor does. The two run into each other in the dark room, where all the best high school revelations come into focus.
“I’ve explained to [Benji] that my mom is trying her best with me being gay,” Victor tells Rahim. “And he’s just—”
“White?” Rahim cuts in. “Sorry, I did not mean to be presumptuous. It’s just that most of my friends are white, so they don’t get it at all.”
Rahim has immigrant parents who, like Victor’s, come from a conservative religious background.
“My parents left everything they knew in Iran so that I could have better opportunities,” Rahim continues, adding that while he doesn’t want to give them “a free pass to be homophobic,” he understands that their context for understanding his sexuality is different than it would be for the parents of someone like Benji, or his other white friends. Rahim’s parents’ marriage was arranged, he adds, and they only met twice before their wedding.
