This article contains spoilers for Episode 3 of Half Man.
For fujoshi, the Japanese term for women who love media about romance between men, we are living through what can only be described as a second Enlightenment. There’s the recent monumental success of Heated Rivalry, the Canadian hockey show that made superstars of its actors and caused author Rachel Reid’s source books to fly off store shelves around the world. Other LGBTQ+ romance books have also been surging in popularity for years, assisted by steamy movie adaptations like 2023’s Red, White & Royal Blue and 2024’s Queer. Hell, out gay actor Jonathan Bailey is People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. At times it has felt like many among us have become Zendaya in 2024’s Challengers, smiling deviantly as we watch Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor kiss feverishly. Indeed, there has never been a better time in which to fujo out.
Enter Half Man, the follow-up show from Baby Reindeer creator Richard Gadd, which is also laden with homoerotic yearning, albeit in other twisted ways. The BBC and HBO co-production, which premiered in late April, spends decades following two men, the chaotic ogre Ruben (played by Gadd as an adult and Stuart Campbell as a teenager) and meek closet-case Niall (Jamie Bell and Mitchell Robertson), after they become “brothers from another lover” when their respective mothers begin a romantic relationship together. The boys’ bond is fraternal, but also poisonous and unstable, marked by years of yearning, brutality, fear, and competitive masculinity. The complicated relationship isn’t consumed by endless will-they-won’t-they sexual tension so much as it is confronting in its physicality, both violent and sexual. At the end of the very first episode, for example, after Ruben has assaulted Niall several times, he assists his younger “brother” in losing his virginity with Ruben’s willing girlfriend. At one point, as Niall is inside his girlfriend, Ruben leans close to him and helps guide his breathing. At another, he helps redirect his brother’s penis. Minutes later in another scene, the episode ends as the now-adult Ruben lays on top of his brother before savagely beating him once more.
On TikTok, Half Man has been accurately described as “real doomed toxic obsessive yaoi,” a Japanese term for the “boys love” genre. But the show is trying to do something very different than other popular works of this kind. Half Man is homoerotic, to be sure, but it’s as much about straight men as it is about gays. The show explores how much queerness—rejecting it, flirting with it, shaming it, running from it, weaponizing it—can sit at the heart of straight male culture. For these men, queerness is an obsession, even if they would never admit it. If Heated Rivalry kicked off a “mass psychosis event,” as New York magazine described, in which the sight of two men going to town on each other had “awakened a libinal desire” in women of all sexualities, Half Man turns the mirror back to men and asks just what is making them so scared. Think of it as Heated Rivalry for sickos.
The show’s third episode, which aired on HBO on Thursday night, is the midway-point linchpin on which the entirety of Half Man turns. The characters are dealing with the fallout from young Ruben’s appallingly vicious assault on Niall’s classmate and love interest at Glasgow University, Alby (played by Bilal Hasna, and later as an adult by Charlie de Melo). The attack put Alby into a coma for six months and left him disfigured, but now, years later, he’s pressing charges. Both Ruben and Niall’s mother, Lori (Neve McIntosh), ask Niall to lie on his behalf, to swear in court that Alby groped Ruben before the assault, thus justifying his sudden outburst of violence. This is because, as Ruben says his lawyer tells him in 1993 Britain, “the only thing a jury hates more than a thug is a fag.” Whether or not Niall will go through with the plan will have lasting effects on everyone for decades to come.
This legal defense, known commonly in the U.S. as the “gay panic defense,” is indeed a real one in countries around the world. After it received prominent attention stateside following the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, much work has been done to ban it in states across the U.S. But it still exists and, per a tally kept by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association, has been raised at least 15 times over the past decade in murder cases involving LGBTQ+ victims, particularly transgender women. It’s based on now-debunked 1920s psychology suggesting that defendants whose homosexuality is repressed may experience an uncontrollable reaction when they experience a sexual advance from a queer person. What’s clear is that while the defense may be outrageous, its focus is also intrinsically on the offender; it’s within him that the problem exists.
Throughout Half Man, we are told there is something dark within the two leading men, but it’s not clear where it’s coming from. Ruben has a “blackness in him,” Niall’s French roommate Celeste (Philippine Velge) tells him at university. “There’s a lot of you in Ruben,” Niall’s mom says to him, years later, on his wedding day. “That’s probably why you hate him so much.” This darkness is often framed in violent terms across the show, but it’s also made out to be sexual. When Niall confesses to Alby how he lost his virginity alongside his brother, Alby tells him it all makes sense now why Ruben feels like part of him. This is just moments after Alby has told him that Niall and Ruben “are the same person in the way Jekyll and Hyde are the same person.” Alby meant to imply the two brothers couldn’t be more different, but his words also hint at a monster within.
From its first episode, Half Man has positioned itself squarely in a world of homoeroticism and violence. Boys and men across all levels of the Kinsey scale seem to delight in torturing one another in the series by using their bodies as weapons, whether it’s Niall’s school bully rubbing a collectible card on his genitals and stuffing it into Niall’s mouth, or Ruben playfully trying to see what’s under Niall’s kilt at his wedding. But the show also makes clear that it’s this combination of sex and violence, of desire and fear, that is at the root of homophobia. When Alby tells Niall how he finally did away with the bullies who beat him at school for being gay by suggesting that the next student to touch him “wants it,” he was exposing the latency of their urges, however small. Desire between men, as opposed to women, is more shameful, Niall tells Alby, which is also why it makes such a powerful weapon. “Someone stabs you, they attack the body,” says Ruben. “Someone gropes you, they attack your fucking soul.”
In Heated Rivalry’s first season, the show’s climax occurs at the end of the fifth episode, when the two main closeted hockey players watch in awe as one of their fellow players throws caution to the wind and declares his love for another man in front of the world. It’s a moment of genuine romance, but also intense catharsis, both for the characters and for the audience. Throughout the series, the closet has imprisoned these men and their desires, and now the sunshine has come streaming in, with all its possibilities. And yet, the sports romance drama does not actually spend much of its runtime exploring the closet or the casual homophobia of the sports world. (Indeed, if anything, the opposite occurs; in the second episode, set at the Sochi Winter Olympics, we hear one straight player marvel at a gay figure skater’s bravery for competing as his authentic true self in Russia.) In the world of Heated Rivalry, the closet is treated as an established given. In Half Man, we see how it gets assembled.
It’s no coincidence that Ruben attempts to better himself with volunteer work by volunteering to mentor young boys, perhaps just to earn leniency in the eyes of a judge. He’s a natural with them, and the children seem to crave his attention and guidance. But to me, these scenes in Episode 3 felt particularly menacing, not because Ruben is positioned as a predator, but because he’s positioned as a teacher. Ruben’s abusive father made him into the man he is today, and now here he is perhaps about to do the same.
It’s for this reason that the most profound lines of the series are spoken not by Niall, but by his classmate Joanna (Julie Cullen), in Thursday’s episode. When she eventually shares dinner with Niall’s family after graduation, she’s asked why she’s decided not to pursue teaching as a career despite studying it. Originally positioned as a daffy character, Joanna surprises with her words, some of the most sage and pertinent in this show: “I’ll end up teaching people like me, and part of me needs to break that cycle. You know, for the sake of humanity.”