Andrew big mouth gay

I experienced my first genuine crush in seventh grade. His name was Chris, and he choked on a breadstick. He had blonde, swoopy hair and a big nose and he was my everything. Our friendship blossomed into something more, though neither of us knew exactly what that meant.

A decade and a half later, it feels like mine and Chris's journey would have been different if we were kids today. Neither of us knew that we were gay, nor had we ever considered the idea of coming out. Andrew Rannells voices Matthew, the singular gay kid that attends Nick and Andrew's middle school on the animated Netflix series.

In Season One, he was mostly comic relief.

Screen Rant

In Season Two, his character got a dash of a storyline, highlighting the social navigations of being gay. And then, in Season Three, he gets the full romantic treatment: dating and first kisses and awkward phone calls included. That's a big deal—not because a gay character is on a TV show, either.

That's old news. Instead, Big Mouth manages to take a gay character and make his storyline realistic, which is a feat in itself for an animated series. Sure, Matthew is funny and a bit stereotypical at times, but that dose of Nick Kroll's signature humor isn't what anchors this series.

He leaves that to the storylines. In Matthew's case, Season Three tells a story I can't remember seeing as a kid or an adult. Matthew's more himself at school than anywhere else, but he butches up a bit when he heads home to his conservative mom and Navy dad.

He talks about how his home life is a "don't ask, don't tell situation. That was my story: a mundane, kind-of-sad-but-not-tragic tale that I feel like a lot of kids go through. Even when I started seeing queer characters on television, it always felt like they were either devastatingly sad or openly, beautifully, sassily gay.

I wanted the in-between. I wanted to know that there were stories like mine, where families glossed over this fabulous elephant in the room because they didn't really know how to talk about them. That real life in-between feels lonely, even during the funny parts. I learned a lot about life through television growing up, which is why I'm grateful I get to write about it.

My first exposure to any kind of diversity in East Tennessee came through a TV screen. I attribute a lot of who I came to be to the shows I watched. But when it came to settling into my own sexuality, that was a learning curve that I felt like I had to catch up on well after my friends had.

If I could talk to Matthew in andrew big mouth gay life, I don't know that I would try to tell him about anything that might happen in the future—how that talk with his dad might be complicated or how many other Aidens he's andrew big mouth gay to come across.

But if I ever got to talk to a gay fourteen-year-old in the real world, one who needed to see something that made him feel a little more seen, I'd make sure he'd watch Big Mouth. The feeling of hearing your own story told to you is more powerful than anyone can explain, especially after going so long without it.

Ohback to Chris. When he choked on that breadstick, he didn't die. I feel like that's an important clarification. He choked on it because he was trying to eat it while he was crying. We'd had a fight, and one or both of us said we weren't going to hang out anymore.