Euphoria Gave Me Courage to Come Out — Now We're Together
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- The author fell for best friend Ellen during the summer of 2019, a month before their final year of school together, when both were 17, despite having 'always assumed' she was straight in her liberal Stockholm upbringing.
- HBO's Euphoria — and specifically the relationship between Rue (Zendaya) and Jules (Hunter Schafer), a transgender newcomer — gave the author 'the push I needed' to kiss Ellen, who kissed her right back.
- The Rue-Jules storyline stood out for what it omitted: 'no major coming-out scenes, no need for Rue or Jules to explain their orientation,' which the author credits with reframing queerness as 'liberating' rather than daunting.
- Ellen and the author have been together for six years, building a life around shared books, movie nights, and laughter, though they didn't settle into coupledom immediately.
- The author tried watching Euphoria's later seasons but couldn't finish them because of the grimmer tone, while emphasizing gratitude specifically for the first season's impact.
Why it matters: The author's account surfaces a specific creative choice in Euphoria — its casual, unexplained queerness, in which Rue's mother simply responds to her 'relationship' with Jules by saying 'I really like her' — as what enabled self-recognition for a viewer who had absorbed heterosexuality as 'the default script.' That refusal to frame queerness as requiring justification functioned less as a mirror than as a model of how orientation could simply exist.
