Spoilers for Dear White People’s third season below.
“Yes, we have the chance to reinvent human sexuality without puritanical oversight. But it’s perfectly valid to, you know, have a boyfriend and be basic,” says D’Unte, a new character on the third season of Netflix’s Dear White People. He says this while dressed in a skimpy crystal singlet, surrounded by fetishwear-clad men in the middle of an underground gay sex party. Meanwhile, Lionel Higgins, the show’s central queer character, stands by awkwardly, underdressed in a pair of ill-fitting boxer shorts and calf-length white socks.
It’s a fitting example of what the show manages to do with Lionel’s story in its third season. While season one found the aspiring writer running away from his sexuality and season two found him exploring it within the confines of a monogamous relationship, season three finds Lionel, now single, experimenting with other parts of queer culture. And because he’s so green, Lionel sees everything with fresh eyes, making him an ideal audience surrogate.
It’s a particularly interesting approach, especially since audience surrogates in the past have just about always been straight. In Adam, an upcoming film directed by Transparent veteran Rhys Ernst, the titular character, a heterosexual cisgender male, pretends to be a trans man after his crush mistakes him for one during their initial meet-cute. As an outsider in the very queer world that he’s placed himself into, Adam is used as a guide for a presumably straight, cis audience. As he learns to navigate this new environment, so too does the viewer — at least that’s the intent. Adam’s central conceit is problematic, indeed, but it also just makes for a boring film. Watching it earlier this year, I couldn’t help but wish that I was watching something focused on the queer background characters instead. Adam himself was the least interesting part. Which is why Dear White People’s third season seems so refreshing. Through Lionel, show creator Justin Simien finds a way to give the audience a relatively uninformed surrogate that will help guide them into a new world of underground queer culture. But because Lionel is actually gay, the show sidesteps the need to show queer culture through a straight lens.
This season is at least partially framed around Lionel’s creation of “Chester,” a secret pen name that he uses for a serial about one gay man’s sexual exploits at the show’s fictional Winchester University. The writings itself is hilariously corny — “Even though I had just eaten breakfast, I was already hungry for a snack, and the campus was crawling with appetizing options,” he writes in one; another reads, “Maybe I’d take it into the end zone with a football player. I ain’t never been scared to take a knee” — but they nevertheless become a surprise hit on campus. Students describe the work as “Moonlight meets Sex and the City,” complete with the “political eroticism of Mapplethorpe plus the intrigue of Dangerous Liasons.” When one reader categorizes Chester as a “highbrow exploration of an oft-ignored community with a pulp noir aesthetic,” another quickly chimes in to add that “it’s also literary Viagra.”
But it’s his new friendship with D’Unte that really helps Lionel come out of his shell. In his very first appearance, D’Unte is already introducing Lionel (who he refers to as a “baby gay”) to new things. After passively using the word trade, much to Lionel’s confusion, D’Unte is forced to clarify himself. “They’re straight-adjacent guys you can just fool around with because they’d rather pass than have that conversation at Thanksgiving,” he elucidates.
