Unrequited
Love still flickers in the dark; a spotlight in training
Unrequited: A Gay Memoir is a story of growing up vaguely aware of passion, attachment, and difference, but consistently out of sync. It explores childhood and adolescence in scenes that are often funny—sometimes painfully so—while tracing a series of attachments that are real, sustaining, and never returned in the same way.
These early loves are not tragic. They are intense and frequently absurd: friendships overloaded with meaning, crushes conducted entirely in silence, elaborate emotional theories built on little evidence. They generate joy, purpose, and momentum—alongside waves of confusion and heartache, and very little chance of robust fulfillment.
If stories like Heartstopper are about connection arriving just in time, Unrequited is about what happens when it doesn’t. When timing fails, signals misfire, and longing becomes both a source of meaning and a recurring pratfall. A reader once called it Heartfloppers. That feels about right.
Written with clarity and restraint, Unrequited treats adolescent feeling neither as trauma nor as joke, but as a serious, sometimes comic apprenticeship—one in which wanting matters, even when little comes of it.
First Person
Unconcealed