Alice's WONDERLAND
With its tender depiction of sexuality and gender in all its myriad forms, Heartstopper has delivered the representation the queer community has been waiting generations for. As this year sees the publication of the final book in the series, Attitude talks to our Person of the Year, Alice Oseman about their gamechanging creation
Words Juno Dawson Photography Dean Ryan McDaid Fashion Joseph Kocharian
Alice Oseman does not look like a media titan.
They are not male; they are under 30, and they dress a bit like Portia from The White Lotus. But you’d be a fool to underestimate them; Oseman is fast becoming an industry powerhouse and, more vitally, a queer icon, thanks to their creation Heartstopper, which grew from a web comic into a bestselling series of graphic novels and is now a hit series on Netflix.
Oseman and I have known each other professionally for a long time. We have the same publisher. This was how I came to share a stage with them on tour last year, and when I realised just how phenomenally huge the 28-year-old author, producer and screenwriter had become. Their legion of fans consisted chiefly of giddy, dungaree-clad, pastel-haired, gender-fluid, septum-pierced, Gen Z young adults. They approached the signing table shaking, trembling, hardly able to breathe, as they told Oseman what they, and their work, means to them. In short, Oseman is giving a voice to the very underrepresented Q and A in LGBTQIA. For that reason, as Heartstopper marks a stellar year, Attitude is crowning Oseman Person of the Year.
If you’re not familiar with Heartstopper, it features a diverse cast of British teenagers figuring out identity and love while at a very ordinary high school. The TV adaptation focuses on Charlie ( Joe Locke), who is gay and in a relationship with Nick (Kit Connor), who is bisexual. Also among the cast of characters is Elle (Yasmin Finney), a trans teenager, and Isaac (Tobie Donovan), who was created specially for the TV series — more on his identity later.
The impact Heartstopper has had means that Oseman’s legacy extends beyond writing. Oseman is one of very, very few media personalities speaking about their experience of being asexual and aromantic. They are a role model, and they aren’t sure how they feel about that.
“It’s a mixture of things,” Oseman tells me after their Attitude cover shoot in a chilly east London studio. “It’s lovely to hear that my work means a lot to readers — it’s what authors dream of. But it’s also jarring to see young people who are so confident in their identity. They’ve had people, or books, to see themselves in. I didn’t have that at all. When I was their age, I was in the repress
