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How Kit Connor Won the Battle Against Online Trolls and Haters

GayNrd Editors July 21, 2023

With a new season of Heartstopper returning to Netflix, 19 year-old star Kit Connor reveals how he battled the online trolls who outed him last season.

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Connor doesn’t linger on the level of scrutiny he started to receive, but it was intense: A portion of fans fixated on the question of whether he, like his character, was queer, their tone ranging from demanding to know if he was indeed bi to accusing him of being “str8 and benefiting off a queer project” or being clearly “straight af” but dodging questions with the “perfect amount of woke brand of political correctness.” Initially, Connor brushed off the speculation, tweeting a few weeks after Heartstopper was released that Twitter “is so funny man. apparently some people on here know my sexuality better than I do,” then saying on a podcast that he preferred not to label himself. In September, he was photographed on location for Heartstopper holding hands with a future film co-star, the actress Maia Reficco, which made certain fans all the more intent on forcing him to disclose his sexuality. He deleted his Twitter account soon after, writing, “this is a silly silly app,” but the messages got to the point of harassment and stalking — “People would start reaching out to my friends and people I was close to about it,” as Connor puts it — which set him off. He certainly would have had cause to be furious, but he couches his feelings to me a little differently. “I think I felt disappointed,” he tells me, “because I was really trying, you know. I really was trying to set that boundary. It was my private life, and I can understand why people would want to know, but I was also, you know, an 18-year-old kid.”
So in bed, after that long day shooting last fall, Connor decided to log back on to Twitter and fire off a message: “back for a minute. i’m bi. congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. i think some of you missed the point of the show. bye.” It was an entirely impulsive decision. He tweeted it, deleted Twitter off his phone, and went to sleep. “Then, the next morning, I just realized, Oh God, what did I do?” he says. “In my head, I was just like, I want it to stop. I didn’t think about the reaction.”
The response to his coming out was overwhelmingly positive. His cast members supported him (“You owe nothing to anyone,” tweeted Locke), as did Oseman, who wrote, “I truly don’t understand how people can watch Heartstopper and then gleefully spend their time speculating about sexualities and judging based on stereotypes. I hope all those people are embarrassed as FUCK.” Famous members of the entertainment industry publicly and privately showed love. Luke Evans, who is out himself, tweeted, “Seems like things don’t change.” (“I wouldn’t want to name-drop,” Connor tells me, Britishly, when I ask who messaged him directly.) He was the subject of op-eds on when digging into stars’ personal lives goes awry. “I didn’t think it would have the reaction it did,” Connor says, downplaying the moment and his part in it, for not the first time, during our walk. “Gave me a lot of hope for mankind, I suppose.”
But it was also, of course, all quite jarring. At the time, Connor was out to close friends and members of his inner circle but not everyone, so some people he personally knew found out from the tweet, “which made coming out more interesting,” he says without elaboration. He’s not anxious about being limited by the label of being a “queer actor.” “It shouldn’t matter, and in my experience so far, it hasn’t,” he says. “But I want to play roles that are interesting and challenging, whether they’re queer roles or straight roles.”