Late last week, Invisible Boys premiered on Stan—and in these past few days, the show has already touched the hearts of so many queer Australians with its gritty representation of what it’s actually like growing up as a queer person in contemporary Australia.
Ahead of the show’s release, Not Safe For Queers sat down with creator and director of Invisible Boys, Nicholas Verso, to discuss this authenticity, pushing Stan’s content acquisition team to their limits, and what audiences should take away from the show.
Adapted from Holden Sheppard’s 2019 novel of the same name, Invisible Boys is a ten-part coming-of-age series following the story of four queer teenagers in the rural town of Geraldton, WA. And from the beginning of the first episode, it’s clear that Verso’s direction is a tenacious one.
“I knew instinctively—immediately—what I was going to do with it,” Nicholas Verso tells Not Safe For Queers. “I grew up on queer cinema. You know, Greg Araki and Derek Jarman and Ana Kokkinos, and those filmmakers, they challenged you.”
“So, I didn’t want to hold my punches. I didn’t want to make it safe. I really did want to show that this is what it’s like. Let’s not homogenize things here.”
What Verso’s managed to portray is an authenticity that we rarely get to see in contemporary queer film and TV. From Red, White & Royal Blue, to Love, Victor, and even Young Royals, the queerness we often see in mass media has been so thoroughly cleaned and sanitised that it lacks any real resemblance to how our communities actually live.
But in Invisible Boys, Verso was encouraged to take those leaps—and it paid off. In the first few scenes alone, we see the main character (Joseph Zada) cruising in a public toilet, hooking up with a married man who asks him if he ‘plays’(IYKYK), and struggling with the threat of being outed.
“That was the bit I was most excited for, you know? I knew not everyone was going to like it, but that was part of the appeal,” Verso explains. “And to be honest, Stan really was the only place I ever planned on taking this to. Partly because every gay man I know has Stan (because of Drag Race), but also because they had all this other great queer content like It’s A Sin and Lost Boys and Fairies.”
“And I was lucky that there are people there who aren’t risk averse. Like, with commercial TV right now (and even with some other streaming platforms), you’ve got to play a safe game.”
“But when I handed in my first draft to Amanda (who’s head of content at Stan) she said, ‘oh I thought you said this was going to be edgy?’. So, I was like, all right, I’ll give you edgy, and I took the script back and beefed it all up,” he laughs.
Beyond the edginess, however, Invisible Boys is just so damn relatable—no matter where you are on your journey to self-acceptance. And that’s where it really shines.
“By the end, I wanted everyone to really be proud of who they were—because the queer community need to really love themselves and be proud of themselves,” Verso begins.
“I didn’t want there to be any shame. The reason certain things happen in the show aren’t linked necessarily to their sexuality. And that was an important thing for me; that nobody was suffering because of their queerness. Their queerness is their strength, it’s never a liability. We wanted to show young people that.”
Stream all 10 episodes of Invisible Boys now—only on Stan.