“It didn’t happen to you because nobody felt comfortable telling you about it. In the 80s, there were openly gay people and queer culture; you simply weren’t part of it.” Gaten Matarazzo to those who question queer visibility in the 80s

Gaten Matarazzo is 23 years old and has an answer you didn’t expect.

In an exclusive interview with British magazine Attitude, published on November 27, 2025, alongside the premiere of the fifth season of Stranger Things in the United Kingdom, the actor who plays Dustin Henderson pushed back against those who insist that queer representation in the series is a modern invention, something that “didn’t happen in the 80s”.

His response was this: the LGBTQ+ community did exist in that decade, with Section 28 imposing silence and taboo around sexuality.

What did not exist was the social permission to talk about it out loud. Matarazzo gave the friendship between Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) and Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) within the fictional story as an example, while Caleb McLaughlin added his own experience as a Black man to the conversation about invisible identities.