Class of 2005 F*CK YOU – two words, no argument

My fiancé paused the movie so I could go find a tissue. Twice.

We had just watched Heartstopper Forever, the two-hour film Alice Oseman wrote to close out the series, which landed on Netflix on July 17, 2026. Three seasons and a finale, binged across a handful of humid Sài Gòn evenings. And it is exactly what everyone says it is: warm, colorful, wholesome, ridiculously kind. More pride and more joy than most of the reality I’ve walked through. Two boys hold hands in a school corridor and the corridor simply lets them.

I cried for about half of it.

Not at the plot. At the corridor.

A school with nothing above it

I started at a state Realschule (secondary school) in rural Bavaria in 1999, its very first year of existence. Three classes. About ≈90 students, total. No graduating year above us, no traditions, no school song, no upper-year kids to be terrified of.

Nothing but fresh paint, then. Except the paint was the only new thing in the place. The school had been handed the grounds and buildings of a convent – a Catholic teaching order, four centuries of somebody else’s institution – and while the main block was being renovated, we had our lessons in a temporary building next door. Some of the sisters were still living in the main house. A brand new school with no history of its own, standing in the yard, waiting for the old one to finish moving out.

By the time I left in 2005 it had a few hundred students. What it has now depends who you ask: the Bavarian school register says ≈575, one school directory says ≈1,006, the ministry says ≈714. Three official sources, one school, one country famous for filing things properly, and a spread of ≈431 students nobody seems bothered by.

I mention the founding year because it matters more than it looks: we weren’t inheriting a culture; we were building one from scratch, ninety kids and a handful of teachers, and whatever that place turned into by 2005, my year group made it. I was a founding student of the thing that spent six years grinding me down.

And in my final year, 2004/2005, they wrote school clothing into the school rules. Shirts, school logo on the chest, compulsory in everyday lessons. In Germany, where school uniforms barely exist and carry a very particular historical smell. It applied to the incoming classes and not to mine, which is roughly the only thing that building ever let me off. The obligation stayed on the books for nine years and was lifted in 2014 – at which point the principal was careful to clarify that the school clothing had not been abolished, merely made optional, and that pupils were still expected to dress appropriately.

So: a former convent, nuns still on the premises, compulsory religion with ethics as the only escape hatch, and a logo shirt. Did I mention the environment was slightly conservative?

In those six years there was not one visible queer person in that building. No out students, no out teachers, no flag, no club, no assembly, no poster, not a single sentence. Sex education in fifth and sixth grade managed a passing reference to non-heterosexual lifestyles and moved swiftly along, and religion class was extremely clear about which shapes love was permitted to take.

Meanwhile the vocabulary was thriving. Schwuchtel, Tunte, schwule Sau, Arschficker, in the corridors, in the yard, in the changing rooms, aimed at me specifically and often. Gas chamber jokes, Auschwitz jokes, the whole racist back catalog, deployed by fifteen-year-olds for the reason fifteen-year-olds do anything: to find the edge of what you’re allowed to say and stand on it, looking cool.

So: no words for me, and an enormous number of words at me. I had known I was different since before that school existed. Crushes on boys and on girls, all the way back through elementary school, none of it fitting anything anyone had described to me. I had the feelings and none of the language. I was a curious, bookish, weird ten-year-old walking into a room where the only available term for what I was, was being screamed across a schoolyard as an insult.

The wrong kind of different

I was an outsider on day one and I stayed one for 2,190 days, give or take.

I came from Munich. I spoke Hochdeutsch – Standard German – in a room that spoke Bavarian at varying levels of density. I was the child of atheists in a Catholic village. My classmates were in the shooting club, the soccer club, the traditional costume club, at the beer festival, at the town festival, at the parish thing on Sunday – and I was in none of it, because my family had no roots there to plug into.

What I did instead: read novels, science books, whatever popular-science magazine I could get hold of, watch documentaries on public TV about geology and buildings, and play video games until games became less of a hobby and more of an exit. And hang out with adults. Constantly.

I spent entire afternoons and weekends in the studios of two local artists, both women, both decades older than me, painting and drawing and working on sculpture and arguing about God and the world. I spent school breaks with teachers instead of in the yard – the IT teacher to nerd out, the chemistry teacher for the stuff that wasn’t in the curriculum, the geography teacher for rocks, the German teacher for poems and for the sheer variety of the language, the biology teacher for questions about bodies that I very much wanted answered. I skipped actual lessons to help the principal and vice-principal put together the official school newspaper.

And at some point around age twelve I made my own gaming magazine. In Microsoft Publisher. Modeled shamelessly on GameStar – news, hardware, reviews, opinion pieces – printed out and pinned to the school noticeboard with the principal’s written blessing. It was called Pl@yGirl (sorry; I was young). It had a lightly-dressed babe of the month on the cover, lifted off a game wallpaper, which was standard practice in the German games press at the time and is deeply cringe now.

It also had a boy of the month. Same treatment. Right next to her.

Nobody said a word. In a Catholic Bavarian village school in about 2001, a twelve-year-old put a half-naked boy on a magazine cover, hung it in the corridor with official approval, and the entire building looked straight through it. That was one of my first public statements about who I was. It got exactly the same response as my second one would, four years later.

I was also, and this is not a small thing in that environment, spectacularly unathletic. Not fat – just clumsy, badly wired for my own body, hopeless at anything involving a ball moving quickly toward me.

Which brings us to sports.

Sports, and the room after sports

The teacher had just come out of the Bundeswehr and ran the class accordingly. Team sports, every single week. Soccer, basketball, volleyball, and damn, Völkerball (prisonball). His favorites got to pick teams, and whoever was left sitting on the wooden bench at the end put the equipment away. Underperformers did extra exercises and push-ups in front of everybody. Mixed classes, boys and girls, everybody watching.

Guess who had the honor. Every week. Anew.

Unsportsmanlike. Lazy. Sloppy. Not a team player. Grades of 5 and 6, year after year. And I want to be precise about what that man built, because he didn’t fail to notice bullying – he designed a weekly ritual with a designated loser slot and a fixed time on the timetable, and then the class only had to show up and fill it in.

Then there were the changing rooms.

Hell on earth is a phrase people use loosely. I mean it structurally: a small tiled room, no supervision, no exit, twice a week, for six years.

I was ashamed of my body and they knew it, so that became the game. My clothes went out the window or into a locker. The word list came out. Towels, snapped. A friendly little shove. A foot placed so I’d go down. Fat, worthless, useless. Some of them held their dicks and their asses in my face while the room laughed. And I looked, sometimes, at boys I shouldn’t have been looking at, quickly and in terror, and got caught, and that fed the machine another week.

One of them liked to explain that in the 1930s and 40s I’d have been treated differently.

That sentence, in a Bavarian classroom, from a fifteen-year-old, in the year 2003.

There were afternoons I locked myself in a toilet stall and cried until the building emptied out and I was brave enough to walk to the bus alone.

Kranich

The nicknames arrived early and never left. Knut first – I still have no idea where that came from and nobody ever explained it. Then Kranich. Crane. The bird. Long, thin, awkward, and I assume that was the joke, but again, nobody ever told me, and after a while you stop asking.

My class used it. Other classes used it. And then the teachers started using it.

There was one lesson where a teacher heard it, stopped, and asked the class what it meant. And a kid explained: that’s just his name now. He doesn’t object to it, so it’s fine.

Kranich? Okay!

The teacher laughed and used it for the rest of the year.

That is the entire school in four seconds. An adult is handed a chance to ask one more question – why does he not object? – and instead takes the class’s word for it and joins in. I said nothing, because saying something was how you got hurt, and because I had decided years earlier to keep gute Miene zum bösen Spiel – a good face for a bad game.

And those were the nice names – Knut and Kranich. The default, however, was Schwuchtel. My surname got chewed into a couple of variations too, which I genuinely didn’t mind, because anything was better than Schwuchtel.

My IT teacher, at some point, called me a Paradiesvogel. Bird of paradise. Fondly, and she meant it.

Two birds. Same kingdom, opposite verdicts. Guess which one the faculty picked up.

The camp

I went to the school trips in the early years and then stopped, and there was a specific evening that ended it.

Some of the boys decided I should kiss a girl. To prove something. To fix something. She was drunk, she was shy, she was also not exactly popular, and neither of us had any say in it whatsoever. They put us in the middle of the room and formed a circle and cheered and shouted and pushed me at her and kicked at my legs. Her face said no as clearly as a face can say anything.

I fought my way out and ran. They booed. A couple of them chased me for a bit, then lost interest and went back to the party, and I sat in the dark sleeping hall on my own, staring at nothing, for what felt like a very long time.

Two things I want said plainly. One: a group of minors staged a coerced sexual act between two other minors as a public loyalty test, and to everyone involved it was a bit of fun at a school camp. Two: when I ran, I got away, and she was still standing there in the middle of that circle. I have thought about that more in the last 20 years than about almost anything else from that particular building.

I never joined another one. Except the graduation trip to Italy in 2005 – Pisa, the coast, Roman ruins, hillsides under grapevines – where my class had a flirty, funny, sunlit week and I was simply present. Sharing a room with boys from my class, which went exactly as you’d expect. Yeah, there were nice moments. A couple of real conversations. I smiled a few times.

But I was an attachment. The leftover guy. And the two teachers who came along had long since accepted that role as a fact of nature, the way you accept weather. Somebody used the phrase superfluous appendage about me on that trip. Their words, not mine, and it still impresses me that a fifteen-year-old reached for something that formal.

Nobody cared what I did, what I thought, what I felt. I existed. Nothing more, nothing less.

Mauthausen – the other camp

We went there on a history excursion. Mauthausen. Concentration camp, preserved site, guided walk, the whole thing – the way half of Bavaria does it at fifteen, because the state believes, correctly, that you should be made to stand in the place.

They laughed. On site. In the crematorium. In front of the gas chamber, some of them said out loud what they thought about the people who had been in it, and about the ones they had been calling by those names all year, and I was one of those.

So much for a good face for a bad game.

I have no memory of a teacher intervening. I have looked for one and it isn’t there. It’s possible somebody said something quietly, later, out of my hearing, and I would like that to be true.

Everything else in this account is bullying – ugly, formative, survivable, the kind of thing a person can eventually write four thousand words about from a hot apartment on the other side of the world. That day was not bullying. That day was a group of German teenagers standing in an Austrian death camp, looking at the evidence, and finding it funny.

There was light, it just wasn’t in my year

The thing I need to say before this reads like six years of unbroken darkness, because it wasn’t: most of my classmates weren’t bullies. Most of them stayed out of it, looked away, got on with their lives – which is its own problem, and I’ll come back to it, but they weren’t the ones shouting. The aggression came from a small number of people. What made it work was the crowd around them.

And I had friends. A small, solid core, some from the years below me, none of them from my own class. They were metalheads, all of them, and they took one look at the weird kid with the magazine and the vocabulary and simply let me in. They dragged me to Wacken. To Summer Breeze. They accepted me at a volume nobody in my own year group managed for six straight years. Two of those friendships are still alive in 2026 – a handful of messages every couple of years, and that’s plenty.

And I was, admittedly, a lot. In the last years I went full hardcore emo. The complete program. Fringe, straightened black hair, black finger nails, the works, plus the trip into Munich for emo meetups to hug other emo boys and emo girls and hang around being enormous about our feelings.

Which I found, by the way, on the internet. Not at home – we didn’t get a connection there until 2008 – but at school, at friends’ houses, in chat rooms and local networks and later MySpace. That’s a part that still gets me – I had the internet. I used it well enough to find a subculture, a scene, a train ticket and a room full of people who’d hug a stranger.

And I still came away with no word for myself. The scene handed me eyeliner and a place to sit. Nobody handed me a vocabulary, and I didn’t know that a vocabulary was a thing you could go looking for.

Years later I found out there had been other non-straight kids in that building the whole time. Same six years. Same corridors. Same hiding, same silence, same set of insults landing on them somewhere out of my sight. Not one of us ever found another one.

That invisibility wasn’t an absence. It was a product. Something made it.

Meanwhile, in Karlsruhe

On August 1st, 2001, while I was starting my third year at that school, the Lebenspartnerschaftsgesetz came into force and same-sex couples in Germany could register a partnership for the first time. More duties than rights, but the state had finally admitted we existed.

Bavaria, together with Saxony and Thuringia, immediately went to the Federal Constitutional Court to have the law declared unconstitutional and void.

I want that timeline to sit next to the other one. In the fall of 2001, I was being called Schwuchtel in a state school in Bavaria, and the government of that same state was in Karlsruhe arguing that my future had no right to legal existence. On July 17, 2002 the court told them no, in every single point.

The other date: Bavaria’s guidelines for family and sex education dated from 2002, and the requirement that teachers address hetero-, homo-, bi-, trans- and intersexuality without prejudice, from eighth grade, arrived in 2016. Reported at the time as genuinely new for Bavarian schools. 11 years after I walked out of that building.

None of which excuses one single teacher. But it does explain why the silence was so total and so comfortable. Nobody in that building was breaking a rule by saying nothing; they were following one.

2001, and then June 2005

I started cutting around 2001. Straight lines, forearm, the usual, and I hid it badly.

One of my classmates found out and told me that next time I should go deeper and make it stick, make it final.

25 years later that sentence is still one of the worst things anyone has ever said to me, and I’ve been called a lot of things.

Then June or July 2005. Final exams done. Six years done. All that pressure and stress and frustration collapsing at once, and underneath it this enormous, disorienting realization that it was actually over – the loneliness, the fear, the corridor, all of it, over.

A sunny afternoon. My room. The window open, late sun coming in across the bed and across me.

I carved two words into my left forearm. In capital letters.

FUCK YOU.

Deep, precise, and – I remember thinking this at the time – surprisingly well-formed. I was in something like a trance. No pain, no discomfort, no hesitation. Character by character, no thought behind it and no plan in front of it. And only when I finished did I understand what I had just done.

I felt surprised. And then, honestly, good about it. Because I had just written a message to two audiences at once, and I was one of them.

I knew it was not clever. I knew it was extreme and alarming and exactly the kind of thing that should have brought the sky down. I also thought I could handle whatever came next, and it was far too late anyway.

What came next was nothing

The next day I went to school in black clothes, black t-shirt, short sleeves. Fresh, red, unmistakable, legible from across a room even with the blood cleaned off.

The teachers saw it. I watched them see it. They looked at me strangely and said nothing – not to me, not to my friends, not to my parents. Nobody asked what happened. Nobody asked how I was. These were people I’d spent six years of breaks with. The IT teacher. The chemistry teacher. The German teacher. The principal I made a newspaper with. Many adults in that building had a relationship with me, and the message on my arm went unmentioned by all of them.

My classmates were briefly confused and then made jokes about it, because of course they did. One more weird act from the weird kid. Filed and forgotten by lunch.

And me? Excited. Genuinely, horribly excited, all day. I had said the thing I had been too frightened to say out loud for six years, and I had said it without opening my mouth, which meant it couldn’t be answered with a fist. No argument, no fight, no aggression. Two passive-aggressive words carved into skin, aimed at the school, at my classmates, and at myself.

An emotional rollercoaster, half of me knowing this was a terrible idea and the other half insisting it was my body and my statement.

At the graduation ceremony, when we were all called up on stage one by one, I wore long sleeves. I’d made my point. I didn’t want to make it in front of everyone’s parents.

Exactly one adult in that building ever showed up for me, and he wasn’t a teacher. He was the caretaker. Not German, and an outsider in that village in his own right, and my classmates bullied him too – for his weight, his job, where he came from. I spent a lot of my last two years with him. He listened. He took me exactly as I was, and we talked about school politics and gossip and the weather and fears and wishes and what we each wanted out of life. Hardworking, honest, warm. Spending time with him made me an even bigger target, and I did it anyway, and I would do it again.

I never contacted him after I left. I never contacted any of them.

Long sleeves

For years after that I wore long sleeves. T-shirts with sleeves down to the wrist, hoodies in summer, jackets I didn’t need. Those scars stayed easy to read for at least five years. Later they went pale – the letters brighter than the skin around them, so the words got clearer as they healed. A shadow burned into me, except in negative.

After secondary school came a vocational college I quit after six months, a training company, another apprenticeship, another one after that. And the thing nobody warned me about: the insults simply stopped. Not gradually. They stopped at the school gate, in 2005, and never came back. The people at those places were creative types and nerds and geeks and misfits, and they were open in a way that six years had taught me people simply were not.

Six years of my life had been a local weather condition. It took me another decade to believe that.

Because the second addressee of that message took much, much longer to answer than the first one. At school I had concluded that I was the mistake. The bug in the system, the virus, the anomaly that provokes reactions and counter-reactions – and if you are told you are wrong for long enough, by enough people, you eventually take over the job yourself and do it more thoroughly than they ever could. FUCK YOU, to them, and FUCK YOU, to me, in the same two words on the same arm, and I meant both.

The line ran on for years after that. It ran through the technical college I quit, the apprenticeships I dropped, the depression I refused to name, and at the far end of it, around 2010 and five years clear of that school, it ran into a night I did not expect to survive. I did, by accident, thanks to friends arriving at a stupid, impossible hour. I wrote about that night here in 2012 and about checking myself into a psychiatric ward in Frankfurt here in 2014 after another suicide attempt – both in German, both written from inside it rather than about it, and both rougher than what you’ve just read.

Therapy started after that first night. It’s the thing that actually did the work: it changed how I looked at myself, it let me connect to myself instead of prosecuting myself, it made the past legible, and it took the blame off the ten-year-old who walked into that building and put it where it belonged.

That’s what finally closed the second half of the message.

I came out to my mother around 2009, when I met my first boyfriend – I was late to the game. Her entire response was So? Aha… Nothing else. A few months later she mentioned, in passing, over something unrelated, that I shouldn’t go sleeping around with shabby people and catch something. These were her final words on the topic. Ever. She died in 2020, and that’s the coming-out I got, and by then I had stopped expecting a different one from anybody.

Support was thin before school, during school, and after school. Part of that was the people around me, including family. Part of it was that I didn’t know how to ask, or what to ask for, or that asking was a category of action available to me at all.

I don’t remember the first day I deliberately wore short sleeves. I know it took years. There is nothing left of those letters now – skin does eventually give up an argument. The scars from 2010 are still there on the same forearm, 16 years on, and those ones I expect to keep.

What I actually was

Looking back at all six years, what I feel is grief. Not rage – that burned out somewhere in my twenties. Grief, and a specific homesickness for a version of those years that never happened.

Because that’s what Heartstopper did to me. It didn’t remind me of what happened. It showed me what COULD have. A corridor where nobody has to check who’s watching. A teacher who notices. A friend group where the queer kid is just the kid. Two boys holding hands, and the biggest problem in the room being an ordinary teenage problem. Well, and bullying, but on a different level.

I was not the bug. I was not the virus, the anomaly, the mistake, the alien, the appendage, the Schwuchtel. I was a curious, weird, over-reading, under-sporting, part-time-overachieving kid – grade average 1.9, a very solid 3 in math, thank you – who liked boys and girls and adults and books and games, in a room that had no slot for that and no interest in building one.

And I want security, and I don’t want to have missed the adventure. I want those years back, and I don’t want to be anyone other than who they made. I would change everything, and I wouldn’t change a thing. Both are true and neither of them resolves, and after 20 years I’ve stopped needing them to.

I moved away – Berlin, Köln, Frankfurt, stops in Leipzig and Weimar, back through Munich, and now a long time in Sài Gòn. Everyone else from my year group is still in the same region. I checked the class lists from the reunions I didn’t attend, at 10 years and at 20. Every single one of them stayed.

I found my sexuality, my character and myself only after I got out of there. The distance did some of it, the years did some, therapy did most.

So no, I don’t think I was born at the wrong time. Everyone is born at the wrong time. Ask the kids growing up now, watching a handful of things quietly roll backwards.

I just got a worse corridor than the one on my screen.

Two boys hold hands in a school corridor, and the corridor lets them, and my fiancé passes me a tissue, and it is 2026, and I am 37 years old, and I am sitting in a hot apartment in Sài Gòn about as far from that building as a person can physically get.

Short sleeves, obviously.