Fragments of Love: Queer Desire in Young Royals and Poetry

Queer love stories have always carried a certain weight—of longing, of hiding, of fighting for space in a world that doesn’t always accommodate them. Netflix’s Young Royals captures this weight beautifully, telling the story of Prince Wilhelm, a boy caught between personal freedom and the suffocating expectations of royalty. His love for Simon is messy, passionate, and genuine, but it’s also complicated because his life isn’t entirely his own.

This tension—between love and loss, between being seen and being truly known—runs through a lot of queer storytelling, not just in TV but in poetry, too. Canbese Jarboe’s Self-Portrait as Disco Ball Missing Tiles and Jennifer Chang’s Conversation with Slugs and Sarah explore these same themes, using reflection, fragmentation, and time to show how queer love bends, twists, and survives. When you look at Young Royals alongside these poems, you start to see a bigger picture: one where queerness isn’t just about identity, but about movement—shifting, hiding, revealing, and sometimes breaking apart.

The Broken Mirror: Seeing and Being Seen

In Self-Portrait as Disco Ball Missing Tiles, Canbese Jarboe plays with the idea of reflection:

why don’t you check your reflection inside of me / nobody wants to see their own face to the nth power

A disco ball should be dazzling, throwing light in all directions. But if it’s missing pieces, its reflections are broken. That’s Wilhelm, isn’t it? He’s supposed to be polished, a prince the world can admire, but when he looks at himself, all he sees are the cracks. His relationship with Simon doesn’t fit into the perfect, glossy image of royalty, and when their love becomes public, the world reacts like a shattered mirror—chaos, splintering, too much of everything.

Jarboe’s lines suggest that seeing oneself too clearly can be unsettling. Wilhelm is trapped in that tension. He wants to be seen, to love Simon freely, but he also knows that the moment he steps into the light, the world will judge him. His queerness, like the disco ball, is both beautiful and fractured—dancing across the walls but never fully whole.

Slugs and Slow-Burning Love

Jennifer Chang’s Conversation with Slugs and Sarah brings an unexpected metaphor into the mix: slugs. Yes, slugs. She writes:

Neither old nor young, we’re familiar with sluggishness,

too tired to explain why nothing makes us

spin like that: a-swirl, a pirouette, a gyre!

At first glance, slugs don’t exactly scream romance. But Chang’s poem takes their slow, deliberate movements and turns them into something sensual—an unhurried, lingering kind of love. It’s the kind of love that doesn’t rush forward but takes its time, spiraling, building, existing in its own space.

That’s Wilhelm and Simon, too. Their relationship moves at its own pace—tentative, hesitant, sometimes drawn out by fear. But it’s not just about hesitation. In queer theory, there’s this idea of temporal drag, the feeling that queer relationships don’t follow the straight, expected path of love-marriage-family. They exist in stolen moments, in the quiet in-betweens, in places where time seems to slow.

For Wilhelm, love with Simon is different from anything he’s known before. It’s slow but intense, deep but fragile. And like the slugs in Chang’s poem, it’s not built for a world that rushes forward without thinking. Their love isn’t just about attraction—it’s about survival.

Secret Compartments and the Fight for Autonomy

A key thread in Young Royals is Wilhelm’s need to carve out space for himself, something that Canbese Jarboe captures perfectly in Morning Morning:

If someone else builds your secret compartment it isn’t a secret

Wilhelm is constantly shoved into compartments built by others—his family, the media, the expectations of the monarchy. He’s given a role to play, a life to live, but none of it feels real. His relationship with Simon starts as something that belongs only to them, hidden away in stolen nights and whispered promises. But once it’s exposed, once it’s no longer his, everything changes.

Jarboe’s poem suggests that real selfhood comes from building your own hiding places, choosing what stays private and what gets revealed. That’s the dilemma Wilhelm faces: Does he keep his love for Simon secret, locked away in a compartment he didn’t even choose? Or does he take control and say, This is who I am. This is my love.

His decision at the end of the second season—choosing to publicly claim Simon—becomes his act of self-construction. It’s terrifying. It’s defiant. And it’s his.

Queer Love Is Never Just One Thing

One of the most powerful things about Young Royals—and about poetry like Jarboe’s and Chang’s—is that queer love is never presented as just one thing. It’s not just romance. It’s not just a tragedy. It's a movement. It’s resistance. It’s something that doesn’t always fit neatly into a storybook ending.

Wilhelm and Simon’s love is both broken and whole, slow and intense, hidden and seen. Like the missing tiles on a disco ball, like the sluggish spirals of love, like the secret compartments we build for ourselves, queer love is always shifting. It bends and breaks. It finds its own rhythm. And most of all, it survives.

Written By: Amaris Prescott