An extract from ‘Out Now: A queer journey through modern television’ by Scott Bryan (EXCLUSIVE)

Scott Bryan’s semi-memoir/semi-television critique book Out Now: A Queer Journey Through Modern Television was published in the UK on 3 September 2026. It’s a 288-page book combining memoir and television criticism, looking at queer representation from the 1990s to today. In this Attitude exclusive passage from Bryan’s book, the author dives in at 2004, making his New Year’s resolutions. It focuses heavily on Bryan’s memories of growing up queer and the impact television had on him, particularly John Paul McQueen and Craig Dean in Hollyoaks.

Out Now: A queer journey through modern television extract:

MY NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS 2004:

• Get a boyfriend (at least one)
• Sort out the situation with Leo (or go out with him)
• Be able to learn the breaststroke fully (not sink)
• Have £200 in a bank account
• Score a goal or win in one ball sport (tennis?)
• Get Grade 5 Clarinet and Grade 2 piano
• Learn how to play Coldplay on the Piano
• Not fuck up on my French Exchange (oui!)
• Have better handwriting
• Get a Duke of Edinburgh Award
• Slap Leo

Here is the all-important update.

Get a Duke of Edinburgh Award

I got mild hypothermia during a hike in May of that year. I turned up to the hike assuming catering would be provided. I was then too proud to admit that I had not brought any food, so I went to bed hungry. I also did not bring any additional layers apart from a jumper. My dad called me down for dinner when I returned home, only to find me in a foetal position on the floor next to the upstairs toilet. I was off school for two days, the smugness of missing double history offset by the realisation that this was a practice hike and it didn’t contribute anything towards my Duke of Edinburgh, which I did not complete.

Score a goal or win in one ball sport (tennis?)

A teacher set up a penalty shootout specifically for me. An attempt where I not only missed the goal, but also the ball, was filmed and the results shown to the rest of Year 11 as part of our Leavers’ Assembly. I think I am now over the trauma this caused.

Have £200 in a bank account

Who are we kidding?

Be able to learn the breaststroke fully (not sink)

After I went boogie-boarding on a family holiday my sister flagged to my mum that out in the water it looked like I was struggling a bit. ‘No, he’s fine,’ my mum said as she looked out to the sea. ‘Oh, wait, no he isn’t.’ I was enrolled for one-on-one tuition classes at the local swimming pool. Each class started with me standing at the edge of a lane wearing bright-red armbands and a swimming cap, waiting for my teacher to tell me to jump in. I was towering above all of the seven – to eight-year olds who were there for their classes in the rest of the pool. For the next six months all of these kids would regularly lap me. It was all very humbling.

It was also here, two years later, eating an unhealthy snack from the vending machine while waiting for my dad to pick me up, that I saw John Paul McQueen (James Sutton) and Craig Dean (Guy Burnet) kiss on Hollyoaks for the first time. I couldn’t work out exactly what was going on at first, as the television at the pool was on mute. It looked like a confusing snog at a school party. Craig had pulled away in disgust. That’s strange, I thought. It was him who initiated it.

This wasn’t a kiss I had watched on my bedroom television with the sound down low. It wasn’t a subplot on another show I had to stick around for weeks for. It was visible for all to see, even to those passing reception. I could feel a sense of pride, a sense overwhelm, knowing that my friends could watch this, that my friends were watching it.

John Paul and Craig started out as a drunken confused kiss but evolved into a complex love affair, all between The Simpsons and Channel 4 News. It also had a surprising amount of nuance, airing over the course of a year.

‘I’m getting emotional talking about it,’ the then Hollyoaks executive producer Bryan Kirkwood tells me. I can see him welling up on our call. ‘God, what’s fucking wrong with me?’ he says. ‘Because still, now, twenty years later, young colleagues at EastEnders where I work come up to me and say how much that story changed them.’

John Paul and Craig (or the ‘McDeans’) feels like an evolution from Todd on Corrie. Kirkwood had also worked on the soap as a storyline and story editor. ‘Daran Little pushed that story through against all manner of objections,’ Kirkwood says. Remarking that it was glorious and triumphant, he also says that it fell into being tentative.

After the storyline progressed into Todd kissing his boyfriend Karl (Chris Finch) in Manchester’s Gay Village, ‘It was very sort of celebratory, but there was still a kind of coyness about how it was the actual, you know, the love was demonstrated. What I was really, really passionate about was that when the camera was on John Paul and Craig, and they kissed, the camera did not move away,’ he continues. ‘Everything I had ever seen … bar Queer as Folk, the camera moved away, representing shame. We will leave that to your imagination. Viewers, we don’t want to see that, do we?

‘I remember [seeing] the rough cut of the day, the episode where Craig said, “I feel the same.” And he moved in to kiss John Paul, and John Paul moved in to kiss Craig, and the camera stayed on them, and they were in the middle of the frame, and the two actors just went for it. I remember going, “This is everything I asked for. This is everything I wanted to see. But, oh my God, can you put this on the telly?” ‘And Channel 4 didn’t bat an eyelid.’ To me, watching, it felt like everything.

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Out Now: A queer journey through modern television by Scott Bryan is published by Blink and is out now.