Glitches in the Gaydar is a gay millennial’s guide to feelings, fandom and the pop culture that accidentally outed us. New drops every Wednesday and Sunday. Subscribe here. Follow IG here.

Note: You’d think Chuck Bass would be in this list — the smirk, the scarf, the soundtrack. But alas, total rapist. In the first episode. No thank you.

We grew up thinking danger was desirable and cruelty meant depth. Every brooding man with a secret became a lesson in how to mistake tension for chemistry. Spike, Damon Salvatore, Ben Barnes in literally anything — these weren’t love interests, they were electives in emotional self-sabotage.

He wasn’t the villain. He was just hot and misunderstood.

The morally grey man was never meant to teach us romance. He was designed to teach us projection. His job was to be half monster, half metaphor — the embodiment of every internal contradiction we hadn’t yet learned how to name.

We didn’t want to fix him. We wanted to be the one he stopped being awful for. The one exception to his emotional carnage. The person he’d ruin the world for, but tenderly.

It wasn’t about love; it was about being chosen by someone who didn’t choose anyone.

That’s how patriarchy disguised itself as passion.

The blueprint goes back further than television. The Gothic era gave us the template: Mr Rochester, Heathcliff, every man in a cravat staring out a rain-soaked window. The mid-2000s just gave them better lighting and indie soundtracks.

When The Vampire Diaries arrived, it turned moral ambiguity into a personality type. Damon wasn’t just bad — he was charming about it. Spike made codependency look like destiny. Ben Barnes built a career on playing beautiful men who made bad decisions and somehow looked remorseful about it.

And then there were the ones pop culture pretended were romantic leads — men who weren’t morally grey at all, just predatory. The early 2000s was full of them: the guy who assaulted someone in Season 1 and was inexplicably forgiven by Season 3. That wasn’t complexity; that was conditioning.

It’s worth pausing on Spike, because this is where it gets messy. Yes, that scene in Buffy was horrific. It never should’ve been written, and it still makes my stomach drop. The difference — and it doesn’t excuse it — is that the show treated it as a breaking point, not a kink. It became part of his arc toward remorse, and we watched him claw for redemption that was never guaranteed.

Spike spent seasons proving that moment wasn’t who he was. The writing was inconsistent, but the performance carried the weight of accountability. You could feel that he hated himself for it — and so did the audience.

Chuck Bass, though? He never earned that grace. His assault in the first episode of Gossip Girl was treated like a character quirk, then quietly swept into “bad boy charm.” The show kept sexual aggression as his defining personality trait and still tried to sell him as aspirational. That wasn’t complexity — it was rot dressed as romance.

Both stories were written by men who wanted the shock value of violence without the long-term honesty of healing. The difference is that one stumbled into redemption by accident, and the other just… kept walking in the same direction.

The morally grey man taught us a kind of romantic literacy — how to read between the lines, how to locate tenderness inside cruelty, how to narrate neglect as nuance.

We became translators for unavailable men. When he said, “You deserve better,” we heard, He’s scared. When he ghosted, we said, He’s protecting me. When he ruined our lives, we said, But he feels things deeply.

The stories rewarded our empathy, not our boundaries. Every time the bad man did one good thing, the world applauded like redemption was a plot twist instead of accountability.

We didn’t learn to recognise love. We learned to analyse damage.

Part of the appeal was always coded. The “hot villain” was usually a little too beautiful, a little too well-dressed, a little too aware of his own effect. The gender performance was fluid; the gaze, unstable.

Queer viewers saw themselves in that friction — the tension between self-loathing and allure, performance and vulnerability. The morally grey man wasn’t just hot; he was camp. He represented every feeling we were told to repress, wrapped up in charisma and leather.

He didn’t fit inside the rules of masculinity, and neither did we.

Eventually, the rewatch hit differently. You start noticing the gaslighting. The manipulation. The way every woman around him becomes a casualty of his self-discovery. You realise the show isn’t romantic — it’s a cautionary tale edited to look like a music video.

But we still root for him. Because part of us remembers when we believed that love could fix a person. That devotion was transformation.

It’s not delusion; it’s nostalgia for a time when wanting the wrong thing felt cinematic.

Now, we’ve evolved. We’re less interested in men who need saving and more into those who’ve already gone to therapy. But the ghost of the morally grey man still lingers in our algorithms.

He shows up in dating apps disguised as “emotionally unavailable but self-aware.” He texts like a redemption arc that never airs. He still flirts like it’s 2009 and the soundtrack is by The Fray.

But here’s the truth: the fantasy was never really about him. It was about us — the way we romanticised being the exception instead of expecting equality.

He wasn’t the villain. He was just the lesson.