guiem

Conan Gray’s “Connell” and the Quiet Ache of Queer Desire, Pain, and the Reclamation of Tenderness by Guiem Muñoz Suau.

There’s a strange kind of loneliness that comes from loving in secret. You learn to hide your softness, to perform normalcy, to let your affection dissolve before it reaches daylight. Conan Gray’s “Connell” captures that quiet ache—the self-hatred that grows from years of loving behind closed doors. Inspired by Normal People’s emotionally withdrawn protagonist, “Connell” isn’t just about one boy’s shame; it’s about how queer desire, again and again, is framed through suffering. For many, pain becomes a language—one never asked to learn, but one queer people grow fluent in nonetheless. “Connell” embodies the internalized rejection that so many carry—a reflection of how secrecy shapes not only relationships but one’s very sense of self.

Gray opens “Connell” with a disarmingly vulnerable verse: “You were never outside with me / Spent my summer months in your unwashed sheets / And I know it’s dumb that I’d ever think that I’d meet your mom and dad” (Gray 2025). From the very beginning, love is rendered as something dishonest, confined to secrecy and solitude. The image of “unwashed sheets” becomes a quiet metaphor for shame—intimacy that cannot leave the room. Beneath these lines lies the weight of internalized homophobia, an affection distorted by concealment. What begins as a private confession soon unfolds, in the chorus, into an examination of how desire and self-loathing become inseparable for Gray.

From “my own damn fucking fault” to “pain is what I earned,” the focus turns inward. Gray redirects blame toward himself, as if suffering were not just inevitable but deserved. When he confesses, “you remind me of how good it feels to hurt,” pain is no longer an intrusion—it becomes familiar, almost intimate. Rather than reaching for vindication or the right to be loved openly, Gray finds comfort in the only feeling he’s been allowed to claim.

The chorus starts with what could be the most heart-wrenching lyrics of the song: “You remind me of how good it feels to hurt.” Gray reminds us of his hard past but also sympathizes with a universal feeling within the queer community—hurting as a comforting feeling. From stories such as Call Me By Your Name to Thelma & Louise, where queer-coded lines always end in tragedy and drama, queerness is learned as an obscure feeling that only foretells tragedy. Young queer people are taught, in an indirect way, to protect—or rather disguise—their queer nature to avoid pain, even when this isolation might be the very reason for their hurting.

But after this tragic vision of love, is it possible to unlearn the hatred toward oneself? “Validate the worst thoughts inside my head / That I’m not worth shit, and I’m better dead / Who’s the victim in the end?” Gray exposes how he uses this relationship to “validate” what he has always believed—or rather, what he has been taught to believe. The final line, “Who’s the victim in the end?” carries an almost unbearable weight. Is the victim the person who cannot accept their own nature, the society that made that nature unspeakable, or the self that learned to find comfort in pain?

The question lingers unanswered, suspended between guilt and longing. Yet, as I wrote before, queer love is also an act of reclaiming softness—of allowing tenderness to exist without apology. In “Connell,” Gray stands at the edge of that possibility, tracing the boundaries between self-loathing and self-recognition. Perhaps unlearning pain begins there: not in forgetting what hurt, but in daring to imagine a version of love that doesn’t have to.

“Connell” leaves its listener suspended between shame and tenderness, between the desire to be seen and the fear of it. In tracing this quiet ache, Gray captures what it means to love from the margins—to mistake pain for proof, and still reach for something softer. There’s no resolution, only the fragile hope that love, someday, might stop hurting.