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Will Byers is gay. He knew that. He's known that since the summer of 1985 when he discovered his feelings for his best friend, one Mike Wheeler were non so platonic. It seemed to him through that he was the last one to find out. All his life people had been telling him what he his and who his is. It's no wonder he actually turned out to be gay. Even after his dad would take him to baseball games, and tell him about going hunting with Jonathan like that could fix him.
There was no fixing him. Will knew that too. He would would, wouldn't he. You don't get stuck with this disease and not know that you can't be fixed. Not that he hasn't tried. Oh, if he could not be gay be just wanting it enough, Will would be as straight as one of those uber masc hockey player his mom secretly loved watching on tv when Lonnie wasn't around.
Everyone around him was in on the biggest inside joke all his life that he didn't figure out until 14. Fourteen years old, before Will realised that the same thing people thought was wrong with him was actually true. After all those years of ridicule, of bullying from his dad, his peers and even the occasional teacher. It's like they'd all met had a secret meeting when he was five and decided that an artsy child living in a small town in Indiana must be gay. This on its own would be humiliating but he didn't have to prove them right.
Maybe they were right. Maybe love isn't meant to be like this. Maybe he got it wrong. Will had seen people in love and they always looked so happy, the characters on TV, that old couple he always saw on the streets. So why the fuck did he feel pain. The jealousy flowing through him like a normal phenomenon. It's all their fault. Lonnie, Troy, everyone who'd assumed that he was taken and assaulted by some queer man and called him zombie boy. Don't get Will started on that stupid fucking nickname. Not even that, a nickname is meant to be something you like being called not a reminder that every person in Hawkins knows he's broken and there is no cure. Not praying for forgiveness and he'd prayed to some God, whichever one, it's not that he even really believed. Not pretending that his love for his best friend wasn't as deep as it was.
He would give anything to swap places with whichever shithead started zombie boy. Give them the eternity of damnation — not that they don't deserve it — just so that Will could know what it like to live as a mediocre homophobic teenager. He would give up everything to live that to not think these disgusting thought whatever he saw a hot guy. To not feel so guilty for loving anther person when that person is also a boy.
But it was Mike's fault. It was his fault Will doesn't li ke girls.