Sleep With Me, starring Janine Gutierrez as Harry and Lovi Poe as Luna, other than being very binge-able over the weekend, asks some very important questions about disabled queer people, with a very prominent one – why aren’t there more stories about them?

Due to the absolute dearth of queer love stories in mainstream media up until a few years ago, we had to content ourselves with what we did get, stories that followed a queer couple (typically cis-male, able-bodied) in the journey of their relationship. While that is still quite the norm in the burgeoning BL and GL industries, we are also now seeing stories that put the romance within a larger storyline; that deal with the individuals as people first and foremost, with their own struggles that they have to navigate apart from the relationship itself.

Sleep With Me, in its short runtime, is impactful in showing characters with two different disabilities, and how they impact Harry and Luna’s lives and relationship, asking the viewer to question whether the world is as accessible to some as it is to others.

Harry’s disability, which presents physically, is treated as a spectacle when she is called an “inspiration” and asked if people could take a picture with her. She deals with invasive and intrusive people who don’t want to make any concessions just to make life a little more accessible for her.

Luna’s disability on the other hand, isn’t something that has a physical manifestation. People don’t believe her when she says she is disabled, calling it a “phase” or implying that she is lazy. I too was guilty of assuming, in the very first scene of the show (when a guard calls her out for parking in the PWD spot) that she had done so accidentally, that this would be used to trigger a meet-cute of sorts between her and Harry, and was a little surprised when she mentioned she was disabled. I reprimanded myself for the presumption, because that kind of attitude towards disabilities is exactly what the show tries to caution against.

Different disabilities manifest in different ways. When you have a disability, you have to take into consideration so many things that just aren’t a concern for non-disabled people (I would highly recommend reading about the spoon theory) in every sphere of your life, including dating, a glimpse of which we get to see in Sleep With Me.

The series depicts the loneliness one can feel even when they are with other people, even when they are in a relationship; the clashes of compatibility that come about when you live in two different worlds. When you are disabled, you have to consider more than just your feelings for the other person, because sometimes they aren’t enough to sustain a relationship. Harry and Luna face all of this. But they work through this for each other, and more importantly, for themselves.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5