“Liberating & Euphoric”: BVT On The Importance Of Queer Representation In Erotic Stories

When we think about sex scenes on screen, we often imagine perfect swishing hair, hazy-orange mood lighting, moans timed like clockwork, and the act always finishing with an orgasm. It's rare to see a realistic portrayal of sex on screen — especially one that shows types of people who often have to fight for screen time, period. But that's what SBS's new drama series, Erotic Stories, is aiming to fix.

While it might sound saucy (and it is!), Erotic Stories is also complex, nuanced and intersectional. Directed by Leticia Cáceres (Bump) and Madeleine Gottlieb (Latecomers), the eight-episode drama explores an anthology of bold and transgressive stories that explore sex and intimacy, with each episode highlighting individuals rarely portrayed in these narratives, including a First Nations person, a person with a disability, and in Bernie Van Tiel (BVT)’s case, someone who is a queer, non-binary person of colour.

"Those are just representations of the intersectionality of my identity," Van Tiel tells Refinery29 Australia. "I'm a queer person of colour — I do belong to a minority within a minority."

"It's rare to have queer relationships depicted on mainstream screens, let alone queer people of colour," they say. "But to add to that, it's hard seeing ourselves depicted in ways that are desirable or ways that are erotic outside of a lens of being fetishised or outside of the male gaze."

In the eighth episode, titled 'Masc Up', Van Tiel stars as a young non-binary lesbian, Cal, who prides themselves on their sexual prowess in the bedroom. But after they sleep with someone who can't orgasm, they're forced to confront their own internalised insecurities, and how toxic masculinity manifests in relationships, even queer ones.

"It wasn't specified that [Cal] was a queer person of colour. It was just specified that they were non-binary masc presenting and were exploring aspects of how toxic masculinity still enters lesbian relationships," Van Tiel says. "You're seeing this through a very intimate human experience."

It was this thread of toxic masculinity that drew Van Tiel to the role in the first place. "That was intriguing to me because that's something that has affected me — whether I was the perpetrator or the person on the receiving end," they said.

As soon as the episode begins, it's easy to see that, despite being a non-binary lesbian, Cal too is somewhat toxic, and a victim of their environment. They're hard, they're closed off, their self-worth is centred on their sexual prowess, and if there's one thing they detest, it's an emotional female. But for Van Tiel, the role of Cal wasn't simply hypothetical — it was inherently personal.

"I see Cal as a part of myself that I've had to work really, really hard to understand and also move through and develop out of," they tell us. "I would say that Cal was like I was in my early 20s. The script read me down. It made me confront a lot of things that I was typically avoidant of."

If it sounds like a confronting exercise to viscerally act in a role that's reminiscent of your younger, pre-therapy self, you'd probably be right. Van Tiel explains that when you're acting, your body doesn't know the difference between something real and something you've induced for the sake of acting. So whether it's performing a scene where crying is involved or where the character is angry, your body can't understand the difference between what is real and what is not. "That physicality will affect your mental state," they say.

While Van Tiel says that acting was a form of therapy, they do admit that the script made them look at themselves a little bit harder. "There were a few moments in the scripts where I listened to what Cal was saying, and I was just, like, embarrassed, you know, that, that I acted this way," they say. "I gave myself the ick."

With such a personal role, it's easy to stay up until 3am contemplating all your past moves, and in Van Tiel's case, feeling like the script has "read you to filth". But there was a key player who was helping them work through the complex emotions that arose from portraying this character: an intimacy coordinator.

We're used to hearing about intimacy coordinators in the context of sex scenes. And while one of SBS's intimacy coordinators, Amy Cater (who worked closely with Van Tiel on set) definitely helped make the actors comfortable in some incredibly raw sex scenes, using an entire kit of items — from protective jockstraps to speciality cushions to distance intimate areas — they weren't only there to safely facilitate sex scenes.

"People don't understand how expansive their skill set is," Van Tiel explains. "They don't just handle what's happening on set in real time during those intimate scenes, but they're also there to handle any scenes that trigger really intense grief or anything like that."

Being a neurodivergent person, Van Tiel says they found the chaos of the set could be too much sometimes, causing them to become overstimulated, overwhelmed, and dissociative. "They were able to identify whether I was being overstimulated in an environment and they were able to navigate that with me and help me go to a place that is more soothing."

Van Tiel recalls that at one point, Amy asked them to come into an isolated pantry cupboard where the two of them would read spice labels on all the containers in an effort to soothe them. They also recount how she was able to request them for any scenes they were shooting, even if it was a comparatively simple kissing scene. "I think intimacy coordinators are people who are experts at holding space," Van Tiel says.

Erotic Stories isn't just about sex. It's about intimacy and rawness in its truest form. "We're just people who normally don't get our stories told on screen, and just happen to identify within these communities," they say. "It's so liberating and euphoric to see us on screen in loveable light, in all its human light, in all of its impurity."