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“Lifelong best friends. Get it?”
Is the term “queerbaiting”
getting overused to the point of losing its meaning?
In recent years,
as the entertainment industry has discovered it pays
to draw in queer audiences, this has led to an explosion
in queerbaiting
— the shallow commercial tactic of subtly suggesting
or joking about LGBTQ+ relationships.
“You’re a great boyfriend.”
“And Sherlock Holmes is a very lucky man.”
While never intending
to follow this up with actual representation.
“I am not gay!”
Calling out this practice is an important tool in fighting
for better LGBTQ+ representation —
but increasingly, the queerbaiting accusation is also being leveled
at more and more celebrities,
raising the question of whether it’s even possible
for actual people to queerbait in their real lives.
Throwing around the word “queerbaiting”
too liberally can erode its power
and veer into harmful gatekeeping —
making individuals feel they can’t explore their personal
sexuality in a fluid, open-ended or playful way without getting policed.
Here’s our Take on why true queerbaiting needs to end,
but it's important not to let this term limit the full, complex expression
of anyone's sexual identity.
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Judith Fathallah,
one of the first academic scholars to write about the concept
of queerbaiting, defines the term in her 2014 journal article as,
“A strategy by which writers and networks attempt to gain the attention
of queer viewers
via hints, jokes, gestures, and symbolism
suggesting a queer relationship between two characters,
and then emphatically denying and laughing off the possibility.”
“They’re only friends!
They’re not gonna get together, they’re only friends.”
Queerbaiting is at its essence a marketing ploy.
By simply implying that a character
might be anything other than straight, these TV shows and movies
can draw in LGBTQ+ audiences, make money from these viewers,
and maybe even earn some praise for appearing “progressive,” —
all without alienating
homophobic viewers or putting effort into queer storylines.
“What are you guys doing?”
“Nothing!”
To many, what’s so upsetting about queerbaiting is the intentionality
with which producers may lead on
viewers over an extended period of time, dropping just enough
crumbs of hope for those
who ship a potential queer couple with subtextual romantic tension.
We can see this dynamic in two of the series that have dominated
the conversation about queerbaiting over the last decade,
Supernatural and Sherlock.
Many fans thought Supernatural’s
Dean and Castiel had a romantic attraction to one another
that should have been made canon.
“I was getting too close to the humans in my charge; you.
They feel I've begun to express emotions.”
Comments by actors and producers revealed that they knew about the desire
for this relationship and at times hinted at in the writing.
“Dean and I do share a more profound bond.”
At last, it was revealed
in the final season that Castiel
was canonically queer and in love with Dean,
but Castiel literally dies and goes to hell right after
confessing his love —
“I love you.” “Don’t do this, Cas.”
flipping the situation immediately
from queerbaiting to “bury your gays.”
Similarly, Sherlock attracted fans who “ship” Sherlock and John
–or “JohnLock” –
based on numerous subtextual moments and jokes,
little nods that seem to converse with queer viewers.
“We’re not a couple.” “Yes you are.”
Season three even includes an imagined scene
of Sherlock and Moriarty leaning in to kiss each other,
before the camera abruptly cuts out.
“What? Are you out of your mind?!”
The tone of this kind of jokey queerbaiting
makes the concept of LGBTQ+ relationships seem like a punchline
or absurd suggestion.
Queerbaiting often follows a certain cycle:
marketing a series in a way that suggests potential queer romance,
then delivering jokes and subtextual tension
but not progressing toward explicit romance, and
(when the creators or cast are asked about it)
denying, laughing at or even acting offended
at the suggestion that the characters might be queer.
It’s a process that makes some viewers feel almost gaslit,
like they’re being treated as delusional for expecting
something that was clearly implied.
“And you don’t want to sleep with me. Do you?”
Sherlock creators
Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat
have been consistently dismissive and annoyed
at questions about whether the characters might be gay.
After saying that his comments
about minority representation had been taken out of context
to support “JohnLock,” Moffat said,
“It is infuriating, frankly,
to be talking about a serious subject and to have Twitter run around and say,
‘Oh, that means Sherlock is gay.’ Very explicitly it does not.
We are taking a serious subject and trivializing it beyond endurance.”
TNT crime drama Rizzoli & Isles followed the queerbaiting cycle to a T
with promotional material implying an attraction between
the title characters,
“Sometimes opposites do attract,”
only for writers and cast
to consistently say there was no intention of a
romantic pairing.
“Do we play it up?
I don’t think it’s an intentional thing.”
To quote showrunner Janet Tamaro:
“The lesbian theory endlessly amuses me,
and it amuses the cast.”
2009 movie Whip It was promoted with a Marie Claire photoshoot
of star Elliot Page and director Drew Barrymore kissing,
but it turned out to be another straight story.
And the Pitch Perfect series
featured palpable chemistry between Beca and Chloe that led to
nothing more than friendship—
but that didn’t stop the marketing team from using romantic-feeling moments
of them in a teaser for the third movie.
“You guys are the homes that my heart lives in.”
Another form of queerbaiting
is including a queer moment for fetishistic or entertainment value
without any follow up in the story.
Riverdale received backlash after Betty and Veronica kissed
in the first episode in an attempt to shock onlookers
at cheerleading tryouts.
“Faux lesbian kissing hasn’t been taboo since 1994.”
Likewise, The Librarians features a handful of subtle jokes that
Cassandra may be attracted to women, ending in a single kiss
with a female vampire in the third season.
But the vampire is only featured for one episode,
and it seems unlikely that Cassandra will ever see her again.
Queerbaiting also often involves a lot of jokes about people of the same sex
finding each other attractive
— like Eleanor’s constant comments about Tahani on The Good Place
“She's tall and glamorous and has cappuccino skin and curves everywhere
and now I'm complimenting her and kind of turned on.”
— and the actors might play this up in promotional interviews.
While some of these examples
may seem relatively harmless on the surface, this type of
half-baked representation
can be both painful and frustrating to a community of viewers
who rarely see positive or accurate LGBTQ+ storylines on screen,
and who’ve been burned and hurt by the feeling that they were led on
for long periods of time by shows
that simultaneously profited off of a community that Hollywood
long ostracized and degraded.
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Looking back on the history of queer representation
(or the lack thereof) in storytelling,
we can see how queerbaiting is really the modern flipside to queercoding.
With the introduction of the Hays code in 1930, homosexuality was deemed
an “immoral” behavior and barred from the screen,
so the only gay characters featured in cinema had to be queer-coded
— implied to be queer in subtext but never stated to be in text.
“His body went limp and I knew it was over.”
“And then?” “Then, I felt tremendously exhilarated.”
Even after the code was replaced in 1968,
queerness was still widely taboo.
Gay characters seemed to almost always receive tragic plotlines,
“He was only 39 years old,”
and when Ellen DeGeneres’s sitcom
famously made history through Ellen
and her character both coming out in 1997,
the star received death threats,
the sitcom lasted only one more season, and she claimed she couldn’t get work
for a long time.
“The phone didn’t ring for three years, I had no offers,
no one wanted to touch me at all.”
So, prior to the 2010s,
many shows still resorted to queer coding
in order to keep airing and enjoying mainstream popularity.
Queerbaiting and queercoding are two sides of the same coin.
Both are winking at queer audiences,
except queercoding is done out of fear or necessity
while queerbaiting is done with the intention of making money.
Queerbaiting emerged as a commercial strategy
in the 2010s in response to the rising profitability
of diverse narratives and changing social norms.
“I'm glad no one saw that.” “Hm?”
“You, ripping my clothes off in a darkened swimming pool.
People might talk.”
As scholar Emma Nordin writes
“Queerbaiting is a historical[ly] situated term, assuming that we
live in a time and place where queer representation is possible
yet constantly denied.”
To apply these terms with awareness of historical context,
let’s look at a classic lesbian favorite, fantasy show
Xena: Warrior Princess.
Were Xena produced now,
it would have almost surely been accused of queerbaiting.
“Ha! It’s not like your breasts aren’t dangerous enough.”
But, because the show started airing in the 1990s,
the queer subtext that was coded in the show is now understood
as a progressive strategy to include a sapphic narrative,
while making it explicit would have put the series
in danger of being canceled.
Thus, it wouldn’t really make sense to call Xena queerbaiting
— most would agree it was queer-coding constrained by the
parameters of its era’s implicit censorship.
“You’ve got to look where the frontiers
are of acceptability in television and start pushing back those.
That’s what makes it groundbreaking television.”
Similarly, 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes
(adapted from an overtly queer book
into a movie that softened the romance into a friendship) and 1996’s The Craft,
didn’t contain direct expressions
of attraction between same-sex characters, but in the context
of their time, the subtextual clues
for gay audiences to find were better than nothing.
Now, we’re living in a time where queer representation can occur
without as much pushback
as in earlier eras, and audiences are increasingly ready
to swap queercoding for direct representation.
Still, there are spaces that
are noticeably lacking in queer representation
— like much of children’s media
and blockbuster movies with big international markets
—and in some of these films and shows,
deciphering what’s queer coding or queer baiting isn’t always
black and white.
Most recently, Disney incited a queer coding vs. baiting controversy
with Luca, a story about Luca and his best friend Alberto
who take secret trips to the surface
where they must hide the fact that they are sea monsters
“But we’re always careful.” “We?”
When Luca’s parents find out that the two boys
have been doing this together, they try to separate them
by sending Luca away
“You’re going to stay with uncle Ugo for the rest of the season,”
— a scene that plays out in many gay love stories after a couple is outed.
The boys escape to the surface where they must hide their true identities,
until the conclusion of the film where they come out as sea monsters,
are widely embraced by the townspeople, and, much to their surprise,
inspire other secret sea monsters to come out, too.
Many feet that Disney crossed the line into queerbaiting with Alberto and Luca.
On the other hand, others could argue that as a studio with a large
conservative audience,
Disney may still need to queer code when releasing films under the
Pixar label and that this is at least a way for young audiences growing up
in conservative households to view some form of
ambiguously queer content.
Still others argue that media needs more non-romantic, affectionate
male friendships and that
depictions of love in children’s stories needn’t be automatically romanticized.
One of the biggest criticisms of the term queerbaiting
is that it dismisses the value of subtext in storytelling.
As the book
“Queerbaiting and Fandom,” puts it,
“subtext is framed solely as a means of withholding representation.”
This can be an overly rigid, limiting view of art.
Drama so often lives in what characters don’t say
and the nuanced three-dimensionality of complicated behavior.
Queerbaiting conversations can also be dismissive to fans
who enjoy subtext or “queer readings” of open-ended media.
After all, many people see the appeal of a “will they/won’t they” relationship
which lets the audience take the lead in imagining consummation.
Think of Mulder and Scully on The X-Files,
or Booth and Bones on Bones,
both of whom were arguably at their most interesting before they
canonically became a couple.
“You’re my one in five billion.”
Still, the crucial difference between
queer couple subtext and straight couple subtext is that tension
between straight characters is almost universally understood as
romantic or sexual — an acknowledged fact
among most viewers.
But when you look at a show like Rizzoli & Isles,
which has almost the exact same format as shows like The X-Files and Bones
(down to the witty banter between an enterprising cop
and an overly logical doctor),
the subtext is emphatically dismissed
by the show’s creators and other (non-queer) fans.
So the issue isn’t really with subtext,
but rather that the collective reaction to queer subtext is fierce denial
or willful obliviousness.
While it’s clear that studios and networks can queerbait in order
to profit off of fans,
what does it mean when a real person is accused of queerbaiting?
In June of this year, Billie Eilish’s music video for her song Lost Cause
included a casual queer kiss.
She also made an Instagram post about the video with the caption
“I love girls.”
Some viewers accused Eilish of queerbaiting, or trying to gain
a larger queer audience
by making supposedly queer content, or implying she herself might be queer
without actually coming out.
Prior to Eilish’s controversy,
Nick Jonas was accused of queerbaiting around 2015, when fans felt that
he was specifically pandering to a gay male audience
by speaking in a deceptive manner
about his own sexual proclivities.
The tipping point was a speech he made several days after
the Pulse Massacre,
which angered some fans who thought he was taking up
unnecessary space.
Part of what makes queerbaiting
on television so upsetting is the investment that fans make over time
in a particular relationship, as they’re baited over a period
of several seasons, and there appeared to be a similarly drawn-out,
cross-promotional effort to do this on Jonas’ part.
Ariana Grande has also been accused of queerbaiting
for her song “Monopoly”
“I like women and men,”
and the “Break up with your Girlfriend” music video,
as has Harry Styles for his “queer fashion” sense
“I mean, I think it’s about enjoyment, and about fun. No judgement, and um,
I don’t know, having fun with clothes. I think fashion’s supposed to be fun.”
And Kylie Jenner often gets comments on her TikToks with her
best friend Stassie Karanikolaou that accuse the two of acting sexually
toward each other for views.
Some of these examples are also loaded due to the legacy of 2000s-era
queer fetishizing.
The faux-lesbianism of t.A.T.u.’s “All The Things She Said”,
Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl”,
and the famous Madonna/Britney kiss at the VMAs are all examples
of queerness in that era being used as a “shock value” stunt
rather than a meaningful experience.
Moreover, those lesbian kisses
tended to be positioned not really as “queer”
but as “hot” or titillating to the male gaze.
“It was pretty sexy, that was kind of fun to watch.”
“It’s always sexy.”
Yet regardless of valid claims
that certain media today fetishizes queerness as an exploitative aesthetic,
there is something disconcerting about
increasingly frequent accusations of individuals queerbaiting.
Celebrities
— especially young ones like Eilish —
aren’t being given the space to be somewhat ambiguous
with their sexuality or gender presentation without making a
definitive statement about it.
Moreover, the controversy seems to assume that musicians and other
artists owe us every detail about their personal lives,
and that their artistic creations have to literally adhere to every fact
about their actual selves.
Artistic expression relies on audience’s understanding that musicians,
like poets or writers of any kind,
create a character for each song or music video, which may take some
inspiration from their personal experience but isn’t actually them.
The video for “Lost Cause”
— read as queer by many viewers — does not have to reflect Eilish’s
own sexual preference,
nor can we be certain Eilish meant it that way.
The same can be said for the “twist” in Ariana’s
“Break up with your girlfriend” video
— which reveals she’s actually telling the guy to break up
with his girlfriend so she can kiss the girl
(a change that arguably makes video more compelling than the story
in the literal lyrics, of a hot girl telling a guy to ditch
his less appealing girlfriend, and also an image that some
have read as a metaphor for self-love).
If we want to normalize anything other than a straight-cis experience,
then we need to allow people the freedom
to explore that option, personally and artistically,
without immediately being expected to define themselves
— in fact, numerous people today prefer to keep their concepts
of their sexual orientation or gender expression indefinitely fluid.
It’s crucial that individuals, whether they be celebrities
or everyday people, are free to explore their self expression openly
without judgement,
and are afforded space for playfulness, ambiguity and discovery
in their personal expressions.
In trying to create structured rules on what is and isn’t queer,
we actually reinforce a dangerous gender or sexuality based binary.
This kind of gatekeeping might discourage individuals from trying
to discover themselves, thus actually becoming a new form of repression.
Ultimately, the best route to overcoming queerbaiting is for mainstream media
to include widespread, authentic queer representation
— after all, the only reason shallow queerbaiting holds any appeal
is that queer viewers have long been starved for stories
that even slightly reflect their lives
and romances onscreen.
When all text and subtext are possible, the practice of queerbaiting will
no longer work and at last be relegated to history, where it belongs.
“That's my jacket.” “No, no, no, no. Keep it. It suits you.”
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