In Skyward Sword, the 2011 entry in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda saga, the primary antagonist
is a mysterious being known as Ghirahim.
As Ghirahim repeatedly shows up and taunts our wholesome, heroic protagonist Link, it
becomes increasingly clear that he isn’t like most other Zelda villains.
You see, Ghirahim stands out from the Ganons and Ganondorfs of the world by just being
so...well...FABULOUS!
Yes, the stylish, flamboyant Ghirahim, with his robust skin care regimen to maintain those
supple arms and...whatever sorts of exercises he does to make his tongue capable of *this*--
--is what we call a queer-coded villain.
See, queer coding occurs when a character is never explicitly shown or stated to be
queer, but they nonetheless behave in ways that play off of and reinforce stereotypes
about queer people, so the audience is supposed to *get* that they’re gay without it ever
being stated outright.
Now, queer coding doesn’t inherently have to be negative; coding can be neutral or even
positive, depending on the circumstances.
But the history of queer coding has largely been one of vilification and demonization,
and the longest, richest tradition of queer coding can be found in cinema.
See, throughout the 30s and 40s, Hollywood movies were governed by the Motion Picture
Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, which put “moral” restrictions on topics
that movies could or could not mention.
One of the verboten topics during this time was homosexuality, but while movies couldn’t
explicitly say that certain characters were gay, they could still “code” them as queer.
A classic example is Peter Lorre in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon.
His character of Joel Cairo is explicitly described as queer in Dashiell Hammett’s
novel, but in the film, it’s only hinted at through things like effeminate behavior
and a mild obsession with his own appearance.
[CAIRO] I'm prepared to promise that, eh, what is the phrase?
That no questions will be asked.
By the 1980s the Hays Code was long gone, allowing films to be more explicit in their
vilification and demonization of LGBT people, like Michael Caine’s “transvestite”
killer in Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill.
[yelling]
However, queer coding of villains in cinema remained fairly common practice, most notably
in animated films aimed at younger audiences like Disney’s The Little Mermaid and
The Lion King.
Now, I want to move on to games but to be clear, what I’ve just provided is merely
the tiniest sample of Hollywood’s long history of queer-coding villains.
Trust me, it’s a whole thing, and for lots more on the topic, check out the 1995 documentary
The Celluloid Closet, and the book of the same name by Vito Russo.
All right, let’s talk video games.
Of course, when games first started becoming widely common in people’s homes with the
success of the Atari 2600, they rarely had much real character development at all.
I mean, there’s only so much you can do when your heroic lead character looks like
this:
...and even when graphics started getting better and characters looked more like this,
with a few exceptions, actual character development in games remained pretty minimal.
But once consoles and computers started getting a little more powerful still, game designers
wasted no time following in Hollywood’s footsteps and jumping into the long and celebrated
tradition of depicting queerness as something threatening, degenerate and vile, which, with
any luck, will be vanquished by our wholesome and righteous heroes!
In the 1991 Konami arcade game Crime Fighters 2, players face queer-coded enemies in leather,
with exaggeratedly effeminate walking animations, who literally dry-hump the player as an attack!
But they don’t stop there!
These guys’ll dry-hump anything!
If there’s a lamppost handy, hell, they’ll hump that, too!
Similarly, in the 1994 Sega beat-em-up Bare Knuckle 3, the midboss Ash is an effeminate
leather daddy wearing a Venus symbol around his neck whose running animations play off
of the stereotype of the male “sissy.”
Beating up these enemies, homophobic players could take added pleasure and satisfaction
in the idea that they were clobbering a character who violated masculine norms and embodied
a transgressive kind of queerness.
When these games were released in the US as Vendetta and Streets of Rage 3, respectively,
these enemies were removed, though Ash remains hidden in Streets of Rage 3’s code as a
secret playable character.
If you think that these kinds of harmful representations were only happening in Japan, hoo boy, have
I got a story for you.
Following his retirement in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, disgraced, racist
LA police chief Daryl Gates worked with Sierra Online on the fourth installment of their
Police Quest series.
The resulting game, Police Quest: Open Season, told the story of one LAPD detective’s investigation
of a grisly series of murders which, as it turns out, are being committed by a “cross-dressing”
serial-killer!
How is a brave, upstanding member of the LAPD meant to deal with
such a threat?
Well, I’m about to show you, but let me first offer a warning that while these 1993
graphics are lacking in detail, the act you’re about to witness is a horrifying display
of violence.
[NARRATOR] Your action neutralizes your assailant.
Oh, neutralizes?
Is that what we’re calling it?
An LAPD detective just used a lighter and a can of hairspray to set someone on fire!
The game requires you to kill the villain in this excruciating manner, and then congratulates
you for it.
It’s clear that players, in the role of a clean-cut, “upstanding” police officer,
were meant to relish the fact that they were ridding the world of someone whose gender
transgressions are an indication of their illness, part of what makes them sick and
threatening and wrong.
With its 2000 entry, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Capcom’s long-running survival horror series
also got in on the action of demonizing trans and gender-nonconforming people with the character
of Alfred Ashford.
Alfred, umm...idolizes his twin sister Alexia, who’s frozen in suspended animation for...reasons.
In her absence, Alfred assumes the persona of Alexia, and attempts to kill protagonist
Claire Redfield.
[ALFRED] I am Alexia Ashford. For the pride of the Ashford family, I will kill you!
Like the villain of Police Quest: Open Season, Alfred’s “cross-dressing” is meant to
be seen as just another manifestation of the same mental instability that makes them a
psychotic killer.
It’s an indication that Alfred is deranged and threatening, and needs to be dealt with.
[ALFRED] My apology. But I can not let you escape now. [high pitched laughter]
[CLAIRE] Alfred! You cross-dressing freak!
A few years later, in 2003’s Resident Evil:
Dead Aim, the series would once again have a villain defy gender norms as a way of making
them seem threatening and unsavory, deserving of being destroyed.
Morpheus Duvall begins the game as a narcissistic figure obsessed with his own appearance, and
eventually he mutates into a female-coded being with breasts and bio-integrated
high heels, before finally succumbing to an Umbrella Corporation virus and mutating into a grotesque
blob.
Meanwhile, Konami’s 2005 game Castlevania: Curse of Darkness gives us a very clear instance
of queer coding when the villainous, elegant and effeminate Isaac kisses Trevor Belmont
while impaling him.
[ISAAC] Enough talk. [kisses him] Time to die.
However, my personal pick for the most horrifying example of a queer-coded villain in a game
would have to be Jo Slade in the original Dead Rising.
One of many so-called “psychopaths” you can encounter, Jo is a chilling example of
how queerness can be demonized in the portrayals of villains.
A butch lesbian cop, Jo captures a conventionally attractive woman and berates her for her presumed
heterosexuality and her attractiveness to men, before proceeding to molest the woman
with her nightstick.
In this dynamic, the conventionally feminine, straight woman is presented as “normal,”
and Jo’s queerness is presented as abnormal and dangerous.
"Officer, can I talk to you for a minute?
[JO] Shut your piehole. If you try to interfere with official police business, I'll start with you
before I get to her. [laughs]
This is a very important distinction: She is not just an evil woman who also happens
to be queer.
Her sexuality, as with most of the villains we’ve discussed, is presented as part of
what makes her monstrous and threatening.
Beyond perpetuating harmful stereotypes and linking queerness to evil, these representations
of queer antagonists also intrinsically assume that the protagonist and the player are not
queer.
They position queerness as something at odds with heroism.
Rather than straight, gay, gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming characters all fighting
alongside each other for some righteous cause, these games create a moral spectrum in which
queerness is inherently anti-heroic, linked directly to being deviant, destructive, or
chaotic, and leaving it up to our wholesome, cisgender, gender-conforming, presumed-straight
heroes to vanquish that chaos from the world.
In contrast to the queer-coded villains, those straight cisgender heroes represent order
and stability and decency.
Their gender conformity and heterosexuality is part of what makes them good, just as the
villains’ queerness is part of what makes them bad.
It’s exceptionally rare at this point, but games can give us villains who are queer without
making it seem like their queerness is part of what makes them villains.
The warm-hearted game Undertale pulls this off with the Royal Guards, a mini-boss duo
who express romantic affection for each other in a way that is sweet and endearing.
Also--and this is admittedly a pretty weak example but we really don’t have a whole
lot to work with here--in Batman: Arkham Knight, at one point you can overhear a random enemy
"I hear ya. My other half's a human rights lawyer. He, uh, he thinks I'm on a business trip.
militia member casually mention his male partner."
"They just don't get it, do they? The mercenary life."
"Exactly. I put food on the table. Blood diamonds in her jewelry box. I launder all my money through her coompany!
She didn't even have to ask! And she dumps me!"
Wow.
We need more.
More queer villains whose villainy and queerness aren’t presented as intrinsically intertwined,
and more heroes who are bisexual, gay, trans, nonbinary or otherwise not just the established
straight cisgender norm, heroes who demonstrate that queerness isn’t something to be feared
or vilified, and that bravery and heroism have no particular sexuality or gender identity.