This video was sponsored by Campfire Blaze! Insert “flaming” joke here.
Warning! This video uses the word “Queer” in a reclaimed way, like, a whole bunch! Like,
I say it more than a hundred times! If that upsets you, you probably wouldn’t have a
good time watching this video, and I’m kind of questioning why you even clicked on it!
Okay here we go!
The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, more commonly knows as the Hays Code, was
a set of self-censorship industry guidelines that basically defined what movies were allowed
to do. It covers a lot of ground, but broadly it puts forward and enforces the following
three general principles: One. “No picture shall be produced that
will
lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should
never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
Two: Correct standards of life, subject only to
the requirements of drama and entertainment,
shall be presented.
And, three: Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed,
nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.” …And to be honest, I could stop the video
here. This, this right here, is the chemical formula for the queer-coded villainy trope.
Between 1934 and 1968, this standard was strongly enforced in US film production down to the
letter. Your movie could not portray “sin” or “violations of the natural law” in
any kind of sympathetic context, which means if you wanted to put queer stuff in your movie,
your only option was to put it on a bad guy. The Hays Code also prohibited things like
masculine women, feminine men and interracial relationships. Ahhh, the 30s-through-60s.
But it’s not like the Hays Code invented the idea that these things were bad. The concept
that queerness is some kind of unnatural crime or sin instead of just being, you know, a
way people can exist, is pretty old and well-established at this point, but more importantly than the
whole discrimination and criminalization thing, for decades if not centuries in the US and
UK, the most popular attitude towards that sparkling rainbow of human diversity was that
it was a thing, sure, but nobody was allowed to acknowledge it. You couldn’t be upfront
or overt about queer tendencies, those were private and shameful and you would be super
arrested and punished if you were caught being queer too loudly. It’s not that these identities
didn’t exist or weren’t known about - it’s that they were mostly obscured, actively punished,
or - most commonly - referred to with obfuscating, polite euphemisms to discreetly imply that
someone was queer without making any concrete statements that would violate the sweeping
agreement that these people’s very existence was fundamentally indecent, embarrassing or
otherwise a problem to be covered up or “fixed”. Men weren’t gay, they were “confirmed
bachelors”. That woman isn’t partnered with that man because they’re mutually covering
up their own queer identities by giving each other plausible deniability while seeing people
they’re actually attracted to on the side, they’re just in a “lavender marriage.”
Those two independently wealthy new-england women aren’t living together because they’re
lesbians - they’re just in a “boston marriage.” That woman who never seemed interesting in
getting married or settling down isn’t asexual or aromantic or a lesbian, she’s a “spinster.”
This guy who publicly stated he was bisexual was… probably just joking. This
person who dressed and lived publicly as a man their whole life and took great pains
to make sure nobody found out they weren’t assigned male at birth wasn’t a trans man,
maybe they were just really committed to going to medical school! It’s not
automatically this queer thing so it’s totally kosher! It’s all about the plausible deniability,
baby! Basically all this to say that while queer
identities have always existed and always been known to a degree, until very recently
the prevailing
attitude was that they had to be kept secret and private, and any kind of publicly visible
queerness had to be smacked down as harshly as possible. This attitude manifested in lots
of different ways - some people treated it like a sin that people had a religious obligation
to oppose in all its forms, while some people took the slightly more charitable attitude
that it wasn’t inherently a problem as long as they kept it quiet and consensual and not
in my backyard and don’t ask don’t tell. Of course, in practice, this was not true
- for instance, Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde were both famously punished absolutely horrendously
for private, consensual relationship with other men. And while Turing was a very private
guy, Oscar Wilde is kind of famous for being flamboyant and a historical queer icon, but
even he kept his actual queer relationships on the DL as much as possible, actually taking
the Marquess of Queensberry to court for libel when he accused him of… sleeping with his
son, which by all accounts Wilde was doing. Unfortunately, during that case, Wilde’s
gay relationships were exposed by a team of private detectives which flipped the case
on its head and turned the whole trial into a sham, after which his life was basically
systematically destroyed. First he denied everything, but when he was arrested and tried,
after pleading not guilty he ended up undercutting himself by delivering a heartbreakingly beautiful
defense of “the love that dare not speak its name” and how that kind of love between
two men is perfectly natural, beautiful and noble, dating back to ancient greece, and
it’s not the fault of the love that the modern world doesn’t understand it. It was
unfortunately kind of the opposite of a legal defense, and he ended up doing two years of
hard labor and was never the same afterwards, actually
dying shortly after his release. This is a very long and depressing way to
say that the real-world social context for the corpus of literature that created the
queer-coded villain trope was an environment where queerness was known and acknowledged
as what amounted to an open secret, but the minute the social contract was violated and
queerness was publicly acknowledged or exposed, it was violently punished for being indecent,
unnatural or wrong, despite demonstrably being none of those things. God, calling someone
out for “public indecency” when you had to hire a team of private detectives to find
them out would be funny if it hadn’t ruined so many lives.
So! This is the fertile soil that gave rise to the Hays Code, which put down on paper
the principles that most people had been operating on for decades already - people were impressionable,
media influenced reality, and it was very important for that media to be ideologically
pure so as to promote good morals and traditional values and buzzword buzzword buzzword. Basically
between this and the prevailing attitude toward queerness, popular media gave queer identities
the same two options that reality did: hide their existence as much as possible, or expose
their existence and suffer. With the added moralistic flavoring that queerness was an
inherently evil or sinful thing that could not be glorified under any circumstances,
the wonderful world of fictional moral absolutism meant that your heroes could not be queer
in any way, but you villains COULD, as long as they were “suitably punished” in the
end.
From this primordial media soup arises the queer-coded villain in all their glory - everything
taboo and indecent in reality embodied totally unsubtly on the silver screen. Men who are
visibly effeminate, women who are visibly masculine,
villains who are actively hypersexual, acting
in publicly suggestive ways towards people who their attraction to is totally unacceptable!
This media made no distinction between traits that were currently socially unacceptable
and traits that were fundamentally evil, so villains got their pick of the pack while
heroes tended to be extremely bland.
But the Hays code really only lasted about 30 years, and near the end there it was already
being pretty thoroughly lambasted, because it was, you know… stupid. It held all of
american cinema to the moral standard of a care bears episode, not to mention it treated
audiences like gullible morons who would see an ounce of moral complexity onscreen and
become so tilted it’d lead to the immediate downfall of civilization. And from their perspective
on what defined civilization, they might’ve been right - forcing an audience to exclusively
consume media that conforms to a fundamentally false moral dichotomy is pretty much the only
way to keep that audience buying that moral dichotomy. If movies were allowed to show
queer characters that weren’t evil villains, it might make the audience think that being
queer was actually totally fine and harmless. And hey, look where we are now! Progress!
Most people agree that the final nail in the Hays Code coffin was Some Like It Hot, a wildly
successful comedy where two musicians dress in drag to escape the mafia and end up in
a whole mess of gender-bending romantic shenanigans completely unacceptable by the Hays Code’s
standards - in the final scene of the movie, one of the musicians exasperatedly reveals
to his smitten would-be-suitor that he’s a guy, to which the man replies “Well, nobody’s
perfect!” and keeps driving. But yea, the Hays Code gradually faded into
obscurity, but that doesn’t mean the tropes it fostered just went away. The queer-coded
villain trope that grew in this basic moralized environment persisted even after the social
context that created it began to wither. 1969 saw the turning point of the Stonewall riots,
while the 70s saw the first organized pride parades and broadly heralded the beginning
of the transition to where we are now - queer identities being publicly acknowledged and
celebrated has become the mainstream attitude, while bigotry is considered the embarrassing
unfortunate reality best swept under the rug. Of course, a simple turn of the tables this
is not, because while the trait of queerness is inherent, the trait of being an asshole
is selective. Look, I know some people are terrible, all right? I don’t mind. I just
need them to not be terrible around me. But while society may have been marching on,
tropes tend to be a little slower to change. There’s momentum to literary movements,
and since creators are largely inspired by the works of earlier creators, generational
tropes can manifest where a new wave of creators produce a new wave of an earlier trope that
they
previously internalized. Queer-coded villains underwent a somewhat subtle shift around this
time - and I’m not entirely sure where it came from, but I have a hunch. See, queer-coded
villains, despite being the most generic dag-nasty evil they can be… are often very beloved
by fans and creators alike. This cannot have been true when the trope started, since the
whole purpose of the Hays code was to make sure to portray these characters as negatively
as possible so nobody in the audience got any funny ideas. But just by making these
characters flamboyantly, unapologetically themselves - even if it was so they could
be punished by the narrative for doing those things - the characters often ended up resonating
with the audience, and not just the closeted queer audience. Defying the social order to
unapologetically exist is the kind of personal narrative that can resonate with anyone who
doesn’t comfortably 100% fit into the social order, whatever it may be. Those three decades
worth of Hays-code-approved queer-coded villains might’ve been intended to enforce the status
quo, but their transgressive nature still taught the audience that the status quo could
be disrupted. Somewhere along the line I think this transformed the trope itself - the focus
of the character was no longer on how evil and debauched they were, it was on how they
existed in a fundamentally transgressive way - a trait that a surprising number of people
can sympathize with. Now I may not know exactly when this first
manifested, but I know when it got big, and it’s all thanks to disney. Classic archetypical
disney villains are frequently queer-coded - the most blatant example being Ursula, whose
visual design was completely based on famous drag queen Divine, but most disney villains
were a combination of flamboyant, immensely self-confident and in some way fundamentally
transgressive. Even the male villains who are explicitly attracted to women don’t
avoid being queer-coded with traits like vanity or a general love of drama
that are associated with femininity or the broad space of queer stereotypes. And these
characters are beloved! Well, maybe not Gaston. But they’re almost always
the most interesting people in their movies,
and even if we know they’re gonna lose in the end it’s still very fun to watch them
sweep around like they own the place, singing about how diabolical they are.
Now there’s one problem here - it’s not easy
nailing down what exact traits constitute
queer-coding, so it’s hard to definitively argue that a given character is queer-coded
or not. But like all coding, queer-coding draws on the corpus of stereotypes. If something
is a queer stereotype, applying it to a character can make them queer coded. For instance, Disney’s
portrayal of Hades has a few traits in common with the “sassy gay best friend” type.
Scar, despite being… you know… a lion has some flamboyant body language that makes
a lot of people think “hm. Kinda gay.” Captain Hook is very flamboyant and swishy
and his whole thing with Smee is, well, a thing. Cruella de Ville is a powerful, bossy
older woman with a husband who is never named and a ridiculously over-the-top personality
and she’s just got this vibe, you know? And this one’s kind of interesting - a lot
of disney villains express a general skepticism or detached amusement about the obligatory
romantic subplot between the mandatory heterosexual couple of pretty young heroes - from eye-rolling
all the way up to dismissing the existence of true love. This is less of a behavioral
queer stereotype and more… tied in with the actual queer experience of feeling fundamentally
separated from the concept of a fairy tale love story happy ending. Disney villains are
usually placed in idealogical opposition to the straight romance in their movies - Ursula
casually tells Ariel to seduce prince Eric by relying on her looks and the importance
of body language rather than, like, getting to know each other as people, Jafar tries
to use genie magic to make Jasmine love him to completely undercut her whole narrative
about being free to choose - which is actually interesting, because Aladdin actually spends
most of the movie also trying to manipulate Jasmine because he’s afraid she could never
love the real him - Gaston seemingly can’t conceive of a paradigm where people might
like people for reasons deeper than physicality and thus might not be into him, Hades actively
manipulates Hercules by using his love for Megara as his “weakness” and Maleficent’s
whole evil plan is based on the idea that “true love’s kiss” will never happen.
Disney villains consistently either dismiss true love or reduce it to physical attraction.
Classic disney villains are disconnected from the concept of true love in a way that could
resonate pretty well with an audience that grew up with no love stories they could personally
relate to. This is a bit of a reach, I know, but it is a common experience that might
help explain why this specific flavor of queer-coded villain resonates as well as it does.
Now of course, as we’ve discussed
earlier, queer subjects have become a lot less taboo in the last few decades. Queer
coding still happens on the regular, but we’re also getting canon queer representation - and
these tropes have been interacting in very strange ways. Plenty of media has been adding
positive representation, where heroes are allowed to be canonically queer on screen.
But the Queer-Coded Villain is such a well-established trope at this point that some creators feel
safer making villains explicitly queer than heroes. Shades of that old moral absolutism
are still there - heroes are heroic and positive role models and giving them character traits
that are not unilaterally regarded as positive can be seen as a risky play. I briefly touched
on this in the Antihero video too - cuz it’s easier for a writer to give an antihero a
potentially spicy character trait like a queer identity because it feels like less of a gamble.
And this pervasive fear is responsible for a whole bunch of tropes in this space. Bury
Your Gays, for instance, is the trope where a canon queer character dies fairly quickly,
often shortly after their orientation or identity is officially confirmed, and this happens
because frankly a lot of writers feel safer when their “controversial” characters
are dead. They get to reap the positive clout of acknowledging that this identity exists
but they don’t need to worry about actually handling that character well. Of
course, Bury Your Gays is a long-standing trope also rooted in the Hays Code, since
punishing immorality was a huge part of the whole premise, so killing off queer characters
was the respectable thing for these movies to do - same stuff, different decade. Queerbaiting
is a comparatively new trope in this general space, as it’s queercoding with an inherently
positive angle - a creator will hint to the audience that canon positive queer content
might be coming in order to draw in an audience that wants to see that kind of representation,
and then sometimes they deliver the barest bit of Canon Queer Content before snapping
the camera away and often killing the character just to be safe. Reap the brownie points of
acknowledging queer stuff is a thing but don’t actually write it into your story in any meaningful
way, because that’s hard and scary and people might get mad. Queerbaiting is queer-coding
for people who want more queer content, and it’s harmful in all the same ways.
For some writers, queer-coding and queer-baiting can feel like a safe alternative to actual
queer representation. You never need to worry about actually writing the queer content if
you just keep hinting at it, or dropping in stereotypes the audience can read into. On
some level we’ve
circled back around to “confirmed bachelors” and “lavender weddings” and plausible
deniability because queer identities haven’t quite shaken off that veneer of social unacceptability
that makes people nervous or ashamed to touch on them in any serious way. Modern queer-coded
villains still have a lot of the baggage from the original hays code version - like how
their queerness will sometimes be used to signal that they’re extra unhinged or dangerous,
tying back into the idea that it’s something inherently abnormal and alarming. And certain
identities get most of their onscreen representation by way of queer-coded villains - most nonbinary
characters these days are explicitly nonhuman beings like genderless aliens or shapeshifters,
bisexuality and pansexuality get most of their rep through very promiscuous characters, often
with cheating subplots, and if you’re asexual or aromantic most of your good rep comes from
robots and the rest of your rep comes from evil villains incapable of understanding what
it is to truly love. Now before I “so yeah” and sign off, a
whole bunch of other youtubers have made videos related to this you might wanna check out
- Lindsay Ellis’s “tracing the roots of pop culture transphobia” video is an extremely
in-depth look at one very specific side of the queer-coded villains trope and how trans-coded
villainy specifically evolved, while Sarah Z’s “the johnlock conspiracy” and “destielgate”
videos talk a lot about queerbaiting in BBC’s Sherlock and the CW’s Supernatural respectively.
HBomberguy’s “Sherlock is garbage and here’s why” video also has a fun bit discussing
BBC Sherlock’s portrayal of Moriarty and how they deliberately queer-coded him to make
him seem scarier and more unhinged, which is, you know, exactly what we were talking
about today. Dominic Noble’s “Lost in Adaptation” video about the 1945
The Picture of Dorian Gray also briefly touches on the Hays Code and how it might’ve
led them to reduce the queer coding of Dorian to make him more redeemable by their standards.
There’s also… like… a million videos about disney villains being queer-coded queens,
so… yea, have fun with that. It’s a lot. A lot. So… yeah.
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