Have LGBTQIA characters always been explicitly represented in media? If not, how have we seen them through the years?
Read on to understand the beginning of queer coding in cinema and its associated connotations!
Queer coding refers to a process by which characters in a piece of fictional media seem — or code — queer. This is usually determined by a series of characteristics that are traditionally associated with queerness, such as more effeminate presentations by male characters or more masculine ones from female characters. These characters seem somehow less than straight, and so we associate those characters with queerness — even if their sexual orientation is never a part of their story.
Queer coding has its roots in a wide variety of places throughout American history, usually situated in the 1950s and '60s, when the U.S. government, along with a number of religious and conservative groups, became extremely concerned with the effect various forms of media were having on the public. It is in this time that the Comics Code Authority arose, banning overt sexuality of any kind from comics, and putting restrictions on the ways in which women could be depicted.
At the same time, depictions of LGBTQ characters were, while not outright banned, heavily discouraged in American cinema. This doesn’t mean these characters were eliminated, but they were hidden in subtext.Directors would tell actors to play their characters as gay, even when those characters were not explicitly described as such within the confines of the film itself. Instead, those characters possessed certain characteristics — styles of dress, mannerisms, phrases, etc. — that would make them recognisable to other members of the community while maintaining a guise of straightness to the general public, and, more importantly, to the censors.
Even dangerous LGBTQ tropes rose out of this time period, as the depictions of pulp noir femme fatales and other deadly women rose in popularity. These women were usually written as promiscuous and sexually devious, both with men and sometimes with women.
They were also evil and usually met their end as a result of their sins. While depictions of LGBTQ characters were frowned upon, depictions of them in this specifically negative light were not.You were not endorsing an “alternative lifestyle” if your gay characters always met an untimely demise. Instead, they were merely paying for their poor choices. This trope would eventually give way to what we now refer to as “Bury Your Gays.”
As the years ticked on and the '60s gave way to the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and, the gay rights movement, the rules began to change. With LGBTQ audiences seen now as a market to be served, depictions of these characters were no longer banned.
Unfortunately, many of the harmful tropes established during the previous era had done their damage, and despite the decades in between, creators still have a hard time removing themselves from what can be considered “traditional” depictions of certain characters.
For this reason, many villains continue to code as gay, either intentionally or by accident. Villains from Disney movies, for example, tend to fall into stereotypes on either side of the dichotomy. These villainous depictions are direct holdouts from the days when creators were encouraged to present queer women as corrupting influences and queer men as less than manly. Male villains tend to be more effeminate than their hyper-masculine heroic counterparts (think Scar vs. Simba or Hades vs. Hercules), while female villains are devious and corrupting in comparison to their sweet, wholesome heroines (Maleficent, Ursula, the Wicked Stepmother, Mother Gothel, etc.).
Remember, when we say “code” we do not necessarily mean that they are meant to be gay, or even that they are meant to appear that way. Coding does not need to be an intentional act. It is as much a part of the relationship between the work and the audience as it is part of the relationship between the creator and audience (or even the creator and their work).
Our understanding of these characters as queer is related to our learned understanding of queer behavior through the media we have consumed as the creators. Devious women are less inhibited, for example, therefore more sexual and, by extension, more likely to enjoy the company of the same sex. Gay men, meanwhile, in our limited, stereotypical understanding of them, are less masculine, therefore we see less masculine men as being gay.
Modern depictions of characters who would have been, at other points in history, simply queer coded are now sometimes actually becoming straight-up queer characters as creators listen to their audiences and begin to understand the ways in which they read queerness in those characters. A perfect recent example of this is in a character like Cheryl Blossom on The CW’s Riverdale. The character began, as many queer women do, as a villain in the show’s first season, but over the course of her time on the air has changed into a character who, due to her position and her characterization, could easily be read as queer. When the showrunners decided to introduce some additional queer characters to the series for Season 2, Cheryl became a perfect choice, and her coming-out arc and subsequent relationship with Toni Topaz took her from queer coded to out-and-proud queer.
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