Visit theallusionist.org/queerbaiting to listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, enter language in a seaside knobbly knees competition as a joke, but it only went and won! Very proud, very proud.
Today’s episode is about the shifting meaning of the word ‘queerbaiting’ - it’s a bit related to the last episode that was about rainbow washing, but this time in entertainment.
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There are a couple of swears in this episode.
On with the show.
LEIGH PFEFFER: I’ve really wanted to talk about these things because I'm a queer historian, but I'm also a big media nerd and I feel really strongly about queer representation and the way that LGBTQ characters and themes have been portrayed on television and on film and in different forms of media. And we have these tropes and this language of representation and stereotypes that show up in media right now that has a long, long history.
I'm Leigh Pfeffer and I use they/them pronouns. And I am the host and producer of History Is Gay podcast.
History Is Gay is - we like to say that it explores the underappreciated and overlooked queer ladies, gents and gentle enbies of the unexplored corners of the past, because history has never been as straight as you think. Bits of queerness have existed in all of humanity since humanity existed.
HZ: And Leigh has been tracking the development of the term ‘queerbaiting’, which has been used a few different ways.
LEIGH PFEFFER: I see the term ‘queerbaiting’ evolving in some circles as like a catchall term for different disagreements about queer representation and I think it's important for people to know the history of the term and the ways that it's been used in the past that we can accurately use it to describe what's going on right now. To understand queerbaiting, you need to know the history and evolution of what's called queer coding. And they're really mixy uppy together.
HZ: Frolicking around like a basket of puppies.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Yeah. Queercoding, it just means that you're not showing something explicitly. It's not inherently negative or positive. It just depends on how it's used.
HZ: For a long time, it was the only option for showing queerness on screen, what with the likes of the Hays Code compelling makers of screen entertainment to self-censor.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Characters couldn't be shown explicitly on screen as gay or as queer. And so you had to hide it in stereotypes and subtext, based on this censorship code that banned ‘immoral behaviour’ on screen. Which meant that anything involving homosexuality, among many other kinds of ‘lewd sexual behaviour’, needed to be done subtextually, or in a way that depicted it like negatively and had consequences and punishments. And so you had these stock characters of pansies and sissies; you had terms like 'confirmed bachelor' was a euphemism that people would use or 'maiden aunt' or calling an unmarried woman a ‘spinster’. And so you had these gay stock characters based in these stereotypes and they had these traditionally cross gender traits.
But what you see that evolve into in some ways is, most people nowadays when they think of queercoding, a lot of times people can see things like the history of Disney villains. You see these characters, these evil characters that are male, but they're coded with like feminine characteristics or, you know, makeup on male characters, like Jafar in Aladdin or like Ursula in The Little Mermaid is based off of the drag queen Divine. So it can be used negatively in creating these associations of queerness as a shorthand for villainy or evil. But some queer coded characters are written for queer audiences, as hints when it's not possible to present an explicit narrative. It's like a subtextual language, and it's a way to say, "Hey, we see you, even though we can't do this." The big kind of shift is that we don't really hear a lot of queercoding nowadays. The language that gets used a lot is this term queerbaiting. It's kind of modelled on the phrase ‘race baiting’, which is incitement of racial hatred for a political advantage.
HZ: The terms ‘race baiting’ and ‘race baiter’ have been in use since at least the 1920s, but became a lot more common in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, during the presidential campaigns of the George Bushes. Then in the 2010s Republican politicians appropriated the word ‘race baiting’ and flipped the meaning to imply that anti-racism activists were inciting racism against white people; so race baiting gets to be another term used to discredit the calling out of racism. The meaning of ‘queerbaiting’ has moved around a bit too over the past few decades. It was quite literal in the 1950s, during the Lavender Scare.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Folks may be familiar with the Red Scare, which was McCarthyism and trying to root out communists from society and from the government. And there was similarly a moral panic in the 1950s where gays and lesbians were fired en masse from government positions and military positions, basically thinking that they like posed a threat to national security, that they were communist sympathizers, that peopl were really weak willed and that they were a big security risk. And so law enforcement would engage in entrap practices and would round up queer people and use 'queerbaiting', is what they had called it at that time, as information-gathering tactics, trying to draw out suspected LGBTQ people, suspected gay people, through entrapment, by offering what they were pretending as safe spaces, or specifically baiting them into sexual situations: classic entrapment, then suddenly you're arrested for lewd and lascivious behaviour and turning them in.
HZ: So that was really ‘bait’ like you would put a worm on a fish.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Yeah. It really was used like that literal version of the term. The same tactics happened with communists in the Red Scare: there's red baiting, there's race baiting. And so the evolution of that in the LGBTQ community became queerbaiting. And then how it got to what it's used for today, is it started in fandom spaces in the late 2000s, early 2010s, blogging sites like Livejournal and Tumblr. There were multiple different posts on Livejournal and different places where people kind of explained the concept, but maybe didn't necessarily call it queerbaiting specifically. Different definitions on places like Urban Dictionary or different websites put an emphasis on the idea of queerbaiting as a goal of drawing in LGBTQ audiences and making money from them and earning recognition and brownie points for being progressive in showing potentially queer content without alienating homophobic or conservative viewers by putting in actual, legitimate, sincere and multifaceted representation. And that's what it evolved into, from this 1950s very literal baiting of people into legally tricky situations, to the idea of “We're going to apply this as a term to a marketing ploy that we, as an oppressed minority, are starting to see.”
HZ: Do you know if there were other terms that had been used to mean that in similar online spaces?
LEIGH PFEFFER: Well, there's a couple of others. There were in certain queer spaces, online slash spaces, which is relationships between characters of the same gender, usually male. And that actually comes from a character name and then a slash and the character name representing that pairing that relationship. That goes back to Kirk and Spock from Star Trek.
HZ: Kirk/Spock. The earliest known fan fiction pairing those two up for more than friendship, is from 1974. But the internet really allowed slash fiction to take off.
LEIGH PFEFFER: You would see phrases like ‘slashwink’ bandied around, and I think people kind of look on that a little bit more fondly than the concept of queerbaiting. I've seen that used in the same kind of context of like queercoding where it's “Hey, you know, we're gonna give you a little wink. We're gonna throw these little bits in here as a little nod to you.” But where things kind of shifted was once money became involved and once it was like, “Oh, we can gain this audience that will give us clout,” being able to market to queer people much in the same way that we have things like pink washing and rainbow washing, and suddenly queer people are a marketable audience. But do you wanna give up, that good middle conservative America money by actually putting in an actual kiss or a long relationship between these characters?
HZ: Just a loving wink.
LEIGH PFEFFER: A loving wink. Yeah. It's marketing a series or a storyline in a way that suggests like a potential queer romance and then no homoing it, essentially; delivering jokes and tension, but not actually progressing towards the romance, and specifically laughing it off and denying it as a possibility.
HZ: What to you are the problems with the term queerbaiting being used in the sense of like TV shows hinting at queer love without showing it, versus previous uses of the word?
LEIGH PFEFFER: Do we still call it queerbaiting when there's actual explicit queer content on the screen? Do we still call it that when maybe some other things are going on in that representation? Maybe some other duplicitous marketing tactics are being used, or maybe there's some sort of really kind of harmful other trope that's being used in representation?
HZ: Like the "bury your gays" trope, also known as "dead lesbian syndrome" - the explicitly queer characters are disproportionately likely to be killed off.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Part of the unfortunate thing about the landscape of LGBTQ representation on screen is that there still is not a huge amount of it, and so it's rife for all of these different abuses. Do we apply it to places where there's virtue signalling in advertising or rainbow washing? They may show actual queer content and themes in these ads, or in a music video, but it's still marketing and insincere tactics to get queer money.
HZ: Well, how do you sort sincere from insincere?
LEIGH PFEFFER: It's really tricky. How do you tell the difference between queercoding and queerbaiting there? They can be mistaken for each other and there's a similarity to them, both because they're both using subtext to hint at queerness, and they can both have a negative impact. But I think the difference is there's a big question of intent. Queercoding could be used positively and negatively. Queercoding has historically been used to explore sexuality where this may not have been allowed otherwise. Queerbaiting, on the other hand, is only used to draw queer audiences into a piece of media but it has no intention of actually meaningfully exploring queerness. It's always going to be negative because the intention is duplicitous. It's a marketing ploy. And so it's a commercial strategy that emerged in response to "Oh, if we tell these progressive stories and these 'diverse narratives', because the world is changing, people will see us in a certain way and give us support and give us money. But also we can't make so strong of a statement that we lose, you know, Joe Tractor who's really homophobic."
HZ: Who just wants to fuck his tractor in peace.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Just wants to fuck his tractor in peace.
What is queerbaiting? What isn't queer baiting? There's constant debate between communities, because it's a community-coined term. And you have all these people from the internet in different communities. So there's so many different definitions going around, and people use this term and propagate this term without defining exactly what they mean, which allows for this evolution of the term, but also can allow for dissolution of it, watering it down or maybe making it lose meaning because it's getting so muddled.
HZ: That happens a lot in all sorts of areas of a language. I guess the importance of having it now is that without it, maybe this concept wouldn't be identified and there wouldn't be as much critique of this phenomenon in mainstream storytelling, for instance, or commercial media.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Yeah, I think where I, as someone who is familiar with the history of censorship and queer depictions on screen, but also is somebody who is existing in these fandom spaces: I think that I get really frustrated when I see these terms being used with definitions different than what I've come to know them as. Is this an evolution of a term or are we overusing it or misusing it to the point that it's losing its meaning? One thing that I've been seeing a lot is ‘queerbaiting’ as kind of a catchall descriptor for behaviour by real people in the public sphere. You'll see it a lot in headlines that say like, "Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish have been accused of queerbaiting. And what does that mean?" People accused singer songwriter Billie Eilish of queerbaiting in 2021, after she posted photos from her music video, and she wrote in this Instagram post, "I love girls." And a lot of people responded to that and were like, "oh, is this you coming out? Hey, you shouldn't tease us like this. You shouldn't say this unless you're actually part of the queer community, et cetera." A lot of people are using this word, queerbaiting, and accusing people of this in a way that can really quickly veer into gatekeeping, or demanding people come out or reveal an identity for legitimacy that they might not yet be ready to do so publicly. Also, what is the harm in normalizing, in further normalizing queerness? It wasn't that long ago that the term 'gay panic' was a legal defense. The idea that if somebody was in an assault or murder trial, that they could use this phrase, this concept of gay panic of like, "I was freaked out and I didn't know what to do and I was really disgusted." So like the fact that we have public figures at this point right now using queer performativity isn't necessarily a bad thing. If we want progress, normalizing queer things is how it gets codified legal support, especially in a time right now, where there are all of these attacks coming from all of these different areas. People have called Harry Styles's fashion sense ‘queerbaiting’. He may be a straight cisgender man, but he's playing with prescribed gender roles in clothing. That's a good thing.
HZ: Yes, he can be a cis straight man wearing a dress in Vogue.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Right, exactly.
HZ: Although let’s not forget that cis straight celebrities can perform aspects of queerness publicly to their advantage, without reaping the disadvantages. Whereas queer celebrities may not have that option.
LEIGH PFEFFER: I think people are a little too quick to ascribe the term ‘queerbaiting’ to anytime they see something that doesn't necessarily sit right with them on instinct. There's a tendency at this point to kind of use it as a synonym for bad representation. I think that there's a disconnect and a mismatch between what younger viewers nowadays are kind of expecting in queer representation versus what pop culture is providing. People are getting used to more representation. They want to see better representation. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about how do we get better representation? What do we call it when we have specific tropes that might lead to harmful stereotypes, instead of lumping everything under this term ‘queerbaiting’ - because if we muddy a term like that, it loses its meaning. We need to be intentional with the language we're using when we're discussing queer representation in media, because we're at a fragile point. We have to have the right language to criticise it and know the history behind that language. We need to be able to specifically say to show runners, to writers, to creators, to studio executives, why X, Y, and Z are not okay, and these are the reasons why. Here's what you are doing; here's how this is harming the community; here's how you can do it better.
HZ: So it's important just to keep this distinction with queerbaiting versus normalization of the defiance of prescribed gender and sexuality tropes that are very cisgender and heterosexual?
LEIGH PFEFFER: Yeah. Queerbaiting seems to be evolving in some circles as like this catchall term for any time queer representation isn't done like respectfully or appropriately or positively, but that's not necessarily really what it means. We might be at the point in queer representation in queer society where we need new terms. We need new language to evolve to describe what we're seeing, which is how queercoding evolved into queerbaiting in the first place. What's the shift there that happened where it was like, "Nope. We're no longer accepting scraps"> And we're noticing that this is being done no longer as like a, oh, Hey, cool! Man, I can't believe that they're putting this in here for us. This is great!" versus "They’re cowards, why won't they do this?"
HZ: I guess a lot of people who weren't raised on culture of pre-21st century don't necessarily know what it was like only to have the subtext and not the text.
LEIGH PFEFFER: Right. Yeah. There's a reason why the queerbaiting conversation, doesn't come up until the late 2000s, early 2010s, when you start to actually have queer representation on screen and you're starting to see what could be, right? People are getting slightly more than scraps. And so when you see this kind of half attempt, it makes people more furious, I think.
HZ: The academic Emma Nordin wrote in a thesis in 2015:
LEIGH PFEFFER: "Queerbaiting is a historically situated term, assuming that we live in a time and place where queer representation is possible yet constantly denied. The same people that accuse producers of TV shows from the 21st century of queerbaiting defend TV shows from the 1990s, because these are considered to have been produced under other circumstances that didn't allow queer representation."
So if these things were produced now, they would've been accused of queerbaiting; but queercoding has a history situated in that time period as a progressive strategy, to be able to show these narratives, without being in danger of not having it at all. So I think context is really important when we're talking about these terms, and you can't divorce terms from their historical context. Words and phrases and language will evolve, but none of it exists in a vacuum.
HZ: Leigh Pfeffer hosts and produces the podcast History Is Gay, which you can find in the podplaces and patreon at at historyisgaypodcast.com.
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