Bill: A Frank Discussion

Bill: A Frank Discussion

Written by Travis Ryans

As young as 9 years old, before I even understood I was a homosexual, I saw myself being mocked in a cartoony and family friendly video game. The game in question was called Banjo-Tooie, a platformer released for the N64 in the early 2000s. Partway through the game, you meet one of the many colorful characters named Jolly Roger. Despite the fact that he was not human, and spoke a gibberish language, the developers still managed to make it very clear from his movements and intonation, that this was a very gay frog. With the grace and nuance of Alex Jones, Banjo-Tooie turned the freakin’ frogs gay. Even as a small child, I could tell in that moment that I was being mocked, although I didn’t fully understand why. I just knew I wasn’t welcome here.

That didn’t stop me, however. I had been playing video games for years, and would continue to love them all through my life. I accepted that I would never see myself represented in them. That experience would not change significantly until, at the age of 22, I played The Last of Us and met a solitary, caustic, gay man named Bill.

Video game storytelling has a long and troubled history with its queer characters - longer than one could ever hope to cover in just one article, or even just one podcast. From the sexualization and objectification of lesbian relationships, to the heinous treatment of trans women as deceptive predators, gaming has a legacy of problematic depictions. While I cannot speak to the experience of all LGBTQ+ gamers, what I do know is how I felt as a young gay man, seeing myself portrayed in video games.

Depictions of gay men in gaming (especially before the 2010’s) tend to fall into two broad categories. There are the big buff daddies like Ash in Streets of Rage 3, and there are the effeminate androgynous twinks like Ghirahim in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Ash is a buff leather-clad biker and the ‘humor’ is that, despite all this, he is still mincing about. The developers could have made his walk animation more macho, but they felt the need to communicate his queerness in a comedic way, because we are a joke. If they had left all of his presentation on-screen completely masculine but still showed him with a male partner, all the laughs would be sucked out of the room. That’s not funny anymore, that’s just a person. The only socially acceptable form of queerness is repression. We must shove it down so deep that no one must ever see it, not even ourselves.

Ghirahim’s presentation is on the exact opposite end of the spectrum, but is still very much a caricature. Everything from his costume, to his makeup, to his body posture, to the way the camera frames him and cutscenes edit him, are all meant to display him as faaabulous. I don’t say this to denigrate androgyny or performative displays of gender - I am a dedicated fan of the art of drag. However, any queer person can immediately tell that this was a character made by cis straight people, for cis straight people. This is not an empowering depiction of someone dismantling the gender binary and being their authentic self - this is a freakish villain who is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable.

This kind of stereotyping is a problem within the queer community itself, but it certainly doesn’t help to have it reinforced by straight creators who dominate the media landscape. These characters are not authentic representations that exist to make queer people feel seen, they exist for a presumed straight cis male player to laugh at. They are extreme versions of gender presentation, because no matter what we do as queer people, we are still seen as abnormal and unwelcome.

After years of resigning myself to these kinds of cartoonish depictions, it didn’t even occur to me on a conscious level how disconnected I had felt from the games I was playing. That is, until I encountered Bill.

This stereotyping was so thoroughly normalized that I didn’t even pick up on Bill as a gay character as fast as some other queer people I’ve spoken to. We, as a marginalized group, have a tendency to project our own experiences onto characters out of a desperation to feel seen by an industry that refuses to acknowledge our existence beyond a joke. Many of my LGBTQ+ friends heard Bill say the words, “I had a partner once,” and immediately had their queer little ears perk up. I’m sure Naughty Dog was banking on this ambiguity, because my straightwashed brain immediately assumed he meant a sort of “business partner” as they were helping Joel and Tess smuggle goods into Pittsburgh. This felt consistent even as I discovered that Bill’s partner was a man named Frank. It wasn’t until I saw Bill’s reaction and Frank’s note that I came to understand the emotional relationship between them.

Bill’s queerness does not dominate his story. It managed to go completely unnoticed by this gay player until his story was almost over. However, it isn’t irrelevant to his story or character either - it colors everything we know about him. Bill is so guarded and mistrustful that he doesn’t just put up walls, he puts up explosive traps. This man’s home is his castle, and he chooses to live with a moat of literal monsters so that he can keep people away. At one point, he remarks: “You know, as bad as those things are, at least they’re predictable. It’s the normal people that scare me.”

It’s sadly not uncommon for queer people to close themselves off like this. I have seen far too many community members teetering on the edge of depression and paranoia, defaulting to a sort of “blackpill” suspicion that every person will eventually harm them - and that’s before the apocalypse. Given all this, I can only imagine the personal growth and vulnerability it must have taken for Bill to open up to another person like Frank. Then, think of how crushing it must have been for Frank to leave him, and how it would have validated all of Bill’s worst fears and insecurities.

Bill clearly has a level of internalized shame around his sexuality. A gruff loner like Bill doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who cares what people think of him. He’s sarcastic, abrasive, dismissive, and our first introduction to him is when he handcuffs a child. He doesn’t seem to be self-conscious about having conversations with himself out loud either. He evidently has zero desire to earn anyone else’s compassion or respect, and if you’re isolating yourself behind a horde of zombies and traps, there’s not much reason to.

Why then does he choose to use the gender-neutral term “partner” when referring to Frank? Why does he get anxious when Ellie peruses his magazine pile? He doesn’t care whether anyone knows that he has pornography - in the next hour they’ll either be dead or out of his hair forever. It’s not the shame of being sexual, but rather the shame of who he’s sexualizing. It’s not others he can’t face, but himself. Although it’s never outright discussed, I refuse to believe that a man who has zero internal conflict about his sexuality chose a confessional booth as his bed. He has an entire town to himself, he could have chosen any number of locations that were more comfortable or defensible. Instead, he lays his head down in a tiny closet exclusively designed for the purposes of guilt and shame.

The last moments we share with Bill break my heart. As he discovers and examines Frank’s body, he is clearly trying to hold back emotion as he coldly walks Joel through the infected bites and subsequent hanging of the love of his life. He’s too conflicted by grief and resentment to even hide his connection to Frank from Joel. As the player character, you can discover Frank’s last note to Bill, where he spews venom at Bill for restricting him with his reclusive behavior. “I guess you were right. Trying to leave this town will kill me. Still better than spending another day with you.” In subsequent playthroughs, I can still never decide whether to show this note to Bill or not. Am I prying? Will this bring him closure or more pain? Will this help him grow as a person, or cause him to retreat further within himself?

We never get the chance to find out, because once Joel can safely leave, Bill curses at him to leave his town and presumably never come back. This is of course, classic Bill behavior, but is it also because Joel now knows his painful secret? Bill is one of the few characters to survive The Last of Us, but he does not escape unscathed and I cannot help but wonder where his story goes from here. I am quite sure he wouldn’t want our pity, but he has mine all the same.

The longing for this kind of story is something that’s hard for some straight audiences to understand. We want our queerness to be seen and validated, without straying into an overdrawn caricature. The vast spectrum of queer people out there in the world can’t be distilled into a single character, which is why it’s important to have a range of queer characters in the medium. But even then, some people feel like we’re asking storytellers to hit too narrow a target with each depiction. I promise you: that fine line you’re picturing between invisibility and stereotype? It’s actually as wide as my entire life experience, and that of the people around me. This is why we advocate for marginalized groups being financed and resourced to tell their own stories. It’s a level of understanding that takes more time and empathy than most straight creators are willing or able to invest so that they can replicate it artificially.

This story is not unique to queerness. Everyone has loved and lost, everyone has struggled to connect with other people, and everyone has grappled with their own personal shames. At the same time, Bill’s queerness can’t be ignored either and it’s crucial to understanding him as a character. I’ve seen my share of queer characters like Bill before and since, handled with varying degrees of deftness, but none of them have stuck with me quite like him. I’ve learned so much more from Bill than any other queer game character. I’m no buff daddy, I’m no skinny twink (well, not anymore), but this fat grumpy survivalist who’s so afraid of others and himself? That’s someone who means something to me, and someone I can learn from - even if it’s what not to do. I will be myself, unapologetically, and still learn to trust and value the people around me.

I will do what Bill taught me, and learn to craft a nail bomb - or at least paint my nails something explosive.

TRAVIS RYANS is an Assistant Director in the film and television industry, as well as the co-host of the podcast “Rainbow Road” - a podcast about queerness in gaming. Twitter: @travisryans @RainbowRoadPod