6 minute read
Are all your Favourite Villians Gay?
Are all your favourite villains gay?
By Libby Driscoll
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Think of a villain. Any villain. Let’s start basic, maybe a Disney villain. Who comes to mind? Ursula, Maleficent, Scar, Cruella De Vil, Captain Hook? You’ll find all of these characters have certain common traits that aren’t shared by their heroic counterparts. They’re flamboyant and camp, with stereotypically queer personalities and appearances. This is called ‘queer coding’ - when an author or director assigns a character stereotypically queer traits without specifically labelling their identity. While this may sound perfectly harmless, and perhaps it has created many of our favourite characters, it does create a dangerous association between queerness and villainy that can be instilled at an early age, especially in the case of Disney films.
In case you aren’t quite convinced yet, I will break down a few of the villains I have mentioned. Ursula is perhaps the clearest example. Her character design was inspired by Divine, the legendary drag queen, with eyebrows, makeup, and a low, husky voice to match. She also possesses negative stereotypes associated with queerness: jealousy, over-sexualisation and obsession with appearance.
Similarly, look at the trope of the ‘sissy villain’, covering Hades, Jafar, Scar, and Captain Hook – they are all very flamboyant, sassy, and weaker than their counterparts. Even more clearly, Governor Ratcliffe from Pocahontas is very vain, wears bows in his hair, is obsessed with gold and glitter, and hates physical labour – he is even the only character to wear bright pink!
Queer Coded Villain Queen Ursula from The Little Mermaid character design was inspired by the drag artist Devine
Poster for a theatrical adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. from 1880s
This doesn’t end with Disney either, or even modern media. Classic villains such as Mr Hyde also have been interpreted as representing homosexuality. This character may have been based on a specific case of Louis V…, a patient in Rochefort Asylum who (according to modern research) probably had dissociative identity disorder. It was recorded that he undertook a startling metamorphosis, he was a ‘quiet, well-behaved, and obedient’ street urchin, but he abruptly became ‘violent, greedy and quarrelsome’, as well as a heavy drinker, a political radical, and an atheist. Accounts of the case study were published around the time he was writing the story, and some of Stevenson’s closest colleagues were the scientists researching male hysteria, the condition he was diagnosed with at the time. This term referred to ‘timid and fearful men, whose gaze were neither lively nor piercing, were rather soft, poetic and languorous. Coquettish and eccentric, they prefer ribbons and scarves to hard manual labour’.
Another queer coded villain within classic literature is Dorian Gray. Although late Victorian society did not allow for an explicit exploration of homosexual love, it has been called ‘the first gay novel written in English’. On the surface, Gray may appear heterosexual – all his affairs are with women, starting with Sybil Vane, for whom he professes undying love (before the love promptly dies); and on he moves to a series of affairs of increasingly short duration, less meaning, and with decreasingly respectable women. And yet, there’s something about him. Written by infamously camp Oscar Wilde, his beauty is a central element of the novel, and it is openly admired by Basil and Lord Henry Wotton throughout. He is given the central characteristics of jealousy and vanity stereotypically associated with gay men and all the vague references to corruption, sensualism, and unspecified night-
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by the Irish author Oscar Wilde.
time activities that are looked down upon by his erstwhile friends all create doubt as to his sexual identity. The novel has been viewed as partially autobiographical, as Wilde stated that ‘[he] used to be totally reckless of young lives’ and ‘used to take up a boy, love “passionately” and then grow bored with him and take no notice of him’.
There is also a trope – particularly within children’s literature, of hyper-masculine female villains. There was Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, ‘a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of pupils and teachers alike’. She is a character traditionally played in drag on stage, with her masculinity carrying an incredibly dangerous queerphobic message about the dangers of straying from traditional gender roles. Her physique is ‘gigantic’ and ‘formidable’, with ‘big shoulders’, ‘thick arms’ and ‘powerful legs’, and a ‘deep and dangerous voice’. She wears breeches that contrast with the other, more feminine characters’ clothes, flats rather than heels and often is depicted with a whistle around her neck. Her sport (hammer-throwing), too, is “gender inappropriate”, with the book being released seven years before the Olympics allowed women to participate. She shows a hatred of femininity, ‘if there’s one thing the Trunchbull can’t stand, it’s pigtails’, she tosses children like hammers as a punishment, eliciting cheers of ‘Well thrown, sir!’, and Dahl uses masculine metaphor when calling her evil, ‘The Trunchbull is the Prince of Darkness…’. In comparison, Miss Honey is the paragon of femininity: humble, demure, motherly, gentle, slender and beautiful ‘like a porcelain figure’. Her “damsel in distress” image stands in stark contrast to Trunchbull’s hot-headed masculine dominance – ‘Miss Honey stood there helpless before this great red-necked giant.’ Through this lens, the conclusion is clearly transphobic, as a child becomes less scared as she ‘realised exactly what was going on inside the Trunchbull’s pants’ and her masculine façade is broken with the entrance of her father to discipline her. He calls Trunchbull ‘Agatha’, and this proves the falseness of her masculine charade. Matilda struggles to overcome her parents’ prejudices that ‘small girls should be seen and not heard’ and that for women ‘looks is more important than books’. Matilda is defiant of this gender predestination, but Dahl’s feminist message ends here. Women should be ‘gutsy and adventurous’, even intellectual and literary, but they should be feminine while doing so – lest they become a villain.
As such, perhaps even if I didn’t mention them here, your favourite villains are queer coded. Stories, with their villains and heroes, are often our first contact with moral judgement. The hero represents desirable values and behaviours, while the villain represents negative values and less socially accepted behaviours – which our juvenile minds easily recognise and mimic. The rigid black and white contrast in nature of these characters were created to teach the audience morality in its simplest form, with no grey areas left to confuse us. The villain is often dehumanised and made to evoke utter repulsion, while the hero is glorified. Therefore, the association made between queerness and villainy in these characters is incredibly dangerous – representation is clearly important in literature, but we must ensure it is in a positive light. That does not mean we cannot have villains, or even that we can’t have camp villains, but having these characteristics, be they overwhelmingly common within these roles, certainly creates a dangerous association. As Wilde himself put it, ‘I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms’, and perhaps we can make the road to true equality ever so slightly shorter by promoting equal, positive representation for all.
