The Appropriation of ‘Queerbaiting’: Where Do We Go From Here?
Image; Bridget Laudien
The discourse around “queerbaiting” (i.e., whether a work is using a queer “aesthetic” to attract queer fans without ever intending to validate such identities ) has been going through a bit of a moment over the past couple of years. If you go online, you will see many commentators telling their viewers or readers that the usage of this term has gone too far.
“The Problem With the Internet’s Obsession With Queerbaiting,” goes the title of a Them article by James Factora.
“Taking media out of context is in bad ‘taste,’” argues the Lanthorn Editorial Board.
There is a building consensus among social critics that we shouldn’t use this phrase anymore, and I wanted to talk about how we have arrived at this point and what it means for our language more broadly.
A brief queer history
Traditionally, queerbaiting has been a marketing tactic. It had to do with the creators and marketers of a text providing cues that are familiar to queer viewers but can be missed by everyone else.
A classic example is Teen Wolf characters Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) and Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien), who had a “frenemies” dynamic that was read by many fans as homoerotic. As I write in a past piece:
“This tension was something that the marketing team of the series definitely leaned into. In one promo for the Teen Choice Awards, Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien are on a boat, seductively wrapped around each other. ‘We are on a ship, pun intended,’ Dylan O’Brien says, referencing the fan culture word shipping, which is about fans pairing two characters together romantically.”
It may seem silly now, but people were genuinely mad at this (see Jaquelin Elliott’s essay Becoming The Monster: Queer Monstrosity and the Reclamation of the Werewolf in Slash Fandom for more details).
Queerbaiting, it’s important to remember, came during a context before the normalization of queer representation in media. In the 90s and 2000s, it was still rare to see queer characters on screen. Advocacy groups spent a lot of time unpacking the lack of LGBTQIA+ representation, with the nonprofit GLAAD tracking representation in television since 1996.
As this discourse navigated to online fandom communities in the 2010s, there was a heated debate on when mainstream properties such as Disney would introduce their “first” queer character.
It was noted by many that the company was not afraid to use queerbaiting in its marketing, releasing promotional material about upcoming queer representation, only for said representation to be small and easily edited out of foreign releases (see LeFou in the Beauty And The Beast reboot, Oaken from Frozen, etc.)
That was the conversation for years.
Yet things have improved (at least regarding representation), partly because that advocacy worked and society changed. There is an increase in queer representation in media — for some demographics.
Disney has many queer characters now (Ethan Clade in Strange World, Greg from the short Out, Phastos from Eternals, etc.). Some of the most popular shows on Netflix are packed with LGBTQ+ characters (e.g., Sex Education, Kaos, Heartstoppers, etc.). The latest Star Wars game, Outlaws, has an entire subplot where you can rescue a man’s boyfriend.
That “first” boundary has been crossed so often that it’s no longer noteworthy.
The urgency for queerbaiting has dissipated because, for some queer fans — especially more privileged, whiter, more male ones — you can just let the marketplace decide now. If Disney or whoever doesn’t want queer characters, you can go to the hundreds of alternatives that are out there. The term, therefore, has little utility (for some).
And in the meantime, it has been appropriated to let people online actually do a lot of harm to queer and non-queer creators alike.
The appropriation of the term
Again, originally queerbaiting was about the content of the media being discussed and how that content was then marketed. The Teen Wolf example was less about whether actors Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien were gay in real life and more about how their characters were being sold to the fandom of the show.
However, parallel to the debates for representation, in the 2010s was also an effort to make sure that queer actors actually played queer characters. It was not uncommon to see debates over whether it was appropriate for straight actors to star in such roles.
This was done in response to the fact that straight and cisgendered actors often played the few queer roles that existed at the time, as Tom Hanks famously did in his role as a gay lawyer in Philadelphia or Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Dont Cry. Some in the community were upset that those facing systemic discrimination for being openly queer were denied such roles, while non-queer actors were receiving accolades for pretending to be such identities.
Over time, such allegations were lumped in with the term queerbaiting. As a pejorative, it came to describe people “pretending” to be queer for fame and attention.
An early example often cited is the Russian duo t.A.T.u. and their 2002 sapphic song All The Things She Said, which drew heavily on a star-crossed lovers schtick. We have since learned that this same-sex branding was a marketing gimmick by their producer, Ivan Shapovalov.
Yet queerbaiting has been thrown around to describe celebrities from Nick Jonas to James Franco, who have had multiple pieces speculating on their sexualities. As S.E. Smith writes, inappropriately, in my opinion, of James Franco in the Daily Dot:
“Franco has trafficked on this kind of ambiguity throughout his career — both in his personal and professional life. He wants people to ask these questions and wants to be targeted directly with them so he can be evasive in interviews…His work straddles that sweet divide of possibly maybe being queer enough to be embraced by the queer community (and lauded by “progressive” straights), but not being so queer as to offend the homophobes. He dangles the prize in front of his followers, and they’re left forever chasing the brass ring, not realizing that he’s made his actual sexuality almost beside the point.”
We are seeing real-life people now being called out for “acting gay” or “trans” under the banner of queerbaiting. Arguably the term has now been weaponized to justify real-life harassment and outing campaigns for actors that garner a queer “aesthetic” (whatever the hell that means) or even play queer characters without being “out.”
An infamous example happened to Kit Connor, who played Nick Nelson in Heartstoppers (2022-present), despite the text being decidedly queer. Kit Connor reported being harassed online for his alleged “queerbaiting” and ultimately felt forced to come out as bisexual, tweeting: “I’m bi, congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye.”
Some have argued that because of this appropriation, the term is not useful anymore. As Sarah Z argues in I Was Wrong About Queerbaiting:
“The more I think about the concept of queerbaiting, the more I genuinely think we should just retire it…When we’ve reached the point that the term has come to encapsulate 500 things — real people being closeted, real people being bisexual, censored gay relationships in TV, ships people like that aren’t canon, the actual use of queerness as a marketing tactic with the intent to deceive a queer audience, etc. — I think the term has ceased to be useful.”
It’s similar to the argument that happens whenever any word is appropriated. Woke was originally a word Black people used for being aware of systemic racism and other injustices and has since come to be appropriated by conservatives to mean anything they don’t like.
The same thing happened with triggered, where trolls tried to rebrand “trigger warnings” as leftist nonsense. Whenever a reactionary force captures a word — and those arguing that everyone must publicly identify as queer are doing so for attention can be labeled as such — there is this tendency to want to abandon the word altogether.
Bad people are using it to say bad things — ergo, it’s gross.
And that’s where we are with the word queerbaiting — do we try to preserve the original meaning, or do we let this discourse go?
A baiting conclusion
Language, of course, evolves, and if queerbaiting exclusively becomes about forming “investigations” into whether someone is “actually” queer or not, then I have little interest in that iteration of the term.
People should be allowed to be open about their sexual orientations and gender identities as much or as little as they wish. Straight people should be able to kiss the same sex without it “meaning” anything. Cisgender men should be allowed to wear dresses and still be cis.
Yet, shying away from such terms just because the conversations around them get messy is something I am wary about. As terms become more popular, they inevitably get appropriated. We can see the same thing with a lot of therapy-speak, such as “gaslighting,” “lovebombing,” or even “narcissism.” People without knowledge of what these words mean misapply them, leading to a water-downing of the original meaning.
That doesn’t mean we don’t need words for these things, even if new words have to take their place or greater education is required to reinforce the original meaning.
The original term queerbaiting is still useful. There are parts of the LGBTQIA2+ alphabet that do not have much representation in media, especially for those living in countries where such representation is legislatively discriminated against or illegal.
Capitalist firms are motivated to attract as many audiences as possible. And when one of those audiences cannot be recognized — either legally or because they are taboo — then it makes a cold kind of sense that companies will do the minimum possible to maintain that audience without alienating their more conservative viewers.
It’s helpful to call that marketing out because it’s useful to describe the hurtful dynamics around us — to say that we are not crazy. That queerbaiting has happened to our community and that it continues to happen.
What we choose to call that process in the future is up to us.