Why We Should Be Conscious About Queerbaiting

Around 10-15 years ago, many people were ready to watch an entire TV show if it had a queer subtext. Remember this subplot with the characters exchanging meaningful glances and touches appearing on the screen for a few minutes but long enough to make you watch more and more. And then nothing happens. Sounds annoying? So it was for thousands of LGBTQ+ people who then felt unrepresented and confused, doubting if they were the only ones who had false hopes. This is how the term “queerbaiting” emerged, from the discussions of disappointed fans on Tumblr and other social media in the early 2010s. Simply put, queerbaiting started as a way of describing a story where character’s queerness was alluded to but ultimately not shown.

“THEY ARE JUST VERY GOOD FRIENDS”

Despite the fact that the concept of queerbaiting is relatively new, the practice of subtly portraying queerness while plausibly denying it has a longer history. By looking at the cinema industry, we will see that queerbaiting is the modern flipside to queercoding. It wasn’t so uncommon to see homosexuality depicted in early film, but it changed with the introduction of the Hays Code, a set of rules and guidelines for self-censorship in Hollywood films that were made to follow between the early 1930s and late 1960s. The Hays Code prohibited the depiction of “sex perversion” and barred homosexuality from the screen.

Nevertheless, filmmakers found ways to bring queer characters on the screen, but, in order to be featured in the cinema, LGBTQ+ characters had to be queercoded. This was done by  endowing the characters with traits sufficient to be associated with any other sexual orientation other than heterosexual, but at the same time leaving them vague so that the filmmakers could technically meet the standards of the Code.

Even after the code was replaced in 1968, the legacy of the Hays Code was still present and queer interactions were widely taboo. Ellen DeGeneres’s sitcom is an unfortunate proof. After Ellen and her character both came out in 1997, the star received death threats and couldn’t get work. So, practically, a lot of U.S.content makers resorted to queercoding out of necessity and fear until the 2010s, when the U.S. public started to enjoy more societal acceptance.

Queerbaiting appeared in response to the rising profitability of diverse narratives and changing social norms, meaning that content creators living in a place and time where and when queer representation is possible deny using this possibility. Queercoding and queerbaiting might be confused, however these terms have crucial differences that can be put as follows. Queercoding appears under the circumstances that don’t allow queer representation meaning that filmmakers use homosexual subtext to include queer personas in the story and still have heterosexual audience (and their money), while queerbaiting, not alienating straight audiences, draws attention of LGBTQ+ audiences (and their money) by using never-actualized homosexual subtext.

One of the first academic scholars to address queerbaiting was Judith Fathallah. In her journal article, Judith Fathallah defined queerbaiting as “a strategy by which writers and networks attempt to gain the attention of queer viewers via hints, jokes, gestures, and symbolism suggesting a queer relationship between two characters, and then emphatically denying and laughing off the possibility”. Nowadays, it is generally accepted to refer to queerbaiting as a marketing strategy of content creators to attract LGBTQ+ audiences and make a profit from these viewers by implying same-sex relationships or characters’ queerness when there aren’t any.