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The Rise and Fall of Comic Book Queer Coding
dccomics.com/blog/2021/06/25/the-rise-and-fall-of-comic-book-queer-coding

Happy Pride! These days, we’re all trying to improve and educate ourselves on how we can be better to each other. With that in mind, I wanted to explore a topic particular to my own background as a queer creator/consumer: queer coding.

Queer coding is a survival tactic.

That’s a heck of a sentence, so let’s unpack it. First, it helps to understand the phrase “queer coding.” It is defined as imbuing a fictional work with queer themes or characters without ever explicitly acknowledging the queerness.

The purpose of queer coding depends largely on the author, but through most of the history of published fiction, it happens because a creator wants to explore these themes, but will face consequences for doing so, whether from the publisher, audience, or culture at large.

What kind of themes are we talking about, here? What are some things a creator may use to indicate queerness without explicitly touching upon it? They may implement a character with a secret identity. Or a character with nontraditional relationships with characters of the same sex. Or a character dressing in a flamboyant manner. Or acting in manners stereotypically associated with LGBTQIA+ people.

Dr. Frederick Wertham, a psychiatrist who specialized in the effects of environment and social background on psychological development, did incalculable harm to the comic book medium that it’s still trying to shake off. His 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent claimed the comics of the day as depraved and harmful to children. This led to creation of the Comics Code Authority, a voluntary yet omnipresent label ensuring comics bearing its sigil would follow many guidelines, one in particular being that “Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Rape scenes, as well as sexual abnormalities, are unacceptable.”
Wertham, the Code, and culture at large during this era, spoke of homosexuality as on par with sexual violence.

It is at this point one might say the code was stupid because authors might not have actually intended on portraying anything gay, and indeed that is one reason of many that Wertham was wrongheaded. But dependent on the notion of queer coding is the notion of a “queer reading,” which is to say consuming a fictional (or nonfiction) work specifically from a queer point of interpretation.

Another aspect of queer coding is queerbaiting. That is, the act of leading an audience to believe that a work will have queer characters and themes and then refusing to explicitly acknowledge any queerness. It “baits” a queer audience with themes and character interactions that appeal while never delivering on these themes, or closing their portrayal with a heterosexual relationship to cement characters as straight.

Queerbaiting is often done by creators for the same reasons as queer coding—ones outside their own control. Writer-producer Dwayne McDuffie has been quoted as saying he wrote Richie in Static Shock as gay, though he certainly would never have been allowed to canonize that in an early-2000s children’s cartoon. In that sense, isn’t it better to have queer coding than no representation at all?


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