Queerbaiting

Based on Wikipedia: Queerbaiting

The Promise That Never Pays Off

Two characters lock eyes across a crowded room. Their hands brush. One saves the other's life, cradling them as danger passes. The camera lingers. The music swells. And then... nothing happens.

If you've ever watched a show or movie and thought "these two are definitely going to get together" only to be left hanging, you may have experienced queerbaiting—a marketing strategy where creators hint at same-sex romance without ever actually depicting it.

The technique serves a cynical purpose. It lets studios have it both ways: attract LGBTQ+ viewers and their allies who are hungry for representation, while avoiding any actual queer content that might alienate more conservative audiences or run afoul of censors in certain markets. The romance remains perpetually almost-there, dangled like a carrot that never gets eaten.

Where the Term Comes From

The word "queerbaiting" emerged from internet fan communities in the early 2010s, but the practice it describes has much deeper roots. The history of LGBTQ+ representation in media stretches back decades, marked largely by absence, innuendo, and strategic ambiguity.

To understand why queerbaiting feels like such a betrayal to many viewers, you need to understand the concept of subtext. Subtext is what's happening beneath the surface of a story—the things implied but never stated outright. During Hollywood's Hays Code era, which lasted from the 1930s through the 1960s, filmmakers couldn't show same-sex relationships explicitly. The Production Code Administration, which enforced these rules, prohibited any depiction of "sex perversion" on screen.

So creators got clever. They embedded queer stories in code—lingering glances, suggestive dialogue, characters who were never given opposite-sex love interests. Queer audiences learned to read between the lines, finding themselves in the spaces the censors couldn't quite reach.

But here's the crucial distinction: that was then. Those restrictions no longer exist. When modern creators rely on the same techniques of ambiguity and suggestion, they're not working around censorship. They're making a choice.

Why It Hurts

For queer viewers, the frustration runs deep. As writer Emmet Scout put it, queerbaiting "works on its audience because it offers the suggestion that queer people do have a vital place in these stories, that they might even be the defining figures, the heroes. The suggestion—but not the reality."

It's the storytelling equivalent of someone flirting with you all night and then leaving with someone else. The emotional investment is real. The payoff never comes.

Critics of the practice point out that queer characters are often reduced to plot devices rather than fully realized people. The television series Glee, despite featuring numerous queer recurring characters, drew criticism for presenting what fans called "superficial stereotypes of queerness for dramatic effect." The show wanted credit for being progressive without doing the work of meaningful representation.

Media scholar Rose Bridges captured the dynamic perfectly: queer audiences receive "just enough to keep us interested, but not enough to satisfy us and make us truly represented."

The Economics of Almost-Gay

There's real money at stake here. The "pink dollar"—a term for the purchasing power of LGBTQ+ consumers—represents significant economic clout. Businesses have increasingly recognized this, with companies like Starbucks, Ben & Jerry's, and even pharmaceutical brands like Tylenol featuring queer people and families in their advertising.

Entertainment companies face a calculation. Include explicit queer content and you might lose certain audiences or face distribution problems in countries with restrictive laws about LGBTQ+ depictions. But ignore queer audiences entirely and you leave money on the table.

Queerbaiting threads the needle. It signals to queer viewers "we see you, we want your viewership, we want your money" while maintaining plausible deniability. If conservative critics complain, studios can point out that nothing actually happened between those characters. If queer fans complain about the lack of follow-through, well, the subtext was never a promise.

Except audiences increasingly refuse to accept that framing.

The Disney Problem

No company illustrates the queerbaiting dynamic quite like Disney. The entertainment giant has been accused of the practice repeatedly, with academic Kodi Maier of the University of Hull arguing that "Disney is willing to create animated films and television shows that suggest queer content, but only so long as it doesn't damage its conservative image."

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Before a film releases, marketing materials or director interviews hint at groundbreaking queer representation. Then audiences watch the movie and find... almost nothing.

Consider Avengers: Endgame. Directors spoke in interviews about believing it was "a perfect time" to include queer representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What audiences got was a single line spoken by an unnamed secondary character, easily edited out for international markets that might object.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker followed the same playbook. Director J.J. Abrams promoted the film as containing queer representation. In the actual movie? A brief kiss between two women in the background of a celebration scene, lasting perhaps two seconds and featuring no named characters.

The 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast was marketed as containing Disney's first openly gay character. In practice, this meant a few ambiguous moments with the villain's sidekick LeFou, so subtle that many viewers missed them entirely. The film Cruella received similar promotion and similar criticism.

What makes this especially frustrating is the promotional cycle. Each film gets billed as a breakthrough before release, generating headlines and social media discussion about Disney's progressiveness. Then the movie comes out, the representation proves minimal or nonexistent, and the cycle repeats with the next film.

When Subtext Becomes Something More

Not every implied relationship is queerbaiting. The distinction matters.

Subtext has legitimate artistic value. Stories gain richness from what they suggest rather than state, from what audiences interpret and debate. Two characters might have chemistry that different viewers read differently, and that ambiguity can be genuinely interesting rather than exploitative.

The line gets crossed when creators actively court queer interpretation in their marketing while refusing to deliver in their storytelling. It's the difference between a show naturally developing tension between characters and a show's producers doing interviews about how "you never know what might happen" while having no intention of letting anything happen.

Media scholar Eve Ng notes that audience complaints about queerbaiting have increased alongside actual queer representation in media. This isn't because audiences have become unreasonable. It's because expectations have evolved. When queer content was rare, any hint of representation felt like a gift. Now that openly queer characters and relationships appear regularly in mainstream entertainment, audiences want more than hints. They want, in Ng's words, "respectful and meaningful depictions."

This also explains why earlier generations of celebrities with ambiguous sexualities—David Bowie, Elton John, Madonna—weren't scrutinized for queerbaiting in the same way contemporary figures might be. The cultural context has shifted. What once seemed progressive now reads as evasive.

The Long List

The examples of alleged queerbaiting span virtually every genre and platform. Some of the most commonly cited cases include the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in the BBC's Sherlock, which leaned heavily into romantic coding while showrunners dismissed the possibility of an actual relationship. Teen Wolf viewers pointed to the dynamic between characters Derek Hale and Stiles Stilinski. Supernatural's Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel generated years of fan discussion about queerbaiting before the show finally had Castiel confess his love—immediately before dying, prompting different criticisms about the "bury your gays" trope where queer characters are killed off after or during their revelation.

The animated series Voltron: Legendary Defender faced criticism over multiple character relationships. Stranger Things has drawn scrutiny for how it handles Will Byers and Mike Wheeler's dynamic. The recent Wednesday series sparked debates about the titular character's relationship with her werewolf roommate Enid.

Films are no exception. The Captain America movies faced questions about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. Luca, Pixar's 2021 film about two sea monster boys who become friends, generated extensive discussion about whether its obvious romantic coding was meaningful representation or another case of suggestion without substance. The Pitch Perfect franchise attracted similar debates about characters Beca and Chloe.

Some shows have responded to queerbaiting criticism by eventually depicting the relationships in question. Killing Eve, after two seasons of charged tension between Eve and Villanelle, had the characters kiss in season three. But by then, for many viewers, the damage was done—years of will-they-won't-they felt like manipulation rather than slow-burn romance.

Beyond Hollywood: The Social Media Dimension

Queerbaiting has evolved beyond scripted entertainment into the realm of social media influencers and content creators. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, a different version of the dynamic plays out.

On April Fool's Day 2020, a trend emerged where content creators—predominantly straight men—posted videos lip-syncing to will.i.am's song "Boys & Girls" while pretending to come out as bisexual. It was positioned as a joke, a challenge, content to be created and consumed and forgotten.

For queer viewers, watching straight people treat their identity as a costume to try on for laughs hit differently than watching a TV show tease a relationship. This was real people, pretending to be something they weren't, for clout.

Other trends followed. Kissing challenges between people of the same gender. Fake coming-out narratives. Claims of same-sex relationships that turned out to be performances. Various influencer houses faced accusations of queerbaiting as members played up ambiguous relationships for engagement.

Some defend these trends as evidence of growing acceptance—straight men comfortable enough with their sexuality to joke about it, traditional masculinity loosening its grip. Others see it as appropriation, a way for straight creators to harvest engagement from queer aesthetics while facing none of the real-world consequences of actually being queer.

Individual celebrities have faced similar accusations. Posting ambiguous content, cultivating queer-friendly aesthetics, making statements that suggest without confirming. The line between genuine exploration of identity and strategic ambiguity for marketing purposes isn't always clear—but audiences are increasingly determined to figure out which is which.

Signs of Change

The landscape isn't static. Some creators are pushing past queerbaiting into genuine representation, and the difference shows.

The animated series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, created by ND Stevenson (who is nonbinary), built toward a same-sex kiss between main characters that was unambiguous and central to the narrative rather than hidden in the background. The show Harley Quinn similarly committed to its queer relationships rather than merely suggesting them.

These examples contrast sharply with earlier animated series. The Legend of Korra, for instance, confirmed its protagonist's same-sex relationship only in the final moments of the series, and even then kept it "purposefully ambiguous" to satisfy network concerns about airing on a children's channel. The difference between what Korra did and what She-Ra did illustrates the shift in what's possible—and what audiences now expect.

Writing in Curve, a lesbian lifestyle magazine, reviewer Sophie Perry argued in 2020 that as more queer creators gain positions of influence in entertainment, queerbaiting will "become a thing of the past." The logic is straightforward: creators who have lived queer experience are less likely to treat queerness as a marketing tool and more likely to tell authentic stories.

Whether that prediction proves accurate remains to be seen. The economic incentives that drive queerbaiting haven't disappeared. International markets with restrictive policies still represent significant revenue. Conservative backlash still generates pressure on studios.

But the conversation has shifted. Audiences are naming the practice, tracking which properties deliver on their promises and which don't, and making viewing decisions accordingly. The ambiguity that once seemed like clever marketing increasingly looks like cowardice—a refusal to commit, a desire to profit from queer audiences without risking anything for them.

What It All Means

At its core, the queerbaiting debate is about more than entertainment. It's about who gets to see themselves reflected in stories, and under what conditions.

For decades, queer audiences had to content themselves with subtext, with reading between lines, with finding themselves in shadows. They built elaborate interpretive traditions, found community in shared readings of coded texts, made do with scraps of representation.

That era is ending, but it hasn't ended yet. Studios still hedge their bets. Marketing still promises more than movies deliver. Characters still almost-kiss without actually kissing.

The frustration with queerbaiting isn't about demanding that every show include queer characters, or that every relationship between same-sex characters become romantic. It's about honesty. If you're going to tease a relationship, commit to it. If you're going to market your product on the promise of representation, deliver that representation.

And if you're not willing to do those things, stop pretending. Stop the lingering looks and loaded dialogue if you have no intention of following through. Stop giving interviews about "representation" that turns out to be a two-second background shot. Stop using queer audiences' hunger for stories about themselves as a marketing strategy while giving them nothing of substance in return.

The promise that never pays off isn't charming or clever. It's just another way of saying queer stories don't matter enough to tell.