Creativity & Queer Identity
Why All (Good) Art is Gay
So, I’ve recently been following my dreams of being a video essayist. See below:
So I thought I’d post the (rough) script here on Substack for those of us who still like to read.
Cold Open
Hello, fellow gays. Or, well—I’m assuming you’re queer since you clicked on this video. I think it might also be safe to assume a few other things about you, too. I’m guessing you’re an artist of some kind. Maybe a musician or theater kid. Maybe you’re a writer or a painter. Or a cosplayer, photographer, or filmmaker. Maybe your creativity is only limited to a few crochet projects and that one time you went to a paint-and-sip art class. But either way, you still consider yourself a creative person.
Am I wrong? Tell me in the comments. No wait, please don’t, because I haven’t even begun to tell you why yet. The historical connection between creativity and queerness is long, but I’m going to start fairly recently, at a place hopefully my entire audience remembers.
Introduction
The 2010s was a contentious time for queerness. Tumblr was ruthlessly arguing about pronouns, Buzzfeed was baiting us all with “am I gay?” internet quizzes, YouTubers like Ash Hardell and Milo Stewart were posting educational content that got endlessly memed and ridiculed. Oh, yeah, and the Obama Administration legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2015. There’s that.
I graduated high school in 2018 and was raised from birth to be a good little heterosexual Evangelical Christian housewife. And while I may not look it, needless to say, that’s not what I turned out to be. Point being, everyone in the 2010s was talking about the gays—in both good and bad ways. My dad was always needling me about one of the guys from theater who he was convinced was gay. Some of my closest friends, even people in my youth group, were self-professed bisexuals. My aunt came out as a lesbian in 2010 and then promptly moved to Finland. You know, maybe she was onto something.
And when I rediscovered many of my old high school journals, I unearthed some baby bisexual yearning myself. More on that later.
Now, what do all these queers have in common: the guy from theater, my friends in youth group, my aunt, me? We’re all artists. Creatives who live creatively. The guy from theater is self-explanatory. My friends from youth group were a visual artist and a singer, respectively. My aunt is a fantastic trumpet player. And me? I’m a novelist, visual artist sometimes.
At the risk of playing on stereotypes, men involved in activities like choir, theater and art are more likely to be called “gay”, regardless of whether or not they actually are. But it reveals a trend: Why did all the weird—read, “queer”—kids hang out in the cool English teacher’s classroom during lunch? Why did a boy from my high school choir wear magenta stilettos at 8am every day? Why did one of my friends from art class, a brilliant sculptor, come out as trans in college? Why, by comparison, did all of the other “popular” “normal” kids from my school stay so painfully straight in every sense of the word? When looking back at my graduating class (who are all 24-26 now), a large percentage of the art kids, choir kids, and theater kids are now some flavor of LGBTQ—me and my musician partner included—and the kids involved in sports, STEM, and student council are still just as straight-laced and socially acceptable as they were at sixteen?
To widen the scope, think about how many celebrities—who are in effect, professional millionaire artists—are visibly and colorfully queer. There are the obvious ones like Ellen, Freddie Mercury, Lady Gaga, and George Michael, to name a contemporary few, but there are the great legends like writers Oscar Wilde and Truman Capote, visual artists Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol, and sapphic singer Maxene Andrews of the Andrew Sisters, and many more.
I realize I’m painting with a broad brush here. This is not to say that everyone who makes a life out of being creative is queer. This is also not to say that people who conform to normative gender and sexuality standards can’t be gay or creative. This is also not to say that cis heteros can’t be creatives. In fact, many of them are. Anyone can be queer, just like how anyone can be creative.
But why does this stereotype exist? Why are so many gay icons artists? Why are so many artists gender non-conforming? Is there a hidden link between queerness and artistic expression? And, the central question of this video: why is good art always so…gay?
Chapter 1: And Historians Will Call Them Roommates
Shakespeare
In order to get my English degree, I had to take an entire course dedicated to Shakespeare. I mean, it makes sense. As much as high school juniors labor over the antiquated language of Macbeth and wider society ridicules Romeo and Juliet for being foolish teenagers, there has never been a writer that has left such an imprint on the English language storytelling canon than one William Shakespeare. Retellings of Shakespeare’s famous works are never in short supply. We all know that The Lion King is just Hamlet. That one zombie romance featuring Nicholas Hoult? Romeo & Juliet. 10 Things I Hate About You is the entire plot of Taming of the Shrew.
In this Shakespeare class, we spent almost an entire week talking about the popular theory that Shakespeare himself was gay. Or at the very least bisexual. In Shakespeare’s day, all on-stage roles were played by men. Juliet—and all female characters—would have been prepubescent or teenage boys. And there’s no shortage of romance and sex in Shakespeare’s work. Meaning that these male actors were on stage, some dressing as women, falling in love with and kissing other men. Don’t you think that’s kinda . . . gay?
We also read a good selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets that refer to “the Fair Youth” and contain bawdy heterosexual (and homosexual) puns. Some scholars believe that a more plausible explanation to this is intense platonic friendship or deep admiration, but hey, man. Love is love.
Point being, the groundwork is there. Like it or not, both the in-text content of Shakespeare’s work and the Elizabethean theatrical context surrounding it is queer-coded, if not explicitly queer. Does it really matter if Shakespeare was English Lit’s first bi icon? No, especially considering he’ll never be able to tell us. But the fact of the matter is, Shakespeare’s work is widely considered and read as queer in both a sexuality and a gender sense. Shakespeare was both acting on, codifying, and pushing the boundaries of his day.
Chapter 2: There’s No Heterosexual Explanation For This
(Queer Coding)
My partner and I are huge fans of the popular anime Naruto, and if you know anything about Naruto besides “Naruto running in Area 51” you probably know how fucking gay Naruto and Sasuke are for each other. There’s no heterosexual explanation for this . . . or this . . . or this.
But…Naruto and Sasuke are canonically heterosexual. Naruto is married to Hinata, and Sasuke is married to Sakura. That is in the text explicitly. Then why does the narrative, its implications, and the wider fanbase have such a strong bisexual/gay headcanon for the two male leads, and for all of Team 7 for that matter? Why is Naruto—and plenty of other fiction—so queer coded, especially when it’s not trying to be?
Queer coding is the attribution of stereotypically “queer” traits to a character without the narrative explicitly stating any specific gender or sexual identity. A good example of this is the recent headcanon that the Spider-Verse version of Gwen Stacy is transgender. And there’s good textual evidence for it: Gwen has a “protect trans kids” poster in her room. Her father has a transgender pride flag on his uniform. Gwen Stacy’s flashback scenes in Across the Spider-Verse are bathed in vibrant pinks and baby blues, colors of the trans pride flag. While the narrative nor the characters ever state that Gwen Stacy is cis OR trans, the evidence is there for you to notice—or NOT notice. Gwen Stacy is transgender if you want her to be. She’s transgender if you’re paying attention.
Queerness is coded into lots of art, and has been across history. It typically has a negative connotation, with the most significant and prominent examples being Disney villains like Ursula, Scar, Ratcliffe, and Hades. But queer-coding can actually be really cool and interesting, especially in a world that has historically condemned homosexuality and gender deviance.
Another great example of positive queer coding is Marvel’s X-Men (a personal favorite). While intentionally created to mirror the Civil Rights movement in the US, there’s a great—and likely intentional—metaphor for queerness wrapped up in here. The X-Men gain their powers from genetic mutations that often arise during puberty. They are ostracized from society (unlike the Avengers) and are forced to hide or adapt.
Not only are the X-Men in general an allegory for “otherness,” two of the most famous characters from the franchise are locked in a perpetual bromance. Professor X (Charles Xavier) and Magneto (Erik Lehnsherr), much like Naruto and Sasuke, represent two sides of the same ideological coin. They’re best friends and also the worst of enemies. Their friendship is intense, pathological, dramatic—much more compelling than any of the romances that the movies try to shoulder onto James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier. Are they lovers? Worse.
I think that this theme—of the two leading male characters in particular having lots of unintended romantic chemistry—is an unfortunate consequence of sexism. Historically, writing and the entertainment industry has been male dominated, and female-centric stories and elevating female authors is, relatively speaking, a new thing. I think that Naruto as a franchise in particular suffers from this. By a large margin, Naruto and Sasuke are the most developed and complex characters in the series. I love Sakura, I really do, but she’s emblematic of an insecure male writer who feels like he doesn’t know how to write women and so therefore just doesn’t try at all. When characters like Naruto and Sasuke are consistently paired as opposing forces who just can’t seem to stay away from each other—well, that’s just prime breeding grounds for good shipping dynamics!
Speaking of shipping, if you spend any amount of time in online fan spaces, you’ll come to notice that some of the most popular ships—short for relationships, for the uninitiated—are some flavor of queer or polyamorous, and millions of words of fanfiction are written about this. Fandom and its shipping culture are notoriously gay, and oftentimes fandom is something that spawns more creativity in the form of transformative works like fanfiction, fan art, and cosplay. This is creativity, even if it is derivative. More importantly, it is self-expression, which, in my opinion, is the intersection between creativity and queerness.
But why is this the case, when the canon of the text specifies that many of these characters are heterosexual? Artists often have to be covert and, well, creative about what they’re trying to say, what point they’re trying to get across. Otherwise, it’s not art, it’s not a story. It’s just a biographical speech. Queerness can be a great vehicle, or a veil, for the truth.
Chapter 3: The Role of Marginalization in Art
Some of the best art comes from marginalized groups. The example most Americans will recognize is jazz, a musical style that originated with Black Americans, and eventually co-opted into wider society. This is of course not always true, but I’m going to draw attention to another stereotype; the idea of the mentally ill, tortured, and mad artist. That in order to make good art, you have to be, well, damaged in some way.
The science is divided on whether this is mere correlation or meaningful causation, but I think it’s grounded in some kind of reality. Many great artists are marginalized in some way: whether they’re queer, or women, or BIPOC, or neurodivergent, or disabled, or abused or traumatized or mentally ill. As someone who identifies with many of those things on that previous list, I do think that good art requires some kind of marginalization in order to be meaningful and impactful on a wider audience. Artists, all of them, draw from a source of pain. But we transform that pain into beauty and share that with others. That’s kind of the whole schtick, right? So, whether it’s the pain of being queer, or the pain of being a racial or ethnic “out group” or the pain of being depressed or the pain of being beaten by your alcoholic father—all of that pain is good, fertile soil for art to arise. For healing through art to take root in the artist and their audience.
I’d also say that most art is about marginalized people. Stories and main characters, at least. In The Last of Us, Joel, for all intents and purposes, a straight white man, is marginalized by his grief. Ellie is marginalized by being the only person immune from the fungus. And well, also by being gay. Shrek is an ogre. Naruto is a vessel for a demon. Hendrix is antisocial. Katniss is from District 12. It’s simply more interesting that way, having a protagonist who is othered in some way. Reading about and watching Joe-Schmoes is only interesting if something interesting happens to that Joe-Schmoe.
So, a lot of good art is gay because these marginalizations have a lot more in common than people like to think. Art by nature is fluid and often ambiguous, meaning that one art piece can have multiple, layered analyses and meanings depending on what “lens” you decide to use to analyze the work. It’s like X-Men. The creator intended the work to reflect a very specific time in history, but it’s not necessarily wrong if you want to analyze it through any number of critical lenses. Good art can be—and should be—looked at through multiple angles. But that means it’s gotta be queer—weird, boundary-breaking, ambiguous, complex—first.
Chapter 4: Why Straight Art Becomes Gay
I would argue that all art is just that: weird, boundary-breaking, ambiguous, and complex. Art is meant to make us feel something, to inspire action and change, to put our lives under a microscope. There’s that famous quote by Dr. Cézar A. Cruz: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Art should shake things up when things need changing, but it should also provide safety when things are unstable. It does—and can do—both. So then how does art created by straight people with straight intentions, become so queer coded? Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto’s mangaka, has a wife and son. Granted, that doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not someone’s queer or not, but one has to wonder. Why is there so much underlying bromantic tension in Naruto? Why is shipping culture so gay and polyamorous? Why is Shakespeare so historically and presently queer?
Now, this is the part of the video when I start dipping my toes into speculation. This is when I might need your help in the comments with your thoughts, experiences, and theories. But I have three I’d like to present for you today for why I think that so much of straight art veers into queer territory.
My first explanation is always, unfortunately:
Misogyny
This is the explanation that I have for art that is written by men for men and happens to be implicitly yaoi—or, art involving male homosexual, homoerotic, and homoromantic relationships, for the uninitiated. Historically, women have been barred from pretty much every space you can think of, and that includes all forms of art. Remember when I said that in Shakespeare’s day, women were not allowed to be actors?
Art has had a long and homosexual history. Women were barred from so many spaces—from writing to painting to sculpting to theater—that the arts almost became a male echo chamber. That sort of artistic affection for other men became normalized. It’s just art, bro, it’s not gay!
In the case of Naruto, I think it’s twofold: Kishimoto’s lack of writing and shonen genre conventions.
Kishimoto himself has admitted that he doesn’t feel confident writing female characters. Which is a total fucking cop-out in my opinion. Usually when I hear male writers say this, they follow it up with something along the lines of “oh I just can’t relate to women” or “oh they’re so complicated, I don’t think I could write one very well,” which just means to me that you don’t have enough women in your life and don’t know how to empathize with them as human beings.
Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints talks in her video on “Twilight” about why so many female writers write yaoi (male-male romance), or write from male perspectives, when men themselves shirk away from placing themselves in women’s shoes. Wynn says this is because “women tend to be fluent in adopting a masculine perspective” because art, even still, is so full of male artists, singers, directors, and writers. Therefore, women are sort of forced to empathize with whatever they see on screen. Due to art’s long-standing male centrism, men haven’t been taught how to empathize with women in art. So therefore, they chose male subjects to instead focus their creative energies on.
Then there’s also the matter of genre. Naruto is a shonen animanga, meaning that it’s aimed toward adolescent boys. So, if Kishimoto had made the central relationship of Naruto a male-female romance, well, that’s too girly for me! That’s shojo! There will be no well-developed romances in my battle manga! By the demands and conventions of the genre, Sasuke had to be a boy and Naruto’s rival, not his lover.
This too applies to the superhero genre because superheroes are for boys, duh! Point being, misogyny has entrenched itself so deeply into narrative art that it’s almost impossible to separate. By this logic, art has to be both created by men and be about men, which means that you’re going to end up with a lot of deep, intimate friendships that are more well-developed than most romances. Looking at you, Stucky.
This one might be a little controversial, but I also think that a lot of straight art veers into the queer because of the artist’s own . . .
Lack of Self-Awareness
Fellow gay artists here in the chat, have you ever created something and been like, “damn, where did that come from?” I have, and it happens a lot more than I’d like to admit. Good art should surprise both the artist and the audience because much of the process of art relies on the subconscious. It relies on instinct, emotion, repression, and expression. And when we let all of that gunk out of us in song or dance or paint or words, we can be quite surprised at what we find.
So my theory is that some of this “straight” art gets unintentionally queer coded by its own artist because perhaps there are maybe some things that this artist has yet to realize. Now, I think that speculating about other people’s sexuality and gender is a no-no, and I won’t be speculating about anyone here. We’ll just take a close look at yours truly.
Earlier in this video, I mentioned rediscovering old journals from high school that contained a suspicious amount of bisexual yearning. In this one particular journal entry, I lament about my bad luck with boys, and the sapphic yearning that came in response to that. Dated August 26th, 2016, my junior year of high school. Names changed for privacy.
“I feel like I can never make it work. That any relationship I have with a boy will go down in flames. And because of the influence of Clarke and Lexa from watching The 100, Sofia and Kristin’s bisexual perversion, and my close relationship with Heather, I think that things might work out better with girls.”
Then I go on to berate myself with the homophobic thought-control techniques I was taught in the church. Not a cute look.
This was one of my first journal entries ever. I would go on to fill nine journals, cataloguing my life with rants and prayers, poetry and creative nonfiction. My point in sharing this is that by journaling, I committed myself to writing. I kept soul-searching. I kept looking inward. I kept writing, kept discovering, kept creating all throughout the years. And look where it’s led me: towards a life and a self that is more whole and more integrated. The intersection of my creativity and my queerness only exists because I’ve spent so much time navel-gazing.
So then, perhaps all this “straight” art is made by people in the closet, who aren’t ready to come out yet for whatever reason. Or who haven’t realized that truth about themselves yet. And that’s okay. The idea is that their art will hopefully lead them into a more whole and healed version of themselves.
My last theory is probably the most charitable. It’s that, well . . .
Love is love
The Ancient Greeks had six main words for “love.” English only has one. While I have such a deep admiration for the English language, it certainly has its constraints. These six Greek words describe the many different forms that love can take: unconditional love, sexual love, brotherly love, familial love, self-love, and hospitable love—very roughly speaking. All of the different types of love we can have for eachother, not even considering the other ways in English that we use the word “love.”
It’s also very common to have multiple different types of love for the same person. I’ve been with my partner for six years, but we’ve known each other for fourteen years. We were friends first. But since we’re also partners, we have romantic and sexual love for one another. That’s three different “types” of love that describes one relationship.
All this to say, love transcends boundaries. That’s what it’s for. It is supposed to be all-encompassing, shame-negating, community-building. Love has lines, certainly, but many of those lines are blurred, depending on the type of relationship you’re dealing with. And so when artists depict love in its many forms, whether that’s in a book, poem, painting, sculpture, or theatrical production, they are attempting to depict love as it exists in the real world. Why do you think the trope of “friends-to-lovers” is so popular? Because close friendship and romantic love have quite a significant overlap. The division of romantic love versus sexual love is a relatively new concept; from my research, the Greeks didn’t have this romance/sex distinction. Friendship and familial love also have overlap. Additionally, all forms of love overlap with our concepts of God and the divine. Consider all the ways the Christian God’s love gets personified in the Bible: He is depicted as a father figure in most of the Old Testament, but also as a lover in Song of Solomon. Jesus is a friend and a shepherd; he shared brotherly love with the Disciples. In the New Testament, the Christian Church is referred to as “The Bride of Christ,” making a metaphor that every Christian is going to marry Jesus. Aside from how strange that might sound, the point being is that love is by nature wibbly-wobbly. Fluid and everlasting and always changing. All-consuming.
So it makes sense that when two characters are depicted as having a deep, intense love that transcends boundaries, there are a myriad of ways that this love can be interpreted by an audience. One of those ways is romantic and sexual and, well, gay.
Chapter 5: The Art Tax
What Art Requires of the Artist
I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen in the eighth grade. It was for a school assignment, and it only had to be about 10 pages long. I ended up writing about 250. This book—which will never see the light of day by the way—featured two male POV characters. My next novel that ended up being my debut featured another male POV. My sophomore novel, Casually Homicidal, is primarily about a teenage boy. All this to say, I’ve never had trouble writing from the point of view of men. A good writer knows that you just have to write them as human. Everything else is just set dressing.
Going back to Contrapoints’s video on Twilight, Wynn connects the idea of women writers writing yaoi, or identifying with the male perspective, with the eponymous YA paranormal romance series, where Twilight functions as a sort of sexual power fantasy, where readers identify both with Bella and Edward, both the feminine and the masculine.
This reveals a level of underlying gender nonconformity, at least for me. Being able to write men so fluidly was one of the first clues of my own queerness. My creativity and my humanness is not simply limited to women or femininity. My creativity, well, makes me queer. I identify as bisexual, and like those damning journal entries from high school, the seeds of my queerness were always there. It just wasn’t always safe to express or even understand that, considering the way I was raised.
Aside from having a deeply supportive, also bisexual, partner, I believe that it was through art that I also came to acknowledge and understand what it meant to be a bisexual woman, both from a sex and gender perspective. Writing men meant I had to tap into my own masculinity and my own attraction to women. One of my recently published pieces in the anthology Writing Out Our Twenties, is retrospective creative nonfiction about how I was always a little fruity. And when Morwynn and Roland, the two main characters of my WIP showed up on the doorstep of my creative process as deeply and unabashedly bisexual, I couldn’t deny it anymore. It was a combination of a loving, creative, and queer partner and a dedication to my own creative process that allowed me to be liberated enough as a person to be comfortable in my sexuality.
But why the creative process specifically? There are plenty of ways to discover yourself. What is it about creativity and being an artist that makes such flamboyant gays—and such good, enduring, authentic art?
If you’ve ever created something: written a book, produced a short film, painted a landscape or portrait, then you know that while creativity is an outpouring of what’s inside you onto a physical medium, that art also requires something of you. In order to create good, fulfilling, rich art, you have to pay The Art Tax.
I define this art tax as the price that you, the artist, have to pay in order to draw that artwork out of you. It’s not a literal cash payment, and it’s not always something negative. But in order to create, you have to give up something. You have to let go of control, of preconceived notions. You have to be vulnerable. You have to be raw, messy, and honest. You have to look at yourself—and life—head-on. And that’s some of the hardest work we’ll ever do. Most of the time, I don’t want to do it. Many people never do this work.
Writing forces me to be honest with myself, to confront my own ugly feelings and the patterns in my life that have wrecked such havoc. Writing forces me to look inward and it forces me to test the limits of my own boundaries, and to break them entirely. That’s The Art Tax.
But that’s the whole point of art, right? To be subversive. To say something true, authentic, real. To tell a story. To break new ground, to innovate, to take what the human race has done and add your own voice to the endless chorus. To shed the shackles of our real, abysmal, and difficult lives and to dream in full Technicolor. Art inherently makes one introspective, and art inherently transverses boundaries.
Is that not what being queer is, too? Finally looking inward, at those feelings you’ve had for most of your life and finally being fucking honest about it. Pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Breaking out of societal expectations for you and your life. People whose hobbies involve looking inward in the way that art requires of its artist are often going to discover and rediscover their true selves. But those of us in the human race who do not regularly engage with their creative instinct in meaningful ways don’t have that free-flowing outlet that allows them to tap into their true self—their perhaps queer self. And when you know who you are better, you find what boundaries you want to push, bend, accept, or disregard entirely. Art requires pushing boundaries, being authentic, and self-exploration, and so does queerness. In a world that values practicality, self-denial, efficiency, and capitalistic gain, it takes a lot of courage to be an artist, and it also takes a lot of courage to be yourself.
Conclusion
Not only is there a historical precedent for art being inextricably intertwined with queer identity, the relationship between queerness and creativity is more visible than ever. Artists, we’re not just weird, we’re queer. And we ought to be proud of that.
There are plenty of examples in art and fiction that exemplify the underlying connection between creativity and queer identity: Beginning with Shakespeare’s sex- and gender-queer legacy to modern representation like Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, art, fiction, and creativity have always been safe spaces for queer people. From covert representation like Spiderverse’s Gwen Stacy to prolific headcanons like Gravity Falls’s Dipper Pines—From comic book artists creating fictional metaphors to Japanese mangakas unintentionally writing the best bisexual polycule ever—art, and for my purposes, fiction, has always been a way for queer people to not only express themselves but understand themselves. It makes sense that this would bleed into the things we create, both intentionally and unintentionally.
There’s a lot of overlap between being an artist and being queer: self-expression, authenticity, pushing boundaries. And I’d argue too that’s why even so much “straight art”—art made by straight people and art with canonically straight people in it—is still queer in the loosest sense of the word. It involves the same amount of liberation that queerness does.
Art is the process by which we become free and become whole. And that process requires a lot of hard work, a lot of introspection, a lot of dedication. On the creative path, you’ll end up finding out a lot more than you ever anticipated, and some of what you find out about yourself is deviant, distasteful, uncomfortable, scary.
But art—from music to paintings to photographs to novels to films—is designed to make us less afraid of all that.
Works Cited
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare/Sexuality
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare/Sexuality
https://bookriot.com/what-is-queerbaiting-vs-queer-coding/
https://www.history.com/articles/stan-lee-x-men-civil-rights-inspiration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity_and_mental_health#
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