What do the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard of Oz,” Ruby Rhod from “The Fifth Element” and Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” have in common?
All three are characterized by drag queen-inspired makeup, campiness and their flamboyant nature — prime examples of “queer-coding.” Despite their stories never acknowledging it specifically, these traits ground the characters’ queerness in performance and exaggeration.
Although this is a widely used term, not many people know it has a history that stretches back to the beginnings of Hollywood.
On Oct. 25, Marley Duncan CG ’25, who recently completed her masters in Cultural Studies, led a discussion at the Claremont Colleges’ Queer Resource Center (QRC) on the origins of queer-coding.
Students began by sharing the shows and online fandoms that had initially drawn them to learn more about this phenomenon. QRC student associate Mia Liang PZ ’28 started the discussion by referencing the pivotal plot point of killing off the queer-coded character, Dean in “Supernatural.” This demonstrated the sustained cultural impact of queer-coding.
“This talk gave us the opportunity to learn about foundational works on this topic,” Liang said. “[It invited] us to bond over the experience of being on Tumblr the day that the ‘Supernatural’ series ended, while the 2020 U.S. presidential election was developing.”
Duncan began her presentation by contextualizing the Hays Code: a set of voluntary rules that heavily censored film created in the 1930s instituted by Will Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America at the time.
The Hays Code aimed to reinstate a moral standard that had otherwise been lost after a series of lawsuit scandals. The code featured guidelines that warned against profanity, suggestively sexual depictions, glorification of religious and social wrongdoings and interracial romance. As these codes were voluntary, films that violated the code could still be released, but they would be rated mercilessly by the Production Code Administration, leading to significantly less viewership.
“Learning about history, like the Hays Code, gives us the skills to recognize the potential concerning impacts that seemingly ‘moral’ censorship practices can have,” Liang said.
At the time, Hollywood executives worried that if films depicted “bad behavior,” then viewers may follow suit. Although attendees at the event expressed astonishment at the thought of this idea, Duncan reminded everyone that we have had time to develop this sense of media literacy.
“Once we become familiar and have an understanding of the technology, we know what to expect, but people didn’t have that,” Duncan said.
This code brought a lot of new limitations for many film directors. Under the Hays Code, characters could not be explicitly queer.
Even after Hollywood stopped abiding by these rules, their legacy remains potent in the films. This is how the taxonomy of stereotypes and tropes that we are all so familiar with came to be.
While there is far more explicit queer representation today, Duncan invited the audience to consider that there is still a lot of work to be done to remove residual traces of the Hays Code’s influence.
In the discussion that followed her talk, students expressed feeling disappointed when media, like “The Color Purple,” or the live-action “Beauty and the Beast,” only hints at certain characters’ queerness.
Queerness is still sanitized in media, often referred to as “burying your gays.” Other times, directors will feature a character that “queer baits,” a largely disappointing and harmful action which attempts to reap the benefits of representation without making the political commitment of explicit queerness.
“The ‘bury your gays’ trope contributes to this [poor representation of queer people] by making queerness seem like something that dooms a person,” attendee Sam McKenzie PZ ’28 said.
Duncan and students wrapped up the talk by expressing their shared view that students need to be cognizant of how queerness is still constrained and caricaturized.
“Censorship is still a hot topic today,” Liang said. ”Queer people are the first to be targeted when restrictions on ‘sexual perversion’ are broadly applied, whether it’s in the name of ‘moral decency’ or ‘safety.’”
Liang noted that media depicting queer relationships or women’s bodies today is often disproportionately labeled with content warnings. This is another reminder that queer visibility is an ongoing struggle.
While queer-coding was originally devised in a time when outright visibility was not possible for queer people, relying on these tropes as a means of representation proves that Hollywood is still recovering from the legacy of the Hays Code.
Conversations like this at the QRC serve to reflect the center’s broader commitment to promoting empowerment and social justice on topics of gender expression and identity.
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