🏳️‍🌈🏺slash and queerbaiting

🏳️‍🌈🏺 2-Gay in History 🏺🏳️‍🌈

Fans have long fan-tasized about romantic relationships between male leads for generations, but first pair to generate wild speculation were confirmed bachelor roommates Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Even in their own time, Punch—a Victorian satire magazine— teased them as perfect “old married couple” and Oscar Wilde and Doyle were friends.

A century later, in 1974—during the rise of the first modern fandom around the newly canceled Star Trek—a short story titled “A Fragment Out of Time” appeared in fanzines at conventions. It depicted Kirk and Spock in an explicitly romantic couple. To distinguish these tales from platonic ones, fans started using a slash mark in Kirk/Spock. “Slash” fiction was born.

Even under the old Hays Code, many Sherlock/Watson screen depictions had seemly intentional queer coding—especially during  Rathbone movie era. But once slash fiction exploded online, mainstream TV writers began intentionally seeding homoerotic beats. This happened in series like Xena: Warrior Princess, Teen Wolf, and Merlin—but never more infamously than in BBC’s Sherlock. The show leaned heavily into romantic tropes and innuendo, at a time when LGBTQ+ representation seemed increasingly possible, many viewers believed Johnlock—the couple portmanteau—was endgame. Instead, in its final seasons, the show abruptly shifted both characters into strictly heterosexual arcs, while dismissing the queer readings as delusional.

This bait-and-switch pattern appeared across genres. Supernatural built long-running flirtation and emotional intimacy between male leads, only to shut it down at the narrative climax—by killing off the queer-coded character immediately after a love confession, without meaningful emotional or story consequences. “Queerbaiting” became the name for this increasingly obnoxious tactic: courting gay engagement while denying representation and then ridiculing fans for believing the intentional signals.

The most recent major show accused of possible queerbaiting is Stranger Things, where the newly out Will has romantic feelings for his best friend Mike—feelings viewers believe may be reciprocated. Guess we’ll see