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The Covert Danger of the Queer Shoulder
A new shorthand for film and TV writers is quietly dehumanizing LGBTQ+ characters and evading criticism in the process.
Conventional wisdom once suggested that the shorthand by which a gay man could be identified was a limp wrist.
Even still, the flop of an inanimate hand, arched pointedly downward, has the power to fill the descriptive gap that polite language can no longer sustain. An evergreen meme makes its rounds every few months in the caustic social media circle known as ‘Gay Twitter.’ The author poses an oblique question: “Is he… you know…?” An attached photo or video provides the answer, in form of a screen capture of SpongeBob, his yellow line of a wrist bent to a ninety-degree angle, or in form of a brief excerpt from the horror film Hereditary, wherein Peter (Alex Wolff), possessed by an unseen entity, raises his hand and, with supernatural precision, snaps it down.
In September 2019, an interview with Cate Blanchett resurfaced, again to the delight of Gay Twitter, in which the actress confuses interviewer Andrew Freund’s adoration of her Lady Tremaine’s “gaze” in 2015’s Cinderella remake with a lineage of subtextually-queer Disney villainy. “Oh, the gaze,” she repeated, chuckling to herself before lowering her voice to a faux-masculine register, and flopping her wrist in that endearing, almost-quaint gesture. “I…
