On Jennifer Coolidge, The White Lotus, And Media's Evil Gays

Earlier this week, Jennifer Coolidge took home the Emmy for Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her role in The White Lotus as Tanya McQuoid. The category was absolutely stacked with talent, and I’m not going to litigate whether she was the right actress to win in this category nor if she was even the best actress on the show’s second season – every single one of those actresses did a great job and d꧙eserved their nominations. As usual, Coolidge gave one of her iconic, hilarious speeches, cracking the audience up from the moment she started speaking. But what caught my attention, and the moment that went viral, was when she said, “I wanna thank… all the evil gays”, to raucous applause.

This is, of course, a reference to her iconic line in the show’s second season, when she pleads with a man to save her from a group of murderous homose⛦xual men after her money, saying, &ldꦰquo;Please, these gays, they’re trying to murder me!” This is the line that spawned a thousand memes, with people replacing the word ‘gays’ with whatever tickles their fancy.

As a chronic migඣraine-haver, I’m particular to one that sa﷽ys ‘headaches’.

To many, this is an offhand joke, a reference to the line that was all over the internet when the show’s second season first released. To me, though, it was layered with meaning. I think about evil gays a lot, partly because I’ve been listening to the for years. In the beginning of the millennium, a big part of the fight for gay rights has been holding queer people up, saying, look at this person who contributed to society and also happened to be gay. We’re just like you!𒉰 This podcast, hosted by novelist, artist, and critic Huw Lemmey, and writer and historian Ben Miller, aims to profile queer people throughout history who have been overlooked in the pursuit of queer heroes.

Their episodes, covering a range of people from Morrissey, to Gertrude Stein, to George Santos, to Liberace, aim to portray queer people not as a platonic ideal of acceptability and respectability, but as complicated human beings just as capable of evil and bad choices as any heterosexual person. We see the impact of this show, and media like this, in the proliferation of more complex queer narratives in television and film. We get to see queer people make mistakes, hurt other people and each other and yes, even attempt to kill Jenni♛fer Coolidge. It is humanising, and it makes queer identity more than just something you slap on a character for brownie points. And even more than that, The White Lotus is part of a legacy of the reclamation of gay monstrosity – does a great job of tracking that lineage.

There are plenty of queer characters in video games, especially now. Just last year, we had Marisa in Street Fighter 6, Dion Lesage and Sir Terrance in Final Fantasy 16, and Mileena and Tanya in Mortal Kombat 1. Borderlands is full of queer characters. So is Mass Effect, especially the later games which move beyond characters being player-sexual. Trevor Philips from GTA V? Evi🌌l bisexual. But having complex queer characters be the face of big-budget games, and having their identities be part of their characters instead of just a personality trait on a list, is much rarer.

I was tempted to say Baldur’s Gate 3 is full of queer characters, but while they’re all technically canonically pansexual and many of them are played by queer actors, it&rsq🃏uo;s more honest to say all the characters are player-sexual.

Ellie As Evil Gay

This is partly because of the ongoing hostility that gamers have towards ‘wokeness’ – when we think of canonically queer protagonists whose identities are crucial to their characters, the best example is obvious: Ellie from The Last of Us. (Sure, Aloy is queer, but… eh.) When I talk about wanting complicated, sometimes 🌠bad queer characters, I am thinking about Ellie as the p꧅rototype, the version 1.0.

She’s the protagonist of The Last of Us Part 2, the first canonical lesbian protagonist in a triple-A game ever, and her romantic relationship with Dina is a major driver of her actions and her choices. People don’t usually see her as an ‘evil’ character, but I think that the definition of evil should be more slippery. Just as Ellie is queer, we have to queer her narrative and emotional arc – she makes some evil choices, pushing away people that love her and want the best for her so she can pursue a pointless revenge. She does bad things, but she is not at her core a bad person. The whole point of the game is, after all, moral ambiguity. It’s the same in real life. It’s doing bad things that makes us bad people, but we always have the choice to end the cycle and do good things instead. We can be bad, queer or straight. But we don’t haveꦏ to be bad, and that’s what makes c𓂃hoosing badness worse.

So when Jennifer Coolidge thanks the evil gays for her Emmy award, she’s entirely right to do so. The evolution of gay rights discourse 🐠and queer portrayals set the stage for her to give one of the most iconic, campy performances of her lifetime, and empowered queer audiences in the process because we knew that the joke was not on us, it was for us. We have moved beyond begging for respect, we are part of the conversation. We’ve seen growing numbers of evil gays on the small and big screens, but game studios are still finding themselves inundated by cavemen on Twitter banging on about pronouns and boobas every time they so much as see a female protagonist, let alone a canonically queer one. But as the conversation moves along, and representation gets further in this industry, I really do believe that we’ll start to see more ღmorally complex queer characters in games – maybe even protagonists. We deserve more Ellies than just the one we have.