House of the Dragon has a queer problem

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Later episodes will no doubt have to reckon with the aftermath. But for the meantime, to introduce a rare couple of queers to the series, only for one of them to be dispatched, quickly, in visceral fashion, leaves an awful taste. After all, it's not the first time that queer characters have been introduced simply to face their ghoulish, bloody demise. Thrones' treatment of gays has been a long-standing point of debate.

As Vulture's Brian Moylan wrote of the Game of Thrones season six finale back in 2016, “gay characters on Game of Thrones have met especially bloody and ignominious deaths”. He notes the shadow monster assassination of Hot King Renly, the head-smashing execution of big-B Bisexual Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), and Loras, not only put through the worst conversion therapy known to man at the hands of religious zealots but A-bombed in the attack on the Sept of Baelor by would-be queer icon Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). The manner of their deaths is appropriate for the franchise's unrelentingly bleak tone, but it's troubling that gay characters are still relegated to devices demonstrative of darkness.

Laenor's queerness presumably isn't going anywhere, so his characterisation has plenty of room to breathe. But it nevertheless feels outdated to embrace the tropes of the past, not least in a media era where renewed focus has been placed on robust explorations of queerness. The Celluloid Closet, film critic Vito Russo's long critique of queerness in the media, was published over four decades ago, as Stephen M Hornby noted in The Conversation as the original series was coming to a close. “[Russo] noted a trend in some film representation where the gay man is presented only to meet an unhappy, punishing and often fatal ending,” he writes, also evoking US academic John Clum's analysis of the trend on stage as “ritualistic purgation”.

It's not just the gays that get the short end of it in the world of Game of Thrones, but it's unsettling that, even in 2022, a roomful of writers might still default to the same trope.

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