The Stinger Conversation is a series in which the co-creators of the site (Sam and Aero) discuss a series of topics that are often the center of internet discourse. This conversation has been edited to be more concise.
Sam: Our first topic for this series is Taika Waititi and his relationship with his queer audience. So, a little bit of background: Taika Waititi is a filmmaker who was born in New Zealand. He has made a lot of films, and the most notable one is Thor Ragnarok, which is the one that brought him to fame around 2016. And since then, he has been involved in a bunch of different projects, such as the show Our Flag Means Death. He also created a project called What We Do in the Shadows, which was a movie that was released in 2014. In 2019, a spin-off show was created and named the same as the movie. This show is currently airing. Because of this, Our Flag Means Death, and Thor Love and Thunder, Taika has gotten very popular with the queer audience because of the fact that the two shows I mentioned have a lot of queer characters. He also made claims that there was a lot of LGBT content in Thor Love and Thunder.
Before we start really digging into it, I just want to clarify that we’re not trying to cancel him. Our purpose is just to contribute to the conversation and add our two cents on what we think about this topic.
Aero: This is going to be a new format on the site. It’s going to be a little bit like a podcast, but it’s going to be in written form. We are both huge fans of his work, and it’s difficult to talk about this, not just because we love his work and we have an inherent bias to praise the people whose work we like, but also, not to say that we’re scared, and we do have conviction in what we say, but we know there’s going to be a lot of rebuttals when people discover what we’re saying, and we just don’t want any conflict. That’s not the purpose of this. We want a conversation – we’re not trying to wage war on people.
Sam: Exactly. And I think also the comments we’re making today aren’t on his filmmaking or storytelling skills because he’s obviously an incredible director and writer and all these things, but we’re discussing the way that he has interacted with his LGBT fans.
Aero: We’re trying to analyze his relationship with the LGBT community, especially his fans, and how that informs the way he markets his work – not pander, but tailor his work and use his skills to try to mobilize his audience.
Sam: With all those disclaimers put out there, we can start by talking about how he has been in a bunch of different interviews where he started talking about how he’s perceived by LGBT fans. One of the most known instances of him talking about his gay audience was the London screening where a fan had asked how gay Thor Love and Thunder is. Taika then told Natalia Portman to answer the question. Natalie Portman has said it was “so gay” and Taika reaffirmed it. It was implied in the way that he handed Natalie the question that he wanted Natalie to answer in the way she did. He said in an interview with Wired that “I come off as very gay.” He also said in an interview with Out magazine that he called himself a “little gay icon” when he was talking with his friends about himself. Aero, what are your thoughts on this?
Aero: Despite my grievances towards how he markets himself, I’ve seen all these interviews and videos, and, yeah, it does seem a little pandery. Like, the London screening video is super uncomfortable because, one, you shouldn’t just be asking that to people. Screenings and Q and A’s should offer constructive questions – questions about filmmaking, questions about the plot, questions about acting, and like, the things that actually make up the movie. It felt like the person who asked that was just not self-aware enough. So, I think that Natalie Portman and Taika Waititi were both put on the spot to answer. Natalie knew the reputation that Taika has with the LGBTQ community, so she answered the way she did.
It just seemed a little awkward, and most people on the Internet who saw that clip thought it was awkward as well and did not receive it well. Because it was cringe, it became viral. Also, it bothers me that he, as a straight man, finds so much pride in being a queer icon. That title has been so diluted and so many people have been called queer icons. I just think that straight people shouldn’t be parading around using a title that a handful of people call him.
Sam: How Taika uses his label as a “gay icon” is different than the way some other “gay icons” who are straight use that label. He uses it to try to explicitly market his products. This idea of a cishet person being a “gay icon” and using this to their advantage has been a discussion in the past before. I’ve seen it in regards to Dan and Phil. Before they came out, people would say that it was problematic that they were trying to pander to their LGBT audience, even though we didn’t know at the time that they were also queer. It’s a little different in this case in that this is a huge franchise movie with such a big budget and an incredible global impact.
Aero: I feel like this is a bit different in that with Dan and Phil; at the time, it felt like they had to play up their “gayness” to appeal to their target audience, gay teenagers, in the mid-2010s. In this case, however, it’s a Marvel movie. It has a $185 million budget. The target audience is the entire world.
Sam: The way he marketed this Thor movie really bothered me. He claimed it was super queer, but (spoilers for Thor by the way) one of the queerest things we got was Valkyrie mentioning her dead ex-girlfriend and kissing a girl’s hand, and Korg and another rock guy holding hands, which isn’t revolutionary. But the way Taika marketed it seemed like it was going to be. Eternals had a gay Black character who had a husband and a son. Chloé Zhao, the director, didn’t market the movie as a gay movie. She just marketed it as a movie. It’s weird that Taika would try to bank on these small moments and try to make it seem like it was a huge thing.
Aero: I kind of sympathize because I know that making a $185 million movie obviously puts a lot of pressure on you to make sure that the movie does well, but this is the wrong way to promote a movie, especially when people can think critically and know what he’s doing. We know his motive, and it was just to make bank.
Sam: It’s strange that he uses his bond with his queer audience to try to convince them to use their wallets to show support for the LGBT community by implying that this movie is super gay so everyone should pay to go see it.
Aero: It’s pretty disturbing as a person who’s just seeing the marketing that he’s doing and not the strategy behind it because I want to know what his reasons are. Is he planning all these interviews out where he’s trying to slowly cement himself as a gay icon? I personally don’t see it like a thing he should be admitting himself. You don’t just give yourself a nickname, you know?
Sam: What’s even more worrying is that some people genuinely believe that Taika himself is queer based on the fact that he played a gay character in Our Flag Means Death and called himself a gay icon in all these interviews. I don’t think anybody should be speculating on people’s private lives in general. They should have the opportunity to tell us stuff about their personal life by themselves because that’s none of our business and we have no right to make judgments based on what characters they play or what they say.
Aero: I’ve seen it on Twitter. People keep commenting on how he dresses. The man’s just wearing patterned shirts. Have you not seen a patterned shirt in real life? Uncles wear patterned shirts and you’re not calling these people gay. I don’t understand the obsession with trying to “queer code” him because he’s a real person. He has the right to his own privacy. Even if he is queer, we don’t need to know.
Sam: A lot of this comes from the Internet because social media is so accessible to the point that Taika now can see that this is what people are saying about him and that his audience is composed of people like this. It’s kind of like a double-edged sword because he can use social media to gain insight into what his audience is like and he can take advantage of that which is good for him and bad for us. But people also have the chance to express their thoughts on him and share their godawful takes and he also has to see that, which could be bad for him because seeing people speculate about your personal life on social media can take a lot out of you.
Aero: Yeah. I don't wanna say that celebrities have become too accessible, but he definitely encouraged people to interact with him. That was him catalyzing his own downfall because people are interacting with him, but they're also like doing it in such a terrible way. As in they're psychoanalyzing him and saying inappropriate things. Not just about him, but about his family and looking into his perceived "queerness". And of course, it's because he opened up the gates and shared a lot with us, but it's also the fans' fault. You need to respect people's boundaries. Regardless if they're a celebrity, you wouldn't look into your friend’s personal life if they're not sharing it with you.
Sam: Taika benefits from having a gay audience but he’s straight so he doesn’t have to face the discrimination LGBT people face. He gets to use LGBT people the way he wants to and just walks away at the end of the day without any personal injury other than the weirdos who speculate on his sexuality.
Aero: He takes the good without taking the bad. It feels a bit, for a lack of a better word, exploitative in the way that he markets his work towards an audience and very clearly profits off of it, but it’s not like he’s actually queer. He’s just benefiting monetarily from it and it’s keeping him relevant. He doesn’t understand the struggles or hardships of being LGBT, especially considering that there are countries where gay marriage isn’t legal or even extremely stigmatized. Allyship is fine but open your wallet!
Sam: I would feel better about watching Thor Love and Thunder and having him market it as a gay movie and then donating profits from the movie to LGBT organizations. I would get that. But then again, there’s just an iffy fine balance in terms of the trust between the audience and creator, you know? Because Taika’s just built such a huge amount of trust with his audience and now he has it in his hand so he’s trying to take advantage of it, which is clear. So, it’s a weird thing for the audience where we like his work so much, but we also don’t like the feeling of being used for money and not being appreciated as people or viewers who just want to see good content or content that’s not just overly hyped up for the sake of being hyped up.
Aero: The people who are excited about his work are maybe a little frustrated because the focus is on him as a person instead of his work and what his future plans are, and I think that people who are excited about his work have been falling out of favor with him because of that. The solution to that would be him toning it down with the “queer icon” performance. Also, if he wanted to show actual allyship and be a good ambassador to the people, he should genuinely donate and promote other projects because I know he’s getting paid a lot to make these movies. He’s an actor, a writer, and a director of Marvel movies. If he’s not getting paid well, I don’t know who is.
Sam: We’re not saying he doesn’t donate, but he just doesn’t seem to publicly endorse it. It’s not to say that you can only be charitable if you’re public about it, but it’s good to be public about being charitable if you’re a celebrity figure because you can draw more attention to smaller organizations and bring more awareness and visibility.
Also, in the projects that Taika’s done, in terms of queerness, the representation he includes doesn’t necessarily encapsulate the entire LGBT community. We are Asian non-binary sapphics of color, and the amount of representation we have in media is so small so it’s easy for us to be critical of it. But I think a lot of Taika’s queer representation is more geared towards mainstream ideas about queerness. Like how he presents the image of two guys holding hands and even though they’re both made of rock, the general idea is that that’s the traditional image of queerness we see in media, so when people see stuff like that they think, “Oh, Taika’s a gay icon because he knows how to show queerness on the big screen like that. This is how queerness should be shown.”
But then, for us, we’re wondering, “Who’s going to show us on the screen?” We need to elevate queer and trans creators of color. We shouldn’t be hailing Taika as the go-to person for queer content.
Aero: Yeah, our sentiment is that a straight person should not set the standard on how queer cinema should look.
Sam: Exactly. Seek out queer and trans creators of color to support. Because of the internet, there’s so much more accessible content made by us, and there’s a lot of great stuff out there. I promise that supporting these creators is probably more impactful in terms of supporting the LGBT community than it is supporting Taika.
Aero: Supporting these individuals will encourage other individuals to make more works. If you’re supporting a corporation or a big creator, no individual’s gonna be like, “Oh, if a corporation can do it, I can do it.” So you have to support smaller creators so other creators can be like, “Oh, there’s an audience for this.”
Sam: It helps bring more impactful and genuine representation to media because representation is always done best when the people writing it, acting in it, and directing it are in that minority group.
Anyway, thank you for joining us for our first conversation, and we’ll see you at the next one!