Is this trope YMMV worthy?: Ambiguously Gay

I guess the "methods" to it(the stereotypes themselves)really are tropes, definitively.Two and three sound as "methods" not "motivations". I guess they deserve their own trope page.

edited 8th Nov '11 1:25:55 PM by MagBas

The trouble with the page as it is comes not from slash fans, but from people who use the trope page as if it were a message board. If you do an online search for "gay cartoon characters" or a similar term, you'll find message board threads dedicated to speculating about fictional characters' sexual orientations. From appearances, many people who add to the page go into it thinking, "I think this character could be gay because..." rather than keeping the trope's meaning in mind. Yes, I've wondered about characters' sexual orientations before, but other times I've seen or read something that caused me to think, "This character is meant to be gay; we're obviously supposed to get the clue that he or she is; it has to be intentional."

As Dark Nemesis said, this trope is about that latter category. The alternate title of G Rated Gay is much clearer about the trope's definition, but not everyone seems to have taken the hint. This trope isn't about characters who share the occasional affectionate moment with a member of the same sex. Nor is it even about characters who actively engage in same-sex flirtation but never use the words "gay" or "lesbian" to define themselves. This trope encompasses such elements as the 1980s animated C-3PO's jazz hands, limp wrists, mincing gait, and campy reactions and Alfred Prunesquallor's flower-pattenered pajamas, lifelong bachelorhood, and effeminate mannerisms.

For anyone who still harbors the notion that this trope should only apply to works that contain in-universe speculation about a character's sexuality, these characters are at least as common in children's material as they are in adult material. The former avoids explicit mention of sexual orientation as often as possible, but children's entertainment is very rarely as sheltered as some people naively believe. Writers for children's programming and film insert veiled sexual jokes and pop culture references in their scripts with great frequency, so do you honestly think that they wouldn't include gay innuendo, too?

If you research gay characters in movies released during the time of the Hays Production Code, you'll find many similarities between them and a whole host of cartoon characters from the last thirty years or so. Films made for adult audiences are vastly more lax than they used to be. Other people have mentioned as much during this thread. Thus, I would argue that the Western animation categories (for television and film) on the trope page list more actual examples of the trope than, say, the live action TV category does, since animation studios use the trope more often.

edited 9th Nov '11 11:36:32 AM by Dioschorium

I like Auxdarastrix's suggestion about "Ambiguous" tropes.

Auxdarastrix: Your suggestion has precedent, actually. Ho Yay Shipping was originally created for that purpose, though an attempt was never made to get it into more common usage.

Too put the trope laconically from how I see it: The character has a traits which are associated with homosexuals of their gender and culture but their sexual status is never confirmed nor denied.

edited 8th Nov '11 10:48:18 PM by Vyctorian

I guess the true objective tropes here are the stereotypes themselves, not the "motivation" to said stereotypes. Values Dissonance is ymmv.

edited 9th Nov '11 12:21:38 AM by MagBas

So the real trope is a set of specific behaviors that can ba classifed as "Camp"? I can see that argument.

So, right now we have

Camp Straight: A Camp Straight is a person who exhibits all of the common characteristics of a Flamboyant Gay but is heterosexual.

Camp Gay: The traditional stereotypical image of a gay man. He's flamboyantly effeminate in his dress, speech, mannerisms, and interests.

What this does is say that someone is camp, but that we don't know there sexual orientation.

In that case, perhaps we need a rename and rewrite to put the emphasis on campness rather than gayness?

There are also works out there that have deliberately made a character maybe gay maybe not, IE Persona 4's Kanji in which Word of God it was ment to be up to the viewer if he is or isn't there is no "Camp" really.

edited 9th Nov '11 7:10:15 AM by Raso

This trope isn't solely about camp behavior. Female characters can also be Ambiguously Gay, and camp is never employed as a representation of female homosexuality. Women can be camp (e.g., Auntie Mame and Cruella DeVille) and thus earn their place in the pantheon of gay male icons, but the theatricality and flamboyance that camp is built on are not characteristics stereotypically ascribed to lesbians. An ambiguously lesbian character, for example, would be an aggressive tomboy who showed no interest in boys—imagine Peppermint Patty if she were never attracted to Charlie Brown—or a grizzled Army woman who always wore combat outfits, especially if she had a particular distaste for men. (Man-hating is more often attributed to lesbians than misogyny is to gay men, for better or for worse.) If you're going to judge the Ambiguously Gay trope by comparing it to the tropes that have titles beginning in "Camp," then bear in mind that this site has a trope called Tomboy and another called Butch Lesbian, but not one called Butch Straight.

edited 9th Nov '11 10:00:09 AM by Dioschorium

Dioschorium has BY FAR the best understanding of the trope that I've seen yet. Agree with everything D has said.

edited 9th Nov '11 9:57:10 AM by Zeta

Thank you.

edited 9th Nov '11 11:22:57 AM by Dioschorium

I'm seconding everything Dio has said. Honestly, I think that while other people on the thread get the trope, she's the best at actually describing it.

I'm a non-op transman, but thank you!

Now...someone mentioned earlier that the oft-vaunted "Ambiguously Bi" trope seems substantially different from Ambiguously Gay. This person was right: it already exists under the title of Ho Yay. Characters who demonstrate heterosexual attraction but share gay or lesbian subtext with another character without displaying any gay or lesbian stereotypes fit under Ho Yay, not a variant of Ambiguously Gay. The Nostalgia Critic's occasional fawning over a male celebrity is Ho Yay, since he is primarily attracted to women and exhibits no other signs that mark him as gay.

Most likely, what prevents many people from understanding the definition of Ambiguously Gay is that it's becoming a Dead Horse Trope in entertainment aimed at teenage and adult audiences, so the "young nerds" who apparently compose most of this site's demographics do not know how to recognize it on sight. Since the replacement of the Hays Code with Valenti's rating system, movies don't need to "code" their gay characters any longer; they usually either use vague same-sex tension (a level of Ho Yay rather than Ambiguously Gay) or ignore homosexuality altogether in the interest of avoiding R or NC-17 ratings. (That's a rant for another time.) The number of Ambiguously Gay characters in Western animation is a direct result of the Animation Age Ghetto, which is the reason Disney movies still use gay coding. No animation studio is as concerned with appealing to children as Disney is. Chaste male/female romances are proven crowd-pleasers with centuries of precedent, and Disney's ethic is to appear as innocuous to mass audiences as possible, so they refrain from putting gay leads in their films. They do, however, provide villains and sidekicks who have ambiguous sexualities: Ursula's character design was based on the drag queen Divine, and Hades, Jafar, Scar, and Shere Khan all have traits associated with gay men. Warner Brothers' gay cartoon characters are more overt, though not necessarily more affirmative (see the Red Guy from Cow And Chicken and Him from The Powerpuff Girls; Larry 3000 from Time Squad is actually one of the most well-done gay characters I've seen, but he's an exception).

Does anyone have anything else to add?

edited 9th Nov '11 11:28:48 AM by Dioschorium

I think you've hit upon the problems with the trope quite nicely:

• Ambiguously Gay is distinct from Ho Yay. An otherwise straight character who displays bisexual tenancies but does not act upon them can be filed under Ho Yay.

• In media aimed at teens and adults it is becoming a Dead Horse Trope or Discredited Trope when played for drama, but is still used as a Running Gag, especially in animation, even those aimed at adults (Smithers, Stewie Griffin and their ilk).

• You can just as easily code a female character as ambiguously gay with lesbian stereotype markers, but this is rarer since masculinity is more accepted than femininity and the depiction of a Tomboy is more socially acceptable and thus less worthy of notice. (And because let's face it, Lesbians are used more for titillation than to be actually developed characters when compared to gay men and a butch lesbian doesn't provided that titillation).

• Since this trope only remains played straight in innocuous "children entertainment" too afraid of the Moral Watchdogs, a disproportionate amount of recent examples will either be potentially gay school-age classmates for a main character or a stereotypically gay teacher whose private life is never examined. For example, Hey Arnold is a perfect example because it had both a coded gay classmate in Eugine and a coded gay teacher in Mr. Simmons. As you said, Disney, and particularly The Disney Channel and it's related live-action media still use this A LOT, as did the first few seasons of Ugly Betty with the character of Justin (whose ambiguity was only finally removed in the second-to-last episode). Ditto Nickelodeon (just take a look at Craig and Eric from Drake And Josh, for instance or the aforementioned examples in Hey Arnold). Or for another gay kid example; Jimmy (I think that was his name - the little effeminate kid with the braces who was best friends with all the girls in the neighborhood) in Ed Edd And Eddy.

edited 9th Nov '11 12:18:29 PM by Zeta

Terrific! Ought we to put this list on the trope page?

I think everyone knows what is is supposed to be. The question is:

How do you tell the difference between the creator intentionally "coding" a character and the audience reading things into a character the creator never intended, based on their own personal stereotypes that, save for Word of God or in-universe Lampshading?

That is the question. After all, "coding" can be considered a form of Getting Crap Past the Radar, which is probably in the top five for most consistently misused tropes we have on here - so how to prevent this from going down the same path?

Maybe everyone who has been posting in this thread knows what this trope means, but if everyone who contributed to the trope page knew its meaning, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I count Ambiguously Gay characters as those who have gay stereotypes attached to them to the degree that you'd have to either be very clueless about gay stereotyping or have a metal plate lodged in your head to think that they weren't gay. For example, compare C-3PO from the Star Wars movies to his incarnation in the aforementioned 1980s cartoon Droids. In the former, he and R2-D2 match up too perfectly with the butch/femme dynamic: Artoo is a take-charge mechanic, and Threepio is Camp. There's no indication that Anthony Daniels intended to play his character that way, but some of his co-workers (Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher among them) interpreted him as gay. The latter, however, exaggerates Threepio's characteristics to a legitimately impressive extent. He's still Camp, but the cartoon doesn't stop there. He also:

• spins his wrist around 360 degrees, allowing for limp-wrist gags
• likes to stand with a hand on his hip and his arm outstretched
• has to remain in a suggestive-looking bent-over position during one episode
• has an even more arch, mincing voice
• displays jazz hands in the face of danger
• has multiple opportunities to be attracted to a woman, but never is, and even seems uncomfortable receiving a hug from one of them.

These traits are what spring to mind when one considers gay coding (although most humans can't spin their wrists in a circle). If you saw the entire series, you would understand. You might think that a robot's lack of sex organs precludes sexual orientation, but if he can think, feel, and identify as a certain gender, then there's nothing to stop him from being gay. No one need penetrate someone by penis in order to be gay—or straight, for that matter. (I could add some instances of Ho Yay from that cartoon, but we've already established that that isn't a prerequisite for this trope.)

Also, just because straight people statistically outnumber gay people in real life does not mean that a straight interpretation of a character is more accurate than a gay one. Until a character displays sexual/romantic attraction in one way or another—or, indeed, appears to be Ambiguously Gay—then audiences are free to interpret characters' sexualities in whatever manner they choose.

edited 21st Feb '12 6:09:38 PM by Dioschorium

See, that's a pretty clear example - but how to prevent Trope Decay into "anything that has even a slight chance of being possibly interpreted as 'coding' from My Favorite Cartoon", as in what happened to Getting Crap Past the Radar?

If the interest is in preventing or counteracting Trope Decay for the trope page, then we could easily open a forum thread about gay interpretations of characters—to supplement the Ambiguously Gay page, not replace it. You can find plenty of threads such as these if you're so inclined. Gay entertainment sites also often include lists of potentially gay characters. (Cracked.com isn't a gay entertainment site, but even it has such a list, as you can see.) Why shouldn't we allow ourselves one?

Yes, some people might not want to acknowledge the existence of stereotypes, but that's what this trope is all about. Moreover, because forum threads are more liberal in their rules than trope pages, those who so desired could also include Ho Yay-based interpretations.

If we can keep racial stereotyped pages like Space Jews, Ambiguously Jewish and Fantasy Counterpart Culture from decaying, even if they do cause contention, then that same discipline can be applied to other minority stereotypes.

The stereotype aspect isn't so much my concern - as I said, it's the relationship to Getting Crap Past the Radar that troubles me.

Not to derail the thread, but the basic problem with Getting Crap Past the Radar, in my opinion, is the result of a combination of several common troper biases. The mixture of "'children's' shows I watch are good" and "'adult' material in a work is good" and "creators always know better then executives" results in a belief that a given troper's favorite work will have lots of "adult" material in it, and said material was definitely "snuck past the radar" rather than allowed through. So we get lots of Square Peg Round Trope, where the examples are only "crap" to a mind that is specifically looking for it and/or the examples were actually let through by censors that really didn't care that much.

Now, some of those biases don't have much to do with this trope - but some of them do, and my concern is that this is going to result in any character with even the slightest gay stereotypes being pegged by overzealous tropers as Ambiguously Gay.

edited 9th Nov '11 4:13:34 PM by nrjxll

You bring up a good point. Maybe slash fans do play a role in this page's decay, though it could also be that people just enjoy speculating about characters' sexual orientations more than they enjoy pointing out ethnic stereotypes.

And to anyone who is still earnestly suggesting that Ambiguously Gay be reserved for characters whose sexualities are questioned in-universe: the point of the trope is that no one mentions it explicitly.

Maybe it's because I don't watch much current children's programming, but most of the examples of Getting Crap Past the Radar I've read about fit the trope well: the morbid jokes on The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, the sexual innuendo on Animaniacs, Pokemon, and many, many other cartoons, and the homosexual references on Time Squad. But yes, I've noticed this pattern too. The misuse of Getting Crap Past the Radar is probably a result of tropers thinking that they can rebel against authority simply by watching cartoons. As someone I talked to in an LGBT Center remarked, "Children's cartoons are racy." They frequently are, but that doesn't make the viewers special.

ETA: Now that I consider it, I don't think Time Squad's censors were particularly uptight about the homosexual references. I'm under the impression that the Cartoon Network censors banned that infamous Cow And Chicken episode because it was offensive to lesbians, not because it featured lesbianism. Homosexuality was never portrayed negatively in Time Squad, so there was nothing that warranted banning.

edited 9th Nov '11 4:28:41 PM by Dioschorium

Getting Crap Past the Radar's issue isn't that people can't recognize the material. It's that they think that the radar cares about much smaller things than it actually does. People are really good at the pattern recognition bit. Just bad with the censor bit which doesn't have a thing to do with this trope.

There are cases of people reading things into the material that wasn't meant to be there at all, though - and that is a possible pitfall for this trope.