for Queer Theatre class, 2023
There is little overt homosexuality in Wicked, despite featuring several romantic pairings (not to mention a strong apparently platonic friendship between two young women) but that’s among the few things about it that aren’t queer. It is commonly well-understood that characters, plots, and themes of Wicked all turn out to be queer, at the very least in the broadest sense of transgression against societal norms. Ultimately, queerness drives and strengthens the main character of Wicked, just as the antagonist is correspondingly empowered by his queerness.
Even Dorothy’s Enemies Turn Out to Be Her Friends
When discussing Wicked, there are four main levels of canon to draw upon: the 2003 Broadway musical with book by Winnie Holzman and music/lyrics by Stephen Schwartz[1]; the musical is adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West[2]; the novel is in turn written as a prequel to the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz directed by Victor Fleming[3]; the movie is itself an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz[4]. However: the corpus of works from which Wicked descends is tremendously vaster even than that: Baum, of course, wrote some 13 sequel novels to his The Wonderful Wizard of Oz before his death in 1919; there have been a number of unofficial sequels to the movie, perhaps most famously Disney’s 1985 Return to Oz, directed by Walter Murch, based on some of Baum’s sequels; and Maguire wrote three sequel novels to Wicked; moreover, there have been countless other adaptations of Baum’s original into various other media, including a 1902 Broadway musical. There is also a movie adaptation of Wicked the musical in production, due to come out in two parts in late 2023 and 2024[5].
In the mid-20th century, being a ‘friend of Dorothy’ became code for being a gay man, derived possibly from the gay icon status of Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in the 1939 movie, but also in line with the themes of the book and its adaptations. Though Dorothy is herself a standard-issue straight white girl who is not, to all appearances, in any way queer herself, she does collect a motley crew of queer, outcast friends – a walking, talking Scarecrow; a woodcutter made of tin; a Lion who lacks bravery – so Dorothy can stand as a queer icon even outside of Judy Garland herself. So it is that Wicked comes from a long and proud dynasty of queer literature.
The plot of Wicked – the musical and the novel – follows Elphaba[6]: a girl who is born with green skin; goes on to develop magical powers; forms a friendship with another girl at school who goes on to become Glinda the Good Witch of some longitudinal direction[7]; acquires a revolutionary mission to save talking Animals from a holocaust at the hands of the Wizard of Oz; and winds up falling victim to the Wizard’s propaganda and the teenaged inadvertent assassin he sends after her. Side characters include Elphaba’s sister Nessarose, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the East; and a variety of persons who wind up, through the events of the musical, becoming Dorothy’s queer companions as we see them in the movie.
Elphaba’s friendship with G(a)linda is easy to read as having romantic undertones, particularly in the transition from the hatred-filled “Loathing” to the romantic tone with which the two serenade each other in “For Good”[8], and this interpretation is one that has made Wicked very popular among young queer people. However, it is not clear to me that a homoromantic or homosexual relationship would necessarily be frowned upon in Oz; it isn’t explored enough to be understood by the audience as particularly stigmatized or not. On a meta level, ‘queerbaiting’ is itself a story that is all too familiar to queer people -- a same-sex friendship that can be read as romantic, but which is carefully kept not explicitly romantic, perhaps angling towards the sort of mainstream success that explicit homosexuality would have hindered in 2003 (and which Wicked has, of course, achieved). And we do not, of course, see any homosexual relationships in the canon, so my contention that such a romance would not necessarily actually be particularly queer in-universe has little canonical evidence for or against it.
It is facile to describe any narrative featuring physical transformation as a transgender narrative – sometimes a thing is easy because it fits, while sometimes it takes a shoehorn: the creation story of both the Scarecrow and the Tin Man could perhaps more plausibly be read as stories of transformation because of trauma, which it may be a bit of a stretch to describe as queer.
Still, the magical transformation into a Scarecrow that Elphaba imposes on Fiyero can be seen as analogous to a gender transition, but in reverse: Fiyero starts out carefree and fitting comfortably in his own skin, until he takes a beating, at which point Elphaba assigns him the body of a Scarecrow to protect him[9]. The traditional gender transition involves progressing away from one’s assigned gender at birth to a new gender, chosen by the self, though in the process becoming (distressingly) much more susceptible to beatings in today’s society.
Similarly, when Nessarose seeks to rape the munchkin Boq, her spell goes awry, potentially killing him, and Elphaba casts a competing spell to save his life, thereby transforming him into a man of tin with no heart. However it is that we see Fiyero’s transformation, Boq’s is analogous.
Disability is, of course, queer. Elphaba’s sister Nessarose struggles throughout the musical with her inability to walk and her use of a wheelchair, until Elphaba enchants her bejeweled slippers to allow her to walk[10] – the very same ruby slippers that Dorothy then inadvertently steals in the movie and Elphaba seeks to recover[11].
In Oz, the societal expectation of Lions is that they are brave. The Lion of these stories, being cowardly due to the events of the musical[12], is therefore queer.
Of course, the Wizard himself turns out to be, on all four levels of canon, a fraud with limited magical ability, putting on a great show of being magically powerful, in order to take and maintain power. On one level, his is a recognizable queer story – but he leverages his power over society’s conceptions to his own ends, including the genocide of Animals, not to mention the incident of probable rape of Elphaba’s mother, none of which are particularly queer. Let’s put an asterisk on the Wizard’s queerness.
Incidentally, the Wizard’s plot to rob Animals of the ability to speak is a holocaust that targets queer folk and seeks to make them less queer by force – something homosexual and transgender people are all too familiar with in reality.
So I would ultimately say that literal homosexual or transgender content, if present – and it could be present, though not made explicit – is among the least queer thing about Wicked. The transitions of Fiyero and Boq, and a variety of other minor cases show that Wicked is suffused with queer themes. But I have not even yet touched upon the chief and foremost of my readings of queer content in this musical: Elphaba’s status as an outsider because of the color of her skin, and the way she uses or masks it to her own advantage.
“Green!”[13]
The protagonist Elphaba is, of course, green of skin, a situation which causes much of the musical’s tsuris – or at least, which drives Elphaba herself, causing both resentment and a need to excel. I wouldn’t say that the common people don’t care about Elphaba’s green skin – she certainly lists her perceptions that she is discriminated against on the basis of her skin color in “The Wizard and I”[14], and the populace does seize upon it as a reason to hate her, once prompted, in “Thank Goodness”[15] – but I would suggest that Elphaba cares about it more than they do, as evidenced in her song, “The Wizard and I”[16], where she is very keen to pretend she doesn’t care about her “verdigris”[17], but makes it clear that she does, in fact, care very much about it:
And one day, [the Wizard]'ll say to me "Elphaba,[…]Would it be all right by youIf I de-greenify you?"“Of course that's not important to me;All right, why not!" I'll reply.[18]
This is all easy to read as a commentary on racism (depending on exactly how broadly we define queerness, a discriminated-against race could itself still be considered queer), but, given that her parents are not green – indeed Elphaba seems to be the only green-skinned person in Oz – and given my contention that Elphaba cares about her green skin more than the common people do, I think this doesn’t quite fit[19]. It could fit as a homosexual, or possibly transgender (born into a body that differs from one’s self-conception), analogy. Or the story of Elphaba’s green skin could be treated as a story about disability, or about the sort of discrimination that people with vitiligo or albinism face – I suspect this last fits best, conceptually. Regardless of the parallels we draw, it is clear that Elphaba’s green skin, and the discrimination she faces because it places her fundamentally as an outsider, makes her queer, and her story a queer story.
The cause of Elphaba’s greenness has something to do with a “green elixir”[20] given to her mother by a traveling salesman (who later becomes the Wizard of Oz), who then sleeps with said mother; this could make Elphaba’s greenness a commentary on either adultery or rape, depending on how, exactly, the elixir scene is read: it’s unclear to me whether the elixir is an aphrodisiac, a sleeping draught, a love potion, alcoholic, or a nostrum with no particular effect. Given the Wizard’s depiction elsewhere (in the 1939 movie, for example) as a snake oil salesman with no particular actual powers, the last seems plausible, though it may not be the intended conclusion. If it is a nostrum or an aphrodisiac, the Wizard is relatively faultless in this case and the commentary is on Elphaba’s mother’s adultery; if it is a sleeping potion or love potion, the Wizard is guilty of rape (although love potions are a literary device with a long history, I would contend that they remain, fundamentally, rape potions). In any of these cases, Elphaba’s greenness is a ‘sins of the parents’ situation – it’s nothing about Elphaba herself that made her green, and if it’s a punishment (by the narrative, or by any deities Oz might have) then it is an undeserved punishment.
The Wizard, given his non-proficiency with actual magic, probably couldn’t actually turn Elphaba’s skin to a less queer hue like she wishes[21], but it seems obvious to me that he could grant her wish the same way he grants the wishes of Dorothy’s queer companions: it wouldn’t take much effort on the part of the Wizard’s propaganda apparatus to loop Elphaba’s appearance into the whole schtick of the Emerald City – so named because it is so very green. (In Baum’s original books, all visitors to the Emerald City are fitted with a pair of green sunglasses, illegal to remove as long as they are within city limits – and of course it transpires that not everything in the Emerald City is actually green; everything just looks green through green sunglasses.[22])
Instead, upon discovering a nefarious plot by the Wizard against Animals[23] to strip them of their ability to talk, Elphaba makes an enemy of the Wizard, and that propaganda apparatus is turned against her instead. Facing the propaganda machine of the state and the consequent opprobrium of society is, of course, a quintessentially queer story. The order of causation in reality is up for debate – taking homophobia as an example, it’s not clear whether the propaganda machine of the so-called social ‘conservative’ movement invented homophobia out of whole cloth as a tool to achieve its own malign ends, or homophobia somehow arose naturally in the general population and the ‘conservative’ movement seized it and turned it to its own ends; I would suppose probably some of both. In any event, in Wicked, it is clearly the propaganda apparatus that comes first, as the Wizard’s new press secretary first labels Elphaba a “wicked witch” at the end of Act I[24], immediately[25] followed by a mob of the populace in Act II singing a song about how bad the Wicked Witch of the West is[26].
One major theme of the musical involves the question of whether you are at risk of ultimately becoming the mask you wear; whether you take on and internalize the role society assigns you. As Elphaba sings,
Let all Oz be agreed,I'm wicked through and through.Since I can not succeed,Fiyero, saving you,I promise no good deedWill I attempt to do again![27]
Ultimately, of course, Elphaba doesn’t actually do anything particularly wicked after that, instead faking her death and fleeing Oz – but she uses the people’s perception of her ostensible wickedness to accomplish that feat, hinging on a popular superstition that pure water would melt her[28].
Masking is ultimately a queer thing – whether you are ‘in the closet’ in terms of sexual orientation or gender or masking a neurodivergence and trying to pass as allistic. Though the closeted gay man who hates who he is so much that he goes into government to legislate against it is a classic archetype in American culture, I would venture to suppose that there is little risk of actually becoming the mask in reality. Those who are not society’s approved standard sexual orientation, gender, or neurotype cannot help but be who they actually are, no matter how intent they are on masking.
It isn’t entirely clear to me whether Elphaba leaning into society’s perception of her, as she says she’s prepared to do in “No Good Deed”, is really a decision to actually be a wicked person, or simply to wear the mask of wickedness while remaining good at heart, thereby accomplishing more than if she had continued to spend her energy fighting it. If we as queer persons in reality lean into society’s perception of us, we might be able to accomplish more than if we spend all our energy fighting it.
A contrast can certainly be drawn between the respective queernesses of Elphaba and the Wizard. While the Wizard uses his queerness and his mask to acquire power and accomplish his own evil ends (rape, genocide, etc.), Elphaba uses her queerness and her mask to try to help others and, in the end, to escape persecution by faking her death – probably, given her consistent characterization, to go on continuing to help people after the end of the musical, albeit perhaps not in Oz.
Works Cited
Baum, L. F. (1900). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill Company.
Holzman, W., & Schwartz, S. (2003). Wicked. Broadway, New York.
Langley, N., Ryerson, F., Woolf, E. A. (Writers), & Fleming, V. (Director). (1939). The Wizard of Oz [Motion Picture].
Maguire, G. (1995). Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. HarperCollins.
Weinersmith, Z. (2020, July 9). "Meaning". Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Retrieved from https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meaning-3
Presented Without Comment
[29][1] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003)
[2] (Maguire, 1995)
[3] (Langley, Ryerson, & Woolf, 1939)
[4] (Baum, 1900)
[5] Just to add fire to the hackneyed complaint that every movie coming out these days is an adaptation or a sequel, here we’ll have an adaptation of an adaptation of a prequel to an adaptation of a novel.
[6] Named, I have heard tell, for L. Frank Baum’s initials.
[7] In the 1939 movie, Glinda is the Good Witch of the North; in most other canons, she’s the Good Witch of the South.
[8] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “Loathing” and “For Good”
[9] ASAB – Assigned Scarecrow At Beating
[10] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003)
[11] (Langley, Ryerson, & Woolf, 1939)
[12] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003)
[13] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “No One Mourns the Wicked”
[14] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “The Wizard and I”
[15] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “Thank Goodness”
[16] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “The Wizard and I”
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] The book and the musical do cover racism elsewhere, in the aspects of the plot pertaining to discrimination against Animals.
[20] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “No One Mourns the Wicked”
[21] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “The Wizard and I”
[22] (Baum, 1900)
[23] It is not entirely clear to me who originated the innovation that an “animal” is a non-sapient creature as one might find in our world, while an “Animal” possesses the ability of speech, as one might find in Oz or Narnia, but it is certainly a useful way to discuss the distinction.
[24] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) Act I
[25] Albeit after an intermission in the theatre and a time skip within the world of the musical.
[26] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “Thank Goodness”
[27] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “No Good Deed”
[28] (Holzman & Schwartz, 2003) “Thank Goodness”
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