She Kills Cisheteronormativity: Queerness in She Kills Monsters and Dungeons & Dragons

for Queer Theatre class, 2023

In Qui Nguyen's She Kills Monsters, "average"[1] Agnes – an English teacher in the original; a cheerleader, that quintessentially ‘normal’ pursuit for ‘normal’ girls, in the Young Adventurers version – unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons, is introduced to D&D through playing a D&D module written by her deceased teenage sister Tilly. Tilly’s D&D module doubles as a sort of coded diary, and Agnes learns things about her sister of which she had previously been unaware, including exploration of non-heteronormative sexuality.[2]

A Brief History of Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game, which boils down to a combination of complex tactical board game, collaborative storytelling, and amateur improv theatre performed only for an audience of your fellows playing the game with you[3]. It has tremendous overlap with a myriad of subjects – drama, English Language Arts, teaching (half my repertoire of teaching tricks originates in D&D), very basic arithmetic, and so on. Tuns of ink have been metaphorically spilled arguing the nuances of D&D as relating to game design and ludology, to socializing activity design, to social justice, to queerness, and to other things.

The current edition of D&D is known as 5th Edition, because, just as you might expect, there have been at least eight distinct editions of D&D:

• 1974: Original Dungeons & Dragons – The barebones original version created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, adapted from a game of army warfare.[4]
• 1977: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition[5] – Greatly expanded from the original in terms of gameplay options, this was the first edition to see large-scale publication.
• 1989: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition[6] – As She Kills Monsters is set in 1995, this is most likely the edition Agnes, Tilly, and so on play – as confirmed by the narrator’s line at the beginning of the play, “Forged by the hands of nerds, crafted in the minds of geeks, and so advanced in its advanciness it would take a whole second edition to contain all its mighty geekery.”[7]
• 2000: Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition[8] – The first edition published after the property was acquired by Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, also known as the creators of the collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
• 2003: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5th Edition[9] – 3.5th Edition was a fairly minor yet comprehensive rules update to 3rd Edition, allowing a certain amount of backwards-compatibility, so you could continue to play your 3rd Edition characters in a way you couldn’t have continued to play existing characters in any previous edition change.
• 2008: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition[10] – Most notable because, when D&D shifted from 3.5th Edition to 4th Edition, many fans disliked the new edition and felt disenfranchised, so new company Paizo swept in with Pathfinder 1st Edition in 2009, which was basically another version of 3.5th Edition, to the extent that many nicknamed it ‘D&D 3.75e’ – the similarity was great enough that backwards-compatibility was alleged as a major selling point, but in my experience rarely actually taken advantage of[11]. Pathfinder remains D&D’s biggest competitor, although they have increasingly diverged from their common source over time and new editions.
• 2014: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition[12] – Something of a synthesis and a distillation of all previous D&D editions, and one which has brought in an unprecedented influx of players new to the hobby.
• The 2024 update to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition – They keep changing what they’re calling the 2024 version – most commonly it is called “One D&D”, but its official name appears to be something like “the revision to 5th Edition D&D to be released in 2024”. Despite it being almost exactly analogous to 3.5th Edition’s relationship to 3rd Edition, I have seen neither WotC nor any prominent fan refer to it as “5.5th Edition”.[13]

Personally, I came into the hobby around 2010, and, though I played a few games of 4th Edition, I ultimately preferred 3.5th Edition, then Pathfinder. When Paizo printed a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder and WotC printed a 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I found I preferred D&D 5th Edition, so I switched teams again.

The Queerness of Geekery

D&D is, of course, eminently queer in a variety of ways – never mind what the grognards[14] of the hobby will tell you, and never mind the reputed conservative politics of Gary Gygax himself. It is an ongoing cold war within the hobby that D&D either is, or is not, ‘political’, and every slight move that either Wizards of the Coast or, in some cases, prominent fans make towards ‘wokeness’ is met with an uproar of outrage from a contingent of grognards.

For example: since the inception of D&D, the term “race” has been used in a Tolkien-esque sense, to refer to Elves, Orcs, Humans, etc.[15] Unfortunately for the hobby, “race” is a term that carries a tremendous amount of real-world baggage, so in 2019, Paizo switched from “race” to “ancestry” in its shift from a 1st to a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder, and WotC is catching up by switching from “race” to “species” for the 2024 version of 5th Edition D&D. This ameliorates (but does not solve) the problem that some races – especially orcs and drow/dark elves – are generally presented as antagonists and have, historically, been treated (or even, in earlier editions, outright described by the game) as inherently evil. However, both changes and the reasoning for them remain controversial, contested primarily by grognards who, in general, resist change of any sort[16].

Gygax himself has, as mentioned, a reputation as having been socially conservative – for example, he was “known to carry a weapon” and “known to be a member of the Libertarian Party”, according to the FBI’s file on him and his company[17]. In the earliest editions of the game penned by Gygax, non-human races faced limits (such as level caps) not imposed upon humans, and in 1st Edition, female characters had a lower maximum Strength score than male characters of the same race[18]. Observing these facts is perhaps more unkind to Gygax than necessary – he did, in his later years, seem to recognize the inherent queerness of D&D, and recanted some of his earlier design decisions.

At the beginning of She Kills Monsters, the point is immediately recognized that “geeky”[19] pursuits like D&D are inherently queer, in a way that is generally lost on grognards (or it could be that grognards attempt to suppress nonconformity in their hobby for the same reason any marginalized minority may end up attempting to oppress and marginalize other, more marginalized, minorities) – normal Agnes is initially put off by the demeanor of Chuck, Tilly’s dungeon master, and is reluctant to try D&D at all; once she does, she proceeds repeatedly throughout the play to try to hide the fact that she is playing D&D (even to the point that for a time she allows her boyfriend to believe she’s cheating on him rather than admit to doing something geeky).[20]

“Why Do Gamer Dudes Always Play Girl Characters?”[21]

One of D&D’s queerest aspects is explored in She Kills Monsters: the play recognizes and probes D&D’s capacity to allow for exploration of sexual or romantic orientations and gender.

In the Young Adventurers Edition, the character Tilly plays in D&D before her death, Tillius the paladin, is male, a different gender than Tilly’s own presumed gender, a common phenomenon known in the hobby as ‘crossplaying’. Tillius only appears in the play after Tilly’s death, presented (we presume faithfully, from the module Tilly wrote, described as a coded diary) by Chuck the dungeon master, but the character of Tillius nonetheless represents Tilly – at least until (though maybe also after) he turns out to be an evil five-headed dragon god in disguise. [22]

Similarly, the character of Kaliope is played by an apparently male performer in drag in the BAVPA production, which goes un-commented-upon.[23]

Agnes: "Why would she do that?"

Chuck: "I don't know, why do gamer dudes always play girl characters?"[24]

I personally know, at the absolute minimum, at least two people (including myself) who are explicitly confirmed to have changed their self-recognized gender identities or presentations because of having explored gender options in D&D. I know at least a dozen more who have crossplayed without it necessarily having an impact on their genders or reflecting real-world gender exploration – while something like half of them have turned out to be transgender, I haven’t explicitly confirmed with them any direct causal connections between that and crossplaying.

The Belt of Gender-Changing has been a cursed item found in D&D for many editions, which helps to open the scope of gameplay and storytelling to exploration of trans stories. You put it on, it alters your biological sex, and you can’t take it off until you cast remove curse on it. My main problem with this item is its name – it would take powerful mind-altering enchantment to alter a person’s gender, whereas altering their sex is a trivial feat of transmutation in a world with such spells as alter self and polymorph, which can wreak much more substantial bodily changes than mere sex changes. To be sure, many groups play with this item as a sometimes-malicious joke, but in my experience, for every group playing it that way, there’s a group playing with it to actually deeply explore gender.

Tillius, moreover, is in a relationship with fellow D&D character Lilith – one appeal of D&D for Tilly, we are told, is that Tillius "gets to save the princess"[25]. Lilith is based on Lily, a fellow player with whom Tilly shares her first kiss, although neither Tilly nor Lily is out of their closets in any official capacity – being 15, Tilly is still exploring her sexual identity, at least in the Young Adventurers Edition:

Agnes: "Are you [lesbian]?"

Tillius: "I… don't really know?"[26]

That doesn’t stop a group of cheerleader demons from bullying and making fun of Tilly for being a lesbian, implied to be based on an actual event from Tilly's life – Chuck: “I think this is actually your sister’s diary. She just wrote it in geek.”[27]

In the original version, everyone in the game’s setting is homosexual (including Tillius, who in this version is female, not crossplayed):

Agnes: “Wait, the big slacker demon is gay?”

Kaliope: “As is everyone in New Landia.”[28]

This is a reflection of Tilly’s own homosexuality:

Agnes: “Tilly, why’d you make everyone gay?”

Tillius: “Um, I don’t know. If I were to take an educated guess, I’d venture to guess that maybe the author of this world was into wearing tanktops and The Indigo Girls.”[29]

The concept of a D&D setting where homosexuality is welcomed, and in some senses even universal, is not unheard-of in actual D&D play. It is commonly thought that Paizo’s position is all non-player characters (NPCs) in Pathfinder Adventure Paths[30], and by extension in the setting, are bisexual unless the text specifically says otherwise – the official position is somewhat more nuanced, as clarified by James Jacobs, creative director for Pathfinder’s Adventure Paths:

Milo v3: “Is it true that NPC's in the Adventure Paths are bisexual unless otherwise stated?”

James Jacobs: “Sort of. More accurately, unless their sexuality plays into something significant of their character (such as them being in an established relationship), it's not something we decide for NPCs. They can be whatever the GM wants them to be, which isn't EXACTLY the same as ‘always bisexual.’ The ‘Always bisexual’ is a simplification.”[31]

In my home D&D setting, after long struggles with what policy would be best, I have made it canon that 90% of NPCs are panromantic – ‘romantic’ because I prefer sex not to be a very big deal in my D&D games, ‘pan’ because it’s a little more intuitively inclusive than ‘bi’ – and the remaining 10% are evenly divided between some flavors of heteroromantic, homoromantic, or aromantic. Moreover, polyamory is well-accepted in society and by most deities. It would be nice for me to say that this is all for the purpose of representation and social justice, but in all honesty it’s just so the romance options for player characters are maximized, for the purpose of gameplay fun[32] – if you want to pursue an NPC romantically, it is almost certainly an option, even if they, or your own character, are already in a romantic relationship.

“This is a D&D adventure, not therapy.”[33]

The characters of the party that Tilly puts together, the characters played by her friends, are a queer crew in the tradition of Dorothy’s Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. They include Orcus the retired demon Overlord of the Underworld (a name drawn from the canon of D&D, where he is the demon king of the undead); Lilith, a demon queen whose father is “the Devil”[34] (a name drawn from real-world mythology, most famously the alleged first wife of Adam in certain apocrypha of Judaism/Christianity, banished from the Garden of Eden for insisting on being on top when making love to Adam); and Kaliope, a dark elf, a race shunned and considered evil by others.

A digression on race: the script calls for Kaliope to be a dark elf, or drow, but that comes with its own heap of issues, rooted in the issues with the drow species itself. Evil spider-worshipping matriarchal dominatrices with literal black skin (sometimes dark indigo in illustrations, never brown) are not a concept that would pass muster with a cultural sensitivity consultant today[35]. Two obvious options present themselves for casting Kaliope in this play as written: either put a white person in blackface, which has obvious problems; or cast a Black person as Kaliope, which has different, equally serious problems.

Casting a non-Black person as a drow and painting them with blackface runs into the issue that blackface has historically been used in minstrel shows to make fun of and oppress actual Black people, and is therefore utterly verboten. In the second season episode of the television sitcom Community, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”, the Asian actor Ken Jeong, playing Asian character Ben Chang, who was in turn playing drow character Brutalitops the Magician by coming to a D&D game in blackface. Ultimately, this was poking fun at the Chang character’s cluelessness and at the issues inherent with the drow in D&D, but the episode was nonetheless pulled from Netflix and Hulu in 2020.[36] No production of She Kills Monsters could possibly get away with casting Kaliope as a person in blackface makeup.

Casting a Black person as Kaliope presents problems which reflect the core issue with the drow species in D&D. Drow are usually depicted as literally black of skin, or sometimes some shade of dark indigo, no hue ever found on any real-world human – but the point remains that a species of usually-evil[37] antagonists use a visual shorthand that describes an actual marginalized group of humans.

Why did the 2023 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feature no drow, despite an excursion to the Underdark, their traditional stomping grounds?[38] After the movie came out, I saw a solid half dozen articles wondering why the drow Drizz’t Do’Urden, possibly the most famous D&D character, did not make an appearance in this movie. The obvious answer: good luck casting a drow in anything without radically updating their appearance!

Maybe you could get away with casting a Black person and painting them with black- or indigo-face makeup – but probably best not to risk it.

So the BAVPA performance of She Kills Monsters, among others, went with the somewhat less contentious casting choice making Kaliope a regular – i.e., with a beigey skin tone – elf, not a dark elf.[39]

At the end of the play, Tillius turns out to be, by some strange turn of events, the evil five-headed dragon god Tiamat (another name and concept drawn from D&D’s canon: Tiamat is the goddess of evil dragons[40]) that the party has been questing to defeat for the duration of the play – and to have been Tiamat since at least the earliest part of the quest, because Tillius casting magic missile, a spell not traditionally castable by paladins, is cited as evidence for Tillius being Tiamat[41]. This could potentially add a new twist, a new facet, to the exploration of Tilly’s psyche. Did Tilly see herself as a multi-headed dragon?

The five heads of Tiamat are played by doubling the actors of Agnes’s party – Tillius/Tilly, Lilith/Lily, Orcus/Ronnie, Kaliope/Kelly, and Chuck the DM. Might this represent Tilly’s struggles with friendship – or Agnes’s struggles with D&D?

Post-Script: Disability Is Queer, Too!

Disability is baked into She Kills Monsters. The script casts Kelly, the beautiful human player corresponding to the beautiful dark elf game character Kaliope, as a girl in a wheelchair (Kaliope does not need or use a wheelchair). BAVPA instead cast Kelly as walking with crutches[42].

Georgia State University transferred the wheelchair use to Tilly and Tillius[43] – although it was not well-supported in 1995, playing a character with a wheelchair is perfectly possible in this day and age, thanks to a well-known fan-made unofficial “Combat Wheelchair” supplement for D&D 5th Edition[44], which naturally has been the subject of many angry tirades from grognards who somehow contrive to find wheelchairs less realistic than orcs, magic missile, liches, dragons, meddlesome gods, hungry gelatinous cubes, demons, and polymorphing people into chickens.

Works Cited

Beuth, K. (Director). (2023, May 31). She Kills Monsters. (BAVPA 11th/12th Grade Theater Department, Performer) BAVPA Black Box Theater, Buffalo, NY, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmQxs99zWGU

Bulmahn, J. (2009). Pathfinder: Core Rulebook. Paizo Publishing.

City Springs Theatre Company . (2022). She Kills Monsters. Georgia, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7deLsNgb9Q

Cook, D. (1989). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monstrous Compendium. TSR, Inc.

Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2000). Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2003). Dungeons & Dragons v3.5: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1995, April 28). 149A-SF-106204. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3866268-TSR-Pt-4.html

Goldstein, J., & Daley, J. F. (Directors). (2023). Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves [Motion Picture].

Gygax, G. (1977-1979). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide. TSR, Inc.

Gygax, G., & Arneson, D. (1974). Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set. TSR, Inc.

Heinsoo, R., Collins, A., & Wyatt, J. (2008). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Jacobs, J. (2015, April 5). Ask *James Jacobs* ALL your Questions Here! Retrieved from Paizo Discussion Forums: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page=1082?Ask-James-Jacobs-ALL-your-Questions-Here#54090

Maas, J. (2020, June 26). Netflix Pulls ‘Community’ Episode ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Due to Blackface Scenes. The Wrap. Retrieved from https://www.thewrap.com/community-advanced-dungeons-and-dragons-episode-removed-netflix-blackface/

Mearls, M. C. (2024). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.

Mearls, M., Crawford, J., Perkins, C., & Wyatt, J. (2014). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.

Nguyen, Q. (2011, November 4). She Kills Monsters. Samuel French, Inc.

Nguyen, Q. (2012, November 14). She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition. Samuel French, Inc.

Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ysDrH2vqKz6NSGkf3_0WX5tV-Ch_t_N_

Wiktionary. (2023, May 5). grognard. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grognard

Macbeth and Lord of the Rings

for Shakespeare For Future English Teachers class, 2022

Great Fangorn Forest to High Isengard Shall Come (And Then, For Good Measure, to Helm’s Deep Shall Come)

In The Two Towers, the second book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the eponymous towers[1] meets its end in a most Macbeth-inspired way. No prophecy is involved in the Tolkien here, but a clear line can be traced from one of the witches’ masters’ prophecies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the fate of the tower of Orthanc and the fortress of Isengard.[2]

The third apparition conjured by the witches – the Child crowned, with a tree in his hand – informs Macbeth that he “shall never vanquish’d be until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him.”[3] In the end, the prophecy of Macbeth’s doom is fulfilled when the armies of Macbeth’s enemies take branches and boughs from Birnam Wood and march holding them, to disguise their number as they approach Macbeth’s stronghold at Dunsinane.[4] This was, in Tolkien’s opinion (at least when he was a boy), an utter cop-out; absolutely dodgy, wimpy writing.

Tolkien therefore devised a race of tree-people who dwell in Fangorn forest in Middle-Earth called Ents, who, after holding an Entmoot to discuss the matter at length, elect to march on Isengard, where the antagonist Saruman dwells and builds his forces. And so it is that the forest of Fangorn literally comes to Isengard and destroys it.[5] The parallel is not a coincidence.

(Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2002)

Tolkien wrote to his friend W.H. Auden that the Ents’ “part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schoolboy days with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill’: I long[ed] to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.”[6]

The Ents then send the Huorns of Fangorn forest – slower-moving and less sapient tree-people shepherded by the Ents[7] – to assist the protagonists at the Battle of Helm’s Deep[8], so Tolkien wrote himself a nice little twofer of biting his thumb at Shakespeare.

The Hand of No Man Shall Harm the Witch-King of Angmar

There is at least one other clear and obvious Macbeth parallel in Tolkien’s Legendarium. This one does involve a prophecy, but we do not have the same clear word from Tolkien’s own hand that he was inspired by one-upping Shakespeare.

In The Silmarillion, a prequel to The Lord of the Rings, the elf Glorfindel issues a prophecy about the Witch-King of Angmar, chief of Sauron’s Nazgûl, that "not by the hand of man shall he fall."[9] Compare this to the prophecy given to Macbeth by the bloody Child apparition, “laugh to scorn/The power of man, for none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth.”[10] Both Macbeth and the Witch-King of Angmar interpret their respective prophecies as foretelling total invulnerability and invincibility, and both of their interpretations are proven incorrect by an unforeseen twist that fulfills the prophecy yet allows for their dooms.

Macbeth ends up executed by Macduff, a man who is not technically of woman born, but instead from woman “untimely ripp’d” – transitioned from fetus to baby via a C-section.[11]

Similarly, the Witch-King of Angmar is killed at the Battel of Pelennor Fields, not by a man, but by the tag-team of the Hobbit Meriadoch Brandybuck (using an ancient magical blade given to him by Tom Bombadil, which undid some of the magic protecting the Witch-King) and the woman Éowyn (who lands the killing blow using a mundane sword, presumably procured the old-fashioned way from the armory of the soldiers of Rohan). Tolkien, being a professional academic linguist, was very deliberately clever about his use of the word “man” here – Merry is a man by gender, but is not of the race of Man; while Éowyn is of the race of Man, but is not a man by gender; apparently two man-in-one-sense-but-not-in-the-other adds up to close enough to zero men to successfully fulfill Glorfindel’s prophecy. The Witch-King of Angmar, not being a linguist, was taken by surprise by this turn of events.[12]

(Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003)

In Pedagogy

A substantial discussion could be driven by prophecy in fiction, starting with the five prophecies in Macbeth (by my count[13]); continuing on with the parallel of one of them with Glorfindel’s prophecy about the Witch-King of Angmar; open an exploration of ancient Greek stories where struggling against fate was common (considering all the stories featuring the Oracle at Delphi, with a bonus sprinkle of the story of Cassandra for taste), and stories from other mythologies featuring prophecy; delve into how prophecy/fate can interact with free will[14]; there’s a whole slew of discussions and lessons one can engage in about prophecy.

While Tolkien is perhaps not as relevant to the youth of today as he was when he was first published, or when Peter Jackson’s film adaptations came out in the early ‘00s, there should certainly still be some students familiar with these works. Painting pictures from Tolkien could help get some students more invested in the Shakespeare. Certainly, using scenes or stills from Peter Jackson’s movies could help to illustrate the parallel concepts from Macbeth (perhaps one might make a video of clips of the Ent attack on Isengard and the Huorn intervention at Helm’s Deep and putting it on repeat before the beginning of the class period that we’re to discuss Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, and leaving it playing as students trickle in).

On the other hand, letting it be known that one parallel event in Tolkien derived from Tolkien’s scorn for how Shakespeare wrote it (even if that scorn originated when Tolkien was a youth, it was still expressed when he was an adult) could be counterproductive, so this merits some thought and care.

Certainly, painting a picture of the long tapestry of human literature (in the very broadest sense here – plays, epics, poetry, novels, television, movies, everything) as an unending chain of creators, inspired by one another and answering one another, could serve pedagogy, especially if I make note to explicitly include my students in the chain. In short, if riffing on Shakespeare was good enough for Tolkien to be literature (and riffing on actual history, as he did in very many of his plays, was good enough for Shakespeare to be literature), riffing on either of them is certainly good enough for my students to be literature.

Works Cited

Banks, F. (2013). Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Jackson, P. (Director). (2002). The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers [Motion Picture].

Jackson, P. (Director). (2003). The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King [Motion Picture].

Pullman, P. (1995-2000). His Dark Materials. Northern Lights/The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass. United Kingdom: Scholastic Print.

Shakespeare, W. (1606). The Tragedy of Macbeth. London.

Tolkien, J. (1954). The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J. (1954). The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J. (1955, June 7). Letter 163. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. (C. Tolkien, & H. Carpenter, Eds.)

Tolkien, J. (1955). The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Tolkien, J. (1977). The Silmarillion. (C. Tolkien, & G. G. Kay, Eds.) London: George Allen & Unwin.

Defying Normativity: Queerness as Strength in Wicked

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 you

If 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 deed

Will 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

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