{"id":1249982,"date":"2025-03-25T10:27:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T10:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/?p=1249982"},"modified":"2025-03-25T10:27:10","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T10:27:10","slug":"is-the-controversial-white-lotus-hookup-the-end-of-queerbaiting-backlash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/is-the-controversial-white-lotus-hookup-the-end-of-queerbaiting-backlash\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Controversial \u2018White Lotus\u2019 Hookup the End of Queerbaiting Backlash?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Credit: Fabio Lovino\/HBO<\/p>\n

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Episode Six <\/a>of The White Lotus Season Three.<\/p>\n

It started from the very first episode. \u201cDude, long plane rides make me so fucking horny,\u201d Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) declares, out of the blue, in the third-season premiere of The White Lotus. \u201cIt\u2019s like, a lot of hot women, away from home, no one to answer to, acting all anonymous,\u201d he continues, while unsubtly adjusting his package as he reclines on a deck chair by the pool of a lavish Thailand resort. Saxon is talking to his younger brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola). On the face of things, the two siblings are very different: Lochlan is a shy, skinny twink in his senior year of high school, who seems happy to slip by unnoticed. Saxon is the archetypal frat bro turned finance bro, who is fueled on protein shakes and recites talking-points plucked from manosphere podcasts. He\u2019s the type of entitled WASP-y guy who seems to have had everything handed to him, and who demands attention everywhere he goes.<\/p>\n

Later in the first episode, the brothers\u2019 conversation turns to masturbation. \u201cThe real question is, how the fuck am I going to jerk off with you in here all week,\u201d Saxon asks, before announcing he\u2019s going to the bathroom to do just that. Lochlan doesn\u2019t reply, but he seems intrigued, and tries to catch a glimpse of his brother\u2019s nude body through the door. This moment convinced fans that, after flirting with an incest storyline last year between cheeky Essex lad Jack (Leo Woodall) and his \u201cuncle\u201d (Tom Hollander), showrunner Mike White might have decided to go all the way this time.<\/p>\n

More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the show, Saxon and Lochlan are both presenting as straight \u2014 especially alpha-male Saxon, who is on a mission to get his little brother laid on their trip. He gives Lochlan a series of bizarre pep talks, telling him that the women they meet are \u201cthirsty for some young fucking cum\u201d and that \u201cpeople want to be used.\u201d Fans have been fixated by the sexual subtext between them and, in Episode Six, they were vindicated when it\u2019s revealed that the brothers hooked up in a drug-fueled haze.<\/p>\n

On my social feed, there had been widespread fan enthusiasm for the prospect of the brothers hooking up. Horniness on the internet isn\u2019t unusual, of course, but the total absence of accusations that this plotline is\u00a0 \u201cqueerbaiting\u201d\u2014 a term describing the practice of simulating or teasing queerness in art for commercial gain \u2014 has been surprising. Over the last decade, the reaction to LGBTQ+ representation has been defined by mistrust \u2014 especially toward artists who have hinted at queerness in their work, but gone to great lengths to avoid defining themselves that way publicly. Audiences are right to demand more and better queer representation, but the\u00a0 discourse around this particular topic has often felt uncompromising and, sometimes, harsh. Does the public embrace of the Ratliff brothers\u2019 bizarre dynamic suggest that audiences are ready to be more flexible?<\/p>\n

SINCE ITS FIRST SEASON, The White Lotus has been one of TV\u2019s most-memed shows \u2014 even by HBO\u2019s zeitgeist-capturing standards. Last week, Schwarzenegger approvingly shared<\/a> a meme on X \u2014 a still image of Saxon and Lochlan at the \u201cfull moon party\u201d which eventually led to their hookup, with the caption: \u201cCall Me By Our Same Last Name.\u201d<\/p>\n

The similarities with Call Me By Your Name \u2014 Luca Guadagnino\u2019s 2017 romance film based on Andr\u00e9 Aciman\u2019s novel \u2014 are obvious, mostly because Schwarzenegger and Nivola in their physicality roughly resemble the film\u2019s leads, Armie Hammer and Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet. Throughout its run, CMBYN was beset by accusations of queerbaiting and queer erasure. The main criticisms were twofold: First, both actors were, at least publicly, straight. And secondly, there was a notable lack of gay sex in the film. Instead, young Elio (Chalamet) was seen having sex with a woman, then sniffing underwear that had been worn by the object of his affection, Oliver (Hammer), before most famously masturbating into a peach. Guadagnino chose to omit the book\u2019s crucial aftermath of the peach scene, where Oliver finds the peach and then greedily sinks his teeth into it. The director later told The Hollywood Reporter that he left out more explicit sex scenes so as to \u201ccreate [a] powerful universality\u201d<\/a> in his movie: \u201cI didn\u2019t want the audience to find any difference or discrimination toward these characters.\u201d This angered fans and critics, such as The New Yorker\u2019s Richard Brody, who rejected<\/a> the film\u2019s \u201cempty, sanitized intimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the loud discourse around CMBYN, it wasn\u2019t until 2022, in an interview<\/a> with i-D Magazine, that Guadagnino was introduced to the term for the first time. (\u201cWhat did you say, \u2018queerbaiting?\u2019 What is that?\u201d he responded.) Since then, he has continued to bring queer stories to life with actors who \u2014 again, publicly \u2014 are known to be straight, most recently Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in Queer. But even Challengers \u2014 Guadagnino\u2019s 2024 sexy tennis flick, which pulsated with homoeroticism that was never acted upon \u2014 escaped criticisms that stalked his work in the previous decade. Why?<\/p>\n

\"Timoth\u00e9e<\/span><\/div>\n

Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name.<\/p>\n

The most obvious factor is a change in attitudes. Queerbaiting isn\u2019t only an accusation leveled at scripted TV dramas and films. In 2018, singer Rita Ora was accused of precisely the same offense when she released a new single, \u201cGirls<\/a>.\u201d The lyrics of the song \u2014 featuring Cardi B, Bebe Rexha and Charli XCX \u2014 alluded to getting drunk and kissing girls, with Ora singing: \u201cI\u2019m 50-50 and I\u2019m never gonna hide it.\u201d The song, which was not lyrically dissimilar to Katy Perry\u2019s breakout hit \u201cI Kissed a Girl,\u201d received intense criticism online. Singer Hayley Kiyoko wrote on Twitter<\/a> that \u201cGirls\u201d did \u201cmore harm than good\u201d for the LGBTQ+ community. \u201cA song like this just fuels the male gaze while marginalizing the idea of women loving women \u2026 I don\u2019t need to drink wine to kiss girls; I\u2019ve loved women my entire life,\u201d she wrote, adding that the song \u201cbelittles and invalidates the very pure feelings of an entire community.\u201d When Ora eventually apologized<\/a> and clarified that she has had sexual relationships with women, it felt like it had been blown out of proportion.<\/p>\n

Something similar happened to Jameela Jamil in 2020, when she agreed to front Legendary \u2014 a Netflix competition show about ballroom culture, an LGBTQ+, Black and Latinx subculture that emerged in the Sixties and Seventies in New York. After backlash from fans who presumed Jamil was straight, she came out as queer herself, saying<\/a> that \u201cit\u2019s not easy within the South Asian community to be accepted\u201d and that nobody in her family was \u201copenly out.\u201d Again, in hindsight, the reaction seemed severe.<\/p>\n

On TV shows and in films, accusations of queerbaiting are difficult to untangle from the seemingly endless debate over \u201cgay actors for gay roles.\u201d Queerness being merely teased or sanitized is one thing, but the reception from LGBTQ+ audiences has been worse when the actors at the heart of a queer story aren\u2019t even (openly) queer themselves. (This is what happened<\/a> with the 2019 Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, starring Rami Malek.) Advocates for gay actors playing gay characters argue that there is a lack of roles for LGBTQ+ actors, and that too many of these limited opportunities go to actors who are straight. (An openly gay man has never won the Academy Award Best Actor, for example, but many straight actors have won for playing gay roles, from Sean Penn to Tom Hanks.) Others argue that such a rigid requirement would deprive audiences of watching actors like Jonathan Bailey playing straight heartthrobs, as he often does, or that it gets in the way of the most basic tenet of acting \u2014 portraying someone who is different from you.<\/p>\n

In 2022, it seemed like this discourse reached a resolution point \u2014 or at least a moment to collectively \u201ctouch grass<\/a>\u201d\u2014 when Kit Connor, star of Netflix\u2019s teen drama Heartstopper, somewhat angrily came out as bisexual after pressure from fans, some of whom accused him of giving purposefully vague answers about his sexuality in interviews. \u201cI\u2019m bi. Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye,\u201d he posted<\/a>. While it\u2019s reasonable to suggest that those around Connor should have better prepared him for the speculation that would come with starring in one of TV\u2019s most-watched queer love stories, most people realized it\u2019s not reasonable to expect actors \u2014 especially teenagers \u2014 to come out publicly to satisfy our expectations.<\/p>\n

Last year, I attended a Q&A with Andrew Haigh, the director and writer of All of Us Strangers, the British romantic fantasy film starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. Haigh was asked about \u201cgay actors for gay roles,\u201d and gave an answer I found refreshing. I\u2019m paraphrasing here, but he basically said sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn\u2019t. For All of Us Strangers, he needed a gay actor \u2014 Scott, in this case \u2014 to play the character who was based on him, because that required a \u201cshorthand\u201d between them, he said. But for Mescal\u2019s character, this wasn\u2019t so important to him.<\/p>\n

It feels like a similar shift is happening with queerbaiting, where the rigidity is being taken out of the discourse. This might be because queer stories \u2014 whoever they\u2019re being portrayed by \u2014 are becoming more complex and nuanced. In Queer, Guadagnino\u2019s 2024 romance film starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey as doomed lovers in 1950s Mexico, we see the characters having plenty of sex. The film is anything but prudish, but also revolves around the question of whether young Allerton (Starkey) \u2014 a gorgeous young man that Lee (Craig) is infatuated with \u2014 is really queer at all. It\u2019s pretty difficult to level accusations of queerbaiting at a film when what it means to be queer is its central theme.<\/p>\n

And what about Challengers? On the surface, by the definitions of 2017 Twitter, the sexy tennis movie starring Josh O\u2019Connor and Mike Faist practically screams queerbaiting. Like the actors who play them, Patrick (O\u2019Connor) and Art (Faist) are ostensibly straight \u2014 despite the obvious homoeroticism between them as they battle it out on the court, take sweaty trips to the sauna together, and seductively share a churro stick<\/a>. Even so, the film\u2019s Very Online fandom didn\u2019t seem fussed.<\/p>\n

Unlike our White Lotus duo, Patrick and Art aren\u2019t blood relatives, but they might as well be. In an interview last year, Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes told me<\/a> that he sees them as \u201cbrothers\u201d and \u201corphans,\u201d who were neglected by their parents and effectively raised at a tennis academy. Near the start of the film, Patrick shares an oddly sweet story of when, as teenagers, he taught Art how to masturbate when they were bunking in a dorm room. \u201cThey\u2019ve gone through everything together, and they\u2019ve shared a lot of the intimacy that you share with somebody who you grew up with,\u201d Kuritzkes says. \u201cAnd whether we acknowledge it or not, in every friendship, and especially in every male friendship between two guys who have literally grown up together since puberty, there\u2019s an unspoken hum of eroticism and repression.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"(L<\/span><\/div>\n

Mike Faist as Art, Zendaya as Tashi, and Josh O\u2019Connor as Patrick in Challengers.<\/p>\n

There is something similar going on with the Ratliff brothers, whose parents are both preoccupied with their own crises \u2014 an FBI investigation, pill addictions, and their daughter, Piper, wanting to move to Thailand to join a monastery. In this void, Saxon seems to have taken it upon himself to teach Lochlan how to be a man \u2014 which, in his mind, involves big muscles, protein shakes, and lots of sex with women. (Or as he puts it: \u201cMoney, freedom, respect, and pussy.\u201d) And we\u2019re never quite sure the extent to which their relationship is sexual for Lochlan. Even in Episode Six, when he hooks up with Chloe \u2014 a beautiful French-Canadian model they befriended at the hotel \u2014 is he motivated by genuine desire? Or does he just want to impress his big brother? Saxon soon learns that, in a drug-fueled haze, his little brother jerked him off. Now that the \u201cunspoken hum\u201d of homoeroticism in their relationship has been acted upon, his performance of hypermasculinity starts to unravel.<\/p>\n

ULTIMATELY, SOME MIGHT ARGUE that queerbaiting has stopped being such a hot topic online because the LGBTQ+ community has bigger fish to fry in the current climate. But I\u2019m not totally convinced by that \u2014 Trump could be sending us to a gulag and I\u2019d still be spending my final moments arguing online with Gen Z about problematic age-gap relationships. No, I think that it\u2019s simply that the queer stories we\u2019re seeing onscreen, whether explicit or not, are more nuanced and interesting.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019ve become better viewers, too. On the whole, I think LGBTQ+ audiences are gradually approaching queer representation with less suspicion. So when someone like Joel Kim Booster shows up in the HBO finance drama Industry and gets his dick out in a sauna \u2014 in a steamy scene with Rob Spearing (Harry Lawtey), where there was an unexpected sexual tension between them \u2014 our first instinct isn\u2019t to think about everything that was missing, or search for offensive subtext, but to accept that it was, simply, pretty hot.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the Ratliff brothers, whether either of them is queer feels way less important compared to the fact that they\u2019re siblings. It\u2019s pretty difficult to get high-and-mighty about \u201cgay actors for gay roles!\u201d when confronted with incest. Here, it\u2019s helpful to consider the word \u201cqueer\u201d in terms of how it\u2019s often defined in academia \u2014 not only as an identifier or umbrella term, but as a force that is constantly evolving to question mainstream norms and conventions. The idea that there is potential for arousal and character development in that gray area \u2014 where the \u201cunspoken hum\u201d of homoeroticism meets friendship, or even brotherhood \u2014 feels more connected to that definition.<\/p>\n

As Saxon and Lochlan try to decipher what happened between them, we are asked to think about why we\u2019re aroused (or repulsed) by it. We\u2019re forced to confront our own complicated desires and taboos \u2014 and that\u2019s something you can\u2019t do while looking at everything in black and white.<\/p>\n

Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n