‘Vicious’ queens in search of intergenerational belonging – chosen families, everyday humour, and wisdom

Accelerated by the impact of Anglo-American gay liberation in the 1970s, the figure of the effeminate homosexual male – or queen – has become increasingly culturally outdated. I’m not talking here about drag queens, or those gay men who celebrate a performative style of camp through cross-dressing. Rather, I am talking specifically about gender nonconforming gay males (Vytniorgu, 2024).

Queens are routinely dismissed – and stereotyped – by more masculine gay men as embarrassingly flamboyant and bitchy, invariably sexually ‘passive’ or ‘bottoms’, and a throwback to less enlightened times. As far back as the 1980s, more masculine gay men (i.e. those who saw themselves as undifferentiated from straight men apart from their sexual orientation) argued that a ‘positive gay identity attempts to free men from the tyranny of rigid role-playing (i.e. as stud or queen)’ (Wooden & Parker, 1983, p. 145).

Entry for ‘S’ in the GayBC Book, 1966 (‘swish’ was another American term in the 1950s and 1960s for an effeminate homosexual male)

Importantly, this kind of role playing was seen to be a rigidity which was ‘directly opposed to the goals of the modern gay movement’ (Wooden & Parker, 1983, p. 145). In other words, queens have gradually come to occupy a marginal space in Anglo-American gay cultures, frequently excluded by other gay men as sexual partners and from wider gay chosen families in which masculinity and sexual versatility are prized. 

            I think this antipathy to the queen explains in large part viewer reactions to the British TV sitcom, Vicious (2013-16) – a comedy that features two older gay men ‘role-playing’ what some saw as an outdated ‘patriarchal heterosexual couple’ in which Freddie (Ian McKellan) plays the supposedly bread-winning husband and Stuart (Derek Jacobi) the effeminate, domesticated ‘wife’ (Kies, 2020). The British art critic Brian Sewell dismissed the series, which was originally titled Vicious Queens, as a ‘regressive representation of gay men’ (Kies, 2020, p. 3).

And yet such dismissal ignores the subversive impact of Freddie’s and Stuart’s relationship. The premise of the comedy is that it’s precisely the ‘heteronormative’ dynamic of their homosexuality that leads to a broader re-imagining of how queer chosen families might nurture intergenerational belonging through humour and the everyday. Freddie and Stuart represent a generation of British gay men whose homosexuality was once criminalised; as Stuart quips, ‘isn’t it lovely that they don’t herd us into police vans and throw us into prison anymore?’ (Series 1, Ep. 5). As such, it’s unsurprising that Freddie and Stuart have developed a chosen family to act as a ‘buffer against the negative effects of stigma and homophobia’ (Hull & Ortyl, 2019, p. 32). But one of the distinguishing features of the chosen family in Vicious is that it’s composed primarily of non-LGBTQ+ people, with Freddie and Stuart at the helm.

The chosen family in Vicious, with Freddie and Stuart at the centre

The mixed nature of Freddie’s and Stuart’s chosen family is important. Where sociologists have argued for the importance of intergenerational bonds among LGBTQ+ people for transmitting queer histories and shoring up past progress against an uncertain future, the intergenerational dynamics in Vicious rely on the ‘everyday, quotidian exchange’ among gay and non-gay people of different generations (Farrier, 2015, p. 1404). In Vicious, this focus on the everyday is enabled by the comedic relationship between Freddie and Stuart, characterised by verbal sparring and frequent put-downs that often impact – but never surprise – their collection of friends to whom they play host in their apartment. These include the masculine heterosexual young man – Ash (Iwan Rheon), their friend Violet (Frances de la Tour), and their other friends, Penelope (Marcia Warren) and Mason (Philip Voss). Within the chosen family unit, Stuart’s effeminacy and domestic role is simply accepted, as is Freddie’s more masculine persona, albeit comically rendered. Indeed, the series insists that this dynamic has always existed, through humorous flashbacks to their younger selves in the 1960s.

Older and younger Freddie (Luke Tredaway) and younger (Samuel Barnett) and older Stuart

But the humour also fosters a focus on generating wisdom out of everyday situations in which everyone in the chosen family – straight, bisexual, or homosexual – can be involved. This attention to wisdom shifts the emphasis from using the transmission of queer histories to structure intergenerational exchanges, to a broader interest in what it means to live well, regardless of sexuality.

Much of the plot in Vicious is driven by the deepening friendship between Ash (straight) and Freddie and Stuart (gay), with a bidirectional intergenerational dynamic structuring the shared exploration of wisdom and everyday life. For his part, Ash is grateful to Freddie and Stuart for taking him under their wing and helping him with his vocational and romantic problems: ‘You know how important you’ve both been to me these last few months. I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t met you when I moved to London’ (Series 1, Ep. 5).

But Freddie and Stuart also learn life lessons from being around Ash. As the series develops, it becomes increasingly clear that Freddie and Stuart feel somewhat adrift in a culture they cannot easily navigate. To echo Margaret Mead’s concept of prefigurative change, in which young and old must ‘forge new patterns of communication’, Freddie and Stuart cannot ‘understand the experience of today’s youth, because their own frame of reference comes from a cultural milieu that is now a decade or two [or more] removed from this profoundly changed time’ (Russell & Bohan, 2005, pp. 2-3).

This sense of feeling adrift helps to stimulate the rich and humorous dialogue central to Vicious. As Stuart tells Ash in the first episode, it’s crucial to ‘interact, ask questions’, and talk to each other. With a dash of camp fun slipped into the mix, characters of different generations in Vicious can find ways to belong with each other in a world that rapidly requires thoughtful – and sometimes comical – responses to help navigate a path in life.

For example, in a bid to stall or even reverse their declining physical powers, Freddie and Stuart join a gym but are quickly accosted by a handsome young gym trainer who persuades Freddie and Stuart to subscribe to an exorbitantly priced membership scheme targeted at the over-50s. Sensing mischief, Ash steps in and confronts this trainer – who happens to be gay – and warns him to back off. Once alone with Freddie and Stuart, Ash prompts them to discuss their motivations for joining the gym, which they now realise was probably unnecessary although founded on good intentions (to be physically well enough to take care of each other). Ash’s intervention enables Freddie and Stuart to see behind their actions to their motives, in the process deepening their love for each other. Ash, meanwhile, discloses his own insecurity and wonders if Freddie and Stuart were so attracted to the gym trainer because he was also gay, which Freddie and Stuart refute.

Stuart and Ash at the gym

The chosen family in Vicious is therefore not reliant on sexual similarity for its members to connect to each other. Humorous dialogue and the homely setting of Freddie’s and Stuart’s Covent Garden apartment set the scene for nurturing intergenerational belonging on an everyday, domestic level that spills out to the wider world. But unlike other, more visible forms of intergenerational dynamics involving LGBTQ+ people, Vicious largely eschews discussion of histories of oppression and prejudice, in favour of a focus on the ‘everyday, quotidian exchange’. In turn, this leads to reflecting on issues of wisdom, or leading a happy life and the ability to put things into perspective, including the ageing process.

And while Freddie, but especially Stuart, can be considered a queen, the comedy salvages and even celebrates a ‘pre-gay’ mode of male homosexual bonding that for many has lost its purpose in contemporary gay culture. ‘Pre-gay’ denotes pre-gay liberation of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the identity label gay not only newly described male homosexual behaviour, but also represented a new political standpoint in relation to gender expression and sexual role. What makes Freddie’s and Stuart’s relationship so distinctive is that it seems to have lasted for so long precisely because they have used defined and largely traditional, heteronormatively gendered roles to carve out a space of belonging for their chosen family. While expressed slightly differently depending on which culture it developed in, the ‘pre-gay’ model nevertheless held a space for effeminate male homosexuals in ways that the rise of masculinist gay types (such as the ‘clone’) rejected (Stines, 2017; Guasch, 2011; Levine, 1998). Vicious, like other TV comedies of the time such as Simon Doonan’s Beautiful People (2008-09), holds such a space in which the queen is accepted and valued, not ridiculed and excluded.

As a contribution to mediations on queer kinship, Vicious invites viewers to question their assumptions of what a ‘good’ gay relationship looks like, what a queer chosen family is and can do, and how intergenerational dynamics can be driven by a focus on the everyday as much as, if not more than, a focus on transmitting queer histories.

References

Farrier, S. (2015). Playing with time: Gay intergenerational performance work and the productive possibilities of queer temporalities. Journal of Homosexuality, 62(10), 1398-1418.

Guasch, O. (2011). Social stereotypes and masculine homosexualities: The Spanish case. Sexualities, 14(5), 526–543.

Hull, K. E., & Ortyl, T. A. (2019). Conventional and cutting-edge: Definitions of family in LGBT communities. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 16, 31-43.

Kies, B. (2020). A Vicious viewership: Transatlantic television audiences and LGBTQ identities. VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, 9(17), 134-145.

Levine, M. P. (1998). Gay macho: The life and death of the homosexual clone. New York: New York University Press.

Russell, G. M., & Bohan, J. S. (2005). The gay generation gap: Communicating across the LGBT generational divide. Angles: The Policy Journal of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, 8(1), 1-8.

Stines, S. (2017). Cloning fashion: Uniform gay images in male apparel. Critical Studies in Men's Fashion, 4(2), 129-151.

Vytniorgu, R. (2024a). Effeminate belonging: Gender nonconforming experience and gay bottom identities. Emerald.

Wooden, W. S. & Parker, J. (1983). Men behind bars: Sexual exploitation in prison. Da Capo Press.