‘The Traitors’ Ushers in the Golden Age of Queer Villains—and It’s About Time
(Warning: Spoilers ahead for the current season of The Traitors.)
Television has never seen a social experiment quite like The Traitors. In Peacock’s hit reality competition series, stars from TV franchises as varied as Survivor, The Real World, Big Brother, Love Island, and The Real Housewives gather in a Scottish castle to partake in a modified Werewolf, a party game in which villagers must seek out the monster among them before they are picked off one by one. Because the contestants are given no clues as to the titular tricksters among them, misinformation and groupthink run rampant. Although the players fancy themselves astute judges of character, the delight of watching The Traitors is that the series reveals that people are rarely as smart as they think they are. Almost every Faithful, the show’s preferred sobriquet for its helpless innocents, join the show thinking they will very easily detect the liars among them. Most are pretty terrible at this, with a notable exception being the contestants from the show’s New Zealand offshoot, who are all so good it makes the show dull.
But among the maelstrom of buffoonery and hysteria, The Traitors has carved out a unique space for its LGBTQ+ cast members, who are subtly challenging the unwritten rules of queer media representation. If The Traitors thrives on treachery and deception, few seem more up to the mission than its LGBTQ+ hopefuls, who are more than ready to engage in some playful backstabbing in pursuit of outrageous fortune. The series’ willingness to let queer people get a bit nasty and dirty—but in a wholly low-stakes manner—is so enormously appealing because it offers something rarely seen on television: LGBTQ+ villains we can actually root for. We are allowed to love them and despise them (or perhaps feel a mixture of the two) without it being a comment on all queer people or a referendum on whether an entire community deserves rights, as has been the case too often in the past. Straight, cisgender people—particularly white men—have gotten to break bad for as long as popular media has existed, and The Traitors shows that queer people are ready for their chance.