[Ads-l] queerbatiing, to queerbait, gay-vague

[Benjamin Barrett]

Queerbait (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/queerbait) refers to someone attractive to queers.

Based on the Wikipedia article for red-baiting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-baiting), it seems that queerbaiting means to accuse someone of queerness or to persecute them for it.

In 1985, Margaret Rivka Polatnick wrote "Strategies for Women's Liberation: A Study of a Black and a White Group of the 1960’s” with the following use (http://bit.ly/2czEi5V):

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Queer-baiting is no different from Red-baiting,” the women responded.
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More recently, though, this word has taken on a new meaning. Today Vox has an article on how this applies to the Harry Potter universe. 

"The Harry Potter universe still can't translate its gay subtext to text. It's a problem.” by Aja Romano (http://bit.ly/2c3G0KJ)

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In fandom, there’s a well-known term for this mechanism of dangling [homoerotic] subtext in front of the audience and then withholding it in the text: queerbaiting. 
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Wiktionary provides the noun at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/queerbaiting with citations in 2013 and 2014; the term is not covered in the online Oxford Dictionaries.

On February 20, Anna Campbell discusses this and “gay vague” in "Queerbaited: Homoeroticism & Homophobia in Supernatural in the Age of the Internet” (http://bit.ly/2c4jctv):

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...the “gay vague”. The student defined it as homoeroticism that purposely toes the line between subtext and overt text but never fully crosses it in order to stay “safe” for heteronormative audiences yet still enticing to gay ones, which to my ears immediately brought to mind a different but similar term I had been seeing all over my Tumblr dashboard online….

At the heart of it, however, I think “queerbaiting” describes an emotion more than anything else: the sense of betrayal that happens after being driven to care about a story in a certain way to only discover that its creator doesn’t share the same ideals as you at all. It’s a term, ultimately, to describe broken trust…. For the problem with “queerbaiting” is that it doesn’t address the issue of why, why might a creator not be inclined to follow through on their perceived build up of same sex romance,...
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On June 30, Anonymous asks (http://bit.ly/2cq0D1I):

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I’m not saying it wasn’t queerbaited but would Stiles being bi add anything to the show?
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Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org