Queer representation in Doctor Who

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LGBTQ representation in Doctor Who and related media

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File:LGBTQ In The Worlds Of Doctor Who - Doctor Who The Fan Show

The ongoing and improving portrayal and representation of queer identities in the Doctor Who universe affects how many fans experience Doctor Who, (DOC: LGBTQ In The Worlds Of Doctor Who, REF: Queers Dig Time Lords) and has been considered an important issue by 21st century showrunners such as Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall.

Overview

1963-1989

When interviewed for an episode of The Fan Show on LGBTQ+ issues and Doctor Who, Waris Hussein stated that Doctor Who in its original form, being a 1960s BBC children's programme, was not in his mind very associated with queer topics. The only connection he could make was that the character Tegana from Marco Polo was, in being "everything you could possibly associate with dark forces", a copious wearer of leather and thus a potential "fantasy figure" for gay audience members. (DOC: LGBTQ In The Worlds Of Doctor Who)

Within early decades of Doctor Who, some fans considered the Doctor to be asexual, using the Fourth Doctor's line in City of Death that Countess Scarlioni was "probably" beautiful as proof. (REF: The Television Companion) Tom Baker later identified that he played the Fourth Doctor to be asexual and clueless to human sexuality, sometimes for visual humour. (DOC: Getting Blood from the Stones) Sixth Doctor actor Colin Baker agreed with this theory, saying, "Love is a human emotion and the Doctor isn't human." (REF: The Television Companion) Asexuality is, however, a facet of human sexuality, and an estimated 0.4%-1% of adult British humans are asexual. Similarly, what Colin Baker describes is closer to aromanticism, which also manifests in a number of humans.

In an interview included in the DVD release of The Curse of Fenric, writer Ian Briggs revealed that the story's Dr Judson was intended to be — like the man he was based on, Alan Turing — struggling with his homosexuality, but this was ultimately cut as it was not at the time considered appropriate to discuss such topics in a family programme. Briggs instead transformed Turing's frustration at being unable to express his true sexual identity into Judson's frustration at being disabled. (DCOM: The Curse of Fenric)

According to Rona Munro, the writer of Survival, there was to be a lesbian subtext to the relationship between Ace and Karra. This raises the possibility of Ace being the first LGBT companion on screen. (DOC: Cat-Flap)

Through their continued use outside television, various characters from the original series of Doctor Who have since been identified as being queer. Liz Shaw, a Third Doctor era character, had a relationship with Patricia Haggard in When to Die, a 2014 P.R.O.B.E. direct-to-video film produced as a tribute to Liz Shaw's late actress, Caroline John. In the 2016 Short Trips audio story A Full Life, the Fourth Doctor companion Adric was depicted as bisexual, in a timeline where he had a wife and later a husband. Harry Sullivan, another Fourth Doctor companion, was originally planned to be referenced along with a boyfriend in the 2017 episode Knock Knock from Series 10. In the final version of the episode that was broadcast, a character named Harry still mentioned his grandfather and his grandfather's boyfriend, but the lines that identified the grandfather as Harry Sullivan were cut, on the grounds that viewers in 2017 may not remember a companion from forty years earlier.

1990-2004

Virgin Publishing's New Adventures saw the first unambiguous gay representation.

Russell T Davies' novel Damaged Goods put significant focus on British gay culture of the 1980s, with the Doctor's companion Chris Cwej going to a club. Established via Cwej happily having sex with David Daniels in Damaged Goods, Cwej's apparent bisexuality was reinforced in Bad Therapy and The Room With No Doors, the former showing an empath notice that Cwej is interested in both men and women and the latter having an implied sexual relationship between Cwej and Joel Mintz.

In 1995, the P.R.O.B.E. home video The Devil of Winterborne depicted a same-sex romance between its characters Luke Pendrell and Christian Purcell, including an onscreen kiss.

It was heavily controversial when the Eighth Doctor shared his first kiss with Grace Holloway in the 1996 TV Movie. (DOC: The Doctors Revisited - The Eighth Doctor) From the TV movie on, the Doctor had an active sexual and romantic life in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures and the BBC Wales version of Doctor Who, not always heterosexual. The novel The Year of Intelligent Tigers, for instance, showed the Eighth Doctor in a relationship with Karl Sadeghi intended by author Kate Orman to be romantic and sexual. Seeing I, another Orman-penned Eighth Doctor Adventure, portrayed companion Sam Jones as bisexual. In the novel, Sam had separate relationships with two male characters and a female character, Chris, over the course of her three year separation from the Doctor.

The 1999 comedic special The Curse of Fatal Death, written by Steven Moffat, doubled-down on the romantic potential introduced for the Doctor in the TV Movie, with the story's alternative Ninth Doctor intending to retire and marry his companion Emma, with whom he had developed a romantic and sexual relationship. Over the course of the special, after a series of regenerations, the Doctor eventually settles into a female incarnation who seems perfectly willing to go ahead with her marriage to Emma. Emma, on the other hand, seems uncomfortable at the idea, breaking the engagement.

Izzy Sinclair and Fey Truscott-Sade kiss in COMIC: Oblivion

Meanwhile, the ongoing Doctor Who Magazine comics introduced Izzy Sinclair as a companion for the Eighth Doctor. Izzy was decided to be a lesbian by Alan Barnes as he wrote her first story Endgame, and it was alluded to throughout her run of about six years. Izzy's character arc culminated in Oblivion with her finding the self-confidence to fully accept her homosexuality and kiss Fey Truscott-Sade. (Author's Commentary: Oblivion)

2005-2009

With Doctor Who's return to television in 2005, Captain Jack Harkness became the first televised non-heterosexual companion. From then on, the programme — not to mention its more adult-oriented spin-off, Torchwood, with Jack in the lead — contained many references to various sexual orientations, and demonstrated the evolution of views towards homosexuality in humanity's future. In including this representation, Russell T Davies's intention was to express that, in his own words, "sexuality is fluid".

In greater detail, Torchwood showed all members of the main cast in some sort of non-heterosexual situation in at least one episode of the series. (TV: Everything Changes, Day One, Cyberwoman, Greeks Bearing Gifts). One of the series' main focus was the relationship between Jack and his boyfriend, Ianto Jones, as well as including a subplot in Series 2 about John Hart, Jack's old male lover. (TV: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, etc) Steven Andrew, then Head of Drama and Acquisitions for CBBC, also requested that Davies put a gay character in The Sarah Jane Adventures, in an attempt to introduce a "normal" gay teenager into children's television. Before the show's cancellation, the plan was to have Luke Smith come out and eventually have Sanjay, his university dorm mate, mentioned in Death of the Doctor, become his boyfriend. (DCOM: Death of the Doctor)

Davies' tenure has not gone entirely without criticism, however. The series 1 episode Aliens of London was criticised for a scene where Rose Tyler calls the Ninth Doctor "gay" after expressing his displeasure at being slapped by Jackie Tyler, with objections coming from some fans regarding its use as an insult. Davies, an openly gay man himself, defended the line, saying he was trying to reflect how people talk in real life.

As revealed by Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat on the DVD commentary for Forest of the Dead, the original draft of the story would have revealed in his final scene that Lee McAvoy (Donna's husband within the virtual world in the Library's data core) was assigned female at birth in the real world. However, it was cut because they didn’t feel that it had been made clear enough that individuals were able to choose their appearance inside of the virtual reality of the Library, and that it would therefore be too confusing in the split-second framing of the reveal that the episode's structure necessitated. This would have made Lee one of the few portrayals of an explicitly transgender character on the show.

2010-2017

Beyond television, 2011 brought the First Doctor a gay male companion from the 1960s, Oliver Harper. Oliver comes out to the Doctor and Steven in Big Finish's The Cold Equations. He was ashamed and afraid to reveal his sexuality to them, in fear of getting kicked out of the TARDIS, as homosexuality was criminalised in his time, but the Doctor assures him that this persecution was "society's crime", and not Oliver's.

After becoming showrunner of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat continued to introduce a number of queer characters, such as Day of the Moon's Canton Everett Delaware III, whose longing to marry a man in 20th century America, where this is legally impossible, is given focus.

Most notable were the recurring characters of the Victorian Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint, a married lesbian couple, introduced as such in A Good Man Goes to War. A line in companion Clara Oswald's debut Asylum of the Daleks also established her, from the get-go, to have had experience with at least one woman, though her apparent bisexuality would only be elaborated on fleetingly in later stories, only becoming explicit and undeniable in Moffat's 2017 The Day of the Doctor novelisation.

In 2013, the spin-off audio Imaginary Boys featured a relationship between David Taylor and Lawrence. The story was partly inspired by events in Paul Magrs own life.

2014 saw the release of the comic The Swords of Kali, which featured Rani Jhulka, an openly lesbian woman and the final appearance onscreen of Jenny and Vastra in Deep Breath, although they would continue to appear in tie-in novels and comics.

In 2015, Rachel Edwards, a character in the Faction Paradox novel Head of State would be introduced as bisexual.

Bill Potts and Heather kiss in TV: The Doctor Falls.

The 2016 TV spin-off Class, written by Patrick Ness, featured a gay romance between central characters Charlie Smith and Matteusz Andrzejewski.

2017 saw the debut of televised Doctor Who's first openly gay full-time companion, Bill Potts. Created by Moffat, Bill's sexual preference was fully established from the beginning of her debut episode, The Pilot, and the character would go on to start a romance with Heather, with the novelisation of Twice Upon a Time revealing that the two of them eventually settled down together.

2017 also saw Big Finish introduce Orr to the Torchwood Three team, beginning with their Aliens Among Us series. Though they are an alien, and thus don't strictly count as non-binary human representation, Orr uses they/them pronouns and opts for Mx in place of binary gendered honourifics (like Mr, Ms or Mrs). The team quickly comes to support and validate them, even amid the initial confusion which some characters express on first encountering someone who does not fit neatly into any conception of gender with which they're yet familiar. It was also important to Russell T Davies that the new team include a particular kind of gay representation which he saw as important to the modern era: the older gay man, here St John Colchester, who is settled down with his husband, Colin.

Furthermore, the year would also have Rachel Edwards return in the 10,000 Dawns crossover Rachel Survived.

2018-present

2018 saw some of the first prominent and positive transgender human representation in Doctor Who thus far, with Russell T Davies' Sally Salter in PROSE: Rose and Alan Flanagan's Eleanor Blake in AUDIO: The Jabari Countdown.

Previously, trans representation had mostly been confined to one-off lines, like in Torchwood's Greeks Bearing Gifts, which many have read as derisive and transphobic. The character of a horse in A Town Called Mercy, who the Eleventh Doctor says prefers to be called Susan due to "life choices", has also attracted criticism as a wholly disrespectful joke. More debatable is the case of Cassandra O'Brien.Δ17, who refers in The End of the World to having once been a "little boy" and is simultaneously painted as a prime example of someone who's excessively modified their body, and said for this reason by Rose to be less than human; if the "little boy" line is taken at face value, Rose's treatment of Cassandra and her surgery becomes much more problematic, though it is far from certain that this was the intended reading of the scene, with the "boy" line quite possibly being meant to instead be one of Cassandra's egregious mistakes about her hazily-remembered life on Earth — meaning Cassandra would not constitute trans representation of any kind, good or bad.

It also saw the introduction of the first officially genderfluid character, Cá Bảy Màu, in the Faction Paradox story What Keeps Their Lines Alive.

Series 11 in 2019 saw multiple appearances of queer side characters, like Angstrom in The Ghost Monument, Frankie Ellish in Arachnids in the UK, or Richard in Resolution. The series also acknowledged the scholarly belief that James I was attracted to men to some degree. Ongoing criticism from within the queer community surrounded the nature of the representation in series 11: each time a queer character is introduced, usually by mentioning an off-screen partner, that character either dies themselves immediately thereafter, or their partner has. One commentator saw this as Chris Chibnall and company "throwing diverse characters into the plot without considering the consequences, or the tropes that they're fulfilling, by not taking enough care. [...] I don't think that they were actively, like, Let's murder all the queer characters, but they did that because they weren't paying attention." Furthermore, she continued, the queer characters seemed to be the only ones made to "randomly mention partners" as their death approaches.

Kiss between Adam Lang and Jake Willis inside the TARDIS in TV: Praxeus.

2020 saw the return of Captain Jack in Fugitive of the Judoon and the introduction of married couple Jake Willis and Adam Lang in Praxeus. Notably, both Adam and Jake survive to the end of the story.

Later that same year, Chris Cwej would make a return in Collective Unconscious, and would continue to feature in his own series, Cwej: The Series.

The Diary of River Song would introduce Luke Sullieman, who would show attraction to males and females.

While working on the 2020 Time War: Volume Three story Unity, producer/director Scott Handcock and Louise Jameson discussed whether to make Leela's relationship with Veega, a woman with whom she lived for many years and raised a child, overtly romantic. Ultimately, it was decided to leave the exact nature of the Leela and Veega's relationship open for interpretation. (BFX: Unity)

In contrast to the earlier story Good Companions giving Tegan Jovanka a husband in the form of a certain William Haybourne, with whom she'd grown old, the 2020 Doctor Who: Lockdown! story Farewell, Sarah Jane by Russell T Davies established that classic companions Tegan and Nyssa had become a couple living in Australia by the time of Sarah Jane Smith's funeral. The same webcast also officially established Luke Smith's sexuality, long after its intended exploration within The Sarah Jane Adventures series, with it being revealed that he and Sanjay had long since gotten married.

Tania Bell would be introduced as the first transgender companion in-universe in Stranded 1, and would enter a relationship with fellow Eighth Doctor companion Liv Chenka. Calypso Jonze, the first non-binary human character in-universe, would also be introduced in the same year, in the standalone The Lovecraft Invasion.

The Guide to the Dark Times, published in Doctor Who The Official Annual 2021, featured the Thirteenth Doctor encountering River Song with the two still considering themselves spouses.

Behind the scenes presence

Although Doctor Who would go a number of years after its inception before having LGBTQ individuals openly represented within its universe, members of the community have contributed their talents to the franchise for much longer, as far back, from a retroactive standpoint, as its very first episode. Waris Hussein, who directed the shows opening serial, An Unearthly Child, as well as several episodes of in the serial Morco Polo, made his sexuality public in the LGBTQ In The Worlds Of Doctor Who webcast, revealing that he had a partner.

In terms of openly gay individuals to have worked on the show, the earliest and most well known instance was the shows longest-running producer, John Nathan-Turner, who took on the role, having previously worked as a production member on the series, beginning from Season 18 and seeing out the final ten years of the shows "classic" run.

In the BBC Wales era of the show, the most famous presence was Russell T Davies, who revived Doctor Who with Series 1 and continued to act as showrunner until The End of Time. His tenure saw him bring LGBT representation into televised Who for the first time, beginning with the introduction of the shows first openly queer character during the first series, Jack Harkness, played by the openly gay John Barrowman. Before reviving Doctor Who, Davies wrote the Virgin New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, which touched upon several LGBT themes.

Another notable example is Mark Gatiss, who has served as a major creative force on Doctor Who since the 1990s, writing various stories for TV, audio, and prose format, not to mention a handful of acting roles. In 2003, he became the first openly gay actor in any medium to portray the Master, albeit a version from a parallel universe, in the Doctor Who Unbound audio story, Sympathy for the Devil, predating the first on screen instance with Derek Jacobi in Utopia. Another gay actor, Alex Macqueen, went on to play the Master for Big Finish, starting in 2012.

A large number of other gay actors have been cast in the series, especially during Davies' tenure, such as Andrew Hayden-Smith and Russell Tovey, both of whom played implicitly queer characters - in Hayden-Smith's case, with an explicit connection occurring in a scene that was ultimately cut. Said scene was later included in the Series 2 DVD boxset.

Some gay actors had also been cast in the classic series though, in most cases, these were before said actors had made their sexuality public, such as Matthew Waterhouse, who played Adric. Very few gay actors who appeared in the classic series had their sexual orientations known publically, primarily due to the different social climate of the time, where being gay was nowhere near as socially acceptable, with homosexual acts even still being considered a criminal offence in the UK during the first four years of the shows run. According to some accounts, Ian Marter was bisexual and kept it private to avoid public scrutiny.

One particularly notable individual was Michael Cashman, who was openly gay at the time of his casting in Time-Flight. He would later become a significant figure of LGBTQ+ history by being one of the founders of the charity Stonewall, which lobbies for the change of policies in the UK that are discriminatory towards LGBTQ+ individuals. His fellow founder, Ian McKellen, has also contributed to a story - by voicing the Great Intelligence in The Snowmen.

Max Adrian, a gay actor who played Priam in the 1965 serial The Myth Makers, was another of these rare exceptions as he was openly gay at the time of recording the story.

Another notable individual to lend their talents to the Virgin New Adventures range was openly gay Gareth Roberts, who later wrote for both televised Who as well as various episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Roberts' most recent planned contribution, to the Target Storybook (2019), was removed before publication in response to a series of transphobic tweets the writer had made in 2017. Roberts' removal further enforced the Doctor Who franchise's status as an ally to the transgender community.

Actress Pearl Mackie, who played the first televised lesbian companion Bill Potts, came out as bisexual in 2020.

Bethany Black was Doctor Who's first transgender actress on television, who played the character 474 in Sleep No More. Rebecca Root was the first trans actress on audio, voicing the character Sable in Zaltys and Cantico in Partisans.

In 2017, James Dreyfus, who had previously portrayed John Harrison in the final Sarah Jane Adventures story The Man Who Never Was, became the fourth openly gay actor to portray the Master, across three Big Finish audio stories, The Destination Wars, The Home Guard, and The Psychic Circus. Like Gareth Roberts before him, Dreyfus had generated a negative public reaction after he began voicing transphobic views on his Twitter feed. In July 2019, Big Finish released a statement reaffirming their stance on equality and diversity at the company, citing messages from fans "concerning the views expressed by individuals [they] have worked with". Likely as a result of this controversy, Dreyfus was left uncredited on the cover of The Psychic Circus. Dreyfus' future with Big Finish, as of this writing, remains unknown.

Previously, trans woman writer Lilah Sturges wrote the IDW comic story A Fairytale Life, although she had not come out at the time, and was credited under her birth name. More recently, Juno Dawson, another trans woman, wrote the BBC New Series Adventures novel The Good Doctor.

Writer and editor Hunter O'Connell came out as non-binary around the time of the release of the first few installments of Arcbeatle Press's prose Doctor Who spinoff Cwej: The Series, starring former Seventh Doctor companion Chris Cwej.

Under Chris Chibnall's tenure of televised Doctor Who, celebrity queer actors such as Alan Cumming and Stephen Fry have been cast in the series, as James I and C respectively.

Big Finish audio story The Lovecraft Invasion's non-binary supporting character Calypso Jonze was voiced by themselves non-binary actor Robyn Holdaway.

Actors to play the Doctor

To date, the only openly LGBTQ actors to have portrayed the Doctor in any medium remain Geoffrey Bayldon and Mark Gatiss. Bayldon was originally offered the role of the First Doctor, and ultimately voiced an alternate universe incarnation of him in the Doctor Who Unbound audio story Auld Mortality. Mark Gatiss, meanwhile, played a "generic" Doctor in the licensed parody sketch The Web of Caves.

A number of LGBTQ actors had been considered to play the Doctor on screen. Openly gay actors John Sessions and Tony Slattery were considered to play the Eighth Doctor.

Bill Baggs was set to create a 40th anniversary special in 2003 which would have featured bisexual actor Alan Cumming as the Ninth Doctor. The special was cancelled when the BBC instead commissioned Russell T Davies to revive the series.

One actor rumoured to play the Ninth Doctor before Christopher Eccleston's casting was now-openly genderfluid actor Eddie Izzard. As a reference to the rumour, Izzard's likeness was used to describe a potential ninth incarnation of the Doctor that the Eighth Doctor caught a glimpse of in the novel, The Tomorrow Windows.

Openly gay Russell Tovey, who had already appeared as Alonso Frame in Voyage of the Damned, auditioned to play the Eleventh Doctor, after being recommended to Steven Moffat's production team by Davies.

Openly gay Ben Daniels was among the actors shortlisted to play the Twelfth Doctor.

One of the actors tipped to play the Thirteenth Doctor was openly gay Ben Whishaw.

Reception

Accolades

Doctor Who received an Ally Award at the 2017 PinkNews Awards for its "long-standing LGBT inclusiveness". The award was picked up by Bill Potts actress Pearl Mackie, alongside executive producer Brian Minchin.

Controversies

As the subject of LGBTQ rights is still seen as a sensitive issue in many communities across the world, including countries where such issues are still seen as taboo, the DWU's queer representation has not gone without its controversies.

A scene in Doctor Who series 8 opener Deep Breath, where Madam Vastra gives oxygen to her wife Jenny Flint via a mouth-to-mouth kiss, generated 6 complaints to Ofcom, with grievances directed at what had been branded as the promotion of a "blatant gay agenda". Ofcom responded to these complaints by confirming that they would not investigating the case. The scene went on to recieve even more controversy when it was cut from Asian broadcasts of the episode in order to comply with Singapore's broadcast code.