Warning: Spoilers ahead for Episode Six of The White Lotus Season Three.
It started from the very first episode. “Dude, long plane rides make me so fucking horny,” Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) declares, out of the blue, in the third-season premiere of The White Lotus. “It’s like, a lot of hot women, away from home, no one to answer to, acting all anonymous,” 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’s the type of entitled WASP-y guy who seems to have had everything handed to him, and who demands attention everywhere he goes.
Later in the first episode, the brothers’ conversation turns to masturbation. “The real question is, how the fuck am I going to jerk off with you in here all week,” Saxon asks, before announcing he’s going to the bathroom to do just that. Lochlan doesn’t reply, but he seems intrigued, and tries to catch a glimpse of his brother’s 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 “uncle” (Tom Hollander), showrunner Mike White might have decided to go all the way this time.
In the show, Saxon and Lochlan are both presenting as straight — 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 “thirsty for some young fucking cum” and that “people want to be used.” Fans have been fixated by the sexual subtext between them and, in Episode Six, they were vindicated when it’s revealed that the brothers hooked up in a drug-fueled haze.
On my social feed, there had been widespread fan enthusiasm for the prospect of the brothers hooking up. Horniness on the internet isn’t unusual, of course, but the total absence of accusations that this plotline is “queerbaiting”— a term describing the practice of simulating or teasing queerness in art for commercial gain — has been surprising. Over the last decade, the reaction to LGBTQ+ representation has been defined by mistrust — 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 discourse around this particular topic has often felt uncompromising and, sometimes, harsh. Does the public embrace of the Ratliff brothers’ bizarre dynamic suggest that audiences are ready to be more flexible?
SINCE ITS FIRST SEASON, The White Lotus has been one of TV’s most-memed shows — even by HBO’s zeitgeist-capturing standards. Last week, Schwarzenegger approvingly shared a meme on X — a still image of Saxon and Lochlan at the “full moon party” which eventually led to their hookup, with the caption: “Call Me By Our Same Last Name.”
The similarities with Call Me By Your Name — Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 romance film based on André Aciman’s novel — are obvious, mostly because Schwarzenegger and Nivola in their physicality roughly resemble the film’s leads, Armie Hammer and Timothée 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’s 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 “create [a] powerful universality” in his movie: “I didn’t want the audience to find any difference or discrimination toward these characters.” This angered fans and critics, such as The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who rejected the film’s “empty, sanitized intimacy.”
Despite the loud discourse around CMBYN, it wasn’t until 2022, in an interview with i-D Magazine, that Guadagnino was introduced to the term for the first time. (“What did you say, ‘queerbaiting?’ What is that?” he responded.) Since then, he has continued to bring queer stories to life with actors who — again, publicly — are known to be straight, most recently Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in Queer. But even Challengers — Guadagnino’s 2024 sexy tennis flick, which pulsated with homoeroticism that was never acted upon — escaped criticisms that stalked his work in the previous decade. Why?
Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name. Sony Picture Classics
The most obvious factor is a change in attitudes. Queerbaiting isn’t 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, “Girls.” The lyrics of the song — featuring Cardi B, Bebe Rexha and Charli XCX — alluded to getting drunk and kissing girls, with Ora singing: “I’m 50-50 and I’m never gonna hide it.” The song, which was not lyrically dissimilar to Katy Perry’s breakout hit “I Kissed a Girl,” received intense criticism online. Singer Hayley Kiyoko wrote on Twitter that “Girls” did “more harm than good” for the LGBTQ+ community. “A song like this just fuels the male gaze while marginalizing the idea of women loving women … I don’t need to drink wine to kiss girls; I’ve loved women my entire life,” she wrote, adding that the song “belittles and invalidates the very pure feelings of an entire community.” When Ora eventually apologized and clarified that she has had sexual relationships with women, it felt like it had been blown out of proportion.
Something similar happened to Jameela Jamil in 2020, when she agreed to front Legendary — 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 that “it’s not easy within the South Asian community to be accepted” and that nobody in her family was “openly out.” Again, in hindsight, the reaction seemed severe.
On TV shows and in films, accusations of queerbaiting are difficult to untangle from the seemingly endless debate over “gay actors for gay roles.” 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’t even (openly) queer themselves. (This is what happened 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 — portraying someone who is different from you.
In 2022, it seemed like this discourse reached a resolution point — or at least a moment to collectively “touch grass”— when Kit Connor, star of Netflix’s 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. “I’m bi. Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye,” he posted. While it’s reasonable to suggest that those around Connor should have better prepared him for the speculation that would come with starring in one of TV’s most-watched queer love stories, most people realized it’s not reasonable to expect actors — especially teenagers — to come out publicly to satisfy our expectations.
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 “gay actors for gay roles,” and gave an answer I found refreshing. I’m paraphrasing here, but he basically said sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t. For All of Us Strangers, he needed a gay actor — Scott, in this case — to play the character who was based on him, because that required a “shorthand” between them, he said. But for Mescal’s character, this wasn’t so important to him.
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 — whoever they’re being portrayed by — are becoming more complex and nuanced. In Queer, Guadagnino’s 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) — a gorgeous young man that Lee (Craig) is infatuated with — is really queer at all. It’s pretty difficult to level accusations of queerbaiting at a film when what it means to be queer is its central theme.
And what about Challengers? On the surface, by the definitions of 2017 Twitter, the sexy tennis movie starring Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist practically screams queerbaiting. Like the actors who play them, Patrick (O’Connor) and Art (Faist) are ostensibly straight — 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. Even so, the film’s Very Online fandom didn’t seem fussed.
Unlike our White Lotus duo, Patrick and Art aren’t blood relatives, but they might as well be. In an interview last year, Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes told me that he sees them as “brothers” and “orphans,” 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. “They’ve gone through everything together, and they’ve shared a lot of the intimacy that you share with somebody who you grew up with,” Kuritzkes says. “And 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’s an unspoken hum of eroticism and repression.”
Mike Faist as Art, Zendaya as Tashi, and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in Challengers. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
There is something similar going on with the Ratliff brothers, whose parents are both preoccupied with their own crises — 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 — which, in his mind, involves big muscles, protein shakes, and lots of sex with women. (Or as he puts it: “Money, freedom, respect, and pussy.”) And we’re never quite sure the extent to which their relationship is sexual for Lochlan. Even in Episode Six, when he hooks up with Chloe — a beautiful French-Canadian model they befriended at the hotel — 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 “unspoken hum” of homoeroticism in their relationship has been acted upon, his performance of hypermasculinity starts to unravel.
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’m not totally convinced by that — Trump could be sending us to a gulag and I’d still be spending my final moments arguing online with Gen Z about problematic age-gap relationships. No, I think that it’s simply that the queer stories we’re seeing onscreen, whether explicit or not, are more nuanced and interesting.
And we’ve 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 — in a steamy scene with Rob Spearing (Harry Lawtey), where there was an unexpected sexual tension between them — our first instinct isn’t to think about everything that was missing, or search for offensive subtext, but to accept that it was, simply, pretty hot.
When it comes to the Ratliff brothers, whether either of them is queer feels way less important compared to the fact that they’re siblings. It’s pretty difficult to get high-and-mighty about “gay actors for gay roles!” when confronted with incest. Here, it’s helpful to consider the word “queer” in terms of how it’s often defined in academia — 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 — where the “unspoken hum” of homoeroticism meets friendship, or even brotherhood — feels more connected to that definition.
As Saxon and Lochlan try to decipher what happened between them, we are asked to think about why we’re aroused (or repulsed) by it. We’re forced to confront our own complicated desires and taboos — and that’s something you can’t do while looking at everything in black and white.
