The "mean gay" trope & Bowen Yang's portray of Pfannee

The "mean gay" trope refers to an extremely harmful trope that has plagued media for decades that portrays gay men as sassy, witty, shady, bitchy & cuttingly critical or dismissive of others drama queens, socially reinforcing these homophobic stereotypes.

It's completely undeniable that Pfannee, the character Bowen Yang portrays, is an obvious instance of this trope, and a particularly one-dimensional (its one dimension being "being the mean gay) one at that, and of course this couldn't have been more deliberate.

However, as a gay man myself, I have to say I absolutely adored it & found it very amusing.

I don't necessarily have a problem with pieces of media portraying homophobic tropes as long as I feel like I'm in on the joke, not the butt of it.

And in this case it definitely felt like the former, not the latter.

For starters, the casting of Bowen Yang for the role is just genius.

Not only does he do an outstanding, flawless job at portraying & paying homage to this media trope that, as harmful as it is, is also pretty iconic, just like queer-coded Disney villains are also iconic, but also, this is someone who is best known for having been making for years comedy sketches parodying gay culture that have gone viral & become super popular among gay men, who tend to find his sketches hilarious.

In the vast majority of instances I hate this trope & feel very negatively towards pieces of media that portray it, but the way Wicked has tackled the trope & the way the instance of the trope that I hate have tackled it are just night & die in my opinion.

It's also a sign of times progressing that it's now even possible to portray this trope in a way that feels fundamentally different from when it's done very problematically, twenty years ago I don't that would have been possible to pull off, any portraying of the trope would have felt homophobic.