At the time, Zak Snyder – who insisted his movie was neither homoerotic nor homophobic – told the press: “What’s more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?” First, what the hell is a “20-year-old boy”? I think that might point to the root of the problem right there. Much has been made about the fact that a movie that could otherwise have doubled as an International Male swimwear catalog went out of its way to present evil King Xerxes as a prissy, jewelry-crazed predatory homosexual (despite the fact that the actual Xerxes is portrayed in classic art as being quite butch). Whether explicitly gay or just “coded” that way to slip past the sensors, these guys represent some of cinema’s most notable acts of heteronormative villainy. While recent years have brought us several notable subversions of this idea with aggressively masculine gay villains ( Strike Back’s James Leatherby, Dexter’s Ivan Sirko), the hissing, scheming gay baddie has always been the more popular stock-in-trade.
Movies and television have a long history of casting effeminate gay men as the bad guys – the added layer of “otherness” is a popular way of making a villain all the more loathsome to a mainstream audience.
