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BoysLove: The Power of Gay Love and Resisting Autocracy In Wicked [1]

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Date: 2025-03-25

Hi all, I hope y’all are doing well and getting along all right in these trying times. That’s what this diary is about too, actually. The hit movie Wicked took the country by storm recently and there are all sorts of themes incredibly relevant to both gay love and resisting autocracy. There are things relevant to gay people and how they exist in the world, there are deep friendships that can easily read as gay love, and there are elements of resistance that relate to anyone living in the modern day.

Wicked is a retelling of the classic Wizard of Oz story with things cast in an entirely new light. I’m going to go ahead and put a spoiler warning for the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Film, and the Wicked book. That said, I am going to proceed layer by layer and start with the fundamentals of the Wizard of Oz story, move on to the movie’s events, and then proceed to add color from the rest of the book.

I tell you about my process so that if you have seen the movie and don’t want the the second movie or the book to be spoiled, you can leave before I reach the section including the book and still safely engage with the rest. I would still recommend avoiding the comments if you want to be sure to avoid book spoilers though.

The second thing you should know is that this move contains no explicit romance between the female leads. This article falls under the great queer literary tradition of reading into things, much in the same vein of my other article on Demon Girl Next Door, the story focuses on the close friendship between two women. Wicked even has a male romantic lead! Despite that, plenty of fans can and do read into the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda, and exploring why people might do that is the topic of today’s article.

Lastly, as promised, this story has a fair bit about resisting autocracy. To tell you exactly how we get there would involve spoilers so I will have to bury the lede on this aspect until we are sufficiently far in the story, but I can guarantee you this is a powerful story of a person singled out as wicked and different trying to exist in a world that isn’t ready for her that will feel very familiar to anyone who has been singled out.

Let’s get to it!

The Wizard of Oz, an All Time Classic of Fantasy

The Wizard of Oz is a classic fantasy story about a girl named Dorothy from Kansas ending up in a magical world. She rides a tornado in a her family home before landing on a woman known as “The Wicked Witch of the East” who rules over Munchkin Country. The woman is so reviled that the local townsfolk immediately come out of hiding and celebrate her death. A “Good Witch of the North” gives her the magical shoes of the Wicked Witch and a blessing that protects from harm, telling her the only way to get home is to journey to the Wizard of Oz and ask for his help in returning.

She makes a long journey to the City of Oz and encounters companions along the way in the form of a Scarecrow, a tin man named Nick Chopper, and a Lion (certain animals can speak in Oz). Once at the city she meets with the Wizard who says he can only help if she can kill the Wicked Witch of the West, the sister of the Witch that she already killed on accident. She travels to try and defeat her so that she can get home, eventually throwing a bucket of water on her and melting her. A few more things happen after that, but Wicked is about the Wicked Witch of the West so I won’t bore you by summarizing the rest.

Wizard of Oz has always been a beloved franchise and the gorgeous movie adaptation made sure it would stick in the public consciousness for a long time. The author was known for his whimsy and well traveled nature and his goal was to write a fairy tale without all the terrifying aspects of the classic ones like children getting eaten and he succeeded at that. However, author Gregory Maguire had very different ideas for the world of Oz. He had been contemplating the nature of evil and wondered if calling people evil could very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If everyone was always calling you a bad name, how much of that would you internalize? How much of that would you say, all right, go ahead, I'll be everything that you call me because I have no capacity to change your minds anyway so why bother. By whose standards should I live?

Maguire has been a lifelong fan of the Wizard of Oz novel and movie, so when he was pondering the question of evil and how to tackle it in interesting ways he naturally thought of the Wicked Witch of the West. She’s the great evil of a large part of the story, and yet we know nothing about her or her motivations besides the fact that she wants Dorothy’s shoes. He decided to make a sprawling fictional world that interrogated connections between the characters of the novel and explains how Elphaba (the name given the Wicked Witch of West in the novel) came to be the “evil ruler of Winkie Country.”

This involves things like resisting institutional power and autocratic government targeting out groups in order to justify tyrannical power! Maguire takes it a step further and does not just theorize a cartoon evil and how they came to be, he mimics the way someone who is different may be ostracized and pushed to actual wickedness in way that could happen in real life. I will get into the nitty gritty of that after the movie section because the book leans into those themes even more directly, but I promise those looking for a story about overcoming social and political oppression will not be disappointed. For now we will start looking at the story of the movie with only small moments of color from the book that aren’t spoilers and circle back to the book’s proper differences later.

Cover of the book the play is based on

The Modern Movie Based on the Play

This novel was eventually turned into a hit play and nearly two decades later that play finally has a film adaptation. The first film covers the first half of the play’s plot (which mirrors the novel but has some discrepancies) and there is a second film due out in November 2025.

The story of Wicked follows Elphaba from a very young age, she is born with green skin and hard to control powers that lash out when she is emotional. She is already ostracized for her skin color and the powers only make people afraid when she tries to stand up for herself. Her father is ashamed of her and her mother died a few years after her birth. She becomes used to shrinking herself to survive but always maintains a sharp honesty despite that. Eventually her sister Nessarose is sent to Shiz, the premiere university of Oz, and her father implores Elphaba to follow Nessarose and assist her because he is worried about his favorite daughter struggling.

At this early stage we can see that society and her father are rejecting her. If she had the faith of her father she could perhaps buck the societal rejection, but even her own father treats her as nasty and a pox. This mirrors a fact with queer people, societal rejection weighs heavily on the mental health of queer people but the presence of a single supportive person can drastically improve someone’s mental health. Here we see the opposite, when large parts of society declare you evil and even your own parent treats you like a pariah, you are likely to internalize increasingly negative beliefs about yourself and the world around you.

Elphaba follows Nessarose to school as instructed and there she is selected to join the school as well by a higher up named Madame Morrible because of her potential in sorcery, those uncontrollable powers that have followed her for her entire life. She doesn’t understand why this makes her special, but she is grateful to finally have some sort of positive institutional recognition. She is told she has a gift and that she should must take sorcery courses to enroll in the school. The rooms have been assigned and thus she is forced to room with someone who is the picture of institutional privilege and normative beauty, Galinda.

Finally! We’re at the Gay Part

I wanted to weave in Wicked’s great theming about how gay people are treated into this conversation, but this is the fun part where we don’t talk about oppression too much, we talk about women in love with each other.

Galinda is the young woman who will become Glinda the Good Witch in the novels. She arrives at Shiz expecting her small world to remain small and is uninterested in education beyond it elevating her stock in society. She naturally clashes with Elphaba, Elphaba is a bit of a gadfly who enjoys pointing out people’s blind spots. She doesn’t disagree only to disagree like a shallow contrarian, but neither is she satisfied leaving people with their illusions. You can imagine how this might play out with someone like Galinda.

Galinda’s been set on having her own room but Elphaba’s already disturbing that plan and it seems that Elphie (her pet name for Elphaba) isn’t interested in playing the social game at all. She is constantly alone and studying instead of socializing, when Galinda does talk to her she is all acerbic wit and philosophical questions. They annoy each other greatly at first but in time Galinda helps her to open up so she can socialize more and Elphaba gets her interested in issues like Animal rights. In fact, the reason her name becomes “Glinda” is because when a Goat professor (in the Wicked universe a capitalized animal word, such as Animal or Goat indicates a talking animal) goes missing she changes her name to the way he would pronounce it.

The movie shows a creeping influence of fascistic repression of these Animals. They are being banned from teaching, we later discover the professor had his power of speech removed, and they even outright state that they are doing this to protect people from animals that might lose control. Elphaba assumes the Wizard, who is talked up by everyone regarding how great and wise he is, must not be aware of these repressive actions and wants to bring them to his attention. The movie’s climactic arc is Elphaba being invited to the City of Oz to discuss her progress with the Wizard. Elphaba gets to the train platform and prepares to bid farewell to Glinda for now, only to call out for her to come with her at the last moment! Glinda dashes after the train and makes it just in time to go with Elphaba as she starts this new journey.

She gets to the City and meets with the Wizard and Madame Morrible. She express concerns about the treatment of Animals and he explains that for safety reasons they must be contained as there have been signs they are losing control lately (I must admit my memory is a bit fuzzy on the specifics here, but I am absolutely sure he give excuses for their treatment one way or another) They test her ability to read a spellbook and with a slip of the Wizard’s tongue Elphaba realizes that she has been had. They could never read the book they said they needed her to read as a test, they have been using her to try and read a book no one else could comprehend.

This makes her also realize that the Wizard is power hungry and most likely fully aware of the poor treatment of animals if not the architect of the scapegoating (the Wizard regime is not going the best). She takes the books for herself and makes her escape with Glinda. They get to the top of a tower in the Oz stronghold and Elphaba enchants a broom to make her escape. With Elphaba ready to go, Glinda has another chance to leave with her similar to the train scene before.

This time Glinda stays, I am again fuzzy on exactly what she said in the moment, but essentially she couldn’t bring herself to abandon her old life by rebelling against the government. Elphaba seems sad to see her go but also understanding of why she can’t leave everything behind. She flies away from the tower and Glinda stays behind saying she tried to stop her, the two separated for the first real length of time since they became roomies.

Why Exactly Do you Think This is Gay Love?

It could be argued these girls are just really close friends that are very supportive. This is the text of the movie, but there is plenty of room to interpret them romantically as well. For starters, they are much more emotionally involved than Elphaba and the male romantic lead, Fiyero. Fiyero does come into more prominence as the story progresses, but despite Fiyero and Elphaba working to free an Animal being unfairly imprisoned, there isn’t much happening here from a character interaction.

Elphaba and Glinda are the picture of romance though. Imagine that story with to characters of opposite gender! Weird country girl comes to a school and meets a put together socialite, he brings he out of her shell and helps her find a sense of style, she teaches him about Animal rights and not trusting the government, then before Elphaba leaves she calls out to him so he can jump on the train and join her. That is textbook romance writing.

There is nothing wrong with having extremely close friends or being closer to friends than your romances, but the way that these women interact with each other and completely change each other in addition to the distress at being separated can definitely be read as a lot more intimate than just bestie roomies.

That is what the art of queer coding and queer readings is about! Queer people have long had to outright hide their identities and romances and this has made us very adept at insinuating relationships without explicitly stating them and reading into insinuations to find relationships.

It’s hard to say 100% if Maguire intended these characters to be gay, wanted to just hint at it’s possibility, or if he just wrote a great friendship that comes off as extremely intimate. Regardless of the intent, there is plenty of material to read into and in a story written by a gay man about people who are different being singled out, it is very easy to read Glinda as in love with Elphaba but understanding that there isn’t a place in their society for gay women. Perhaps to leave it up to the imagination or focus on the fantastic forms of oppression, they don’t really bring up homosexual love at all in the book.

It is up to you to decide what you see, but if you can get over the fact that they never outright make goo-goo eyes at each others Glinda and Elphaba are clearly the central relationship of the book and clearly have a deep love. Looking at these sorts of implications and discussing what we see is part of the fun of Girls’ Love and Boys’ Love!

The Book

The book covers the entirety of the play and both movies but there are quite a few differences. I don’t think I have the time or space to do a fully written out analysis so I am going to try a bullet point style list of all the queer themes and themes of resistance present in the full story. This will also likely spoil the next movie to some degree to bail here if you want!

Being trans or intersex is demonized in the book by characters (not the author). Dorothy’s companions start the book being spied on by Elphaba while they loudly wonder if she is secretly a man or has two pairs of genitals. Starting the story with transgender and intersex people being used as insult fodder for the rumor mill is a powerful statement.

Elphaba’s family had something of a polyamorous arrangement in the book. Elphaba’s helped a Quadling visitor (Elphaba’s family lived in the country and Quadlings would be in back, backcountry) who became a family friend that helped raise Elphaba while also having sexual affairs with the mom and dad. They never acknowledged that reality but it seemed to be an open secret among the family. The fact her dad is a minister in the book makes that even more interesting.

The professor is not just made mute in the book, he is murdered and a witness is also cursed or charmed in some way to not remember the happenings. A lot more outright comparison to government repression here.

Fiyero is dark-skinned in the book, he is also shy and not well spoken because of being singled out as different and not growing up in Oz, so him and Elphaba directly connect over that instead of just having a love of protecting others.

Elphaba leaves to confront the Wizard about the treatment of Animals in the book, not because she was invited.

After failing to get answers from the Wizard and fleeing his stronghold, Elphaba joins a resistance cell. One that has dead drops, decentralized leadership, and plans to bomb government officials. She ends up there because she has tried every institutional avenue for change and only ended up an enemy of the state.

She actually cannot bring herself to commit violence that endangers innocents and ends up leaving town when the sabotage scheme fails.

Her sister rises to be the governor of Munchkin Country. Unlike the original she is not evil, she is actually just a straight laced leader who has to act tough because of Oz’s ongoing attempts to control Munchkinland (which she leads in seceding from Oz’s rule.) The state controlled media of Oz portray her as an evil wicked witch to soil her reputation and destabilize the Munchkin government, but she was never outright evil.

When Nessarose is killed by Dorothy, Elphaba wants the ruby slippers back because they are a memento of her father and not because of magic. They are only magic because Glinda enchanted them for Nessarose and the magic isn’t helpful to Elphaba.

Elphaba eventually resolves to kill the official she failed to kill, find her already dead corspe in a hospital bed, and smashes her head in with a trophy. This is when she becomes a criminal in the public eye although we still don’t know if she had it in her to commit a murder.

All of the stress and being demonized by the government gets to Elphaba and should does start to become more legitimately unstable. She takes out her emotions on those around and she starts taking stimulants to stay awake and hard sleeping medicines when she does sleep.

This culminates in her confrontation with Dorothy. Dorothy has been told she was evil and had to die, but Dorothy did not necessarily believe that because she is a reasonable and sweet girl. Dorothy came to ask why they call her evil and what is going on.

Elphaba’s decline has reached a low point, filled with paranoia and not a drop of good sleep, she assumes this small girl must be a state agent or trying to fool her so that she can kill her for her own benefit.

Dorothy doesn’t even throw the water bucket in frustration like in the book, Elphaba’s own behavior makes her catch fire which leads to Dorothy putting it out with a water bucket, she had no intention to harm anyone.

This is a story of decline and how scapegoating and ostracization can legitimately create dangerous radicals who have lost sight of their values by pushing them to the brink after treating them as enemies, at the end of the day it is a tragedy.

I could try and do a more in-depth analysis of what’s going on in the book, that would be much more complicated and sort of out of the scope of our group. That said, if you do want to see a more narrow and political analysis of what’s in the book I would be open to it, maybe outside of the Boys’ Love group so it isn’t off topic. Let me know your thoughts below!

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