I’ve always associated certain words with that gooey anti-hero Venom. Ominous. Toothy. Hungry. Humiliated (that last one solely because of how Topher Grace says the word in Spider-Man 3.) Gay was not necessarily one of them.
Sure, Venom always had that long slithering tongue, and in the original comics he’s often seen drenching buff dudes in slobber (before he bit their heads off.) But Venom and the queer community initially seemed to have as much overlap as Rascal Flatts and homosexuals. However, something’s happened in recent years for David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane’s comic book creation. Something…a little bit fruity.
Related
For many years, the often darkly humorous and silly Venom character was strictly associated with his gnarliest comic exploits. This included a 1991 comic cover where he’s clutching the skull of Spider-Man. That edgelord sensibility began to melt away though with 2018’s big screen bid,Venom. The LGBTQIA+ community suddenly latched onto a version of the character played by Tom Hardy, an actor with his own fascinatingly queer past. This vision of the anti-hero really emphasized wacky antics that would make Jim Carrey proud. Most importantly, it leaned on perceived homoerotic tension between Venom’s human alter-ego Eddie Brock and the alien Symbiote giving him superpowers.
Culture, unfiltered
Our newsletter will bring you the pulse of queer culture, from the tastemakers to the groundbreakers.
With this emphasis, the impossible had happened…Venom was something approaching a gay icon. How on Earth did we get here?
Certainly this would’ve been the last outcome anyone could’ve imagined for Eddie Brock/Venom back in the mid-2000s. Before the character’s live-action film debut in Spider-Man 3, his primary internet presence was limited to people on superhero forums feeling the need to defend the character. “I’m getting really sick and tired of people saying that Venom is a bad character” proclaims one Superhero Hype user circa. 2006. A lengthy 2008 post on The Letter by Gavok, meanwhile, openly declares “It’s not easy being a Venom fan. Or, to be more specific, it’s not easy being a fan of Eddie Brock.”
Disdain for Venom even extended to the man technically responsible for his creation. Randy Schueller was a Marvel Comics fan who wrote into the publication to suggest the mechanics behind Spider-Man getting a block costume during the Secret Wars storyline. This development eventually led to the symbiote that gave Spidey a new look springing onto Eddie Brock. The duo proceeded to become the anti-hero known as Venom. “I was never a fan of the costume-turned-villain idea,” Schueller later recalled. “Give me the classic Ditko villains any day!”
Schueller’s comments epitomized the general culture’s attitude towards Venom for years. Doc Ock or the Green Goblin were beloved even before their big screen incarnations. The comparatively more recent Venom was a bit of a punchline. Venom was popular enough in the 90s to warrant spin-off comics and even his own equivalent to The Joker or Lex Luthor in Cletus Kassidy/Carnage. However, once the era of Black Eyed Peas topping the Billboard charts rolled around, he had become a punching bag.
Topher Grace’s divisive iteration of Venom in the equally controversial Spider-Man 3 in 2007 didn’t help Venom’s reputation. This wasn’t even really an edge lord culture fixture like The Punisher or The Joker. He was just on the outskirts of comic book culture. The only real reflections of an enduring Venom fanbase in this era were recurring fetishistic DeviantArt/Tumblr fan art, consistent Venom merch on toy-shelves, as well as a 2013 fan film entitled Truth in Journalism directed by Joe Lynch.
The comparatively more suppressed presence of Eddie Brock/Venom in pop culture meant there were minimal pre-2018 intersections between the queer community and this vicious anti-hero. The closest to a connection was recurring interpretations that Spider-Man’s symbiote suit in the Secret Wars storyline can be perceived as a loose AIDS metaphor. However, that perception only extended to the Symbiote’s time on Peter Parker, not Eddie Brock. All these elements meant that nobody could’ve predicted then that a queer co-opting was inevitable for Venom.
This was true even when the marketing for the first solo Venom movie began. Those initial teasers and posters couldn’t have been further from a queer sensibility if they’d tried! A widely mocked teaser trailer from February 2018 was filled to the brim with flaws, including a deeply vague voice-over monologue from Hardy about how “everyone’s got problems”. For comic books, though, the biggest shortcoming was the teaser delivering no visible glimpses of Venom. This was a potential signal that Venom would be a grim and grounded superhero affair far from the decidedly queer maximalism of Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies. Emphasizing a dreary atmosphere rather than silly banter between Brock and the Symbiote instilled low audience expectations for this production.
Related
Horror is trans, period.
More specifically, this teaser didn’t provide any harbingers of Venom’s eventual queer fanbase. Most LGBTQIA+ viewers undoubtedly greeted this teaser with a shrug. Generally negative pre-release Venom reviews made little to no mention of any possible queer subtext to the proceedings. Then audiences got to see it and…something quickly shifted. The film’s storyline concerned lots of comic banter between Eddie Brock and the Symbiote. These two initially hate each other before growing to see how they need one another. Or, in the words of the Symbiote, “I’m a loser on my planet…like you.”
Sony executives may have assumed these interactions would come off like a typical buddy-cop movie dynamic. However, recall how Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz easily transferred dialogue from a jettisoned romantic interest character to Nick Frost’s Danny Butterman. That detail exemplified the minimal difference between wordplay in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and 48 Hrs. People going from hating each other to realizing they can’t live without one another is an arc informing both domains. No wonder people began viewing Eddie and the Symbiote as a couple affectionately named Symbrock. It also didn’t hurt that Venom featured a scene where Brock’s Symbiote-covered former lover Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) transfers this goo to the journalist through passionate kissing. Such smooching inevitably sent queer sirens off everywhere.
By Venom’s second’s day of release, Tumblr users were already declaring the film “was good and gay and everything that I wanted…the Symbiote choose his human crush of like 2 days over his entire species.” Tumblr denizens co-opting decidedly heterosexual media as covertly queer is nothing new. However, this Venom interpretation would not be confined to this website for long. By October 8, The Mary Sue published a piece about the film’s queer fanbase.
Lines like “I am Venom. And you are mine” or Brock’s observation that “I have been…taken” when referring to the Symbiote immediately became plastered on images all across the internet. Venom’s sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, was even more forward in winking at queer viewers. For one thing, the film conclude with Eddie and Symbiote watching the sunset on a beach. Even more pronounced is the Symbiote, while partying on its own, loudly declaring “I am out of the Eddie closet!”
Beyond just these silly lines or the external context people bring to certain Venom moments, certain other aspects inform Venom’s queer fanbase. For one thing, the gays, we love unpredictability. Like Spider-Punk, we “don’t believe in consistency”. Our activism, the way we shatter gender norms, and the art we consume, we’re always zagging when people expect us to zig. When Hollywood serves up “digestible” or “proper” mainstream queer characters like Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club, it often feels geared towards cis-het people. Instead, queer folks liked to take characters nobody ever imagined would be holding a pride flag. Think of Creech in Monster Trucks or the titular entity in The Babadook.
The co-opting of Venom continues this trend tenfold. Save for some adorable posters for its Chinese release, the Venom pre-release marketing campaign featured no appeal to queer viewers. It wasn’t until marketing the home video release that Sony got on this bandwagon. Without any corporate pushing, queer fans grabbed this material once marketed as “grim” and “gritty” and began gawking over a man and some masculine-coded goo kissing. Plus, people really latched onto Tom Hardy’s interpretation of Eddie Brock as somebody really grimy who only wears unbuttoned shirts. He never looks like a billionaire or an Avenger, he just looks like a schlub.
No wonder people began viewing Eddie and the Symbiote as a couple affectionately named Symbrock.
Lisa Laman
Typically, American media emphasizes queer men as being incredibly trim with style to spare. Think of the various men anchoring Queer Eye, for example. For queer viewers, grabbing Eddie Brock as an allegorically LGBTQIA+ figure meant finally having a queer male icon that looked like them. Here was a guy who didn’t shower. He constantly forgets to shave. There’s always beads of sweat trickling down the lines on his forehead. Hardy committed to a more vulnerable and down-on-his-luck style of physicality for this incarnation of Eddie Brock. That choice inevitably meant Venom’s protagonist could stand out as especially relatable to queer moviegoers.
It also didn’t hurt that the 2010s were devoid of allegorical, let alone explicit, superhero movie queer representation. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Similarly, without a lot of other options, Venom stood out as especially queer-coded in the superhero cinema landscape. Plus, Venom’s pre-2018 fanbase made it easy for SymBrock shippers to come out of the woodwork and dominate the conversation. If a wave of queers wanted to take over the cultural perception of Joker, The Punisher, or other famous comic book characters, it’d be significantly harder. Some people die for these figures. They wouldn’t want any of those “icky gays” near their beloved cartoon clowns.
Related
INTO chatted with Finn and Scott to dish on which horror movies influenced Smile 2.
Venom, meanwhile, was a punchline for so long that there was a fanbase void. There were surely some folks lurking on message boards constantly showing off photos of their various Venom Funko Pops! with pride in 2014. However, they weren’t the norm. Without a massive Batman-sized pop culture legacy to contend with, the queer interpretation of Venom could really take off like wildfire.
Surely nobody, from Randy Schueller to Todd MacFarlane to Venom director Ruben Fleischer, could’ve ever imagined the Venom character having this modern-day legacy. Heck, any excitement online for Venom: The Last Dance hails from queer social media users curious about what silliness Eddie and the Symbiote will get into next.
The Last Dance is reportedly Hardy’s final time playing Venom. However, this new queer interpretation of the toothy anti-hero is clearly going nowhere. When I first learned about Venom, queer was the last word that hopped into my mind. For future generations, though, that may be the only word they associate with this guy. Well, that and the phrase “tater tots”. ♦
Sign up for the INTO newsletter and get your twice-weekly dose of stories that shape the queer experience, culture, and lifestyle.
