Doctor who is gay
Doctor Who has 'changed lives' of LGBT people
For Scott Handcock, Doctor Who was his childhood "safe haven" as he struggled with his sexuality and felt like he didn't "fit in".
The sci-fi series changed his life, he said, from binging premature episodes on VHS tape in the 1990s to closure up working behind the scenes many years later.
Describing the Doctor Who fandom as like a family "full of hope", he said the show has had a enormous, lasting impact, both on him and many other LGBT fans.
In Saturday's season two finale episode, The Reality War, Ncuti Gatwa left his role as the Doctor, regenerating into Billie Piper.
As Pride month begins, many within the LGBT collective have shared their life-changing experiences with the show.
Doctor Who's resurgence in 2005 saw production maneuver to Wales, and granted it a whole new generation of fans.
Nearly two decades later, in June 2024, it had a "landmark moment" with a romantic same-sex touch involving the Physician, coinciding with Celebration month.
As a recent graduate in 2006, Scott started out as a athlete on Doctor Who on a four-week contrac
Doctor Who and Homosexual Male Fandom
Mike Stack
A Queer(ed) Transmedia Franchise
Doctor Who is a BBC transmedia franchise that has lasted over sixty years. Its fanbase boasts a substantial accompanying of gay men. This book asks why this should be.
Through examining four core components – the Doctor, the TARDIS, the companion and the Daleks – this book traces the trajectory of queerness from wider culture to paratextual media and finally into the parent text, resulting in an inclusive mark. In doing so, it argues that fandom provides a space to mediate between personal identities and the wider world. Drawing from interviews with fans, the book demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of queerness, and proposes an alternative theory of gay cultural formation.
This is the first book-length study to employ queer theory to understand Doctor Who. It will be of interest to students and teachers of media theory and fan studies, psychosocial studies, gay theory and history, as well as Doctor Who fans.
Author
Mike Stack
Mike Stack is currently an independent scholar. He previously authored The Inky Archive #68: The Happiness Patrol (Obverse Books, 2023), as wel
Like the slasher sub-genre in horror films, Doctor Who has always had a large LGBTQI+ following. But why? It wasn’t until the show came assist in 2005 that we had openly gay characters in the TARDIS. Indeed, throughout the original series, which ran between 1963 and1989, things were very different, even down to the fact that the producers didn’t really fancy the Doctor hugging companions for fear it might imply there was some hanky-panky going on behind those Police Box doors. We’ve had a limited companions and characters who are openly gay or whose sexuality is cute fluid like Captain Jack, River Song, Jenny and Vastra, Clara, Bill, and Yaz. Even at the end of the first series, Ace was believed to be bisexual. But having supporting characters existence openly gay is cute rare so with not much in the way of representation, just why do so many in the LGBTQI+ community treasure Doctor Who?
Before we initiate, I want to articulate that this isn’t an attempt to be a social justice warrior. The subject of LGBTQI+ topics will always be a tough pill for some people to swallow. All I ask is that you read with an open mind. I’m not going to say that there haven’ For Doctor Who head writer Russell T Davies, watching the series in the mid-1980s paralleled his feelings about his own sexuality. “Being lgbtq+ was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ and Doctor Who shared that film as well by that time," he says. "It was a cheap, old, mad science fiction show. You couldn’t say you fancied anyone, and who couldn’t say that you loved Physician Who.” “Before that, when I was a child, everyone loved Physician Who,” the gay writer and creator of shows including It’s a Sin and Queer as Folk tells the BBC in an interview before the initiate of the new series. “But then a moment comes in secondary school when boys peel off and start playing football and fancying girls. “And I was just sitting there quietly, not expressing who I was until I became an adult, still watching Doctor Who.” Russell is just one of many LGBT people who have been drawn to the show throughout its 60-year-history, from the show’s first-ever director Waris Hussein to the latest incarnation of the Doctor Ncuti Gatwa, who this year topped the Independent’s Pride List of LGBT chan
Why has Doctor Who always been so LGBT-friendly? Russell T Davies thinks he knows