Game of Thrones is back. The most-watched show from HBO in nearly half a century is in its home straight after seven years – and the last six episodes will be among the most expensive television ever made. Given the way the world of television is rapidly splintering into audiences self-scheduling their viewing across different platforms, the show’s final episode could be the last global TV mega-event. Watch it or not, you will have heard of it. And it matters.

It matters in terms of representation. This show will be screened in countries where homosexuality is illegal, where women’s sexual choices are controlled and where trans identities are violently subjugated. How GoT reflects sexuality and what lessons are implied is culturally important. As the show moves towards its conclusion, it’s time to ask whether, given that cultural importance, the show has missed an opportunity with its queer storylines.

The story’s creator, George R.R. Martin, acknowledges his general debt to European history for inspiring plots and characters. At a recent fan convention, Martin identified some specific queer icons of the past, citing Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart, and Edward II and saying:

If indeed those men were gay it had a significant effect upon history and it has a somewhat significant effect on the events in my book … I wanted to include the full range of humanity, including the full range of sexual preferences and sex is an important part of the books.

Knights and lovers

The first big gay relationship is between Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell. Renly is the younger of two brothers of King Robert Baratheon, who sits on the Iron Throne of Westeros as the series opens. After the king’s death, it is Renly’s champion knight Loras – also his lover – who first puts the idea of claiming the throne into Renly’s head.

One of the biggest threads of online debate about the show is the way the television series deviates from the books. Loras’s characterisation is hotly contested. In the books, his sexuality is more ambivalent, his adoration of Renly more ambiguous. HBO has outed the couple, given them sex scenes and created a fully-formed relationship. But they have also made Loras more effeminate, interested only in fine clothing and fripperies. He beds almost any man who crosses his path. There’s nothing wrong in that in itself, but take away the plots that revolve around Loras’s sexuality in the TV show, and the character disappears.

A matter of tastes

There is also plenty of lesbian lust blooming in GoT. Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons, is headed throughout the show’s long narrative to Westeros to claim back the Iron Throne that was stolen from her murderous and insane father. But, before any of that begins we see her as as a nervous virgin being instructed in how to please her man by acting out positions and intimate touches with another woman. Bi-curiosity pops out of the screen.

It’s a bi-curiosity that Daenerys shows again five seasons later with the show’s fully-fledged Sapphic lover Yara Greyjoy – a potential ally with a much-needed navy – in a brilliant scene where flirtation and political consummation mingle inextricably.

Yara is such an attractive seductress that Ellaria Sands, another potential ally of Daenerys, also comes to find her hand between Yara’s legs at one point in the political assignations, while she purrs that she’s “developing a taste for it”.

Bisexuality is embodied not just by Ellaria Sands, but also by her male lover Oberyn Martell. When Oberyn is shown a line-up of women in a brothel, he admires each woman’s beauty and character before turning to the young man who is pimping them and demanding to sleep with him. Such a beautiful man as Oberyn is not met with any form of disgusted denial. The pimp/host Olyvar simply replies that he’s “wildly expensive”. Perhaps “gay for pay” exists in Westeros too?

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