Throughout the history of cinema, queerness has long had associations with wickedness and villainy – whether that’s explicit homosexuality or a gay coding that signaled a character’s unspoken affections.

That troubled legacy – which too often treats same-sex attraction as the cause of violent perversion – can be a burden for queer audiences looking for greater positive representation. But coming to terms with or even embracing cinema’s robust history of sissy villains and problematic queer archetypes engages in a radical act of what queerness is: taking something imperfect and transforming it.

As a Glaad report from September shows, Hollywood is failing LGBT people. While less than a fifth of top-grossing 2014 releases featured a gay character, a disturbing number (Get Hard; Ted 2) relied on gay people as the butt of their jokes. And this past week is another indication why: actor Michelle Rodriguez ignited controversy for playing a transgender assassin in the upcoming Tomboy, a Revenger’s Tale. Glaad’s Nick Adams correctly chastized the film’s problematic use of trans issues as a “sensationalistic plot device”.

But this is hardly a new problem. Throughout cinematic history, queer people weren’t just punchlines – they represented an unspoken evil. In films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, the assumed queer leanings of their effeminate villains stands in for the “other”. Dr Robert Elliott, a Hitchcock-esque trans killer played by Michael Caine in Brian de Palma’s 1980 film Dressed to Kill, was one of the first films – followed by Silence of the Lambs – to be protested by LGBT groups for its representation of queer people.

In the recent Do I Sound Gay?, documentarian David Thorpe points out that the gay villain is also absurdly ubiquitous in the Disney canon: everything from The Jungle Book to Aladdin features an effeminate animated antagonist. In the former, George Saunders voiced Shere Khan, which was a shrewd choice: Saunders played the similarly swishy Addison Dewitt, a venomous theater critic, 17 years earlier in All About Eve.

However, what’s unique about Disney’s usual suspects is that they’re almost always the most memorable thing in the movie; they might be evil but, for lack of a better word, they’re fabulous.

Aside from James Woods’ playfully diabolical playful Hades, 1997’s Hercules is completely forgettable. And there’s a reason a Thought Catalog article once called Ursula “the best Disney princess”. Based on director John Waters’s frequent collaborator Divine, Ursula completely upstages Ariel by simply curling her impossibly arched eyebrows. She’s the diva that launched 1,000 drag costumes.

Such queer villains aren’t role models in the traditional sense. Ursula is a sea witch who steals a woman’s voice to gain dominion over the oceans. Frank ‘N’ Furter, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is a murderous cannibal and a rapist who creates his own sex slave. In a recent essay for the Mary Sue, Caelyn Sandel pointed out that though the character has appeal, he’s more than a bit problematic. “Dr Frank-N-Furter is not an example of positive queer representation,” Sandel writes. ”He is a ton of shitty, old-fashioned queer exploitation stereotypes mashed into a single character.”

In a sense, Sandel is absolutely correct that Tim Curry’s Frank ‘N’ Furter is sensational but certainly no hero – and he’s not supposed to be one. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t find aspects of his his persona that we like and want to emulate: Frank ‘N’ Furter’s gender and sexual freedom and his fabulous way with a string of pearls.

These characters might not be perfect or even good people, but that’s not why we need them. In an interview with Craig Ferguson back in 2011, John Waters famously defended the rights of queer people to be just like everyone else: complicated, messy or downright depraved.

“Why do we have to be ‘good’ all of sudden?” Waters quipped to the former late-night host. “I’m for the rights of bad lesbian mothers.” Waters’ own work is a testament to his love of “bad” gay people, from his decades-long friendship with Leslie Van Houten to his omnipresent bands of outsiders – in films like Pink Flamingos – that resemble more the Manson Family than the Brady Bunch.

In an industry that too often tells LGBT viewers it’s bad to be queer through lazy, homophobic jokes at our expense, queer villains remind us that embracing the darkness isn’t just liberating – being bad can be absolutely divine.