LGBTQ+ representation in Doctor Who

A downgrade from 2005?

This contains spoilers for the most recent episodes of Doctor Who.

I was around 12 when I started to realize I wasn’t quite like the other people in my grade. I was starting to understand that my interests may not align with those of my peers. Now imagine my reaction when I witnessed a man kissing another man in the science fiction TV show my family was watching together. The show was, of course, Doctor Who, and my family has continued to watch it together to this day. Over the years, there have been a variety of different queer characters on the show, albeit some better written than others. The show originally aired in 1963, and the plot often contradicts itself, but the basis of the show is that there is an alien known as the Doctor with the ability to regenerate, and the show follows them and their companions as they travel through space and time. 

I’m going to start this discussion by bringing you all the way to the original 1963-1989 series. If you only consider the TV show as “canon,” it includes no queer characters, as it was primarily a children’s show, and queer people would have been deemed “inappropriate.” This is fine on its own, but it’s once you start to look into the greater Doctor Who lore that it all breaks down. There are a variety of novels, audio dramatizations, and comics that were released afterwards that effectively rewrite some of the characters to be queer. While this may be seen as a win for diversity, it doesn’t actually change how the character was originally written—which was as straight. 

In 2005, the show was relaunched for the BBC by Russell T. Davies, who is an openly gay man. You may be familiar with him as the writer of Queer as Folk and It’s a Sin. The first openly queer character who appeared on the show made his appearance in the first season: Captain Jack Harkness, played by openly gay actor John Barrowman. In his first scene, he comments on the attractiveness of both a man and a woman, making his pansexuality explicit. It is later explained that he comes from the 51st century, where there is a much more relaxed approach to sexuality. Throughout his episodes, Captain Jack flirts with both the Doctor (currently in a male body) and the woman he is travelling with, kissing them both before leaving for his apparent death. However, instead of dying, he becomes immortal, successfully avoiding the “bury your gays” trope.

After the first season of Doctor Who, Jack was given his own spinoff show, called Torchwood, which aired from 2006 to 2011. Torchwood was aimed towards an adult audience, and the show took full advantage of its target audience. One episode is about an alien who takes the form of a gaseous cloud and gets her energy from making men orgasm, subsequently killing them. Torchwood holds a special place in my heart, partially due to the fact that every single character in it is bisexual/pansexual, and they do not shy away from their sexualities. The show includes multiple well-written same-sex relationships, one of note being Jack and Ianto Jones. Unfortunately, Torchwood only got three seasons (I do not count Miracle Day, as it was produced by a US company and not the BBC) but Jack has shown up in multiple episodes of Doctor Who afterwards, his most recent appearance being 2021. 

Following Jack’s departure, there were no explicitly queer companions for multiple seasons, but there were characters who could be considered “ambiguously bisexual.” Clara Oswald, who was on the show from seasons seven to nine, could be considered bisexual, but this is never explicitly shown. Her only romantic relationship is with a man, and there is a single line in which she suggests Jane Austen is a good kisser. This is never expanded on within the show, and I recently found out there is a book that officially confirms her as being bisexual. The next character is River Song, who appeared on and off throughout seasons four to nine. River is married to the Doctor (while he was in his male form) but has been mentioned to have been married to women before, although this is never expanded upon, and wasn’t brought up until her last appearance in 2015. The last character who fits this trope is the Master, who was the Doctor’s childhood friend and originally appeared as a man. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say there was a lot of queer subtext surrounding their relationship. This was only heightened in 2014 when the Master regenerated into a woman, nicknamed “Missy.” In her first episode, she describes the Doctor as her “boyfriend” and kisses him senseless when they meet for the first time. 

It wasn’t until season ten in 2017 when Doctor Who had a full-time queer companion: Bill Potts, played by Pearl Mackie, who came out as bisexual after the season had aired. Bill’s a lesbian, and her sexuality is explicitly stated in the first episode. She spends the first episode trying to save the girl she’s interested in from an alien, and in future episodes, she says she’s not interested in men. This leads to a very memorable scene, when after meeting up with a group of Roman soldiers and telling them this, they view it as strange, due to bisexuality being the norm for them. Bill was only present for one season, and in the finale, she was almost converted into a cyborg in a process that seemed a tad too similar to conversion therapy for my liking. She did end up getting a “happy” ending; she transformed into a sentient oil puddle after her death and travelled the world with her girlfriend (yes, I am aware of how this sounds). I do think her ending could have been handled better, but I appreciate the effort that the writers put in. 

In 2018 the Doctor regenerated for the thirteenth time, but instead of turning into a white man, they regenerated into a white woman, played by Jodie Whittaker. As expected, this change in gender led to a lot of “fans” being very angry, but I believe she has been doing a magnificent job as the Doctor. However, this does lead into the idea of how gender and sexuality works for their alien species. It was stated in the previous seasons that they don’t subscribe to the same notions of gender as us, and it is very easy to read the different regenerations of the Doctor as being genderfluid. This change also has the fortunate consequence of making all her previous relationships gay. As of yet, she has not mentioned her wife, but I keep my fingers crossed. 

This brings us to the most recently confirmed queer companion, which is Yasmin (Yaz) Khan, who has been present for the past three seasons. There has been some minor queer subtext throughout her episodes, but it was only in the most recent episode in which she admits to having romantic feelings for the Doctor. It is implied that Yaz had never told anyone she was gay before, and while having an arc about a woman discovering her sexuality is fantastic, I don’t think it was done to the standards it deserves and is too little, too late. Whittaker is only going to be in two more episodes before her version of the Doctor regenerates, and I don’t think there is enough time to properly create a romance between the two of them in that time. It feels as though the writers saw a lot of fans online were shipping the Doctor and Yaz, and decided to create romantic feelings based on that, as it doesn’t seem as though this was plotted out in advance. However, Russell Davies, who left in 2010, is set to take back over in 2023, so we can only hope he will continue his streak of having well-written queer characters and relationships.