The 200 most iconic queers in cultural history, part one

Queeries is a Digital Publishing Award-winning weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens. This is a celebration of its 200th edition.

So this is, somehow, the 200th edition of this column.

What began as a love letter to Tegan and Sara in October 2017 has now resulted in roughly 250,000 occasionally thoughtful words to offer you, the reader, week after week. I'm fairly certain the most overused word among these (and certainly in queer culture as a whole) has been "iconic." And I promise to retire it forever if you allow it one final most grandiose use: to count down the 200 most iconic queers in the history of culture.

Yes, the entire history of culture. And I don't just mean queer people, either. Literary characters, animals, professional sports mascots, robots: they are all fair game.

The list will be many things: subjective, excessive and absolutely an homage to how two iconic queers much more talented than myself celebrated their own 200th edition. It is not intended to be taken particularly seriously, though I do stand by its ranking. And I hope those of you with the endurance to consume it have as much fun doing so as I did putting it together.

This will be the first of four editions (did I mention it will be excessive?), running every Thursday for the next few weeks and counting down 50 queers at a time. Without further ado, here are numbers 200 through 151.

• Check out even more stories from us on LGBTQ+ icons and activists

200. Andy King

Occupation: Event planner, "wonderful gay leader"
Years active: The public became aware of King's willingness to be the ultimate team player when the documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened was released in 2019. He continues to occasionally pop up in our consciousness whenever we see a bottle of Evian water.
Why so iconic: For becoming the most talked-about gay man in the world for at least an entire day when we all saw this:

199. Gritty

Occupation: Mascot for the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers
Years active: Made their furry, orange, googly-eyed debut at a Flyers game on September 14, 2018.
Why so iconic: For being the first professional sports mascot to be instantly embraced as queer, with the city of Philadelphia even passing a formal resolution that referred to them as a "non-binary leftist icon."

197. & 198. Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep

Occupations: Ancient Egyptian royal servants who shared the title of  "chief manicurists of the king"
Years active: Roughly 2380 to 2320 B.C.E., though modern civilization was not made aware of them until their tomb —  which features an image of the two men embracing — was discovered in 1964.
Why so iconic: There is some debate to the contrary, but many believe these two were literally the first gays ever in recorded history and they were... a power couple who groomed the king!?

196. J. Roy Helland

Occupation: Hair and makeup artist
Years active: Helland has also groomed a queen — Meryl Streep — ever since her first New York stage appearance in 1975.
Why so iconic: Because in addition to being the person responsible for Streep's stage and screen appearances for nearly 50 years, he fulfilled two of the ultimate gay dreams in one night: being handed an Oscar by Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez for his makeup work on 2012's The Iron Lady, and having Streep dedicate her third Oscar to him.

195. Mickey Deane

Occupation: Hairdresser
Years active: In the world of the HBO series The Comeback, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris) has been Valerie Cherish's hairdresser and closest friend since the late 1980s.
Why so iconic: There's no way Niankhkhnum, Khnumhotep or J. Roy Helland offered the kind of dedication to their clients that Mickey did to Valerie. And he was ultimately capable of melting Valerie's narcissist heart so much that she gave up the moment she'd been living for (winning an Emmy) to visit him in the hospital. Would Meryl have done that for Roy? (I mean, probably, yes.)

194. Bronco Henry

Occupation: Deceased rancher
Years active: First mentioned in Thomas Savage's 1983 novel Power of the Dog and then in the 2021 Jane Campion film based on it, both set in the 1920s. He is a fictionalized version of Bronco Henry Williams, an actual real person who worked as a ranch hand at a property owned by Savage's maternal grandparents.
Why so iconic: Because he is one of the greatest ranchers of all-time, at least according to (spoiler alert!) a man he used to sleep with who is now totally obsessed with him. They are also the most important character in a book and a movie in which they never actually appear, which is iconic gay ghost behaviour.

193. Che Diaz

Occupation: Very bad podcast host and even worse stand-up comedian who is currently "filming a pilot" 
Years active: We meet Che in the alternate universe timeline of the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That (seemingly late 2021 but time makes no sense on the series). It seems likely Che has existed in the darkest corners of the minds of the show's writers for a long time.
Why so iconic: Because they are the most lazily constructed and poorly written LGBTQ character in television history and we all not only watched anyway, we also made 20 billion memes about them and now tweet about how much we miss them every Thursday. Bonus points for how they single-handedly destroyed our faith in Miranda Hobbes (who is... not on this list).

192. Demon Twink

Occupation: Demon, twink
Years active: First brought to the attention of the gay internet in the summer of 2021 but has surely been demon twinking for several summers prior.
Why so iconic: Because they soared to notoriety after throwing a drink at the DJ equipment and refusing to get off the stage (among other things) at a Britney Spears-themed boat party, becoming a necessary symbol for the vast community of chaotic, unhinged twinks.

191. Roy Cohn

Occupation: Lawyer, villainous character in Angels in America
Years active: Rose to prominence in the 1950s as a prosecutor at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, successfully leading to their execution. Later mentored Donald Trump for a decade before dying of AIDS-related complications in 1986 (though he vehemently denied that he had HIV).
Why so iconic: I mean, arguably being the most evil gay to ever exist is obviously notable. But I'm mostly putting him here in case he's able to read this list from hell, as I'd imagine being placed a lowly 191st between "demon twink" and two gay penguins would really annoy him.

189. & 190. Silo and Roy

Occupations: Chinstrap penguins 
Years active: Hatched in 1987, the male penguins were discovered to be going steady by the staff at the Central Park Zoo in 1998.
Why so iconic: Another iconic power couple, their 1999 adoption of a young chick, Tango, drew international attention after a New York Times article was written about them. Multiple theatrical works and children's books followed, including And Tango Makes Three, which has regularly been listed as one of the most banned books in American public libraries because of its "homosexual overtones".

187. & 188. Siegfried and Roy

Occupations: Magicians often incorporating large animals into their acts
Years active: After meeting on a cruise ship in 1958, they began a partnership (both professionally and romantically, though they never discussed the latter) that lasted until Roy suffered a career-ending injury from a tiger attack in 2003.  
Why so iconic: I mean, they overcame bleak childhoods in Germany to find each other (on a boat!) and become the world's most famous magicians (their Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage Resort and Casino was considered the most-visited show in Las Vegas for over 20 years).

186. Sara Lee Employee Played By Harry Styles

Occupation: Sara Lee employee
Years active: Was caught putting "off-message" comments and captions on the official Sara Lee Instagram account in November 2019. Never seen or heard from again, though probably now focusing on getting rid of toxic in community.
Why so iconic: For wrecking us all in the funniest, queerest Saturday Night Live sketch of the last decade (written by two iconic queers in their own right, Julio Torres and Bowen Yang):

185. Lee Pace

Occupation: Actor
Years active: Made his screen debut in the 2003 TV movie Soldier's Girl.
Why so iconic: Ok, yes, for many notable roles like Pushing Daisies, Halt and Catch Fire, Angels in America on Broadway and The Hobbit trilogy — but let's be honest, it's really this November 2021 Instagram post. We cannot even imagine what the Sara Lee employee would have been commenting if he still had access to his work account.

184. William Reynolds

Occupation: Film editor
Years active: Began his career in 1934 and continued working up until his death in 1997.
Why so iconic: We've all heard that films get made in the editing room, but are we all aware of the queer man whose editing room is where The Sound of Music, The Godfather and The Sting were made? That would be a true king, William Reynolds, who was named by Film Comment as one of the top three editors of all time.

182. & 183. Alyssa Edwards and Tatianna

Occupations: Drag queens
Years active: Tatianna made her Drag Race debut in season 2 (2009) while Edwards first competed in season 5 (2013).
Why so iconic: For offering us perhaps the greatest lipsync battle of all time on the September 22, 2016 episode of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars:

181. Shane McCutcheon

Occupation: Hairdresser, model and heartbreaker played by Katherine Moennig on the Showtime series The L Word
Years active: First debuted in 2004, currently back on the reboot The L Word: Generation Q.
Why so iconic: Because every queer woman I knew (and didn't know, seemingly) was obsessed with her during The L Word's initial run and honestly I was not immune myself.

180. Rawley Farnsworth

Occupation: High school drama teacher
Years active: Taught Tom Hanks at Skyline High School in Oakland, California in the early 1970s.
Why so iconic: Because he's the only person to have a movie based on him being mentioned in an Oscar speech. When Hanks accepted his Oscar for Philadelphia, he called Farnsworth one of the "finest gay Americans." This, of course, inspired the movie In & Out  (and a New York Post headline that screamed "OUTED AT THE OSCARS!") But Hanks had actually contacted Farnsworth before hand, asking permission to disclose his sexuality; Farnworth, long since retired, had no issue with it.

179. Amy Schneider

Occupation: Engineering manager and game show contestant
Years active: Rose to fame during a 40-game winning streak on Jeopardy! from November 2021 to January 2022.
Why so iconic: Besides having the second-longest streak in the game's history (behind Ken Jennings), our ability to root for the unflappable Schneider during the worst few months of the Omicron surge almost single-handedly kept society from fully collapsing into despair. It was also a huge moment for trans visibility — something that was not lost on Schneider:

178. Lord Alfred Douglas

Occupation: Poet and journalist
Years active: Born in 1870, Douglas published work consistently from 1896 to his death in 1945, including several works about his romantic relationship with Oscar Wilde.
Why so iconic: While best known for being Wilde's lover, Douglas himself deserves his legacy for — among many other things — writing the iconic queer phrase "the love that dare not speak its name" in his 1894 poem "Two Loves" (though it has been widely misattributed to Wilde). He also got to be portrayed by peak hot Jude Law in the 1997 movie Wilde.

176. & 177. Tegan and Sara

Occupations: Singer-songwriters, authors, activists
Years active: Twin sisters Tegan Quin and Sara Quin formed a band in 1998 and released their first album, Under Feet Like Ours, in 1999.
Why so iconic: For normalizing being famous queer twins, for releasing 9 wonderful albums of heartbreak pop and for inspiring the very first edition of this column back in 2017 (a love letter to their album The Con).

175. Willow Rosenberg

Occupation: Wiccan, Scooby Gang member
Years active: Played by Alyson Hannigan from 1997-2003 over seven seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (and then in many, many comic books afterward).
Why so iconic: For being the lesbian witch of a generation and for offering one of the most thoughtful, nuanced portraits of a queer character in the era of The WB:

174. Cassandra Peterson

Occupation: Actress, writer and singer
Years active: Known best for her portrayal of horror movie hostess Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, which began in the early 1980s and eventually resulted in her own 1988 feature film. She came out as queer in her 2021 memoir, Yours Cruelly.
Why so iconic: Proudly claimed to be "raised by a pack of wild drag queens," she brought camp humour, sex positivity and a queer sensibility into the mainstream like no one else. Queer children of the 80s and 90s (myself included) will be forever grateful. 

172. & 173. Emperor Ai of Han and Dong Xian

Occupations: Emperor of the Chinese Han dynasty and his lover
Years active: Emperor Ai ascended at the age of 20 and reigned from 7 to 1 BCE, during which time his intensely passionate relationship with Dong made them the power gay couple of the Han dynasty.
Why so iconic: Ai and Dong's relationship (which you can read about in juicy detail here) is referred to by historians as "the passion of the cut sleeve" because once when they fell asleep in the same bed, Emperor Ai cut off his own sleeve rather than disturb his sleeping lover. He also gave him all the best jewels and weapons and made him supreme commander of the armed forces, which pissed off everyone around them. Tragically, when Emperor Ai died at the age of 26 of "mysterious causes," Dong was forced to kill himself. (Why is this not currently being adapted into a prestige limited series?)

171. Andrew Scott

Occupation: Actor
Years active: Has been regularly acting on stage and screen since the late 1990s, but took our awareness of him to heavenly new levels when he played "the hot priest" in the second season of Fleabag.
Why so iconic: For making Fleabag and every single person who watched her show fall in love with him, and for delivering the best fictional wedding sermon in television history:

170. Ariana DeBose

Occupation: Actress, singer, dancer
Years active: Made her television debut competing on So You Think You Can Dance as a teenager in 2009.
Why so iconic: Took on the iconic role of Anita in the 2021 adaptation of West Side Story, reclaimed it as her own while still honouring the legacy of Rita Moreno's performance, and is now getting all the awards for it. She is very likely about to, like Moreno, win an Oscar for the role — making DeBose the first openly queer actor to ever win an Oscar.

169. Marc Shaiman

Occupation: Composer and lyricist
Years active: Began his career in the most remarkably gay manner possible: as a vocal arranger for Bette Midler in the 1980s.
Why so iconic: Literally pick any handful of Shaiman's eclectic credits and it's clear he is a legend. He's won a Grammy, an Emmy and a Tony but he's somehow still an Oscar away from EGOT (after seven nominations). Frankly, it should have already happened for this:

167. & 168. Brian Boitano and Brian Orser

Occupation: Rival figure skaters
Years active: They both started their skating careers in the early 1980s.
Why so iconic: For giving us the "Battle of the Brians" at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, where the whole world watched as two gay men (who were both closeted at the time) battled for the gold. The American Boitano ended up edging out the Canadian Orser in a showdown that will live on as a yet another classic moment in sports that made so many of us realize that we're gay (or maybe it was just four-year-old me).

166. Jimbo

Occupation: Drag artist
Years active: Broke out on the first season of Canada's Drag Race in 2020.
Why so iconic: For giving us two of the greatest exits ever given on Drag Race, and for not remotely deserving to have gone home either time.

165. Scar

Occupation: False king of Pride Rock
Years active: First seen in the 1994 Disney animated film The Lion King.
Why so iconic: Though essentially every Disney villain in the 20th century was coded as queer, few were as undeniable as Lion King antagonist Scar. An effeminate, highly intellectual outcast and loner who loved throwing shade just as much as he loved throwing his brother off a cliff, Scar taught a generation camp without us even knowing (just listen to his big number "Be Prepared"). He was unfortunately significantly less gay in the 2019 remake, which many agree was erasure. 

164. Lestat

Occupation: Vampire, prince, theatre actor, rock star, author
Years active: Introduced by author Anne Rice in the 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire, where it is stated that they were born on November 7, 1760.
Why so iconic: A bisexual antihero in a dozen of the late Rice's hugely popular novels, Lestat arguably gave Tom Cruise his queerest role (save Top Gun, maybe) in the wildly homoerotic 1994 film adaptation Interview with the Vampire — a film that at its core is about Lestat's toxic queer relationship with Louis, played by Brad Pitt. (If you haven't watched that film in a while, it is very much worth revisiting if only to be astonished that it was made by a Hollywood studio almost 30 years ago).

163. Gilbert Baker

Occupation: Artist, activist
Years active: In 1970, he was serving in the United States Army when he stationed as a medic in San Francisco. He discovered the gay rights movement and was discharged from the army to spend the rest of his life devoting his energy to art and activism.
Why so iconic: He hand-dyed and stitched the original rainbow flag! And he even refused to trademark it, seeing it as a symbol for the queer community. (Fun fact: the first flag had eight colours, each stripe "carrying its own significance" — pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for peace and purple for spirit.)

162. Niecy Nash

Occupation: Actor
Years active: Made her acting debut in the 1995 film Boys On The Side (a queer guilty pleasure) before becoming an underappreciated comedic goddess in Reno 911!, Getting On, Claws, etc.
Why so iconic: For coming out by just casually dropping this perfectly captioned surprise wedding post on Instagram:

160. & 161. Irene Sharaff and Mai-Mai Sze

Occupations: Costume designer (Sharaff) and writer, painter and performer (Sze)
Years active: Both began their creative careers in the 1930s. They were a "devoted couple" from the mid-1930s until their deaths, which were just a few months apart in late 1992 and early 1993.
Why so iconic: Sharaff is regarded as one of the greatest costume designs of all time, winning five Oscars for films like West Side Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cleopatra. Sze could seemingly do just about anything (she was first recognized as a landscape painter but wrote fiction, non-fiction and performed on Broadway) and broke major barriers for Chinese-American artists while advocating for war relief and foreign relations with China in her spare time. While they weren't public about their relationship (because it was the mid-20th century), they were clearly the lesbian power couple of 20th-century art.

159. Murray Bartlett

Occupation: Actor
Years active: The Australian actor been working since the mid-1990s, but it was his role as Dom in the HBO series Looking that made any reasonable North American queer fall in love with him.
Why so iconic: Bartlett had not one but two of the most iconic moments of the summer of 2021 when he starred as Armond in another HBO series, The White Lotus. I won't fully spoil it for those who have somehow still not seen, but both moments very much involved the use of butts.

158. Mike White

Occupation: Filmmaker, actor, reality show contestant
Years active: After writing for series like Dawson's Creek and Freaks and Geeks, he made his film debut in 2000 by writing and acting in the truly stunning Chuck and Buck.
Why so iconic: Beyond writing and directing the aforementioned moments on The White Lotus involving Murray Bartlett and butts, he created a perfect series (HBO's Laura Dern-starring Enlightened), wrote a perfect screenplay (the Richard Linklater-directed The School of Rock) AND competed in one season of Survivor (where he was runner-up) and two seasons of The Amazing Race.

157. Gregg Araki

Occupation: Filmmaker
Years active: With a budget of only $5,000 and using a stationary camera, he made his first film Three Bewildered People in the Night in 1987.
Why so iconic: For being one of the most exciting voices in the early 1990s film movement New Queer Cinema; for giving us the unparallelled Teenage Apocalypse trilogy (Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere); and for directing Anna Faris to one the greatest comedic performances of all time:

156. Pedro Zamora

Occupation: AIDS educator and television personality
Years active: Best known for starring in the 1994 San Francisco season of MTV reality show The Real World, Zamora had been a full-time AIDS educator for years leading up to his stint on the series. He passed away at the age of 22 on November 11, 1994.
Why so iconic: For personalizing and humanizing people living with HIV on a level that had never really been seen before in popular media.

155. Miriam Margolyes

Occupation: Actor
Years active: First gained recognition as a voice artist in the U.K. in the early 1970s (notably in part for a soft-porn audio called Sexy Sonia: Leaves from my Schoolgirl Notebook) before breaking into film and TV in the 1980s. You may think you've never heard of her, but consider: she played the Nurse in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet, Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films and voiced Fly the dog in Babe.
Why so iconic: For literally hundreds of reasons, though we will go with when she referred to herself as a "dyke" in front of then-Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard after officially becoming an Australian citizen (Margolyes's partner since 1968, Heather Sutherland, is Australian).

154. Rachel Morrison

Occupation: Cinematographer
Years active: Got her first shot (literally) as the director of photography on the underrated 2011 film Sound of My Voice.
Why so iconic: For being the first (and, until this year, only) woman to be nominated for a best cinematography Oscar. (The film she was nominated for, 2017's Mudbound, was also directed by a queer woman, Dee Rees). She followed that up by becoming the first queer cinematographer on a Marvel film, which just so happened to also be the best Marvel film: Black Panther.

153. Sasha Velour

Occupation: Drag queen
Years active: Started performing drag in 2013 before dominating the 9th season of RuPaul's Drag Race.
Why so iconic: For doing this:

151. & 152. Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers

Occupations: Comedians, actors, podcasters
Years active: Both broke out doing live comedy in New York City in the early 2010s. Since 2016, they have co-hosted the podcast Las Culturistas, which has made every Wednesday of the past six years significantly more enjoyable for all of its fans.
Why so iconic: For celebrating the 200th edition of their podcast by counting down "the top 200 moments in culture history" over several consecutive episodes. This list has unquestionably been inspired by this masterwork, and if you have not listened to it yet, I assure you it is 200 times more entertaining than what you just spent way too much time reading:

Continue on to numbers 150 to 101 and then 100 to 51 on this subjective and excessive list of the 200 most iconic queers in cultural history.