10 Queer Supervillains You Need to Know

Suicide Squad hits theaters next month, and we can't wait for the explosion of screwed up psychopaths it promises, or for Margot Robbie's frightening incarnation as notorious bisexual criminal Harley Quinn.

Queerness has been villainized for decades in popular films, television, and books. Giving children's antagonists stereotypically gay characteristics is extremely common and intentional: think Scar in The Lion King or Jafar in Aladdin.

In the documentary Do I Sound Gay?, filmmaker David Thorpe explains this phenomenon.

"Films need villains," Thorpe told Vice. "And for a very long time, the effete, aristocratic, effeminate man was the villain."

The queer villain appears not just in cartoons, but in Hollywood as well--for example: All About Eve's Addison DeWitt or Norman Bates in Psycho.

"The central subject of a lot of movies is the marriage plot," explained Thorpe. "Gay men stand outside that agenda--or at least they did..."

Comic books are no exceptions to the historically queer bad guy. Except here, many of our monsters are nuanced and complex. Sometimes they change to the good side at the last minute, sometimes they go straight for a while, or sometimes they remain too fluid to fit into any definitive box. We've collected our favorite non-hetero public enemies into one evil list.