Reading Snape Through A Queer Lens

Reading Snape through a queer lens

It’s funny how the years shape your opinions, and no matter how hard I try, I can never shake the idea of Snape as being queer – whether he’s gay, or bi, or genderqueer, or whatever…there’s something ‘different’ about Snape that makes me love him through a queer lens.

And for me, the most joyous moment is when Sirius calls him Lucius’ lapdog – because the implication and insinuation in that is so strong for anyone who has an awareness of what boarding school could be like in the 20th century.  

So, it’s a full admission from me when I say that I’ve always read Snape through a queer lens – but I have, at times, read his relationship with Lily as being heteronormative, and subsequently taken it as read that he coveted a sexual relationship with her.

As I get older, that reading has made me more and more uncomfortable.  I understand where the ‘nice guy’ criticism comes from – which, in fairness to JK, wasn’t such a trope when she wrote the books, and I don’t think she was aiming for.

But Snape’s ‘desire’ for Lily absolutely reduces his character from being someone powerful and interesting to well, a character who is a little pathetic – pining after someone who had no reciprocal interest, and who had clearly moved on.  

So, let’s break down the heteronormative reading:  

-  Firstly, Snape and Lily are boy-meets-girl which is prevalent in our culture.  

-  Secondly, Voldemort reveals that Snape desired Lily.

-  Thirdly, the way Snape reacts to Lily over James – particularly his possessiveness, and also:  “The intensity of his gaze made her blush.”  

The first can potentially be dismissed; we know for a fact that Lily is some variation of heterosexual, as she marries and has a child – but we know nothing about Snape’s sexuality. 

The second can definitely be dismissed because the whole point of Voldemort’s character is that he doesn’t understand love.  Interestingly, Snape must be presenting as some variation of heterosexual or bisexual for this to be credible to Voldemort.  Furthermore, we see throughout the series that Snape consistently lies to Voldemort.  

The last can be interpreted in a few ways; it could be a young teenage boy wrangling with his feelings…but it could be a young teenage boy who realises that he’s got competition for his best friend and a boyfriend will always rank more highly than a friend.  The contrast of ‘he fancies you’ versus ‘I’m your friend’ is quite interesting.

And it’s here that the message is rather mixed – for a man who devotes his life to honouring Lily’s name, he doesn’t explicitly choose Lily; he wants to associate with Mulciber and Avery at the same time.  For a 15 year old with raging hormones, he throws himself down the path of power…which follows his obsession with James, Sirius et al, who routinely strip him of his power.  He doesn’t, at any point, attempt to woo Lily.  

When Lily closed the door on Snape, he walked away.  Canon doesn’t state that he sent her flowers, or wrote her letters, or hung about outside her house; it rather suggests that they left each other alone with no further contact.

So when Snape goes to the hill and begs Dumbledore to keep Lily safe, he isn’t doing it because he thinks that slaughtering her family will mean that the path is clear for him; he does so because:

-  Lily is the only person in the Potter family who matters to Snape; if she hadn’t been at risk, he wouldn’t be defecting.

-  James was his schoolyard bully.  When James is long dead in the 90s, Snape still hasn’t moved on from how he was treated – Snape’s hardly likely to request a pardon for him…he’d probably be pleased if he was murdered.

-  Harry was the baby in the prophecy.  It’s not that I think Snape cares particularly either way about Harry – but that he believed that if Voldemort wanted to murder Harry, he wouldn’t be in a position to prevent it.  I think he felt Lily could be spared, whereas Harry couldn’t. 

You can read Snape’s acquiescence to Dumbledore’s suggestion to save the entire Potter family in two ways – either he sees it’s the only way to save Lily and accepts it, or he genuinely hasn’t thought any further than, “Lily must stay alive.”  I rather subscribe to the latter, which makes it an incredible scene of selflessness and selfishness in one swoop (which is Snape all over; a mass of contradiction).  

Our reading of Snape is distorted, because we read Snape-the-Spy.  We don’t see any sign of Snape’s true character (which would probably have been present in his post-school Death-Eater years) – instead, we meet him when he seems to despise his occupation which he’s forced into, and he socialises with people who are useful to the cause, as opposed to who he wants to.

As it stands, we can categorically state that Snape doesn’t appear to move on from his love for Lily – but we don’t know how much of this is love or coveting of Lily, and how much is due to his role as a spy.  We only have to look at Lucius and the way Voldemort treats Draco and Narcissa to see the dangers of having a family when you’re embroiled in warfare; Snape would be bringing a partner or a family into a war.  

…so I think sometimes we fall back on thinking that Snape has spent 15-20 years crying over Lily, when actually, he hasn’t flaunted a relationship with anyone for fear of them being toyed with by his enemies as a way of reaching him.  

For me, reading Snape as non-heterosexual helps to clear the path slightly.  If we assume that he wasn’t interested in Lily sexually, the story is tilted slightly differently – and Snape’s story becomes one of guilt.  Sirius tells us in OotP that many wizarding families followed Voldemort because his true thoughts weren’t apparent until it was too late, and I think Snape’s childhood, where his Muggle father seemingly dominated his magical mother, caused him to believe the two worlds should be separate.  

We don’t learn much about Avery and Mulciber, although Snape doesn’t appear to have a particularly close relationship with them post-school.  The rest of the Death Eaters present as varying degrees of insane, with the Malfoys being notable exceptions – and it would be credible to suggest that Lucius groomed Snape for his own ends, suggesting a bit of a power imbalance in their relationship.

However, we also see how Snape isn’t – despite Dumbledore standing up for him, and it not being proven until GoF that Snape was a Death Eater – really trusted by anyone on the side of the light.  It’s easy to see how Snape, who was bullied and almost murdered by a group of boys who were subsequently groomed into the Order, wouldn’t have aligned himself with any group they were in or with Dumbledore.

So that leaves, in his entire shabby life, Lily.  Her death stunts him emotionally because it turns out that she was the only person who seemed to like him for who he was.  Yet, he ignored her warnings, followed the wrong path, and was implicated in her death (committed by those he was aligned to).  He tried to make amends, but it was too late – which is the story of their friendship.  

Lily became an emblem of the path he should’ve taken and somewhat perversely, when Lily dies, Snape “becomes” Lily.  With Lily’s love for Harry keeping him safe in Surrey, Snape’s love for Lily causes him to take up the role of protector at Hogwarts.  Snape also assumes her patronus (or what we’re led to believe is her patronus), which is strongly coded as feminine – suggesting that it’s transformed, and isn’t his natural patronus.  

Somewhat ironically, when Snape leaves his own path and takes on Lily’s preferred route, he becomes everything she’d have been impressed by: a teacher, Head of House, and ultimately, Headmaster – and he gained the prestige and power he coveted as a youth. 

We start the story knowing that James and Lily were an item long before we discover that Snape and Lily had a friendship.  When we finally discover James and Snape didn’t like each other, and Lily and James ended up together, we assume that Snape treats Harry badly because James got the girl.

But that’s a huge reduction.  Snape doesn’t hate Harry because he’s James and Lily together; Snape hates Harry because he’s James.  We see throughout the series that Snape is the only character who refuses to acknowledge any amount of Lily in Harry (until, arguably, his dying moments).  Snape hates Harry because he looks exactly like the boy who tortured him for 7 years, and because he perceives Harry to be an arrogant rulebreaker, in the same way that James was.  

So no, I don’t think Snape was pleased that James and Lily ended up together, but not particularly because he was jealous.  Instead, it was the idea that he lost his best friend to his school bully – and that his own actions helped to push her that way. 

And that reads a whole lot more neatly to me than Snape coveting a relationship with Lily. 

Of course, you don’t need to read Snape through a queer lens to draw these conclusions; he could well have been heterosexual and either had a crush on Lily whilst they were friends but grew out of it, or he could’ve been heterosexual and not interested in Lily at all.  But if you read Snape as a celibate heterosexual, you do end up drawn down the Nice Guy path. 

Instead, Snape’s ‘pure of heart’ patronus rather suggests that he was genuine in his feelings, which points to him regretting the death of his childhood friend, rather than him feeling as if he friendzoned and missed out on a relationship that was somehow owed to him – and a queer lens rather helps to clarify that stance.