Arts & Culture | Queer Life

Miss Scarlet, in the Lounge, with the Rope: What Clue Taught Me About Gender

Being a girl meant minimizing myself and my needs, but Miss Scarlet embodied glamour, power and possibility in an unapologetically femme package.

By the time I was ten years old, I was terrified of getting in trouble. It was the end of fifth grade, the end of the annual school-wide Field Day, in which my entire elementary school spent the day in various outdoor games and contests on the blacktop and field behind the school. We cycled from one activity to the next, the sun beating down on our small bodies. On the lower field, on the lumpy, dusty grass, a group of us waited for our turn at the next game.

One of the boys kept saying something to us girls. It was an us I was part of, as far as I knew at the time. I don’t remember now what he said. “Girls are stupid,” maybe, or something even more demeaning, but it was about girls as a whole. He said something, and I turned, arm extending, finger unfurling. It was an almost out-of-body experience, because it wasn’t the kind of thing I did. Even now, I distinctly remember the times I got in trouble at school, and I can count them on one hand.

This gesture needed only a finger: the middle one. I flipped him off.

Later, in the office, we sat at opposite ends of a bench, waiting to talk to the principal. I turned away from him, toward the wall, and cried, dreading my mother’s arrival. I was a good kid. Teachers praised my classroom presence, and my parents appreciated me for making their lives easier. Good kids didn’t flip people off, no matter what the other person said first. If I got in trouble, the affection and approval of the adults in my life vanished and, as far as I could tell, was replaced by shock, anger, and silent disappointment. If I got in trouble, then I was bad, and bad people didn’t get or deserve love.

So I tried to be good as much as possible. I look back and see a child doing their best in a stressful home environment, holding in their anger, fear, and confusion until it boiled over in big ways—this wasn’t the first time I’d flipped off a classmate. At the time, though, I had no language. All I had was shame.

*

At home, it was the four of us: my mother, my father, my younger sister, and me. When I was ten, my family, by my parents’ choice, did not yet have a television. Instead, the silver screen of imagination powered my days. We went to the library and filled plastic laundry hampers up with books, then spent hours reading on the couch. My sister and I rode endless loops around the block on our bicycles and staged elaborate scenes from Sailor Moon in our backyard. As a family, we played board games, usually Scrabble, Sorry!, Monopoly, or—my personal favorite—Clue.

For the uninitiated, Clue is a murder-mystery game. In its most basic form, three to six players take on the role of six guests, all named after colors, and deduce who murdered the host of their soiree, in what room of his mansion, and with what weapon. The game was patented in 1947, and various versions have been in production ever since all over the world. Among other media, the franchise has spawned PC games, several book series, a TV miniseries, and a feature film. (Which bombed when it came out. It is now a cult hit and one of my favorite movies.)

The script is highly quotable, full of zingy one-liners and innuendo just vulgar enough to make a kid feel cool and grown-up for getting it; the characters are played to campy perfection by a cast of standout comedians; and it all rests on one of the best-selling board games of all time. The game mixed elements of strategy easy enough for my child mind to grasp but hard enough to make me feel triumphant and superior when I won and, like the movie, contained adult (and therefore interesting) concepts like murder, betrayal, and seduction in a sanitized package held together by the glamour of a mansion party.

I wanted to be the center of attention, surrounded by friends and admirers; I wanted to feel loved. 

I entered the Clue universe via the 1996 US version of the board game. The first mention of the game appears in my journal in early 2001, midway through sixth grade. My big, still-childish handwriting scrawled a list of all six of the game’s characters: Mr. Gerald Green, Colonel Martin Mustard, Miss Charlotte Scarlet, Mrs. Wilhelmina White, Professor Paul Plum, and Mrs. Penny Peacock. Three men, three women, and the host, whose name was Mr. Boddy.

The board game sparked my fixation, but the chapter books sustained it. They were slim paperbacks, usually consisting of ten different mini-mysteries on classic themes: Who stole the host’s rare jewel or artifact? Who won the contest between all the guests? Who murdered one of the other guests or, in the last chapter, Mr. Boddy himself? At the end of every chapter, you could turn the book upside down and read the answer to check your own guess. I called my local used bookstores relentlessly for copies of each one; there were eighteen of them, published throughout the 1990s, and though they were out of print, I was determined to collect them all.

Like the rooms of the mansion (the Library, the Kitchen, the Lounge, and so on) and the weapons (the Rope, the Knife, the Revolver, etc.), the characters were not sophisticated. Maybe that was their appeal. They were archetypes, easy to understand, easy to inhabit as I read: Colonel Mustard, the brash military man; Mrs. White, the stressed-out maid; Professor Plum, the forgetful academic; Mr. Green, the greedy businessman; Mrs. Peacock, the prim and proper matron; and Miss Scarlet.

Of all the characters, I gravitated immediately to her. Miss Scarlet’s imagery has gone through several iterations, but her characterization has remained consistent. She was the embodiment of a femme fatale, before I ever knew the term. She was the only “Miss” out of all the female characters, her title denoting her single status. Described by Wikipedia as “young, cunning, and attractive” and “a flirtatious young woman who likes to seduce, steal from, and murder people for money, revenge, etc.,” she is often pictured on the book covers reclining in chairs, clutching the arm of one of the male characters, or sneaking around the mansion at night—always in a red dress.

Miss Scarlet was everything I wasn’t. I was the older sibling, the people pleaser, the “good kid.” Until high school, I rarely had more than one or two close friends at a time. I was gullible and shy and rarely asserted myself. As a teenager, I remained both mystified and terrified by flirting and dating, even as I nursed countless unrequited crushes. I absorbed my lessons in what I was supposed to be and do from my social world and the media. I watched my mother and her relationship with my father and learned from it. I knew without knowing it, in the way children do, that my emotional survival and access to love and connection depended on my ability to take care of others and minimize my own needs.

As a girl, it was required of me.

Miss Scarlet, though, was different. She did not depend on anyone. She was more than beautiful; she was glamorous. She had not just looks but mystery and power. She knew what she wanted and she acted to get it, regardless of consequence. I was fascinated by her, my childhood mind filtering out how she came to her power through deceit, manipulation, and murder. It was a fascination I learned to tamp down when my family members commented on my attachment to her. She was the only character I would choose when we played the game; I refused to let anyone else play her. I talked about her often and would point out red cars when we were out and about.

Someone—my sister? She doesn’t remember—said something, and I felt ashamed. That it was weird, somehow, to be so fixated on a person who didn’t exist.

This is a common queer experience though. I wanted to be her, and perhaps, on some unconscious level, a latent attraction outside the heterosexual prescription was bubbling up. I imagined myself in the future, grown-up, driving a red sports car. I didn’t fantasize about weddings or babies or a husband. Neither did I picture myself manipulating and deceiving people, as she did. In my eyes, her power was inherent. That red dress spoke loudly, and I wanted to be heard. I wanted to feel powerful. I wanted to be beautiful and, more deeply, to be seen. I wanted to be the center of attention, surrounded by friends and admirers; I wanted to feel loved.

I wanted things I got unreliably, from parents who loved us but were lost in their own chaotic dynamic, extending their isolation outward around our family. Sometimes, very rarely, my sister or I would have a friend over, but it always seemed like a big deal to ask, so when I saw my friends, it was usually at school or at their houses. My mom had a small circle of friends and saw them about as often as I saw mine. My father, as far as I knew, only had us.

*

In one of our high school’s bathrooms, my friends and I changed out of the clothes we’d worn to the Big Band Dance. From here, we were headed to the aquarium for Tolo, a spring dance for which the girls were supposed to ask out the guys. I was going stag, with my friends. Moments ago we’d all been awkwardly swing-dancing in the gym, our shoes squeaking across the floor while our school’s jazz band played. Now I was in a stall, my feet on cold tile, as I pulled on my first dress.

It wasn’t my first dress, of course. I’d worn dresses a few times as a kid. But it’s my first memory of a dress. It wasn’t scarlet. It was a light green, the color of spring grass, cut low across my chest, made of a synthetic fabric that hugged my fifteen-year-old curves. I’d found it during a day spent traversing the mall with my friends while we hunted for dresses. My friends cooed over me when I emerged from the dressing room; I was more at home in T-shirts and jeans, my necklines high and my styling usually somewhat baggy.

I exited the bathroom; in my memory, I was the last of the girls to do so. One friend turned, and then they all did, and the group exploded.

“Oh my god!”

“You’re so gorgeous!”

“This is a Kodak moment,” one of the girls said. “You’re simply stunning!”

The boys looked at me in a way I had never been looked at before. That night, I was a word I’d never once thought of to describe myself.

I was hot, and I felt powerful.

After the track pants and T-shirts I lived in during my elementary and middle school years, my style throughout high school became more feminine in a vague way, cobbled together from thrift stores, the juniors section of JCPenney, and the occasional outlier from Zumiez or the Gap. My favorite clothing items were a pair of light-wash bell-bottoms my friends covered in drawings and slogans, and a suit jacket, the lapels lined with pins.

But I loved dressing up for dances. It felt like, and was, a sacred, sexy ritual, the girls and I meeting up at someone’s house to take silly pictures, eat snacks, do our makeup and hair, and, finally, put on our dresses and strike poses for the camera. There were no smartphones; I still have film photos of these moments tucked away in storage.

When I dressed up for dances, I was doing it with a purpose: not just to be seen by others but also for myself, to feel beautiful and powerful in a way I rarely felt. At every dance, someone commented on my appearance with both surprise and awe. I was “sexy,” with an “amazing figure.” I was a version of me they never saw in our day-to-day at school. On those nights, my body and the way I looked communicated something deeper, something internal. For a night, I was confident and seen, having fun with all my friends. My dresses alternated in color largely between black and green, but inside, even though I hadn’t thought about her in years, I was Miss Scarlet.

In my journal that year, I made a list of facts about myself, in the style of the ubiquitous Myspace quiz. One of three favorite movies I listed was Clue.

Besides her status as the only single woman, Miss Scarlet also has the distinction of being the first of all the characters in the United States iterations to change race. Until 1972, she was depicted as a blonde bombshell, but that year, she changed both hair color and ethnicity, and until 1996 she was shown as a dark-haired Asian woman. Her country of origin is unspecified. At one point, she was referred to with the distinctly Red-Scare-flavored tagline “the Mercenary of Macao,” after a city and region in China on the coast by the South China Sea.

Her switch to presumably Chinese coincides with an effort by the United States government at the time to improve relations with China after the end of the Vietnam War. Given the history of racism against Chinese people, and Asians in general, in the United States, her positioning as a murderous and deceptive femme fatale, ensnaring men with her beauty and sexuality, becomes racist when her race is changed, aligning her with the “Dragon Lady” stereotype commonly applied to East Asian women.

Her shift back to white—this time as a brunette—happened just six years after the Chinese government’s crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests fractured their relationship with the United States once more. Miss Scarlet has remained white ever since.

As a child, I could see that Miss Scarlet was Asian on the mini-mystery covers (whose publication began before her second change of race) and white on the board game packaging, but I don’t remember thinking anything of it. I am white, and back then I took for granted the whiteness of the game. No one around me ever questioned it, and neither did the culture at large, in any medium. White was, and still remains, the default. Now, the subtext of Miss Scarlet’s racialization is clear to me, almost painfully so. Reading about her identity change, I had to check my own still-knee-jerk reaction: Are you serious? How was that okay? Of course it was, and I have the privilege to still feel surprised even when I know better.

Diving into the racial implications of Clue could fill a dissertation. Similarly, so could a gender or queer analysis of the franchise. No one in the Clue universe, at least in the board game editions, is queer or trans; there have been no gender or sexuality changes for the characters.

The film takes a different tack. It was released in 1985 and set in 1954 during the McCarthy era, a time of government-led anti-communist witch hunts that also targeted suspected gay people. It is pure camp, led by Tim Curry, who had already starred in the queer classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, as Wadsworth the butler. All the characters are summoned to a mysterious mansion to meet the person who has been blackmailing each of them. The night begins with his murder, and the rest of the movie is a madcap race by the guests and Wadsworth to find out whodunit. As each of the guests’ motivations is revealed, Mr. Green takes matters into his own hands.

“I have something to say,” he says, standing up. “I’m not going to wait for Wadsworth here to unmask me. I work for the State Department, and I’m a homosexual.”

Other characters gasp, and Mrs. Peacock shakes her head, making a sound of disgust.

“I feel no personal shame or guilt about this,” he says, glancing at her, “but I must keep it a secret, or I will lose my job on security grounds.”

While most of the other guests proclaim their innocence, Miss Scarlet, played by Lesley Ann Warren, is similarly unashamed of her secret.

“Oh, I’m being blackmailed all right,” she says with a smirk, “but I did what I’m being blackmailed for.” She’s the madam of an underground escort service in Washington DC. Her lack of shame was a direct contradiction to the way sex work was portrayed then and now. I don’t remember what I thought watching it as a young teen; maybe it went over my head at the time, maybe I thought it was scandalous. Now I recognize it as a unique moment in the media I consumed.

Miss Scarlet, in all her representations, was a possibility outside what I absorbed, first as a child, then as a teenager, about the role I was expected to play in my family and in society. Though she is not canonically queer—none of the characters are, and even Mr. Green’s brief turn is revealed as a ruse—if any of the characters were, it would be her. Queer can refer to who you have sex with, but it can also mean the way you live in the world. Queerness questions and challenges gender, sexual, and other norms, not just in straight society but gay culture as well. It is a personal identity and a political stance. Miss Scarlet embodies a challenge to what was prescribed for women in the era she was created and beyond. She is simply herself, and she makes no apologies for it. Other characters attempt to judge or shame her for her appearance or sexuality, but she never internalizes it. She is a femme fatale, and the most important word in that phrase is the first one.

*

The only word I had to describe myself in high school was bisexual. I came out the same year I wore that first green dress, and I was one of the few out students at my high school. It wasn’t until I was nineteen that I learned about transgender people beyond their exploited and stereotyped depiction on shows like Maury and Jerry Springer and considered for the first time that there might be a name for that thing I’d felt my whole life, that there was something different about me that bisexual didn’t cover. But even under that label, nothing really fit, and I didn’t know any trans people, so I convinced myself that being a girl was fine.

I dated cis men and lived as a cis woman up until my midtwenties, when I had my first relationship with someone who was not a cis man. They were nonbinary, a word previously unavailable to me, with more of a masculine lean, and I was starting to build a real community around me. For the first time in my life, I knew more than one or two people who were queer, and I knew people who were trans too.

In September 2015, an eleven-page journal entry marked a new phase of questioning my gender, something I’d been cycling through for seven years.

“Femme,” I wrote then. “There is a word that has been loaded for so long.”

I was ready to take my gender apart, find out what it really was; my relationship with my partner was a safe space in which to rest in these questions for real and take action on the answers.

“They make me feel femme in a way I never have before,” I added, “not in a way that makes me feel weak and submissive, or like a girl—but the strongest I have ever felt.”

She was the embodiment of a femme fatale, before I ever knew the term.

By the end of that relationship the next month, I came out as nonbinary and changed my pronouns to they/them. I’d felt inklings of what it might mean to be femme in that relationship, in the way we interacted, so different from my relationships with cis men as a cis woman, and I knew the word from my love for the book Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. I wasn’t sure if it was my word, if I could be nonbinary and be femme; most trans people I knew who’d been assigned female at birth were masculine in some way.

I don’t remember how I learned about Femme Fest, but one morning that November I stepped into Gay City, Seattle’s queer health center, and entered the auditorium space at the back. The fest consisted of a weekend of workshops and evening events, by and for femmes of all genders.

Almost immediately I was greeted by a femme, someone I read as a white woman older than me, with power and confidence that caught my attention just as much as her bright lipstick. She didn’t just greet me; she welcomed me. As the small theater filled up with other femmes, I found a seat and looked around. There were people I read as cis women and folks whose genders I couldn’t discern; there were animal prints and floral patterns and lipsticks in all shades of the rainbow. There were high femmes and sporty femmes, loud femmes and quiet femmes.

The organizers led us through group writing and sharing exercises, and I settled into the space, feeling at home in a way I hadn’t felt before.

“What are the intersections between femme and femininity?” they asked.

We scribbled, heads bent, on the small squares of colored paper they had on hand.

“What does it mean to embody femme?”

“What are your femme roots?”

A root, in a queer context, is the thing in your life that sparked your awareness of your own queerness, often a character who helped you realize that other possibilities of gender, sexuality, and ways of being outside the norm existed. I struggled to think of someone I could call my femme role model. I was still untying “femme” from my association with “cis woman,” so I didn’t want to pick a cis woman as my example. I hadn’t thought about Clue, much less Miss Scarlet, except for still naming the movie as one of my favorites, in years.

Eventually, I landed on David Bowie, whose music and persona entered my life at fourteen. There are more names now, and I can see the throughline of campy, unashamed, fabulously adorned femininity in all of them: from Bowie to Britney Spears to the Sailor Moon characters. But the most influential among them, dug up from my memory to receive her rightful recognition, is Miss Scarlet. She was my first femme icon.

*

I was twenty-six when that first queer relationship ended. I have been out as nonbinary since then and, after exploring the facets of gender expression available to me, have landed back in femme. Once again, I found affirmation of that identity through a relationship, and over time, without noticing it, a large part of my sense of self and my life shifted to revolve around him. When it ended, I started from scratch: Who was I without a partner? What did my future look like? How could I pull myself from the depths of trauma and heartbreak and heal myself? I gravitated back to a familiar archetype.

“I think this year’s vibe is gonna be ‘gay socialite,’” I wrote beneath a thirst trap posted to my private instagram. In the photo, I lounge in a chair, wrapped in a silky floral robe.

As I excavated myself from the breakup, I came across an essay by a queer woman a few years older than me, about what it was like to be single at her age and the cultural narratives about single women. I knew I’d read it before, and I scrolled through it again. When I finished the essay and got to the comment section, I stopped.

“I too have always had that vision of my future self as a glamorous single [person, now that I’m out as genderqueer],” my 2015 self, newly post-breakup, had written. “Yet I also feel that intense desire for intimacy. I don’t know how to navigate it.”

It has always been hard for me to imagine a future where I could have everything I want: independence and intimacy, self-worth and connection, adventure and consistency. These desires seemed wholly incompatible. In the back of my mind, too, it wasn’t the desires themselves; it was me. I was simply incapable, uniquely unable to access, balance, and sustain them. As a child, and in many of my romantic relationships, I was often punished for or denied my feelings, needs, and autonomy in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Eventually, I learned to deny them to myself, but they would resurface when I couldn’t keep them down anymore. Flipping off my classmate for his sexist comment during Field Day was a Miss Scarlet moment in which I, however clumsily, asserted myself, my power, and my opinion.

“Being femme is like being in love,” I wrote in a later passage of that September 2015 journal entry, before I ended that first (but not last) queer relationship. “You feel good and sexy all the time . . . because no matter what you wear, you’re being you.”

The socialite, the glamorous single person, the Miss Scarlet: I wanted to be surrounded and loved by my community, to be the host and participant of fabulous events, to be confident in myself and all that I bring to the world.

Femme can be so many things: a gender, a presentation, something you feel inside and express on the outside, a role you take in relationships and who you are just for yourself. Femme is inherently queer; it’s femininity on purpose, taken apart and made anew and stripped of social norms and expectations. Femme is inner power, and power that is shared, not power given to others or held over someone else. (Unless it’s consensual. Let us not forget that the Rope can be used for tying people up.) Femme is adornment for my own pleasure and, yes, if I want, for others’ pleasure as well. Choice is an integral aspect of femme identity. As a femme, I choose to let myself be seen and loved for who I am. I choose to see and love myself.