WICKED Author Gregory Maguire Confirms “Intentional” Lesbian Subtext Between Glinda and Elphaba in THEM Interview

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In an exclusive interview published today, THEM sat down with Gregory Maguire, author of “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” the 1995 novel the beloved musical is based on. With the story reaching its widest audience yet as a blockbuster movie hit, fan theories are swirling more than ever, including speculation about the identities and queerness of starring characters. 

Maguire speaks at length with Them about his narrative choices in Wicked, why Glinda and Elphaba’s sexuality is open for interpretation, and whether Elphaba is trans or intersex.  

On whether the sexual tension between Glinda and Elphaba was intentional: “That was intentional, and it was modest and restrained and refined in such a way that one could imagine that one of those two young women had felt more than the other and had not wanted to say it. Or perhaps because a novelist can’t write every scene, perhaps when the lights were out and the novelist was out having a smoke in the back alley, the girls had sex in the bed on the way to the Emerald City. I wanted to propose this possibility, but I did not want to make a declarative statement about.”

On fan theories about Elphaba being trans or intersex based on excerpts from his book: “I do sow seeds of possibility there. But I will tell you that the reason I sowed those seeds is that I wanted this book to be an examination about how we think of people as the end result of trauma, and that in fact, we are all larger than our traumas. So, I put right at the very beginning the moment she’s born, there’s a question, does she have both sex organs? Maybe that was just a trick of the light? Well, you could wonder for the rest of her life and yours whether she did or not. But whether she did or not would not change the path that she had to go on.”

On whether the AIDS crisis informed his writing in Wicked: “The answer is yes. When Fiyero is murdered, as far as we know, and Elphaba retreats into the monastery of nuns, she spends seven years there and her job is to take care of the dying. And that was my nod to where we had been and where we were in our community. And by then, by the time I wrote the book, I had been living with a man for 15 years or so. I knew that somebody would have to care for dying people, even in a magic land where troubles melt like lemon drops away above the chimney tops. Somebody has to wash the corpses and say the prayers.”

On adding sexuality to Wicked’s narrative: “I wanted to make Oz seem as real as Middle-Earth. I wanted it to have a depth of culture, a depth of history, and a depth of complexity, of experience that was more analogous to the world in which we live. And that meant it had to have varieties of sexual experience.”

[Photo Credit: harpercollins.com, Universal Studios]

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