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Apr 29, 2023

'G.I. Joe: The Movie' Is a Pride Month Must Watch

There are a lot of movies one can put into the rotation to celebrate Pride

There are a lot of movies one can put into the rotation to celebrate Pride Month: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar; The Birdcage; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Spice World; Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. All camp, all classics, and all located within the LGBTQ canon. I, however, would like to propose another addition to the list of must-watch movies: 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie. I’m serious! Push aside all of the juvenile jingoism and the movie's massively toyetic plot and you will find a cornucopia of queer icons called Cobra.

Because honey, Cobra is more than an animated global terrorist organization determined to take over the world. They are a fierce representation of the entire glamorous LGBTQ+ spectrum.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, y’all! Villains have been queer-coded since the beginning of film, and legends like Paul Lynde and Vincent Price earned fame and fortune from playing snippy antagonists and/or terrifying figures in movie musicals and B-level horror movies. There's Billy De Wolfe's "messy messy messy" Professor Hinkle in Frosty the Snowman and Charles Nelson Reilly's Horatio J. Hoodoo on the bizarre Lidsville. Disney gave us Ursula, Jafar, Scar, Maleficent, Captain Hook, Hades, and plenty of other dastardly characters that the queer community can claim, at least subtextually. Is this because straight society has historically viewed queerness as evil? I mean, probably! But can I, a gay man, also choose to see these characters as the only ones having any damn fun in any of these movies? Absolutely.

And honey, that brings us to Cobra, the villains who served charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent throughout the G.I. Joe franchise. Cobra is a pantheon of queer iconery, and G.I. Joe: The Movie, particularly the opening 10 minutes, is the absolute best example of this. Why? Because the movie opens up with the queerest, draggiest, fiercest villain that ’80s cartoons ever gave us (sorry Skeletor): Pythona.

For those who need a refresher on the canon, Pythona is an emissary from the remote, isolated realm of Cobra-La, essentially Apple TV+'s Silo if the silo was made out of a giant bean pod nestled in the Himalayas and populated exclusively with snake/fungus/lizard people. Pythona is smart, cunning, deadly, and — most importantly — a body queen.

I’m just gonna cut to the chase: if the G.I. Joe movies were to do one thing right and bring Pythona into live-action, she would without a doubt be played by the legendary Sasha Colby, the winner of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 15.

This is who Pythona is: a badass bitch who cuts through solid steel doors with a razor-sharp and acid-tipped manicure and then flips and stunts her way through wave after wave of himbo security guards, all while serving straight-up reptilian puss.

Making matters even gayer is the fact that Pythona's one-bitch infiltration of Cobra's Terror Drome is intercut with a scene wherein all of Cobra's fiercest divas read Cobra Commander to filth. The first line of the movie is Serpentor, a man dressed in head-to-toe snake fetish gear, screaming at the top of his lungs, "Blunderers! Fools!" He's Phi Phi O’Hara telling all of Cobra's wannabe boss bitches to go back to Party City where they belong. Except, in all that snake gear, Serpentor kinda looks like the emperor of Party City — but go off, sis.

The main offender is, of course, Cobra Commander, quite possibly the gayest villain in animated history. Not only does he have a lisp that could slice a Porsche in half, he is the platonic ideal of the scheming, sassy, annoying, maniacal supervillain — so, he's essentially the blueprint made-for-reality-TV gay that's appeared on screen since Justin tried to sabotage Amaya and Colin's relationship in Real World: Hawaii. To be clear: I love Cobra Commander and he owns a mid-century home in every ventricle of my gay heart.

Still, CC is being read-the-terror-drome-down-boots because he has 95 episodes of catastrophic failures to answer for. Destro — who embodies the butch queen energy of, like, a barely-closeted European mogul who made a ton of money funding silent films in the old Hollywood era — calls Cobra Commander a "world-class… buffoon!" It's the pointed pause before buffoon for me, honey.

He's backed up by Doctor Mindbender, a mad scientist who has a name that sounds like a brand of poppers from the ’80s. Now, the character designers behind Mindbender had to know what they were doing. You don't create a bald, mustachioed, shirtless muscle daddy wearing a monocle, cape, and silver suspenders and codpiece unless you’re only looking at Tom of Finland images while working on your G.I. Joe assignment. Mindbender's read: "Destro forgot to mention your frequent displays… of cowardice." You betta werk, Mindbender.

The rest of Cobra's higher-ups drag CC, higher-ups that include rich twin twunk influencers Tomax and Xamot, as well as the iconic Baroness. Now, Baroness is herself not queer. Baroness is the G.I. Joe equivalent of a Housewife or, to speak a language I’m fluent in, a Christine Quinn type. She's not gay, but she is so legendarily, spectacularly villainous that the gays love her.

Then there's Zarana, the other undoubtedly queer femme icon of G.I. Joe. She's a punk clad in pink who is a master of disguise who, while dressed as an ’80s bimbo named Heather, manipulates Don Johnson's Lt. Falcon into letting her into the Joes’ prison facility. Oops!

On her way out, she throws mega shade at Jinx, one of the Joes’ few queer icons (the others are bearded sailor-daddy Shipwreck and the javelin expert and baseball cap collector Lady Jaye). I will give Jinx props for telling "Heather" to "make like an amoeba and split." Jinx knows how to read the dolls.

Like a lot of queens, Zarana is part of a house — the House of Zartan.

That includes the always-overlooked brother Zandar, a ginger who is hella into body paint, and Zartan himself. With his old Hollywood leading lady hairdo, black eye makeup, body armor, and exposed midriff, Zartan is essentially practicing the kind of genderfuck drag that RuPaul was known for in the 1980s. And if you had any doubts about Zartan being a queen, here's his reaction when Pythona offers to pay him for his services with a gem so big it would make Alyssa Edwards do a double take.

His actual response: "A gem of that size answers all my questions." That's a queen.

Now, is Cobra really a terrorist organization determined to take over the world? They fail every single time they try. But when it comes to being fierce, to slaying the fashion game, to reading a bitch down beneath the ground, to just plain-ass serving cunt all across the globe? Honey, Cobra gets 10s, 10s, 10s across the board. I wish nothing but the happiest of Pride Months to all of my snake-loving supervillains. Cobra as queer icons: I rest my case.