'A Quiet Place perpetuates an exhausting gay trope'

When hostile aliens sensitive to sound fall from the sky, you should probably stay quiet and make as little noise as possible.

That's true in John Krasinski's A Quiet Place, and it's also key to Michael Sarnoski's prequel, Day One, which swaps out the original's rural horror for New York City. The Big Apple isn't exactly known for being quiet though, which ends up being a problem for Samira (Lupita Nyong’o) and her cat Frodo (Nico and Schnitzel) who just want to grab some pizza before the world ends.

Yet A Quiet Place: Day One is weirdly quiet, practically silent in fact, when it comes to Samira's new friend Eric (Joseph Quinn) and his apparent queerness, which was strongly hinted at after the film's release in a deleted scene that never made it to cinemas. Yep, that old chestnut, and during Pride Month, no less.

During the scene in question (released by People), Samira asks Eric why he was in the subway when they first met. It turns out he was planning to cut out all the noise completely and die by suicide, even before the aliens showed up.

"When I left home, I thought, 'I can go anywhere.' New York. That’s the place. I will be accepted in that city," says Eric. "I grew up in a really small town, and my dad was… he had an idea of the sons that he wanted. And I wasn’t like that. Here, people didn’t really mind that part of me…"

While Eric doesn't fully come out and say it, the obvious truth behind these words is that he's gay and that's why he wasn't accepted by his family. You'd think New York would be better for a card-carrying member of the alphabet people, but Eric goes on to explain why that wasn't the case for him.

"I was so lonely. And one day I woke up, and I just realised that I don’t have a home anywhere. I got really tired of feeling alone, and just bored of feeling alone. So I thought it would be easier not to live anywhere."

That gay reveal aside, this is a vital scene that should have been included. Knowing Eric felt suicidal at the start of the movie would have made his eventual fight for life by the end that much more powerful. But moving back to our regularly scheduled programming, it's also frustrating that Eric's queerness was effectively deleted out of the film we got to see in cinemas.

Small-town gays deserve to be seen too, even if they are still of the white, cis variety we're more used to seeing on screen. Yet gays of any kind are still largely absent in blockbuster cinema of this magnitude, or they're effectively invisible, only to be revealed as queer long after the fact.

In case there's still any doubt about the nature of that deleted scene, director Michael Sarnoski has since confirmed (via YouTube channel ‘beyond the cinerama dome’) that Eric was indeed a raging homosexual. It's just a shame that people will only find out about that through interviews or special features hidden away in a digital copy of the film.

Actually, no. It's not just a shame. It's a p**s take. Why is it ok to sideline queerness so often and so readily in blockbuster films when heterosexual kisses are crowbarred in on the daily, even when they have absolutely nothing to do with the story? You shouldn't have to watch deleted scenes or interviews to find out key information like this, especially when it’s pivotal to the character's motivation (as it clearly is in this case).

This isn't the first time a character has been retconned as gay. Or "gay-conned" if you will. Who can forget when JK Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay and in love with Gellert "Nazi" Grindelwald? Or when Tessa Thompson revealed that Valkyrie was supposed to be queer, only for Marvel to give her the run-around and delete any scenes that confirmed her as such?

If I were being very, very generous, naively so, I'd suggest that these later "reveals" actually come from a good place, that the studios wanted to show support, yet were too afraid of pushback at the time of release. But no. That's about as believable as Frodo refusing to meow or hiss at the aliens.

No, the real "con" is on studios and creators thinking they can have their cake and eat it too, that they can placate bigoted audiences and countries where they risk a ban only to reveal that there was actually a queer character in there all along. It's insulting, quite honestly.

Queer characters should never be rendered invisible or silenced completely in this fashion, especially in a franchise like A Quiet Place, which apparently took its name far too seriously. Because what we're left with is a story that's incomplete in ways that can make queer people watching feel the same way.

A Quiet Place: Day One is currently in cinemas.