This story contains spoilers for Season 4 of Stranger Things.
The term queerbaiting gets thrown around a lot these days, and like any useful word that the discourse latches onto, it’s begun to lose any real meaning. In its most useful definition, queerbaiting refers to a piece of media that teases an implicit romantic or sexual chemistry between two same-sex characters, with the intention of drawing in a queer audience, only for the relationship to be left in a fog of plausible deniability. The queerness is never confirmed.
