Wicked author finally confirms ‘intentional’ lesbian subplot between Glinda and Elphaba

The original author of Wicked, Gregory Maguire, has opened up about speculation there’s some serious lesbian tension going on between Glinda and Elphaba and confirmed what we were all thinking.

During the Wicked tour, both Cynthia and Ariana were very vocal about their thoughts about the sexuality of their characters, with Ariana saying she thought Glinda was “in the closet.”

Well, now the original author of Wicked has confirmed it was “intentional” for the novel to have a subplot of lesbian romance between Glinda and Elphaba. This was made even more clear in the books when Glinda and Elphaba actually kissed each other but were left out in the 2024 film.

In an interview with Them, the author opened up about wanting to create an authentic culture for Wicked, which included exploring themes of sexuality.

He explained: “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.”

The author also discussed the kissing scene between the pair in the books, saying: “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.”

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He added: “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 it.”

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