Queerbaited by Aliens: How Mulder and Krycek Made Me Question Everything

You can keep your slow-burn ships. I’ll take the emotionally repressed FBI agent and his treacherous, chaos-bisexual, gun-to-your-head enemy/lover every single time. Yes, I’m talking about Mulder and Krycek—TV’s most confusing, most homoerotic, most emotionally damaging will-they-won’t-they that was never actually canon but felt more real than half the straight ships we were spoon-fed.

Let’s start with the vibes. Krycek shows up all fresh-faced, all eager-to-please, all "Yes, Agent Mulder"—only to immediately betray him. And from that moment on, they can’t stop circling each other: gun to the head? Repeatedly. Whispered threats and lingering eye contact? At least once per season. Weirdly tender betrayal vibes? Every. Single. Time.

Krycek betrays Mulder again and again, but does Mulder ever actually kill him? Nope. He punches him. He threatens him. He throws him against walls (more than once). But there’s something achingly personal about all of it. It’s not just revenge. It’s not just rivalry. It’s messy, intimate, slow-burn obsession.

It wasn’t subtext. It was just text we pretended wasn’t gay. The glances. The unspoken history. The you’re-the-only-one-who-gets-me energy. It was too much. And yet—just not enough. Because the show? Never went there. Instead, they left us feral, scrolling fan fiction forums, convincing ourselves we weren’t imagining it.

The fandom did what the writers wouldn’t. We wrote the stories. We filled the gaps. We turned homoerotic betrayal into centuries of messy, unresolved sexual tension. And honestly? We did a better job than the writers ever could.

Maybe it was real. Maybe it was projection. Maybe it doesn’t even matter anymore. Because the truth is, they raised us anyway—in all their gun-wielding, tension-dripping, never-actually-kissing chaos.

And somewhere out there…the truth is still gay.