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Harry M. Benshoff - Monsters in The Closet - Homosexuality and The Horror Film (Inside Popular Film) (1997) PDF
Harry M. Benshoff - Monsters in The Closet - Homosexuality and The Horror Film (Inside Popular Film) (1997) PDF
Harry M. Benshoff
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College, but real heartfelt thanks to Carol and Kevin, Todd and
Raphael, David Scasta, and Barry Cohen. And of course, much love
and many thanks to Sean, who for three years has made my life a
Technicolor musical rather than a horror film.
Permission to reproduce photographs has kindly been granted by
the following: plates 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15 and 23 Copyright © by
Universal Studios, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Divi
sion of MCA Inc. All Rights Reserved; plate 5 Copyright © Turner
Entertainment Co. All Rights Reserved. Photo courtesy of Scarlet
Street magazine; plates 11 and 12 Copyright © 1943 RKO Pic
tures/Used by permission of Turner Entertainment Co. All Rights
Reserved; plate 13 Copyright © 1945 Turner Entertainment Co. All
Rights Reserved; plate 16 Permission by Susan Nicholson Hofheinz;
plates 17 and 26 courtesy of Scarlet Street magazine; plate 22 Art
work © Orion Pictures Corporation; plate 31 courtesy of Kevin
Glover and Aries Productions. Every attempt has been made to
obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper
acknowledgement has not been made, copyright-holders are invited
to inform the publisher of the oversight.
Introduction: The monster and
the homosexual
the queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels
in the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomatically pro
scribed position of same-sex desire. Unlike petitions for civil rights,
queer revels constitute a kind of activism that attacks the dominant
notion of the natural. The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous,
the uncanny. Like the Phantom of the Opera, the queer dwells under
ground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to
8
look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music.
havoc in the cinema. While some have critiqued this model as essen
tialist, Wood did note the importance of historical parameters in
understanding the relationship between normality and monsters,
asserting that "[t]he monster is, of course, much more protean,
changing from period to period as society's basic fears clothe them
21
selves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments."
For many, the repressive hypothesis explicit in Tarratt's and
Wood's readings of the genre was overturned by the work of the
French theorist Michel Foucault, who, in The History of Sexuality
(1978) argued that sexuality is in fact not repressed by society, but
rather explicitly constructed and regulated via a series of discourses
which include those of the medical, legal, religious, and media
establishments. While many of these discourses have the same effect
on certain sectors of society as might be argued under the repressive
hypothesis (the exclusion from the public sphere, dehumanization,
and monsterization of certain forms of sexuality), Foucault argues
that "it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive
element from which one would be able to write the history of what
22
has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch." In
a by now famous turn of phrase, Foucault noted of "repression" that
23
"[t]here is not one but many silences." (This does not mean that
basic psychoanalytic concepts such as sexual repression and ego
dystonic homosexuality will not be discussed within the following
pages. Indeed, homosexual repression - as it might exist within an
individual psyche rather within society at large - is still a potent for
mulation in how one might understand the homosexual and/or
homophobic dynamics of many horror films.)
Like Wood, Foucault was a homosexual cultural critic who drew
upon (and eventually expanded) a Marxist understanding of how
society regulates human sexuality, developing a more precisely his
toricized formulation which examines how power and knowledge
are embedded in the practice of social discourse. Shifting the debate
from the repression of sex to the production of sexuality, Foucault
noted that ours is now a culture wherein "the politics of the body
does not require the elision of sex or its restriction solely to the
reproductive function; it relies instead on a multiple channeling
into the controlled circuits of the economy - on what has been
24
called [by Marcuse] a hyper-repressive desublimation." As sex and
sexuality become more ever-present in the public sphere, they are
nonetheless regulated into certain cultural constructions through
10 Monsters in the closet
As British cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall have pointed out, the
multiplicity of these discourses and their multiple sites of reception
also allow for the active negotiation of these issues. Thus, when
talking about a cultural product or "discursive object" such as a
filmic genre system, one would be wise to take into consideration
the historical discourses not only of production (where meanings
are encoded) but also those of reception (where meanings are
26
decoded according to a multiplicity of different reading positions).
One recent popular account of the monster movie that fails to
take under consideration the issues of history and active spectator-
ship can be found in James Twitchell's 1985 book Dreadful Plea
sures. After asserting that most monster movies are made for and
viewed by a predominately teenage audience (and how many Hol
lywood films are not?), Twitchell argues that horror films are "really
formulaic rituals coded with precise social information needed by
the adolescent audience. Like fairy tales that prepare the child for
the anxieties of separation, modern horror myths prepare the
27
teenager for the anxieties of reproduction." According to
Twitchell, the films function to encode patterns of "normal" sexual
ity that are in alignment with the dominant ideology; the monster is
seen as the product of misdirected or inappropriate sexual energy.
The vampire and werewolf myths therefore address the horror that
results from being "too" sexual and/or appetitive, or the horror that
results from desiring an "inappropriate" sexual object, chiefly
defined by Twitchell as an incestuous one. While a provocative read
ing of the genre, Twitchell's analysis rests upon a certain essential
ized portrait of the genre's audience, and an overvalued attention to
the classical horror film's climax and denouement, in which the
monster is traditionally vanquished by the forces of normality. How
the genre might function tactically against the ideological status quo
(by encouraging identification with the monster, by allowing the
monster to live at the film's end, or by turning the figure of the mon
Introduction 11
ster into some sort of heroic figure) are all important questions
which Twitchell's account cannot address. (For example, Carol
Clover's recent work theorizes the slasher, possession, and rape-
revenge subgenres of the horror film from a psychoanalytic per
spective and finds their lure to be more of a cross-gendered
masochistic identification with the "final girl" victim, rather than a
28
simplistic sadistic identification with a misogynistic killer.) Fur
thermore, while TwitchelPs book focuses on explicating metaphors
for incest taboos, masturbation, and promiscuity, he fails to address
in any depth the topic of homosexuality within the genre, despite
the fact he almost has to ignore it (willfully?) in his discussion of the
cinematic Frankenstein myth. Twitchell sees Dr Frankenstein's
obsessive need to create life without heterosexual reproduction as a
myth about the "dangers" of onanism. Yet why Dr Frankenstein is
obsessed with creating his very own man, or why the good doctor
usually has a closely bonded male assistant by his side, remain elu
sive questions, ones commonly overlooked by a heterocentrist cul
ture and the textual readings that support it.
How actual practices of spectatorship interact with the narrative
patterns of a genre system must then be considered when discussing
the queer pleasures of a horror film text itself. Where does the
viewer of monster movies position him/herself in relation to the
text? The overtly heterosexualized couple of the classical horror
film of the 1930s might be said to represent the most common (or
intended?) site of spectatorial identification for these particular
films, yet as many theorists have pointed out, it is more likely that
specific shot mechanisms within the film's formal construction will
29
link the spectator's gaze to that of the gothic villain or monster.
Furthermore, there is more to the processes of spectatorial identifi
30
cation than patterns of subjective shots and cinematic suture. For
example, the heterosexualized couple in these films is invariably
banal and underdeveloped in relation to the sadomasochistic vil
lain(s), whose outrageous exploits are, after all, the raison d'etre of
the genre. To phrase it in Richard Dyer's terms, in the horror film,
it is usually the heterosexualized hero and heroine who are stereo
typed - painted with broad brush strokes - while the villains and
31
monsters are given more complex, "novelistic" characterizations.
As the titular stars of their own filmic stories, perhaps it is the mon
sters that the audience comes to enjoy, experience, and identify
with; in many films, normative heterosexuality is reduced to a
12 Monsters in the closet
48
boy. While Ulrichs's aim was to explore and differentiate Urning
love from murderous pederasty, the Zastrow case of 1869 (as it
became known) and Ulrichs's discussion of it, only helped to link
same-sex relations with concepts of the monster both ages old (the
Greek Incubus) as well as more modern (the sexual psychopath).
For years after the trial, the common parlance of the day used the
term "Zastrow" (the name of the accused murderer) in place of
49
"Urning." Also less well known is that towards the end of his
career Ulrichs wrote an explicitly homosexual vampire story enti-
tled "Manor," which was published in 1885: true to what would
become narrative convention, the story ends with its male lovers
embracing, but only in death.
Like "Manor," the works of the late nineteenth century's gothic
renaissance were even more explicit than their predecessors regard-
ing the conflation of the monstrous with some form of queer sexu-
ality. J. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote his lesbian vampire tale "Carmilla"
in 1872, and Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1887. This latter tale has recently
received an excellent queer exegesis from Elaine Showalter, who
uses unpublished manuscripts to argue that Jekyll's repressed Mr.
50
Hyde was meant to be read as homosexual. Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1897), which arguably created the most enduring of monsters, fea-
tures an elegant and seductive count who preys not only upon the
bodies of men and women, but also on the very being of his victims,
transforming them into creatures as sexually monstrous as himself.
This might be understood as mirroring the culture's invention of the
homosexual: the vampire's victims not only indulge in vampiric sex,
but now become a new and distinct type of individual/monster
51
themselves.
Around this same time, the association of homosexual behavior
with elitism, death, and decay existed dramatically in an entire
movement of poets and painters who became known as "The Deca-
dents." Centering their work on abnormal loves, necrophilia, and
the ever-present image of the woman's corpse, the school was
simultaneously morbid and queer. As cultural historians have noted,
the term "Decadence" itself became "a fin-de-siècle euphemism for
52
homosexuality." The (mostly) male Decadents celebrated them-
selves as pale, thin, delicate, aestheticized, and emotional creatures,
turning upon one popular "scientific" construction of homosexual-
ity at that time: that of gender inversion, "anima muliebris in cor-
20 Monsters in the closet
55
gary (the latter possibly featuring Bela Lugosi)." Whether or not
these films (most of them are now lost) focused more on the novel's
tropes of pictorial transformation or its thematic queerness, it is
nonetheless clear that they did help to construct a very definite
image of the monstrous male homosexual. For example, the poster
for the 1917 German version of The Picture of Dorian Gray shows
a figure consistent with that era's understanding of the male homo
sexual. Dorian Gray stands next to a vase filled with heart-shaped
leaves; the figure himself wears a stylish tuxedo, patent leather slip
pers, bracelets and makeup, has rounded hips, arms akimbo with
one on the pedestal and one on a hip, crossed legs, cocked head,
flowered lapel, and a slightly bored, bemused expression on his
56
face.
It was the Germans who would ultimately create the distinctive
"look" of the horror film by wedding its queer characters and occur
rences to a visual style drawn from modernist painting, one that
eventually became known as a cinematic style in its own right,
57
German Expressionism. The nightmarish subjectivity explored in
the twisted and distorted mise-en-scene of these films proved to be
a key visual analog to the literature of horror and monsters, as well
as to the hidden recesses of the human psyche and sexuality. Many
of the German "Schauerfilme" of the era explored gothic themes
such as the homosexual creation of life (The Golem (filmed in 1914
and 1920)), while others focused on homoerotic doubles and mad
ness (The Student of Prague (1913), The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1917), and perhaps most famously The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919)). One of the leading filmic Expressionists of this era, F. W.
Murnau, was homosexual; he made film versions of both The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula, released in
58
Germany as Der Januskopf (1920) and Nosferatu (1922). German
Expressionism and modern art in general was and still is frequently
linked with homosexuality, not only through the historical sexual
ity of many of its practitioners, but also through its subject-matter,
and its opposition to "normality" as constructed through realist
styles of representation. Nazi Germany made these links most clear
in 1937 when it invited its citizens to denounce and mock mod
ernist art at a Berlin exhibit snidely entitled "Degenerate Art." The
aim of the exhibit was to demonstrate how Aryan culture had been
polluted by primitivism and the modernist style practiced (of
course) by Jews, homosexuals, and other social deviants. By that
22 Monsters in the closet
time, however, many of Germany's artists had died or fled the con
tinent. Film-makers such as Karl Freund and Paul Leni (among
many others) brought the German Expressionist style to America
and specifically to the horror films of Hollywood's classical period.
Once there, it helped to create some of the defining examples of cin
ematic horror, upon whose foundations almost all of Hollywood's
later monster movies have been built.
In citing these historical "facts" I do not mean merely to suggest
a rather coarse or knee-jerk auteurism (queer works are produced
by queer authors), but rather to point out the confluence of contra-
straight sexuality within the development of the gothic/horror
genre. The idea that the homosexual was socially constructed as a
distinct type of person during the late nineteenth century, and
inflected culturally ever since, is a key tenet of this work, which
means to situate itself somewhere between the theoretical poles of
essentialist sexuality and social constructionism. These models are
readily mapped out by John Boswell and David M. Halperin in the
first two essays contained in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the
59
Gay and Lesbian Past. While Boswell argues that there have always
been individuals whom today we might describe as "homosexual" -
that is, people who prefer sexual activity with members of their own
sex, Halperin's view (and mine) suggests that how this specific pref
erence is understood from era to era is shaped by a myriad of soci
etal concerns. In attempting to combine or mediate these positions,
it might be acknowledged that some form of innate and hardwired
"[b]iological sexuality is the necessary precondition for human sex
uality. But biological sexuality is only a precondition, a set of poten
tialities, which is never unmediated by human reality, and which
60
becomes transformed in qualitatively new ways in human society."
In other words, whether or not we understand the existence of
homosexuality to be biological or social in origin (or some combi
nation thereof), the idea of homosexuality being perverse or mon
strous is clearly the construction of historical and social ideas.
As such, the very language we use to describe and make sense of
our world works to mediate our understanding of homosexuality.
The historical progression of words such as "sodomite," "urning,"
"invert," "homosexual," "gay," "lesbian," and "queer" reflect in
themselves the changing understanding of our approach to human
sexuality across the years. And even within set eras, such words
mean different things to different groups of people. Thus, while the
Introduction 23
Notes
1 See John Wayne Plasek and Janicemarie Allard, "Misconceptions of
Homophobia," in Bashers, Baiters, & Bigots: Homophobia in American
Introduction 25
Society, ed. John P. De Cecco (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985)
23-38.
2 For more on the phenomenon, see Kellie Gibbs, "Fundamentalist Hal
loween: Scared All the Way to Jesus," Out 29 (February 1996) 2 0 .
3 Some of these essays include: Ellis Hanson, "Undead," in inside/out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge,
1991) 324-340; Andrew Parker, "Grafting David Cronenberg: Mon
strosity, AIDS Media, National/Sexual Difference" and Katharine Park,
"Kimberly Bergalis, AIDS, and the Plague Metaphor," both in Media
Spectacles, eds Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca Walkowitz
(New York: Routledge, 1993) 2 0 9 - 2 3 1 and 2 3 2 - 2 5 4 .
Other writings on the connections between fictional monsters and
homosexuality (not cited directly below) include: Terry Castle, The
Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Rhona J . Berenstein,
Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in
Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Richard Dyer, "Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality,
Homosexuality as Vampirism," Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and
Popular Fiction, ed. Susannah Radstone (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1988) 4 7 - 7 2 ; Bonnie Zimmerman, "Daughters of Darkness:
Lesbian Vampires," Jump Cut 24/25 (1981) 2 3 - 2 4 ; Martin F. Norden,
"Sexual References in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein," Eros in the
Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film, ed. Donald
Palumbo (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) 141-150; Elizabeth
Reba Weise, "Bisexuality, The Rocky Horror Pictre Show, and Me," in
Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. eds Loraine Hutchins
and Lani Kaahumanu (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1991) 134-139; Patricia
White, "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting," in
inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York:
Routledge, 1991) 142-172; Diana Fuss, "Monsters of Perversion: Jef
frey Dahmer and The Silence of the Lambs," in Media Spectacles, eds
Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York:
Routledge, 1993) 1 8 1 - 2 0 5 ; Edward Guerrero, "AIDS as Monster in
Science Fiction and Horror Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Tele
vision 18:3 (Fall 1990) 8 6 - 9 3 .
4 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media,
second edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 4 2 .
5 Many of these essays have been reworked and published in Robin
Wood, Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986) 7 9 .
6 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
26 Monsters in the closet
tury construction(s) of that same desire and activity: gay and lesbian
refer to social identities. "Queer" is the most multifarious term, encom
passing homosexual, gay, lesbian and all other terms used for describ
ing contra-straight sexuality; thus most of the monsters depicted in
horror films are "monster queers" by virtue of their "deviant" sexual
ity. I also use queer to refer to a reading protocol, one described by
aspects of textual coding and active spectatorship that question or go
beyond normative, compulsory, white, male, heterosexist assumptions.
16 Margaret Tarratt, "Monsters from the Id," Films and Filming 17:3
(December 1970) 38-42 and 17:4 (January 1971) 4 0 - 4 2 . Reprinted in
Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986) 2 5 8 - 2 7 7 .
17 For a brief narrative history of Films and Filming, see Anthony Slide,
ed., International Film, Radio, and Television Journals (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1985) 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 . Slide notes the magazine's "definite
homosexual slant" and also the mild controversy it caused in 1971
when some readers began to object. See also "Letters," Films and Film
ing (July 1971) 4.
18 See "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic," Film Comment 14:1 (Janu
ary-February 1978), Reprinted in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Meth
ods, Volume Two (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985)
6 4 9 - 6 6 0 . One might wonder as to the degree his thinking about and
writing on the horror film was related to this process.
19 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), Gad Horowitz, Repression :
Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich,
and Marcuse (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
20 Watney 2 6 .
21 Wood 7 9 .
22 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1978) 12.
23 Foucault 27.
24 Foucault 114. Compare these thoughts with those of Herbert Marcuse
in "Chapter Three: The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness:
Repressive Desublimation," in One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1964) 5 6 - 8 3 .
25 Foucault 100.
26 For an overview of the theoretical arguments which developed within
and from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
see Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Boston,
MA: Unwin Hyman 1990). Many of the most important original essays
are collected in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and
28 Monsters in the closet
Janet Woolacott, eds, Culture, Society and the Media (New York:
Methuen, 1982) and Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and
Paul Willis, eds, Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson,
1980).
27 James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 7.
28 Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
29 Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision: Essays in
Feminist Film Criticism, eds Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp,
and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: University Publications of America,
Inc., 1984) 8 3 - 9 9 .
30 For an exploration of some of these issues, see Nick Browne, "The
Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach," in Movies and
Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1985) 4 5 8 - 4 7 5 .
31 Richard Dyer, "The Role of Stereotypes," in The Matter of Images:
Essays on Representation (New York: Routledge, 1993) 1 1 - 1 8 .
32 Clover 6.
33 Twitchell 69-70.
34 For a discussion of the Bakhtinian Carnival and how it relates to film
(and briefly Halloween), see Robert Stam, "Chapter Three: Film, Liter-
ature, and the Carnivalesque," Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural
Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989) 8 5 - 1 2 1 . Although he doesn't specifically talk about horror films,
several of the ten criteria he isolates for the cinematic expression of the
Carnivalesque are highly relevant to the genre.
35 For an interesting account of how gay and lesbian actors get marginal-
ized both within Hollywood narrative systems and industrial practice,
see Patricia White, "Supporting Character: The Queer Career of Agnes
Moorehead," in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on
Popular Culture, eds Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 9 1 - 1 1 4 .
36 For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Doty 1 7 - 3 8 .
37 See Dyer, "Homosexuality and Film Noir," in The Matter of Images:
Essays on Representations (New York: Routledge, 1993) 5 2 - 7 2 .
38 Doty xi-xii.
39 Doty 16.
40 For a historical overview of these figures, see Nicolas Kiessling, The
Incubus in English Literature: Provenance and Progeny (Seattle: Wash-
ington State University Press, 1977).
41 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) 1 7 1 .
Introduction 29
T he years from 1930 to 1936 saw the first flowering of the Hol
lywood horror film. The codes and conventions of the genre
that were developed and exploited during these years were to
become the basis for the monster movie's structure and appeal
throughout the remainder of the century. The early 1930s also
chronicled the depths of the Great Depression, the repeal of Prohi
bition, and the beginning of the end of a certain popular cultural
construction of homosexuality, one that defined homosexual
behavior more in terms of gender deviance rather than of sexual-
object choice. As in the construction of homosexuality in other
world cultures (such as the Mediterranean), American men during
the first third of this century who indulged in sex with other men -
but performed the active, insertive role - were still likely to be
considered "normal," whereas those men who performed the
"woman's role" were the ones most likely to be identified (and sub
sequently stereotyped) as homosexuals. Likewise, it was the man
nish lesbian who caught the public's attention and contributed to
the idea that homosexuality was somehow caused by the improper
alignment of spiritual gender and physical body. This view was held
by homosexuals as well as heterosexuals: in a 1932 rebuttal of a
virulent diatribe against homosexuality in the magazine The
Modern Thinker, pseudonymous author "Parisex" explained that
"The homosexual man does not shun women because he wants to
flee from the reality of normal sex life, but because he himself is
psychically a woman and his normal sex life is directed to the other
1
sex, another man, the only person to attract him."
Medical science at this time was still considerably removed from
the sphere of popular culture: its treatises on sexuality were sold
only to professional men, and not to the general public. While most
32 Monsters in the closet
During the early 1930s, homosexuality that was more visible than
connotative was under attack in different quarters from various
social reformers. Broadway had been rocked with scandals in the
late 1920s over several gay and lesbian themed plays, and Radclyffe
Defining the monster queer 35
become involved in the villain's plot: the queer villain's desire for
one or both members of the couple is one of the main thematic
imperatives of the genre. However, by the end of the film, the vil
lain and/or monster is destroyed by a public mob or its patriarchal
representatives, and the "normal" couple are reinstated after safely
passing through their queer experience.
While the classical horror film encourages everyone in the audi
ence to understand these narrative patterns from a queer perspec
tive, it was probably easier for homosexual men and women to do
so on a more regular basis. Because of their already disenfranchised
location outside of the dominant culture, or their practice at lead
ing "double" lives, many homosexual spectators of the genre would
perhaps be more likely than heterosexual ones to identify with the
figure of the monster or villain, even as he or she was eventually
vanquished by the narrative's heterosexist agents. This facet of gay
and lesbian readership (making do with less than optimal represen
tations) is today still a facet of how non-straight people negotiate
popular media texts. It has necessitated the strategy of selective and
carefully chosen identificatory practices; for example, queer specta
tors may identify with a monster such as the lesbian vampire, enjoy
ing her exploits for the majority of the film's running time, while
ultimately discounting the patented narrative resolution and its con
comitant reinstatement of heterosexual norms. This strategy had its
analog in the flurry of underground gay novels which were written
during the early 1930s. While some of these novels managed to pro
vide a remarkable illustration of urban gay life and culture, most
also "ended with the death or suicide of the gay protagonist ... an
obligatory bow to convention, transparently intended to disarm the
19
moralists who might otherwise have tried to suppress the books."
Like Code-abiding Hollywood films in general and horror films
specifically, these novels felt obliged to punish their sexual trans
gressors, even as the pleasures of the text for homosexual readers
were deeply connected to the exercising of such transgressive pos
sibilities in the first place.
Furthermore, not all horror films of this period insisted that their
monsters were wholly evil. In many of these films, ambivalence is
felt and expressed towards the monster - in some films he is unre
lentingly evil (for example Dr Mirakle in Murders in the Rue Morgue
(1932)), while in other instances the film-makers have created sym
pathy for him/her and even an occasional plea for understanding
38 Monsters in the closet
sons who "really are" gay; at the same time, it holds the universalizing
view that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable
identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are
strongly marked by same-sex influences and desires, and vice versa for
apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual iden
tity and modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance
the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is wide
21
spread and in the first place internal.
Plate 2 Ernest Thesiger, the outrageously campy character actor w h o set the
tone for the queer happening of The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935)
Plate 3 A queer couple: butch female vampire and fey manservant. Countess
Marya Z a l e s k a (Gloria H o l d e n ) a n d S a n d o r (Irving Pichel) in Dracula's
Daughter (1936)
(discussed below), perhaps the most obviously queer ones are those
wherein the homosexual pair set out to procreate without the aid of
woman. The act of procreation, read as sex, thus makes this partic
ular formula spectacularly queer.
The locus classicus of the queer "domestic" couple can be found
in James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. In the first
film, Dr Frankenstein creates life with the aid of a hunchbacked
assistant, Fritz. In the second, his marriage is interrupted when he is
blackmailed by Dr Pretorius into creating a mate for the monster.
(One "Numa Praetorius" was allegedly the author of a large German
45
sexological essay published in 1908.) Bride of Frankenstein is most
explicit in its queer intentions, opening with a framing sequence
wherein Mary Shelley is coaxed by Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley to continue her tale. This particular erotic triangle feels little
need to suppress its homoerotic leanings. The "elegant three" are
decidedly foppish and repeatedly call each other "darling." Their
status as sexual transgressors is made clear: Lord Byron refers to
50 Monsters in the closet
Plate 4 In this still from Island of Lost Souls (1933), Charles Laughton's
salacious Dr Moreau seems overly interested in heterosexual hero Parker
(Richard Arlen), who, in turn, is interested in panther-woman Lota (Kathleen
Burke)
"Sex perversion"
Another classical horror film that exploits the theme of a male
couple seeking to create human life homosexually is 1933's Island
of Lost Souls. In this film, Dr Moreau and his male assistant Mont
gomery attempt to create normal human beings from animals
through "plastic surgery, blood transfusions, gland extracts, [and]
ray baths." That same year, "real-life" medical practitioners were
using similar therapies in their quest to create "normal" human
beings from homosexuals. One such doctor boasted that he could
have cured Oscar Wilde:
While much of the "mad" science of the classical horror film plays
like so much melodramatic hokum to today's audiences, reports
such as this one remind us that "cutting-edge" science of the era was
much closer to that depicted in the era's horror films than we would
perhaps otherwise imagine. Mad science and accepted standard
medical practice are sometimes only differentiated through histori
cal retrospection, and (as the next chapter will explore in greater
detail) this has often been the case with many so-called medical
"cures" for homosexuality.
A queer reading of Island of Lost Souls is encouraged by Charles
Laughton's performance as Dr Moreau. Laughton had just starred
in Cecil B. DeMille's Sign of the Cross (1932), where he played a
very obviously homosexual Roman emperor, or as the euphemisms
53
of the day would have it, a "voluptuary." As usual, in Island of Lost
Souls, Laughton, with much winking and smirking, manages to milk
every salacious drop out of each line he speaks. He slyly notes that
(heterosexual hero) Edward Parker will "be wanting a cold shower"
after his encounter with one of Moreau's hairy "manimals." When
he remarks that his assistant Montgomery is "a fair sort of sailor,"
it is hard to miss the activated connotation of the word "sailor",
especially since the film has introduced Montgomery within a pan
ning shot of several shirtless seamen. It is Montgomery who first
"acquires" heterosexual hero Parker, picking him up from a ship
wreck and taking him back to his cabin to be nursed back to health;
Montgomery later tells Parker that he looks "Splendid!" Neither
Moreau nor Montgomery exhibit heterosexual desire, although the
former exhibits an active bitchy misogyny, as when (idly lounging
on an operating table) he tells Parker of his difficulties in getting his
creations to speak: "Someday I'll create a woman and it will be
easier."
But Moreau already has created a woman, Lota, from a female
panther. He decides to use Parker as a sexual surrogate - to see if
former animal Lota can be sexually responsive in some form of
normal (or is it queer?) heterosexual relation. Moreau's pleasure in
becoming a voyeur is evident, and can be seen in Laughton's per
formance as he lurks in the shadows outside Parker's room, relish
ing a cigarette as he watches the mating of man and beast-woman.
When Parker's financée Ruth arrives at the island in search of him,
Moreau sets about a plan for having her become intimate with
Ouran, a hairy half-ape manimal Moreau secretly lets into the com-
54 Monsters in the closet
64
in the path of unsuspecting women and children."
Just as the medical and social reformist discourses of the era made
little differentiation between various queer acts, so did the era's
horror films, serving up a mixed bag of paraphilias along with their
monstrous signifiers. As one film review put it, "Colin Clive gives a
splendid performance as the mentally perverted Frankenstein
yet exactly what that perversion might have been was never
65
named. Any and all deviance from heteronormativity fell under
the Production Code's rubric of "sex perversion," and all would
continue to be linked with homosexuality throughout the course of
the twentieth century, both in horror films and culture-at-large.
Same-sex relations are repeatedly linked with the horrors of rape
and murder, a social tangle that is still being simultaneously braided
and unwound today. The possibility of a healthy loving relationship
between people of the same sex is nowhere to be found in the clas
sical Hollywood cinema. By default, the images of the classical Hol
lywood horror film which link homosexuality with violence and
monstrosity were some of the strongest signifiers in circulation, and
remain so to this day.
While all forms of on screen "sex perversion" were curtailed
somewhat after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934,
the linkage of homosexuality with each of these other sexual behav
iors had already been firmly established. Even after 1934, the same
tropes were employed, only in less flagrant ways. Aside from Island
of Lost Souls, bestiality is explicit or hinted at in Murders in the Rue
Morgue, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, King Kong, The Black Cat, and
Werewolf of London. Incest is explicit or hinted at in Mark of the
Vampire, The Mask of Fu Manchu, The Old Dark House, and The
Black Cat. Pedophilia (which will become a more common trope of
the genre in the following decades) is hinted at in the monsters' (off
screen) attacks on children in Frankenstein and Dracula. Cannibal
ism and oral sexuality (which will also become more prevalent as
the years go by) is a central concern of the vampire narrative, while
necrophilia, actual or thematic, is perhaps the most pervasive sexual
perversion of the horror film and can be found in Dracula, Franken
stein, White Zombie, Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Mummy,
The Ghoul, The Black Cat, Bride of Frankenstein, Mark of the Vam
pire, Mad Love, The Raven, and Dracula's Daughter. (From The
Mummy: "Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love
with?") And in each film, sadomasochism becomes endemic to the
Defining the monster queer 57
genre as villains and monsters lust after the hero and heroine and
stop at nothing to consummate their desires. Voyeuristic sado
masochism, which might describe a certain appeal o f the genre for
its spectators, is also prominent in several films, which reflexively
call into question the nature o f the genre itself: specific examples o f
this can be found in Mad Love, Freaks, Dr. X, and Mark of the Vam
pire.
O n e o f the most queerly perverse films o f the period, which
brings together homosexuality with almost all o f the aforemen
tioned tropes, is M G M ' s The Mask of Fu Manchu ( 1 9 3 2 ) . T h e film
stars Boris Karloff as the famous Asian criminal; he seems t o be per
petually surrounded by half-naked slave boys, both African and
Asian. O n e latter-day critic apprised the role as follows: "Karloff,
with his Ann-Margret smile, false eyelashes, Adrian-designed
gowns, dragon lady fingernails, and lisping, c o m e hither delivery,
has created a wild, kinky, archfiend o f a Fu; part Yellow Peril, part
66
Frederick's o f H o l l y w o o d . " Fu's main hench-person is his daugh-
Plate 5 Boris Karloff has his way with an immobilized Charles Starrett in this
notorious scene from The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
58 Monsters in the closet
ter Fah Lo See, played by Myrna Loy, who reportedly called the
67
script "obscene" and her character a "sadistic nymphomaniac."
Together the incestuous father and daughter share quite visible
sexual excitement over the sight of the film's hero (Charles Starrett)
being stripped and whipped. ("Faster! Faster!", cries Fah Lo See as
Fu Manchu watches from the shadows.) Throughout the film Fu
Manchu tortures his enemies in highly creative ways: one is
strapped spread-eagled under a huge bell (where he is teased with
fresh fruits but fed salt water), one is fed to alligators in an elabo
rate counterbalance device, while yet another is set to meet his fate
via opposing walls of spikes which slowly close around him - the
"slim silver fingers" of death. Karloff's delivery of that line, dis
torted through his infamous lisp, as "the thlim, thilver fingerth,"
firmly links the pansy stereotype to the sado-masochistic exploits of
Fu Manchu.
The film's most memorably homosexual scene comes when Fu
Manchu straps down the film's hero (wearing nothing but a loin
cloth), strokes his bare chest, and injects him with a special serum.
As Fah Lo See stands by watching and smoking, Fu Manchu tells the
young man that "This serum, distilled from dragon's blood, my own
blood, the organs of different reptiles, and mixed with a magic brew
of the Sacred Seven Herbs, will temporarily change you into the
living instrument of my will. You will do as I command!" Like those
of the homosexual and the vampire, one mingling of such (bestial)
bodily fluids is enough to turn the hero into the monster's simu
lacrum. Audiences of the day apparently appreciated the overtly
sensationalized exploits, and according to one review "laugh[ed]
68
where they oughtn't." In more recent years, "Karloff's gay, lisping
dragon of a Fu Manchu, looking like Carmen Miranda from hell in
69
his fruit basket hat," has also upset Asian-American audiences.
When MGM decided to re-release the film in 1972, one group
protested at the film's racism by pointing out the same constellation
of signifiers which mark it as a classical Hollywood horror film in
the first place: "Fu Manchu is an ugly, evil homosexual with five-
70
inch fingernails while his daughter is a sadistic sex fiend."
foreign agents, and many of them play upon racist fears as well as
homophobic ones, conflating and blurring their stereotypical signi
fiers. It was not uncommon for audiences to think of foreign lands,
and Europe especially, as the site of sexual decadence, the birthplace
of Oscar Wilde and others of his ilk. In an anthropological essay
published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1930, for instance, the
author muses on "primitive" sexuality and then suggests that "The
whites are a highly strung race of extremists, and they would react
differently [to liberated sexuality]; they would become voluptuar
ies, as have some of the European people to whom greater sexual
license has been allowed. These people have developed to a state
71
where perversion is the rule ...". Frequently the queer couple is
itself an interracial one, a trope that invariably recasts a light/dark
racial hierarchy along with a gendered one. Many of the classical
(foreign, but still white) villains have non-white racial others as their
consort(s): "Black Janos" to Bela Lugosi's Dr Mirakle in Murders in
the Rue Morgue, "The Nubian" to Karloff's Mummy, Dr Wong to
Peter Lorre's Dr Gogol in Mad Love, Dr Yogami to Henry Hull's
Werewolf of London, Fu Manchu's African bodyguards, or Murder
Legendre's black zombie slaves in White Zombie. These films and
others repeatedly link sexual transgression to racial transgression,
as does today's universalizing and coalitionist use of the word
"queer". While this suggests the possibility of a wide-ranging queer
spectatorship based on the politics of race as well as sexuality and
gender, it also simultaneously monsterizes both the queer and the
racial Other. It also tends to deny the cultural formations and types
of expression and/or oppression specific to separate groups.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the actors tapped to play the
villains and monsters of the classical (and later) horror films were
also foreign-born or bred: Peter Lorre, Ernest Thesiger, Conrad
Veidt, Colin Clive, Charles Laughton, Warner Oland, Erich von
Stroheim, and most famously Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Most
of these actors played foreign characters in non-horror films as well:
Karloff played an Asian detective in a series of Mr. Wong films, as
did Peter Lorre in the Mr. Moto films. Peter Lorre, even more than
the others, seemed to embody the swishy, neurotic, homosexual for
eigner, as attested by his roles as the ringlet-haired spy in Alfred
Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936) or the perfumed Egyptian Joel
Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Lorre, like many of these
actors, managed to make a career out of suggesting both racial and
60 Monsters in the closet
sexual otherness, and this was noted even at the time of his films'
initial releases. A Time magazine review of Mad Love in 1935 notes
this queer appeal directly, even comparing Lorre's acting skills to
those of another homosexually coded actor: "Lorre, perfectly cast,
uses the technique popularized by Charles Laughton of suggesting
the most unspeakable obsession by the roll of a protuberant eyeball,
an almost feminine mildness of tone, an occasional quiver of thick
72
lips set flat in his cretinous, ellipsoidal face." As this review sug
gests, gender inversion and physical deformity were the things used
to frighten horror movie audiences in the 1930s. (Ironically, actor
David Manners, who played many of these films' stalwart heroes,
reportedly had to seek out Eva Le Gallienne to help him curb his
own effeminate tendencies, a fact which suggests from the outset
that these films' depiction of normality was just as fantastic and
73
unreal as their depiction of monstrosity.)
Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the reigning stars of the era's
horror films, were also marked ethnic others who were typed by the
Hollywood industry as monsters. Lugosi was born and trained in
Hungary, while Karloff left his native England to pursue a career in
acting across Canada and the United States. While Hollywood pub
licists constructed Karloff's image as that of a genteel Britisher,
Lugosi's image was figured as that of a European mystery man,
given to odd excesses, "decadence," and the supernatural. Both men
were never far from the stigma of racial Otherness. According to his
close friend Alan Napier, there was some reason to believe that
Karloff himself was the product of a illegitimate miscegenated rela
tionship:
When his mother was returning to England one time, she ... fell from
grace and had an affair in the Suez Canal with an Egyptian gentleman!
Whether Boris stated that he was the result of this adventure, or
whether my wife Gip and I surmised it, I cannot be sure. But it fits so
perfectly: the split with his family's middle class Victorian respectabil
ity to become an actor; his intellectual political liberalism combined
with a yearning for the British establishment ... it all adds up to the
portrait of one aware of being different by reason of "half-caste" ille
74
gitimacy . . .
the stories' melodrama, the core o f the dramas actually rests within
the sado-masochistic relationship between the two male horror
stars. T h i s type o f homosocial/homosexual competition between
two men over a w o m a n (or a heterosexual couple), is often "as
intense and potent as the bond that links either o f the rivals to the
beloved," and suggests a slippage along the homosocial/homosexual
7
continuum as it has been theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. '
This continuum for men (as c o m p a r e d to that for women) has often
been described as broken. As Sedgwick continues, it is hard to imag
ine "an intelligible continuum o f aims, emotions, and valuations"
linking (to use her example) Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms to a
loving gay couple, even as it is possible to imagine some form o f
(however troubled) continuum between lesbianism and "other
80
forms o f w o m e n ' s attention to w o m e n . " M a n y of these 1 9 3 0 s
h o r r o r films depict their male couples at the very precipice of this
h o m o s o c i a l / h o m o s e x u a l divide; the break in the continuum is fig
ured in symbolic ways, most regularly as a displacement which sub
stitutes hatred for love, violence for tenderness, and death for life.
Plate 6 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935). The film revels in
and climaxes with homoerotic and sadomasochistic scenes of torture.
1
Defining the monster queer 63
Plate 7 In the climax of The Black Cat (1934), Bela Lugosi "skins alive" the
half-naked body of his closely bonded rival, played by Boris Karloff
64 Monsters in the closet
lead to death.
The Black Cat also focuses on a sado-masochistic queer couple
who dabble in all sorts of queer romance: Satanism, incest,
necrophilia, and bestiality. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) and Dr
Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) are overly friendly enemies with an
old score to settle. Their relationship is defined almost solely in
terms of a series of homoerotic triangles: Poelzig has stolen Werde-
gast's wife when Werdegast was sent away to prison. Subsequently
he has married Werdegast's daughter, Karen, although this fact is
unknown to Werdegast. When Werdegast and the obligatory
normal couple are forced to spend the night at Poelzig's art-deco
castle, the two "old friends" suppress their hatred for one another
and instead exchange pleasant admiration: "Engineer Poelzig is one
of Austria's greatest architects" ... "Dr Werdegast is one of Hun
gary's greatest psychiatrists." Their mutual admiration evaporates,
however, when Poelzig attempts to enter Werdegast's bedroom in
the middle of the night: "Now Vitus, we have something to settle,
we two." He takes Werdegast to the cellar and shows him the
embalmed corpse of their (shared) dead wife. Symmetrically framed
around the body, the two men re-create a scene so common in
gothic novels, wherein, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, "male
rivals unite, refreshed in mutual support and definition, over the
81
ruined carcase [sic] of a woman." Their homosexual desire is fil
tered through death, and Poelzig and Werdegast realize that their
destiny is linked: "Are we not both the living dead?"
They decide to play a game of chess, a "game of death" which
(because of narrative demands and the logic of the homosocial tri
angle) must involve a woman as prize, this time the heterosexual
ized heroine. Poelzig wins the game and plans to sacrifice the
heroine to Lucifer later that night. Werdegast intervenes, the hero
and heroine escape, and Poelzig ends up bare-chested and strapped
to a rack in his dungeon. Werdegast moves close to him with a
scalpel, and, in a shadow shot, proceeds to "flail the skin from
[Poelzig's] body, bit by bit." One early draft of the film's script
would have placed the heterosexualized hero himself upon the rack,
and would have come to its climax with the already-skinned Poelzig
"turn[ing] with the last vestige of his strength and crawlfing] on his
82
belly toward Werdegast," thus reuniting the queer couple in death.
Instead, the film ends with the normal heterosexualized couple
escaping and then joking together on their continuing train trip.
Defining the monster queer 65
While The Black Cat was attacked by censors for its sadism (Variety
83
called it "dubious showmanship"), its climactic scene nonetheless
serves as another prime example of a monstrous 1930s couple con
summating their unnatural desires as only they were allowed:
through violence and death.
The extant triangulation of the heroine through the desires of
Werdegast and Poelzig, and the degree of overall queerness of the
film, would have been much stronger had the film not undergone
extensive reshooting before its theatrical release. In scenes origi
nally filmed, Werdegast is equally as monstrous as Poelzig, desiring
the heroine for himself. (Lugosi apparently objected to being cast
yet again as a sexually obsessed madman.) The film's scripted intro
ductory wedding sequence was to have featured a homosexual pho
tographer, until the Production Code authorities cautioned against
84
this and the entire sequence was scrapped. The role of Werdegast's
daughter Karen was also considerably "toned down" in the release
print: originally she was to have been an almost animalistic "cat-
person." Perhaps most interesting was a scene which suggested the
queerness of the Satanic cultists. Director Edgar Ulmer's original
description of them was to make them appear "as aberrant as pos
sible. A stable of misfits, members of the decadent aristocracy of the
countryside." Their gender-bending was to have been made appar
ent by the addition of a character named Frau Goering, "to be
played by a man, the dark fuzz on her lip suggesting Hitler's mous
85
tache." The Production Code authorities quickly crushed those
ideas: "it would be well to avoid any suggestion of German nation
ality in presenting these people. Also, in this scene, care should be
taken to avoid any suggestion of homosexuality or perversion of
86
any of the characters." Nonetheless, the scene (like the film itself)
remains a high point of German Expressionist design, from
Karloff's angular make-up and costuming to the inverted, doubled,
and skewed crucifix which comprises his Satanic pulpit. Jewish
director Ulmer's vision of the scene was reportedly inspired not
only by his anti-fascist sentiments, but also by the woodcuts of
Aubrey Beardsley, an artist of the Decadent School renowned for
illustrating editions of Oscar Wilde's work. Ulmer's resultant vision
would have succeeded in conflating homosexuality with Nazism,
yet another monstrous signifier of same-sex desire which continues
to circulate through popular culture. It is perhaps ironic (or fright
ening?) to realize that the spectre of homosexuality and the German
66 Monsters in the closet
Plate 8 In this scene from White Zombie (1931), the monster is used to
mediate the homoerotic tension between Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi)
and Monsieur Beaumont (Robert Fraser)
Expressionist style were used in a very similar way in both Nazi Ger
many and 1930s Hollywood cinema: to signify decadence and
depravity.
87
lurks beneath them. In the film, the typical young, white, hetero
sexual couple is triangulated through the separate desires of Murder
Legendre (Bela Lugosi) and Monsieur Beaumont (Robert Fraser).
While both Legendre and Beaumont ostensibly vie for the atten
tions of the young wife, Madeline (Madge Bellamy), eventually
homosexual desire is revealed as the "true" form of evil which
Murder Legendre practices.
Legendre first spies the young about-to-be-married couple in a
coach, and his desires are immediately linked to the horrific: his
male zombies come shuffling up behind him as he "cruises" Made
line and Neil. Beaumont, who is less directly linked to the queerly
supernatural, is hysterically infatuated with Madeline and begs her
to marry him even as he walks her to the altar to meet Neil. Still,
there are warnings about his intentions which raise the spectre of
queer sexuality: a priest warns the couple that it is unnatural for a
man like Beaumont to want to "play fairy godfather to a young
couple like you, unless ...". When Madeline rejects Beaumont, he
administers Legendre's zombie drug in order to "kill" her. Does he
do so to gain control over Madeline, or in order to be rid of her so
that he might enjoy a relationship with Neil? The slippage between
the male and female as objects of queer desire is echoed in a scene
in Legendre's sugar-mill, which he staffs with zombies: previous
enemies whom Legendre has "taken" and made his supernatural
servants. He tries to entice Beaumont with his male zombies: "You
could make good use of men like mine on your plantation." Flus
tered, Beaumont, who has refused to shake Legendre's hand, replies
"No, that's not what I want." "Then perhaps you want to talk about
the young lady offers Legendre. Beaumont does, but Legendre
does not: "There was a young man with her . . . " Beaumont offers to
give Legendre anything he wants if Legendre will help him win
Madeline from Neil. In answer, Legendre reaches out and touches
Beaumont's shoulder, then looks to his zombie servant. A tilt shot
from foot to head of the bare-chested zombie answers his gaze, and
in an objective medium shot, Legendre leans over and whispers his
price in Beaumont's ear. "No - not that!", cries Beaumont, but he
takes the drug anyway, and uses it in the very next scene. (Interest
ingly, this tilt shot of the zombie "from feet to hairy chest" was one
88
of the Studio Relations Committee's suggested deletions.)
Madeline "dies" but is revived by Legendre and Beaumont and
the three of them retreat to Legendre's castle in "the Land of the
68 Monsters in the closet
together, while the vulture cries again. The "normals" are safely
reunited and the queer couple, whose desire can only be spoken
through metaphors of violence and predation, are destroyed.
Although the classical horror films of the early 1930s were in
many cases actually created by homosexual film-makers, this fact
was seldom acknowledged outside of gay subculture(s), whose
members would have recognized the queer appeal of actors and
directors such as Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, and James
Whale. However, any queer pleasure spectators might have found
in the horror film was mitigated by the very nature of the genre's
classical form, wherein queer forces were routinely quelled by each
film's narrative resolution. While outright homosexuality was con
sidered taboo by the Production Code authorities, its signifiers still
crept into the classical horror film, along with a wide range of other
monstrous signifiers, including bestiality, miscegenation, incest,
sado-masochism, and rape. Like the popular culture of the day,
most classical horror films make little or no distinction between
homosexuality and any other form of "sex perversion": all are used
to titillate, to thrill, to repulse, and to demarcate the depravity of
the villain or monster. Many of these queer signifiers had already
been connected with homosexuality both within gothic horror and
within popular culture-at-large. However, the monster movie, once
it coalesced as a filmic genre system, proved to be a powerful and
efficient vehicle for disseminating such ideas and structures of feel
ing, and the themes and representational codes which were devel
oped during this period influenced almost all subsequent
English-language horror films.
The queer couple, which was to become a core narrative trope of
the genre, expressed itself in the classical Hollywood horror movie
in several different ways: as a vampire and his/her manservant, as a
doubled self (one "normal" and one queer), and as a mad scientist
and his assistant. Usually these couples were structured by strict
hierarchical codes derived from traditional racial and gender roles.
When they weren't trying to create life homosexually, these queer
couples spent their cinematic lives torturing one another, triangu
lating their desires through the heterosexualized normal couple.
This particular formation of classical Hollywood horror film facili
tates an exploration of the homosocial/homosexual continuum, and
suggests that the continuum's "break" is not so much an absolute
fracture as a dip into the social unconscious, from which the threat
70 Monsters in the closet
Notes
1 Parisex (pseudonym of Henry Gerber), "In Defense of Homosexuality,"
The Modern Thinker (1932). Reprinted in A Homosexual Emancipation
Miscellany c. 1835-1952 (New York: Arno Press, 1975) 2 8 8 .
2 John Addington Symonds, Studies in Sexual Inversion: Embodying "A
Study in Greek Ethics" and "A Study in Modern Ethics (Privately
Printed, 1928). Reprinted New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1975.
3 William Stekel, The Homosexual Neurosis, trans. James S. Van Teslaar
(Boston, MA: The Gorham Press, 1922).
4 Stekel 2 3 .
5 Stekel 2 8 6 .
6 G. W Henry, "Psychogenic factors in overt Homosexuality," American
Journal of Psychiatry 93 (1937) 9 0 3 , excerpted and discussed in Henry
L. Minton, "Femininity in Men and Masculinity in Women: American
Psychiatry and Psychology Portray Homosexuality in the 1930s,"/o«r-
nal of Homosexuality 13 (1986) 1-21.
7 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books,
1994). See also Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A His
tory of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin
Books, 1991), and Eric Garber, "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and
Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem," in Hidden From History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha
Vicinus, and George Chauncey, J r (New York: Meridian, 1989)
318-331.
8 For a brief narrative history of the magazine, see Dean Howd,
"Esquire," American Mass-Market Magazines, eds. Alan Nourie and
Barbara Nourie (New York: Greenwood Press, 1 9 9 0 ) 1 0 8 - 1 1 5 .
9 Esquire (autumn 1933) editor's page. The editors and publishers are
adamant about their magazine's masculinity: "we have tried to allow
this magazine to take on an easy natural masculine character - to endow
it, as it were, with a baritone voice." While "we feel that men have long
since ceased to believe there is anything effeminate or essentially
unbusinesslike about devoting a little care and thought and study to the
selection of clothes," the magazine was also quick to apologize to its
manly readers when it started running perfume ads, or endorsing pink
Defining the monster queer 71
John P. DeCecco (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985) 5). See also
Sandor Ferenczi, "The Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homoeroti-
cism)," in The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society , ed. Hen-
drik M. Ruitenbeek (Newark: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1963) 3 - 1 6 . As this
edition notes, Ferenczi's paper was originally delivered at the Third
Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association at Weimar,
October 1911, and published in a German psychoanalytical journal in
1914.
34 Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 4 6 .
35 "Review of The Old Dark House," Variety (November 1, 1932) in Vari
ety Film Reviews 1930-1933, Volume 4 (New York: Garland Publish
ers, Inc., 1983).
36 See Berenstein 6 0 - 8 7 for a fuller discussion of how classic horror was
marketed to the public. As she points out, romance and horror were
often conflated in the films' advertisements, a campaign strategy which
promised the spectacle of queer love.
37 Advertising copy appearing in the Motion Picture Herald 105:8
(November 2 1 , 1931) 41 and 105:11 (December 12, 1931) 6 3 .
38 Reported in George E. Turner, "Flash Gordon, an Interplanetary
Gothic," in The Cinema of Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. George
E. Turner (Hollywood: The ASC Press, 1989) 2 0 6 .
39 For example, "Algy the Aristocrat," a line drawing featured in the
period's advertisements for Reis sport shirts and pullovers, wears mar
celled hair, a foppish moustache, a supercilious expression, and is posed
with his arms akimbo - one hand on his hip, the other gesturing with a
lighted cigarette (Esquire (May 1935) 181). For a discussion of "arms
akimbo" and its relevance to gay culture, see Thomas A. King, "Per
forming Akimbo': Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice," in The
Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge,
1994) 2 3 - 5 0 .
40 See Chauncey 1 2 - 2 3 for a valuable discussion of these terms and their
evolution.
41 Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 5 2 .
42 Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Faragoh, in Philip J . Riley, ed.,
Frankenstein Universal Filmscripts Series (Absecon, NJ: Maclmage
Filmbooks, Inc., 1989) Scene H - 6 , page 5 2 .
43 This moment is especially interesting because the male victim thinks it
was his girlfriend who has bitten him: "Nikki - your eyes - I never saw
them so queer!" Only later do we find out that the bite came from the
male vampire Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi).
44 Paramount's and most later screen versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are especially interesting in this respect because
they actively set out to "heterosexualize" their dual character by the
74 Monsters in the closet
76 F.S.N., "Review of The Raven," The New York Times (5 July, 1935) 9:2.
77 Mank, Karloff and Lugosi xi.
78 Mank, Karloff and Lugosi x-xi.
79 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 2 1 .
80 Sedgwick, Between Men 2 - 3 .
81 Sedgwick, Between Men 76.
82 Reported in Paul Mandell, "Enigma of The Black Cat," The Cinema of
Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner (Hollywood:
The ASC Press, 1989) 182, 192.
83 "Review of The Black Cat," Variety (22 May, 1934).
84 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
85 Mandell 190.
86 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
87 An account of the racial implications of White Zombie can be found in
Tony Williams, "White Zombie: Haitian Horrors," Jump Cut 28 (April
1 9 8 3 ) 1 8 - 2 0 . Its production history is described in Michael H. Price
and George E. Turner, "The Black Art of White Zombie," The Cinema
of Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. by George E. Turner (Holly
wood: The ASC Press, 1989) 1 4 7 - 1 5 5 .
88 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
89 L. N., "Beyond the Pale" (Review of White Zombie), The New York
Times (29 July, 1932) 18:2.
2
shadows of the dead." The countess makes it quite clear that she
"wants to live a normal life - think normal things." Like an ego-dys-
tonic homosexual, she feels compelled to lead a double life, and
characterizes her subconscious urges as "horrible impulses."
Although she tries to suppress them repeatedly, eventually these
"overpowering command[s] - wordless - irresistible - and I had to
obey - it's too, too, ghastly ..." overcome her, and she is forced to
seduce her victims and drain their bodily fluids. Her surly manser
vant Sandor, a nay-saying bitchy queen and supreme fatalist about
their minoritized condition, is far less optimistic about her chances
for a cure.
Shock treatment 79
23
gothic romances and proto-noir films of the war period. In many
of these films there is a connotative slippage between homicidal
maniacs and homosexual ones, just as the popular press epithets
"sex criminal" and "pervert" were understood to include homosex
uals along with rapists and murderers. Vincent Price, whose persona
would become increasingly important to the American horror film
as the years went by, first became a star during this period. His oily,
slightly effeminate presence and mellifluous voice code him as
queer, and in films like The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The
House of the Seven Gables (1940), Laura (1944), Shock (1946) and
Dragonwyck (1946), he harbored hidden secrets behind locked
doors. Years later in Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the
Movies, gay critic Parker Tyler would comment upon Price's
"[r]ather schmaltzy versions of high-toned sissy types," acknowl
edging that for certain audiences of the period, Vincent Price,
Clifton Webb, Monty Woolly, and other "professional sissies"
24
always connoted some degree of homosexuality. This is also the
period when Peter Lorre, George Sanders, Tom Conway, Anne
Revere, Judith Anderson, and Agnes Moorehead played movie vil
lains, often including Nazis; each of these actors (along with many
others less well known) suggested queerness in their characteriza
25
tions by virtue of their gender-bending personas.
Another typecast queer villain in non-monster horror films was
Laird Cregar, an effeminate and obese actor who died at the age of
28 and who (as one of my colleagues has quipped) "makes your gay-
dar jump right off the scale." Cregar had come to Hollywood's
attention after starring in a local stage production of Oscar Wilde,
and was by most accounts a troubled homosexual himself, a man
who yearned for leading-man stardom yet realized that his physical
presence and personal life would probably never allow such a
27
thing. One of his first screen roles was as bullfighting aficionado in
Blood and Sand (1941), "a gay iguana, gaudy in his sun bonnet,"
who has a barely concealed sexual response to Tyrone Power's
27
studly matador. He too played Nazis (Joan of Paris [1942]), fifth
columnists (This Gun for Hire [1942]), and even the Devil himself
in Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943). He had also been con
sidered for Vincent Price's role in Dragonwyck, and the role of
Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), two other famous queer movie
28
murderers of the era. In films such as The Lodger (1944), Hangover
Square (1944), and I Wake Up Screaming (1941), Cregar played
88 Monsters in the closet
Universal cures
Immediately before and during the years of World War II, Universal
Studio's horror films began to employ a more humanistic depiction
of their monsters. In the mid-to-late 1930s, Universal's classic mon
sters had ostensibly taken Brides and had Sons and Daughters; in the
1940s they set up several Houses together; as one review for Drac
ula's Daughter had put it, "Universal is making out quite a case for
29
the home life of the monsters." This bringing of the queer force
into the realm of the hegemonic sphere also necessitated a geo
graphic shift from the far reaches of Transylvania to a location
closer to home. While many of Universal's monster sequels main
tained their mythic European settings, American characters and
American locations became much more prevalent in the films. A
series of films based upon Inner Sanctum radio plays did so by
bringing the terror state-side and making it a function of psycho
50
logical anxiety and crime rather than shambling monsters. Univer
sal's highly successful run of Mummy sequels were almost all set in
America," and their newest monster (destined to become a "clas
sic"), The Wolfman (1941), is also Americanized, even though he
encounters his troubles in England. Significantly, his monstrous con
dition is now characterized as "a disease of the mind [that] can be
cured."
Somewhat remarkably, 1943's Son of Dracula, set in the Ameri
can South, tells the story of a young woman named Kay who know
ingly brings Dracula to her ante helium mansion in order to marry
him (the local Justice of the Peace officiating), in order to receive his
"gift" of immortality. In a dramatic shift, the normalized hero and
heroine of this film actively court queer passions. Dracula himself
has come to The United States because the Americans are such a
"young and virile race" - not only does he suck the blood of a south
ern patriarch, but he also attacks a small boy. Mirroring a social sit
uation for "real-life" queers, Kay's friends and guardians, who
consider her "morbid" personality dangerous, argue that "no one
could choose a thing so loathsome," and attempt to have her com
mitted in order to "protect her from herself." In an amusing and
early instance of the use of "politically correct" euphemisms, the
undead Kay corrects her boyfriend Frank when he starts to call
Dracula a "vampire": "Don't use that word Frank - we don't like it!
Say rather that we are undead - immortal." Unlike the Hollywood
90 Monsters in the closet
solely the stuff of the movie monster and the mad scientist, yet, as
was indicated above, these are precisely the types of experiments
that were being carried out in dignified scientific research centers.
The line between cutting-edge medical science of this period and
the melodrama of horror films becomes further blurred by accounts
such as the one that appeared in Science News Letter on "Queer
Brain Waves": "People who have 'queer ideas' show it in their brain
wave patterns as well as other more obvious ways. The queer or
abnormal brain wave patterns found in persons who have 'queer
ideas' and others who have phobias, or who show signs of paranoia
or other mental disturbances, were described by doctors
Again, as in many such reports from the 1930s, homosexuality is
rarely mentioned forthrightly; rather one must infer that particular
"sex perversion" from the word "queer," pointedly used three times
in the opening two sentences and even bracketed within quotations.
However, later on the same page, it becomes manifestly clear what
Dr Clifford Wright of Los Angeles is talking about: "Persons who
commit sex crimes suffer from disorders of the endocrine glands...
Abnormal condition of the sex glands and some of these other
glands which also influence sex activity could, Dr. Wright said,
cause deviations such as homosexuality and exhibitionism."" In
truth, the correlation between homosexuality and sex hormones
was studied intensively during the war years; no definite conclu
sions could be drawn from much of the research. Interest in hor
mone therapy for homosexuals eventually declined as it became
more and more scientifically discredited, yet the scientific journals
were full of articles such as "Electroencephalographic and Neuro
54
logic Studies of Homosexuals," or "Hormones of Homosexuals."
Seen in this light, the mad scientist's tamperings with organ grafts
and brain transplants, which form the bases for Universal's prof
itable ongoing Frankenstein films, takes on much queerer dimen
sions.
and the wolfman appear at his door seeking professional help for
their "conditions." As always, their compulsions are expressed in
sexualized terms: Dr Edelmann tells Dracula that vampires are
"driven by some abnormal urge" which "upset their metabolism"
and "induces lustful appetites." At first, Dracula (who has come to
the doctor under the pseudonym Baron Latos) seems genuinely
interested in curing his unnatural lusts. "That's why I've come to
you - to seek release from a curse of misery and horror against
which I am powerless to fight alone." Eventually, however, his truer
nature asserts itself and he is back to entrancing the doctor's female
assistant. (True to form, as Meliza falls under the Baron's spell, her
piano-playing shifts from classical to atonal modernist.) The wolf
man is more serious about his cure. Depressed and suicidal because
of his own particular set of queer desires, he attempts to throw him
self off a cliff when he learns Edelmann may not be able to help him.
Eventually the good doctor diagnoses Larry's condition as a glan
dular-hormonal problem, exacerbated by pressure on the brain.
Luckily for both men, the doctor has been experimenting with a
procedure which will "soften any hard structure," and in so doing,
he is eventually able to soften Larry's aberrant phallicism by
expanding his cranium. Still, Larry is not without doubts about his
cure. When Nina, the hunchbacked assistant, tells him "After what
Dr Edelmann has done for you, only happiness lies ahead," Larry
can only fitfully mutter "I wonder . . . "
Things go wrong for everyone, however, when Dracula's lustful
nature begins to outweigh his desire for a cure. Reversing a transfu
sion, he gives Dr Edelmann some of his own blood. Now contami
nated by the monstrous fluids, Edelmann spends the rest of the film
in a sort of Jekyll/Hyde state. The doctor has become the very thing
he was attempting to cure: the disease of "monsterity," like homo
sexuality, is apparently catching. He murders townspeople on a
whim and revives the Frankenstein monster. "My blood has been
contaminated by the blood of Dracula. My soul and mind have been
seized by some nameless horror, the lust which changes me into the
thing which killed [villager] Siegfried tonight." Since there is no
normalized hero or Van Helsing figure in the film, it is Larry who
kills Edelmann and starts a fire in which the monster perishes yet
again.
This description attests to a rather remarkable transformation in
the genre's narrative structure: the wolfman is the hero of the film.
Shock treatment 97
The war involved mass mobilisation, throwing men together with men
in the military and women together with women in both the military
and on the home front. It created conditions in which homosexual
experience became almost commonplace and in which people might
47
easily realise they were gay and well known to be so.
some audience members read a lesbian meaning into the action. I was
aware that could happen with the cafe scene, and Val got several let
ters after Cat People was released, congratulating him for his boldness
in introducing lesbiana to films in Hollywood ... Actually, I rather
liked the insinuation and thought it added a neat bit of interpretation
to the scene. Irena's fears about destroying a lover if she kissed him
could be because she was really a lesbian who loathed being kissed by
5
a man. '
Indeed, Irena's monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men
(specifically the psychiatrist who tries to cure her by making love to
her) serves as an often-cited metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the
54
films of this era. As the ad campaign would have it: "She was
marked with the curse of those who slink and court and kill by
night!"
After the commercial success of Cat People, Lewton's team set
out to create similar shockers according to the successful formula:
'"a love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual
55
violence.'" Apparently, homosexual connotation was also part of
that formula, for many of the ensuing films can easily be read in
homosexual terms, from the queer couple triangulations of The
Body Snatcher (1945) to the lingering lesbianism of Irena's ghost in
Curse of the Cat People (1944). The final Lewton horror film,
Bedlam (1946), is filled with effeminate men and strong-willed
102 Monsters in the closet
time I was ever happy was when I was with you." Another memo
rable scene that makes the latent lesbian erotic menace manifest
occurs when chief Palladist and "odd woman" Mrs Esther Redi
invades young heroine Mary's shower and speaks threateningly to
her.
The linkage of homosexuals and witchcraft within popular
understanding has a long and tangled history. The analogy was cer
tainly present at the dawn of the classical period of Hollywood
horror films, as evidenced by a 1930 Scribners Magazine essay about
56
homosexuality entitled "Demoniac Possession." Certainly many of
the women (and men) put to death for witchcraft throughout the
preceding centuries might have been considered homosexual by
twentieth-century definitions. And it is part of gay folklore, apoc
ryphal or not, that the term "faggot" comes from the faggots
thrown onto the fires used to burn such victims at the stake. The
analogy has also been frequently used in recent years in order to
describe the ongoing discriminatory practices ("witch hunts")
against gay men and lesbians in government service. Somewhat sim
ilarly, The Seventh Victim invokes the analogy in ways more sympa
thetic to homosexuality. While it could have easily fallen into the
trap of using gay and lesbian signifiers to characterize its villains (i.e.
homosexual = Satanist, as did Universal's The Black Cat in 1934),
the film is much more complex than that. Contemporary reviews of
the film didn't comment upon the homosexual connotations, but
were still a bit baffled by the subtleties of the film: "just what the
sister was doing, of how that curious doctor figured in, or why that
egg head poet was so prescient or who came out with what - well,
57
don't ask us." In fact, it is part of the film's project to depict com
plex erotic relationships that ultimately defy the traditional narra
tive demands of a happy heterosexual Hollywood ending. The
secret symbol of the Palladists is a skewed triangle inside a parallel
ogram, suggesting expanded romantic triangles and quadrangles,
rather than the enforced binaries of heterocentrist culture. The
climax of the film involves an extended cross-cut sequence between
Dr Judd and Jason and a scene wherein the Palladists try to get
Jacqueline to drink poison. Thematically, the two men lay their
cards on the table while the Palladists try to keep their secret by
forcing Jacqueline's suicide. Ultimately, Jacqueline does hang her
self, and the Palladists continue their shadowy existence. Remark
ably for a Hollywood film of this era, they are not punished in any
104 Monsters in the closet
Plate 11 In The Ghost Ship (1943), the repressed Captain Stone's advances on
young Tom Merriam move from the friendly to the sadomasochistic
Shock treatment 105
Sailors have especially figured in gay erotic tradition ... for a number
of possible reasons: longer enforced periods spent in enclosed single-
sex environments suggest they may have greater homosexual experi
ence; their rootlessness accords with the anonymity and fleetingness
of much gay sexual contact and means they are not "tied down" to
marriage, family, and conformity; their knowledge of the world makes
them seem either exotic or broad-minded; the rigours of sailing pro
duce well-developed physiques. Even their clothing, perhaps by asso-
Plate 12 By the end of The Ghost Ship (1943), Stone's paranoia leads him to
this violent phallic assault upon Tom
106 Monsters in the closet
"You'll learn it. You'll even learn to take great joy in it." Later, after
Tom has turned against Stone, the darker side of these tutorials
becomes clear. Now Stone's pedagogy is actively threatening: "I'm
rather glad that you're on board. It will give me a chance to prove
certain theories of mine. You know, I'm sure that you will find them
very interesting and instructive." As is made clear through Richard
Dix's delivery of these lines, Captain Stone's initial friendship has
now taken on the threat of male rape or other violence, the forcing
upon Tom of a dangerous sexual knowledge.
One sequence involving a sailor with appendicitis brings many of
these motifs into sharp focus. The sequence begins when a sick
sailor (who just happens to be "Greek"), bare-chested and oily from
liniment applied by a fellow-sailor, faints from severe pain. A diag
nosis of appendicitis is made via radio, and the Captain and Tom
must prepare to operate with radioed instructions. Dressed in
gleaming white (Tom in his T-shirt), the two men prepare to open
and explore the body of the Greek sailor. At the last minute, Stone
freezes and cannot make the incision - cannot consummate the
physical act. Tom performs the operation, even though Stone takes
credit for it. Stone later explains that his actions were due to fear of
failure, but the sequence itself suggests his ultimate impotence, his
inability to consummate desire. His homosexual impulses, which he
keeps repressed, resurface in his paranoia. The possibility of
"normal" homosexual relations is displaced onto an obsession with
authority, and the sado-masochism of military discipline." One
moment that threatens to de-repress the homosexuality within the
text arises during a conversation between two sailors. Says one, in
speaking of the Captain's sovereignty at sea, "Why, he can even
marry you!" "Not me," quips the other, "I have a wife." (While this
particular double entendre slipped past the censors, in their initial
review of The Ghost Ship's script, the Production Code authorities
did caution that "there should be no 'pansy' gags attached to this
62
[sailor] business.")
Stone's failure to love either hetero- or homosexually is made
explicit by the lone female character in the film. Ellen, one of Cap
tain Stone's only two friends, is introduced first as a photograph on
Stone's desk, then as a shadow, and finally as a whole woman. She
is the only speaking female character to be seen on screen through
out the entire film. The depiction of women in this highly stylized
manner resonates with several possible meanings. First, it marks
Shock treatment 109
that women are clearly peripheral to the story, mere shadows in the
background of the drama taking place between the men. By making
the female non-corporeal, the film also emphasizes the physicality
of the men, as did the vignette with the Greek sailor's body. The
trope also places the women within a privileged space within the
genre - the shadows. As many critics have noted, women in horror
63
films are often aligned with the forces of darkness. We have seen
that in these films the terror that lurks in the shadows is primarily
psychological; in this case, it is Stone's fear of the "feminine"
impulse within himself (his homosexual desire) that these shadow-
women represent. It thus makes thematic sense that Ellen under
stands Captain Stone's problem, even as the narrative constructs her
as a somewhat deluded lonely heart who still thinks she can
"change" the Captain. She attempts to explain the situation to Tom:
"For fifteen years I've tried to give [Stone] love, instead of loneli
ness." Needless to say, Stone has continually rejected Ellen's
advances, and tells her (quite honestly) that "I'm afraid of my mind
. . . I don't trust it anymore ... Don't come close to me."
Stone's ego-dystonic homosexual desires have forced him to
remain aloof from life, and to become increasingly more isolated
and paranoid. Ellen fears that this could potentially happen to Tom
too, and tells him to "embrace warmth and life. A good joke, a
pretty girl." When Tom replies "I don't know any girls," Ellen
laughs: "That's clear enough." In an amazing bit of dialogue that
seems to validate the possibility of a positive homosexuality, Ellen
offers to introduce Tom to her younger sister. "And if you don't like
her," she continues, "she'll introduce you to other girls - and other
young men - young men who don't even know what the word
'authority' means." On one level Ellen is inviting Tom to join the
human community; on another she is making it clear that sexual
object choice is unimportant, that there are available young men
who have not perverted their sexual impulses into an obsession with
authority. What is important, as she tells Tom, is that he learn to
love someone, male or female, and not end up like the repressed
and obsessed Captain Stone. This rather enlightened attitude did
have its proponents in society at this time. Many of the psychiatrists
who "treated" homosexuals did so without the moral indignation of
later decades. In 1943, Newsweek even conceded that even though
medical officers were trying to keep homosexuals out of the army,
64
"It is possible that they may even turn out to be excellent soldiers."
110 Monsters in the closet
And once the war was oven, Newsweek printed findings that con
cluded that "homosexuals topped the average soldier in intelli
gence, education, and rating," and that "As a whole, these men were
65
law abiding and hard-working."
Eventually Tom is rescued from his bondage by the silent Finn,
who kills Stone in a knife-fight. The Finn, who has been figured by
the narrative as a mysterious red herring, turns out to be Tom's
savior. (Again, people are not always what they seem.) The specta
tor is once again privileged to hear the Finn's thoughts as he proudly
stands next to Tom on the bridge of the ship. "The boy is safe and
his belief in men and men's essential goodness is secure. He stands
beside me in command. All's well..." The idolatry afforded to Tom
by the Finn is unmistakably cast with homoeroticism and fetishiza-
tion: the Finn is blissfully happy just being in the same cabin with
Tom. Tom leaves the ship and meets Ellen's sister, but the traditional
happy (heterosexual) ending is subverted through the mise-en-
scene: the sister appears, as did Ellen, in the shadows, and the film
ends before she appears on camera.
Plate 13 Hurd Hatfield and George Sanders in The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1945). Although the film was officially sanctioned by the Production Code
Office, some viewers still understood the film to be about "sex perversion."
the morbid theme of the Wilde story [is] carefully but also somewhat
boldly adapted to the screen ... [Gray is] a subject any psychoanalyst
would like to lay his hands on. In the adaptation, Albert Lewin, who
directed, has very subtly but unmistakably pegged Gray for what he
was, but it may go over the heads of a lot of people anyway ... As Hat
71
field does the Gray part, he's singularly Narcissistic all the way.
Notes
1 "Medicine," Time (27 January, 1941): 2 0 .
2 Marion Joyce, "Flight From Slander," The Forum 100:2 (August 1938):
90-94.
3 For a brief overview of the magazine's history, see Ronnie W. Faulkner,
"Forum," in American Mass-Market Magazines, eds Alan Nourie and
Barbara Nourie (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) 1 2 6 - 1 2 9 .
4 "Hairy Chest is Not a Sign of the Masculine He-Man "Science News
Letter (8 May, 1937) 297.
5 Joyce 94.
6 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
7 Psychiatry in the horror genre can be traced back at least to Dr Seward
in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is significant, however, that in Universal's
1931 adaptation, his role is a relatively minor one. In Dracula's Daugh
ter and many of the horror films of the World War II years, the psychi
atrist replaces either or both of the roles filled by Jonathan Harker and
Professor Van Helsing - i.e. the normal male of the heterosexualized
couple and/or the voice of patriarchal authority. In other films, espe
cially those made at Universal Studios, the psychiatrist becomes a new
version of the mad doctor.
8 This is mirrored earlier in the film when Lily, the countess Zaleska's
female victim, dies in a hospital bed after Garth hypnotizes her and
forces her to recall her seduction: rather than implicate himself in her
death, however, he blames it totally on the countess.
9 Some of these films include The Walking Dead (1936), Dark Eyes of
London (1939), Black Friday (1940), The Monster and the Girl (1941),
the Kay Kyser musical You'll Find Out (1940), and Dick Tracy Meets
Gruesome (1947).
10 For the most comprehensive account of how homosexuality was con-
Shock treatment 115
structed and understood during the years of World War II, see Allan
Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women
in World War II (New York: Penguin, 1990). See also Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-
Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991) 1 1 8 - 1 3 8 , and John
D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a
Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983) 1-53.
11 See "Medicine," Time (3 April, 1944) 6 8 - 6 9 for one such report of the
trial. The author of the piece opines that "Psychiatric treatment some
times cures homosexuality, especially when it is not congenital."
12 The review continues: "In their saga of a souse, Brackett and Wilder
abandon the note of lavender. Their drunken hero does not start bend
ing his elbow to keep from putting his hand on his hip. He doesn't
hiccup to keep from 'yoo-hooing.'" This was undoubtedly comforting
news to Esquire's readers, many of whom were probably fairly heavy
drinkers, if the abundance of liquor ads in the magazine were any indi
cation of their readers' habits (Jack Moffit, "Movie of the Month,"
Esquire (November 1945) 101).
13 D'Emilio 24.
14 Berube 156.
15 See Berube 1 4 9 - 1 7 4 ; also the scientific treatise by Nicolai Gioscia,
"The Gag Reflex and Fellatio," American Journal of Psychiatry 107
(May 1950) 3 8 0 . Almost all of these tests were designed to identify
male homosexuals. For reasons too numerous to account for here, male
rather than female homosexuality seems to be the chief concern of
homophobic people and especially military policy, even in the 1990s.
16 Interestingly, one of the main texts on homosexuality during this period
was George W Henry's Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns
(New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1941). It is remarkable in that it pre
sents case histories culled from co-operative homosexuals recruited by
a "Miss Jan Gay"(!). It does not address treatment or intervention in
any systematic way, but a 1948 edition does suggest that "more homo
sexuals served with the Armed Forces than were eliminated before or
after induction. Many men had their first overt homosexual experience
while in the Armed Forces" (vii).
17 Berube 147: "From 1941 to 1945, more than four thousand sailors and
five thousand soldiers - mostly men - were hospitalized, diagnosed as
sexual psychopaths, and discharged from the service with the label of
homosexuality appearing on their military records. By contrast, the
total population of men in both the Army and the Navy who had been
convicted of sodomy from 1900 to the beginning of World War II had
numbered only in the hundreds."
116 Monsters in the closet
46 D'Emilio 24.
47 Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (New
York: Routledge, 1990) 1 1 1 .
48 Faderman 119.
49 Berube argues that the blue discharge could be used indiscriminately, to
purge the army of any soldier it deemed "undesirable." It was not only
used against homosexuals, but against racial and ethnic minorities as
well.
50 Faderman 126.
51 The Archbishop of Canterbury, quoted in "Great Britain: Question of
Consent," Time 70 (16 December, 1957) 2 2 - 2 5 .
52 Lewton is generally considered to be the auteur behind these films. I
have no intention of unproblematically accepting this supposition, but
constraints of space and time may unfortunately conspire to make it
appear so.
53 Quoted in Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 2 2 2 . DeWitt Bodeen's career
repeatedly dabbled in homoeroticism. He also wrote the screenplay for
Billy Budd (1962).
54 The production history of Cat People is recounted in George E. Turner,
"The Exquisite Evil of Cat People," in The Cinema of Adventure,
Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner (Hollywood,: The ASC
Press, 1989) 2 3 2 - 2 4 3 .
55 Reported in Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New
York: The Viking Press, 1973) 3 1 . That formula was further delineated
as follows: budgets were "limited to $150,000 per picture. The films
were to be 'programmers,' slated for placement on double features in
less than key theaters, with a running time not to exceed 75 minutes.
[The production] office was to dictate the titles of these films, based
upon a system of market pre-testing." This is why some of the most
subtle horror films ever made have exploitative titles such as I Walked
with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. See also J . P. Telotte, Dreams of
Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1985); and John Brosnan, "Lewton and Company," in
The Horror People (New York: New American Library, 1976) 7 3 - 8 5 .
56 Juanita Tanner, "Demoniac Possession," Scribner's Magazine 87 (June
1930) 6 4 3 - 6 4 8 . The essay attests to the subcultural usage of terms such
as "fairy," "invert," and "queer," and laments the fact that there is no
terminology available to discuss homosexuality which does not seem
steeped in social opprobrium. The author questions the singling out of
homosexuality as a special and exaggerated form of perversion:
"indeed when we have called it disgustingly immoral we have after all
failed to prove that it is worse than other forms of immorality which we
are accustomed to regard more leniently." From a feminist perspective,
120 Monsters in the closet
two of us were a visible couple on campus. Those who didn't know the
nature of our relationship would often query us about it, asking if we
were related: brothers, an uncle and nephew, or "just good friends."
The obvious possibility of homosexuality is denied in favor of increas
ingly outlandish theories.
70 Bosley Crowther, Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, The New York
Times (2 March, 1945) 15:2.
71 Char., Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Variety (7 March, 1945).
3
decade wore on, more and more debate about homosexuality was
featured in popular magazines: Time and Newsweek ran essays in
their medical columns about psychiatry and homosexuality, and by
1953 the news weeklies were reporting that "leading U.S. psychia
trists and other doctors are at last nearing agreement that homosex
uality is not an inherited taint... Nobody is born with it, and it is not
glandular in origin. It is not a disease in itself but a symptom of an
underlying emotional disorder.""
As homosexuality became more openly discussed throughout the
1950s, various professional experts argued for their right to define
and claim control over "the homosexual problem." Moralists saw it
as sin, psychiatrists as a curable mental illness, while still others
maintained that it was simply a crime against the state. All three of
these often warring positions can be found in a 1954 Newsweek
essay that begins by invoking the story of Sodom, touches on
Kinsey's findings, and then quotes from a member of the British
aristocracy who argues that Freudian thought has greatly damaged
Western civilization, complaining that in the past '"they called such
14
things sin; now they call them complexes.'" When these debates
became more sharply focused in 1957 around the UK's controver
sial Wolfenden Report (which suggested that the government
decriminalize prostitution and homosexual acts between consenting
15
adults), Newsweek opined that "It is far from certain that the [US]
16
public is ready for such a drastic revision in its moral code." This
conflation of homosexuality and the United Kingdom had existed in
the popular press long before the issuance of the Wolfenden Report.
In 1954, the UK was rocked by two homosexual scandals, one
involving actor John Gielgud and another involving Lord Montagu
of Beaulieu and London film producer Kenneth Hume. While Giel
gud was arrested for "persistently importuning male persons on the
streets of Chelsea," Montagu and Hume were charged with assault
against two young boys. The US news magazines that covered these
stories almost always invoked the figure of Oscar Wilde, implying
that homosexuality was more or less a foreign affair. This trend
lasted at least throughout the end of the decade: in 1959, Newsweek
reported on a British psychiatric survey which claimed that Oxford
was rife with homosexuality. "Absolute rubbish!" said Sir Maurice
Bowra, warden of Wadham College. "It's very hard to tell what the
proportion of Oxford homosexuality is, but my guess is that it is
17
jolly small."
126 Monsters in the closet
some gay men and lesbians argued for their civil rights, based on the
view that homosexuality was an illness and should be treated as
such, and not as a crime against the state. This was certainly the case
with the 1951 publication The Homosexual in America: A Subjec
tive Approach by the pseudonymous Donald Webster Cory. The
book is introduced by Dr Albert Ellis, and the bulk of the text is a
sort of simultaneous apologia for homosexuality and a civil rights
plea by the now-married Cory. In the Preface to the Second Edition
(1959), Cory still maintains that the homosexual's "behavior (or
desire for such behavior) is a symptom of emotional maladjust
ment," and that "what greater help can he obtain than a better
understanding of his problems, a reorientation of his drives, while
at the same time one seeks to alleviate the social and legal pressures
24
that he faces?"
Yet, groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of
Bilitis remained relatively unknown to the public at large. And a
book like Cory's could easily be read in conjunction with those by
Edmund Bergler, reinforcing the idea that homosexuality was a
mental illness that could be and should be cured. Eventually these
and other critical voices held more sway with the public's under
standing of human sexuality than did Kinsey's findings or his sug
gestions. All of this pathologizing media publicity helped to create
a very different image of the homosexual than had existed in previ
ous decades. As George Chauncey puts it:
As a result of such press campaigns, the long-standing public image of
the queer as an effeminate fairy who one might ridicule but had no
reason to fear was supplemented by the more ominous image of the
queer as a psychopathic child molester capable of committing the
most unspeakable crimes against children. The fact that homosexuals
no longer seemed so easy to identify made them seem even more dan
gerous, since it meant that even the next-door neighbor could be one.
The specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible com
25
munist, haunted Cold War America.
sexual dynamics and social tensions can be found in the era's mon
ster movies and horror films.
tropes, and suggests the repressed homosexual urges which may lie
at the heart of such homosocial bonds. Yet these films also differ
from the more standard monster invasion narratives of the era in
that the Creature (across the course of three films) becomes almost
as humanized and as domesticated as any monster of the 1930s or
1940s (and has thus insured his ongoing popularity?). In Revenge of
the Creature (1955), he is transplanted from his own alien world
and turned into an exchange commodity displayed for profit at
Florida's Ocean Harbor Oceanarium. By The Creature Walks
Among Us (1956), medical science forces the creature to adapt to
the "normal" human world by making him an air-breather, recalling
1940s monster movies tropes which sought to cure the monster
queer rather than destroy him. Yet in each film the Creature remains
the embodiment of an abstract sexual urge: his phallic design and
interest in a string of female starlets are his chief characteristics. The
ad copy for the first film makes this sexual threat clear, proclaiming
the Creature a "terrifying monster of the ages raging with pent-up
passions!" Joseph Breen at the Production Code Administration was
also a bit worried about the monster's overt phallicism, and sug
gested that the producers take care to "avoid any sexual emphasis
that might suggest bestiality."" As usual within the genre, the threat
of bestiality exists in a semantic blur with other forms of queer sex
uality.
A closer look at The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its
sequels reveals the exact form of the phallic urge which the monster
represents: the male-male erotic tension contained within the
homosocial triangle. (This homoerotic undercurrent would have
been even more pronounced had the role of Dr Carl Maia, the sci
entist who first unearths a fossilized Creature, gone to the produc
6
tion's original first choice, homosexual actor Ramon Novarro.)' In
each film, a pair of male scientists (Richard Carlson and Richard
Denning, John Agar and John Bromfield, Rex Reason and Jeff
Morrow) vie for the attentions of a female (Julie Adams, Lori
Nelson, Leigh Snowden), while hunting for the Creature. The men
are constantly linked with the Creature, swimming around in the
murky waters with him, ostensibly sharing his lust for the female
lead, and frequently serving as "red-herring" shocks by coming into
the frame suddenly while the Creature is on the loose. Like the all-
male world of The Ghost Ship, in the Creature films there is no
shortage of jocular homosocial camaraderie, swimsuited beefcake,
134 Monsters in the closet
ilar gift for overdetermined phallic symbols: when three men and a
woman crash land into the titular dinosaur-infested world, they
quickly realize that their only hope of escape hinges upon their abil
ity to straighten out or replace their helicopter's bent and broken
"push-pull rod.")
In most of these films, the homosocial worlds of scientists and
sailors are skewed by the presence of a woman: as one character in
the first Creature film warns about the initial expedition, "There's
just one problem - going into unexplored territory with a woman."
These lone women exist in the films ostensibly to defuse the homo
erotic tension of the situation, but ironically they more regularly
draw attention to it. The women themselves are linked to the mon
strous by way of their femininity, and it is through their presence
that the possibility of the triangle's male-male desire is filtered. In
the first film, Mark (Richard Denning) gets rather bitchy when he
sees his rival David (Richard Carlson) with the woman Kay (Julie
Adams): "Come on, David, you can play house later!" He scorns
not only the possible heterosexual couple, but the feminizing and
domesticating threat that it represents to the buddies' all-male
world. One brief sequence from the same film pulls all of this
together and firmly links the erotic tension of the homosocial trian
gle to that of the monsters which lurk in the jungle: David and Kay
are on deck, about to kiss, when their embrace is interrupted by the
cries of a wild animal. They attempt to kiss again, but this time they
are interrupted by Mark, who suddenly appears brandishing and
firing a spear-gun. Later Mark, who has become obsessed with
killing and/or capturing the Creature, sits on deck with David and
anxiously calls out "Come on! Come on!" David queries: "You talk
ing to me, Mark, or something out there?" "Both," answers Mark:
his desire for David, first triangulated through Kay, is now displaced
onto the Creature. If Mark can kill or capture the Creature, perhaps
he can keep his own sexual urges under control. Mark actually
stands in for the Creature a few minutes later, when, in the Crea
ture's lair, David (and the spectator) is shocked when Mark reaches
into frame and tries to grab David.
In all three of the Creature films, the narrative seems less con
cerned with the destruction of the monster than with reducing the
plurality of male suitors to a single man, in order to re-form the
proper heterosexual couple. (At the end of each film, the Creature
is hurt but shown either swimming away or heading for the sea.)
136 Monsters in the closet
The Creature Walks Among Us: as the Creature becomes more and
more humanized, it is decided by the paranoid Dr Barton that he
must now wear clothing, as if to mask or repress the queer sexual
threat which the Creature's naked form has come to embody.
Parker Tyler has also commented upon Suddenly Last Summer's use
of the monster movie's visual tropes, and laments the fact that
the audience never gets to see Sebastian or his monstrous activi
ties: "Even Creature Features give us a few good nips at skull
44
duggery ..."
In many films of this period, young men were at risk from deviant
Pods, pederasts and perverts 139
famous science fiction novel The Shrinking Man finds himself the
49
recipient of a drunken homosexual's attentions. Perhaps most
egregiously, in 1955 a homosexual scandal erupted in Boise, Idaho,
and shocked the nation with its allegations of homosexual under
worlds soliciting teenage boys for sex. Editorials with titles such as
"Crush the Monster" appeared in the Idaho Daily Statesman,™ and
the story quickly spread to newspapers across the country. Time
reported that Boise, "usually thought of as a boisterous, rollicking,
he-man's town ... had sheltered a widespread homosexual under
world that involved some of Boise's most prominent men and had
S1
preyed on hundreds of teen-age boys for the past decade. " Several
of the older men involved were sentenced to prison for long jail
terms and one man was sentenced to life; his sentence was later
reduced. In the words of one of these men:
Time magazine reported that the boys did "it" for the money, and
while undoubtedly some of them did, the possibility that some of
these teenagers might have had sex for the pleasure of it cannot be
countenanced by the magazine. The essay concludes by noting that
Boise's city government was helping the boys by getting them after-
school jobs and special sessions with psychiatrists imported from
Denver.
As a response to these new perceptions, short educational films
such as Boys Beware were made by police departments and shown
in schools. Boys Beware (c. 1958) comprises four vignettes in which
older, slightly balding men entice pubescent boys back to their
apartments. (Ironically, the police officer in the film is also an older,
slightly balding man.) The voice-over tells us that two boys ended
up in custody with their "sick ... mentally ill... contagious" attack
ers, that one boy escaped, and that one was murdered. Homosexu
ality as pederasty was also a cornerstone of Dr Edmund Bergler's
rantings (again, italics are his): "The fight is for the young generation
of homosexuals, for the individual who has not yet completely fallen
Pods, pederasts and perverts 141
5
under the spell of homosexuality's alleged 'glamor.'" ' Like today's
fundamentalist Christian activists, Bergler blames the media for dis
seminating too tolerant a picture of homosexuality and thereby
putting children at risk:
This cannot be too strongly stressed: The conspiracy of silence which
surrounds homosexuality, and is - with negligible exceptions - main
tained by the daily press, magazines, radio, television, has the end
effect of promoting homosexuality. If information is unavailable, if
false statistics are left uncontradicted, if new recruits are not warned
by dissemination of the fact that homosexuality is but a disease, the
confirmed homosexual is presented with a clear field for his opera
54
tions - and your teen-age children may be the victims.
Yet although both the photograph and the text activate signifiers of
invisible communism and homosexual pederasty, this "average Joe"
turns out not to be a child-molesting queer, but rather a simple
wage-earner, who is berated by the advertisement for not having a
high-paying job. Upon reading further, we discover that he is not a
security risk to the government, but to his own family. It is evident
that good Americans are neither communist nor homosexual; how
ever, the advertisement makes it clear that poor-wage earners are
also suspect.
The processes of proper maturation for teenage boys were also
addressed during this era in a spate of juvenile delinquency films
which arose to address the various more concrete dangers that
youth might encounter (violence, gangs, anti-social and communist
142 Monsters in the closet
straight (wearing a normal face), and the care with which this must
be done. "Tonight I'm going to lead you out of this darkness. We'll
go among people - discreetly of course - and you'll be able to pick
the face that pleases you." Frankenstein and the monster go to the
local Lover's Lane (!) and spot a face they like, one that is "rather
handsome ... even drugged with passion, it has brightness, intelli
gence." Once he gets his new face, the teenage monster turns into a
self-absorbed narcissist: he spends the rest of the film gazing lovingly
into his hand-mirror. But Frankenstein doesn't seem to mind, glad
that his "quite, quite handsome" boy is happy.
Just what might Dr Frankenstein want from his handsome boy,
now that he is all pumped up and ready to go? Sadly, the film cannot
divulge that information, and the spectator is left to wonder. A spec
tator who regularly paged through the muscle magazines, or even
Adventure - The Man's Magazine of Exciting Fiction and Fact, how
ever, might have had some idea, especially if he had read an article
entitled "We Still Have Male Sex Slaves" published the same year
6
Teenage Frankestein was released. ' The essay mostly focuses on his
torical harems of male eunuchs in exotic foreign lands, yet the
accompanying photograph is right out of homophobic Middle
America, showing a shirtless white boy standing upon an auction-
block, head bent down submissively, while a middle-aged man in
slacks and cigarette gestures with his free hand in the direction of
the boy's crotch. The tone of the article is shocked and condemna
tory, although it does tell the reader who might be interested where
to find such sex for sale, reluctantly adding that "Male prostitutes
are available in many European cities, such as Berlin and London.
In both Germany and England professional homosexuals have
reached alarming numbers." But apparently this sort of thing does
n't happen in the USA - according to the text - although the pho
tograph seems to suggest otherwise.
Sharing a double bill with Teenage Frankenstein was Blood of
Dracula, AIP's lesbian entry in the subgenre of teenage monster
films. The film is set in an all-girl boarding school (which just hap
pens to be run by a Mrs Thoxndyke) and brings together many dif
ferent strands of US post-war culture, especially fears of nuclear
technology/holocaust, the rising power of the young, and the hint
of forbidden sexuality. While the queer sexual metaphor for vam
pirism lurks at the manifest edges of the film, on a more latent level
the film is filled with vaginal symbols such as Miss Branding's
Pods, pederasts and perverts 149
Plate 18 In this publicity still from How To Make a Monster (1959), Pete and
his teenage monsters share an intimate moment
152 Monsters in the closet
faces, and makes them into monsters. Larry confesses that "I'd hate
to have my girlfriend see me not necessarily because she would
be frightened by his make-up, but because Larry now has something
to be ashamed of - he has been forced from the dominant (hetero
sexual) order back into a regressive monstrous non-heterosexual
state. Pete's desire to take photographs of his creations creates a fris
son of voyeuristic pederasty that cannot be much more plainly
marked: while looking over a stack of photos, Pete says "I want to
take home some pictures of these boys - 1 like to study them. I enjoy
working with these teenagers. They've got spirit and they co
operate ... they put themselves into your hands." Pete and especially
Rivero are characterized as childlike and neurotic. Their world is
visual, concerned with appearances, surfaces, id-creatures, and a
traditionally feminine profession; heterosexuality has not yet been
inscribed. Later in the film the police will tell them, "Look -
We know you live in a world of make-believe. All right - Come out
of it!" However, whereas Rivero is firmly situated in this pre-
heterosexualized world (given all of the signifiers of effeminate
homosexuality), Pete (the "active" half of the couple) proves him
self to have a predatory power over both Rivero and his teenage
victims.
An early scene follows Pete and Larry as they walk arm-in-arm
from the make-up lab to the set. Pete constantly touches and
retouches his creation Larry/Werewolf; as a newly born monster
queer, Larry is both Pete's possession and sexual object. The two
pass before and significantly ignore a "cheesecake" actress, a studio
tour (reflecting Mr and Mrs Middle America taking in the fantastic
sights of the movie world), and a pair of male actors outfitted as
underwater explorers (who could be the homoerotic male leads of
a Creature from the Black Lagoon-type movie). The "beefcake" of
the divers is lingered over much more than the "cheesecake" of the
female starlet, and the divers seem to recognize some familiar aspect
in the queer duo of Pete and Larry/Werewolf. "Well, at least we look
normal," one remarks, to which the other replies, putting on his
face mask, "Yeah, don't we, though?" The image of the homoerotic
divers serves as a visual metaphor for Pete and Larry/Werewolf,
while their exchange explicitly acknowledges the phenomenon of
"invisible" homosexuals passing for straight. Once on the set,
Larry/Werewolf is introduced to an already made-up Tony/Franken
stein, a muscular young actor in a tight fitting T-shirt. The director
Pods, pederasts and perverts 153
is anxious to get them both on the set to stage his "Battle of the
Monsters." The theme of feminization and objectification of the
queer monster boys is again sounded when the director tells Pete, "I
want to see how these two beauties look together." As the "Battle of
the Monsters" commences and the two lock arms in a fierce
embrace, the scene abruptly cuts to Pete and Rivero. The metaphor
in the cut is obvious: Pete and Rivero are monsters, too; though
they are not wearing make-up (not being obviously flamboyantly
gay), there is something "monstrous" about them. The film's narra
tive engine and ideological counterpoint enters the film at this
point, when two studio executives arrive to tell Pete that they have
just taken over the studio and will no longer be needing his services.
"Monsters are finished," they tell him. "People want to hear music,
they want to laugh, they want to see pretty girls." What they do not
want to see, the executives imply, is monstrous metaphors for ear
lier stages of psychic development and/or alternative lifestyles.
Pete rises to the occasion in a self-reflexive defense of the horror
film, acknowledging that its appeal lies in regression to earlier stages
of development (primary, visual, pre-heterosexual) in order to
experience the thrill of the monstrous: "Even psychiatrists say that
in all these monster pictures there's not only entertainment, but for
some people, therapy. Well, you know we never get over our child
hood fear of the sinister - the terrifying faces we see in nightmares
- well, through these pictures we can live out our hidden fears. It
helps." As agents of the corporate patriarchy, this is the last thing
that the studio executives want to hear. Heterocentrist institutions
maintain their power through fear, intimidation, and the repression
of monstrously queer impulses that horror films attempt to de-
repress and celebrate. The scene explicitly links the patriarchal
order with capitalism, and Pete and his monstrous world as oppos
ing it. As Pete turns down the offer of severance pay, one of the
studio executives clucks "Turn down money - maybe you've been
living too long with monsters." Pete walks through a darkened
sound stage and decides what he must do, coming to rest in front of
posters for I Was a Teenage Frnkenstein and I Was a Teenage Were
wolf. Curiously, even as the film's visuals work to blatantly plug
those films, the character Pete is decrying money-grubbing studio
executives. This contradiction - between the reality of why How To
Make a Monster was made (to cash in on the financial success of the
above two films) and Pete's anti-capitalist observations - suggests a
154 Monsters in the closet
Marxist critique and raises a systemic tension that the film will
finally be unable to resolve.
Pete makes a decision to exact revenge upon the studio execu-
tives, revealing yet another signified of "monster-making." Up until
this point in the film, the title has referred to Pete's activity in
making-up actors for monster movies, and in seducing nominally
straight young men into queerly-tinged relations. Upon Pete's deci-
sion to plot revenge, he becomes a new monster - one formed from
the direct effects of the prevailing system (the executives closing
down the dream factory). According to this particular chain of sig-
nification, it is the prevailing system that "makes monsters" - as in
Robin Wood's argument, that which is repressed (in this case the
Hollywood monster movie) must eventually return. However, these
particular monsters are not going to be of the Imaginary/Make-
believe/Movie/Sexuality kind; they are going to be deadly. Back in
the make-up lab, Pete tells Rivero of his plan to control the young
actors through a special novocaine-based make-up: "Now - this
enters the pores and paralyzes the will. It will have the same effect
chemically as a surgical prefrontal lobotomy. It blocks the nerve
synapses. It makes the subject passive - obedient to my will." The
next day Pete applies the make-up to Larry. Along with hypnosis,
the make-up transformation effects a complete regression for Larry:
he is pulled back from the heterosexual order and becomes a mon-
ster queer. The action then switches to a screening room where
studio executive Nixon (a deliberate linkage of the real Richard M.
with the industrial patriarchy?) sits watching the rushes for the
"Battle of the Monsters." In a very explicitly constructed sequence,
the werewolf on the screen is replaced by a "real-life" werewolf -
one that Nixon and his backers have been complicitous in making.
Pete's harmless movie monsters have now become violent killers as
a direct result of the dominant system's attempt to repress them.
A later sequence in the police station depicts a confrontation
between a violent patriarchy and its passive victims. The police offi-
cers are brutish, overbearing, and unappealing; positioned within
the mise-en-scène as surrounding and dominating, they brusquely
interrogate and intimidate their suspects. A black woman's eye-wit-
ness account of murder is treated with skepticism, and the police are
condescending towards an old night-watchman who is hard of hear-
ing. Finally, they browbeat Rivero and almost succeed in cracking
him before Pete intervenes:
Pods, pederasts and perverts 155
Plate 19 Bela Lugosi, as God, performs a miraculous sex change in this shot
from Ed Wood's autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953)
Glen and Glenda, like all the other Glens and Glendas, have an even
bigger problem. The homosexual, it is true, at times does adopt the
clothing or the make-up of a woman to lure members of his own sex.
But this is not so for the transvestite. The transvestite is not interested
in those of their own sex. The clothing is not worn to attract the atten-
Pods, pederasts and perverts 161
Plate 20 S a d o - m a s o c h i s t i c lesbian t i t i l l a t i o n in t h e Ed W o o d - s c r i p t e d
monster-nudie burlesque film Orgy of the Dead (1965)
164 Monsters in the closet
of the Dead: "As it is with all the night people, they are destroyed by
the first rays of the sun. But upon the first appearance of the deep
shadows of the night, and when the moon is full, they will return to
rejoice in their evil lust! And take back with them any mortal who
might happen along . . . Who can say that we do not exist? Can
you?"
Notes
1 Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadel
phia: W B. Saunders, 1948).
2 Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953).
3 See, among many others, "Medicine: Shocker on Sex," Newsweek 3 0
(1 December, 1947) 5 2 ; "Medicine: How Men Behave," Time 51 (5
January, 1948) 66; "Manners and Morals: How to Stop Gin Rummy,"
Time 5 1 (1 March, 1948) 1 6 ; "Medicine: Kinsey Speaks Out,"
Newsweek 31 (12 April, 1948) 5 1 ; and O. Spurgeon English, MD,
"What Parents Can Learn From the Kinsey Report," Parents 23 (Octo
ber 1948) 2 6 , 144, 1 4 6 - 1 4 8 .
4 Quoted in "Medicine: Dr. Kinsey Misremembers," Time 51 (14 June,
1948) 82.
5 Quoted in "Manners and Morals: How to Stop Gin Rummy," Time 51
(1 March, 1948) 16.
6 Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1956) 7.
7 "Medicine: Curable Disease?" Time 68 (10 December, 1956) 76.
8 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 9.
9 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 3 0 0 .
10 Edmund Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals (Paterson, NJ: Pageant
Books, Inc., 1959) viii.
11 "Medicine: Queer People," Newsweek 34 (10 October, 1949) 5 2 .
12 Robert J . Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homo
phobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) 8.
13 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 28.
14 "Medicine: A Delicate Problem," Newsweek 43 (14 June, 1994) 100.
15 For an interesting and enlightened overview of the report and the topics
it discussed, see Eustace Chesser, Live and Let Live: The Moral of the
Wolfenden Report (London: Heinemann, 1958).
16 "Britain: Facing the Dark Facts," Newsweek 50 (16 September, 1957)
52.
Pods, pederasts and perverts 169
17 "Medicine: Lavender and Old Blues," Newsweek 54 (20 July, 1959) 82.
18 Esquire (July 1951) 134, (August 1951) 1 3 1 .
19 Advertisement for the Jowett Institute, Esquire (August 1951) 132. Also
with this special offer one could receive "Free! Jowett's Photo Book of
Famous Strong Men!"
20 The history of these magazines has recently been explored in F. Valen
tine Hooven, III, Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America
1950-1970 (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1995).
21 "A Delicate Problem," Newsweek (14 June, 1954) 9 9 .
22 See Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History, revised edition (New
York: Penguin, 1992) 4 0 6 - 4 2 0 for a first-hand account of these events,
and 420^433 for an interview with Barbara Gittings, the founder of the
New York Daughters of Bilitis.
23 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One, trans. Robert
Hurly (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 1 0 1 .
24 Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective
Approach, second edition (New York: Castle Books, 1960) xxiii. This is
essentially the same argument put forth in Man on a Pendulum: A Case
History of an Invert, "Presented by Dr. Israel J . Gerber, A Religious
Counselor" (New York: The American Press, 1955). The author of this
latter work, now also married, tells of the homosexual lifestyle and how
he was able to overcome it through counseling with a Rabbi.
25 George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
359-360.
26 See among many others Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Inter
pretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana Uni
versity Press, 1987); and Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing : How
Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983).
27 Noel Carroll, "Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology
of Fantastic Beings," Film Quarterly 34:3 (Spring 1981) 2 3 . Basically
the formula is outlined as follows: onset/discovery of the "thing," the
attempt to warn the general populace, confirmation of the "thing's"
presence and further evil mayhem, and finally a confrontation with and
destruction of the "thing." See also Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of
Disaster," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octa
gon Books, 1986) 2 1 0 - 2 1 1 . (I have collapsed some of her observations
from the larger-budgeted color formula plot into the following sum
mary.)
28 Annette Kuhn, "Border Crossing," Sight and Sound 2:3 (July 1992) 13.
See also Kevin Jackson, "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," Sight and
Sound 2:3 (July 1992) 1 1 - 1 2 .
2 9 Margaret Tarratt, "Monsters from the Id," Films and Filming 17:3
170 Monsters in the closet
45 Dyer 84.
46 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 2 9 .
47 Dr Shailer Upton Lawton, "Sex Secrets," Challenge 5:5 (August 1959)
47-18.
48 Fredric Werthem, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart &
Company, Inc., 1953) 1 8 8 - 1 9 3 .
49 Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man (Garden City, NY: Nelson Dou-
bleday, Inc., 1956) 5 2 - 5 7 .
50 "Crush the Monster," Idaho Daily Statesman (3 November, 1955).
51 "Crime: Idaho Underworld," Time 66 (12 December, 1955) 2 5 .
52 Anonymous account published in Katz 110. The scandal was covered in
a book-length report by John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice
and Folly in an American City (New York: Collier, 1968).
53 Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals 2 4 4 .
54 Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals 2 4 9 .
55 True War 2:2 (January 1958) 3.
56 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of Ameri
can Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988) 147.
57 For background information on the studio and its productions, see
Mark Thomas McGee, Fast and Furious: The Story of American Inter
national Pictures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1984)
and Robert L. Ottoson, American International Pictures: A Filmography
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985).
58 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 8.
59 The presuppositions of this psychoanalytic model - that homosexuals
were arrested at some stage of their psychosexual development - is also
allegedly responsible for their choice of children as sexual partners, or
at least their simple and child-like demeanors. This idea can also be
found in monster movie manifestations. For example, in Attack of the
Puppet People (1958), a kindly, old (but foreign and queer) doll-maker
(John Hoyt) is revealed to be an evil scientist, bent on shrinking normal
people down to his emotional, childlike level. This idea is also inherent
in Bride of Frankenstein's Dr Pretorius, who also had a collection of
such homunculi.
60 Producer Herman Cohen: "Our films concerned teenagers who had
doubts about their parents, their teachers or what-have-you. That these
doubts influence a teenager to go bad. I felt this would appeal to a
teenage audience, which it did" (reported in McGee 63).
61 Philip Cascio, "We Still Have Male Sex Slaves," Adventure 132:2 (Feb
ruary 1957) 4 6 - 4 7 , 89.
62 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 2 8 .
63 "Medicine: These Tragic Women," Newsweek 53 (15 June, 1959)
62-63.
172 Monsters in the closet
ster was really just like everyone else. Many queer people, such as
the horror fan quoted below, found in these shows the "permission"
or social space to be different:
I think The Munsters and The Addams Family were wonderful exam
ples of happily functioning families. They always got along and were
very loving towards themselves and the community. Being gay myself,
I feel different as a minority functioning in the world. I think these
families were positive role models for me: here's something different
functioning in the real world and enjoying it and dealing with it, and
it gave me hope that I could be different and live in the general world
too.*
The term "homophobia", which had been used in the popular press
at least since 1969, began to be discussed by some psychiatrists as
the true pathological condition, although many psychiatrists and
especially psychoanalysts continued to assert theoretical paradigms
for models of illness and cure, and some do so to this day.'" Even the
American Medical Association did not formally declare such repar
ative therapies inadvisable until 1994.
As I hope this brief overview has shown, the topic of homosexu
ality reached unprecedented levels of cultural visibility during the
period immediately before and after the Stonewall Rebellion. The
new-found visibility of organized gay and lesbian communities, and
the politics of "coming out loud and proud," caused tremendous
social change, especially in terms of the resultant commercialization
and celebration of gay urban culture throughout the 1970s. By
1972, there had been enough homosexual characters on-screen for
Parker Tyler to publish Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the
Movies, the first book-length study of queerness in cinema." Even a
fairly mainstream British film journal, Films and Filming, became
almost flamboyantly gay during this era. Under the editorship of
Robin Bean, ads for and reviews of the latest films (including many
of the horror films discussed below) nestled alongside nearly nude
and homoerotic photographs of the era's male stars. Yet as Vito
Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight 183