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MONSTERS IN THE CLOSET:
HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE HORROR FILM
by
Hairy Morgan Benshoff
A Dissertation Presented to the

FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Cinema-Television-Critical Studies)
August 1996
Copyright 1996 Hairy Morgan Benshoff
UMI Number: 9705075
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This dissertation, written by
WqAM*!. .....
under the direction of h i* . Dissertation

Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date ... 2J?.; i ?.§
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
Harry Morgan Benshoff Lynn Spigel
Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film
This dissertation is a history of the horror film that explores the genre's relationship to the
social and cultural history of homosexuality in America. Drawing on a wide variety of films and
primary source materials including censorship files, critical reviews, promotional materials,
fanzines, men’s magazines, and popular news weeklies, the dissertation examines the historical
figure of the movie monster in relation to various medical, psychological, religious, and social
models of homosexuality.
The dissertation first identifies a constellation of monstrously queer signifiers in the
classical Hollywood horror film of the 1930s, and then traces their evolution throughout the
genre’s more recent history. The sadomasochistic queer couple of the 1930s, for example,
becomes softened, domesticated, and psychologized during the years of World War Two, just as
social knowledge of homosexuality was becoming increasingly common via its pathologization by
the medical establishment and the Armed Forces. The 1950s saw a fear of the invisible
homosexual analogous to that of the invisible communist; movie monsters became irrevocable
Others during this era and were frequently figured as pederastic threats. By the late 1960s, the
discourses of Pop and camp began to view movie monsters in a different light, even as relaxing
censorship codes made it possible for monsters to be more forthrightly delineated as homosexual.
Most recently, even as some horror films continue to demonize queemess, other writers and
filmmakers have attempted to reappropriate the genre for queer ends by positing the monstrous
forces as heroes and heroines, and the traditional forces of normality as evil.
Drawing on the close textual analysis of a wide number of different types of horror films
(both American and British), Monsters in the Closet theorizes the importance of popular culture
artifacts (such as Hollywood genre films) to questions of identity, hegemony, and social power. It
examines how the honor film has and continues to demonize (or quite literally “monsterize”) queer
sexuality, and what the pleasures and costs of such representations might be both for individual
spectators as well as culture-at-large.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Monster and the Homosexual 1
1. Defining the Monster Queer

in the Classical Hollywood Horror Film 30
2. Shock Treatment:
Curing the Monster Queer During World War n 70
3. Pods, Pederasts, and Perverts:

(Re)Criminalizing the Monster Queer in Cold War Culture 110
4. Exposing the Monster Queer to the Sunlight,

Circa the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion 157
5. Satan Spawn and Out and Proud:

Monster Queers in the Postmodern Era 209
Epilogue 256
Bibliography (Works Cited) 267
1
Introduction:
The Monster and the Homosexual
In a 1984 study of anti-homosexual attitudes, the investigators broke heterosexuals’ fears

of gay and lesbian sexuality into three topic areas:
(1) Homosexuality as a threat to the individual-that someone you know (or you
yourself) might be homosexual.
(2) Homosexuality as a threat to others—homosexuals have been frequently linked

in the media to child molestation, rape, and violence.
(3) Homosexuality as a threat to the community and other components of culture—

homosexuals supposedly represent the destruction of the procreative nuclear
family, traditional gender roles, and (to use a buzz phrase) “family values.”'
In short, for many people in our shared English-language culture, homosexuality is a

monstrous condition. Like an evil Mr. Hyde, or the Wolfman, a gay or lesbian self inside
of you might be striving to get out. Like Frankenstein’s monster, homosexuals might run
rampant across the countryside, claiming “innocent” victims. Or worst of all, like mad
scientists or vampires, who dream of revolutionizing the world through some startling
scientific discovery or preternatural power, homosexual activists strike at the very
foundations of society, seeking to infect or destroy not only those around them but the very
concepts of Western Judeo-Christian thought upon which civil society is built. For the
better part of the twentieth century, homosexuals, like vampires, have rarely cast a
reflection in the social looking glass of popular culture. When they are seen, they are often
filtered through the iconography of the horror film: ominous sound cues, shocked reaction
shots, or even thunder and lightning. Both movie monsters and homosexuals have existed
chiefly in shadowy closets, and when they do emerge from these proscribed places into the
sunlit world, they cause panic and fear. Their closets uphold and reinforce culturally
constructed binaries of gender and sexuality that structure Western thought. To create a
' Ser Dhn Wayne Plasek and Janicemarie Allard, ‘Misconceptions of Homophobia,’
Bashers., alters, & Bigots: Homophobia in American Society, ed. in John P. De Cecco (New \t>rk:
Harrington Park Press, 1985) 23-38.
2
broad analogy, monster is to “normality” as homosexual is to heterosexual.
Ostensibly based upon these melodramatic fears, as well as a host of others, the
conservative right wing and Fundamentalist Christian sectors of American society have
sought to demonize homosexuals within all aspects of civil(ian) life, as well as more
specialized sectors such as the military and institutionalized pedagogy. They do so
primarily by painting the gay and lesbian community in shocking, horrifying colors. THE
GAY AGENDA (1993), a recent anti-gay propaganda video tape (which was produced in
Antelope Valley, California by a Christian group calling itself the Springs of Life Ministry),
uses discredited “expels” purportedly to tell the truth about what depraved creatures
homosexuals actually are: carefully selected footage from gay and lesbian pride festivals
“document” their claims. The point comes across loudly and clearly: homosexuals are
violent, degraded monsters and their evil agenda is to destroy the very fabric of American
society. Many members of Congress, who received this tape gratis from the helpful
Springs of Life Ministry, seemed to find its argument compelling and reasonable,
especially during the recent national hysteria surrounding the question of whether or not
homosexuals should be legally discriminated against within the Armed Services. A similar
use of horror movie iconography has recently been employed by other Fundamentalist
Christian groups in seasonal Halloween “Hell Houses.” In an attempt to frighten teen-age
patrons into conforming to heterosexual norms, the traditional Halloween haunted house
tour is reappropriated for anti-gay propaganda. Instead of showcasing vampires and
werewolves, these “Hell Houses” now use monstrous effects to delineate the horrors of
homosexuality and AIDS/
The AIDS crisis, which has spurred Christian compassion from some quarters, has
also significantly fueled this “homosexual as monster” rhetoric: now more than ever, gay
men are contagions—vampires-who, with a single mingling of blood, can infect a pure and
innocent victim, transforming him or her into the living dead. Some people have always
considered anything that opposes or lies outside the ideological status quo intrinsically
monstrous and unnatural. Perhaps expectedly, an ideological approach to fictional
*For more on the pi lomenon, see Kellie Gibbs, ‘Fundamentalist HalloweenrScared All the
Way to Jesus,’ Out29 (February 1996) 20.
3
monsters frequently bleeds into an accounting of real life honors such as AIDS: recent
critical essays on the mass media have demonstrated how the representational codes and
narrative tropes of the monster movie (plague, contagion, victimization, panic) have been
grafted onto much television and newspaper coverage of AIDS.3 Yet, in his book on how
the media in Great Britain has covered the AIDS crisis, Simon Watney warns us that “Aids
commentary does not "make’ gay mot into monsters, for homosexuality is, and always has
been, constructed as intrinsically monstrous within the heavily over-determined images
inside which notions of ‘decency,’ ‘h«.<man nature,’ and so on are mobilized and relayed
throughout the internal circuitry of the mass media marketplace.”4 The multiple social
meanings of the words “monster” and “homosexual” are seen to overlap to varying but
often high degrees. Certain sectors of the population still relate homosexuality to bestiality,
incest, necrophilia, sadomasochism, etc.-the very stuff of classical Hollywood monster
movies. The concepts “monster” and “homosexual” share many of the same semantic
charges and arouse many of the same fears about sex and death.
3 Some of these essays include: Ellis Hanson,*Undead.' Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New \brk: Routledge, 1991) 324-340; Andrew Parker, “Grafting David
Cronenberg: Monstrosity, 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 \brk: Routledge, 1993)209-231 and 232-254.
Other writings on the connections between fictional monsters and homosexuality (not
cited directly below) include: Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and
Modem Culture (New Mark: Columbia University Press, 1993); Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the
Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatonship in Classic Horror Cinema (New \brk:
Columbia University Press, 1996); Richard Dyer, 'Children of the NightVampirismas
Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism,* Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and Popular
Fiction, ed. Susannah Radstone (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988) 47-72; Bonnie
Zimmerman, 'DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS: Lesbian Vampires,’ Jump Cut24/25 (1981) 23-24;
Marlin R 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 Vbrk:
Greenwood Press, 1986 141-150; Elizabeth Reba Weise, 'Bisexuality, THE ROCKY HORROR
PICTURE SHOW, and Me,’ Bi Amy Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, eds. Loraine
Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu (Boston: Alyson, 1991) 134-139; Patricia White, ‘Famale
Spectator, Lesbian Specter. THE HAUNTING,” inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed.
Diana Rjss (New \brk: Routledge, 1991) 142-172; Diana Rjss, 'Monsters of Perversion: Jeffrey
Dahmer and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS,’ Media Spectacles, eds. Marjorie Garber, Jann
Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New \brk: Routledge, 1993) 181-205; Edward Guerrero,
AIDS as Monster in Science Fiction and Horror Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Television
18:3 (Fal 1990) 86-93.
4 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, Second Edition
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 42.
4
True to the postmodern condition, it seems clear from the preceding examples that
the melodramatic formulas and patterns of representation to be found in the horror film
have slipped into the realm of “real life” politics. And while horror films and monster
movies are frequently dismissed as children’s fere or vacuous, meaningless escapism, the
demonization (or “monsterization”) of homosexuals in American society is a very serious
life and death issue. One might well wish that American society could dismiss anti-gay
propaganda like THE GAY AGENDA as easily as it does the latest B honor film. To do
so would require the unmasking of another institutionalized power hierarchy, one
embedded in the form of media texts themselves: ibcumentaries (no matter how
propagandistically they are produced) are usually perceived as somehow inherently true,
while fictional film and television shows, in an attempt perhaps to bolster their own
significance, maintain their own hierarchies of meaningfulness. Thus, “political
significance” in fictional film and television is reserved for realist “social problem” formats,
while horror movies, like soap operas and comic books, lie at the bottom of those particular
media hierarchies. What these denigrated artifacts might have to say about the culture they
encode and provoke is frequently ignored and/or discounted. In what follows, however, I
will be insisting that there is much to learn from looking at such texts, and arguing that the
figure of the monster throughout the history of the English-language horror film can in
some way be understood as a metaphoric construct standing in for the figure of the
homosexual. However, while this work will argue that the figure of the monster can
frequently be equated (with greater or lesser degrees of ease) with that of the homosexual,
what this means from decade to decade and from film to film can be shown to change
dramatically, according to the forces behind their production as well as the societal
awareness and understanding of human sexuality as it is constructed in various historical
periods.
Theorizing the Monster Queer

In the 1970s, in a series of essays exploring the horror film, critic Robin Wood suggested
that the thematic core of the genre might be reduced to three interrelated variables: normality
(as defined chiefly by a heterosexual patriarchal capitalism), the Other (embodied in the
5
figure of the monster), and the relationship between the two.3 According to Wood’s
formulation, these monsters can often be understood as racial, ethnic, and/or
political/ideological Others, while more frequently they are constructed primarily as sexual
Others (women, bisexuals, and homosexuals). Since the demands of the classical
Hollywood narrative system usually insist on a heterosexual romance within the stories
they construct, the monster is traditionally figured as a force that attempts to block that
romance. As such, many monster movies (and the source material they draw upon) might
be understood as being “about” the eruption of some form of quc.T sexuality into the midst
of a resolutely heterosexual milieu. By “queer,” I mean to use the word both in its
everyday connotations (“questionable. . . suspicious. . . strange. . . ”) and also as how it
has been theorized in recent years within academia and social politics. This latter “queer” is
not only what differs “in some odd way from what is usual or normal,” but ultimately is
what opposes the binary definitions and proscriptions of a patriarchal heterosexism. Queer
can be a narrative moment, or a performance or stance which negates the oppressive
binarisms of the dominant hegemony (what Wood and other critics have identified as the
variable of “normality”) both within culture at large, and within texts of horror and fantasy.
It is somewhat analogous to the moment of hesitation that demarcates Todorov’s Fantastic,
or Freud’s theorization of the Uncanny: queemess disrupts narrative equilibrium and sets in
motion a questioning of the status quo, and in many cases within fantastic literature, the
nature of reality itself.6
Sociologically, the term queer has been used to describe an “oxymoronic
community of difference,”7which includes people who might also self-identify as gay
5Many of these essays have been reworked and published in Robin Wood, Hollywood: Rom
Vietnam to Reagan (New \brk: Columbia University Press, 1986) 79.
* Tzvetan Todorov, The fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Trans. Richard
Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973) especially 25-40. Sigmund Freud, “The
Uncanny,’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Reud, Vol.
XVII, Trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955) 219-252.
This trope of the genre has been theorized by a great many people in a variety of ways. For
example, Noel Carroll has focused on rot, ooze, slime, and blood as generic motifs which suggest
transition and transgression, concluding that “What horrifies is that which lies outside cultural
categories”-in short the queer. Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the
Heart (New \brk: Routledge, 1990) 35.
7Louise Sloan, ‘Beyond Dialogue,” San Rancisco Bay Guardian Literary Supplement (March
1991), quoted in Lisa Duggan, “Making it Perfectly Queer," Socialist flewew(April 1992) 19.
6
and/or lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transvestite, drag queen, leather daddy, lipstick
lesbian, pansy, faiiy, dyke, butch, femme, feminist, asexual, and so on-anyone not
explicitly defining themselves in “traditional” heterosexual terms. Queer seeks to go
beyond these and all such categories based on the concepts of normative heterosexuality
and traditional gender roles to encompass a more inclusive, amorphous, and ambiguous
contra-heterosexuality (thus there are those individuals who self-identify as “straight
queers”). Queer is also insistent that issues of race, gender, disability, and class be
addressed within its politics, making interracial sex and sex between physically challenged
people dimensions of queer sex also, and further linking the queer corpus with the figure of
the Other as it has been theorized by Wood in the honor film. Queer activism itself has
been seen as unruly, defiant, and angry: like the mad scientists of horror films, queer
proponents do want to restructure society by calling attention to and eventually dismantling
the oppressive assumptions of heterocentrist discourse. As one theorist has noted,
the queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels in the
discourse of the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomatically proscribed 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 underground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to
look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music.8
Queer even challenges “the Platonic parameters of Being-the borders of life and death.”9
Queer suggests death over life by focusing on non-procreative sexual behaviors, making it
especially suited to a genre which takes sex and death as central thematic concerns.
Other film genres--the melodrama, the musical-also lend themselves to such queer
theorization, yet few do so as readily as the fantastic genres. While each of these genres
are very different in many ways, they are similar in that they create a ready-made (non
realist) hyperspace for their spectators, diegetic worlds in which heterocentrist assumptions
may be as “real” or as “make believe” as magic and monsters. As Alexander Doty has
noted, “everyone’s pleasure in these genres is ‘perverse,’ is queer, as much of it takes
“Sue Ellen Case, ‘Tracking the Vampire," differences3:2 (Summer 1991) 3.

“Case 3.
7
place within the space of the contra-heterosexual and the contra-straight.”10 In the case of
monster movies and science fiction films, the narrative dements themselves demand the
depiction of alien “Otherness,” which is often coded (at the site of production and/or
reception) as lesbian, gay, or otherwise queer. As one bibliographic review of the genre
notes,
Fantastic literature has always contained depictions of homosexuality, both female
and male. It has also contained portraits of androgynes, transsexuals, gender-
switching people, and alien sexuality that is clearly not heterosexual. In the
centuries before writers could deal explicitly with homosexuality, they used
fantastic literature’s various forms to disguise homoerotic passions."
In this respect, horror stories and monster movies, perhaps more than any other genre,
actively invoke queer readings, because of their obvious metaphorical (non-realist) forms
and narrative formats which disrupt the heterosexual status quo.
Yet, as products of a patriarchal culture, these artifacts also tend to narrow the
scope of the word queer by reflecting the dominant culture’s masculinist bias, wherein all
of queer’s multifarious plurality is most frequently signified in terms of (white) men and
male homosexuality. The female here serves as the source of the monstrous taint: the male
homosexual or queer is monstrous precisely because he embodies characteristics of the
feminine, either in outward displays or in the selection of a sexual object choice
traditionally reserved for women. (Julia Kristeva reached this conclusion with her study of
the “abject"-“that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’ . . . that which
‘disturbs identity, system, order. Kristeva centrally locates the abject in patriarchal
culture’s fear of and revulsion towards the specifically maternal body with its fluid
10Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer. Interpreting Mass Cu/fr/re(Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 15.
11 Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, Uranian Worlds: a Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science
Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (Boston, MA: G.K. Hail and Co., 1990) vii.
12Quoted from Julia Knsteva, The Powers o f Horror. An Essay on Abjection^Tians. Leon S.
Roudiez (New \bric Columbia University Press, 1982) in Barbara Creed, "Horror and the
Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection," Screen 27 (January-February 1986) 44-70.
Expanding upon Kristeva’s ideas, Creed notes that "definitions of the monstrous as constructed
in the modem horror text are grounded in ancient religious and historical notions of abjection-
particularly in relation to the following religious ‘abominations’: sexual immorality and perversion;
corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the
feminine body and incest." This list accurately describes the constellation of factors that surrour^
and circulate through the social constructions of both the homosexual and the monster.
8
boundary-crossing potential; it destroys rigid territoriality and undermines binary
oppositions, just as queer theory insists.)
Furthermore, in accordance with the masculine/feminine model in which
Hollywood homosexuality is/was usually depicted, gay or quasi-gay couples in film are
often made to mimic heterosexual role models. This stereotype has broad implications as
Richard Dyer points out:
Where gayness occurs in films it does so as pan o f dominant ideology. It is not
there to express itself, but rather to express something about sexuality in general as
understood by heterosexuals how homosexuality is thought and felt by
heterosexuals is part and parcel of the way the culture teaches diem (and us) to think
and feel about their heterosexuality. Anti-gayness is not a discreet ideological
system, but part of the overall sexual ideology of our culture.13
The stereotype of the butch and femme halves of the homosexual couple (or the monster
queer couple) reflects the inherent sexism in the heterosexual model: the sexist ideology
enforces the belief that men and women cannot be equal by disallowing the possibility of a
relationship between two (same sex) equals. This coded inequality of the sexes becomes
one of the bases for the dominant ideology's fear and loathing of male homosexuals.
According to this model, one man “must” feminize himself (give up the phallus) and act as
the “woman” to another man. Reflecting this, as well as other cultural and formal sexist
imperatives, the majority of homosexual figures in the American cinema (especially during
the classical period) have been and still are coded as masculine with some type of feminine
and/or monstrous taint.14 In honor films, monsters which might be understood as
displaced lesbian figures occur far less frequently (although perhaps they are more readily
acknowledged, as in the construct of the overtly lesbian vampire). Also rarer in
Hollywood cinema, though certainly present, are those monsters which might be
understood as reflecting the fears of androgyny or transsexualism. Yet, because American
culture has generally constructed its ideas about and fears of homosexuality within a
framework of male homosexuality, the majority of the monsters investigated in the
following pages reflects this bias. As such, what this work will be chiefly investigating
,3 Richard Dyer, “Gaysin Rim" Jump Cut 18 (August 1978) 16.

MFor more on this and related points, see Barbara Creed, ‘Dark Desires: Male Masochism in
the Horror Rim,’ Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinity in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steven
Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New Mark: Routledge, 1993) 118-133.
9
might be considered a “subset” of queen (primarily male) homosexuality, even as it draws
from the expanding body of queer theory and historiography of twentieth century gay and
lesbian experience.13
Earlier critical thinking on the monster movie frequently drew upon metaphysical or
psychoanalytic concepts relating to the genre's twin obsessions, sex and death. Some
earlier writing on the links between cinematic honor and (homo)sexuality used a Freudian
model of repression as a theoretical rubric. In Margaret Tanatt’s ground breaking essay of
the early 1970s, “Monsters from the Id,” the author examined Hollywood monster movies
of the 1950s and persuasively postulated that the monster represented an eruption of
repressed sexual desire.16 Thus, 195l ’s THE THING (FROM ANOTHER WORLD)
develops explicit parallels between the monster in question and the libidinous nature of the
film’s male lead, Captain Hendiy. The monster serves as a metaphoric expression of
Hendry’s lusts; it is a displaced and concretized figure of phallic desire. Even a cursory
glance at the monster movies of this era will repeatedly reveal this trope: THE CREATURE
FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), THE GIANT GILA MONSTER (1959), and
most of their scaly brethren seem to “pop up” like clockwork whenever the hero and
heroine move into a romantic clinch. The ideas put forth by Tarratt became common and
useful tools to understanding the functioning of the genre, but what is perhaps less well
known was that her essay was initially published in the British journal F ilm and Filming,
which was produced and marketed primarily for and to a gay male readership.17
,s A brief note on terminology. Generally speaking, in the following pages I use the term
“homosexual” in a somewhat clinical sense, to refer to a predisposition towards same-sex desire
and sexual activity. I use the words ‘gay’ and “lesbian” in reference to the specific twentieth-
century construction(s) of that same desire and activity: gay and lesbian refer to socra/identities.
“Queer” is the most multifarious term, encompassing homosexual, gay, lesbian and all other terms
used for describing contra-straight sexuality; thus most of the monsters depicted in horror films
are “monster queers” by virtue of their “deviant” sexuality. 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.
18Margaret Tarratt, ‘Monsters from the Id,” Films and Filming 17:3 (December 1970) 38-42 and
17:4 (January 1971) 40-42. Reprinted in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Flim Genre Reader (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1986) 258-277
17For a brief narrative history of Films and Filming see Anthony Slide, ed., International Film,
Radio, and Television Journals (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985) 163-164. 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 Filming(My 1971) 4.
10
During the 1970s and 1980s, in a series of articles and books, Canadian film
scholar Robin Wood further developed Tarratt’s ideas, expanding them generally to all
honor films, and specifically to the films of 1970s honor auteurs such as Larry Cohen,
Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper. (Robin Wood is himself a gay man who makes certain
distinctions between his pre- and post- “coming out” work in film criticism.1®) Drawing on
Herbert Marcuse’s and Gad Horowitz’s readings of Marx and Freud (in Eros and
Civilization and Repression, respectively19), Wood invokes concepts of basic and surplus
repression to sketch a model of life under patriarchal capitalism. According to this model,
society cannot be formed or continue to exist without a certain amount of basic repression.
Surplus repression, on the other hand, is used by those in control to keep all “Others”
subjugated to the dominant order. The Other reciprocally bolsters the image of “normality”:
as Simon Watney has observed, “Straight society needs us [homosexuals]. We are its
necessary ‘Other’. Without gays, straights are not straight.”20 According to Wood’s
readings of the American horror film, it is easy to see these Others cast in the role of the
monster, repressed by society, these sociopolitical and psychosexual Others are displaced
(as in a nightmare) onto monstrous signifiers in which form they return to wreak havoc in
the cinema. While some have critiqued this model as essentialist, 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 themselves in fashionable or immediately
accessible garments.”21
For many, the repressive hypothesis explicit in Tarratt’s and Wood’s readings of
the genre was overturned by the work of French theorist Michel Foucault, who, in The
History o f Sexuality (1978) argued that sexuality is in fact not repressed by society, but
18See “Responsibilities of a Gay Rim Critic," Film Comment 14:1 (January-February 1978).
Reprinted in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, Volume Two (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1985) 649-660. One might wonder as to the degree his thinking about and
writing on the horror film was related to this process.
18Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: An Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, Beacon
Press, 1955). Gad Horowitz, Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic
Theory: Freud, Reich, and Marcuse (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
“ Wbtney 26.
* Wood 79.
11
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
has been said concerning sex starting from the modem epoch.'’22 In a by now famous turn
« of phrase, Foucault noted of “repression” that “[t]here is not one but many silences.”23
1 (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 formulation 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 historicized 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 called [by Marcuse] a hyper-repressive
desublimation.”24 As sex and sexuality become more ever-present in the public sphere, they
are nonetheless regulated into certain cultural constructions through powerful social
discourses. Yet, as Foucault further asserts,
we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical
function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a
22Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Trans. Robert Hurley (New 'fork: Vintage Books, A
Division of Random House, lnc.,1978) 12.
23Foucault 27.
"Foucault 114. Compare these thoughts with those of Herbert Marcuse in “Chapter Three:
The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation,’ One-Dimensionaf
Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society{Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) 56-
83.
12
world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or
between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of
discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies.25
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 decoded according to a multiplicity of different reading positions).26
One recent popular account of the monster movie that fails to take under
consideration the issues of history and active spectatorship can be found in James
Twitchell’s 1985 bode Dreadful Pleasures. After asserting that most monster movies are
made for and viewed by a predominately teen-age audience (and how many Hollywood
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, modem horror myths prepare the teen-ager for the
anxieties of reproduction.”27 According to Twitchell, the films function to encode patterns
of “normal” sexuality 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 honor that results from desiring an “inappropriate” sexual object, chiefly defined by
Twitchell as an incestuous one. While a provocative reading of the genre, Twitchell’s
analysis rests upon a certain essentialized 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
** Foucault 100.
26For 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: Unwin Hyman 1990). Many of the most important original
essays are compiled in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and Janet V\ibolacott, eds.,
Culture, Society and the Media (New Mork: Methuen, 1982) and Stuart Hail, Dorothy Hobson,
Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, eds., Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
27James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modem Horror (New \brk:Oxford
University Press, 1985) 7.
13
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
monster 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
perspective and finds their lure to be more of a cross-gendered masochistic identification
with the “final g irr victim, rather than a simplistic sadistic identification with a
misogym^ic killer.18) Furthermore, while Twitchell’s book focuses on explicating
metapho.s 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 elusive questions, ones commonly overlooked by a heterocentrist culture 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 honor 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 link the spectator’s gaze to that of
the gothic villain or monster.” Furthermore, there is more to the processes of spectatorial
“ Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modem Horror Film (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
” Lirai Williams, “When the Woman Looks’ Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, eds.
Mary An^ Ooane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: University Publications of
America, Inc., 1984) 83-99.
14
identification than patterns o f subjective shots and cinematic suture.30 For example, the
heterosexualized couple in these films is invariably banal and underdeveloped in relation to
the sadomasochistic villain(s), whose outrageous exploits are, after all, the raison d ’etre of
the genre. To phrase it in Richard Dyer’s terms, in the honor film, it is usually the
heterosexualized hero and heroine who are stereotyped-painted with broad brush strokes-
while the villains and monsters are given more complex, “novelistic” characterizations.3'
As the titular stars of their own filmic stories, perhaps it is the monsters that the audience
comes to enjoy, experience, and identify with; in many films, normative heterosexuality is
reduced to a trifling nairative convention, one which becomes increasingly unnecessary and
outmoded as the genre evolves across the years.
As I shall be arguing throughout this work, the cinematic monster’s subjective
position is more readily acceded to by a queer viewer—someone who already situates
him/herself outside a patriarchal, heterosexist order and the popular culture texts that it
produces. While it is nearly impossible to reconstruct actual historical audiences, recent
studies have attempted to discuss the demographics of the modem horror film audience,
albeit within severe heterosexist assumptions which in themselves ignore or denigrate the
possibility of queer spectators. While the gender of an audience is relatively easy to
calculate, the various sexualities of a group are much harder to qualify and most
demographic accounts never even try. It has been argued that in recent horror movie
audiences (i.e. mostly slasher films), men somewhat outnumber women, as they probably
also do at westerns, action films, gangster sagas, and war movies. Younger people
predominate (especially if one observes these audiences, as some have done, on Friday
evenings, more commonly known as “date night”). Drawing on these studies, Carol
Clover describes the typical audience for recent horror films as follows, from most
common type to least: “young men, frequently in groups but also solo; male-female couples
of various ages (though mostly young); solo ‘rogue males’ (older men of ominous
30 For an exploration of some of these issues, see Nick Browne. “The Spectator-in-the-Text:
The Rhetoric of STAGECOACH,” Movies and Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Los Angeles:
University of California ~ rss, 1985) 458-475.
31 Richard Dyer, “T. Role of Stereotypes," The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation
(New Vbrk: Routledge, 1993) 11-18.
15
appearance and/or reactions); and adolescent girls in groups.”32 Yet what this information
tells us about how individual audience members might position themselves to the horror
film genre’s victims and villains is negligible. To her credit, Clover puts the typology
“rogue males” in the quotation marks that it deserves; the term is Twitchell’s, and he
identifies these men as the disturbed and disturbing individuals who cheer on the psycho-
killer’s gratuitous acts of violence towards women. It is disturbing to attend a screening of
a bloody slasher movie where this happens; however, it is even more disturbing to suggest
this response is essentially the produc* of (as Twitchell calls them) “sour Humbert
Humberts.”33 Subtle fag-bashing as.je (these lone men are sexually immature, sadistic,
pedophilic creeps), Twitchell £uls to entertain the possibility that everyone in the audience
may be there to identify in some way or another with the monster, just as Clover has
argued that a masochistic identification with the victim might also cut across strictly
gendered categorizations.
These accounts amply demonstrate the complexity of such issues with regard to
slasher films and their presumed heterosexual male spectators, but what of other types of
monsters, and other types of spectators? Surely some of those individuals and groups of
young men and women are queer (either sexually or philosophically), just as others are
resolutely straight. The focus of this work-for a hopefully welcome change-presupposes
a queer spectator who attends these genre films for pleasure and entertainment. What does
it mean if lesbians identify with the beautiful female vampires of THE HUNGER (1983),
or if gay men go to see Tom Cruise bite Brad Pitt in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
(1994)? In what ways does this happen and what is the “price paid” in culture-at-large for
yet another depiction of monstrous predatory homosexuals? Identification with the monster
can mean many different things to many different people, and is not necessarily always a
negative thing for the individual spectators in question, even as some depictions of queer
monsters undoubtedly conflate and reinforce certain sexist or homophobic fears within the
public sphere. For spectators of all types, the experience of watching a horror film or
monster movie might be understood as similar to that of the Carnival as it has been
“ Clover 6.
“ Twitchell 69-70.
16
theorized by Bakhtin, wherein the conventions of normality are ritualistically overturned
within a proscribed period of time in order to celebrate the lure of the deviant.34 Halloween
functions similarly, allowing otherwise “normal” people the pleasures of drag, or
monstrosity, for a brief but exhilarating experience. However, while straight participants
in such experiences usually return to their daylight worlds, both the monster and the
homosexual are permanent residents of shadowy spaces: at worst caves, castles, and
closets, and at best a marginalized and oppressed position within the cultural hegemony.
Queer viewers are thus more likely than straight on?s to experience the monster's plight in
more personal, individualized terms.
What then exactly makes the experience of a horror film or monster movie gay,
lesbian, or queer? There are at least four different ways in which homosexuality might
intersect with the horror film. The first and most obvious of these occurs when a honor
film includes identifiably gay and/or lesbian characters. These characters might be victims,
passers-by, or the monsters themselves, although gay and lesbian people (to this point in
time) have never been placed in the role of the normative hero or heroine.35 Broadly
speaking, the appearance of overtly homosexual film characters doesn’t occur until the late
1960s and early 1970s, following the demise of the Production Code and its restrictions
against the depiction of “sex perversion.” Films such as BLACULA (1972), THEATRE
OF BLOOD (1973), or THE SENTINEL (1977) fell into this category. In these films, gay
or lesbian characters fell victim to the monster just as straight characters do, although
somewhat disturbingly their fetes are frequently deemed “deserved” by the films they
inhabit, often solely on the basis of their characters’ homosexuality. Other films such as
THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967), THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1971), or
THE HUNGER (1983), characterize their vampires as specifically homosexual or bisexual.
34Fer a discussion of the Bakhtinian Carnival and how it relates to film (and briefly Halloween),
see Robert Stam, ‘Chapter Three: Rim, Literature, and the Camivalesque,* Subversive
Pleasures:Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989) 85-121. Although he doesn’t specifically talk about horror films, several of the ten criteria he
isolates lor the cinematic expression of the Camivalesque are highly relevant to the genre.
35For an interesting account of how gay and lesbian actors get marginalized 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, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1995) 91-114.
17
These films have perhaps done much to cement into place the current social construction of
homosexuals as unnatural, predatory, plague-carrying killers, even as they also might
provide a pleasurable power-wish fulfillment fantasy for some queer viewers.
The second type of homo-horror film is one written, produced, and/or directed by a
gay man or lesbian, even if it does not contain visibly homosexual characters. Reading
these films as gay or lesbian is predicated upon (what some might call a debased) concept
of the cinematic auteur, which would argue that gay or lesbian creators of film products
infuse some sort of “gay sensibility” into their films either consciously or otherwise. Yet,
such questions of authorship, which are certainly important anc hold bearing on this
particular study (for example the films of James Whale or Ed Wood) will herein be of
lesser importance, since it is not necessary to be a self-identified homosexual or queer in
order to produce a text which has something to say about homosexuality, heterosexuality,
and the queemess that those two terms proscribe and enforce.36 A variation on the homo-
horror auteur approach is that in which a gay or lesbian film star (whether “actually”
homosexual or culturally perceived as such) brings his/ho-persona to a horror film.
Classical Hollywood cinema is full of such performers, who, regardless of their off-screen
lives, bring an unmistakable homosexual “air” to the characters they create: Eric Blore,
Franklin Pangbom, Robert Walker, George Sanders, Judith Anderson, Eve Arden, Greta
Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich, to name just a few. The characters created in 1930s horror
films by Charles Laughton or those by Vincent Price in the 1960s and early 1970s best
typify this type of homo-horror film.
The third and perhaps most important way that homosexuality enters the genre is
through subtextual or connotative avenues. For the better part of cinema’s history,
homosexuality on screen has been more or less allusive: it lurks around the edges of texts
and characters rather than announcing itself forthrightly. In films such as WHITE
ZOMBIE (1932), THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943), or HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER
(1958), homosexuality becomes a subtle but undoubtedly present signifier which usually
serves to characterize the villain or monster. This particular trope is not exclusive to the
horror film. It has been pointed out in films noir, action films, and in other films wherever
” For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Doty 17-38.
18
homosexuality is used to further delineate the depravity of the villain.57 Alexander Doty has
argued against this model of connotation, suggesting that it keeps gay and lesbian concerns
marginalized: “connotation has been the representational and interpretive closet of mass
culture queemess for far too long [This] shadowy realm o f connotation allows
straight culture to use queemess for pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting to
it.”58 Accordingly, in many of these films, queemess is reduced to titillation, frisson,
fashion, or fad. The “love that dare not speak its name” remains a shadowy Other which
conversely works to bolster the equally constructed idea of a normative heterosexuality.
But it is also precisely this type of connotation (conscious or otherwise) which
allows for and fosters the multiplicity of various readings and reading positions, including
what has been called active queer (or gay, or lesbian) reading practices. If we adopt Roland
Barthes’ model of signification wherein the denotative meaning o f any signifier is simply
the first of many possible meanings along a connotadve chain, then we can readily
acknowledge that a multitude of spectators, some queer, some not, will each understand the
“denotative" events of a visual narrative in different ways. For Doty then, there is the
(fourth) sense that any film viewed by a gay or lesbian spectator might be considered
queer. The queer spectator’s “gay-dar," already attuned to the possible discovery of
homosexuality within culture-at-large, here functions in relation to specific cultural
artifacts. As such, “Queer readings aren’t ‘alternative’ readings, wishful or willful
misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things' readings. They result from the recognition
and articulation of the complex range of queemess that has bear in popular culture texts and
their audiences all along.”59 In the case of horror films and monster movies, this “complex
range of queemess" circulates through and around the figure of the monster, and in his/her
relation to normality.
These approaches to finding homosexuals in and around the text are hardly
mutually exclusive-in fact, usually these factors work in some combination to produce a
text which might be easily understood as being “about” homosexuality. James Whale’s
37See Dyer, “Homosexuality and Rim Noir," The Matter of Images: Essays on
Representations (New "fork: Routledge, 1993) 52-72.
“ Doty xi-xii.
39Doty 16.
19
THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), directed by and starring homosexual men would be one
such Elm that combines these approaches: while it might be possible for some spectators to
miss the homosexual undercurrents which fuel the plot (since no character is forthrightly
identified as overtly homosexual), for other spectators these themes readily leap off the
screen. Conversely, other films which have no openly homosexual input or context might
still be understood as queer by virtue of the ways in which they situate and represent their
monsterfs) in relation to heterosexuality. Ultimately then, this project rests upon the
variable and intersubjective responses between both media texts and their spectators, in this ,
case spectators whose individualized social subjectivities have already prepared and enabled
them to acknowledge “the complex range of queerness” that exists in the English-language
monster movie.
A Short History of the Homosexual and the Monster

In many ways, the development of the gothic form and the social understanding of
homosexuality have followed concurrent and often commingling paths. Before the
codification of the classical Hollywood horror film, and before the late nineteenth-century
“invention” of the homosexual as a distinct type of person, it is apparent that Western and
non-Westem cultures alike had some sort of terminology for and/or knowledge of both the
monstrous and same-sex love. In many cultures, such as that of ancient Greece, the two
clusters of meaning had little in common; monsters were often terrible beasts encountered
on perilous journeys, and (male) homosexual acts were an accepted element of the
structuring patriarchy. (Although overtly sexualized monsters such as the incubus and
succubus do date from these eras.40) Out of necessity and prudence, this work focuses on
the distinctly Western, modem/ist, nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of the
monster and the homosexual, and their considerable overlap. The histories of these
concepts are complex, but the origins of Western literary horror are usually traced to the
mordant verses of the mid-eighteenth-century Graveyard Poets or the appearance of the
“first” gothic novel, The Castle c f Otranto, in 1764. In that era, the to m “homosexuality”
40For a historical overview of these figures, see Nicolas Kiessiing, The Incubus in English
Literature: Provenance and Progeny (USA: Washington State University Press, 1977).
20
was as yet unknown; if and when same-sex desire was acknowledged as a possible form of
human sexuality, it was usually understood as a preference for a specific range of sexual
behaviors and not as an entire identity. In many cultural artifacts of the time (including the
early gothic novels), contra-straight sexual behavior was often linked to the crumbling class
of aristocracy who had the means to indulge in whatever forms of pleasure they could
imagine. Most significantly, when “homosexuality” (which was officially nominated in the
scientific lexicon in 1869) reached a common English parlance in the 1880s and 1890s,
Victorian England was in the middle of a gothic renaissance whose legacy can still be felt in
today’s horror films.41
Still, even before this momentous cultural event, the confluence of contra-straight
sexuality with the development of the gothic, both in tom s of its production and its
thematic concerns, is striking. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, “the Gothic was the
first novelistic form in England to have close, relatively visible links to male homosexuality
. . . .”‘c She points to the fact that many of the writers of the first wave of gothic novels
(William Beckford, Matthew “Monk” Lewis, Horace Walpole) might be understood to
have been homosexual by today’s understanding of the word. A “case can be made about
each that he was in some significant sense homosexual-Beckford notoriously, Lewis
probably, Walpole iffily.”43 Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, was
certainly eccentric, if not forthrightly homosexual: his personal life exhibited tendencies that
we might now view as indicative of a gay camp sensibility. One biographer describes the
bachelor dandy as a “gentle, sickly, effeminate boy” who grew into a “whimsical man
[who] found it difficult to avoid flights of fancy,” such as spending most of his adult life
constructing a mock Medieval castle, a gothic fantasy world, at his home Strawberry Hill.44
Whether or not Walpole was homosexual by today’s understanding of the tom remains
41 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at We Fin de Siede (New \brk:
Penguin Books, 1990) 171.
42 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New \brk: Columbia University Press, 1985) 91.
43Sedgwick 92.
44E. F. Bleiler, “Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto,' Three Gothic Novels: The Castle
of Otranto, Vathek, & The Vampyre, ed. E.F Bleiler (New \brk: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966) vii,
x.
21
unknowable; however, by virtue of his apparent gender-bending and his focus on the
performative aspects of role-playing, he might be more readily called queer, a term more
historically distant but perhaps more descriptively accurate.
Many of the gothic works of this first wave (which were more or less satirized by
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in 1797-98 but not published until 1818) focused
on a young heroine and an older, sexualized male threat. Yet many also contained more
obviously queer menaces, albeit in ways displaced through the gothic signifiers of death,
decay, and the double. William Beckford, who had been “hounded out of England in 1785
over charges involving a younger man,"45published Vathek in 1796, and this work can be
easily read as an allegory about homosexual proclivity.46 M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (also
1796) found the form becoming increasingly explicit, and it garishly featured religiously
repressed sexual hysteria and a transsexual demon. A few years later at the Villa Diodati,
two of history’s most enduring monsters entered the literary canon when a rather queer
congress decided to write some ghost stories. The sexual eccentricities of John Polidori
(“The Vampyre" [1819]), Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley (Frankenstein [1818]) are well documented, and many read Polidori’s sexually
predatory Vampyre Lord Ruthven as a thinly disguised portrait of the bisexual libertine
Lord Byron. Frankenstein itself has become something of counter-hegemonic classic;
feminists and queers alike have plumbed its depths to underscore a scathing critique of male
hubris in which the attempt to create life without the aid of procreative sexual union results
in disaster for all. Though rarely filmed in any manner approaching the novel’s complexity
of metaphysical argument, this core idea-that of a male homosexual mad science giving
birth to a monster-can be found to a greater or lesser degree in almost every filmic
adaptation.
After several relatively dormant decades, Gothic writing flourished again during the
latter half of the nineteenth century. Also at this time, homosexual “underworlds" began to
46Sedgwick 92.
44A fuller queer exegesis of Vathek was recently offered by Jason Tougaw in his paper
“Owning Our Own Devils: Jeffrey Dahmer, Vathek and Gay Male Subjectivities,” presented at
Queer Frontiers: The Fifth Annual National Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Graduate Student
Conference, Los Angeles, CA, 1995.
22
be acknowledged in many European cities, and early sexologists such as Richard von
Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs began to argue that same-sex relations should be
understood in terms medical rather than criminal. Ulrichs wrote essays on the natural
etiology of same-sex feelings, arguing in 1862 that “Umings” (his word for a passive,
effeminate, male homosexual) were a biologically determined ‘Third Sex." Like the mad
scientist of the Hollywood horror film, Ulrichs was interested in the effects of blood
transfusion, and wondered in print whether or not exchanges of bodily fluids might make
an Uming into a “normal” man, and vice versa/7 Ulrichs also perhaps unwittingly
contributed to the monster-homosexual equation in 1869 when he wrote “Incubus: Uming-
love and blood lust" in response to a particularly violent rape and murder of a five-year-old
boy.48 While Ulrichs's aim was to explore and differentiate Uming 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 modem (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 “Uming.”44 Also less well known is that towards the end of his
career Ulrichs wrote an explicitly homosexual vampire story entitled “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 regarding the conflation of the monstrous with
some form of queer sexuality. J. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote his lesbian vampire tale
“Carmilla” in 1872, and Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case o f 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. Hyde was meant to be read as homosexual.30 Bram Stoker’s Drnada
47See Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: Pioneer of the
Modem Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson Publications, Inc., 1988) 77.
“ Kennedy 136-144.
“ Kennedy 138.
“ Showalter 105-126.
23
(1897), which arguably created the most enduring of monsters, features an elegant and
seductive Count who preys not only upon the bodies of men and women, but also 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 themselves.11
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 Decadents.” 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-
siecle euphemism for homosexuality.”32 The (mostly) male Decadents celebrated
themselves as pale, thin, delicate, aestheticized, and emotional creatures, turning upon one
popular “scientific” construction of homosexuality at that time: that of gender invasion,
“anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa,” a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body. The
Decadent monster queer is also invariably sad, like the tragic gothic and romantic heroes
from whom he descends. This sad young slightly effeminate man can be found throughout
the twentieth-century history of homosexuality and is a staple of horror films as well. In
the 1950s this character was especially susceptible to the seductions of older, forthrightly
“evil” men, and in the 1970s and 1980s he was often figured as an ostracized high school
student and loner.
This image of the pathetic and slightly sinister homosexual dandy was perhaps
cemented into place through the life and work of Oscar Wilde. Wilde was linked to the
Decadents through social connections as well as through “The Yellow Book,” a literary
magazine which was featured heavily in his 1895 trial for sodomy and itself became
synonymous with homosexual scandal. But it is Wilde’s 1891 book The Picture o f
Dorian Gray that contains the quintessential imagery of the monster queer-that of a
s’ For a fuller account of the novel’s homoerotic aspects, see Christopher Craft “‘Kiss Me with
Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula," Representations8 (Fall 1984)
107-133.
“ Showalter 171.
24
sexually active and attractive young man who possesses some terrible secret which must
perforce be locked away in a hidden closet. The oommon gothic trope of the “unspeakable”
was now (partially, incompletely) de-repressed; it had become, in the words of Wilde’s
young lover Lord Alfred Douglas, “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Monsters, and especially the imagery o f the vampire, continued to be linked with
homosexuality during the early years of the twentieth century. DerEigene, a German male
homosexual magazine published between 1896 and 1931, “contained much vampire
imagery in its fiction and at least one complete vampire story.”33 And Lillian Faderman has
demonstrated how vampiric imagery crept into a slew o f novels at this time in order to
pathologize or “monsterize” women’s “romantic friendships.”31 In the 1910s, when
narrative cinema began to explore the monstrous, the gothic literature of the nineteenth
century was pressed into service. Edison filmed FRANKENSTEIN in 1910, and D. W.
Griffith adapted Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” as THE AVENGING
CONSCIENCE in 1914. However, by far the most filmed horror story of the period was
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture o f Dorian Gray. According to horror film historian Gregory
William Mank, there were at least seven adaptations of the novel during the 1910s: “a 1910
Danish version; a 1913 U.S. adaptation; a Russian film in 1915, as well as another
American version; a British 1916 film, starring Henry Victor, with an appearance by ‘the
devil’; and, in 1917, versions from both Germany and Hungary (the latter possibly
featuring Bela Lugosi).”33 Whether or not these films (most of them are now lost) focused
more on the novel’s tropes of pictorial transformation or its thematic queemess, it is
nonetheless clear that they did help to construct a very definite image of the monstrous male
homosexual. For example, the poster art for the 1917 Goman version of THE PICTURE
OF DORIAN GRAY shows a figure consistent with that era’s understanding of the male
homosexual. Dorian Gray stands next to a vase filled with heart-shaped leaves; the figure
himself wears a stylish tuxedo, patent leather slippers, bracelets and makeup, has rounded
hips, arms akimbo with one on the pedestal and one on a hip, crossed legs, cocked head,
53Reported in Richard Dyer, “Children of the Night" 48.

54Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New Mxk: Marrow, 1981).
“ Mank, Hollywood Cauldron298.
25
flowered lapel, and a slightly bored, bemused expression on his face.56
It was the Germans who would ultimately create the distinctive “look" of the horror
film by wedding its queer characters and occurrences to a visual style drawn from
modernist painting, one that eventually became known as a cinematic style in its own right,
German Expressionism.57 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 human psyche and sexuality.
Many of German “Schauerfilme” of the era explored gothic themes such as the
homosex ual creation of life (THE GOLEM [filmed in 1914 and 1920]), while others
focused on homoerotic doubles and madness (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.
Mumau, was homosexual; he made film versions of both The Strange Case o f Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde and Dracula, released in Germany as DER JANUSKOPF (1920) and
NOSFERATU (1922).58 German Expressionism and modem art in general was and still is
frequently linked with homosexuality, not only through the historical sexuality 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 modernist 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 time however, many of
Germany's artists had died or fled the continent. Filmmakers such as Karl Freund and
Paul Leni (among many others) brought the German Expressionist style to America and
58Reprinted in Phil Hardy, ed., The Overtook Film Encyclopedia: Honor (Woodstock: The
Overlook Press, 1986) 20. For a discussion of “arms akimbo’ in relation to queer politics, both
historically and today, see Thomas A. King, ‘Performing Akimbo’: Queer Pride and
Epistomological Prejudice," The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New \brk:
Routledge, 1994) 23-50.
"S e e Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1969).
“ See Lotte H. Eisner, Mumau (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973).
26
specifically to the horror films of Hollywood’s classical period. Once there, it helped to
create some of the defining examples of cinematic 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 ninetee-th 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 Gay and Lesbian Past.S9 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 preference is understood from era to era is shaped by a myriad of societal
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 sexuality. But biological sexuality is only a precondition, a set of potentialities,
which is never unmediated by human reality, and which becomes transformed in
qualitatively new ways in human society."60 In other words, whether or not we understand
the existence of homosexuality to be biological or social in origin (or some combination
thereof), the idea of homosexuality being perverse or monstrous 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
SBJohn Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories.” and David M. Halperin,
“Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics, and Power in Classical Athens,“ both in Hidden from
History. Reclaiming the ~ay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vidnus, and George
Chauncey, Jr. (New \b A Meridian Book, 1989) 17-36 and 37-53.
" Robert Padgug, “Sexual Matters: Rethinking Sexuality in History,” Hidden From History57.
27
as “sodomite,” “uming,” “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 term “homosexuality" entered the scientific lexicon a little over one
hundred years ago, “homosexuality” was still not a concept spoken in the common
American parlance for another fifty years or so. And it was rarely popularized in the
homosexual underground, which generally preferred a plethora of slang terms including the
word “gay,” which in turn didn’t en ter mainstream vocabularies until (in some cases, most
notoriously that of The New York 1;/nes editors’ policy) the 1980s.61
Other representational systems, such as Hollywood film genres, are also tied in
complex ways to the material culture of the times which produce and receive them. They
convey ideas and ideologies, and perhaps more subtly “meanings and values as they are
actively lived and felt,” what Raymond Williams has called “structures of feeling.”62 These
structures of feeling are often contradictory and always in flux (Williams further delineates
them as emergent, dominant, and residual), and they allow for the theorization of how
concepts such as monstrosity or homosexuality might be seen to change and evolve
through time.
The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms
and conventions—semantic figures-which, in art and literature, are often among the
very first indications that a new structure is forming this is a way of defining
forms and conventions in ait and literature as inalienable elements of a social
material process: not by derivation from other social forms and pre-forms, but as
social formation of a specific kind which may in turn be seen as the articulation
(often the fully available articulation) of structures of feeling which as living
processes are much more widely experienced.”63
As such, and also because of the active historical suppression of information related to the
topic of homosexuality, it has become in many cases both necessary and efficacious to
search in the shadows for the “semantic figures” which relate to the lived experiences of
those whom today we might call queer. As one recent queer theorist most emphatically
8’ See Halperin 38-40 for a brief overview of the evolution of these terms.
“ Raymond Williams, Marxism and I iteratureiNew 'fork: Oxford University Press, 1977)128-
135.
“ Williams 133.
28
asserts: “Sexual identity is heterogeneous and is gleaned from many cultural sites,
including bad, old movies.”**
In the following pages, I will be constructing a sort of epochal analysis as
suggested by Raymond Williams, exploring in greater detail the confluence of thinking
about homosexuality and the movie monster within different historical periods and within
different series of horror films. Yet, I also mean to avoid constructing a naive teleological
argument (i.e.one that asserts a progressive, “march-towards-enlightenment” model of
history), for many of the issues under contestation during the classical period remain
endemic to the forms and representations of the gwire today. The history I write is one of
conjunctural moments, of emergent and residual traces, that reflect in twisted and distorted
ways the social understanding of the concept “homosexuality.” As Foucault has advised,
when constructing a history of sexuality,
we must begin with these positive mechanisms, insofar as they produce
knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleasure, and generate power, we must
investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation, and try to discover how
the related facts of interdiction or concealment are distributed in respect to them.65
Thus, during any given epoch, one must attempt to put into play the many (often
conflicting) “takes” on homosexuality, the “positive mechanisms” which culturally
construct it. There are “official” medical or scientific ideas (which themselves often
contradict each other), as well as varied legal and religious discourses referent to
homosexuality. There are the perspectives of homosexual or queer people themselves: how
might the individuals who belonged to various historical queer subcultures have reacted to
the films under question? In between those two poles—of those who set themselves up as
the official arbiters of homosexuality, and those individuals who know their lives with
some degree of intimacy, lies yet another position, one that might be called the popular
impression of homosexuality, one most closely linked to the media construction of
homosexuality not only in the “factual” press, but also in the fictional cinema. All of these
discourses, then, contribute to the ebb and flow of the meaning of the concept
“homosexual.” It is my hope that by examining the mechanisms of specific texts, the
“ Tanya Krzywinska, “La Belle Dame Sans Mera'?” :n A Queer Romance, ed. Paul Burston and
Colin Richardson (New \brk: Routledge, 1995) 106.
“ Rjucault 73.
29
subjectivities of possible readers, and other ancillary cultural discourses related to
homosexuality, this work will create a new and somewhat unique impression of what being
gay or lesbian has meant, and continues to mean, in twentieth-century America.
30
X Defining the Monster Queer
in the Classical Hollywood Horror Film
The years from 1930 to 1936 saw the first flowering of the Hollywood horror film. The
codes and conventions of the genre that were developed and exploited during these years
were to become the basis for the mobster 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 Prohibition, 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 sexual-object choice. Similar to the construction of
homosexuality in other world cultures (such as 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 subsequently
stereotyped) as homosexuals. Likewise, it was the mannish 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 to a virulent diatribe against
homosexuality in the magazine The Modem 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 sex, another man, the only person to attract him.”1
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 doctors agreed that homosexuality should be treated as a
medical rather than a criminal problem, opinion varied to a great degree as to the causes
' Parisex (pseudonym of Henry Gerber), “In Defense of Homosexuality,’ The Modem Thinker
(1932). Reprinted in A Homosexual Emancipation Miscellany c. 1835-1952 (New Vbrk: Amo
Press, 1975) 288.
31
and best “treatment” of the condition. The argument that had been put forth in Germany by
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, and others—namely, that a homosexual
inclination was inborn and natural, a biologically predisposed “third sex”—had been
seriously challenged by the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis. (Books which were more
sympathetic to a “natural” model of homosexuality were invariably written in carefully
worded language, banned outright, and/or published privately, such as the 1928
monograph Studies in Sexual Inversion, which reprinted several essays on “Greek Ethics”
by John Addington Symonds.2) Since Freud and ^ost of his followers had acknowledged
a bisexual stage in the formation of the adult subject, many psychoanalysts of the 1920s
and 1930s argued that homosexuality was an immature stage o f adult sexuality: through
proper psychoanalytic treatment, the homosexual could be cured, or more precisely brought
to a “mature” stage of sexual functioning. Psychoanalyst William Stekel’s views were
among those influencing the medical community of the era. In his 1922 bocdc The
Homosexual Neurosis (which was “For sale only to Members of the Medical Profession”),
Stekel begins by refuting Magnus Hirschfeld’s claims that homosexuality is an inborn
condition, and ends with an impassioned plea for the acceptance of psychoanalysis as a
medical science.' Interpreting various case studies and dreams, Stekel associates
homosexuality with epilepsy (which he understands not as a somatic disorder but as a
“particular form of hysteria”4), as well as sadism, masochism, incestuous desires, jealousy,
paranoia, criminality, and regression to baser animalistic instincts: all states or aspects of
human existence that would more or less comprise the catalog of the classical Hollywood
horror film’s themes and obsessions.
While most psychoanalysts placed the etiology of homosexuality within the
parental-child unit, there was little consensus as to the exact dynamics required for the
production of homosexuality: too much or too little mother love, too much or too little
attention from father, etc. Stekel reviews many of these positions and eventually concludes
2 John Addington Symonds, Studies in Sexual Inversion: Embodying “A Study in Greek Ethics"and
UA Study in Modem Ethics (Privately Printed, 1928). Reprinted (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1975).
1William Stekel, The Homosexual Neurosis, Trans.James S. Van leslaar (Boston: The Gorham
Press, 1922).
‘ Stekel 23.
32
that “The homosexual neurosis is a flight back to one's own sex induced by a sadistic
predisposition towards the opposite sex."5 According to Stekel’s model, male
homosexuals have a deep-seated fear and hatred of women, and presumably lesbians have
a similar hatred of men. It is from this hatred that the homosexual's perverse appetites
arise, as well as the host of anti-social behaviors which commonly accompany him or her
(such as a woman desiring a career). Inherent in these dynamics (although not often
recognized as such at the time) is the now obvious construction of social definitions of
masculinity and femininity as themselves inherently inborn and natural. It was deviation
from these cultural norms that was considered pathological by .iiany psychoanalysts. As
one psychiatrist advised in 1937, in order to avoid producing homosexual offspring,
the father should be an understanding, tolerant, but virile and decisive male. The
mother should have the gentleness, patience and passivity usually associated with
womanhood Any mixture, such as an effeminate father and an aggressive
masculine mother is likely to be disconcerting to the child and accentuate
homosexual tendencies.4
Thus, deviance from traditional gender roles was understood as both a cause and a
symptom of homosexuality. More than an explanation of how and why homosexuality
occurs, this model might be more aptly understood as a means of policing and enforcing
traditional gender roles.
While these “scientific" debates raged throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the
figure of the effeminate male homosexual was both highly visible in “sophisticated" urban
sets, and simultaneously under siege in the streets and meeting places of New York and
other major cities.7 Recent histories have argued that while people far removed from urban
cultures may have remained relatively ignorant of homosexuality, the pansy and the bull-
5Stekel 286.
*G. W. Henry, “Psychogenic factors in overt Homosexuality,”American Journal of Psychiatry
93 (1937) 903. Excerpted and discussed in Henry L. Minton, ‘Femininity in Men and Masculinity
in Women: American Psychiatry and Psychology Portray Homosexuality in the 1930s,” Journal of
Homosexuality13 (1986) 1-21.
7George Chauncey, Gay New \brk: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
Hbrtd, 1890-1940 (New tork City: Basic Books, 1994). See also Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and
Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New \brk City: Penguin
Books, 1991), and Eric Garber, ‘A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian ac.d Gay Subculture of Jazz
Age Harlem,” Hidden Rom History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. by Martin
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, & George Chauncey, Jr. (New Mark City: Meridian, 1989) 318-331.
33
dagger were fairly visible figures in the urban (night)life of the first several decades of the
twentieth century. However, after the stock market crash of 1929, the “lesbian chic,”
“pansy craze,” and fashionable experimental bisexuality of the 1920s began rapidly to
evaporate as the country turned toward more pressing concerns, such as finding food and
shelter. Economic imperatives curtailed the possibilities of middle class lesbian
relationships (women were expected to give up their jobs to men), while the newly created
(legal) alcohol industry, whose previous prohibition was understood to have led to all sorts
of lawlessness, both inebriate and sexual, helped to insure that unprecedented numbers of
gay men and lesbians would be legally persecuted. The mere suspicion of being a
homosexual was now enough to warrant entrapment and arrest for “disorderly conduct,”
and in New York City and other vicinities, the newly formed State Liquor Authorities used
homosexuality as an excuse to regulate drinking establishments.
Still, even after the demise of the “pansy craze,” subtle and equivocal hints of male
homosexuality could occasionally be found in the popular press. Esquire magazine, for
example, had been founded in Autumn 1933 with the goal of becoming “the common
denominator of masculine interests-to be all things to all men.”8 Apparently, at least for
the first few years, this included homosexual men. Esquire was a unique venture in that it
showcased men's fashion (and eventually even interior design and cooking columns),
although according to its original editorial policy, “it never intends to become, by any
possible stretch of the imagination, a primer for fops.”9 In its first few years, the magazine
ran cartoons and jokes about pansies and eunuchs, as well as occasional essays on
homosexual men such as Cole Porter, tennis ace “Big Bill” Tilden, or painter Paul Cadmus;
in most of these stories it is possible to discern homosexual innuendo (or just as easily
ignore
s For a brief narrative history of the magazine, see Dean Howd, ‘ Esquire," American Mass-
Market Magazines, eds. Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie (New \brk: Greenwood Press, 1990)108-
115.
9Esquire (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 shirts for
men.
34
it).10 A story in the first issue, “Stonewall and Ivy,” is indicative of the type of
homosexual connotation the magazine dabbled in during this era: it tells the story of a
college football coach's successful campaign to ruin his star athlete's heterosexual
relationship in order to ensure that the young man continues to play ball with the coach."
The story becomes even more gay when one sees the biographical note and photograph of
its author, Robert Buckner. Perched on a rock in a swim suit with (me arm akimbo (as
opposed to the dignified head shots of the other pipe-smoking authors) Buckner
unmistakably comes across as a gay camp: “‘I love birds, children, rainbows, and oh so
many things.’"13 And, if one looks very closely, one can also find, tucked in between the
magazine’s usual ads for liquor and guns, an occasional advertisement for “nude studies of
the world's finest physiques”-apparently muscular male nudes as attested to by a
photograph advertising “Tony Sansone's Body Culture Studio.”13
During the early 1930s, homosexuality that was more visible rather 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 Hall’s lesbian novel The Well o f Loneliness, published in
1928, was also the target of censorship campaigns.14 The perceived immorality of the
movies had led to the creation of the Production Code in 1930 which forbade (among other
things) the depiction or mention of homosexuality, or “sex perversion,” as it was
classified. Yet, until the Code came to be enforced in 1934 through the Production Code
Administration’s Seal of Approval provision, Hollywood film did contain a few visibly gay
characters. Most of these representations are still essentially connotative-representing
sexuality through the common stereotypes of effeminate men and mannish women-and
thus perhaps they are not all that different from those made during the era of the Code.
10Gilbert Seldes, ‘The Park Avenue Hill-billies," Esquire (April 1935) 79,116; Vincent Richards
‘The Astonishing Mr. Tilden," Esquire (August 1937) 51,176; Hany Saltpeter (!) “Raul Cadmus:
Enfant Terrible,’ Esquire (July 1937) 105.
” Robert Buckner, ‘Stonewall and Ivy," Esquire (Autumn 1933) 25+.
“Backstage with Esquire," Esquire (Autumn 1933) 7
,3 Esquire (October 1937) 22.
14For a history if these incidents, see Kaier Curtin, “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians’:
The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Men on the American Stage (Boston: Alyson, 1987).
35
After 1934, however, openly (or more broadly connotated) homosexual characters were
banished from the screen, words such as “pansy” and “fairy” in reference to men were
stricken from potential scripts, and homosexual characters “officially” ceased to exist in the
manifest world of cinematic representation, banished to the shadowy realms of inference
and implication.13 Movie villains were also obliged to behave in slightly better terms,
although their essential monstrosity, like that of homosexuals, could still be suggested
onscreen in more subtle, connotative ways.
Film historians have long debated the effects of censorship on the classical
Hollywood cinema, and many recent critics have taken a Foucauldian approach to the
situation in order to investigate exactly what particular silences may have meant.16 For
example, in regard to the “fallen woman” film cycle of the era, Lea Jacobs has argued that
audiences came to understand how a narrative ellipse could signify an offscreen sexual
liaison. In relation to the horror film, Rhona J. Berenstein has also argued that the self-
censorship Hollywood dabbled in (both before and after the Code w ait into effect) often
produced similar effects upon the spectators’ reading protocols:
implying versus representing elements of the storyline serves a dual function in
classic horror. First, it satisfied censors, who were rather shortsighted in their
equation of sight with knowledge, and, second, it heightened the risqu6
connotations of monstrous attacks. Here, violence and romance are generally
conflated and both are hidden from direct view this device invited spectators
to assume that what occurred offscreen was as significant as what happened
onscreen and that offscreen events were not solely acts of violence (the monster
attacking the heroine) but were displays of romantic/sexual desire as well (the
15Because of heterocentrist histories, censorship, and the relative cultural scarcity of Pre-
Code Hollywood cinema, it is easy to forget that homosexuals were ever part of Hollywood film
before the 1960s. I can still recall my utter shock at seeing two men dance together in WONDER
BAR (1934), which has recently been screened around the country as part of the “Forbidden
Hollywood” Warner Brothers retrospective. While others may disagree, I personally feel that
outright filmic genocide is a for worse fate than any degree of marginalization or stereotyping. I
often wonder how different the course of life for twentieth-century gay and lesbian people might
have been had the Production Code not forbidden their filmic existence.
,s For a fuller account of the Production Code and the debates surrounding it, see Leonard J.
Leff & Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, & The Production
Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New Mxk: Grove Weidenfsld, 1990); Vito Russo, The
Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, Revised Edition (New \brk: Harper and Row,
Publishers, 1987); Chon Noriega, “SOMETHING’S MISSING HERE!’: Homosexuality and Rim
Reviews during the Production Code Era 1934-1962,” Cinema Journal30:1 (Fall 1990) 20-41;
Richard Maitby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Containment(Metuchen,
NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1983) 94-117; and Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the
Fallen Woman Film 1928-1942(Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).
36
monster seducing the heroine).17
Similarly, when a male monster approaches a male victim and the film cuts away from the
scene, the audience is left to speculate upon the precise nature of the attack: is it sexual,
violent, or both? For a spectator predisposed towards a queer reading protocol, these
narrative ellipses open up a range of possible meanings. And as censorship became more
pronounced after 1934, this only increased the connotative queemess of the genre.
“Unspeakable” (or unseen) horrors and the “love that dare not speak its name” moved into
closer proximity through the silences imposed by the Production Code Administration. As
Berenstein puts it, “sexually illicit meanings were reinforced by the . . . use of indirect
representation and created in some instances by the PCA’s insistence on deletions and
substitutions.”18
The genre of gothic horror had been tinged with a queer presence from its
inception, not only in terms of its patterns of formal construction, but also through the
work and sensibilities of the queer men and women who created the texts. In Hollywood,
this was little different: openly homosexual James Whale directed four of the classical
period’s most famous horror films for Universal Studios. His films and others’ exploited
not only homosexual signifiers in conjunction with their gothic villain’s crimes, but often a
whole range of queer sexual behaviors. The stories usually chronicle the exploits of a
single male gothic villain (or even more readily this figure and his male companion) who
alone or together exhibit some form of queer sexuality-that is to say, a sexuality which
deviates from the standard heterosexualized drive. The look of the genre, adapted from the
German Expressionist cinema, helped to further demarcate a space of psychosexual
transgression. True to the tropes of gothic literature, the physical spaces inhabited by the
classical Hollywood monsters reflect their twisted natures and dark mysterious secrets.
When the style is more sparingly used it is almost always reserved for the monsters’ lairs
or for their moments of sexual transgression. The monstrously queer deviation of the
gothic villain is also clearly marked within the text by the presence of an assertively
17Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship
in Classic Horror Cinema ( New Mark: Columbia University Press, 1996) 83.
'‘ Berenstein 87.
37
“normal” heterosexualized couple, who serve as the center of a naturalized and normative
heterosexual equilibrium which the queer force disrupts. One or both members of this
“normal” couple 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 villain 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 audience to understand
these narrative patterns from a queer perspective, it was probably easier for homosexual
men and women to do so on a more regular basis. Due to their already disenfranchised
location outside of the dominant culture, or their practice at leading “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 due with less than optimal representations) 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 spectators may identify
with a monster such as the lesbian vampire, enjoying her exploits for the majority of the
film’s running time, while ultimately discounting the patented narrative resolution and its
concomitant 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 provide 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 moralists who might otherwise have
tried to suppress the books.”'9 Similar to Code-abiding Hollywood films in general and
horror films specifically, these novels felt obliged to punish their sexual transgressors,
even as the pleasures of the text for homosexual readers were deeply connected to the
exercising of such transgressive possibilities in the first place.
Furthermore, not all horror films of this period insisted that their monsters were
18Chauncey 324-325.
38
wholly evil. In many of these films, there is an ambivalence felt and expressed towards the
monster-in some films he is unrelentingly evil (for example Dr. Mirakle in MURDERS IN
THE RUE MORGUE [1932]) while in other instances the filmmakers’ have created
sympathy for him/her and even an occasional plea for understanding (for example, KING
KONG [1933], or Boris Karloffs portrayal of the Frankenstein monster). This
ambivalence about the figure of the monster corresponds in many ways to the cultural
ambivalence with which the homosexual was then understood: while some people found
the night-clubbing pansy a threat to the moral fiber of the country, others found him an
amusing diversion. Much as the real life homosexual was simultaneously tolerated and
oppressed, treated as both the object of thrilling titillation and as social pariah, so were
movie monsters of the classical period.
Monsters and homosexuals were also linked by way o f their mysterious origins. In
accordance with the prevailing construction of homosexuality as a matter of gender
inversion rather than sexual object choice, medical studies continued to write about
homosexuality as a disorder primarily having to do with gender nonconformity, even as the
experts differed as to whether this was the result of nature or nurture20 The origins of
movie monsters were similarly contested: were they man-made creatures such as
Frankenstein’s monster, or part of a natural, but hitherto unexplored territory, such as the
werewolf? This “minoritizing” versus “universalizing’’ construction of both monsters and
homosexuals can be found in the 1930s and continues to exist in today’s honor films and
in culture-at-large, where two opposing schools of thought vie for dominance: the
minoritizing view considers the monster queer irrevocably Other and outside the “Natural
Order,” while the universalizing position suggests that the monster queer is a naturally
occurring force or aspect of being that can potentially be found in everyone, everywhere.
Queer theory’s construction of a minoritizing versus universalizing model to
explore the social construction of homosexuality attempts to forge a conceptual shift away
from debates over essentialist views of human sexuality, which, as Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick has argued, rest on theoretically slippery ground. While not simply wanting to
“ Two of these medical studies from the 1930s are discussed in Henry L. Minton, ‘Femininity
in Men and Masculinity in Women: American Psychiatry and Psychology Portray Homosexuality in
the 1930s," Journal of Homosexuality13 (1986) 1-21.
39
replace one binary model with yet another, nor discredit the very real minoritized
experience of those who choose to self-identify as gay or lesbian, Sedgwick points out that
the social debate over homosexuality underscores “a radical and irreducible incoherence'’ in
how dominant society defines the homosexual. This definition simultaneously
holds the minoritizing view that there is a distinct population of persons 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
identity and modem masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the
scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is widespread and in the
first place internal.21
This is the thesis of Sedgwick’s Epistomology o f the Closet, wherein she argues that much
of Weston culture can be understood to be organized around a series of binary and
hierarchical oppositions that stem from the enforcement of a heterosexual/homosexual
dichotomy, even as the tenets this binary are based upon are tacitly understood to be
contradictory. Is homosexuality an irrevocable alien Other to heterosexuality, or is
homosexuality part of a natural continuum of human sexual behavior to which we all
belong, in whose desires we all potentially share? The latter position would seemingly be
the conclusion drawn by Dr. Alfred Kinsey when he constructed his six point scale of
human sexuality, or that of psychoanalysis when it speaks of the polymorphous perversity
of the Pre-Oedipal subject.
In the horror film, similar debates rage over questions of normality and nature, self
and Other, minoritization and universalization. On the one hand, medical science is often
responsible for constructing monsters, the way that medical discourses have perhaps
“invented” the homosexual. On the other, science is repeatedly invoked in these films in
order to show that there are things within the natural world which should be reckoned with
and ultimately accepted. (From WEREWOLF OF LONDON [1935]: “Nature is very
tolerant-she has no creed”). The vampire’s ability to spread his monstrous condition
openly acknowledges the universalizing potential of his queer sexuality, even as the
narratives of the stories which contain him work to reinforce his minoritization and eventual
21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistomology of the Closet (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1990) 85.
40
destruction. In the classical Hollywood horror film, science is sometimes used to suggest
that “normality" needs to update its thinking on queer matters, but these discovered “truths"
are usually shown to lead to tragedy and are ultimately classified as “things man was not
meant to know.” As such, in film after film, the monster queer of the classical horror film
is taken out of his coffin or tomb, perhaps celebrated by some producers and spectators as
a thrilling deviation to mundane heterosexuality, but eventually firmly replaced within his
closet.
James Whale and THE OLD DARK HOUSE

A discussion of homosexuality and the classical Hollywood horror film often begins (and
all too frequently ends) with the work of James Whale, the openly gay director who was
responsible for fashioning four of Universal Studio’s most memorable horror films:
FRANKENSTEIN [1931], THE OLD DARK HOUSE [1932], THE INVISIBLE MAN
[1933], and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN [1935].~ Drawing on interviews with actor
Alan Napier and Whale’s former lover David Lewis, historian Gregory William Mank
draws a rather homophobic portrait of James Whale as “an arch, bitter homosexual, who
had created his own public ‘self that in time increasingly became a monster___
Napier has also gone on record describing Whale as “enigmatic-with a taint of sado
masochism in his homosexuality, which doubtless became more dominant as success
adversely affected his career.”2'1 While it is difficult to know how hyperbolic or factual
these accounts are, filtered as they are through several layers of heterosexist presumption, it
is clear that Whale’s homosexuality was common knowledge in Hollywood. Allegedly, in
his later years, Whale was dubbed “the Queen of Hollywood” by industry wags.25
Whether or not Whale’s homosexuality contributed to his eventual expulsion from the
“ Two rather sketchy biographies of Whale are extant: James Curtis, James Whale (Metuchen,
NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1982); and Mark Gatiss, Jam es Whale: A Biography (New >fork: Cassell,
1995). There is also a recently released novel based on the life of James Whale by Christopher
Bram, Father of Frankenstein (New >brk: A Dutton Book, 1995).
23Gregory William Mank, Karloff and Lugosi:The Story of a Haunting Collaboration (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland &Company, Inc., Publishers, 1990) 12.
“ Ousted in Mank, Karloff and Lugosi 10.
” Gr jory William Mank, Hollywood Cauldron (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 1994) 34.
41
Hollywood community and his subsequent suicide as many have suggested, most critics
will agree that there is to be found within Whale’s work something that might be termed a
“gay sensibility.” What this might mean is the sensibility of a man who recognizes his
status as a sexual outsider, someone who acknowledges his difference from the
heterosexualized hegemony, and uses that distanciation as a way to comment upon it. One
of the ways the gay community has traditionally done this is through campy black humor,
and Whale’s work is no exception. His films are filled with jibes against Christian morality
and heterocentrist pretension.
Whale also m aie it a habit to employ in his films openly gay or gay-seeming actors,
many of whom he had known through his stage work in London in the 1920s. The
homosexual Charles Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester w oe good friends of his, and
both actors worked in James Whale horror films. Colin Clive (Whale’s Dr. Frankenstein)
and Dwight Frye (his hunchbacked assistant) also convey a certain gay aura in their
performances, although each man, like Laughton, was married. (Leslie Halliwell does
refer to Colin Clive as Whale’s “nervous fellow-homosexual.”:6) While it is difficult-and
perhaps ultimately impossible-to reconstruct the actual historical sexuality of any of these
personages, many of whom might have married for appearance’s sake as did Laughton,
their personas and performances are still easily read as queer.27 And undoubtedly the gay
underground gossip networks (which would also have been aware of Whale’s
homosexuality) relayed such suspicions and interpretations, much as they do today about
certain closeted Hollywood stars. Another (also married) actor whom Whale consistently
hired was his friend Ernest Thesiger, whose fame in England, according to one author,
“rested in his female impersonations.”38 Like many of the pansy entertainers in New York
City of the 1920s, Thesiger was known in London for his queer appeal; one review of his
performance in Doctor Faustus (1925) noted that he played the role of Mephistopheles “like
“ Leslie Halliwell, The Dead That Walk (London: Grafton Books, 1986) 114.
27For more on gay and lesbian personages during Hollywood’s classical era. see Boze
Hadleighb two books c* interviews: Conversations With My Elders (New \fark: S t Martinis Press,
1986) and Hollywood* bians (New \brk: Barricade Books, 1994).
“ Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 39.
42
a maiden lady from Balham.”29 [pun intended?] BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN co-star
Valerie Hobson coyly said of him in a latter day interview, “I don’t think he had a very
strong ’male’ approach to things!”30 Another (possibly apocryphal) story concerning
Thesiger’s sexuality reports that he had a habit of entering Hollywood parties and loudly
querying “Anyone fancy a spot of buggery?”31
While Thesiger is probably most famous for his role as Dr. Pretorius in Whale’s
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, he also used his pansy persona to great effect three years
earlier in one of the director’s most 'iamboyantly gay and least seen horror films, THE
OLD DARK HOUSE. For varying reasons Oegal and otherwise), THE OLD DARK
HOUSE had been kept out of circulation for many years; it was not released on
commercial video tape until 1995. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is also the film which most
spectacularly shows the imprint of Whale’s “gay sensibility.” THE OLD DARK HOUSE
partakes of the conventions of the “clutching hand” thriller, a sub-genre of horror which
was popular on the stage and screen during the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps best exemplified
by THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927). In it, a group of “normal” people find
themselves trapped in a mysterious mansion wherein madmen and monsters abound. But
in Whale’s film (as in all of his horror films) “the normals” are as eccentric as the denizens
of the HOUSE, and the horror inside is revealed to be an explicit function of queer
sexuality and its attempted repression.
Incest, necrophilia, male and female homosexuality, androgyny, sadomasochism,
and orgiastic behavior are all hinted at to greater or lesser degrees and used to characterize
the HOUSE and its denizens as queer. At the top of the dark and oppressive HOUSE lies
its 102-year-old patriarch, Roderick Femm. Whale facilitates a queer reading of the film by
having chosen actress Elspeth Dudgeon to enact the role, making manifest the gender-
bending sexuality inherent in the family name. Roderick’s son, Horace Femm, is played
” Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 39.

30Quoted in Philip J. Riley, ed., The BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN Universal Filmscripts Series
(Absecon, NJ: Maclmage Filmbooks, 1989) 23.
31 Reported in Anthony Slide, “James Whale” Stallion 31. Stallion was a gay menfe porno
magazine and this particular clipping i. roused in a folder on Ernest Thesiger at the Gay and
Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
43
by Ernest Thesiger in a fruity effete manner (“I am rather a nervous man”).31 He is figured
as existing outside the law, both natural and divine: not only is he supposedly wanted by
the police (we never learn why), he sarcastically refers to his sister’s habit of saying grace
as a “strange tribal custom.” Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore) herself is a rather butch deaf
religious zealot obsessed with “the sins of the father” that she feds have damned the house.
Over the course of the film it becomes clear that at one point in time the house had been the
frequent site of all sorts of unmentionable sexual exploits. Unlike the dead daughter Rachel
Femm, Rebecca, presumably because of her religious interests, had been excluded from the
sexual pleasures the house had afforded others. “No beds!” she repeatedly cries to the
visiting “normals,” as if to expunge or repress the very place of the horror. Yet she barely
conceals her own lesbian desires when she chastises the heroine’s perceived lack of
morality: “You’re wicked too. Young and handsome, silly and wicked. You think of
nothing but your long straight legs and your white body and how to please your man. You
revel in the joys of fleshly love, don’t you!?" Whale accentuates the perversity of this and
other scenes by shooting Rebecca Femm through a series of increasingly distorted lenses;
at the climax of her speech she places her hand on the heroine’s breast and then leaves the
room. Also lurking in the HOUSE is Morgan (Boris Karloff), the mute and drunken butler
who may or may not be an illegitimate son of the house.
In place of the traditional happy heterosexual couple who accidentally enter a world
of horror, Whale’s initial protagonists are a threesome, Mr. and Mrs. Waverton (Raymond
Massey, Gloria Stuart) and their companion Penderel (Melvyn Douglas). With their witty
badinage, they suggest the sophisticated urban menage a trois of Noel Coward’s Design
fo r Living, which was popular on the stage at the time and would be filmed in Hollywood
the following year. The Wavertons are far from a happy couple; they are bitchy and
petulant and Penderel is marked by his flippant attitude, mocking both their situation and
the generic conventions of the film in which they find themselves (the rain storm, the
” ‘Nervousness” was at this time a signifier of failed masculinity: ‘real men” have steady
nerves. A Came! cigarette ad which ran in Esquire during this era makes the point quite clearly
when it asks ‘Are you a pencil chewer?” and then reminds its readers that ‘right or wrong, people
put their own interpretations on them [jangled nervesj. So it pays to watch your nerves’ by
smoking “Camel’s costlier tobaccos [which] never jangle your nerves~no matter how many you
smoke.”
44
desolate countryside). Penderel is further linked with the denizens of the house by his war
experiences which have left him “slightly soiled" with a “twisted smile.” He later
confesses to having “not much sympathy with fish out of water, although I happen to be
one myself.” He is especially linked to the effeminate Horace, accepting his offers of gin
and potatoes with relish. However, when Horace invites Penderel to his bedroom (“There
are one or two things that I should very much like for you to see”), Penderel declines. By
this point in the narrative, he has been actively heterosexualized by character Gladys
Perkins (Lilian Bond), a faux society lady who shows up at the house with Sir William
Porterhouse (Charles Laughton). Porterhouse is not interested in Gladys sexually because
(so we are told) he is obsessed with the memory of his dead wife, an “acceptable” reason
for lack of heterosexual interest, one that effaces a more common cause that Laughton
himself exhibited. This possibility is touched on as Penderel and Gladys discuss
Porterhouse/Laughton: even though he has funneled his lack of heterosexual interest into
making money/acting, they conclude that Porterhouse/Laughton is actually very lonely,
even though he ironically “likes people to think he’s ever so gay.” This double entendre,
activated by the doubling of Laughton with his character, is typical of the sly gay humor
that defines Whale’s ironic sensibility.
Ultimately, the most dangerous member of the family, Saul, is released from his
locked room and faces off with Penderel. Saul too seems to recognize a fellow spirit in
Penderel: “I am a clever man also. That is why we understand one another. That is why
you understood so quickly that I wanted to kill you. We understand each other so well,
don’t we my friend?” Saul is best understood as a repressed homosexual as theorized by
Freudian psychoanalysis: paranoid to the point of trying to eradicate the unacceptable object
45
of desire.33 He tells Penderel the story of Saul and David (one of the more homoerotic male
couples in the Bible) before he attempts to kill Penderel with a long knife. (“Like you?”
queries Saul: “My friend I love you!”) Ultimately, the two men tussle and both fall from
the staircase. Saul dies and Morgan tenderly carries his body away, again suggesting some
sort of relationship tinged with the queen father and son? jailer and prisoner? brothers?
lovers? all o f the above? One recent account of this sequence, Whale’s “most wicked
vignette,” describes the scene thusly: “Hugging the cadaver, the mad butler breaks down
and weeps pitifully. Then Morgan picks up Saul and miserably minces up the.steps,
rocking him, his hips swaying effeminately, as if he w oe some nightmarish mother
cradling a dead, horrific infant”34 Gladys cradles the broken Penderel, and in an ironic
inversion o f FRANKENSTEIN’S most famous bit of dialogue, cries out “He’s alive! He’s
alive I tell you! He’s alive! ” Only this time the line refers not to the creation of a queer
monster, but rather to the feet that Penderel has overcome the queemess of THE OLD
DARK HOUSE (and that within himself) and been “reborn” into a heterosexual union with
Gladys, who has vowed to make him “a useful person.”
While the film thus ends with two requisite (relatively) happy heterosexualized
couples, Whale subverts the generic imperative by giving the last “line” to Charles
Laughton’s Sir William Porterhouse, who loudly snores over Penderel’s proposal of
marriage. Audiences of the day also apparently shared Whale's attitude towards the
“normals. ” Variety reported that the audience “was audibly derisive of the love scenes
33The theoretical key to this phenomenon has been around at least since 1911, when Sandor
Ferenczi, expanding upon Freud’s observations on homosexuality and the Oedipal phase,
concluded that (as a modem psychologist puts it): “heterosexual merfe feelings of aversion,
hostility, and disgust toward male homosexuality really are reaction-fonmations and symptomatic of
defense against affection for the same s e x Q u o t e from Gregory M. Herek, ‘Beyond
’Homophobia’: A Social Psychological Perspective on Attitudes toward Lesbians and Gay Men,"
dashers, Baiters, and Bigots: Homophobia in American Society, ed. John P. DeCecco (New \brk:
Harrington Park Press, 1985) 5. See also Sandor Ferenczi, ‘The Nosology of Male Homosexuality
(Homoeroticism)," The Problem of Homosexuality in Modem Society, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek
(Newark: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1963) 3-16. 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.
34Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 46.
46
between [Melvyn] Douglas and Lilian Bond.”75 And as if picking up on the film’s queerer
undercurrents, or perhaps as an allusion to Whale’s homosexuality, the Variety review also
chose to single out Karloffs performance by noting that he “by no means impresses as a
sissy by stature, demeanor, and surliness.”
The Domestic Queer Couple: Re-Imagining Procreation

Not all of the Hollywood honor films of the classical period are as explicitly homosexual
as is James Whale’s THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Yet there are no shortage of queer
moments or inferences, such as the mannish lesbian couple who accompany Renfield on
his Transylvanian coach ride in DRACULA (1931), or the odd wedding of Oscar Wilde
and the Grand Guignol which occurs in MAD LOVE (1935) when crazed Dr. Gogol (Peter
Lorre) realizes, like Wilde’s Reading Gaol captive, that “each man kills the thing he loves.”
DRACULA, the film which had begun the successful cycle of sound horror films, had
been released on Valentine’s Day with the ad-line “The strangest love story ever told.”76
FRANKENSTEIN was also sold with queerly tinged ad-lines, suggesting of the doctor
himself that “No woman’s kiss has touched his lips,” or that he would be somehow forced
to choose between “The Lady or the Monster! ”” And as the decade wore on, homoerotic,
bare-chested sadomasochistic imagery became a staple of fantastic serials: Flash Gordon,
Buck Rogers, Ray “Crash” Corrigan, et al. were frequently tied up, oiled up, and posed
for the spectator’s delectation. Buster Crabbe, the bleached blond lead of many of these
serials, reportedly was thought so “pretty” that he got “wolf whistles from guys.”3*
However, it is more regularly the monster or villain of these films who can be
understood as queer, even when he supposedly lusts after the female ingenue. Often he is
35‘Review of THE OLD DARK HOUSE,” Variety ( November 1,1932). Compiled in Variety Film
Reviews 1930-1933, Volume 4 (New \brk: Garland Publishers, Inc., 1983).
38See Berenstein 60-87 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 of the spectacle of queer love.
37Advertising copy appearing in the Motion Picture Herald 105:8 (November 21,1931) 41 and
105:11 (December 12,1931) 63.
38Reported in George E. Turner, ‘FLASH GORDON, an Interplanetary Gothic," The Cinema of
Adventure, Romance, and Tenor, ed. by George E. Turner (Hollywood, California: The ASC Press,
1989) 206.
47
tinged with the era's signifiers of male homosexual culture, being finely acculturated,
somewhat dandified, and given to bizarre modes of dress, makeup, and deportment. He is
shown to love the arts, both through his modernist set design and his obsessive organ
playing, a pun on male masturbation which has circulated for decades. Regularly, the
gothic villain is touched with a European decadence or a British air, both of which
constituted a certain subcultural fashion at the time among male homosexuals.39 Flowers
and things “horticultural” were also a coded signifier for male homosexuality. In THE
INVISIBLE MAN, director James Whale’s mise-en-scene prominently forces (seemingly
incongruous) flowers into a scene wherein the Invisible One’s friends wonder about his
disappearance. In MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (193S), police inspector Lionel Atwill
denigrates effeminate town doctor Donald Meek with the snide observation, “You’re no
moon flower-you’re a morning glory.” The flower is also the key signifier of the
homoerotic male couple’s lycanthropy in WEREWOLF OF LONDON: the incredibly rare
bloom of the “Marifesa lupina lumina” is the only thing that can keep the two men from
acting upon their bestial urges.
Also, the words “gay” and “queer” (which were part of a homosexual lexicon at
this time) show up with alarming regularity in the horror films of this period." While it
might be argued that they are being used in their broader, “straight” definitions, it is more
than probable, given the amount of homosexual input many of these films received, that
they are further evidence of homosexual codings in popular culture at this particular point in
time. James Whale, who certainly would have known the connotations of the word, at one
point used it to describe Boris Karloffs “queer, penetrating personality.”41 In the shooting
script for FRANKENSTEIN, which constructs an explicit dialectic between the doctor’s
odd “experiments” and his plans for a socially sanctioned heterosexual marriage, the old
38For example, ‘Algy the Aristocrat," a line drawing featured in the period's advertisements tor
Reis sport shirts and pull-overs, wears marcelled 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 "Performing Akimbo': Queer Pride and Epistomotogicai
Prejudice,” The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. in Moe Meyer (New Mark: Routledge, 1994) 23-
50.
40See Chauncey 12-23 for a valuable discussion of these terms and their evolution.
48
Baron refers to his son’s lab as a “queer sort of place for a son of mine to be in.”c A few
years later in Columbia’s RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943), vampire Armand Tesla is
referred to as “a queer sort of duck,” and his male victim, panting and delirious, calls the
vampire’s eyes “queer.”43 A party guest in DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931)
comments of Dr. Jekyll that it is “very queer that he’s not here,” immediately following his
unexpected transformation in a public park into Mr. Hyde. THE INVISIBLE MAN’s
disappearance is also considered “a queer thing” by the film’s “normals,” and the titular
character in THE MUMMY (1932) is described as “queer” by its patriarchal heroes, one of
whom jokingly (but accurately) suggests that The Mummy had been buried alive because
he “got too gay with one of the vestal virgins.” Even if the explicitly homosexual
connotation of the word “gay” is denied, because of its earlier linkage with prostitution,
“gay” still resonated with the thrill and deviance of unsanctioned sexuality.
Ultimately, the classical period produced several iconographic queer monsters
whose homosexual undertones would become more and more prevalent as they were
remade and adapted across the years. These figures include the homosexual or bisexual
vampire (DRACULA, DRACULA’S DAUGHTER [1936], MARK OF THE VAMPIRE):
the seemingly “normal” man who becomes a monster or has a hidden monstrous self (DR.
JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE,44WEREWOLF OF LONDON); and the mad scientist, who,
with the frequent aid of a male assistant, sets out to create life homosexually-without the
benefit of heterosexual intercourse (FRANKENSTEIN, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS
[1933], and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN). Together the mad scientist and his sidekick
became a major generic convention that is easily read as queer the secret experiments they
"Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Faragoh, in Philip J. Riley, ed.. FRANKENSTEIN Universal
Filmscripts Series(Absecon, NJ: Macimage Filmbooks, Inc., 1989) Scene H-6, page 52.
"This moment is especially interesting because the male victim thinks it was his girlfriend who
has bitten him: *Nikki-your eyes-l never saw them so queer!’ Only later do we find out that the
bite came from the male vampire Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi).
44Paramount’s and most later screen versions of Robert Louis Stevensorfe Or Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde are especially interesting in this respect because they actively set out to “heterosexualize”
their dual character by the addition of two women, one virginal and one whorish, neither of whom
is present in the original story. Many popular theatrical versions of the work also heterosexualized
the story, long before Hollywood did. Nevertheless, the film and most of its latter-day adaptations
can still be easily read as a story about a man battling his own queer sexual urges. R>r a full reading
of the novel’s homosexual components, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and
Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New \t>rk City: Penguin Books, 1990) 105-126.
49
conduct together are chronicled in private diaries and kept locked away in closed cupboards
and closets. These sidekick figures include Fritz in FRANKENSTEIN, Montgomery in
ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, Janos in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, and Dr.
Wong in MAD LOVE. Even outside of the mad scientist narrative, queer couples still
abound: consider Renfield’s relationship to DRACULA, Beaumont and Legendre in
WHITE ZOMBIE, or “The Nubian” and THE MUMMY. Each of these servants is
devoted to his master; in fact, they are often under some kind of supernatural spell which
keeps them in their masters’ thrall. As the filmic horror cycle began to wane around 1934-
1935, the queer couple became even more pronounced: fellow monsters Henry Hull and
Warner Oland battled to the death in WEREWOLF OF LONDON, Karloff and Lugosi
starred together in THE BLACK CAT, THE RAVEN, and THE INVISIBLE RAY, and
perhaps most flamboyantly, Dr. Septimus Pretorius teamed up with Dr. Frankenstein to
create the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. A few ostensibly “heterosexual” queer couples
are also present during this period (but no lesbian ones): THE MASK OF FU MANCHU
and MARK OF VAMPIRE both feature incestuous Father-Daughter couples, and
DRACULA’S DAUGHTER has an overly coiffed, surly queen for a manservant.
The hierarchies inherent in most of these relations again reflect the construction of
homosexuality at that time: rather than affording the possibility of two equal partners
attracted on the basis of sexual object choice, homosexuality was understood to be
constructed around strict gender hierarchies. One man would be assumed to be the femme
to the other man’s butch. This hierarchy works its way through the genre (and culture-at-
large) in a set of binary oppositions which include but aren't limited to active/passive,
dominant/submissive, master/servant, top/bottom, sadist/masochist, white/non-white,
physically “normal”/deformed, and ultimately, straight/gay or “normal”/queer. While many
of the classical horror films take the sadomasochistic relationship between their male leads
to be the singular driving force of their narratives (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 particular formula
spectacularly queer.
The locus classicus of the queer “domestic” couple can be found in James Whale’s
50
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 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 clean
Lord Byron refers to himself as “England's greatest sinner” while Mary (in dialogue cut
from the release print) asserts that Shelley is “reviled by society as a monster himself"
because of his unorthodox sexual praxis. In a further bit of dialogue which was also cut,
Mary hints at their open relationship: “We are all three infidels, scoffers at all marriage ties,
believing only in living fully and freely in whatever direction the heart dictates. Such an
audience needs something stronger than a pretty little love story.”44 Indeed, such an
audience needs to see a tale of queer sexuality, but at this point in time it can only be
rendered through the conventions of the Hollywood horror film.
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN’S Dr. Septimus Pretorius is one of the most visibly
gay characters in American film of the period Even though the enforcement of the
Production Code one year earlier expressly forbade such a depiction, Pretorius is easily
read as gay according to the genre’s queer reading protocols. Not only is Pretorius a
homosexual according to film’s narrative logic (it is Pretorius who enters Frankenstein’s
bridal chamber and steals him away from Elizabeth), but also in terms of the
characterization and star persona of Ernest Thesiger. Pretorius/Thesiger oozes a gay camp
aura over the entire film, his “fluttery, limp-wristed gestures and prissy remarks” hinting at
unknown vices.47 His line readings frequently verge on double entendre, as when he tells
44Referenced in Stekel 29 as ‘ Jahttouch I sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. IX, 1908, p. 504.”

44 William Hurlbut and John H. Balderston, in Philip J. Riley, ed.. The BRIDE OF
FRANKENSTEIN Universal Filmscripts Series (Absecon, NJ: Maclmage Filmbooks, 1989) Scene
A2-A6.
47Halliwell 125.
51
Henry “I had hoped that we might together probe into the mysteries of life and death.”
Likewise, in dialogue cut from the release print, Pretorius reminds Hairy that “You were
my pupil-you shared all my experiments-my secret experiments.” Frankenstein’s servant
Minnie introduces him to Frankenstein (and to the spectator) with the line “He’s a very
queer looking old gentleman.” As did Thesiger’s Horace Femm in THE OLD DARK
HOUSE, Dr. Pretorius pointedly drinks gin (“Its my only vice”), suggesting the cultural
connection between the bootleg gin of Prohibition and the pansy-friendly speakeasy. And
he defends his unorthodox scientific practices as a gay man might defend his sexuality:
“Those who experiment in the creation of living organisms have been accused of impiety,
^ even o f blasphemy. Of course, as you and I, and all men of learning know, such
accusations are only made by the narrow, the bigoted, and the superstitious.”48 As
^Pretorius tells Frankenstein, “Science, like Love, has h a little surprises.” Taking Henry
back to his apartment (appropriately situated at the end of a twisted, bent staircase and
hallway), Pretorius puts the moves on Henry. In one of the film’s most famous
sequences, they drink a toast “To a world of Gods and Monsters,” and Pretorius shows
Frankenstein not his etchings but his scientific handiwork: a “pleasing variety” of bottled
homunculi. Not surprisingly, his “first experiment turned out to be a Queen.” Also
included in the array is a Devil, an oversexed King, and a Bishop who wakes firom a nap
and immediately begins to denounce all in sight.
In an ironic reversal, Karloffs monster is the most heterosexual character in the
film. He certainly desires his female mate more than Frankenstein desires his. Yet the
monster does share an intense homosocial friendship outside the boundaries of society
when he meets up with another social outcast, a blind beggar. The beggar is so pleased to
have found a friend that he puts him to sleep in his own bed, and offers a prayer to God:
“Our Father, I thank Thee-that in Thy great mercy Thou hast taken pity on my great
loneliness-and out of the silence of the night hast brought two of Thy lonely children
together.” Whale emphasizes this tender scene with a glowing crucifix above the bed,
whose radiance lingers as the scene fades. (Other writers have discerned the implication of
“ Hurlbut and Balderston, Scene B-15.
52
fellatio in this scene as the old man kneels before the monster.49) Whale constructs the
Monster as a Christ figure (both here and in another sequence where he is almost
“crucified”), a misunderstood martyr who is tormented and tortured at the hands of the
social mob. Joseph Breen, at the Production Code Administration, was especially
concerned with the religious symbology that Whale had worked into the film, as well as the
more gruesome aspects of the stay. In the letters he sent Whale, he objected to the degree
of violence in the film, shots of Mary Shelley’s breasts, and seemingly innocuous things
such as a :hot of a rat or use of the word “entrails."30 There is no indication whatsoever
that he was aware of the homosexual sensibility in which the film seems to have been
steeped. Indeed, Rhona J. Berenstein argues that the Breen Office may have even
unwittingly contributed to the film’s overall homoerotic project by insisting that the word
“mate" in reference to the female monster be dropped from the script. “Friend” replaced
“mate," supposedly desexualizing the possible heterosexual relationship between the male
and female creations, but in effect sexualizing all the other the male-male bonds, most of
which are also described in terms of friendship. As Berenstein suggests, “if the monster’s
rapport with the bride is sexual, then homoerotic connotations are produced, not deleted,
by this particular censorship effort."51
“Sex Perversion”
Another classical honor 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 Montgomery 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:
We could have subjected the overactive thymus to X-ray radiation, atrophied the
gland and suppressed the overactivity of its function—which was one of the
“ Bram 133.
50 ’H Gardner, The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office,
1934- V 1 (New \t>rk: Dodd-Mead, 1987) 65-72.
*' Berenstein 87.
53
principle causes of Wilde’s lack of sexual normality. Then we could have built up
the masculine characteristics, by means of proper combinations of post-pituitary,
adrenal, and testicular extracts.32
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 historical 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 Cedi B. DeMille’s
SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932), where he played a very obvious homosexual Roman
emperor, or as the euphemisms o f the day would have it, a “voluptuary.”53 As usual, in
ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, Laughton, with much winking and smirking, manages to
milk every saladous 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 “mammals.” 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, espedally since the
film has introduced Montgomery within a panning shot of several shirtless seamen. It is
Montgomery who first “acquires” heterosexual hero Parker, picking him up from a
shipwreck and taking him back to his cabin to be nursed back to health; Montgomery later
tells Parker that he looks “Splendid! ” Ndther 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
52La Forest Potter, Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities (New \brk: Robert
Dodsley, 1933) 147. Reprinted In Jonathan Ned Katz, ed., Gay American History, Revised Edition
(USA: A Meridian Book, 1992)164.
53“Voluptuary" and “morbidity" were words frequently used to connote homosexuality at this
time. For example, in a Harper’s Monthly Magazine essay from 1930, the author compares
“primitive” sexuality at the Puka-Puka trading station to that of the “civilized world, noting off
handedly that “With th -txception of old Bones, the local voluptuary, there is no sex morbidity at
Puka-Puka." Ftobert D-. i Rlsbie, “The Sex laboo at Puka-Puka," Harper's Monthly Magazine 162
(December 1930) 96.
54
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 Parka- 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 performance as he lurks in
the shadows outside Parker’s room, relishing a cigarette as he watches the mating of man
and beast-woman. When Parker’s financee 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 th~ compound. The dynamics between Parker/Lota and
Ruth/Ouran (both cases of what might be considered heterosexual bestiality?) are strikingly
different and indicative of the era’s assumptions about gender, whereas Parker is actively
attracted to the almost totally human Lota and kisses her out of desire, the ape-man Ouran
embodies nothing more than the threat of bestial rape to Ruth. The “mammals” also seem
to represent sublimated fears of black-white miscegenation, as has been noted by some
critics about other period horror films including KING KONG.54 Moreau, in his gleaming
white suit, thus not only suggests homosexuality, but also a Western patriarchal colonial
force on the island (quite literally the lawgiver and voice of the father). His creations (and
especially Ouran) are the embodiment of his animalistic phallicism which is conflated
within the film with Moreau’s homocentric megalomania.
As this assessment indicates, like many of the era’s horror films, ISLAND OF
LOST SOULS activates and blurs together discourses surrounding not only
homosexuality, but also race, gender, and colonialism, here filtered through metaphors of
bestiality (not to mention cannibalism and vivisection). H. G. Wells created a similar
slippage of signifiers when he wrote the source novel The Island o f Dr. Moreau in 1895.
He claimed to have beat thinking about the trial of Oscar Wilde, and set out to create a
parable regarding man’s bestial nature.55 (His choice of the name “Moreau” may have been
an acknowledgement of the writings of another Frenchman, Dr. Paul Moreau, who in an
“ See Ed Guerrero, “Slaves, Monsters, and Others,’ framing Blackness: The African
American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) 41-68.
“ Reported in Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siede
(USA: Penguin Books 1990)178.
55
1877 analysis of sexual inversion also compared homosexuality to bestiality.56) ISLAND
OF LOST SOULS takes this blurring of bestiality and homosexuality as one of its central
thematic concerns. Moreau and Montgomery live amidst the hairy, wild, brutish manimals,
having produced them by unnatural sexual means. While the equation between bestiality
and racial Otherness is fairly well known in the history of racism, the “phenomenon has an
additional dimension in connection with homosexuality. . . [since] the term ‘sodomy’ has
comprised both bestiality and homosexuality throughout the history of Christian Europe.”57
This linkage can be found in the popular culture (and not just gothic horror texts) of the last
several centuries and throughout this one as well. For example, during one early twentieth-
century homosexual scandal in the Goman army, bestiality was invoked to ostracize those
involved while concomitantly suggesting their depravity. “Dozens of cartoons employed
dogs, pigs, and excrement, and one from France featured a pig-faced man, effectively
completing the transformation of human into subhuman.”58 While sexual activity of any
kind links together homo sapiens with all other species, ironically this idea is often denied
or displaced onto one specific non-procreative form of sexuality: male homosexuality,
which was (and still is) often conceived of within in the popular gestalt as a form of
degeneration or regression to baser, animalistic instincts.
These confusions were the direct result of ignorance and social taboos against
speaking about sex in the early 1930s. When Random House decided to publish Havelock
Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology o f Sex in 1936 as a four-volume set specifically meant for
public consumption, it was hailed as a major event and reported in magazines such as
Time and The American Mercury.59 As noted above, books that discussed sex had been
MSee Symonds 121-127 for a discussion of Dr. Paul Moreau’s Des Aberrations du Sens
Genesique, 4th Edition (1877).
57Jam es D. Steakley, ‘Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenburg Affair in
Wilheimin Germany,” Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, & George Chauncey, Jr. (New \t>rk City: A Meridian Book, 1989) 255.
“ Steakley 255.
" See, among others, ‘Medicine: Studies for All,” Time 27 (March 9,1936) 59-60; Ernest
Boyd, ‘The Most Civilized Englishman," The American Mercury 38 (May 1936) 120-124; and
Havelock Ellis, “Studies in Sex: A History,” The American MercuryZT (January 1936) 14-21. Time's
‘Studies for All” is noteworthy because its mentions transvestism in a fairly sympathetic light. Also
of note is that the article points out that the now “childless widower” Dr. Havelock Ellis ‘maintained
separate homes” from his wife during the years of their marriage.
56
regularly banned (as had Ellis's original volume Sexual Inversion) and/or sold only to
medical professionals. This move towards a more public market for books on sexuality
fueled an ongoing debate surrounding sex education in schools. Most of these debates
didn't even mention homosexuality, but instead focused on venereal disease and unwed
heterosexual intercourse; often they concluded with the conservative admonition that girls
didn’t need to “pet” to be popular.60 When homosexuality was mentioned, it was done so
as part of a largo- constellation of sexual perversions, as in reports of a “sex crime wave”
that swept the nation in 1937.6> Although most of the crimes discussed were heterosexual
rapes or attacks on female children by older men, the reader is meant to understand that the
classification of “sex perverts and degenerates of all types” includes homosexuals.
The number of people convicted of such offenses is comparatively small. . . but
the number of people who commit them is very large. We have in our institutions
(this was in January, 1937) less than forty men known to be homosexuals.
Anyone who knows anything about the subject at all knows that there are thousands
of homosexuals in New York City.62
The implication is that homosexuals constitute the same threat to society as do rapists and
child molesters, and that there are literally “thousands” of them waiting to commit such a
crime. As the reports further opine, such men may be “feebleminded,” “senile,”
“neurotic,” or perhaps they suffer from “sleeping sickness,” “epilepsy,” or “organic brain
diseases.”63 They are “human rattlesnakes coiled in the path of unsuspecting women and
children.”64
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
“ For a typical take on the era’s approach to sex education in the schools, see ‘Education:
Open Sexame,” Time 36 (November 13,1939) 61. The essay reviews the federally approved
manual High Schools and Sex Education and notes that ‘The authors recommend that pupils and
teachers discuss prostitution, masturbation, illegitimacy, divorce* Homosexuality is never
mentioned.
*’ “Medicine: Pedophilia,’ 77me30 (August 23,1937) 42-44. Other similar articles cited below.
“ “Crimes Against Children,” The Literary O/gesf 124 (October 2,1937) 16.
“ ‘Mental Hygiene: Night Club Patrons Cry ‘Criminal’ at ‘Paeping Toms’: Conflicting Attitudes
Toward Sex Complicates Matter of Sex Crimes; Certain Types Require Medical Care,* Science
News Letter 32 (November 27 1937) 346.
64“Sex Crime Wave Alarms U.S.: Police Grope for Method to Stem Rising Tide of Perversion,"
The Literary Digesf\24 (April 10,1937) 5.
57
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 be was never named.65 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 honor films and culture-at-large. Same-sex relations are repeatedly linked
with the horrors o f 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 classical Hollywood cinema. By
default, the images of the classical Hollywood 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 onscreen “sex perversion” were curtailed somewhat after the
enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, the linkage of homosexuality with each of
these other sexual behaviors 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’ (offscreen) attacks on children in FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA.
Cannibalism 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, FRANKENSTEIN, WHITE ZOMBIE, MYSTERY OF THE WAX
MUSEUM, THE MUMMY, THE GHOUL, THE BLACK CAT, BRIDE OF
FRANKENSTEIN, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, MAD LOVE, THE RAVEN, and
“ Leo Meehan, ‘Review of FRANKENSTEIN,” Motion Picture Herald 105:7 (November 14,
1931) 40.
58
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
genre as villains and monsters lust after the hero and heroine and stop at nothing to
consummate their desires. Voyeuristic sadomasochism, which might describe a certain
appeal of the genre for its spectators, is also prominent in several films, which reflexively
call into question the nature of the genre itself: specific examples of this can be found in
MAD LOVE, FREAKS, DR. X, and MARK OF THE VAMPIRE.
One of the most queerly perverse films of the period, which brings together
homosexuality with almost all of the aforementioned tropes, is MGM’s THE MASK OF
FU MANCHU (1932). The film stars Boris Karloff as the famous Asian criminal; he
seems to be perpetually surrounded by half-naked slave boys, both African and Asian.
One latter day critic apprised the role as follows: “Karloff, with his Ann-Margret smile,
false eyelashes, Adrian-designed gowns, dragon lady fingernails, and lisping, come hither
delivery, has created a wild, kinky, archfiend of a Fu; part Yellow Peril, part Frederick’s of
Hollywood.”66 Fu’s main hench-person is his daughter Fah Lo See, played by Myma Loy,
who reportedly called the script “obscene” and her character a “sadistic nymphomaniac.”67
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 elaborate counterbalance device, while yet another is set to meet his fate via opposing
walls o f spikes which slowly close around him-the “slim silver fingers” of death.
Karloffs delivery of that line, distorted through his infamous lisp, as “the thlim, thilver
fingerth,” firmly links the pansy stereotype to the sadomasochistic 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

67Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 65. 68.
59
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 simulacrum. Audiences of the day apparently
appreciated the overtly sensationalized exploits and according to one review “laugh[ed]
where they oughtn’t.”68 In more recent years, “Karloffs gay, lisping dragon of a Fu
Manchu, looking like Carmen Miranda from hell in his fruit basket hat,”69has also upset
Asian-American audiences. When MGM decided to re-release the film in 1972, one group
protested 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-inch fingernails while his daughter is a sadistic sex fiend.”70
Karloff and Lugosi and the Sadomasochistic Queer Couple

As has been suggested repeatedly, almost all of the monsters and villains from the classical
period are the products of foreign lands or foreign agents, and many of them play upon
racist fears as well as homophobic ones, conflating and blurring their stereotypical
signifiers. It was not uncommon for audiences to think of foreign lands, and Europe
especially, as the sight of sexual decadence, the birthing ground 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 voluptuaries, as have some of the
European people to whom greater sexual license has been allowed. These people
have developed to a state where perversion is the rule 71
“ Bige., “Review of MASK OF FU MANCHU,” Variety, December 6,1932. Compiled in Variety

Film Reviews 1930-1933, Volume 4 (New Vbrk: Garland Publishers, Inc., 1983).
" Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 55.
70 ‘Letter from the Japanese-American Citizens League to MGM, requesting the removal of
THE MASK OF FU MANCHU from Metro’s catalogue, 1972.” Reprinted in Mank, Hollywood
Cauldron 54.
7’ Robert Dean Fnsbie, “The Sex laboo at Puka-Puka," Harper’s Monthly Magazine 162
(December 1930)100.
60
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): “Blade 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 body guards, or Murder
Legendre’s black zombie slaves in WHITE ZOMBIE. These films and others repeatedly
link sexual transgression to radal transgression, as does today’s universalizing and
coalitionist use of the word queer. While this suggests the possibility of a w.de-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 spedfic 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 bom or bred: Peter
Lorre, Ernest Thesiger, Conrad Vddt, Colin Clive, Charles Laughton, Warner Oland,
Erich von Strohdm, and most famously Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Most of these
actors played fordgn 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 fordgner, as attested to by his roles as the ringlet-haired spy in Alfred
Hitchcock's SECRET AGENT (1936) or the perfumed Egyptian Jod Cairo in THE
MALTESE FALCON (1941). Lorre, like many of these actors, managed to make a career
out of suggesting both racial and 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 lips set flat in his cretinous,
ellipsoidal face.”72 As this review suggests, gender inversion and physical deformity were
72Quoted from a Time magazine film review in Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 148.
61
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 unreal as their
depiction of monstrosity.73)
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 bom and trained in Hungary, while Karloff left his native England to pursue a career .><
in acting across Canada and the United States. While Hollywood publicists constructed
Karloffs image as a genteel Britisher, Lugosi’s image was figured as 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
relationship:
When his mother was returning to England one time, sh e. . . 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 respectability 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” illegitimacy 74
Karloff supposedly revealed this anecdote to his sunbathing friend, declining to join him
because “his skin was dark enough as it was.” Whether these anecdotes are “true” or not, it
nevertheless is well apparent that Karloff and Lugosi both played a broad variety of
monsters as well as racial character parts precisely because of their deviance from a WASP
ideal.
The teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the mid-1930s in a series of
horror vehicles furthered the concept of a monstrously queer sadomasochistic male couple.
This type of queer couple, unlike their domestic counterparts, were not interested in
creating life together but rather in torturing one another to death. Nonetheless, a
73Mank, Karloff and Lugosi 57.

74Quoted in Mank, Karfoff and Lugosi 18.
62
hierarchical master/servant dichotomy still manifests itself in these films-and even in their
advertising campaigns. For example, a later film in which they starred together milked the
queer potential of their relationship with the ad line “The Hero of Honor, BORIS
KARLOFF, joins forces with the Master of Menace, BELA LUGOSI, in the UNHOUEST
PARTNERSHIP This Side of the Grave! ”75 But rather than figure the two as equal
partners, Karloff and Lugosi were more regularly billed and sold during the 1930s as the
“screen’s Number One and Two Bogy men.”76 This undoubtedly added to the offscreen
rivalries which mirrored those onscreen. For whatever reasons-talent, his thick Hungarian
accent, his need to present himself as an aloof member of the Hollywood royalty-Lugosi
never enjoyed the same success in Hollywood that Karloff did, and allegedly referred to
him as “my rival.”77 Even by the time of their first film together (1934’s THE BLACK
CAT), Karloff was receiving top billing and higher pay. According to many reports,
Lugosi deeply resented Karloff, and that animosity may be responsible for much of their
bitter filmic characterizations. Nonetheless, their pairing led to substantial box office
profits, and, as one latter day historian notes “a queer, sublime chemistry' in their work
together.”78
While all of the queer couples in 1930s horror films may be understood to be
sadomasochistic to some degree, two of these Karloff-Lugosi vehicles present a very
homoerotic sadomasochism as their central horrific conceit. In THE BLACK CAT (1934)
and THE RAVEN (1935), a violent homoerotic triangle between the two villains and the
heterosexualized couple is developed and explored; in both films, the heroine is supposedly
the object of the villains’ lusts, but any form of sexual consummation is displaced onto
murder and torture-the heroine is to be sacrificed to the devil in THE BLACK CAT and
crushed to death with her lover in THE RAVEN. And while the normal couple ostensibly
represents the identificatory focal point of the stories’ melodrama, the core of the dramas
actually rest within the sadomasochistic relationship between the two male honor stars.
This type of homosocial/homosexual competition between two men over a woman (or a
76Trailer for THE BODY SNATCHER (1945). Reported in Mank, Karloff and Lugosi 274.
76F.S.N., “Review of THE RAVEN," The New )trk Times (July 5 , 1935) 9:2.
77Mank, Karloff and Lugosixi.
78Mank, Karloff and Lugosi x-xi.
63
heterosexual couple), is often “as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the
rivals to the beloved,” and suggests a slippage along the homosocial/homosexual
continuum as it has been theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.” This continuum for men
(as compared to that for women) has often been described as broken. As Sedgwick
continues, it is hard to imagine “an intelligible continuum of 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 of (however troubled) continuum
between lesbianism and “other forms of women’s attention to women.”® Many of these
1930s honor films depict their male couples at the very precipice of this homosocial/
homosexual divide; the break in the continuum is figured in symbolic ways, most regularly
as a displacement which substitutes hatred for love, violence for tenderness, and death for
life.
In both THE RAVEN and THE BLACK CAT, any potential homosexual desire is
displaced onto sadomasochistic behavior. And while the representation of this partakes of
many of the same aspects of role playing and gamesmanship that today demarcate
sadomasochistic sexual practice, the films fail (as does Hollywood cinema in general) to
make any differentiation between a consensual sadomasochistic sexual experience and the
more simple (and common) conflation of homosexuality with violence, terror, and death.
In THE RAVEN, Bela Lugosi’s Dr. Vollin sadistically tortures Boris Karloffs Bateman
with a scalpel, rearranging his facial naves in order to deform his visage. Once uglified,
Dr. Vollin torments Bateman with a phalanx of mirrors; later he whips him with a riding
crop. According to the plot, all of this is done in the name of (queer) love: Vollin has saved
a young girl’s life and has subsequently fallen in “love” with her. When she spurns him,
he puts his collection of Edgar Allan Poe torture devices to use with the aid of henchman
Bateman. At the climax, the normals are saved and the villains die at each other’s hands;
heterosexuality endures while violent queer relationships lead to death.
THE BLACK CAT also focuses on a sadomasochistic queer couple who dabble in
78Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosociai Desire
(New \brk: Columbia University Press, 1985) 21.
“ Sedgwick, Between Men 2-3.
64
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 soley in terms of a series of
homoerotic triangles: Poelzig has stolen Werdegast’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 Hungary’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 between the body, the two men recreate 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 ruined carcase (sic) of a
woman.”81 Their homosexual desire is filtered 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 (due to narrative
demands and the logic of the homosocial triangle) must involve a woman as prize, this time
the heterosexualized 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 torture rack, and would have come to its climax with the already-skinned
Poelzig “tum[ing] with the last vestige of his strength and crawl[ing] on his 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
81Sedgwick, Between Men 76.

“ Reported in Paul Mandell, “Enigma of THE BLACK CAT” The Cinema of Adventure,
Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner (Hollywood, CA: The ASC Press, 1989) 182,192.
65
trip. While THE BLACK CAT was attacked by censors for its sadism (Variety called it
“dubious showmanship"85), its climactic scene nonetheless serves as another prime example
of a 1930s monstrous couple consummating 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 queemess of the film, would have been much stronger
had the film not undergone extensive reshooting before its theatrical release. In scenes
originally 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 introductory wedding sequence was to have featured a
homosexual photographer until the Production Code authorities cautioned against this and
the entire sequence was scrapped.84 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
queemess of the Satanic cultists. Director Edgar Ulmer’s original description of them was
to make them appear “as aberrant as possible. A stable of misfits, members of the decadent
aristocracy of the countryside.” Their gender-bending was to have been made apparent by
the addition of a character named Frau Goering, “to be played by a man, the dark fuzz on
her lip suggesting Hitler’s moustache.”85 The Production Code authorities quickly nixed
those ideas: “it would be well to avoid any suggestion o f German nationality in presenting
these people. Also, in this scene, care should be taken to avoid any suggestion of
homosexuality or perversion of any of the characters.”®5 Nonetheless, the scene (as does
the film itself) remains a high point of German Expressionist design, from Karloffs
angular makeup 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 by the woodcuts of Aubrey Beardsley,
an artist of the Decadent School renowned for illustrating editions of Oscar Wilde’s work.
83‘Review of THE BLACK CAT Variety (May 22,1934).

84MPM files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.
“ Mandell 190.
88MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.
66
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 frightening?) to realize that the spectre of
homosexuality and the German Expressionist style were used in a very similar way in both
Nazi Germany and 1930s Hollywood cinema: to signify decadence and depravity.
Conclusion: De-Repressing the Homosocial Triangle in WHITE ZOMBIE

While the figure of the homosocial triangle is usually theorized to explain how male
homosociality serves to bolster patriarchy, it can also be invoked as a device used to mask a
sublimated or repressed homosexual desire. In THE RAVEN and THE BLACK CAT, the
queer couples’ desires are displaced onto violence and torture, while in a film such as
WHITE ZOMBIE, the break in the homosocial/homosexual continuum is linked to another
gothic signifier-that of the predatory bird. Made in 1931 by an independent producing
team who shot much of their film on sets left over from DRACULA, Victor Halperin’s
WHITE ZOMBIE is remarkable in that it plots several homosocial triangles before
revealing the homosexual desire that lurks beneath them.87 In the film, the typical young,
white, heterosexual 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 attentions 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” Madeline and Neil. Beaumont, who is less directly linked to the
queerly supernatural, is hysterically infatuated with Madeline and begs her to many 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
87An account of the racial implications of WHITE ZOMBIE can be found in Tony Williams,
“WHITE ZOMBIE: Haitian Horrors," Jump Cut28 (April 1983)18-20. Its production history is
accounted 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 (Hollywood, California: The
ASC Press, 1989) 147-155.
67
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 “kiir
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
o f queer desire is echoed in a scene in Legendre’s sugar mill, which he staffs with zombies:
previous enemies who 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.” Flustered, Beaumont, who has refused to shake Legendre’s hand, replies
“No, the.: 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. (Interestingly, this tilt shot of the zombie “from feet to
hairy chest” was one of the Studio Relations Committee’s suggested deletions.88)
Madeline “dies” but is revived by Legendre and Beaumont and the three of them
retreat to Legendre’s castle in “the Land of the Living Dead.” Once there, the triangle is
reformulated between Madeline with Beaumont and Legendre vying for her affections, but
Legendre now seems less interested in her (“I have other plans for Mademoiselle”) than in
Beaumont himself. It is at precisely this moment that the homosocial suddenly shifts to the
homosexual. Legendre drugs Beaumont and tells him forthrightly “I have taken a fancy to
you, Monsieur.” Out of nowhere a vulture appears at the window and its cry pierces the
air. Initial reviews of the film were unable to follow the symbolic logic of this move, even
as one of them did note the key to the code: “to go on would only lead to a description of
why the eagles [sic] screamed, and that would prove very little, indeed, in the orderly
scheme of life. There was, in short, no great reason.”9* On the contrary, the bird signifies
“ M -\A files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.

" L. ., “Beyond the Pale” (Review of WHITE ZOMBIE), The New Ybrfr Times (July 29,1932)
18:2.
68
the emergence of Legendre’s homosexual desire. (The vulture as symbol also figures
significantly in Freud’s reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s historical homosexuality.)
Beaumont now realizes what is happening, and understands the vulture as a symbol of
Legendre’s homosexual plotting: “The vulture! You! No-not that, not that!” The scene
fades to black, and when we return, Beaumont has lost his tie and is wearing a different
(white) jacket. During the ellipse something terrifying has transpired which has caused him
to lose his clothing; in losing his tie, Beaumont is further symbolically feminized, and it is
now possible that he h?s become the titular WHITE ZOMBIE, not Madeline.
In a scene tc be repeated in horror films throughout the rest of the century, one
member of the horrific queer couple now sadistically taunts the other who is suffering at his
hand: “Can you still hear me? It is unfortunate you are no longer able to speak You
see, you are the first to know what is happening None of the others did You
refused to shake hands once. Well, well, we understand each other better now.”
Immediately preceding this scene had unfolded a sequence reminiscent of F. W. Mumau’s
NOSFERATU (1922), wherein the hero and entranced heroine reach out to one another
telepathically. Using dissolves and wipes, director Halperin contrasts Neil and Madeline's
“normal” heterosexual desire with the sadomasochistic queer desire between Legendre and
Beaumont. Now that he has “taken” Beaumont, Legendre (like a homosexual with an anti
heterosexual “agenda”) tries to make Madeline stab her husband. The knife is stopped by
the hand of the old priest, and eventually Legendre and Beaumont fall over the cliff
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 filmmakers, 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 reso. ion. While outright homosexuality was considered taboo by the
69
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,
sadomasochism, 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 tuch ideas and structures of feeling, and the themes and
representational codes which were developed 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
orders 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,
triangulating their desires through the heterosexualized normal couple. This particular
formation of classical Hollywood horror film facilitates 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 whence the threat of
homosexuality emerges in symbolic terms. It is from this particular part of the continuum,
that which has been forced below the ordered surface of consciousness and/or social
convention, that the uncanny acquires so much of its charge, and conversely, that
homosexuality is often figured in nightmarish, horror movie terms.
70
Shock Treatment:
Curing the Monster Queer during World War II
DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936), although the most obviously “lesbian" monster movie
of the classical period, has several striking formal patterns which make it important to a
discussion of how the monster movie changed drying the years surrounding and during
World War Two. While the film retains its classical status by linking homosexual desire to
the usual Hollywood honor film signifiers of depravity (bestiality, necrophilia,
sadomasochism, incest, racial Otherness, modernism, and the construction of the queer
couple), it also looks ahead to a new set of signifiers which would become the chief foci of
the monster movie's narrative during the war years-an increasing domesticization of the
monstrous figures, the idea of monstrous communities, less interest in the so-called
“normal” couple, and a more vigorous interest in psychiatry or medical science as a tool for
treating and/or eventually “curing" the monster. Like the debate over homosexuals,
monsters were increasingly figured as a problem best approached through medical and/or
psychiatric intervention, rather than legal or religious means. Yet, while many of the
World War Two era horror films insist that the monster queer can be cured (or at least
understood) through psychological means, many others reflect a deep ambivalence about
the figure of the psychiatrist himself, as well as his “psychiadabra,” as one 1941 Time
magazine article succinctly put it.1
Perhaps because of her female status, Dracula’s daughter, the Countess Marya
Zaleska (Gloria Holden) is one of the most equivocal monsters of the classical period; in
fact, she actively desires to be cured of her condition. This “condition” is directly
expressed in terms of her queer sexuality, her non-traditional gender role, and death: she
longs to be “free-firee to live as a woman. Free to take my place in the bright world of the
living, instead of among the shadows of the dead." The Countess makes it quite clear that
she “wants to live a normal life-think normal things.” Like an ego-dystonic homosexual,
’ “Medicine," Time (January 27,1941): 20.
71
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 - i t ’s too, too,
ghastly—” overcome her, and she is forced to seduce her victims and drain their bodily
fluids. Her surly manservant Sandor, a neigh-saying bitchy queen and supreme fatalist
about their minoritized condition, is far less optimistic about ho1chances for a cure.
While some "real life” homosexuals probably w oe interested in curing themselves
at this point in time, many others were not interested at all, if a remarkable first person
essay from the Forum is any indication.2 The Forum was a magazine of political and
social commentary that prided itself on tackling controversial issues such as evolution and
the separation of church and state.3 One particular Forum article from 1938 chronicles its
author’s life as a butch woman (she refuses to use the label lesbian because of its negative
connotations) and recounts in vivid detail terrible social ostracism, sexist employers,
unhappy and suicidal lesbians, and a barbaric encounter with the medical profession. She
might have drawn some support for her disgust with medical models of homosexuality had
she read an item in a 1937 Science News Letter entitled “Hairy Chest is Not a Sign of the
Masculine He-Man,” a short essay which debunked the idea of essentialist gender roles:
"Gradually, as they are attacked by scientific study, many so-called sex differences are
melting away.”4 Yet, the wheels of medical progress grind slowly, and it would be another
decade at least before many people started to realize that nonconformity to traditional gender
roles did not necessarily correlate with sexual object choice. Nonetheless, while the author
of the Forum essay probably would have found DRACULA’S DAUGHTER’S desire for a
cure to be misguided, she nonetheless might still have identified with other counter-
hegemonic monsters of the classical Hollywood horror film (or even Sandor), since she
characterizes herself as "constantly having to fight against an overwhelming disgust with
humanity,” precisely because of its unjust and cruel legacy of oppression towards women
*Marion Joyce, "Right From Slander," The Forum 100:2 (August 1938): 90-94.
3for a brief overview of the magazine’s history, see Ronnie W. Faulkner, “forum," American
Mass-Market Magazines, eds. Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie (New \brk: Greenwood Press,
1990) 126-129.
4"Hairy Chest is Not a Sign of the Masculine He-Man,"Science News Letter(May 8,1937) 297.
72
and queers.3
DRACULA’S DAUGHTER’S expressionist lair is an artist’s studio in London’s
Chelsea district, which along with her queer sexuality, interest in music, and bohemian
lifestyle, easily suggests to the spectator a connection with New York City’s Greenwich
Village and its burgeoning homosexual community. (A thorough history of London’s gay
neighborhoods has yet to be written; Chelsea nonetheless was known as a place of similar
social and sexual transgression.) In actuality, the Countess preys upon both men and
women, although her vamping of artist’s model Lily (Nan Grey, that same year also one of
Universal’s THREE SMART GIRLS) and secretary/heiress Janet Blake are iier most often
remembered conquests. These are also the scenes that caused the most discomfort at the
Breen office. Several versions of a (very different) script had initially been rejected by the
Production Code authorities because of their “very objectionable mixture of sex and
horror.” When the final version of the script was approved, the Breen office noted that the
seduction scene between the Countess and Lily would “need very careful handling to avoid
any questionable flavor.. . . The whole sequence will be treated in such a way as to avoid
any suggestion of perverse sexual desire on the part of Marya or of an attempted sexual
attack by her upon Lily.”6 Yet, for the attuned spectator, the lesbian implication is as
unavoidable as was the male homosexual connotation in other contemporary horror films:
Countess Zaleska triangulates her desire through the “normal” couple just as did her
monstrous male counterparts. And, while she ostensibly wants the tough talking
psychiatrist, Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) to cure her, the climax of the film occurs when
she threatens to seduce his girlfriend Janet.
The debate over normality, and the monster’s etiology, are activated in the film as
per usual, but the place of that discourse is now much closer to home. Professor Van
Helsing is still on hand to explain the ways of the vampire, but the chief voice of
hegemonic “normality” has shifted from an eccentric “expert” to an institutionalized medical
“Joyce 94.
73
discourse which works in tandem with Scotland yard rather than with folkloric talismans.7
This change is indicative of a larger shift in this and later films, away from foreign exotic
lands and singular exotic characters to a more localized, familiar setting and identifiable
state apparatuses of “normality," both repressive (the police force) and ideological
(psychiatry). Thus, rather than staking first and asking questions later, as would Van
Helsing, Dr. Garth has faith in his profession’s ability to “normalize” any untoward
obsessions: “Like any disease of the mind it can be cured through sympathetic
treatment.” Like many so-called “cures” for homosexuality, this “sympathetic treatment”
apparently consists of denial and “will power.” Garth tells the Countess she must “meet it
[and] fight it” if she is ever to be free of “it.” True to generic conventions, her unconscious
sexual urges are conflated with the unnatural (or supernatural), yet the Countess herself
does suggest their universalizing potential: “Perhaps there are more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamed about in your psychiatry, Dr. Garth.”
Normality in the film is itself none too appealing. Dr. Garth is an active
misogynist, and his “normal” heterosexual relationship with Janet is based as much on
mutual antagonism as attraction. The film also conflates unproblematically a romantic
interest between patient and doctor with a professional one: both Garth and the Countess
have a strong sexual interest in each other as their many pointed gazes that cinematically
dissolve into a fireplace make apparent. Drawing upon another common construct of the
era’s fascination with psychiatrists (as well as the psychoanalytic processes of
transference), the confused Countess has fallen in love with her analyst. Despite her
phallic powers of seduction (symbolized through her hypnotic jewel), and her rather butch,
severe costuming (at least when she is on the prowl), Countess Zaleska, like many other
post-Code 1930s female characters, is rather weak-willed. She actually seeks less to be
“cured” of her obsession than to supplant one form of unconscious mental control
7Psychiatry 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 DAUGHTER and many of the horror films of the World War Two years, the
psychiatrist 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, especially those made at Universal Studios, the psychiatrist becomes a
new version of the mad doctor.
74
(Dracula's “spell”) with another (the discourse of modem psychiatry in general and the
patriarchal control of Dr. Garth in particular). This is made manifest when she
acknowledges that a cure is impossible, but still wants Dr. Garth to be her eternal
companion. The climax is played out back in Transylvania, where the seemingly
ubiquitous Universal Studios peasants are celebrating yet another fertility rite—this time a
wedding. Sandor, who has been promised eternal life, becomes jealous when the
Countess offers it to Garth, and Sandor shoots her with a cross bow before he himself is
shot and killed by a uniformed policeman. Van Helsing and Dr. Garth stand by helplessly;
their power to force the eradication of monsters is strong, but they are no longer the actual
physical agents of the monsters’ destruction.8 This is left either to the monsters themselves
(such tragic people will eventually cause their own deaths), or to the proper socially
sanctioned repressive state apparatuses; after all, psychiatry is supposed to help people, not
destroy them. Perhaps most significantly, the film’s final shot is a tight close up of
Countess Zaleska's face, not the patented shot of the normal couple's embrace, suggesting
both an increasing interest in the figure of the monster and a decreasing need for
“normality” to have the final word.
DRACULA’S DAUGHTER thus looks ahead to the themes and motifs of the
World War Two monster movie. For various reasons (Great Britain’s new restrictions on
horror films, Universal Studios undergoing a change of management, the public’s attention
to “real life” sex crimes in 1937-1938), cinematic honor went into a brief decline in the late
1930s, until successful re-releases of FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA in 1938 renewed
public interest in the genre. Starting with the rather expensive production of SON OF
FRANKENSTEIN in 1939, filmic horror underwent a revival that lasted throughout the
years of World War Two. Both the major studios and the minors (as well as “Poverty
Row” studios such as Monogram, Republic, and Producers Releasing Corporation) found
that monsters were again extremely profitable at the box office. Searching for new
formulas, the studios began to mix and match monsters, and even produced a series of
gangster-horror films, “queering” both genres by wedding two of the most phallocentric
8This 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.
75
and homoerotic genres into one.9 Yet, in many o f these films, tenor is tempered with more
and more sympathy for the monster. RKO remade THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE
DAME in 1939; already one of the most sympathetic of monsters, Quasimodo was made
even more so by Charles Laughton’s moving (and queerly tinged) performance.
Universal’s remake of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1943) also downplayed the
horrific aspects of the property in favor of lengthy opera sequences, and made its titular
character into an innocent musician who is cruelly wronged by the world. Similarly, MGM
cast nice-guy Spencer Tracy in their remake of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941).
And in Columbia’s RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943), a female doctor has sympathy
rather than disdain for a wolfman: his hairy palms indicate that he has fallen under the
vampire’s queer spell, an almost too-obvious metaphor for onanism, which itself had been
linked by many psychiatrists (as well as lay people) to the development of sexual
perversion.
Public awareness of homosexuality reached a new height during these years,
primarily due to the new set of social conditions wrought by the war.10 Slowly, the love
that dare not speak its name was being spoken, albeit in ways almost always obscurantist,
punitive, and homophobic. The linkage of homosexuality with violence and disease
remained strong. For example, the famous Lonergan murder case of 1944 (in which a
supposedly happily married husband killed his wife) was highly publicized in the popular
press, and much was made over the murderer’s alleged homosexuality, the psychiatric
evaluation of it, and how the condition might lead to murder.11 In another example, a 1945
9Some 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)
10For the most comprehensive account of how homosexuality was constructed and
understood during the years of World War Two, see Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The
History of Gay Men and Women in Wortd WarTwo (New fork City: A Plume Book, 1990). See also
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century
America (New Mark City: Penguin, 1991) 118-138, 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.
” See “Medicine,” Time (April 3,1944) 68-69 for one such report of the trial. The author of the
piece opines that “Psychiatric treatment sometimes cures homosexuality, especially when it is not
congenital."
76
Esquire review of THE LOST WEEKEND could opine that the film was superior to its
source novel since it left out the implications of its protagonist's homosexuality, arguing
that “The souse and the pansy are two different people.”12 However, it was the
government's decision to use psychiatrists in an attempt to “weed out” homosexuals from
the Armed Services that actually made millions of people openly confront an issue that for
many had hitherto only been whispered about. Recruits were now required to
acknowledge, categorize, and reveal their sexuality to a medical examiner. In “an era most
when silence most typically characterized society's approach to same-sex eroticism, the
military medical examination was a significant exception. For gay and non-gay men alike,
it represented the first and perhaps only time that they faced such inquiries in a public
setting.”13
Working under the assumptions of the gender-inversion model of homosexuality
(as well as the idea of homosexual predator and straight prey), it was feared that one or two
homosexuals might turn an entire military unit into pansies, rendering them unable to fight
like men. This new policy thus tacitly acknowledged a universalizing model of human
sexuality (since it was an attempt to “contain” the “virulent” threat of homosexuality among
supposedly “normal” men), even as it maintained a minoritizing belief that there was such a
thing as a “true” homosexual. This paradox was regulated by the psychiatric identification
of “true” homosexuals through “scientific means.” Most regularly this meant observing
men for effeminate tendencies: “Effeminacy was by far the most common characteristic
psychiatrists attributed to the typical homosexual.”14 However, a barrage of bizarre
methodologies based on the assumption that a “true” male homosexual always partook of
passive, “female” sexual pleasures were also employed. (These included tests for
12The review continues: ‘In their saga of a souse, Brackett and Wilder abandon the note of
lavender. Their drunken hero does not start bending 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
EsquireS readers, many of whom were probably fairly heavy drinkers, if the abundance of liquor
ads in the magazine were any indication of their readers? habits. Jack Moffit, “Movie of the Month,’
Esquire (November 1945) 101.
13D'Emilio 24.
“ Berube 156.
77
“patulous rectums” and repressed gag reflexes.13) Thus, even as it was acknowledged that
the same-sex environments of the Armed Services might lead “normal” men and women
into such vices, it was usually the “habitual” effeminate male homosexual or the mannish
lesbian who was most often singled out for persecution. When “normal-seeming” men and
women (i.e. those who conformed to traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity) were
caught in homosexual situations, they were more likely given another chance, since they
weren’t really “true” homosexuals, but had simply given in to understandable, situational
temptations. (It should be acknowledged that gay men and especially lesbians were
sometimes tolerated within the Armed Forces during the war years because they were
needed; undoubtedly the “mannish-ness” of the identified lesbians was seen as a positive [if
deviant] aspect of their condition. However, once the war was over, the organized
persecution of gay men and lesbians would become increasingly frequent.)
“Persecution” is not too strong a word to use when discussing these military and
psychiatric interventions.16 While psychiatry was supposedly invoked in order to provide a
more humane way of dealing with queer people (or “sexual psychopaths” as they would
become known in the value-laden military-psychiatric parlance), in truth it resulted in the
imprisonment or forced hospitalization of thousands of individuals, and the destruction of
tens of thousands of careers and lives.17 But psychiatry’s most damaging and cruel legacy
is to be found in the “sympathetic treatments” it has prescribed throughout the twentieth
18See Berube 149-174. See also the scientific treatise by Nicolai Gioscia, ‘The Gag Reflex and
Fellatio,” American Journal of Psychiatry 107 (May 1950) 380. 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.
18Interestingly, one of the main texts on homosexuality during this period was George W.
Henry’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (New \brk: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1941). It is
remarkable in that it presents case histories culled from cooperative homosexuals recruited by a
‘Miss Jan Gay" (!). It does not address treatment or intervention in any systematic way, but does
suggest in a 1948 edition that ‘more homosexuals 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).
17Berube 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.”
78
century for its diagnosed homosexuals: shock treatment, castration, vasectomy, testicular
irradiation, ovariectomy, nerve section, gender realignment therapy, electrical or emetic
aversion therapy, hormone injections, and even lobotomy.18 Most of these therapies were
based on the gender inversion model of homosexuality and were designed to “remove” the
feminine taint from male subjects, or vice versa, the masculine from female subjects.
While Nazi doctors experimented on their imprisoned subjects in Europe, similar types of
irresponsible “mad science” were practiced on the home front (and would continue to be
practiced even after the war) both upon patients who gave their “consent,” and those who
were deemed unable to give their consent. Other individuals were exposed to such mad
science when their parents signed them over to psychiatrists in the hopes of a promised
cure; many were forced to endure treatments which made those of the period’s horror films
seem almost mundane.
Partly this came about because psychiatry had become such a popular topic in all
spheres of popular culture, including the movies.19 Psychiatry was considered by many to
be the modem panacea, and in film after film the talking cure was successful in bringing
peace and contentment to troubled lives. Mostly, psychiatrists were used to uphold the
status quo of heterocentrist patriarchy, as in (perhaps most infamously) 1944’s LADY IN
THE DARK, in which psychiatrist Barry Sullivan assures corporate executive Ginger
Rogers that she would be much happier at home with a man to “dominate” her. In horror
films, the figure of the psychiatrist was a bit further removed from such realist issues, but
he too confronted social deviates and attempted to bring them back into the hegemonic fold.
Interest in helping monster queers rather than casting them out forthrightly (“Bum the
monster!”) was both altruistic and self-serving. Fighting a war against fascism meant that
’“See Berube, but also Jonathan Ned Katz, ‘Treatment 1884-1974,’ Gay American History:
Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., Revised Edition (New \brk City: A Meridian Book, 1992) 129-
201 .
19For a somewhat celebratory overview of the figure of the psychiatrist in American film, see
Krin Gabbard and Glen O. Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1987). The authors are brothers: Krin is a professor of comparative literature and
classics while Glen is a practicing psychoanalyst The work is immured in a somewhat
unproblematic acceptance of the entire psychiatric project For example, they identify ‘The
Golden Age’ of movie psychiatry as the late 1950s and early 1960s wherein there was a “growing
conviction in American culture that psychiatrists were authoritative voices of reason, adjustment,
and well-being” (84).
79
Americans had to take a long hard look at their own social practices, as well as be able to
mobilize a strong, unified force against the enemy. The Hollywood war film especially
dramatized the need for overcoming individual d ifferences and bonding against a common
enemy, although the sentiment can easily be found in a multitude of genres.
Other spheres of popular culture also resorted to endorsing traditional gender roles
as both a model of mental health and a patriotic ideal, even as the needs of the war economy
were forcing women out of the home and into the factory. Esquire magazine butched itself
up considerably during the war years: gone are the ads for male nudes and jokes about
pansies. Instead, the glossy “Vargas girl” feature was added to the magazine, delivering to
“real" men an objectified image of femininity that figured women as soft and pliable sex
kittens, even as the advertisers in the back of the magazine began to sell slacks for women.
One interesting example of heterosexism as patriotic ideal ran in Esquire in 1945. Entitled
“FAREWELL, Noel Coward,” the short essay is part of a “Who’s Hot, Who’s Not”-type
feature, and attempts to (re)define American masculinity by denigrating Noel Coward: “we
haven’t time to toy with the less healthy facets of our emotions.” The tirade continues:
“Where is the man? Your brilliance strikes us as a little tawdry. Like sequins in the
morning sunlight. And your concept of human values, like your singing voice, sounds
strangely off-key.”:o Coward’s homosexuality is not named directly, but it is clear from
this essay that in a time of war, men need to be traditional masculine men; i.e. they cannot
have questionable “human values” or be associated with femininity. Although the piece
itself reads like bitchy gay dish, it definitely argues that non-traditional gender roles are bad
for the war effort, concluding that “There are crises that can’t be met in a silk dressing
gown.”
The demonization of male effeminacy was strongly felt in the Hollywood films of
the era. While the depiction of homosexuality per se was still taboo under the Production
Code, homosexual connotation crept into the movies of the war years as it did in the
previous decade: often it was used to further delineate Nazi villains as evil, as in the
characterization of the effeminate German spy in Alfred Hitchcock’s SABOTEUR (1942).
Much • 'he monster queers of the 1930s had been linked to European decadence, this idea
“ "“FAREWELL, Noel Coward,' Esquire (December 1945) 35.
80
became even more pronounced during the war years. Popular magazines of the day created
a clear dichotomy between sexually normal Americans and the unmentionable sexual
deviances of the Nazis.
There is impressive support for the theory that the whole Nazi movement arose in
large measure out of the sexual frustrations of some groups in the German
population. Certainly, distorted personalities have been prominent among the
leaders of the movement and orgiastic “paganism” has been encouraged among the
Nazi youth. A telltale hatred for the morality of the Western Christian world runs
through the writings of the Nazi leaders.21
In film, the links betWw'm Nazism and homosexuality might be best exemplified by the
career of character aaor Martin Kosleck, whose roles, in retrospection, seem to be divided
between portrayals of Nazis (specifically Goebbels in CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY
[1939], THE HITLER GANG [1944], and HITLER [1962]), and queerly tinged outsider
figures in films such as THE MAD DOCTOR (1940), THE MUMMY’S CURSE (1944),
THE SPIDER (1945), and THE FROZEN GHOST (1946). (Kosleck would play mad
scientists well into the next decades in films such as THE FLESH EATERS [1964] and
AGENT FOR H.A.R.M. [1966].) Kosleck’s onscreen persona was slightly effeminate
and his German accent hinted at a secret sexual depravity forcefully coded in many films as
homosexual. In BERLIN CORRESPONDENT (1942), for example, his Nazi villain
orders two bare-chested storm troopers to torture his victim, while in HOUSE OF
HORRORS (1946), he plays a fey cat-loving artist in Greenwich Village who falls into a
murderous relationship with a grotesquely deformed man he fishes out of the river and
befriends (Rondo Hatton, who in real life did suffer from acromegaly). When members of
the critical establishment deny the Kosleck character’s genius, his friend sets out to murder
them, a plot very similar to the very gay THEATRE OF BLOOD produced years later in
1973. The film also embeds an explicit comparison between homo- and heterosexuality
into its coding of artistic styles: the “normal” heroic American male artist paints naturalistic
cheesecake, while Kosleck’s character creates modernist impressions of masculinity by
*’ George W. Herald, “Sex is a Nazi Weapon," The American Mercury54 (June 1942) 657-658.
81
sculpting his friend’s visage." One of the most interesting examples of the Nazi-queer-
monster can be found in Columbia’s RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943) in which the
vampire Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi) is directly linked to the German threat, both in World
War One and in World War Two.
Queers also began appearing with increased frequency in the gothic romances and
proto-no/r films of the war period.23 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 homosexuals along with rapists and
murderers. Vincent Price, whose persona would become increasingly important to the
American honor film as the years wait 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 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,” acknowledging that for certain audiences of the period, Vincent
Price, Clifton Webb, Monty Woolly, and other “professional sissies” always connoted
22Kosleck was apparently married for many years to "the wealthy and titled Eleonora von
Mendelssohn,' although by a 1982 account he was sharing ‘a house in West Hollywood with a
friend. It is filled with his antiques collection and the oils he has painted.” His good friends include
Angela Lansbury and he considers himself to be Carol Burnett’s greatest fan. Reported in Richard
Lamparski, Whatever Became 01.. ? 8th Series (New fork: Crown Publishers, inc., 1982) 161.
Trying to reconstruct the actual historical sexuality of Hollywood actors and actresses is
always a tricky business. Studio publicity departments and arranged marriages of convenience
work to heterosexualize many individuals who otherwise might have been or continue to be queer
in their actual desires. One place I have found interesting 'clues' regarding certain individuals is in
books such as Richard Lamparski’s Whatever Became of.. ? series. Kerwin Mathews, for instance,
who played the rugged heroes in the fantasy films THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958),
THE THREE WORLDS OF GULLIVER (1960), and JACK THE GIANT KILLER (1962), is discussed
in one of Lamparski’s books as follows: 'Kerwin Mathews has lived in San Francisco since 1970.
He manages Pierre Deux, a shop in the midtown area specializing in antiques and fine fabrics....
Kerwin Mathews has remained a bachelor.’ While these facts in and of themselves hardly
constitute an “outing,” and indeed might be considered an unnecessary essentialization of gay
male lifestyles in the 1970s and 1980s, I nonetheless find them provocative and pregnant with
meaning within the context of MathewsS overall career. (Whatever Became Of.. ? 8th Sehes [New
fork: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1982]).
” For a closer look at queers in film noir, see Richard Dyer, “Homosexuality and Rim Noir,' The
Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (New fork: Routledge, 1993) 52-72.
82
some degree of homosexuality/4 This is also the period when Peter Lorre, George
Sanders, Tom Conway, Anne Revere, Judith Anderson, and Agnes Moorehead played
movie villains, often including Nazis; each of these actors (along with many others less
well known) suggested queemess in their characterizations by virtue of their gender-
bending personas.23
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 s:ale.” 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
thing.26 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 studly matador.27 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 considered for Vincent
Price’s role in DRAGONWYCK, and the role of Waldo Lydecker in LAURA (1944), two
2t Discussing the perversities of Clifton Webb’s famous turn as MR. BELVEDERE, Parker Tyler
acknowledges the logical outcome of conflating horror/science fiction tropes with queer ones:
"Can't you imagine the Webb baby-sitter a monster who converts human babies into animated toys
for little girls on Mars?~and the police not destroying him till he has consumed at least ninety
minutes doing his dreadful thing? But what am I saying? Take a look at the next installment of that
perennial TV favorite, The Addams Family, whose character Uncle Fester is an ugly, bald, middle-
aged version of the classic sissy-boy, girl-shy and girl-crazy, mental age about nine. Transparently
he has just read What Everyone Always Wanted to Know About Sex (sic), precocious boy-doll that
he is." Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1973; New 'fork: Da Capo
Press, 1993) 330, 336-7.
25See Patricia White, ‘The Queer Career of Agnes Moorehead,” Out in Culture: Gay,
Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 91-114 for a discussion of Moorehead's career as well as
interesting thoughts about the marginalization of such characters and character actors within
mainstream Hollywood film.
“ See Mank, Hollywood Cauldron (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1994) 244-246
for an account of Cregar’s sexuality. He apparently had a chorus boy lover, and frequently
appeared in drag at Hollywood parties. At Danny Kaye’s Oscar party in 1943, Cregar won a mock
Oscar for ‘Best Female Impersonation of the 'fear."
83
other famous queer movie murderers of the era.2* In films such as THE LODGER
(1944), HANGOVER SQUARE (1944), and I WAKE UP SCREAMING (1941), Cregar
played “sexual psychopaths,” human monsters that predate the sexually confused killers of
the 1980s slasher film. In I WAKE UP SCREAMING, for example, Cregar’s corrupt
police inspector is called a “ghoul” by the film's heroine and the mise-en-scene continually
figures him within shadows and the imagery of death; hero Victor Mature refers to him
(ironically?) as “a gay dog.” THE LODGER, based on the history of Jack the Ripper, also
barely conceals a homosexual subtext: Cregar’s psychopath waxes rhapsodically over a
portrait of his dead brother, calling it “something more beautiful than a beautiful woman.”
H ie “real life” maniacs and villains that these queerly tinged character actors created
during this period stand in stark contrast to the more traditional and fantastic monsters
which were still being produced at Universal and elsewhere. In many ways, the more
realist Nazis and psychopaths of these proto-noir films are much closer to the public’s
concept of homosexuals than are the vampires and werewolves of the era’s B monster
movies. Yet almost all of these films share the idea that monsters, either “real life” or
fantastic, might be understood, if not cured, by way of psychological methodology.
Because of this, the classical movie monsters were no longer to be feared in quite the same
way. While during the classical period monsters were primarily evil diameters who sinned
against God, Mankind, and the Natural Order, now they were “tragic” figures who, with
the proper care, might be cured of their “unnatural lusts.” The films made at Universal
Studios, while ostensibly continuing their monster sagas of the 1930s, reflect a growing
interest in psychiatry as a tool for correcting social deviance, but ultimately suggest that
their monstrous contagions are beyond medical intervention. Those made at RKO under
Val Lewton reflect a growing awareness of homosexuality, homosexual communities, and
the dynamics of homosexual oppression as it was played out in society and the military.
Indicative of these shifts toward an increasingly complex understanding of the monster,
there was also less focus on a happy heterosexualized closure for the films--many
eschewed the “normal” couple altogether and instead focused soley on their queer
protagonists, suggesting, as will the horror films of later decades, that it is the monster
84
queer whom the audience really comes to see and identify with, and not the
heterosexualized heroes and heroines.
Universal Cures
Immediately before and during the years of World War Two, Universal Studio’s horror
films began to employ a more humanistic depiction of their monsters. In the mid-to-late
1930s, Universal’s classic monsters had ostensibly taken BRIDEs and had SONs and
DAUGHTERS; in the 1940s they set up several HOUSEs together, as one review for
DRACULA’S DAUGHTER had put it, “Universal is making out quite a case for the home
life of the monsters.”29 This bringing of the queer force into the realm of the hegemonic
sphere also necessitated a geographic shift from the far reaches of Transylvania to a
location closer to home. While many of Universal’s monster sequels maintained 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 psychological anxiety and crime
rather than shambling monsters.” Universal’s highly successful run of MUMMY sequels
were almost all set in America,” and their newest monster (destined to become a “classic”),
THE WOLFMAN (1941), is also Americanized, even though he encounters his troubles in
England. Significantly, his monstrous condition is now characterized as “a disease of the
mind [that] can be cured.”
Somewhat remarkably, 1943’s SON OF DRACULA, set in the American South,
tells the story of a young woman named Kay who knowingly brings Dracula to her ante
bellum mansion in order to many him (at the local Justice of the Peace), in order to receive
" Rank S. Nugent, “Review of DRACULAS DAUGHTER," The New Ybrfr Times (May 18,1936)
14:2.
“ These films indude CALLING DOCTOR DEATH (1943), DEAD MAN’S EYES (1944), WEIRD
WOMAN (1944), FROZEN GHOST (1945), STRANGE CONFESSION (1945), and PILLOW OF
DEATH (1946).
31Of THE MUMMY’S HAND (1940), THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1942), THE MUMMY’S GHOST
(1944), and THE MUMMY’S CURSE (1944), only the first Is set in Egypt For a closer examination
of how these films adapt the classical horror film’s parameters, see Bruce Kawin, “The Mummy’s
Pool,"FHm Theory and Criticism, Third Edition, eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New Ybrk:
Oxford University Press, 1985) 466-481. As Kawin notes, THE MUMMY’S GHOST is espedally
interesting in that the Mummy actually gets the girl at the end of the film.
85
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 America because it is such a
“young and virile race”-n o t only does he suck the blood of a southern patriarch, but he
also attacks a small boy. Mirroring a social situation 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 committed 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 ?
“vampire”: “Don’t use that word Frank—we don’t like it! Say rather that we are undead-
immortal.” Unlike the Hollywood horror film's traditional pattern of narrative closure,
Frank eventually chooses to bum Kay to death rather than save (or join) her. The heroine
herself, having become queerly sexualized, must be put to death.
In Universal’s many mad scientist films, a paradoxical relationship towards science
was still expressed, and their queer couples became increasingly domesticated. Usually the
plots of these films revolve around the attempts of medical science to cure the monsters
(rather than create them in the first place), to somehow make them “normal” enough to be
integrated into society. The curative powers of science had been featured a few years
before the war in THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936). In it, Dr. Janos Rukh (Boris Karloff)
becomes exposed to “Radium X” and is slowly transformed into a maniacal glow-in-the-
dark killer. While his monstrous condition is the result of a scientific mishap, science is
also his salvation: Dr. Felix Benet (Bela Lugosi) is able to render Rukh temporarily
“normal” with a “counteractive” serum. Like a homosexual with a double life, Rukh is
adamant that his secret be kept in the closet: “Tell no one of this! Promise me!” Furthering
the metaphor, Rukh’s radioactivity gives him ample reason to avoid his young wife, and
later in the film he solicits a man in the street in order “to do you a benefit-the greatest
benefit one man can do another.” As the logic of paranoia dictates, Rukh murders the man
as part of his plot to appear dead. Karloff as Rukh (“I have beat called-unorthodox”) has
already been “homosexualized” by the presence of his domineering mother. Ultimately
Rukh kills Benet and causes his own death when his mother confronts him about his
“condition.” Like the scientific discoveries of the FRANKENSTEIN films and the mad-
86
science melodramas they inspired, the Radium X in THE INVISIBLE RAY contains the
potential for both good and evil. The prologue to THE INVISIBLE RAY explicitly situates
the story within the realm of science, and figures “radioactivity'' as another form of
“dangerous knowledge." Like the knowledge of homosexuality in the 1930s, radioactivity
is best “whispered [about] in the cloisters of science,” even though it may one day “startle
the universe as feet.” Thus, even as these things may be part of the natural world, they still
evoke much anxiety and are ultimately figured (through the narrative’s tragic course) as
things “man was not meant to know.”
The idea of bathing subjects in mysterious rays, subjecting them to chemical
injections, or even transplanting organs, seems to be 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 13
Again, as in many of 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.33
In truth, the correlation between homosexuality and sex hormones was studied intensively
during the war years; no definite conclusions could be drawn from much of the research.
“ “Queer Brain Waves," Science News Letter 34 (June 18,1938) 394.

“ “Temporary Death," Science News Letter 34 (June 18,1938) 394.
87
Interest in hormone 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 Neurologic Studies of Homosexuals,” or “Hormones of
Homosexuals.”74Seen in this light, the mad scientist’s tamperings with organ grafts and
brain transplants, which form the bases for Universal’s profitable on-going
FRANKENSTEIN films, takes on much queerer dimensions.
By 1939, the year SON OF FRANKENSTEIN was released, the sadomasochistic
monstrous couple so often played by Karloff and Lugosi had considerably softened into a
more friendly domesticity. The film initiates a very queer relationship between the Monster
and Ygor (Karloff and Lugosi again) that was popular enough to be reprised in the next
film of the series. While their relationship is still tinged with violent signifiers, a physically
loving aspect of their relationship is hinted at as Ygor constantly touches and strokes the
monster. Ygor hesitatingly tells Frankenstein, “He’s my-friend. H e-he does things for
me.” Ygor is also frightfully possessive (“No-you cannot take him away!”) and at one
point pushes aside Dr. Frankenstein while he is attempting to measure the monster’s pulse:
“He is well enough for me-and you no touch him again!” True to form, their queer desire
is ultimately channeled into the monster’s murderous rampages (Ygor uses the monster for
his own purposes of revenge against the townspeople). The fact that sexual politics are
part of theJilm’s appeal to terror is announced early in the film, when Baron Wolf von
Frankenstein's American wife inquires as to the peculiar arrangement of beds in the master
chambers. A maidservant tells her, “when the house is filled with dread, place the beds at
head to head,” as if all “dread” is the result of improper sexual interactions facilitated by
easy bed-hopping.33
Dr. Wolf von Frankenstein is distraught because the monster only obeys Ygor’s
commands and not his own. Ygor’s control over the monster is thought by Wolf to be
14Daniel Silverman and William R. Rosanoff ‘Electroencephalographic and Neurologic

Studies of Homosexuals,’ Journal of Nervous and Mental D isea sed (April 1945) 311-321; E. L.
Sevringhaus and John Chomyak, ‘Hormones of Homosexuals,’ Sexology 12 (December 1946)
740-741.
“ True to generic form, Mrs. Frankenstein remains clueless as to the queer goings-on,
apparently used to such distractions, but nonetheless Inadvertently voicing the problem: ‘He’s
deep In some experiment He’s terribly preoccupied now but just as soon as his problem’s
solved he’ll be gay as a lark again. He’s like that!”
88
“hypnosis-or something more elemental perhaps." Ultimately Wolf realizes that the
monster “loves Ygor and obeys him.” Meanwhile, the monster’s self-loathing (he is
displeased with his “ugliness” and his status as a social outcast) works to characterize him
as a humanized monster and further elicit spectator sympathy. When Wolf shoots Ygor,
the monster’s cry of anguish is heartfelt, and he seeks to replace his friend with
Frankenstein’s toddler son, Peter, in the process activating pedophilic connotations which
are still mostly latent in the genre at this time (but will become much more pronounced in
the honor films of the 1950s). Perhaps not surprisingly, these queer themes were even
more explicit in an earlier draft of the screenplay: in it, since his previous BRIDE had
spumed him, the monster demands that Frankenstein reanimate a dead young soldier to be
his special friend.*
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1943) also would have presented a
very queer relationship between the titular creatures, had not all scenes of the Frankenstein
monster’s dialogue been cut before the film’s release. For this particular sequel, Bela
Lugosi was cast as the monster. In the previous film of the series, Lugosi (as Ygor) had
succeeded in having his brain put into the body of the monster, so it is somewhat “logical”
that the monster should now speak with Lugosi’s voice. According to historians on record
in the published script edition of the film, Lugosi’s finished scenes were thought laughable
by studio executives and were excised from the release print.37 This occurred ostensibly
because of the actor’s thick Hungarian accent, but the scenes and dialogue in question were
also very homoerotic. In the original shooting script, Lany Talbot (THE WOLFMAN)
finds the Frankenstein monster frozen in an ice cave. The monster is weak and almost
blind as a result of the last film’s climactic fire, and Larry himself is still an ego-dystonic
werewolf, miserable because of his “condition.” Sitting around a campfire in the ice cave
the two outcasts tentatively establish a relationship; as one contemporary review subtitled
MThe monster searches for a new mate that the townspeople will accept ‘I - hear - you - say -
Father-all-right-people-not-understand. We - make - nice - man - people - all - like - us.” Wilis
Cooper, THE SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (Original Shooting Script), ed. by Philip J. Riley
(Hollywood: MacImage Rlmbooks, 1990) 89. See also 85-91,174-175, and 179-196.
37See Philip J. Riley, ed., FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (The Original Shooting
Script), by Curt Siodmak, Production Background by Gregory Wm. Mank (Hollywood: Magiclmage
Rlmbooks, 1990).
89
“When Gentlemen Meet” campily noted, “they both hit it off magnificently.”38 The scene
was tenderly written and had the monster confide to Lariy that “you are my friend. . . I
need friends-so do you. We can help each other.” Despite his warm feelings for Larry,
the monster is misanthropic and angry with the society that has hounded him for so long: “I
shall use it [a new brain] for the benefit of the miserable people who inhabit the world,
cheating each other, killing each other, without a thought but their own petty gains. I will
rule the world! I will live to witness the fruits of my wisdom for all eternity.”'9 This type
of powerful wish-fulfillment fantasy is certainly part of the genre’s appeal to
disenfranchised minorities; situated here within the increasingly domestic space of the
monstrously queer couple, the implications are hard to overlook.
As the film progresses, the monster develops quite an attachment for Larry, one
perhaps more fitting of a jealous lover than a monster bent on the destruction of
humankind. When Larry does so much as move away from the monster to the other side
of the room, the monster nervously calls out “Wait! Don’t leave me-wait!” The script
continues: “I was afraid you’d run away ” Left on his own, the monster wanders into
the villagers’ Festival of the New Wine and causes panic, but Larry saves him and takes
him home to the ruined castle. Later, snuggled up together in blankets “found in
Frankenstein’s closet,”40the monster tells Larry he came into town because “I was afraid
you’d left m e-I thought you’d found [Frankenstein’s] diary and run away.”41 The
monster’s strength is eventually restored by mad science, but he and the Wolfman, in a
fatal embrace, together get washed away in a giant flood set by an angry townsman.
Although the monster and the Wolfman are less vile and violent toward each other in this
film (compared to the sadomasochistic exploits of Karloff and Lugosi during the classical
period), their monstrous relationship must still must end in death—here a sort of double
suicide as each half of the queer couple destroys the other. The film offers no good reason
for this development except the demands of the generic narrative pattern and the film’s
” Bosley Crowther, "When Gentlemen Meet" (Review of FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE

WOLFMAN), The New \brk Times (March 6,1943) 8:3.
30Siodmak, in Riley, ed. 64.
90
graphic advertising campaign, which had promised such a “battle of the monsters"
complete with a muscular and hairy Wolfman in a ripped-open tee shirt.
Other films from this series demonstrate psychiatry's newfound popularity. In
GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942), Dr. Frankenstein is characterized for the first time
as a psychiatrist: the plaque on his gate reads “Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein, MD--Diseases of
the Mind.”42 Dr. Ludwig (the second son of Frankenstein, played by the always fey
Cedric Hardwicke) lives in his own competitive, hierarchal, homosocial world with two
other doctors, Dr. Kettering and Dr. Bohmer (the latter played by Lionel “Pinky” Atwill).
The monster is humanized more than ever before, befriending a small child rather than
killing one (as he does in the original FRANKENSTEIN), and even walking into the town
square without the requisite villagers screaming in fear. Instead, they treat him as a
mentally ill vagrant, not a monster, and he even appears in a (somewhat) civilized court of
law. Ygor blackmails Dr. Ludwig (his connection to the the monster is the terrible secret
that must be kept hidden) into helping him cure the monster via a (healthy) brain transplant.
Ygor is at first jealous of the doctor’s attentions: “No, no, no-you cannot take my friend
away from me. He’s all that I have—Nothing else. You’re going to make him your friend,
and I will be alone." Eventually, Ygor hits upon a better plan and cajoles Dr. Bohmer into
placing his (Ygor’s) brain into the body of the monster. This act comes with its own queer
connotations; as Ygor tell the doctor, “You can make us one-we’ll be together always-my
brain and his body together!” Ygor in turn describes his plan to the monster as an act of
selfless love: “Tonight, Ygor will die for you!” Oddly enough, the monster doesn't seem
to care for this plan, and, in a moment of (homosexual?) panic, he kills Ygor, and kidnaps
the small girl he had befriended earlier in the film. He takes the girl to Ludwig and
indicates that it is her brain he wants. The gender-bending possibilities of that particular
operation would have to wait another 25 years to be explored in Hammer Films’
FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967), because it is Ygor’s brain that is placed
within the monster’s cranium, and not the little girl’s. Had the monster’s plan been
enacted, audiences would have been treated to a very unusual walking example of the
42For production background and a version of the original shooting script, see Philip J. Riley,
ed., THE GHOST O F FRANKENSTEIN (The Original Shooting Script) by W. Scott Darling
(Hollywood: Maclmage Rlmbooks, 1990).
91
gender inversion model of male homosexuality—“an/ma muliebris in corpore virili inclusa ”
-literally a young girl’s brain inside the monster’s hulking masculine body. While this
would have undoubtedly been a terrifying development for the series, it was apparently not
the type of horror Universal Studios was interested in showcasing so forthrightly.
While the classical monsters continued to be more humanized and normalized in
HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944), the film that most clearly makes a case for the
possibility of psychiatrically curing them is 1945’s HOUSE OF DRACULA.43 In it, a
good-heated Dr. Edelmann runs a sort of halfway house for wayward monsters. Both
Dracula 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 “induce 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 Wolfman is more serious about his cure. Depressed and suicidal because
of his own particular set of queer desires, he attempts to throw himself off a cliff when he
learns Edelmann may not be able to help him. Eventually the good doctor diagnoses
Larry’s condition as a glandular-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 transfusion, he gives Dr. Edelmann some of
43 P induction background and a version of the original shooting script, see Philip J. Riley,
ed., HL 3E OF DRACULA (The Original Shooting Script) by Edward T Lowe (Hollywood:
Maclmage Rlmbooks, 1993).
92
his own blood. Now contaminated 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 o f “monsterity,” like homosexuality, 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. The heterosexualized normal couple of the
classical Hollywood horror film is no longer a key component of the formula. In HOUSE
OF DRACULA, the doctor’s assistant Meliza is the most “normal” individual in the film,
but she is aligned with the psychiatric/monstrous forces from the outset. Like a “fag hag,”
Meliza seems to have a thing for queer men, falling first for Dracula and then for Larry; in
so doing she is used by the narrative to buffer any manifest homoerotic interplay between
the monsters themselves.44 All of the other principles are monsters or linked with them.
Professor Edelmann, who would have been the Van Helsing figure of earlier films, here
succumbs to the lure of the monsters. His pretty but hunchbacked assistant Nina is also an
odd amalgam of monster and heroine (she dies at the end). And the voice of the
townspeople, the peasant Steinmuhl, is a badly scarred individual reminiscent of Dwight
Frye’s Renfield or his psychotic lab assistants. Most surprisingly, the film’s final moment
offers no “normal heterosexualized couple,” aside from the recently cured Larry and
Meliza. The Wolfman himself has become the male half of the formerly “normal”
heterosexualized couple.
What this precisely means (and to whom) is open to much interpretation. Would
gay and lesbian spectators have found these monsters’ cures as laughable, as damaging, or
as futile as those performed on real life homosexuals? Most reviewers of the era dismissed
44Many of my closest and dearest friends strongly object to the term “fag hag,’ arguing that its
derogatory connctatk ... convey a sexist and homophobic ideology. I can only agree, although I
tend to use the term &;: do ‘queer,’ attempting to reinscribe the former label of opprobrium as a
positive term. I use the word here and elsewhere in a descriptive, hopefully non-pejorative sense.
93
these films forthrightly, not bothering to consider their implications. Undoubtedly many
spectators also would have dismissed them, while perhaps some, attuned to a queer reading
protocol, may have recognized in these stories of reparative therapy a ghastly analog to real
life situations. Many people of the era were critical of psychiatry's newfound mission, yet
most of them lacked the vocabulary or space or fortitude to voice such a critique. One such
man (Henry Gerber) attacked the profession in 1944 in an anonymous letter to Time
magazine:
The subsidized psychiatrist- -yes-man-always wears a policeman’s badge under his
white frock. Psychiatry is a Political device to drag those to the concentration
camp-euphemistically camouflaged under the term “state hospitaT-who have not
committal a crime but who are guilty of the heinous offense of refusing to be
suckers and to be exploited. Those who refuse to believe the political, religious and
moral fairytales current in our conventions, are styled psychopaths, degenerates,
perverts, radicals, infidels, etc."
Like Gerber’s understanding of the matter, these Universal FRANKENSTEIN films

present a paranoid-or is it accurate?-“take” on the psychiatric project, and suggest that the
attempted “curing” of monsters often leads to further trouble. The fact that monster movie
psychiatrists usually fall sway to the monsters’ charms in and of itself suggests a suspicion
that the profession was in some way linked to the social deviants that it treated (There
were plenty of gay psychiatrists even during World War Two.) Like the military's official
policies on homosexuality, these films acknowledge the universalizing potential of the
monster queer, suggesting that the “normals” might be attracted to him. The monster is
“normalized” to the extent that he might even become the ostensible hero of the genre, but
at what cost? For example, it is Larry’s “cure” that allows him to defeat Edelmann in
HOUSE OF DRACULA (although he will be a wolf again three years later in ABBOTT
AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN [1948]). Is the monster or homosexual only
able to perform the hero’s function once s/he has beat cured, i.e. dragged back into the
realm of normality? The idea that the monster queer can be the hero (or antihero) of the
genre will become increasingly prevalent in the horror films of the post-Stonewall era, yet
45Anonymous letter to 77/ne magazine, dated April 5,1944. Reprinted in Jonathan Ned Katz,
ed. ,Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New tbrk: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1983) 560-561. Gerber, under
his own name, wrote another such toiior to the American Mercury magazine in June, 1947,
‘debunking erroneous conceptions obout the much-maligned homosexual.” (Henry Gerber,
‘Homosexuals," American Mercury 65 (June 1947) 123-124.
94
the idea has been inherent in the genre for many of its readers since its inception. It was
especially prevalent during the horror films of World War Two, many of which begin to
eschew the normal heterosexualized couple altogether. These films do represent a
complicated and complicating shift in how society viewed the monster, away from
ostracized Other to tragic neurotic. The brief bit of compassion offered to him or her within
these films may be reflective of organized psychiatry’s attempt to deal with homosexuality
in more humane terms; however, as in real life, many of these good intentions proved to
have disastrous results.
Secret Societies and Shadowy Sailors at RKO

One of the biggest changes brought about by World War Two was the ever increasing
number of individuals and communities specifically identified as homosexual. As one
historian puts it: “World War Two created a substantially new ‘erode situation’ conducive
both to the articulation of a homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolution of a gay
subculture.”46 Richard Dyer expands upon this observation:
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 easily realise they were gay and well
known to be so.47
In other words, despite the Armed Services determination to “weed out” homosexuals
during the recruiting process, such attempts regularly failed and many gay men and
lesbians found themselves (and others like them) in uniform. For those who could “pass”
as straight, or for those whose deviances were overlooked, tentative communities of
homosexuals arose within the heterocentrist world of the Armed Services. The
contributions of some gay men and lesbians even became valued, and in some cases
“female independence and love between women were understood and undisturbed and even
protected.”48 Others were hunted out and expelled. Many of these less fortunate men and
46 D’Emilto 24.
47Richard Dyer, Now \bu See It Studies on Lesti?n and Gay Film (New Mark: Routiedge, 1990)
111.
“ Raderman 119.
95
women received the infamous “blue" discharge, which effectively denied them their GI
honors and benefits.49 Lesbian historian Lillian Faderman notes how these men and
women
were loaded on “queer ships" and sent. . . to the nearest U.S. port. Many of them
believed that they could not go home again. They simply stayed where they were
disembarked, and their numbers helped to form the large homosexual enclaves that
were beginning to develop in port cites such as New York, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, and Boston.50
Paradoxically, institutionalized government discrimination may have helped to solidify the

urban gay and lesbian community and its emerging sense of identity.
The idea of homosexuals forming secret societies and coteries was prevalent during
the Pre-Stonewall decades. While this notion would develop into the idea of homosexuals
forming almost communist cell-type structures during the 1950s, other commentators
understood that the “secret society" of homosexuals was necessary as a means of survival.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, writing in the 1950s as part of the debates surrounding the
Wolfenden Report, made this point clear, even as he still made recourse to horror him
rhetoric:
There are, I believe, groups of clubs of homosexuals with an organization of their
own, and a kind of freemasonry from which it is not all that easy to escape. So
long as homosexual offenses between consenting adults are criminal and punishable
by law, the pressure of this kind of freemasonry will remain and will operate
powerfully, for it gains strength from the fact that it must remain a secret society to
avoid the law. Into this kind of nightmare world—for it is a nightmare world-there
can be no entrance for the forces of righteousness until. . . they are delivered from
the fears, the glamour, and even the crusading spirit of the rebel against law and
convention who claims to be a martyr by persecution.51
While this shadowy, “nightmare world" of homosexuals would become a regular model of
straight society’s representation of gay and lesbian people in later decades, it is possible to
locate a more contemporary formation of the idea within several “horror” films produced by
Val Lewton at RKO between 1942 and 1946. These B films were not (as my quotation
40Berube 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.
“ Faderman 126.
*’ The Archbishop Canterbury, quoted in ‘Great Britain: Question of Consent’ Time 70
(December 16,1957) 22-25.
96
marks imply) honor films similar to those that had been produced in Hollywood during the
1930s, or even similar to those produced at Universal Studios during the 1940s. They
feature no hulking monsters and few Transylvanian crypts: instead they dwell upon implied
monsters and psychological horror. They focus on tone over shock effect, and feature
complex and elegant literary designs that make them similar to finely crafted short stories.
Allusions to high art abound: epigrams from from John Donne and paintings by Hogarth
and Boecklin are peppered throughout the films. Visually, the films employ chiaroscuro
lighting and Expressionist effects, all of which suggest that these films might be
understood as a link between classical horror films of the 1930s and the later 1940s films
noir which would soon supplant them, especially at RKO. Like the films noir, the Lewton
horror films depict a paranoid and pessimistic world wherein traditional roles of gender and
sexuality are perpetually in flux. Also like film noir, characters frequently find
psychological tenor within shadowy corridors and behind locked doors, and often the
narrative is concerned with the investigation of a female subject, in many cases by a
psychiatrist, played in two of the films by George Sanders's equally fey brother, Tom
Conway.
The man most often credited for the success of these films was producer Val
Lewton.32 Lewton was the nephew of Hollywood lesbian Alla Nazimova—producer and
star of the notorious “all-homosexual” SALOME (1923); her lovers included Natasha
Rambova, Mrs. Rudolph Valentino. In his earlier years, Lewton had earned his income
writing pornographic novels; undoubtedly these personal and cultural factors helped to
situate Lewton in a unique historical position from which he helped to craft films that
employed homo/sexual subtexts. Often in these films, homosexual signifiers help to
characterize a terrible secret or a group of odd fellows, a trope that both draws on and
foregrounds the phenomenon of the closet, wherein monster queers who are not “out” may
choose to “hide.” At other times, an implied homosexuality is part of the mysterious
relationship that exists between two people. For example, in CAT PEOPLE, Lewton’s
first RKO horror film, “odd girl” Irena is heterosexually frigid, but has a strange alliance
“ 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.
97
with a mysterious woman who shares her particular national and spiritual heritage, as well
as her “corrupt passions.” Their only exchange pointedly takes place during Irena’s
wedding celebration: the cat woman gives her an incredulous stare and greets her as “my
sister.” Screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, noted after the release of the film that
some audience members read a lesbian meaning into the action. I was aware that
could happen with the cafe scene, and Val got several letters 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 a man.53
Indeed, Irena’s monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men (specifically the
psychiatrist who is tries to cure her by making love to her) serves as an often-cited
metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the films of this era.54 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 violence.’”55 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
women, yet does not necessarily demonize either. Instead, it offers a fairly sophisticated
critique of the British class system, and the film’s moral seems to be that one shouldn’t be
53Quoted in Mank, Hollywood Cauldron222. DeWitt BodeenS career repeatedly dabbled in

homoeroticism. He also wrote the screenplay for BILLY BUDD (1962).
“ The production history of CAT PEOPLE is recounted in George E. Turner, “The Exquisite
Evil of CAT PEOPLE," The Cinema of Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner
(Hollywood, California: The ASC Press, 1989) 232-243.
55 Reported in Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror(Hew Vbrk: The Viking Press,
1973) 31. 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 FMms of Val
Lewton (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and John Brosnan, "Lewton and Company,"
The Horror People (USA: A Plume Book, 1976) 73-85.
98
frightened of people who are different from oneself, that they too deserve human
compassion as much as anyone. Boris Karloff as Master Sims, the corrupt ruler of
Bedlam, brings his usual lisping, shuffling, sadomasochistic persona to the film. Sims
seems to enjoy torturing his inmates, happily beating a young man who thinks he is a dog,
and even presents a nearly nude, gilded young man to an audience of aristocrats—yet his
actions are shown to be the result of his own paranoia and place within the class system.
Other characters include Lord Mortimer (Billy House), an obese noble “voluptuary" with a
black servant boy and no discernible interest in women (it is m?de clear he only values
women for their ability to make witty conversation), and the heroine’s effeminate friend
Varney (Skelton Knaggs). Some of the dialogue gets quite dishy, with Master Sims and
Lord Mortimer exchanging bitchy barbs, and the film’s nominal hero is a Quaker whose
religious beliefs ironically prevent him from doing anything too heroic. Above all hovers
the question of psychological sanity and the possible abuse of institutionalization: heroine
Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) is banished to the asylum because she offends the powers that be,
not because she exhibits a pathological condition.
THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943, also written by DeWitt Bodeen) is a somewhat
less well known Lewton horror film; it centers on a secret coven of Satanists who may or
may not also be homophiles. The film makes extensive use of quasi-lesbian characters in
its girls' school opening and at the “La Sagesse" cosmetics factory. There is nothing in the
film to characterize the Palladists (the men and women of the Satanist group) as
heterosexual; instead they use secret symbols to identify one another and are terrified of
being exposed. (“Why you fool! That symbol is us! She was asking about us!") The
Palladists can easily be read as gay and lesbian, especially since they are pointedly living in
Greenwich Village. Fashions, hairstyles, and behavioral mannerisms further distinguish
these people as being not quite “normal." Remarkably for the era, Jacqueline Gibson, who
has let the secret of the group slip to her psychiatrist (and is therefore marked to become the
titular “seventh victim"), is characterized as having had a loving relationship with another
woman. This woman later confides to Jacqueline that “The only time I was ever happy
was when I was with you." Another memorable scene that makes the latent lesbian erotic
menace manifest occurs when Chief Phlladist and “odd woman *Mrs. Esther Redi invades
99
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 certainly present at the dawn of the classical period
of Hollywood horror films, as evidenced by a 1930 Scribners Magazine essay about
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, apocryphal or
not, that the term “faggot” comes from the fagots thrown onto the fires used to bum such
victims at the stake. The analogy has also been frequently used in recent years in order to
describe the on-going discriminatory practices (“witch bunts”) against gay men and
lesbians in government service. Somewhat similarly, THE SEVENTH VICTIM invokes
the analogy in ways more sympathetic 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, don’t ask us.”57 In fact, it is part of the film’s
project to depict oomplex erotic relationships that ultimately defy the traditional narrative
demands of a happy heterosexual Hollywood ending. The secret symbol of the Palladists
is a skewed triangle inside a parallelogram, suggesting expanded romantic triangles and
quadrangles, rather than the enforced binaries of heterocentrist culture. The climax of the
“ Juanita Tanner, "Demoniac Possession,’ Scribner’s Magazine^! (June 1930) 643-648. 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, the author suggests that
uncontrolled sexual possessiveness is the truly immoral behavior, and suggests that we now
‘stop talking and thinking about sex as sex, now that the word has come to have such
contradictory meanings, and talk more intelligibly of physical attraction and mental attainment. . .
We shall think less of love as possession, more of it as live-and-let-live kindness.’
57Bosley Crowther, ‘Review of THE SEVENTH VICTIM,’ The New Vbrtr Times (September 18,
1843) 11:3.
100
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 herself, and the Palladists continue their
shadowy existence. Remarkably for a Hollywood film of this era, they are not punished in
any way. Ironically, it is a line spoken by one of the Palladists that lingers in the mind and
exposes the film’s ultimate ideological project: “Wrong? Who knows what is wrong or
right?" The inability to answer that question resonates with the inability of the characters tfr
know one another. (“I thought I knew her. Today, I found out such strange things.")
“Just because I’ve kept a secret from you doesn’t make a monster of me," says one
character, but she is wrong. In the world of these films, human beings are ultimately
unknowable; the things that make them monstrous are, quite literally, their secrets: the
unknown or repressed issues of human sexuality that they keep in darkened closets and
secret societies. It is the keeping of secrets, not necessarily the secrets themselves, which
leads to destruction.
This theme becomes the central one in the fifth Val Lewton honor film, THE
GHOST SHIP (1943, directed by Mark Robson and written by Donald Henderson
Garke), which contains one of the most sustained homosexual plots of any film of this
period. The film focuses on sailors, sexual repression, and the trope of the double; in so
doing, it recalls other homoerotic literary antecedents such as Herman Melville's “Billy
Budd” and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer."38 Richard Dyer has noted that sailors
have always occupied a privileged niche in the popular mythology of homosexuality, as
well as in homosexual literary history from the Greek Argonauts to Genet’s Querellede
Brest.
Sailors have especially figured in gay erotic tradition. . . for a number of possible
reasons: longer enforced periods spent in enclosed single-sex environments
suggests they may have greater homosexual experience; 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 produce
“ Also among its alleged sources was an unsolicited screenplay manuscript whose authors
sued Lewton and RKO following the film’s premiere. They eventually won their suit and the film
was withdrawn from theatrical exhibition. Prints of THE GHOST SHIP are still very hard to find,
although in 1994 it played as part of a Val Lewton retrospective in Los Angeles.
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well-developed physiques. Even their clothing, perhaps by association, seems
more erotic-open-necked tops suggesting broad chests; trousers worn tight at the
crotch and made of moulding serge; the flap fly; bell bottoms which emphasise, by
their oddity, naval costume as costume/9
As is appropriate for a sailor’s tale with homoerotic undercurrents, THE GHOST SHIP
does indulge in a bit of visual beefcake surrounding bare torsos and tight tee-shirts.
Interestingly, the one port wherein the ghost ship docks is named “San Sebastian,” a name
linked repeatedly throughout history with male queers and immortalized by homosexual
artists including Caravaggio, Tennessee Williams, Yukio Mishima, and Derek Jarman.
THE GHOST SHIP is also filled to the brim with overdetermined phallic signifiers.
Gleaming knives are featured prominently, first seen fin the film’s opening shot) in the
window of “Rubin's Seamen’s Outfitting Co.,” and eventually in the climactic knife fight.
Other phallic signifiers foregrounded by the text include hypodermic needles, scalpels,
guns, spikes, and cigars. One of the film’s most striking sequences involves a large cargo
hook that swings out of control during a storm at sea: it serves as an apt metaphor for
untethered and uncontrolled phallic power, and as such comes to represent the obsessed
Captain Stone’s monomania.
Like the crazed Saul in James Whale’s THE OLD DARK HOUSE, Captain Stone
can be understood much as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reads Claggart in “Billy Budd”: a man
with homosexual impulses but also severe internalized homophobia. Thus while Claggart
and Stone both desire a young seaman (Billy or Tom), they are simultaneously repulsed by
their desire. In the psychological sense, Stone, like Claggart, may “be described by some
such condensation as ‘homosexual-homophobic knowing.’ In a more succinct
formulation, paranoia.”® As the tale progresses, Stone grows ever more paranoid and
almost confesses the nature of his internal conflict: “I’ve done things I couldn’t remember
doing. I’ve had moments when I felt that I was on the verge of losing control. Of doing
some terrible, stupid, ugly things.” We learn that the previous Third Mate died in bed from
ss Dyer, Now \bu See /f 112. Interestingly, ‘Sailors’ anxieties about the boyishness, tightness,
and effeminacy of their uniforms surfaced during the war when thousands of sailors wrote letters
to \hnk about changing the Navy enlisted merfe uniforms" (Berube 319).
80Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistomology of the Closet (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1990) 97.
102
some kind of convulsion. A crew member further hints at a closeted secret when he speaks
of the dead mate: “He didn’t want to die-he was always telling funny stories.” Eventually,
Stone’s conflicted desires lead him to have Tom bound and gagged in his bunk,
hypodermically injected with a sedative, and prepared for the consummation of death at the
point of Stone's long knife.
However, even before the spectator has been introduced to Captain Stone and his
ego problems, the narrative has featured characters who in some way comment on Stone's
secret obsessions. In the opening shots of the film, Tom Metriam meets a blind musician
and then a mute “Finn,” played by character actor Skelton Knaggs, who also played the
swishy Varney in BEDLAM (1946) as well as a denizen of the queer underworld in THE
PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945). As the mute tells us (in a voice-over which
privileges his internal monologue for the spectator): “I am cut off from other men, but in
my own silence I can hear things they cannot hear, know things they cannot know.” The
blind man (who is also amazingly prescient) and the Finn serve in the narrative as displaced
homosexual figures: different from “normal” men, yet possessing a secret knowledge of
their own. They have accepted their difference, however, in a way that Stone has not.
During the first third of the film, a courtship of sorts takes place between Captain
Stone and his new Third Mate. The interaction between Stone and Tom is riddled with
thinly veiled homosexual implication. The narcissism implicit in psychoanalytic models of
homosexuality can be found in Stone’s approach to hiring Tom: “I chose you Merriam.
Your history could have been my own.” He wants to mold the young officer in his own
image. The mise-en-scene further accentuates the doubling of the two men: one striking
two-shot frames them on either side of Stone’s mounted motto: “He who does not heed the
rudder shall meet the rock.” Stone is the rock in question, and the men who do not heed
his authority throughout the film are murdered by him. Stone first courts Tom with
friendly banter. “You know, that’s one of the nice things about long voyages—time for talk,
time for friendship.” However, again raising the possibility that Stone’s intentions are not
altogether “honorable,” radio operator Sparks warns Tom that “There’s a friendliness that
tries to get you to thinking wrong.” Tom is initially an apt pupil as Stone lectures about
authority, and the “difference between being a man and being a boy,” a master/pupil
103
arrangement that recalls Socratic methods as well as initiation rituals. Stone, as the older
man, falls into the more masculine role of teacher and leader while Tom is the feminized
student; Stone’s repeated pronunciation of Merriam as “Miriam” makes this relationship
obvious. Stone gleefully extols the privileges of masculine authority: “You’ll learn it.
You’ll even leam 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
diagnosis 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 tee-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 sadomasochism of military discipline.61 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
81This phenomenon can be seen in any number of alt-male situations, from prisons to boys’
schools to the military. Sex is used as a weapon to demonstrate power relations. The possibility
of open (loving) homosexuality is vociferously denied, while the repressed impulse returns in
jokes and colloquialisms. *Cocksucker became a favorite putdown among G.I.fc during the war.
When a G.l. was reprimanded by superiors, he was said to have ’had his ass reamed.’To ‘tangle
assholes’ meant to argue or tight; ‘asshole buddies’ were dose pals. Recruits playfully called each
other ‘sweetheart”’ (Berube 37).
104
sea, “Why, he can even many 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 [sailor] business.”42)
Stone’s failure to love either hetero- or homosexually is made explicit by the lone
female character in the film. Ellen, one of Captain 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 female character with dialogue to be seen on screen throughout the entire
film. The depiction of women in this highly stylized manner resonates with several
possible meanings. Firstly, it marks 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 honor films
are often aligned with the forces of darkness.63 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 understands 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 15 years I’ve
tried to give [Stone] love, instead of loneliness.” 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, becoming 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
"MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.

**See Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks," Re-Vision:Essays in FeministRm Criticism,
eds. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Maryland: University Publications
of America, Inc., 1984) 83-99.
105
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, “It is possible that they may
even turn out to be excellent soldiers.”64 And, once the war was over, Newsweek printed
findings that concluded that “homosexuals topped the average soldier in intelligence,
education, and rating,” and that “As a whole, these men were law abiding and hard
working.”45
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
spectator 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 w ell ” The idolatry
afforded to Tom by the Finn is unmistakably cast with homoeroticism and fetishization: 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.
44'Science: Soldiers and Sex,’ Newsweek22 (July 26,1943) 72.

15“Medicine: Homosexuals in Uniform,” Newsweek29 (June 9,1947) 54. Lest I paint too rosy
a picture, this article also reinscribes stereotypical notions of active/passive homosexuals, linkage
to mental disorder, and the rationale of cure.
106
Conclusion: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The points of intersection between filmic honor and the societal understanding of
homosexuality changed dramatically during the years of World War Two. The
medicalization of homosexuality had been occurring for decades, but the idea that it should
be the purview of psychiatric specialists was given a tremendous boost during the war by
the Armed Forces’ decision to have psychiatrists attempt to detect and discharge
homose’-cals from their ranks. In historicizing these particular films, it can be seen that the
issues surrounding homo/sexuality and psychiatry were a growing popular concern among
filmmakers. The FRANKENSTEIN series produced at this time at Universal Studios grew
increasingly homoerotic and often replaced the figure of the mad surgeon with that of a
psychiatrist, although more often than not he still fell victim to the spreading contagion of
monsterity. Val Lewton’s films, especially THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE GHOST
SHIP, offer complex meditations on the nature of human sexuality, meditations that have
proven to be quite sophisticated for their time and not necessarily homophobic. (Compare
them to THE UNINVITED [1944], wherein the evil ghost haunting a young girl is revealed
to be an express function of a past lesbian relationship.) Within the guise of the
psychological horror film, THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE GHOST SHIP make
profound statements on the deleterious effects of the enforced secrecy and the repression of
homosexuality within individuals, within the military, and within society at large.
Like their counterparts made at Universal, most of the Val Lewton horror films
were dismissed by critics without much thought. A much more typical “A” film approach
to the period’s treatment of monsters and homosexuals (and which critics had little choice
but to confront) can be found in MGM’s 1945 production of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
o f Dorian Gray, itself a novel produced under severe codes of “acceptability.” The film
partakes of many of the same tropes as other World War Two era honor films: an interest
in psychological processes such as guilt and repression, and a more humanized depiction of
its monsters—herein quite literally the queer amoral dandies Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield)
and Lord Hairy Wotton (George Sanders). (Laird Cregar, already famous for playing the
homosexual psychopaths discussed above, had been briefly considered for the role of Lord
107
Henry.66) True to the classical Hollywood formula, homosexual monster Dorian Gray is
associated with a foppish effeminacy, violent murder(s), the animalistic (a character calls
him “bestial, sodden, and unclean”), as well as racial exotica (the Egyptian cat, interest in
Buddhism, the writings of Omar Khayyam), and deformity (a misshapen dwarf leads him
into one of London's dark and mysterious dives).
As if to throw this all into clearer relief (unlike a Lewton film), MGM has
considerably heterosexualized the tale, primarily through the pointed use of a normalized
heterosexual couple (Twnna Reed and Peter Lawford) who barely escape from Dorian
Gray's aura of evil ana survive to bear witness to his tragic, monstrous (and deserved)
end. The film’s advertising campaign also played up a heterosexual angle: representations
of female victims in filmy nightgowns were draped across posters, while tag lines such as
“Women were his prey...romantic thrills his bait!” hinted more at heterosexual than
homosexual chicanery. When artist Basil Hallward confronts Dorian about the “moral
leprosy” which seems to have overtaken both him and his portrait, and refers to a
“wretched boy in the guards who committed suicide,” Dorian (and the script) is quick to
suggest that he killed himself over a woman, not threats of blackmail or internalized
homophobia. Since homosexuality cannot be spoken forthrightly, it must manifest itself
through Dorian’s monstrosity and clever connotative tropes: the play with Lord Henry's
cane (which becomes erect at his first sighting of Dorian), Lord Henry’s capturing of a
butterfly as an objective correlative to his capturing of Dorian Gray’s soul and “young
Adonis” body, and the placement of The Yellow Book within the story (its called “vile,
evil, corrupt, [and] decadent” by Basil Hallward). Repeatedly the characters talk of the
“curious stories” and “hideous things” that surround Dorian Gray, the “monstrous” and
“strange rumors about his mode of life,” and his “visits to the abyss” that exist in the “half
world of London.” Yet the “H” word itself cannot be spoken, and not even a “queer” or a
“gay” is slyly bandied about. Perforce, “monster” stands in for “homosexual.”
In short, in THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY—possibly the most overtly queer
film of the period-homosexuality is both everywhere and nowhere to be seen. From the
beginning, the Breen Office was alert to the story’s homosexual content, and in a pre-
108
production memo dated September 13,1943, insisted that “For obvious reasons, it will be
absolutely essential that there will be no possibility of any inference of sex perversion,
anywhere in this story.”67 The filmmakers “complied,” and upon its release the film
received its Production Code Seal of Approval. It was even rated A-2 by the Legion of
Decency. Yet, after the film was actually in release around the country, the Legion of
Decency wrote to Breen suggesting that they had all missed something. Based upon a few
perceptive film reviews and public response, the Legion now realized that “there were
portions in the picture which could be interpreted as conveying implications of
homosexuality.”68 Breen was “shocked,” but defended his Office’s approval of the film as
a psychological drama about the wages of sin. As this exchange amply demonstrates, this
kind of connotative homosexuality was (and for many still is) in the eye of the beholder.
As I have suggested, by 1945 it was becoming increasingly difficult to be truly ignorant of
homosexuality, yet the power of both social and individual denial of homosexuality seems
to know no bounds.69 Denial is also a useful means to show that you yourself have not
been infected with the dangerous knowledge of homosexuality. Bosley Crowther of The
New York Times, who certainly should have known better (of both homosexuality and the
work of Oscar Wilde), wrote of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY that “the whole thing
. . . makes little or no intelligible sense,” effectively distancing himself from its un/spoken
subject matter.70 The Variety review was somewhat more positive, calling the film “daring”
but also a “critic’s picture.” The review cautiously continues:
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 Hatfield does the Gray part, he’s singularly Narcissistic all
the way.71

“ MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.
” A personal anecdote: in coliege I had a somewhat older lover and the 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 increasingly outlandish theories.
70Bosley Crowther, “Review of V. IE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY’The New \txk Times (March
2,1945) 15:2.
71Char., ‘Review of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY" Variety (March 7,1945).
109
This review adapts itself to the prevailing “homosexuality-as-medical-illness” position,

even as it too refuses to say exactly what Gray was “pegged” as. However, the little slip
about any psychoanalyst wanting to lay his hands on the young Dorian Gray seems to give
the game away. The “open secret” of homosexuality that was (and is) required for the
social construction of “true” versus “situational” homosexuals, allows the medical,
military, and media discourses to construct the queer as monstrous Other (and vice versa).
In so doing, it masks the “normal” person’s universalizing desire for the minoritized queer,
the normal couple’s desire for the monster’s special charms, or as implied above, the
psychoanalyst’s desire for his homosexual patient’s body.
110
Pods, Pederasts, and Perverts:
(Re)Crlmtnalizing the Monster Queer In Cold War Culture
In many ways, the 1950s might be thought of as the darkest decade o f the twentieth century
for both monsters and homosexuals, as well as anyone else who might have considered
him/herself somehow outside the hegemonic construction of normality. The 1950s have
been described as a decade of conformity and containment, both at home (women were
being re-contained within the domestic sphere) and abroad (the spread of communism had
to be checked). And while racial minorities began to address the issue of their civil rights,
social difference for the most part was still feared and suspected; many Americans chose to
move within the lock-step patterns of a white bread suburban middle class culture rather
than risk the repercussions of being singled out as somehow (in the sentiments of the era’s
monster invasion films) “one of Them and not one of Us.” Indeed, a strict Self/Other
dichotomy seemed to permeate the culture of the era, both for movie monsters and
homosexuals. The qualified compassion that had been directed towards queer monsters
during the years of World War Two evaporated in the blazing heat of McCarthyism; a new
paranoia surrounding difference, be it political or sexual, added to a socially oppressive
atmosphere which fueled not only greater social persecution of homosexuals, but also
conversely the beginnings of an organized homosexual civil rights movement.
The post-war era also saw a newly inflected model of homosexuality gain
prominence, one that acknowledged that all gay men weren't necessarily sissies and that all
lesbians weren’t necessarily butch. While this might ostensibly represent a movement
away from understanding homosexuals as diseased and minoritized “sexual psychopaths,”
in truth the newly discovered “invisibility” or “passability” of homosexuals only led to
further hysteria. Homosexuals were now apparently everywhere—far more common than
anyone had hitherto suspected. The 1948 Kinsey Report on Male Sexuality reported that
I ll
37% of adult men surveyed had had at least one post-adolescent homosexual encounter.1
The statistics for women reported in 1953 were a bit lower 13% of women surveyed
reported homosexual experiences to orgasm.2 Kinsey also argued that human sexuality
could not be adequately described by terms such as homosexuality, heterosexuality, and
bisexuality, and instead theorized a seven point sliding scale which corresponded to an
individual’s complex relationship to both homosexual and heterosexual feelings. These
statistics and ideas w oe widely reported and discussed at length in the popular press of the
day.3 Many critics, and especially psychiatrists, were quick to question zoo’ogist Kinsey’s
findings, arguing that his sample was biased (it included only white college graduates in six
Northeastern and Midwestern states) and that his interviewing techniques did not take into
account the flaws and discrepancies of human memory. One such critic, psychiatrist
Lawrence S. Kubie, went on the attack in Time magazine and ultimately accused Kinsey of
denigrating the psychiatric profession as a whole. He further added that “The implication
that because homosexuality is prevalent we must accept it as ‘normal’ or as a happy and
healthy way of life, is wholly unwarranted.”4 Columnist Dorothy Thompson also warned
that the report holds “the danger of being used to justify unbridled license. If this
interpretation is drawn from a report so dubiously representative, its results may do more
evil than good.”5
While the medical community as a whole remained divided as to the causes of
homosexuality (most theories still focusing on too much or too little mother or father love),
many members of the psychiatric profession were all too ready to exploit the idea of
“curing” homosexuality for profit. One such doctor was Edmund Bergler, who apparently
' Alfred C. Kinsey, etai., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders,
1948).
2 Alfred C. Kinsey, etal., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders,
1953).
3See, among many others, “Medicine: Shocker on Sex,' Newsweek30 (December 1,1947)
52; ‘Medicine: How Men Behave,* 77ime51 (January 5,1948) 66; “Manners and Morals: How to
Stop Gin Rummy," 77me51 (March 1,1948) 16; “Medicine: Kinsey Speaks Out," Newsweek31
(April 12,1948) 51; and O. Spurgeon English, MD, “What Parents Can Learn Rom the Kinsey
Report," Parents 23 (October 1948) 26,144,146-148.
‘ Quoted in ‘Medicine:Dr. KinseyMisremembers," 77me51 (June 14,1948) 82.
*Quoted in “Manners and Morals: How to Stop Gin Rummy," Time 51 (March 1,1948) 16.
had something of a cottage industry treating homosexuals and then writing books about
them. A few of his books from this period (all for sale to the general public) include
Neurotic Counterfeit-Sex (1951), K insey’s Myth o f Female Sexuality (1954),
Homosexuality: Disease or Way o f Life? (1956), and One Thousand Homosexuals (1959).
Typical of the paranoia of his day, he asserts (in the original italics) that “the perversion
has become more widespread through artificial creation o f new recruits as a result o f the
dissemination o f misleading statistics ” His works repeatedly attacked Kinsey’s
findings and attempted to soothe his worried readers by asserting unequivocally that “it
has recently been discovered that homosexuality is a curable illness. "* Bergler’s works
also deny the possibility of bisexuality, calling the idea “as rational as one declaring a man
can at the same time have cancer and perfect health.”7 Read today, Bergler’s writings
themselves seem fueled by a neurotic hysteria found more regularly among fundamentalist
preachers and right-wing politicians. Unlike the more coolly detached “scientific” medical
positions espoused in earlier decades, the rhetoric employed by Bergler is now one of
moral anger and Christian righteousness. To him, there is no question that homosexuality
is a contagious disease, “a neurotic distortion if the total personality” and that “there are no
healthy homosexuals.”8 Tapping into another well of demonizing tropes, Bergler also
reminds his readers that Hitler's SS men were mostly homosexuals, and that the guards in
concentration camps were “frequently recruited from the ranks of homosexual criminals.”9
Sadly, the work of nascent homophile groups such as the Mattachine Society and the
Daughters of Bilitis was relatively unknown to the country at large, but Edmund Bergler’s
thoughts were printed by major publishers, reviewed in professional journals such as
Psychiatric Quarterly, and discussed in the United Press and Time magazine.10
In contradistinction to Bergler’s assertion that the media was glamorizing
homosexuality, the popular culture of the 1950s was little interested in either civil rights for
6Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? QHm Mxk: HRI and Wang, 1956) 7.
7‘Medicine: Curable Disease?” Time 68 (December 10,1956) 76.
8Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 9.
0Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?300.
,0Edmund Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals (Paterson, NJ: Pageant Books, Inc., 195")
viii.
113
homosexuals or even non-judgmental medical models. During the first few yean of the
decade, the media returned to criminalizing homosexuality with a vengeance, and did so by
linking it to murder, communism, pedophilia, and a totally foreign and minoritized
Otherness (all of which was reflected in the era’s monster movies, much as it had been
during the 1930s). A 1949 Newsweek article entitled “Queer People” begins thusly: “The
sex pervert, whether a homosexual, an exhibitionist, or even a dangerous sadist, is too
often regarded merely as a ‘queer’ person’ who never hurts anyone but himself. Then the
mangled form of some victim focuses public attention on the degenerate’s work.”11 The
very next year HUAC announced that sex deviates in government positions were security
risks that needed to be eradicated. Ultimately “more homosexuals and lesbians were
expelled from the federal government in the 1950s than were suspected communists and
fellow travelers.”1' As the 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. psychiatrists and other doctors are at last nearing agreement
that “Homosexuality is not an inherited taint Nobody is bom with it, and it is not
glandular in origin. It is not a disease in itself but a symptom of an underlying emotional
disorder.”13
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 oftentimes
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 British Lord who
argues that Freudian thought has greatly damaged Western civilization, complaining that in
” “Medicine: Queer People,’ Newsweek 34 (October 10,1949) 52.

12Robert J. Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the
Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1993) 8.
13‘Medicine: The Hidden Problem,’ Time 62 (December 28,1953) 28.
114
the past “‘they called such things sin; now they call them complexes.’”14 When these
debates became more sharply focused in 1957 around England’s controversial Wolfenden
Report (which suggested that the government decriminalize prostitution and consenting
homosexual acts between adults15). Newsweek opined that “It is far horn certain that the
[American] public is ready for such a drastic revision in its moral code.”16 This conflation
of homosexuality and Great Britain had existed in the popular press long before the
issuance of the Wolfenden Report. In 1954, England 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 Gielgud was arrested for
“‘persistently importuning male persons’ on the streets of Chelsea,” Montagu and Hume
were charged with assault against two young boys. The American 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 jolly small.’"17
American masculinity, as exemplified by men’s magazines such as Esquire (and
more pulpy imitators such as Stag, Sir!, Saga, Showdown fo r Men, etc.) continued to be
defined via “true adventure stories” of intense homosocial bonding and the ever-increasing
objectification of women as sex objects. (Masculinity in films, discussed below, was
apparently less sure of itself.) Esquire rarely spoke about homosexuality during the 1950s,
although its back pages did begin to advertise kinky sot novels such as Love me Sailor,
My Sister and I, and a sadomasochistic cartoon serial called Diana’s Ordeal. 18
Advertisements for Charles Atlas-type body building courses were also in abundance in
14"Medicine: A Delicate Problem,’ Newsweek 43 (June 14,1994) 100.

15For 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 fleport (London: Heinemann,
1958).
’Britain: Facing the Dark Facts’ Newsweek 50 (September 16,1957) 52.
17’Medicine: Lavender and Old Blues,” Newsweek 54 (July 20,1959) 82.
18Esquire (July 1951) 134, (August 1951) 131.
115
most of these magazines, yet even their version of hyper-masculinity often came under
suspicion of homosexuality. Certainly many homosexual men would have sent for their
“easy to follow, picture-packed courses,” not only for the exercises described, but also for
the erotic visual thrills of men in posing straps.19 (Skimpy brief underwear could also be
ordered from the back pages of most of these magazines.) Eventually, during the ensuing
years, such “physical culture” brochures and magazines evolved into a sort of gay male
proto-pomography industry, perhaps best exemplified by mail order firms such as the
Athletic Model Guild and magazines such as Physique Pictorial, Tomorrow’s Man, and
V im “
Another important voice on the subject of homosexuality began to be heard more
forcefully in the 1950s~that of homosexuals themselves. Perhaps in response to the crises
in civil liberties such as those perpetrated by HUAC, homophile organizations such as the
Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were founded in the early 1950's, and the
newly formed homosexual magazine One was even mentioned in a 1954 Newsweek
essay.21 An Undergound lesbian magazine, Vice Versa, had been briefly circulated in the
late 1940s, and The Ladder, the official newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, was
published from 1956 until 1972.22 Somewhat paradoxically perhaps, many of these groups
accepted and made recourse to the medical discourse of earlier decades which classified
them as mentally ill. Yet, as Michel Foucault has noted in another context, this apparent
acquiescence to a model of sexual psychopathy still made “possible the formation of a
‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its
legitimacy or ‘naturality ’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same
categories by which it was medically disqualified.”23 Thus some gay men and lesbians
,8Advertisement lor the Jowett Institute, Esquire (August 1951) 132. Also with this special
offer one could receive "Free! Jowett’s Photo Book of Famous Strong Men!"
"T he history of these magazines has recently been explored in F. Valentine Hooven, III,
Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America 1950-1970(Germany: BenediktTaschen, 1995).
21 ‘A Delicate Problem," Newsweek (June 14,1954) 99.
22See Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History, Revised Edition (USA: A Meridian Book,
1992) 406-420 for first hand account of these events, and 420-433 for an interview with Barbara
Gittings, the founder of the New York Daughters of Bilitis.
“ Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Trans. Robert Hurty (New \brk:
Vintage Books, 1978) 101.
116
argued for their civil rights based on the fact 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 of The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach by the
pseudonymous Donald Webster Cory. The book is introduced by Dr. Albeit Ellis and the
bulk of the t a t 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 maladjustment,” 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 that he faces?”24
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, further 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 understanding of human sexuality than did
Kinsey’s findings or his suggestions. All of this pathologizing media publicity helped to
create a very different image of the homosexual than had existed in previous 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 dangerous, since it meant that even the next-door neighbor could be one. The
specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted
Cold War America.25
Rather than understand the presence of “normal” homosexuals as evidence of a

universalizing stance on homosexuality, the paranoia of the era constructed homosexuals as
secret and subversive agents linked to communism, posing as normal in order to infiltrate
*4Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, Second Edition
(New \brk: 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 Vbrk: 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.
“ George Chauncey, GayNewtork (New Vbrk: Basic Books, 1994) 359-360.
117
small town America and prey upon new victims, most readily figured as teenagers and
children. And as in previous decades, many of these sexual dynamics and social tensions
can be found in the era’s monster movies and honor films.
Pods: Queer Sexual Threat in the 1950s Monster Invasion Film

As a whole, the films of the 1950s are usually considered escapist fantasies, with little of
the social commentary that could be found in some films of the 1930s, let alone the “social
problem" films of the late 1940s. While honor films had subsided in popularity during the
immediate postwar years (in a way supplanted by the more realist films noir), they became
exceedingly lucrative again in the 1950s, due to a queer hybridization with the science
fiction genre, which created a spate of what might be called monster invasion films. These
films have been most often discussed as representative of Cold War fears: their monsters
are often unleashed by nuclear power, or else they can be understood to represent the fear
of communist infiltration. Morphologically, the monsters of these films were usually
irredeemable Others: scaly, slimy, tentacled, vegetative, insectoid, or reptilian-in many
cases quite literally NOT OF THIS EARTH (1957). Most of these alien-invasion
monsters lacked even the rudimentary human qualities that marked Frankenstein’s monster,
Dracula, or the Wolfman, let alone the imperfect and complex human monsters of Val
Lewton’s horror films.
The opposite (and less frequently used) trope of the alien invasion film finds Them
looking just like Us. The few “good" aliens of the 1950s almost invariably take human
form: for example, Michael Rennie in DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951), or the
sexy and therefore none-too-deadly CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1954). But more
regularly these human-seeming monsters are like the emotionless pod people of
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956), outwardly human but actually a totally
different form of life. These human-looking monsters have been thought to reflect a
paranoid fear of both mindless American conformity and communist infiltration, wherein a
poisonous ideology spreads through small town America like a virus, silently turning one’s
118
friends and relatives into monsters/6
The overriding tension of these films, whether the monster could pass as human or
not, was the clash between Us (normal Americans) and Them (alien monsters). The
narrative formula for most of these films was surprisingly similar, ‘‘normal” small town
America (usually represented by an actively heterosexualized couple-here staging a
comeback after their dormancy in World War Two era horror films) is menaced by
something unknown, something queer. Several different critics have described this
formulaic “Discovery Plot” in some detail, including Noel Carroll and Susan Sontag.27
According to Sontag’s schema, “The hero. . . and his girl friend. . . are disporting
themselves in some ultra-normal middle class surroundings Suddenly . . . strange
lights hurtle across the sky.” The hero and heroine discover the presence of the Thing and
attempt to warn the local authorities, without effect. (As for the closeted homosexual, the
monster queer’s best defense is often the fact that the social order actively prefers to deny
his/her existence.) “Meanwhile, It continues to claim other victims in the town, which
remains implausibly located from the rest of the world.” Sooner or later the monster
menaces the heroine, and just in the nick of time the hero finds the Thing’s Achilles heel
and succeeds in destroying it. With the queer threat thus vanquished, normality once again
reigns supreme. That the Thing has invariably come to earth in order to conquer and/or
reproduce itself is a requirement of the form, and many of the films make their monsters’
queer sexuality quite explicit by dwelling on invading rocket ships, oozing pods, cocoons,
egg sacs, birthing chambers, and the like.
This formula is somewhat different from that of the classical Hollywood monster
movie, and especially from that of the more psychological horror films of the preceding
:s See among many others Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties
Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), and Peter Biskind, Seeing is
Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New Mjrk: Pantheon
Books, 1983).
27Noel Carroll, ‘Nightmare and the Horror Him: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings,”
Film Quarterly34:3 (Spring 1981) 23. 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 former evil mayhem, and finally a confrontation with and destruction of the ‘thing.” See also
Susar .ntag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New \brk,
1986) *..0-211. (I have collapsed some of her observations from the larger-budgeted color
formula plot into the following summary.)
119
decade. Firstly, the monsters are usually far less humanized and therefore more easily read
in metaphoric terms. For example, the giant irradiated egg-laying ants of THEM (1954)
easily suggest the fear of nuclear technology run amok, as well as a fear of female
sexuality. In many cases, the films evoke multiple systems of explanation for their
monstrous horrors, in so doing blurring or “queering” the usual explanatory binaries
(technology/nature, male/female, science/religion) of earlier fantastic narratives. Also, in
contradistinction to the domestic monsters of the 1940s, the monster films of the Cold War
era regularly assert that the source of the horror comes from somewhere “out there” as
opposed to internal sources; they struggle to mark a strict division between Self and Other
as do the monster movies of no other period. Yet, in trying so hard to divide and
(ultimately) conquer, the films themselves often give way to interesting conflations of
normality and the monstrous. As Annette Kuhn has mused on the topic, such “things are
not always quite so clear cut: boundaries can be permeable, and it is sometimes difficult to
determine who or what belongs on which side of the divide.”28 Indeed, as Margaret Tarratt
eloquently argued in her seminal analysis of the topic, these “Monsters From the Id” seem
to be in some way a product of the “normal” characters’ sexual energies, representing
social and/or individual anxieties over sex, gender, and sexuality.29 While the films appear
to maintain and celebrate normality, for critics like Tarratt there is the almost always the
sense that the monster represents the eruption of a sexual force which cannot be contained
by the heterosexualized normal couple. The monster always seems to raise its scaly head
and pop into view just as the hero and heroine are about to move into a romantic clinch.
As previously indicated, homosexuality became directly connected to communism
both in the popular press and the public gestalt from February of 1950, when hearings
before the Senate Appropriations Committee revealed that homosexuality had been the
“ 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 Sound2:3 (July 1992) 11-12.
” Margaret Tarratt, Monsters from the Id," Films and Filming 17:3 (December 1970) 38-42 and
17:4 (January 1971) 40-42. Reprinted in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader{Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1986) 258-277.
120
reason for recent dismissals of government workers.30 In an essay entitled “Object
Lesson,” Time magazine, following the Congressional lead, compared the situation of
homosexuals in the United States government to that of Colonel Alfred Redl, the
homosexual counter-intelligence chief of Austro-Hungaiy who had been blackmailed into
divulging secrets to the Russians during the years before World War One. The U. S.
Congressmen “concluded sharply” that the government “had been lazy or downright
negligent about cleaning house,” and “recommended tighter laws and harsher punishment
for sex perversion in the District of Columbia.”31 Three years later the McCarthy hearings
were still emphasizing the idea of evil and invisible homosexual subversives. All of this
this led to an increasing number of witch hunts against gay men and lesbians both in the
military and in civil service.32 In 1953, Time reported that “the State Department has
flushed out and dropped more than 300 employees on moral charges.”33 By mid-decade,
McCarthy and his tactics had been more or less discredited, but the anti-homosexual furor
he had whipped up failed to subside as easily.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the 1950s films with communist infiltration
subtexts can also be read as allegories about the invisible homosexual-especially a film
such as I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958), in which a newly wed
husband (Tom Tryon), secretly a monster queer, finds it preferable to meet other strange
men in the public park rather than stay at home with his wife. The invisible homosexual
was a phenomenon attested to more directly in other popular cultural artifacts. In the March
1958 issue of the men’s magazine Sir!, for example, along with the usual soft-core
cheesecake photographs of women and tales of stirring “true adventure,” one can read an
article entitled “It’s the Day of the Gray Flannel Fag.” The piece warns that “Not All
Homos Are Easy to Spot. Many Have Muscles, Are He-Men in Everything—Except
30John D’Emilio, ‘The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,"
Passion and Power Sexuality in History, eds. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.1989) 227.
31“Object Lesson," Time 56 (December 25,1950) 10.
3! See Lillian Faderman, Odd Girfs ;md Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-
Century America (New tork: Penguin. 1991) 139-187
“ “investigations: Files on Parade,* Time 61 (February 16,1953) 26.
121
Sex,"34and echoes the same fear of homosexuality dramatized in I MARRIED A
MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE. According to the piece, an estimated 15-20% of men
are “homos” and only “4% are so effeminate they are recognizable.” It continues:
They design dresses, decorate homes, sell antiques, make the rounds o f Broadway
producers’ offices. But what throws unsuspecting women is that they also can be
found heading Wall Street firms, boxing in Madison Square Garden and playing
baseball. There’s no telling where a gray flannel he-man fag will turn up.
Curiously for a men’s magazine, the article is supposedly addressed to women: “Lady, take
a good look at that date you’re having cocktails with. Is he a real guy? Or is he a he-man
homo?” However, since it is fairly safe to assume that few women would be reading Sir!
—A Magazinefo r Males, it is easy to conclude that the essay is meant more as a cautionary
warning to Sir!' s male readers rather than as advice to women. The article offers “clues”
which might be used to separate the real man from the “neurotic muscleman,” thus
effectively policing the homosexual/homosodal boundary line. For example, readers of the
essay leam that male homosexuals “can make even a Brooks Brothers suit look fussy___
have a clipped, arty way of speaking,” and have perfect hair (either that or “Napoleonic
bangs”). Homosexuals tend to linger over man-to-man handshakes, and “their pat on
another man’s back is a caress.” Yet, complicating this simple checklist is a half page
photograph of male body builder’s bulging bare back. This is not a surprising image in
and of itself, since Sir!, like most of its ilk, featured several advertisements per issue for
Charles Atlas and other bodybuilding courses, as well as frequently very homoerotic
illustrations accompanying many of their “true adventure” stories. Yet here the beefcake
supposedly signifies “homosexual” rather than “real man.” The presence of the essay
suggests a profound insecurity over the current construction of masculinity at this time.
Hyper-masculinity as well as hypo-masculinity were now both suspected as possible
signifiers of homosexuality. Despite the essay’s attempt to police the homosocial/
homosexual divide by offering helpful hints as to the identification of “true” homosexuals,
its presence in such an intensely homosocial milieu calls into question the very dynamics of
homosociality in the first place.
Universal-Intemational’s most successful monster of this period, THE
34James Connolley, 'ft’s the Day of the Gray Flannel Fag," Sir! 15:1 (March 1958) 20-21, 40.
122
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), spawned two sequels within three
years and exemplifies many of these new tensions and tropes, and suggests the repressed
homosexual urges which may lie at the heart o f such homosocial bonds. Yet these films
also differ in 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 disp’ayed 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 suggested that the producers take care to “avoid any sexual emphasis that
might suggest bestiality.”33 As usual within the genre, the threat of bestiality exists in a
semantic blur with other forms of queer sexuality.
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 scientist who first
unearths a fossilized Creature, gone to the production’s original first choice, homosexual
actor Ramon Novairo.*) 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
“ Reported in Tom Weaver, “Production Background,” CREA■URE FROM THE BLACK

LAGOON Original Script Edition (Hollywood: Maclmage Filmbook- 1992) 13.
“ Weaver 17.
123
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, swim-suited beefcake, and
overdetermined phallic signifiers, all of which are used to subdue or capture the Creature:
knives, spear guns, hypodermic needles, rifles, poison-tipped spears, air tanks, air hoses,
cattle prods, and even an underwater squirt gun which shoots out “rotenone ' a creamy
liquid knock-out drug. (Universal’s THE LAND UNKNOWN [1957] follows a similar
narrative pattern as well as a similar 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 ability 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 homoerotic tension
of the situation, but ironically they more regularly draw attention to it. The women
themselves are linked to the monstrous by way of their femininity, and it is their presence
through which the possibility of the triangles’ male-male desire is filtered. In the first film,
Mark (Richard Doming) 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 triangle 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 captu'ing the
Creature, sits on deck with David and anxiously calls out “Come on! Come on!” David
124
queries: “You talking 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
Creature’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 concerned with the
destruction of the monster than with reducing the plurality of male suitors to a single man
in order to reform the proper heterosexual couple. (At the end of each film, the Creature is
hurt but shown either swimming away or heading for the sea.) The Creature’s embrace
invariably kills the inappropriate suitors, leaving Richard Carlson, John Agar, and Rex
Reason to ponder the meaning of life and love and “happily ever after” with Julie Adams,
Lori Nelson, and Leigh Snowden. Still, the films’ overall project to investigate queer
desire is echoed in lines from REVENGE OF THE CREATURE: “Some things should
remain unknown Love is such a mystery I cannot find it out.” Repeatedly, the films
seem to be asking about monstrous male-male bonds and then demonstrating that they must
be destroyed before the normative heterosexual couple can be established.
These male rivalries are especially intense in the final film, CREATURE WALKS
AMONG US, wherein at least three men vie for the attentions of Helen Barton (Leigh
Snowden): her drunken overzealous husband Dr. Barton (Jeff Morrow) who humanizes
the Creature only to pen him in a cage, compassionate scientist Dr. Morgan (Rex Reason),
and lusty ship’s Captain Grant (Gregg Palmer), who masters Barton’s yacht, the
“Vagabondia HI” from San Francisco. The reference to San Francisco may be a clue to Dr.
Barton’s sexual psychopathy: he distrusts his wife, calls her “useless” and “worthless,”
and has paranoid fantasies that she is sleeping with the handsome Captain Grant. Dr.
Barton is easily read as a repressed homosexual, and although the concept of sexual
repression was not as topical as homosexual security risks during this era, an occasional
reference to such ideas could be found: a 1953 Time article noted that in “every human
personality there are both masculine and feminine traits,” and that psychiatrists still feel that
“those who protest most loudly against deviations in others are the least sure of their own
125
sexual adjustment.”37 In THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US (and note the
universalizing metaphor of the title), Dr. Barton murders Captain Grant (consummating his
repressed homosexual desire?) and then is himself killed by the Creature, who has been
rather idly standing by while the men played out their sexual dramas. The film strains to
make an analogy between Dr. Barton’s bestial behavior and that of the now more
sympathetic Creature. In its final moments the film’s characters reflect upon the fate of
humankind: “I guess the way we go depends upon what we're willing to understand about
ourselves.” Helen, raising the spectre of repressed sexual desire, quickly adds “And
willing to admit.” The themes of sexual repression, explored through many of these Cold
War monster movies in metaphoric terms, is perhaps best exemplified by a small detail of
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.
Pederasts: American International Pictures and the Teenage Monster

The male beefcake on display in the CREATURE films was not an isolated phenomenon,
but rather another aspect of the changing trends of Cold War movie making. As many
critics have pointed out, in the films of this era the male body starts to become almost as
spectacularized as that of the female body, in so doing they objectify and homoeroticize
onscreen masculinity for a male spectator.38 Simultaneously, Hollywood films promoted a
new version of masculinity in general: a softer, more vulnerable type of man than that
which had come before. Exemplified by the personas and filmic characterizations of stars
like James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Farley Granger, Sal Mineo, Anthony Perkins, Rock
Hudson, and Marlon Brando, this new type of leading man was more sensitive and
compassionate; often he is internally conflicted, and given to feminizing traits such as
37‘Medicine: The Hidden Problem,’ Time 62 (December 28,1953) 28-9.

“ Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudsonfe Body." inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed.
Diana Fuss (New \t>rk: Routledge, 1991) 259-288. See also Steven Cohan, ‘Masquerading as
the American Male in the Fifties: PICNIC, William Holden, and the Spectacle of Masculinity in
Hollywood Film,’ Male Trouble, ed. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993) 203-233.
126
emotionalism and occasionally even tears. Not surprisingly, this new type o f man could be
easily read as queer by those audiences inclined to do so, especially since the “real life”
sexualities of these actors was in many cases also non-straight, and probably discussed at
length in certain homosexual and/or Hollywood circles. The appearance of Hollywood
beefcake photos within the pages of Physique Pictorial and Vim also enhanced the
possibility that gay men of the 1950s might have read these stars’ personas and
performances as homosexual.39
The “sensitive young man" existed in 1950s culture beyond the movies and their
ancillary products. In a review of underground homosexual novels of the era, Richard
Dyer has noted how the iconography of the troubled youth was explicitly used to denote the
young male homosexual, a representation “both irredeemably sad and overwhelmingly
desirable.” Like the image of the movie monster, for the queer spectator seeking
identificatory pleasures, these images “can be complex, varied, intense and contradictory,
an image of otherness in which it is still possible to find oneself.’*'0 Thus, the sad young
man's “delicious melancholia” might be both concomitantly oppressive and empowering to
a gay male spectator. Like the monster queer, the sad young man of these novels was often
doomed from the outset, obliged by both narrative structure and social opprobrium to a
tragic death or “twilight” existence. Yet at the same time, the sad young man also “offered
an image of holy sensitivity, stunning good looks, overwhelming erotic experience and
escape from the dreariness of real manliness.”41
As Dyer’s essay argues, the spectre of a monstrous homosexuality lurked
underneath Hollywood’s new image of the sensitive, spectacularized young man. Perhaps
most famously, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) activates many of these concerns:
James Dean’s Jim Stark is a sensitive (i.e. troubled) teen whose problems result from his
weak and effeminate father, while his friend Plato (Sal Mineo) is a thinly veiled
38See Hooven 78-79. “For a while, even the notoriously skittish Hollywood studios allowed
their top talent to grace the pages of the little physique mags--* This phenomenon lasted until at
least the mid-1960s, and Hooven documents the fact with a beefcake shot of Robert Conrad that
appeared in the August 1963 issue of Physique Pictorial.
40Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (New \brk: Routledge,
1993) 73-74.
41Dyer 90.
127
homosexual.42 The infamous ship-board gymnasium production number in GENTLEMEN
PREFER BLONDS (1953) more playfully suggests homophobic fears: Jane Russell sings
and dances amidst a bevy of swim-suited body-builders, but can't find any men who desire
her. (“Doesn't anyone want to play?”) In much darker terms, THE STRANGE ONE
(1957), set in a military boarding school, hinted that homosexuality might be the cause of
its lead character's sadism, while the utter horror of a young man’s homosexuality was
linked to both pedophilia and cannibalism in the 1959 film version of Tennessee Williams's
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Vito Russo’s comments on SUDDENLY LAST
SUMMER are especially telling: the homosexual poet
Sebastian Venable is presented as a faceless terror, a horrifying presence among
normal people, like the Martians in WAR OF THE WORLDS or the creature from
the black lagoon. As he slinks along the streets of humid Spanish seacoast towns
in pursuit of boys (“famished for the dark ones”), Sebastian’s coattail or elbow
occasionally intrudes into the frame at moments of intense emotion. He comes at us
in sections, scaring us a little at a time, like a movie monster too horrible to be
shown all at once.43
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 activities: “Even Creature Features give us a few good nips at
skullduggery . . . . ”"
In many films of this period, young men were at risk from deviant sexual feelings.
Even as the Production Code authorities attempted to expurgate “homosexuality” perse
from the film version of TEA AND SYMPATHY (1956)—focusing instead on the
euphemism of its young protagonist's effeminacy-this move fooled few spectators and
simultaneously reinforced a stereotypical (and reassuring) blurring of effeminacy and male
homosexuality. And, while these concerns over the proper gendering of youth ostensibly
“applied to women as much as men. . . men were constructed as the main focus of
42See Christopher Castiglia, ‘Rebel Without a Closet* Engendering Men: The Question of
Male feminist Criticism, eds. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New fork: Routledge, 1990)
207-221 for a more detailed exploration of the homosexual currents in REBEL WITHOUT A
CAUSE.
43Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet Homosexuality in the Movies (Revised Edition) (New
fork: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987)117.
44Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972; New fork: De Capo
Press, 1993) 310.
128
anxiety. The worry was whether boys would become successful, mature, adult males; the
possibility that they might turn out queer was one of the dangers along the way.”43 Films
such as TEA AND SYMPATHY, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and the German import
THE THIRD SEX repeatedly asserted that a good heterosexual liaison was all that was
required to “straighten out” a “sexually confused” young man. The idea of “saving” young
men from their homosexual tendencies was a popular one in both scientific and lay circles.
Time argued that psychiatric treatment was best for these troubled boys: “If the boy is in
his early teens and not set in his ways, a few hours of give and take interviews may
suffice.”46 Even men’s magazines such as Challenge occasionally broached the subject. In
a 1959 article by “Shailer Upton Lawton, Consulting Psychiatrist,” the author notes that
“Perhaps nothing terrifies a man more than the secret w ary that he may be a homosexual.
This worry is usually based on one or two homosexual experiences indulged in between
the ages of 12 and 15, when more than 27 per cent of boys have such contacts.” The
doctor recounts a worried patient's fears and how he soothed them: “I made him
understand that no man can be classified as a homosexual simply because he has had such
an experience in youth, as long as his desires are at present directed toward women.”47
Implicit in these films and essays is the idea that “normal” young men (who engage
in “normal” homosexual experimentation during adolescence) would only turn into “true”
homosexuals if older “true” homosexuals continued to lead them astray. This
homosexuality-as-seductive-pederasty idea was becoming increasingly prevalent during the
post war period. Famous tennis champion “Big Bill" Tilden had been convicted of sex
with teenage boys repeatedly in the late 1940s, and in Seduction o f the Innocent, his
popular attack on comic books, author and psychiatrist Frederick Werthem maintained that
Batman and Robin were role-modeling homosexuality for young boys.4* Even the
diminutive hero of Richard Matheson’s famous science fiction novel The Shrinking Man
“ Dyer 84.
48“Medicine: The Hidden Problem,’’ Time 62 (December 28,1953) 29.
47Dr. Shailer Upton Lawton, “Sex Secrets,” Challenge 5:5 (August 1959) 47-48.
44Fredric Werthem, Seduction of the Innocent (New Mark: Rinehart &Company, Inc., 1953)
188-193.
129
finds himself the recipient of a drunken homosexual's attentions.49 Perhaps most
egregiously, in 1955 a homosexual scandal erupted in Boise, Idaho and shocked the nation
with its allegations of homosexual underworlds 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 tow n had sheltered a widespread
homosexual underworld that involved some of Boise's most prominent men and had
preyed on hundreds of teen-age boys for the past decade.”51 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:
There was a hysteria in Boise about young teen-age boys being seduced by older
men; that’s what they conveyed to the public. The city paper, The Idaho Daily
Statesman, embellished on this. It kept emphasizing older men and young boys; it
kept saying there was a sex ring of older men who w oe enticing these boys. There
was no such thing; no such ring existed. The boys who w oe arrested in Boise all
knew exactly what they were doing.r
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
(circa 1958) chronicles four vignettes in which older, slightly balding men entice pubescent
boys bade 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” attackers, that one boy escaped, and that one was
48Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man (Garden City, New \brk: Nelson Doubleday, Inc.,
1956) 52-57.
50“Crush the Monster," Idaho Dally Statesman (November 3,1955).
s' “Crime: Idaho Underworld," Time 66 (December 12,1955) 25.
52Anonymous account published in Katz 110. The scandal was covered in a book length
report by John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise; Riror, Vice and folly in an American City (Hew \brk:
Collier, 1968).
130
murdered. Homosexuality as pederasty was also a cornerstone of Dr. Edmund Bergler's
rantings (again, italics are in the original): “‘Thefig h t is fo r the young generation o f
homosexuals, for the individual who has not yet completely fallen under the spell of
homosexuality’s alleged ’glamor.”’53 Similar to today’s fundamentalist Christian activists,
Bergler blames the media for disseminating a too tolerant 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-maintained by the daily press,
magazines, radio, television, has the end effect of promoting homosexuality. If
'^formation 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 operations-and your
teen-age children may be die victims.54
The general conflation of homosexuality, communism, and child molestation during

this period might best be attested to by an advertisement for the International
Correspondence Schools which appeared regularly in the pulpy men’s magazines of the
era.55 At the top of the full page ad is a picture of 30-something man crouching next to a
small boy. The man has his arm around the boy, and together they hold a watering hose at
waist level. A bold face caption captures the readers attention with the proclamation: “This
man is a ‘security risk’!” The text continues:
Age, 29. Married. Two children. High school education. Active in local
lodge, church, veterans’ organization. Employed by large manufacturing concern.
Earns $82 a week.
Sounds like an average Joe. And he is. Too average!
Yet, although both the photograph and the text activates 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; however, the advertisement makes it clear that poor wage
“ f rgler, One Thousand Homosexuals 244.

54. rgler, One Thousand Homosexuals 249.
55 True War 2:2 (January 1958) 3.
131
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
agitators), while its sub-species the teenage monster movie began to specifically address in
metaphoric terms the kinds o f dangers that more mainstream films could not. In his book
Teenagers and Teenpics, Thomas Doherty argues that the “horror teenpics” (or “weirdies”
as the Hollywood industry referred to them) became popular after the very successful
American release of Hammer Films’ CXJRSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1957. Itself a
rather homoerotic retelling o f the Frankenstein myth, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN
began a successful horror film cycle which Hammer would exploit well into the 1970s.
Arriving from Great Britain the same year as the Wolfenden Report, it is hard not to
understand it as bringing a taint of explicit and eroticized British (homo)sexuality to
American horror film audiences. Indeed, as Doherty notes, “sex is the open secret of every
weirdie, the intrinsic perversity, or weirdness, of a ripe desire for sexual congress mingled
with a virginal dread of closure.”56
Whereas TEA AND SYMPATHY had to imply its discussion of homosexuality
through the metaphor of effeminacy, the late 1950s teenage monster films implied a
homosexual threat through the medium of monsters. The monster as sexualized threat to
children or teenagers (as opposed to a sexualized threat directed at a heterosexual couple)
was becoming more manifest in the genre as the years went by. Upon its initial release,
FRANKENSTEIN (1931) had censored its infamous child murder, although the off-screen
suggestion of what the monster actually did to Little Maria was perhaps worse than the cut
footage (he gently tosses her into the water, hoping she will float like the other “flowers”).
Yet, during the film’s successful re-release seven years later (amidst a media flurry of “sex
crime” stories), this aspect of the film was ballyhooed in a theatrical trailer that showed the
monster and Little Maria walking hand-in-hand while the narration described “a monster
turned loose to prey upon the innocence of children.” SON OF FRANKENSTEIN’S
“ Thomas Doheii . Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the
1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988) 147.
132
monster menaced the Baron's toddler son onscreen in 1939, and the SON OF DRACULA
killed a small boy in 1943. That same year, in a narrative situation almost exactly like those
of the teenage monster films released fifteen years later, George Zucco’s mad scientist
character turned a young male student into THE MAD GHOUL via strange medical
experiments. Even the creatures in the 1950s monster invasion films were more ready than
not to menace children: THEM's giant ants badly traumatize a little girl, while INVADERS
FROM MARS (1953) placed a small boy at the center of its narrative. However, while
most of these younger children we e depicted as wholly innocent victims, the teenage
monster movies made at American International Pictures in the late 1950s usually suggested
that there was something wrong with these young people in the first place, much as David
Bruce in THE MAD GHOUL was represented as somehow “not quite right” even before
his transformation into monster queer. And perhaps the most famous horror film of this
period, and certainly one of the most influential films ever made, Alfred Hitchcock's
PSYCHO (1960) forever etched into its audiences’ minds an almost textbook example of a
stereotypical teenage homosexual (complete with a harsh overbearing mother and absent
father)—not as a young man who desires other men, but as a knife-wielding, cross-
dressing, psychopathic murderer.
The studio responsible for the 1950s teenage monster movie craze was American
International Pictures.57 Founded as a small distribution company in 1954 by Samuel Z.
Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, A.I.P. quickly moved into film production when they hit
upon a successful formula: producing genre films so cheaply that they would almost
invariably turn a profit. Often starting with an exploitable film title and a flashy advertising
campaign (as had Val Lewton’s RKO honor film unit), scripts were then written to flesh
out the outrd premises and quickly filmed by directors such as Roger Carman and Herbert
L. Strock. However, whereas Lewton's films artfully surpassed the promise of their
cheesey titles, A.I.P.’s horror films rarely did. Films such as ATTACK OF THE CRAB
MONSTERS (1956), IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956), and VIKING WOMEN
57For background information on the studio and its productions, see Mark Thomas McGee,
Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., 1984) and Robert L. Cttoson, American International Pictures: A Filmography
(New Vbrk: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985).
133
AND THE SEA SERPENT (1957) reveled in the pleasures of rubber-suited monsters and
scantily clad women. Teenage audiences, which were just beginning to be courted by the
major Hollywood studios, were targeted directly by A.LP. with films such as ROCK ALL
NIGHT (1956), TEENAGE DOLL (1957), and HIGH SCHOOL BIG SHOT (1958).
Thus it is perhaps not surprising that A.I.P., itself something of a queerly constituted film
production company (compared to the decorum and propriety of Hollywood's major
studios), would soon hybridize both genres into the teenage monster movie.
Beginning with the phenomenal box office success of I WAS A TEENAGE
WEREWOLF in 1957, A.LP. (and other smaller production companies) quickly churned
out similar entries including I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN (1957), TEENAGE
CAVEMEN (1958), TEENAGE MONSTER (1957), TEENAGE ZOMBIES (1957), and
TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE (1959). In many of these films, adult scientists
and teachers prey upon same-sex teenagers and attempt to turn them into monsters,
suggesting a ghoulish analog to Dr. Edmund Bergler’s assertion that Kinsey’s researches
had legitimated and thus fueled an increase in homosexual behavior. This is an almost
complete inversion of the formula of the World War Two era horror film, wherein
scientists were (at least ostensibly) trying to help and/or cure the monster queer.
Specifically, A.I.P.’s teenage monster movies can be understood as metaphoric reworkings
of the increasingly common idea that older homosexuals were out to recruit young people
into their ranks. As Dr. Bergler had put it, the rising plague of homosexuality in 1950s
America was partly due to the fact that “there has been a new type of recruit observable in
the last few years. These are youngsters in their late teens or early twenties, ‘borderline’
homosexuals in whom the decision ‘to be or not to be’ a homosexual hangs in the
balance.’’38 The German film THE THIRD SEX dramatized this formula almost exactly-
without the camouflage of monsters-and subsequently it could not be widely distributed
under the stipulations of the Production Code. In it, young men are seen to fall under the
sway of older homosexual men who like modem art, musique concrete, and
demonstrations of Greco-Roman wrestling. As in previous decades, the modernist impulse
is indicative of the homosexuals’ depravity, but herein it is also used as a sort of recruiting
“ Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 8.
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tool, luring young men of artistic temperaments into the homosexual world
In I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, teenager Michael Landon falls under the
hypnotic sway of scientist Whit Bissell. True to generic imperatives, Bissell and his male
assistant comprise a queer mad scientist couple, and together they work out their nefarious
deeds through the body of the young protagonist. TEENAGE WEREWOLF also taps into
a psychoanalytic model of homosexuality when it links Michael Landon’s psychological
condition to his bestial, primordial urges. Landon first comes to Bissell in order to leam to
control his violent urges, and Bissell promptly suggests a coir's? of regressive
hypnotherapy. Some of the period’s psychoanalytic treatment models for homosexuality
were based on the belief that via therapeutic regression to an earlier stage of development,
the conflict responsible for the subject’s homosexuality could be isolated, understood, and
dismantled This would then ‘‘cure" the homosexual, or at least facilitate the subsequent
restructuring of his/her psyche towards a heterosexual alignment.39 In the monster movie
genetically, and in TEENAGE WEREWOLF specifically, such regression to immature
stages of psychosexual development more often than not leads to some form of
concomitant bestial devolution, at which point the monster queer invariably escapes the
control of the doctor and runs amok. Inherent in both the werewolf myth and the
Jeky11/Hyde story, this concept of bestial regression can also be found in other 1950s
monster movies such as THE NEANDERTHAL MAN (1953) and MONSTER ON THE
CAMPUS (1958).
In most of the teenage monster movies, even though the teenage character is figured
as the monster, s/he is much more humanized and likable than the older homosexual
scientist couple, who are constructed in the films as drawing the impressionable youths into
their world of terror. Indeed, part of the appeal of the teenage monster movie to its
primarily youthful audience was and is its deliberate linkage of monster and teenager the
“ 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.
135
angst of the adolescent expresses itself through monstrous signifiers as easily as does that
of the homosexual. Similar to how a queer spectator might revel in the joys of monstrous
rampages that overthrow heterocentrist presumption, so might teenagers enjoy a monster of
their very own, one given to venting passions both sexual and violent, especially when the
teenage monster’s rages are directed against adult authority figures. The subjectivity
implied by the (soon to be) formulaic “I WAS A . . title suggests that audience
identification was shifting (or had already shifted) away from the “normals” towards that of
the monster. It also suggests other properties such as I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE
FBI (1951) or the television show / Led Three Lives (1953-1956), both of which
purported to deliver subjective experiences of how political deviants operated. However,
while those properties were understood by most spectators to be rabidly anti-communist
and pro-hetero-capitalist, I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (and many of its less-
monstrous ilk) frightened a lot of civic minded adults who called for their censorship.60
Arguing (perhaps rightly) that these teenage exploitations movies were anti-social, their
censorship campaigns echoed those of Edmund Bergler (or Frederick Werthem) when they
asserted that the media was “glamorizing” and legitimating homosexuality.
Yet, aside from the subversive pleasures the teenage monster movie may have held
for its younger audiences, these films continued to use homosexual connotation in fairly
straightforward and traditional ways-to make their older villainous authority figures that
much more unappealing. In TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, the mad scientist couple is
tinged with queemess from the outset. When Frankenstein “proposes” to “close ally and
fellow worker” Dr. Karlton his plan to create life, he defends it as “simply an intelligent
adaptation of the principle of selective breeding. After all, if you breed morons you beget
morons, but when brilliant people mate—” Here he looks at Karlton and the implication is
perfectly queer two such brilliant scientists should be able to create homosexually a simply
fabulous young man. Frankenstein is also something of a chicken hawk, insisting that his
newly made man be strong and youthful (he also wants it to call him “Sir”). “I shall use
only the ingredients of youth!. . . If I can create-out of different parts-a youth whom I
"Producer Herman Cohen: “Our films concerned teenagers who had doubts about their
parents, their teachers or what-have-you. That these doubts influence a teenagar to go bad. I felt
this would appeal to a teenage audience, which it did.” Reported in McGee 63.
136
shall instruct and control, I'll prove that only in youth is there any hope for the salvation of
mankind.'' When he reads of a tragic airplane crash that took the lives of a track team,
Frankenstein sighs deeply and waxes rhapsodically: “All those fine young athletic bodies!
All those hours of training for strength, speed, endurance!" Once the monster is assembled
and awakened, Frankenstein buys him a set of barbells (“our main concern is with your
physique") and watches eagerly as the monster develops his form through bare-chested
workouts. Indeed, the teenage monster’s work out regimen would not have appeared out
of place in the pages of Physique Pictorial or Tomorrow’s Man.
Obligatorily, Dr. Frankenstein is given a heterosexual love interest, a
nurse/secretary named Margaret, whose unhappy lot it is to answer the phones and see to it
that Frankenstein is not disturbed; as he tells ho- (standing in front of a large vase of
flowers), “I want to see no one but my assistant Dr. Karlton." Eventually, she discovers
Frankenstein’s secret by entering the locked laboratory and opening up the slab-drawer
upon which the monster rests. He becomes erect-sitting up into the camera for a full
“shock” close up-and Margaret runs away. Nonetheless, the very next day she is picking
out engagement rings, although Frankenstein now orders his monster to kill her. Much is
made of the fact that the monster cannot pass in normal society (“walk among people") until
the doctor finds him a pleasing face to wear. Indeed, it has been his goal to “bring forth a
perfectly normal human being—able to walk among normal people undetected.” This
suggests the phenomenon of queers passing as straight (wearing a normal face), and the
care with which this must be done. “Tonight I’m going to lead you out o f 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,
intelligence." 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 spectator who regularly paged through the muscle
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magazines, or even Adventure—The Mcui’s Magazine o f Exciting Fiction and Fact however,
might have had some idea, especially if he had read an article entitled “We Still Have Male
Sex Slaves” published the same year TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN was released.61 The
essay mostly focuses on historical 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 condemnatory, although it does tell the reader
who might be interested where to find such sex for sale, reluctantly acceding 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 doesn’t happen in America-according to the text-although the
photograph seems to suggest otherwise.
Sharing a double bill with TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN was BLOOD OF
DRACULA, A.LP. 's lesbian entry in the sub-genre of teenage monster films. The film is
set at an all-girl boarding school (which just happens to be run buy a Mrs. Thom dyke) and
brings together many different strands of American postwar 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 vampirism 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 amulet (her supposed connection to Dracula), or the final image of Miss
Branding’s charred notebook, placed within the mise-en-scene at a young girl’s waist level
and looking suspiciously like a charred and desiccated womb. Actually, BLOOD OF
DRACXJLA has very little to do with Dracula p erse, and the word is even used as a
common noun and not a personal name (“It looks like she was bitten by a Dracula”); this
semantic blurring might indicate that for some producers and audiences at this time,
“Dracula” had become synonymous with “vampire,” or some other deviant sexual being.
Located historically between DRACULA’S DAUGHTER in the 1930s and the
more explicit lesbian vampire boom of the early 1970s, BLOOD OF DRACULA remains a
ai Philip Cascio, “We Still Have Male Sex Slaves,” Adventure 132:2 (February 1957) 46-47, 89.
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little known variation on the lesbian vampire theme, but one which fits within the
homosexuality-as-pederasty model of the era. The story revolves around an evil black-
robed science teacher named Miss Branding who tries to hypnotize teenage girls as part of
her perverse experiments. In an amazing bit of (il)logic, Miss Branding is conducting
experiments that will unleash the destructive force in each and every one of us (again
through hypnotic regression), thereby making the world safe from nuclear aggression. For
her work, Miss Branding needs a special kind of subject, “a special kind of girl-with
special potentials I must find someone with the natural fire-explosiveness-close to
the surface-a disturbed girl perhaps, but with a will of her own.” According to these
films, youths that are troubled to begin with-Nancy comes from a broken home, Michael
Landon’s TEENAGE WEREWOLF is a “hot head” unable to control his temper-are
especially vulnerable to the lures and promises of older same-sex adults, whether they be
teachers or doctors. This idea was also part of the cultural construction of “real life”
homosexuality-as Time opined in 1953, homosexuality is “commonest in families that
have been disrupted by the death of one parent, by divorce or separation, or by constant
bickering between husband and wife.”® In BLOOD OF DRACULA, Nancy’s mother has
died and her father has remarried too quickly, thus it is not all that surprising when Nancy
reverts to a hairy bestial vampire and begins to kill at Miss Branding’s command. Still, she
is confused during her (normal) waking hours, and asks Miss Branding for help: “Who am
I? What am I doing? I’m living a nightmare! A horrible urge comes over me. I feel a
strength that’s almost frightening I must do something awful, but when I try to
remember, all I can see is you! ”
As this singular lesbian vampire film attests (compared to the handful of queer male
monster movies), the subject of lesbianism was far less prominent in the popular culture of
the 1950s than was male homosexuality. It was not until 1959 that “the first published
report of the psychoanalysis of a Lesbian” was reviewed in Newsweek magazine.63 Its
author, Dr. Richard C. Robertiello, asserted the standard psychiatric line: homosexuality is
“a symptom of an emotional illness” brought on by anxieties resulting from “damaging
82“Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (December 28,1953) 28.

“ “Medicine: These Tragic #Women," Newsweek 53 (June 15, 1959) 62-63.
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childhood experiences." The book, and the review, also promulgate the active/passive
nature of homosexual relationships and the efficacy of cure. “Under psychoanalysis,
[lesbian subject] Connie revealed through interpretation of ho- dreams and through free
association, the well-known Freudian pattern of an unresolved Oedipal conflict. Her basic
wish was for a man’s love.” BLOOD OF DRACULA also pits Nancy’s “basic” desire for
her boyfriend Glenn against the unnatural force unleashed by Miss Branding. Once tainted
by Miss Branding’s man-hating hypno-lesbianism, Nancy can no longer relate to Glenn
and complains to Miss Branding that “what I feel for Glenn you’ll never understand. . . I
know who you are and I know what you’ve done to me. When I was in his arms, instead
of feeling what I should, I almost killed him! ” Ultimately, both Nancy and Miss Branding
are destroyed by their own folly, and the final lines of the film attest in generic aphorism
that “There is a power greater than science that rules the earth, and those who twist and
pervert knowledge for evil only work out their own destruction.” While the Production
Code Administration probably applauded that sentiment, they missed altogether the lesbian
implications of the film. They were chiefly bothered by the fact that the film discussed
evolution and therefore “tend[ed] to give credence to an erroneous philosophy of the origin
of human life.”44
The film from this series that most clearly depicts a pedophilic homosexual villain is
A.I.P.'s HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER, released in 1958 on the top half of a double bill
with Roger Corman’s TEENAGE CAVEMAN. HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER was an
obvious attempt to cash in on the popularity of I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF and I
WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN; it purports to be a realistic “behind the scenes”
story of the makeup artist responsible for bringing the Teenage Werewolf and Teenage
Frankenstein to the screen. What is remarkable about HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER,
however, is the wide range of signifieds to which the signifier “monster” becomes
attached, and the complexity with which it manipulates these signifiers. Monstrosity is
again used traditionally to depict the film’s villains as queer. However, through its self-
reflexivity and its shifting processes of signification, the text also acknowledges a
psycho"lalytic model underlying the act of making a monster queer, and the ideological
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systems at work within both the Hollywood industry and culture-at-large which
simultaneously create and demonize the monster queer. Ultimately, the film hints at the
revolutionary potential of “making monsters” against those same ideological forces.
In the film, Pete the makeup man and his assistant Rivero are coded from the outset
as being a queer mad scientist couple, complete with its requisite butch/femme
stereotyping. The subservient Rivero coos about Pete: “He’s the greatest Always the
master’s touch For twenty-five years he’s been the master!” Pete and Rivero are
older men who “prey” upon teenage boys. In this respect, Pete’s making up of teenage
monster stars Tony and Larry can be read as an exploitative seduction—even rape-as well
as feminization. Breathing heavily, Pete strokes their brows, paints their faces, and makes
them into monsters. Larry confesses that “I’d hate to have my girlfriend see m e . . . ” not
necessarily because she would be frightened by his makeup, but because Larry has
something now to be ashamed of-he has been forced from the dominant (heterosexual)
order back into a regressive monstrous non-heterosexual state. Pete’s desire to take
photographs of his creations creates a frisson 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—I like to study them. I enjoy working with these teenagers.
They’ve got spirit and they cooperate. . . 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
himself 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 makeup lab
to the set. Pete constantly touches and retouches his creation Larry/Werewolf; as a newly
bom 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
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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 Lany/Werewolf, while their exchange explicitly acknowledges the
phenomenon of “invisible” homose/.uals passing for straight. Once on the set,
Larry/Werewolf is introduced to an already made up Tony/Frankenstein, a muscular young
actor in a tight fitting t-shirt. The director is anxious to get them both on the set to stage his
“Battle of the Monsters.” The thane 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 lode 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 makeup (not being
obviously flamboyantly gay), there is something “monstrous” about them. The film’s
narrative 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 earlier 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
childhood fear of the sinister-the terrifying feces 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
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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 opposing 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 in,
coming to rest in front of posters for I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN and I WAS
A TEENAGE WEREWOLF. 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 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 executives, 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 murders. Upon Pete’s decision 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
signification, 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
makeup lab, Pete tells Rivero of his plan to control the young actors through a special
novocaine-based makeup: “Now-this enters the pores and paralyzes the will. It will have
the same effect chemically as a surgical preffontal lobotomy. It blocks the nerve synapses.
It makes the subject passive-obedient to my will.” The next day Pete applies the makeup
to Larry. Along with hypnosis, the makeup transformation effects a complete regression
for Larry: he is pulled back from the heterosexual order and becomes a monster queer. The
action then switches to a screening room where studio executive Nixon (a deliberate linkage
of the real Richard M. with the industrial patriarc hy?) sits watching the rushes for the
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“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 officers are brutish, overbearing, and
unappealing; positioned within the mise-en-scene as surrounding and dominating, they
brusquely interrogate and intimidate their suspects. A black vtm an’s eye witness account
of murder is treated with skepticism, and the police are condescending towards an old night
watchman who is hard of hearing. Finally, they brow beat Rivero and almost succeed in
cracking him before Pete intervenes:
Pete: He told you he was only my assistant.
Cop: You shut up and let him talk for himself. (Lewdly) Sure he’s your assistant-
we know that-how far does his assistance go? (to Rivero) Who do you
live with?
Rivero: I live alone....
Cop: Ever been married?
Rivero: No.
Clearly the cops are gay-baiting their suspects: the homosexuality implied in the insinuating
question “How far does his assistance go?” and the focus on Rivero’s unmarried status
indicate that the police suspect some form of sexual deviancy. Yet once Pete and Rivero
have left the interrogation, the cops seemingly revert to confused schoolboys:
Cop 1: Something weird about that old Pete.
Cop 2: And his assistant Rivero.
Cop 1: Maybe that’s what comes from spending all of your adult life with
monsters.
The policemen and the film itself cannot acknowledge homosexuality openly. If that were
to happen socially, the tools of gay-baiting, blackmail, and coercion that the closet
mentality fosters would no longer be of use as political weapons.
By the climax of the film, Pete has degenerated into a glassy-eyed and obsessed
gothic hero and the boys have become the traditional objectified and helpless damsels in
distress. Pete shows the boys his shrine-the gallery of his greatest masks and makeups
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from past films. Pete glides about the room, lighting candles, intoning spookily about “My
family—my children—I’m devoted to them. I’ve arranged them here with great care—as you
see. Later I’ll tell you their history-how each one came about. But now let’s just look at
them. This room is like a cathedral for me. ' Even Rivero realizes that Pete has lost
control, but he still stands by his man: “You young men should feel honored!” he says,
beaming all the while. Larry and Tony realize that they are at the mercy of a madman who
wants to possess them more fully—in this case make life masks of them for his shrine.
Tony admits that something is very wrong: “Old Pete’s got ways about hin. I don’t know-
-strange ways. Like when he was making me up for the picture-putting on the foundation
cream.” The boys suspect Pete of some perversity but they cannot speak the terrible truth
either.
Meanwhile in the kitchen, Rivero attempts to tell Pete that he thinks Pete has made a
mistake in bringing the boys to his home. Pete cannot accept Rivero’s taking an active
(vocal) role in the proceedings and stabs Rivero in the belly with a knife, asserting his
dominance within the active/passive nature of their relationship. The boys are clearly
spooked by all of this and make feeble excuses: “Larry and me have sort of a dinner date.”
(With each other? Have they been converted?) “We don’t feel quite right in here___
Now look Pete-you did something to u s We don’t want you or your influence.”
Pete tries to explain that the three of them are all tied together by the murders at the studio.
Pete brings out a knife, and the phallic signifier sends the boys into a homosexual panic: a
struggle ensues and the room is set on fire. Pete dies with his melting creations a la
Vincent Price in HOUSE OF WAX (1953), and the cops break down the door and
rescue/apprehend Larry and Tony. The hardboiled cops snarl: “Take ‘em downtown!” It
is unclear whether the boys are guilty or innocent of murder, and the film is unable or
unwilling to answer that question. Either way, from the point of view of the film’s
capitalist patriarchy, the boys have met with an even worse fate-they have been tainted by
the signifier “monster.”
The resolution of the film, as just noted, does not offer satisfactory closure. There
are too many unanswered questions, unresolved tensions, and unspoken structuring
absences. The film is unable even to resolve its attitude towards its monster queers: Pete
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and Rivero are made freakish and unappealing, yet the film explicitly invites audience
identification with them (though even more so with the teenage monsters). It uses
stereotypes and the usual coded conventions to connote homosexuals as strange and
monstrous, yet the film also makes a plea for tolerance: early in the film Pete says ‘T he
good Lord created saints and he also created sinners. He created the lamb and the fawn,
but he also created the wolf and the jackal. Who can judge which is the most
praiseworthy?" This is before Pete becomes a murderer, but here again the script takes
pains to show that it is the dominant order that is responsible for this transformation. Th>-r?
are lines in the script that decry Hollywood’s capitalist exploitation, yet the film itself is a
product of that same process. Ultimately, the film acknowledges that it is the patriarchal
power structure (both within Hollywood and society at large) that keeps homosexuals and
women in a place of submission, primarily by constructing their images in specific ways.
As Robin Wood and other Marxist cultural theorists have argued, the “logical aim of both
movements” (Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation) is “to attack and undermine the
dominant ideological norms on all levels This attack, for instance, could-indeed,
should-be directed at the economic structures of capitalism that support the norms, as they
are embodied in the structure of the film industry itself as well as in its products.”45 This is
precisely what HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER achieves within its filmic narrative, even as
the physical film itself is a product of that same exploitative system. As such, the film
contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Perverts: Ed Wood and “The Twilight People”

The original story for HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER was allegedly written by (and then
stolen from) a Hollywood “wanna-be” and monster movie aficionado named Edward D.
Wood, Jr.66 Ed Wood was (by most accounts) a heterosexual male transvestite whose
name today might not be remembered at all if it were not for the queerer tastes of B movie
fans, who, over the last twenty years or so, have patiently unearthed his work and
“ Robin Wood. “Responsbilities of a Gay Rim Critic,'’ Movies and Methods Vot II, ed. Bill
Nichols (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) 653.
“ Rudolph Grey, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Los Angeles:
Feral Press, 1992) 62.
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championed it as some sort of apex in the art of bad movie making.67 Wood’s best known
films, all of which were independently financed and shot outside of the studio system,
were poverty-stricken genre epics or cheap exploitation films; refracted through Wood’s
particular queer sensibility and apparent lack of artistry, his films are championed by many
movie fans precisely because of their ability to baldly expose the cliches and formulas of
the Hollywood system. Almost all o f Ed Wood’s work had an interesting way of
conflating the monstrous and the sexual, and while his film work traversed a number of
different genres (western, crime, teenage rebel), he is often best remembered for his
science fiction/horror films, BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955), PLAN NINE FROM
OUTER SPACE (1956), and NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1958). His monstrous
approach to sex became ever more apparent as his career continued a downward spiral
throughout the 1960s—from NIGHT OF THE GHOULS in 1958 (a fairly straightforward
ghost-hoax narrative) to ORGY OF THE DEAD in 1965 (basically a “cooch” movie
showcasing a series of female strippers within a gothic frame story) to a film like
NECROMANIA in 1971 (an X-rated nudie with allegedly hardcore footage shot in a
coffin).
The existence of a filmmaker like Ed Wood acknowledges the way that queer
individuals wanting to work within the Hollywood system often became marginalized (the
lack or presence of “talent” notwithstanding). Hollywood’s closet mentality has thrived
during most of its history and is today still a potent tool working to keep queerness
invisible within mass culture. The history of Hollywood is rife with the stories of queer
individuals who were dropped from major studios’ A lists because of their personal lives.
Directors such as James Whale and George Cukor both lost projects because of their sexual
orientation (Cukor perhaps most infamously when Clark Gable asked that he be removed
from GONE WITH THE WIND [1939]), while actors and actresses who didn’t fit
traditional notions of “proper” gender were often relegated to supporting characters,
villains, or B movies in general. Anthony Perkins never lost the monster queer stigmata he
acquired in PSYCHO (even after his heterosexual marriage), and Hurd Hatfield, who had
67See Harry and Michael Medved, The Golden Turkey Awards (New Mark: Perigee Books,
1980); and Harry and Michael Medved, Son of Golden Turkey Awards (New \brk: Villard Books,
1986).
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played Dorian Gray in 1945 similarly noted that “The film didn’t make me popular in
Hollywood. It was too odd, too avant-garde, too ahead of its tim e The decadence,
the hints of bisexuality, and so on, made me a leper. Nobody knew I had a sense of
humor, and people wouldn’t even have lunch with me.”68 The changing modes of movie
making throughout the 1950s and 1960s—more independent films and films produced
outside of Hollywood’s sphere of influence—frequently provided work opportunities for
queer artists who were no longer welcome within the mainstream Hollywood industry.
Actor George Nader, who was a handsome leading man “type,” is a good case in
point: Nader was allegedly “sold out” to the tabloids in the 1950s as concession for their
keeping silent about Rock Hudson’s closeted homosexuality. (Nader and his companion
Mark Miller were beneficiaries of Rock Hudson's will upon his death in 1985.69)
Consequently, Nader spent most of his career making films either abroad or in the
backwaters of Hollywood, usually cheap monster/sci-fi films such as THE HUMAN
DUPLICATORS (1965), THE MILLION EYES OF SU-MURU (1967), HOUSE OF
1000 DOLLS (1967), and BEYOND ATLANTIS (1973). Yet, even before his brief run as
a Universal B player in the 1950s, Nader had starred in one of the “classic” bad monster
movies of all time, ROBOT MONSTER (1953), suggesting even then a tie between queer
filmmakers and the less sexually-policed world of the low budget independent or “Poverty
Row” monster movie. As Nader himself described those years, “We lived in fear of an
exposd, or even one small remark, a veiled suggestion that someone was homosexual.
Such a remark would have caused an earthquake at the studio.”70 Apparently keeping a
level head about being “out,” Nader made the most of his B movie career and even went on
to write a gay robot love story, Chrome, in 1978, which has subsequently become
something of queer cult novel, yet another example of homosexual artists using the
fantastic genres as a space in which to figure queer desire.
Ed Wood was certainly no exception to the vagaries of marginalization or
“ Quoted in Gregory William Mank, Hollywood Cauldron (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 1994) 321.
" Reported in David Ragan, Who's Who in Hollywood, Volume 2, M-Z (New Vbrk: Facts on File,
1992) 1213.
70Quoted in Boze Hadleigh, Hollywood Babble On (Carol Publishing Group: A Birch Lane
Press Book, 1994) 152.
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monsterization. Even in his first exploitation film, the autobiographical GLEN OR
GLENDA (19S3), ostensibly a story about transvestism and transsexualism, Wood made
recourse to monstrous signifiers, primarily through the casting of Bela Lugosi, but also
through the inclusion of iconographic horror movie elements such as thunder and lightning,
ominous musical cues, and a nightmare sequence complete with a menacing Devil. In the
broadest sense, cross-dressing Glen's double life and his special standing as a sexual
outlaw suggest both the era's construction of the homosexual and the movie monster. The
monster queer theme continues throughout the film, as when the newly bom “Ann" (whose
sex change has been referred to as “the tortures of the damned") is described by the narrator
as a “happy, lovely young lady that modem medicine and science had created almost as a
Frankenstein monster." Glen/Glenda is literally terrorized by the constructs of masculinity
and femininity in his/her nightmare, when the nursery rhymes “What Are Little Boys Made
Of?” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” haunt the character in distorted, threatening
voices. Despite the liberal platitudes spoken by various characters in the film (such as
“love is the only answer” and “maybe society should try to understand them as human
beings”) the linkage of queer sexuality with the monstrous remains an indelible coloration
of the film. Indeed, even producer George Weiss recalled that there was a problem getting
some transvestites and transsexuals to appear in and/or promote the exploitation film,
“because Lugosi signified ‘horror’ and any sex change, therefore, was horror. There were
a lot of people who thought the same thing.”71
Yet, while the film might have been a very early vehicle for the idea of “queer” as it
was developed some thirty years later, it frequently draws harsh distinctions between the
types of “strange people” it wants you to accept as “normal." Much is made of the feet that
“Glen is engaged to be married to Barbara, a lovely, intelligent girl," and that really they are
just “two perfectly normal people about to be married and lead a normal life together.” If
transvestism and transsexualism (which, in the world of the film, at least,
unproblematically reinscribe traditional gender roles) are normal, the film also suggests
what is abnormal. Three times, like Peter denying Christ, the film points out that “Glen is
not a homosexual. Glen is a transvestite, but he is not a homosexual. Transvestism is the
71Grey 46.
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term given by medical science to those persons who desperately wish to wear the clothing
of the opposite sex, yet whose sex life in off circumstances remains quite normal.” A bit
later the film actually depicts two male homosexuals cruising under a street lamp, while the
narrator points out (in typical Wood-en dialogue) that
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
makeup 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 attention of their own sex but to eliminate
themselves from being a member of that sect.
Visually, Glen is shown rebuffing the advances of a homosexual man who later appears in
his/her nightmare. Finally, an exchange between the psychiatrist and the police inspector
raises the point one final time:
Inspector: Did this Glen have any homosexual tendencies?
Doctor: Absolutely not. It’s very seldom that a true transvestite does.
This information was probably news to gay transvestites, although undoubtedly comforting
to heterosexual ones.
Thus, even while attempting to create a broad coalition of queer people (in this case
transvestites and transsexuals and the people who love them), GLEN OR GLENDA still
feels the need to construct the male homosexual as the ultimate Other to be excluded. The
male homosexual is an easy target in 1953, since he was under siege in Washington D.C.
as a threat to national security. As if acknowledging and wanting to counter those charges
should they be leveled at himself, Wood has his narrator state that Glen is actually “more of
a credit to his community and his government” when he is allowed to dress as a woman.
The film also works to reinscribe traditional gender roles rather than deconstruct them, as
when the newly bom “Ann” is taught how to be a woman: she learns how to do her hair,
how to walk like a woman, and what the “duty of a woman in her sex life” is to be.
(PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE espouses a similar sexist philosophy when space
alien Eros contends that women are only “for advancing the race.”) GLEN OR
GLENDA’s wholly benevolent patriarchal figures (doctors, psychiatrists, police
inspectors, and the scientist/God figure played by Bela Lugosi) unproblematically suggest
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that transvestites and transsexuals can by cured of their afflictions, either through gender
realignment surgery or through psychoanalysis. Indeed, medical science is praised
throughout the film, and is used to make a plea for tolerance and understanding of these
queer monster people, much as it had been used in some World War Two era horror films,
or by the members of fledgling homosexual civil rights groups in the 1950s.
Yet, one must remember that GLEN OR GLENDA’s universe is still ruled by Bela
Lugosi: God himself is a movie monster. And it is nearly impossible to discern what type
of reaction GLEN OR GLENDA may have elicited from straight or queer audiences during
its initial releases; today the film cannot be viewed without the mitigating positionalities of
camp and the “cult of trash” which surrounds such baroque cinematic endeavors. Precisely
because of his films’ excesses and inconsistencies, many find Wood’s work to be
p
subversive of the dominant social order (not to mention Hollywood film style). And
indeed, the pleasures for queer spectators are many. Wood never shied away from
delivering beefcake in his movies—he gets several of his stalwart heroes out of their shirts
(including a pre-HERCULES Steve Reeves in JAILBAIT [1954]), and frequently Wood
himself can be discerned doubling in drag for his actresses in his films’ action sequences.
Wood’s films both romanticized the figure of the mad scientist and incorporated pleas for
social tolerance and understanding, often espoused by his queer outsider figures. In
BRIDE OF THE MONSTER, Wood writes and directs Bela Lugosi’s Dr. Eric Vomoff
with a rare compassion that manages to shine through the film’s otherwise cheesey mise-
en-scene. PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE has been read as a bargain basement DAY
THE EARTH STOOD STILL, complete with space aliens who attempt to subdue the earth
before it can destroy the entire universe through the construction of a “solaronite” bomb.72
The fact the the male alien of PLAN NINE is named Eros (and performed by an actor
credited as Dudley Manlove) adds greatly to the campy ambience. Indeed, Wood’s stock
company o f actors themselves constituted a sort of proto-queer family. John “Bunny”
Breckinridge, who played the Supreme Alien Commander in PLAN NINE was a
preoperative transsexual, while the skeletal Maila “Vampire” Nurmi was a member of
Hollywood’s beatnik avant garde—her friends included alleged homosexual masochist
72Danny Peary, Cult Movies ( New Mark: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1981) 266-270.
151
James Dean.77 Drug addicted Bela Lugosi, fruity swami Criswell, and the obese
professional wrestler Tor Johnson rounded out Wood’s bizarre entourage.74 Their “real
life" relationships were most recently recreated in Tim Burton’s loving film biography ED
WOOD (1994), although the idea of a monstrously queer but loving family of Hollywood
misfits didn’t seem to play any better to mainstream audiences in 1994 than it did in the
1950s.
The one film of Ed Wood’s which come closest to articulating a theory of queer
monsters is 1965’s ORGY OF THE DEAD, for which Wood did not direct but did write
the screenplay (adapting it from his novel). In it, a writer of horror stories takes his
girlfriend Shirley out to an old cemetery in the dead of night, in order to find inspiration.
After a car crash they awake to find themselves captured by a werewolf and a mummy,
who bring them to a clearing wherein the Emperor of the Night (Criswell) and his female
sidekick the Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver) are forcing dead women to perform burlesque
routines. At its most elemental level, ORGY OF THE DEAD is a mild stag film, a series of
women stripping and dancing for the Emperor, the camera, and the heterosexual male
spectator. The Black Ghoul watches too, but the lesbian overtones h oe function as they
usually do in straight male pornography-primarily as a means of further titillating the
heterosexual male spectator. As Criswell intones, “I will watch. . . a fitting climax to an
evening’s entertainment," the Black Ghoul briefly menaces Shirley by ripping off her shirt
and brandishing a knife, but the normal couple is saved when the sun suddenly rises and
the ghouls turn into skeletons. Although incorporating lesbian titillation, the film only
briefly acknowledges and then repudiates the threat of male homosexuality, when Criswell
proclaims that “No one wishes to see a man dance!"
It is through Wood’s approach to matters both monstrous and sexual that a proto
queer theory might be discerned. Criswell’s opening monologue, as does the entire film,
73Discussed in Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon //(New\brk: Dutton, 1984) 135.

74The very first entry in Criswell’s book, Criswell Predicts (Anderson, South Carolina, 1968), is
entitled “Homosexual C i t i e s “Mdu will be able to find them near Boston, Des Moines, Columbus,
Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, S t Louis, New >brk, Dallas, and Miami....And all
this wifi be within the law because the perverted will claim they have been discriminated against"
This is jrdly that daring a prediction, given the fact that Criswell himself would surely have moved
within a burgeoning queer community of Los Angeles, a city he thoughtfully spares from his list
of places where “perversion will parade shamelessly.”
152
makes an explicit parallel between people who are sexual and people who are monsters:
1am Criswell. For years I have told the almost unbelievable, related the unreal, and
shown it to be more than a feet. Now I td l a tale of the threshold people—so
astounding that some of you may feint! This is the story of those in the twilight
time-once human-now monsters-in a void between the living and the dead.
Monsters to be pitied! Monsters to be despised! A night with ghouls-the ghouls
reborn from the innermost depths of the world.
As in most of his films, Wood herein asserts the universalizing presence of queer
monsters. Even when some ghosts are shown to be a hoax, as in NIGHT OF THE
GHOULS, “real" monsters still get the final word. In the world of Ed Wood’s films, such
things are ‘"more than a fact.” And, while a traditionally equivocal take on the morality of
monsters is herein espoused forthrightly (“Monsters to be pitied! Monsters to be
despised!”), the entire film itself seems bait on showcasing monsters to be desired. In
order to get his voyeuristic entertainment, the presumed spectator (“Are you
heterosexual. . . ?” asked the ad campaign, although a lesbian might certainly enjoy the
show73) must oiter the cemetery and participate in this gothic ceremony along with the other
creatures of the night. Once there s/he might watch from a position of sadistic power (that
of the Emperor of the Night or the Black Ghoul), or from one of masochistic weakness (the
tied-up heterosexualized couple). Either way, the film’s raison d ’etre seems to be the
showcasing of popular female strippers such as Texas Starr and Bunny Glaser. Yet, why
frame the strippers in such a gothic way in the first place?
The prevailing social attitudes about monsters and sexuality (and an oblique
reference to male homosexuality?) are first discussed by Shirley and Bob as they drive to
the cemaery. Shirley cannot understand why anyone would want to write horror stories.
Bob: Shirley, I wrote for years without selling a single word. My monsters have
done well for me. You think I’d give that up just so I could write about trees, or
dogs, or daisies? Daisies! That’s it! I’ll write about my creatures who are pushing
up the daisies. [They kiss.] Your Puritan upbringing holds you back from my
monsters but certainly doesn’t hurt your art of kissing!
Shirley: That’s life. My kisses are alive.
Bob: Who’s to say my monsters aren’t alive?
Wood’s queer monster was specifically transvestism: here he acknowledges the role
75Reprinted in Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (New \brk: Ballantine
Books, 1983) 533.
153
American Puritanism has had in countering matters both sexual as well as monstrous, and
he argues that his monsters are just as much alive and valid to the real world as are
heterosexual kisses. In ORGY OF THE DEAD, any and all sexuality—not just queer
sexuality-is understood by the filmmakers as some sort of secret and monstrous thing that
lurks in the night, having been forced there in the first place by a repressive social heritage.
Yet, knowing what we know about Wood himself, one can come to acknowledge (perhaps
only in retrospect) that his definition of monstrous sexuality also includes that of the queer.
Actually, while most of Wood's film work remained within the bounds of
(transvestite) heterosexuality, his paperback soft-core novels written in the late 1960s truly
do run the gamut of queer sexuality.76 Interracial sex and social unrest were explored in
Warrs-rhe Difference (1966) and W atts-A fter (1967). Male and female homosexuality
were dealt with in books such as It Takes One to Know One (1967), Night Time Lez
(1968), Young, Black and Gay (1968), and To Make a Homo (1971). In many of these
books, Wood's alter-ego character, a male transvestite with a fetish for Angora sweaters,
frequently makes an appearance, or is the center of attention in books like Black Lace Drag
(1963, also reissued as Killer in Drag [1965] and The Twilight Land [1967]), Drag Trade
(1967), Death o f a Transvestite (1967), and Death o f a Transvestite Hooker (1974). And
no matter what the queer flavor of the day happened to be, almost all of these books
describe queer sexuality with metaphors of darkness, monsters, twilight people, the night,
the undead, the ghostly and the ghoulish. Like the gothic tropes of “The Unspeakable" or
“The Unnamable,” “the love that dare not speak its name" has often been figured within
mainstream culture in spectral, half-seen ways. Investigating the queemess of literary
ghost stories in her book The Apparitional Lesbian, Terry Castle notes how this particular
trope was used to sell lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s.77 With titles such as
Who Walk in Darkness (1951), Women in the Shadows (1959), The Shades o f Evil
(1960), Twilight Girl (1961), Twilight Lovers (1964), The Ghosts (1965), and Sex in the
Shadows (1965), lesbian pulp novels of the era-most without the slightest bit of
76See Grey 175-195 for an invaluable (if incomplete) bibliography of Wood’s printed work. As
Grey notes, it ‘is conceivable that Wood wrote as many as 75 books.”
77Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lasbian: Female Homosexuality and Modem Culture (New
\brk: Columbia University Press, 1993) 54.
154
supernatural context-demonstrate the prevailing queer-as-monster philosophy.
During the late 1960s monster-sex (both hetero- and homo-) apparently sold well to
customers who learned (or who already had learned) to filter their sexual desires through
metaphors of shameful evil and wrongdoing-while perhaps other consumers simply
appreciated the campy mise-en-scene of such endeavors. Nudie monsters flicks like
ORGY OF THE DEAD, HOUSE ON BARE MOUNTAIN, LEGEND OF THE
WITCHES, and THE MONSTER OF CAMP SUNSHINE made the rounds of late-night
screenings. These films might be best understood as a hybrid form of horror-proto-
pomography, the horror part often becoming the justification (or the socially acceptable
reason) for the onscreen nudity. LEGEND OF THE WITCHES, for example, was sold
with two simultaneous blurbs: “‘Has more exposed flesh and genitalia per square foot than
virtually anything in the sex film genre,”’ and for a less openly sexualized spectator,
“‘Essential viewing for anyone committed to or interested in the occult.’”78 Magazines
such as M onster Sex Tales and Horror Sex Tales also published hundreds of monster-sex
stories, many written by Ed Wood himself. Even when published in non-horror sex
magazines such as Beavers or Hot Fun Magazine, Ed Wood’s sex stories still had titles that
suggested the horror genre: “Out of the Fog,” “Whorehouse Horror,” and “Dracula
Revisited.”
Aside from a prevailing Puritanical philosophy which figured sex as monstrous,
there is another reason for the transmogrification of queer sexuality into violent signifiers,
both at this point in time and in other decades (for example, the sadomasochistic exploits of
Karloff and Lugosi during the 1930s.) Censorship throughout the twentieth century has
usually been more concerned with sexuality than with violence. As such, the depiction of
violence has often been made to “stand in” for instances of unrepresentable queer sexuality.
In a slightly different context, this point has been dramatically illustrated in F. Valentine
Hooven’s history of the American “physique magazines” of the 1950s and 1960s. Before
1965, full nudity was forbidden, as was any intimation of sexual activity. Thus, when
putting two models together in compromising positions, “legitimate” (i.e. non-sexual)
reasons had to be invoked as cover for the provocative poses. As Hooven puts it:
78Advertisement appeared in Films and Filming 17:8 (May 1971) 15.
155
Wrestling, wrestling, wrestling! Dressed, undressed, or halfway in between-why
were they always wrestling? . . . Because [if the models] had been embracing
instead of wrestling, everyone involved would have been arrested for pornography
and perversion, but since they w oe trying to kill one another, it was okay.79
Sadomasochistic imagery is thus another way to nominate homosexual desire within a

social atmosphere that forbids its forthright depiction. The male physique films of the
1960s (as well as the avant-garde film work of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, et al.) mined
these territories with a vengeance, producing homoerotica filled with fraternity initiations,
gladiators and slaves, motorcycle rebels, and all the accouterments of sadomasochistic
leather sex. Simultaneously exploding the sexual undercurrents of homosocial male
bonding rituals while eroticizing hierarchy and violence, such representations and practices
remain topical issues in 1990s debates over queer sexuality and social violence. For the
proto-porno industries of the 1950s and 1960s however, sadomasochistic erotica (and in
many cases monster-sex) was often the only way that sex could be packaged and sold
without legal ramifications.
Ed Wood’s life and work represent a unique take on America’s changing
understanding of sex and the monster during the Cold War years and after. His (and his
films’) status as Hollywood outsiders allowed a more explicit take on the subject of
monster queers than those films coming out of the more regulated Hollywood industry,
although his films still did shy away from any positive depiction of male homosexuality.
While big-budgeted Hollywood projects such as BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE (1958) or
THE HAUNTING (1963) were using homosexual connotation to color a society of
witches and warlocks in Greenwich Village or ghostly apparitions in a haunted house,
many of Wood’s exploitation films tackled the subject of monster queers much more
directly, even if they did so in confused, confusing ways.80 While Cold War culture
(re)criminalized the homosexual as enemy of the state, and suggested that the movie
monster was somehow irrevocably Other, Ed Wood’s mad scientists and space aliens
spouted long justifications of their “humanity,” or at least their interest in saving humanity.
78Hooven 129-130.
80For a good discussion of THE HAUNTING and how it figures lesbianism, see Patricia White,
"Fomale Spectator, Lesbian Specter: THE HAUNTING," inside/out. Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New \brk: Routledge, 1991) 142-172.
156
And, as his career slid into the realm of soft-core pornography, Wood’s writings continued
to explore what he apparently knew best—because he had lived it—the connections between
unorthodox sexuality and the monstrous “twilight world of the damned.” These queer
people might be “despised” and “pitied," but nonetheless they cannot be vanquished in their
entirety. As Criswell intones at the end of ORGY 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 hack with them any
mortal who might happen along Who can say that we do not exist? Can you?
157
Exposing the Monster Queer to the Sunlight
Circa the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion
By the late 1960s, the signifier “monster” had undergone a radical shift, splitting into at
least two opposing constructs-a traditional one which continued to posit the monster as &
/
threat to the moral order of society, and another which saw the monster becoming
increasingly domesticated. On the one hand, monsters became flagrantly sexualized figures
in both films and pulp pornography, while on the other they were turned into cartoons and
plush toys for the delectation of children. As television recycled and re-ran the classic
Hollywood canon of horror films, monster magazines such as Frankenstein’s Castle, The
Monster Times, and Famous Monsters o f Filmland brought classical Hollywood monsters
into the hands of youngsters and movie fans alike, treating them with an adoring and loving
playfulness.1 Peter Bogdanovich's self-reflexive TARGETS (1968) is indicative of this
split signifier in a slightly different way, suggesting that the real monsters confronting
American society were no longer those played at the movies by Boris Karloff, but those
produced at home by a culture of warfare. Indeed, the rise of the counter-culture and the
increasing militancy of the civil rights and anti-war movements posed an immediate threat
to the status quo. The classical movie monsters were now more often than not appreciated
as camp, or as homely, endearing figures that were marketed to children as toys, or as
beloved animated puppets in a film such as MAD MONSTER PARTY (1968).'
To some extent, monsters became hip and, like the witch, defined in counter-
cultural or feminist terms, so much so that by 1970, a children’s film called PUFNSTUF
’ The editor of Famous Monsters, Forrest J. Ackerman, was himself no stranger to the queerer
undercurrents of the genre, having written under the pseudonym “Ermayne Laurajean" a short
story entitled “The Radciyffe Effect” which documents what happens after the Earthfe male
population suddenly disappears. Published in The Science Fiction Worlds of Forrest Ackerman
and Friends (Reseda, California’ Ftowell Publications, 1969).
2See David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror {New Mxk: W.W. Norton
and Company, 1993)263-286 for a good overview of this phenomenon.
158
could have one of its ostensible villains, a witch named Hazel (played by the proto-Eve
Sedgwickian ‘'out” fat-Iady Mama Cass) sing what amounts to a psychedelic queer anthem
for lesbian witches and monsters everywhere:
When I was smaller and people were taller / 1realized that I was different.
I had a power that set me apart.
I learned to take it, to use it, to make it / Its not so bad to be different,
To do your own thing and do it with heart.
(chorus)
Different is hard, different is lonely, different is trouble for you only.
Different is heartache, different is pain, but I'd rather be different than be the same.
At first I’d wonder what hex I was under? What did I do to be so different?
Then I discovered some others like me!
Wonder no longer-together we’re stronger! Its not so bad to be different!
Be true to yourself, that’s what you must be!3
PUFNSTUF, an early postmodern artifact which recycled and burlesqued Hollywood

forms and icons for children both at the cinema and at home on a Saturday morning
television show (H. R. Pufhstuf [1969-1971]), dramatically illustrates the shifting
meanings of one particular monster, the lesbian witch. In the 1930s she was Disney’s Evil
Queen and MGM’s Wicked Witch of the West; children and even adults could feel the
menace she represented. By 1970, for some audiences the witch had become an icon of
pride, self-worth, and the promise of social change through coalition building.4
This shift in understanding the classical monsters of Hollywood’s past as now
more or less benign figures had already begun by mid-decade, with the arrival and
popularity of television situation comedies such as The Ministers and The Addams Family
(both 1964-1966), which in their on-going premises regularly conflated the figure of the
monster with the bourgeois suburban family.5 These shows and many others which
featured supernatural or science fiction elements (Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, Lost in
3 Music and lyrics by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel.

4 George Romero, who in 1968 directed NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and was responsible for
reworking many of the genrefe central tenets during the 1970s, explored this idea-the witch as
feminist heroine- in his little-seen 1972 film JACK’S WIFE (aka SEASON OF THE WITCH).
s See Lynn Spigel, "Rom Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Famiy
Sitcom,” Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, eds. Constance Fenley, Liz
Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 205-
235.
159
Space, Star Trek, Dark Shadows) worked to significantly universalize the idea of the
monster as if in response to the paranoid scapegoating of the 1950s, monsters were now
understood more and more like “Us" instead of “Them.” These shows implied that the
monster queer was really not so bad, that beneath his/her odd exterior, the monster 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 M unsters and The Addams Family w oe wonderful examples 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.6
Some of these shows are more “homosexual” than others; that is to say, some of these
shows are more easily read as queer, since none of them featured openly homosexual
characters or situations. (Openly homosexual characters on TV would not become an issue
until the early 1970s.7) Still, My Favorite M artian's Uncle Martin and Tim can be easily
read as a gay male couple (hiding the secret of their Otherness from nosy neighbors), while
Lost in Space showcased a quite visible nelly old queen (Dr. Zachary Smith, played by
Jonathan Harris) on a weekly basis. Furthermore, many of these shows, like Bewitched,
featured homosexual or homosexually-coded actors such as Dick Sargent, Agnes
Moorehead, and Paul Lynde, which in ways both conscious and unconscious increased the
possibility that they could be understood as queerly inflected popular culture artifacts.8
This televisual recycling of the classical Hollywood horror film’s witches, mad
monks, Frankenstein monsters, and wraith-like vampires firmly situated them within the
hegemonic construction of normality, the American middle class living room, and worked
*Personal interview.
'See “Out of the Closet.” Time 101 (March 5,1973) 80, for a contemporary review of TV’s first
homosexual characters.
*For a discussion of queemess on the set and on the screen of Bewitched, see Patricia White,
‘Supporting Character: The Queer Career of Agnes Moorehead,"Out in Culture, eds. Corey K.
Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 91-114.
160
to universalize the figure of the monster.’ Yet, while this may have been metaphorically
liberating for some queer viewers who viewed the assimilation of monsters into society as a
positive move, an opposing position might argue that the figure of the oppositional
monster, the queer sexual outlaw, had “sold out” to petit bourgeois ideology.10 In that
respect, the subversive charge of the monster became softened or eradicated, and the queer
sexual threat that s/he had previously represented was now contained within the institution
of the suburban American family. Aside from their more playfully monstrous peccadilloes
and appearances, most of these shows’ characters, like the Munsters or the Addamses,
practiced (more or less) traditional family values: Gomez Addams, for example, is clearly
aligned with dominant ideologies through his profession as a venture capitalist. Yet, in
other instances, these shows could also be interested in civil rights (for monsters), as in a
Bewitched episode in which Samantha and her sorceress friends picket Darin’s advertising
firm as “Unfair to Witches” because it is planning to depict witches as ugly old women,
and not the “normal” looking individuals they really are. Given the growing awareness of
the media’s negative stereotyping of racial and sexual minorities during this period, it is
hard not to read Samantha’s crusade in metaphoric terms, even as other critics might decry
the reduction of civil rights struggles to a pop culture burlesque.
Occasionally these comedic television approaches to monsters crossed over into the
movies in films like MUNSTER GO HOME (1966) or CARRY ON SCREAMING
(1966), which also posited the furry and/or scaly monsters of the 1930s-1950s as campy
fun. However, this left a space within cinematic representation for new honor movie
threats, and a batch of increasingly violent and sexualized, more realist human monsters
8 These “new and improved” monsters could even became heroes of a sort. On Dark
Shadows, the vampire Barnabas Collins was figured by the narrative as a “good guy’ battling more
evil characters, just as in his films Godzilla started to protect Ibkyo from other monsters rather than
destroy it himselt Gamera, another popular Japanese movie monster, was even marketed as a
‘friend to children,” and his exploits were regularly shared by a small boy.
,0 In using the term “sexual outlaw,” I mean to invoke its usage by author John Rechy, whose
1977 book on the subject was a polemic treatise on how and why male homosexual behavior was,
is, and should be considered a powerful counter-hegemonic social force. John Rechy, The
Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (New \brk: Grove Press, 1977). Rechy'S earlier novel The
Vampires (New \brk: Grove Press, 1971) works the queer monster trope in usual ways for its era: it
weaves together bloody murder, voodoo, a “perfectly shaped midget,” a Catholic priest, and a
bevy of rich, jaded, beautiful people all bent on exploring their varied desires through the cruel
manipulation and mistreatment of one another.
161
quickly arose to fill the void left open by. this shift in signification. In many ways this new
realist monster was much closer to the public's image of the homosexual than either the
werewolf or the vampire. Films such as THE BOSTON STRANGLER (1968)
demonstrated that “real life” psychosexual deviants were far more terrifying and posed a
much more “real” threat to society than did mad scientists or teenage werewolves.
PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM (both 1960) and their many imitators had refashioned the
“human” monster as sexual psychopath, and repeatedly suggested that effeminate men or
forceful women were more likely than not to be homicidal maniacs. William Castle's
PSYCHO knock-off HOMICIDAL (1961) made it clear that its maniac was a transsexual,
and repressed psychosexual secrets became the gothic flavor of the era in Hammer horror
films such as TASTE OF FEAR (1960), MANIAC (1962), PARANOIAC (1962),
NIGHTMARE (1963), and HYSTERIA (1964). American International Pictures expanded
their output from teenage monster movies to wide-screen color psychoneurotics in Roger
Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films, almost all of which starred the fey Vincent Price as some
sort of crazed sexual psychopath. THE INNOCENTS (1961) explored the sexual
repression of a frigid governess in ghostly metaphors, and THE HAUNTING (1963) made
its spooks an explicit function of its characters' lesbianism. When the classical movie
monsters (vampires, werewolves, etc.) were invoked, it was often done with an increased
awareness of the genre's implications; thus Roman Polanski made one of his vampires
overtly homosexual (and another one Jewish) in his film THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE
KILLERS (1967). Although one might argue that the film's satiric project works to
deconstruct the trope of the monster queer rather than reinforce it, this more overt melding
of queer sexuality with the monster was quickly becoming one of the genre's central tropes
at this point in time.
As the 1960s progressed, the weakening Production Code’s loosening restrictions
on sex and violence helped the horror film define itself in new and explicit terms, and
added to the overall “thrill” of the genre. B horror films (produced most regularly by
American International Pictures and England's Hammer Films) boomed throughout the
1960s, and reached an apex of popularity around 1970. For the first time in film history,
openly homosexual characters became commonplace within the genre, sometimes as
162
victims (BLACULA [1971], THEATRE OF BLOOD [1973]) but more regularly as the
monsters themselves (the lesbian vampire). The monster’s violent acts were increasingly
defined in overtly queer tom s, and perhaps not surprisingly, non-straight sexuality in non
horror films was also defined as monstrous. Throughout the 1960s, gay and lesbian
characters were becoming more visible on American movie screens, and, as Vito Russo has
amply demonstrated, whenever they weren’t swishy jokes (STAIRCASE [1969], THE
GAY DECEIVERS [1969], LITTLE BIG MAN [1970]), they were frequently represented
as murderous villains (FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE [1963], CAPRICE [1967], THE
DETECTIVE [1968], DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER [1971], ad infinitum)." As a Time
cinema column opined in 1968, “unashamedly queer characters are everywhere [but]
most of the homosexuals shown so for are sadists, psychopaths, or buffoons. If the actors
are mincing more than the dialogue these days, that may only be because Hollywood has
run out of conventional bad guys."12 Even in films such as THE KILLING OF SISTER
GEORGE (1968) or BOYS IN THE BAND (1970)-ostensibly comedic realist melodramas
about modem day lesbian and gay relationships-the iconography of the horror film creeps
in: thunder and lightning, Expressionist shadows, ominous musical cues, and hysterical
moments of formal excess are used to characterize homosexuals’ lives. THE KILLING
OF SISTER GEORGE is exemplary in this respect: director Robert Aldrich films a lesbian
seduction scene as if he is still directing the Grand Guignol opus WHAT EVER
HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1963).
The public debate over “real life” homosexuality was also shifting. The popular
1950s construction of homosexuality as a psychiatric illness and a threat to national security
was slowly giving way to an increasingly militant gay and lesbian civil rights movement.13
These opposing constructs were put into play (however feebly) in a 1967 CBS special
news report entitled The Homosexuals. Although the show reflects the growing social
awareness of gay communities and the work of the Mattachine Society in fighting for legal
" Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet Revised Edition (New Vbrk: Harper & Row, Publishers,
1987).
12Trends: Where the Boys Are," 77me91 (June 28,1968) 80-81.
,3 For an excellent first hand overview of the situation, see Laud Humphreys, Out of the
Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1972).
163
reform, much longer sections of the show are devoted to the 1955 Boise, Idaho scandal
and a “you are there" reality-style arrest of a man caught soliciting sex in a public restroom.
The show makes much use of psychiatric professionals (including Charles Socarides, who
would later discover his own son was gay) who insist repeatedly on the deviancy of
homosexuals. In a brightly lit classroom, they teach future doctors Irving Bieber’s even-
then-disputed developmental model of male homosexuality (overbearing mother, distant
father) as if it were scientific fact and repeatedly assure their students once again that there
are “no happy homosexuals.”14 A self-hating homosexual mouths the “medical concepts”
psychiatric professionals have taught him, calling himself “sick,” “immature," “childlike,
and “not human at all." For an “objective" news report, the show repeatedly indulges in
horror film iconography (shadows, darkened rooms, unsettling musical cues, garbled and
distorted vocal tracks) in order to make its homophobic points. Several of the men
interviewed for the special do so from behind a potted plant, hiding their faces and
effectively calling up images of monsters lurking in the bushes. The show climaxes with a
“debate” between Gore Vidal and conservative cultural pundit Albert Goldman, who links
homosexuality to the other social horrors of the 1960s: promiscuity, divorce, a “fun and
games” approach to set, sadomasochism, the “smut industry,” and “masturbatory” dance
styles. Vidal has his say, but the inflammatory often-heard accusations of Albert Goldman
are what stand out: in McCarthyist terns, Goldman asserts that a “homosexual mafia” in
the arts is busily infiltrating American culture with decadent forms such as pop art, camp,
14In a remarkable short story from 1970 entitled "Vanishing Breed," author Niel Straum works
together vampire mythology with an understanding of late 1960s gay culture and specifically its
adversarial relation to psychiatry. Straum muses that in the future, vampires will be divided up into
those of the old school (still given to wearing capes and turning into bats) and those younger
assimilationist “human vamps" who scorn the old ways. As a critic of the human vamps puts it,
‘They blended into the background, became respected commoners, upheld the UN and hated
the perverts, all the time carrying on a heritage which they accepted as being a norm for their
particular subculture." The creation of the human vamps had been a great experiment to see
whether or not vampires could be successfully integrated into human society. But in so doing,
one human vamp confesses his vampirism to his “psych-proctor." “The vamp talked freely about
his entire life. He complained of his feelings of non-belonging, his desire for acceptance. And he
told the proctor every detail, not knowing what reaction he would get from the human. The vamp
had been so humanized that he thought being a vampire was like being a homosexual, deviant
but accepted and permitted." Eventually, the vampires flee earth in a space ship, because the
psyct octors, as the moral guardians of this 22nd-century earth, have begun to hunt and stake
them, sie! Straum, ‘Vanishing Breed,"The Curse o f the Undead, ed. M. L. Carter (Greenwich,
Conn.: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1970) 211-221.
164
and homosexual fashion, the latter of which was allegedly trying to turn females into “boy-
women.” A few years later, glam rock stars and others in the public eye would admit their
bisexuality, spurring a small cultural infusion of bisexual chic, androgyny, and general
performative queemess, perhaps best exemplified by David Bowie's series of musical
personas which included space alien Ziggy Stardust and the gothic Thin White Duke. Not
surprisingly, some of these gender-bending musicians eventually distanced themselves
from their sexually ambiguous personas; Alice Cooper, for example, found more
mainstream commercial success once he shifted his persona from transvestite to monstrous
sadomasochist, sugg^ting once again American culture’s relative comfort with violence
compared to sexuality.
“Real men” such as Albert Goldman would also have been upset by the changes
taking place within the pages of Esquire. Essays by Gore Vidal and other known
homosexuals (or “homosexualists,” as Vidal would have it) did appear in the magazine
during this period, but perhaps even more disturbing to “heterosexual” male readers was a
new explicitness in the magazine’s photographic essays and advertising campaigns.13 A
1970 essay on Yukio Mishima, for example, features a photograph of the nearly-nude
author posed in gloves, boots, and briefs astride a Honda motorcycle; another shot shows
him posed nude on the rocks as ocean waves crash around him.16 Male models in
swimsuits and briefs were becoming more and more prominent within the pages, and art
reviews covered all sorts of avant-garde happenings, from a sculptor of male nudes to an
artist who painted with blood.17 (One can also find a reflection of the culture’s newfound
interest in the occult: Tarot Cards and Mystic Arts Books could now be ordered directly
from ads within Esquire’s pages.) Also, the unisex styles of hippy and other counter-
cultural movements had infiltrated the journal, as evidenced by an ad for a “Maxi scarf with
swinging fringe. . . for him or her.”18 Indeed, the mod styles of the era, many of which
were being imported from London, posited men as “peacocks” ready to be garbed in
,s For example, Gore Vidal, “A Memoir in the Form of a Novel," Esquire (May 1970) 109-
116,169-175. This particular essay features a scene set in a homosexual brothel.
"“Oliver Evans, “A Pleasant Evening with Yukio Mishima,” Esquire(May 1970) 126-130,174-
ISO.
,TEsquire (March >970) 112.
’8Esquire (January 1970) 191.
165
paisley caftans, Midnight Cowboy vests, or conspicuous amounts of jeweliy-what one
photographic essay described as the exciting “gleam of metal on men."19 In the back pages
o f the magazine, clothing shops that catered to gay men (such as the Ah M at shop in West
Hollywood, California) sold erotic briefs and swimsuits, and one could find ads for Roy
Dean’s A Time in Eden, a “photo essay on MAN,” which promised to show the buyer a
series of photographs “following man through his first experiences and adventures” here
on earth, presumably including his first erection and ejaculation.20
In the homosexual community itself, the movement for civil rights had gained
considerable momentum during tf>* 1960s, most notably with “Zaps” aimed at garnering
television coverage (another o f the witches in PUFNSTUF sings a song entitled “Zap the
World”), but crystallized, perhaps only in retrospect, around the Stonewall Riots which
occurred in June of 1969. As a result of this civil disturbance, the revolutionary Gay
Liberation Front and its more assimilationist off-shoot the Gay Activists Alliance were
formed.’1 These events were covered in the popular newsweeklies of the era, although in
dramatically conflicted ways which suggest the uncertainty of writers and editors when
dealing with the topic. Before and immediately after the riots, words such as “invert,”
“pervert,” “third sex,” and “queer,” were in common usage, even as there were frequent
pleas for tolerance. “The treatment of homosexuals as cripples and monsters is unjust,”
opined one author, noting the cultural construction of the monster queer, even as he goes
on to demonize homosexuals as “biologically inaccurate and socially unsound.”22 The old
ploy of displacing homosexuality onto foreign shores was still used in a 1968 Newsweek
article about “Amsterdam’s thriving fairyland” where “deviates meet freely to drink and
dance," as if that sort of thing wasn’t happening in America.23 More and more gay-
positive bodes and essays were being written, yet homophobic journalists more often than
,8 ‘The Peacock Persists," Esquire (January 1972) 112.

20Esquire, (June 1970) 206.
21See, among many others: 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); Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1981); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girts and Twilight Lovers {New Mark: Penguin, 1991).
22A. I Baker, ‘Books: The Difference," Time99 (February 28,1972) 81-82.
23 ‘International: Netherlands: A Gay Place," Newsweek72 (December 23,1968) 38.
166
not couched their reviews within their own “moral” standards. For example, in a review of
Martin Hoffman’s book The Gay World, which calls for the elimination of anti-sodomy
laws, police harassment, and legal discrimination against homosexuals, the reviewer
concludes by offering his own solution to the problem, namely, “to turn full circle in the
other direction and treat homosexuals as a quasi-criminal dement.”'4 A few years later the
same pattern emerges by another author in another book review. After reviewing Merle
Miller’s On Being Different and Dennis Altman’s Homosexual Oppression ami Liberation,
reviewer A. T. Baker tells his readers that Altman’s complex arguments are “utter
nonsense” and that “Homosexual love is regarded as deviant because no children can be
bom of it,” apparently forgetting to demonize concomitantly the millions of American
heterosexuals who were practicing birth control.25
Not long after the Stonewall Rebellion, long multi-part articles were published in
October of 1969 in both Time and Newsweek discussing the “Newly Visible, Newly
Understood” homosexual. While covering the facts and fall out of the Stonewall riots,
most of these essays still made recourse to psychiatric models and even repeated the
homophobic myths of previous decades: “At their fullest flowering, the Persian, Greek,
Roman, and Moslem civilizations permitted a measure of homosexuality; as they decayed,
it became more prevalent. Sexual deviance of every variety was common during the Nazis'
virulent and corrupt rule of Germany.”25 Many of these essays give the final (or near final)
word to recovered homosexuals,27homophobic psychiatrists such as Socarides,28 gay
bashing cops,29 or liberal platitudes still embedded in a medical model, such as “Americans
can now recognize the diversity of homosexual life and understand that an undesirable
handicap does not necessarily make everyone afflicted with it undesirable.”30 Yet, the
pressure was now on the psychiatric profession to maintain its authority over the topic,
“ Thomas Gordon Plate, *Notso Gay". Newsweek72 (October 14,1968) 108.

“ Baker 81-82.
“ "Behavior. The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood,” 77me94 (October 31,
1969)65.
27“Four Lives in the Gay World’ Time 94 (October 31,1969) 62.
“ A Discussion: Are Homosexuals Sick?” Time 94 (October 24,1969) 67.
“ “Policing the Third Sex,“ Newsweek 74 (October 27 1969) 81.
“ ‘Behavior Homosexuality: Coming to Terms," Time 94 (October 24,1969) 82.
167
often in any way they could. For example, what confronted within one open forum with
the prospect of “happy homosexuals," Dr. Socarides makes recourse to the old
homosexual-as-predatory-pederast model: “A little boy might go next door to the Y and an
older man might say to him, ‘Look, this is normal, my son. Just join me in this/"31 The
newsweeklies continued to run stories on Dr. M. Sidney Margolese’s attempts to cure
homosexuality with testosterone injections and Dr. Richard Green’s behavior modification
therapy which sought to turn sissy boys into he-men via negative and positive
reinforcement programs, an experiment based on the tacit assumption that femininity is
itself pathological.2 Yet they also ran articles on “Gay Powe*,” “Gay Pride,” “California:
Gay Mecca No. 1," “The Militant Homosexual," and eventually more humanist stories on
lesbian mothers, the Reverend Troy Perry’s newly formed Metropolitan Community
Church, and even a group calling itself The Lavender Panthers, whose goal was to stop
gay bashing in San Francisco.33
As the name “The Lavender Panthers” implies, many of these newly visible and
outspoken gay and lesbian groups were linked with the counter-cultural ideals of other
civil rights and anti-war struggles.34 Position papers on gay and lesbians rights and
concerns could now be found in underground newspapers such as The Berkeley Tribe and
the San Francisco Free Press, even as spokespersons for black and feminist groups often
decried the comparison. And, while some of these more radical gay and lesbian groups
were chastised by the older and more reformist homophile organizations such as the
Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, it was their activism which directly led to
31 A Discussion: Are Homosexuals Sick?* Time 94 (October 24,1969) 67.

32 'Homosexual Chemistry,’ Newsweek77 (April 26,1971) 54-55; ‘The Sexes: Girlish Boys,”
Time 102 (November 26,1973) 133-134. The results of Dr. Greenb experiments were published
in 1987. His project has been scathingly deconstructed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in ‘How to
Bring 'ibur Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys,” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1993) 154-164
33 “Gay Power,” Newsweek81 (February 26,1973) 32; ‘Gay Pride,” 77me96 (July 13,1970) 6;
‘California: Gay Mecca No. 1," Time 96 (November 2,1970) 12; ‘The Militant Homosexual,”
Newsweek78 (August 23,1971) 45-48; ‘Medicine: The Lesbian as Mother,’ Newsweek82
(September 24,1973) 75-76; ‘Religion: The Homosexual Church,’ Newsweek 76 (October 12,
1970) 107; “Religion: Hope for the Homosexual," Time96 (July 13,1970) 46; “The Gay Church,"
Time 98 (August 23,1971) 38-39; and ‘The Lavender Panthers/ Time 102 (October 8,1973) 73.
34This was the slant taken by Life magazine’s special report ‘Homosexuals in Revolt’
(December 31,1971) 62-72, even as It too made recourse to words such as ‘deviants.”
168
the de-pathologization of homosexuality as a medical illness by the American Psychiatric
Association in 1973. Despite the prominence of Dr. Socarides and his homophobic
colleagues on television and in print, some psychiatrists, such as Evelyn Hooka-and
Thomas S. Szasz, had been speaking about homosexuality throughout the era in more gay-
positive toms. For example, in a 1971 essay entitled “Gay Liberation and Psychiatry,”
which appeared in Psychiatric Opinion, the author’s argument was very similar to the
position papers published in the underground presses:
Accordingly, it is about time that this entire subject were taken off the
psychoanalyst’s couch and out of the psychiatrist’s office and the chologist’s
laboratory and approached as what it is: A sociological problem in prejudice,
discrimination, and bigotry, directed against a minority group not different in kind
from others of our sociological minority groups. It is society which is defective
and at fault and needs our attention, not the homosexual.35
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.36 Even the American Medical
Association did not formally declare such reparative therapies inadvisable until 1994.
As I hope this brief overview has shown, the topic of homosexuality reached
unprecedented levels of cultural visibility during the period immediately before and after the
Stonewall Rebellion. The newfound visibility of organized gay and lesbian communities,
and the politics of “coming out loud and proud,” caused tremendous soda! 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 onscreen
for Parka T yla to publish Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies, the first
book-length study of queemess in cinema.37 Even a fairly mainstream British film journal,
“ Franklin E. Kameny, “Gay Liberation and Psychiatry,’ Psychiatric Opinion VIII (February 1971)
18-27. Reprinted in Joseph A. McCaffrey, ed., The Homosexual Dialectic(Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1972) 188.
MSee John P. De Cecco, ed., Bashers, Baiters and Bigots: Homophobia in American Society
(New \brk: Harrington Park Press, 1985) for an overview of the term’s evolution and its implications
in recent American sociology and psychiatry.
*7Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972; New Mxk: Da Capo
Press, 1993).
169
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 Russo has challenged, the depictions of homosexual characters in
the movies of this era were particularly odious. Certainly, there wore more homosexual
characters on the screen than ever before, yet (as Molly Haskell has argued with regard to
images of women on screen) the dissolution of the Production Code in 1968 ushered in a
new era of exploitation and violence, much of it firmly centered on tragic homosexuals and
monster queers.3* The 1970 film version of (THE SECRET OF) DORIAN GRAY, which
updated the Oscar Wilde story to mod swinging London, exemplifies many of these
changes (it was also the subject of a December 1971 cover story in Films and Filming) .
Now, for the first time, cinema could actually show what it had previously only hinted at
regarding Dorian's depravity. Yet, whether or not this represents a “better” representation
of homosexuality (or one more in line with the fledgling gay and lesbian movement’s
goals) is certainly debatable.
Perhaps because of its status as an international co-production, the 1970 version of
DORIAN GRAY may have felt more license in depicting its subject matter; European
cinema was often more willing to depict onscreen sexuality than were films made in the
United States. Yet, in many ways, the film is more resolutely heterosexual and sexually
conservative than the 1945 MGM version. Although there are (stereotypical) homosexuals
onscreen and we do see Dorian cruising the docks and men’s rooms of Mediterranean sea
ports, he continues to have quite active heterosexual relations throughout the film.
(Although it suggested that he has anal intercourse and/or sadomasochistic sex with some
of these women.) The film makes it attitude towards these exploits perfectly clear through
both visual design and musical cues: more often than not Dorian’s heterosexual exploits are
scored with a bouncy late 1960s soft jazz theme (and take place in “natural” settings such as
sunny beaches and green parks) while his homosexual ones utilize shadows and more
somber, ominous scoring. Certain homosexual aspects of the 1945 version are rewritten in
“ Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, Second Edition (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1987), especially pages 323-371.
170
this adaptation, including the blackmailing of college chum and chemist Allen, which
results in him disposing of Basil Hall ward's body. Rather than threatening to reveal
Allen’s homosexual relationship with Dorian (as is suggested in the 1945 film), the
blackmail in this version is effected through compromising pictures of Allen’s wife with
Dorian.
Nonetheless, like many other European horror films of this period, DORIAN
GRAY seems to be steeped in a gay male sensibility. Dorian Gray is played by Helmut
Berger, fresh from his cross-dressing stint in Luchino Visconti’s homo-Nazi movie THE
DAMNED (1969), and the film unabashedly makes his nearly naked body the object of a
frequent erotic gaze. One soft focus, Vaseline-rimmed shot of his nude body is all that is
needed to melt his female companion (and ostensibly the gay male spectator). When he is
dressed, Dorian is given to wearing pink and purple velour suits, a striped fur jacket, and
other mod outfits common to swinging London. This mod style (fringes, bangles, beads,
a satin jumpsuit) also links him to the swishy homosexual stereotypes he encounters
outside the private nightclub “The Black Cock.” Dorian’s portrait is itself something of a
male pin up: wearing nothing but tight blue jeans, Dorian stands with his hands on his
hips, his fingers framing his crotch, smiling a come-hither smile, with a pink scarf draped
around his bare chest and shoulders. Henry Wotton (Herbert Lom) is similarly
homosexually coded: he admits that he dislikes sex with women, wears a pink carnation,
calls people “Darlings! ” and affectedly smokes from a cigarette holder. Henry and Dorian
do apparently have sex in the film—Henry soaps up Dorian’s chest before the scene ends-
and this leads directly to Dorian’s cruising the docks for trade. However, there is little
doubt that his picking up of a black man in a public urinal is meant to signify the nadir of
his debauchery. And, although the film frequently works to situate the spectator within or
alongside Dorian himself (from the opening subjective camera w ok to a reflexive moment
in a theatre where Dorian tells Sybil Vane that “I’m the audience”), the film more regularly
invites the viewer to ogle Dorian’s body and his exploits. This in itself might not be such a
bad thing, since it does suggest that filmmakers were beginning to acknowledge and
address a gay male spectator, but Dorian’s exploits are used simultaneously to titillate and
to repulse, and the film’s moralizing conclusion, true to generic form, still reasserts that
171
such sexual excesses are indeed monstrous. Thus, in many ways, the newfound cinematic
visibility of homosexuals worked to make the equation between monster and homosexual
even more indelible: to apply a semiotic distinction to the construct of the monster queer,
what had once been homosexual connotation within the genre was now homosexual
denotation.
Late-Period Hammer and The Lesbian Vampire Boom

From the 19S0s until 1973, Great Britain’s Hammer Films produced some of the most
popular horror films screened in America.39 Like American International Pictures, Hammer
Films evolved out of a small film distribution company, and thus were acutely attuned
towards marketable formulas. Initially, Hammer produced low budget (non-honor)
features in the late 1940s and 1950s, many of which were based on successful BBC
serials. They scored their first big hit in 1955 with the theatrical film version of the BBC’s
THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT (released in the U.S. as THE CREEPING
UNKNOWN [1956]). A mixture of horror and science fiction elements, THE
QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT fit comfortably within the 1950s monster-invasion film
cycle, but it wasn't until the company shifted to color remakes of the gothic classics that
they found their most exploitable formula. CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN was released in
1957, and HORROR OF DRACULA followed in 1958: both films were phenomenally
successful both in Great Britain and in the United States. Quickly establishing a house
style and a coterie of recognizable actors including Pets’Cushing and Christopher Lee, the
Hammer team remade almost all of the classic horror films during the late 1950s and early
1960s. Most of these films were fairly straightforward period adaptations of the gothic
classics and were generally well-received by audiences, even as critics tended to deplore the
increasing amounts of sex, violence, and sadism that they contained. True to the trend as
manifested in other 1960s horror films, Hammer’s monsters were more overtly humanized
" See Allen Eyles, Robert Adkinsion, and Nicholas Ry, eds., The House of Horror. The Story
of Hammer Films (New \brk: The Third Press, 1974); David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror The
English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1973); PBter Hutchings, Hammer
and Beyond: The British Horror Fiim (Manchester. Manchester University Press, 1993). See also
Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Charm of Evil: The Life and Films of Terence Fisher (Metuchen, NJ:
The Scarecrow Press, 1991); Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Freddie Francis (Metuchen,
NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1991); John Brosnan, The Horror People (USA: A Plume Book, 1976).
172
and sexualized than those of the previous decades. As one contemporary review of
HORROR OF DRACULA attested, “Dracula is no legendary half-man, half-bat as Bela
Lugosi was in the original version-he is a handsome, sinister human being in a long black
cloak with a sexual lust for the blood of the beautiful women who are his victims.”40
As the 1960s progressed, Hammer Films conformed to the demands of the adult
monster-sex marketplace, and relied heavily on sequels to their most successful films,
producing a series of generic variations on the classic gothic tales. Hoping to inflect their
stories with modem cultural concerns (and the tropes of other hit movies), while still
preserving that which had made them successful in the first place, Hammer began to flavor
their output with female monsters (THE BRIDES OF DRACULA [1960], THE NANNY
[1965], THE REPTILE [1966]), generational conflict (TASTE THE BLOOD OF
DRACULA [1970]), and, after the enormous popularity of ROSEMARY’S BABY in
1968, an increasing interest in Satanism and Satanic ritual (especially in relation to their
vampire films). Each new film seemed to offer more and more sexualized titillation from
the confluence of cleavage and carnage. Many of these late-period Hammer films did grow
increasingly baroque, in the process de-repressing and making manifest many of the
genre’s queerer implications, most pronouncedly in a spate of films produced around 1970
which concerned themselves with lesbian vampires and the potential horrors of gender
inversion.
Perhaps not surprisingly, these late-period Hammer films are often dismissed by
critics who write in the field, as if these bizarre variations on the horror canon were
somehow betraying the intentions of the genre rather than unmasking them. David Pirie,
who wrote one of the first books on the British horror film, was of this mind when he
referred to “the decadence that began to swamp British horror in the early 1970s."41 It is
unclear whether he meant the word “decadence” to carry its homosexual connotations, but
he clearly preferred (as did and do many other critics, gay and straight alike) Hammer’s
earlier filmic output to their latter. It is certainly true that the seriousness and measured
propriety with which Hammer had begun their series of horror films had by 1970 turned
40 Nina Hibbins, Daily Worker, quoted in John Brosnan, The Horror People (New \brk: A
Meridian Book, 1976)105.
41 Pirie 179.
173
more towards flippancy and exploitation. Thus a film such as DRACULA HAS RISEN
FROM THE GRAVE (1969), one of the Christopher Lee Dracula sequels, was sold with
an advertising campaign that featured a young woman with a band-aid on her neck and the
catch-line “Boy does he give a hickey!” (Christopher Lee’s Dracula also makes an
appearance on board THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969), running amok alongside a same-
sex interracial couple and Y ul Biynner in drag.) Yet, along with these campier
developments, many of the films produced interesting variations on their generic
imperatives. Many of them began to blur the traditional line between good and evil in
significant ways. DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE features a priest who
falls sway to the vampire, while TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA features a group of
Victorian patriarchs who embrace the lure of deviancy rather than fight against it.
Even quite recent accounts of Hammer horror bring up films such as 1970’s
HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN only to dismiss them as “marred aesthetically by an
unevenness of tone and attitude (which lurches from horror into the characteristic camp
humour of much British horror of this period),” as if once a film has been branded “camp”
it is no longer worth commenting upon.*2 The subtle homophobia of that stance aside
(which can perhaps be traced back to Susan Sontag’s preposterous assertion in 1964 that
camp is always apolitical43), I would argue that these films are more revealing of their
makers' and consumers’ sexual anxieties than those more icily professional ones produced
a few years earlier. Indeed, HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN is remarkable not only for
its shifting tone of campy black humor, but specifically because it contains a fairly
straightforward and non-judgmental representation of a gay man. While the film’s
narrative itself conforms to the requisite homoerotic subtext of the Frankenstein story (the
doctor [Ralph Bates] and his pretty-boy buddy Wilhelm [Graham James] setting out to
create life together), the film seems especially aware of these implications and sets out
actively to counter them by making Dr. Frankenstein something of a (hetero)sexual athlete
who might compare favorably with James Bond. The doctor beds his father’s mistress,
and also impregnates the daughter of the Dean of his Medical School. The gay character is
41 Hutchings 114.
43Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on C a m p A Susan Sontag Reader (New \6rk: Vintage Books, 1982)
105-119.
174
introduced for similar reasons, a process that some gay critics have dubbed “inoculation,'’
wherein a minor character is identified as homosexual in order to show that the main
character is not. This occurs early in the film, when Frankenstein asks a young woman to
help him “study anatomy.” Stefan, another young friend of Frankenstein, mentions to the
group that “I’d like to have helped him.” Underlining Frankenstein’s heterosexuality, but
without denigrating Stefan’s desires, another student (Jon Finch) remarks that “I don’t
think he’d have appreciated that offer, Stefan.” Later in the film, Stefan becomes the
doctor’s devoted cook, and is handily framed for murder when the bare-chested and
heavily muscled creature (David Prowse) escapes and kills a villager. Unlike other male
homosexuals depicted in films in the period, Stefan is a rather ordinary and likable young
man, not stereotypically effeminate, but nonetheless still linked in some way to the
monstrous world of Dr. Frankenstein.
Even the most bizarre late-period Hammer horror films are marked by a certain
pedantic studio realism which I have always understood to be a function of what might be
called their particularly British reserve, as well as their heterocentrist (and frequently
outright sexist) presumptions. Unlike many of the more raw and/or refined films made or
distributed by American International Pictures at this time, at the heart of Hammer Films’
most flagrant gender-bending forays almost always lies a reactionary fear of sexual
difference and/or the monstrous feminine. Hammer’s early films were often concerned
with issues of class and nationality, wherein women were figured within the narrative most
regularly as helpless victims and/or simple objects of desire. The late-period films
challenge this stance by making manifest the latent issues of women's sexuality (here
perhaps best understood as a subset of queer sexuality). As one recent author puts it, as
Hammer films evolved throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, they began to focus more on
“the transformation of the woman from passive object to problem subject.”44 This is
apparent in 1967’s FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN, which was the first Hammer
Frankenstein film to approach so explicitly issues surrounding gender. I say “approach,”
because although the film tells of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments to place a male soul into a
female body, there is almost no exploration of gender-based issues that such a situation
"Hutchings 109.
175
would immediately imply. As usual, Dr. Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is helped in his
endeavors by male assistants, the younger Hans (Robert Morris), and the queenly old Dr.
Hertz (Thorley Walters), who thinks Frankenstein simply “a wonderful man!" When Hans
and his disfigured girlfriend Christina (Susan Denberg) are both killed, Frankenstein
blends them together by placing Hans’s soul into Christina’s body. Frankenstein
apparently also gives her a bleach job and cosmetic surgery, for the new Christina is a
blond bombshell who sets out to avenge herself (or is it himself?) upon the three foppish
aristocrats who had been responsible for his/her death(s). Typical of a female ingenue in
Hamnnr films, Christina is naive to the often offensive point of stupidity. “Who am I?"
she repeatedly queries as presumably “herself," until Hans’s soul takes over ho- body and
turns her into a sexual juggernaut who lures the three men to their deaths. How Hans
might feel inside Christina’s body (let alone how Christina might feel with Hans’s psyche
inside of her) is never explored, nor are the homosexual implications of having
Hans/Christina make love to the three fops. The serious reticence of the classical Hammer
style (the film was directed and scripted respectively by first generation Hammer alumni
Terence Fisher and John Elder) here impedes an exploration of such queer dynamics: the
film almost deliberately turns its back on such issues. As usual, queemess is used to
titillate the audience, but nothing more.
Four years later, Hammer filmmakers produced a more detailed (but still rather
underdeveloped) portrait of a transsexual monster in DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE
(1971, directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by Brian Clemens). In it, Dr. Jekyll
(Ralph Bates) experiments with female hormones, not in order to cure homosexuality, but
rather to discover an elixir of life eternal. He apparently succeeds, and the side effect of
such an elixir, the terrifying transformation of a male subject into a female one, becomes
the chief focus of the film. Unlike FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN, the film
picks up on its original text’s queerer undercurrents and tries to expand upon them. Dr.
Jekyll is perhaps homosexual as the story opens: compared to his wolfish friend Professor
Robertson, Jekyll displays little interest in heterosexual exploits, at first snubbing the film’s
ingenue Susan and causing her brother Howard to wonder aloud whether or not Jekyll is
“imp ious to women.” After Sister Hyde (Maitine Beswick) emerges and bundles of
176
women’s clothing begins to arrive at Dr. Jekyll’s address, Howard, who finds himself
attracted to Sister Hyde, starts to become perplexed. Meeting Dr. Jekyll outside a corset
shop he inquires as to Sister Hyde's health. “Fine. Excellent. I am in excellent health,”
answers Dr. Jekyll, to which Howard replies “No-you misunderstand me-your sister.”
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, here coexisting simultaneously in Jekyll’s body, softly speaks
the name of “Howard” and reaches out to touch the confused suitor’s face. But before
things can become too overtly homosexual, Jekyll retains control of the body and abruptly
turns and leaves.
Campy hum -, is used throughout the film in order to underline the project's queerer
implications: Howard muses “Imagine Dr. Jekyll having a sister like that-never thought he
had it in him.” Sister Hyde later tells Howard that Dr. Jekyll “hasn’t been himself of late,”
and Professor Robertson notes to a policeman that the whole thing is “a queer business,
Sergeant-very queer.” Sister Hyde is a good example of a monstrous Hammer female
“problem subject”-not fully granted her own subjectivity but rather only existing as half of
Dr. Jekyll in the first place. And, although both Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde repeatedly
murder streetwalkers in order to procure the hormones necessary for their experiment,
Sister Hyde is presented as the more sadistic of the two, and she is bent on attaining full
subjectivity by destroying Jekyll’s maleness within the body they both share. In a
reworking of the homosocial triangle, Sister Hyde competes with Dr. Jekyll for the
affections and bodies of the normal couple. She actively tries to kill Susan, partially
because of her status as the film’s generic ingenue, but also because Susan supposedly
awakens maleness (read: heterosexuality) within Dr. Jekyll. Thus, even within a film as
queer as this, gender is still figured primarily through heterosexual desire: maleness is
desiring women and femaleness is desiring men. As usual within the horror film, the
mixing of the two can only lead to horror and destruction. Ultimately, it is Sister Hyde’s
own “femaleness” that leads to her destruction: when Dr. Jekyll is trapped on a ledge by an
angry mob, Sister Hyde emerges but is too weak to hold on and falls to her death.
If Sister Hyde, with her unsheathed stiletto and murderous desire, represents late
1960s cultural anxi*ies over the social emergence of powerful, phallic women, then so do
Hammer’s lesbian mpires, whose voluptuous bodies and fangs activate similar fears,
177
ones traditionally symbolized by the vagina dentata. The lesbian vampire is a figure present
in each era of the English-language horror film, and a very important one to all questions of
queer representation since, as Andrea Weiss has asserted in her recent book Vampires and
Violets: Lesbians in Film, “outside of male pornography, the lesbian vampire is the most
persistent lesbian image in the history of the cinema.”45 Weiss reads the lesbian vampire
primarily as “an articulation of men’s subconscious fear of and hostility toward women’s
sexuality,” yet she understands that “the lesbian vampire is more than simply a negative
stereotype,” and is specifically interested in how lesbians themselves might react to such
representations.46 Unlike the guilt, and butch Countess Zaleska in DRACULA’S
DAUGHTER (1936), Hammer’s lesbian vampires take an unapologetic delight in their
same-sex seductions. Is it not possible that the lesbian vampire of these Hammer films, a
beautiful and powerful woman in charge of her own queer sexuality, might be personally
empowering to a lesbian spectator?
During the 1960s, lesbian vampires were enjoying a vogue on the continent, but
many of these films never received a wide release in the United States, and today they
remain difficult to view. Roger Vadim made BLOOD AND ROSES in 1960, Italian
filmmakers Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti directed Barbara Steele in BLACK
SUNDAY (1960) and LA DANZA MACABRA (1963), and France’s lean Rollin made
several sadomasochistic lesbian vampire films including LE VIOL DU VAMPIRE (1967)
and LA VAMPIRE NUE (1969). The Belgian-French co-production DAUGHTERS OF
DARKNESS (1971), made in English, was distributed more widely in the United States; it
was one of the first of these films to be written about from a lesbian feminist perspective (in
Bonnie Zimmerman’s ground-breaking 1980 Jump Cut essay).47 The film stars queer cult
actress Delphine Seyrig as an updated Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a historical figure who
allegedly bathed in the blood of young women in order to preserve her youthful
44 Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (Hew \btk City: Penguin Books, 1992)
84. See also Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love o f Men (New \brk: William Morrow and Co.,
1981) esp. 277-294; and 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) 47-72.
"Weiss 103, 84.
47Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘DAUGlfHERS OF DARKNESS: Lesbian Vampires,” Jump Cut24/24
(Fal 1980) 23-24.
178
appearance. Zimmerman's essay details how director Harry Kumel subverts the
expectations of the genre by making the honeymooning normal couple dangerously
dysfunctional (the male lead [John Karlen] is a repressed homosexual who beats his new
wife), and by making the Countess herself an extremely attractive figure. Zimmerman
ultimately balks at calling DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS a “feminist" film, but she does
foreground queer reading strategies and suggests that “when the viewer is herself a lesbian
and feminist. . . the film takes on a kaleidoscope of meaning. It shows lesbianism as
attractive and heterosexuality as abnormal and ineffectual.”48 While this is a valid queer
response to the film (it is one of the more lesbian-positive films of this sub-genre),
contemporary reviews reflected a male heterocentrist bias and tended to dismiss
DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS as a “perverse campy vampire item,” singling out “the
butch countess” and describing her as “a Satanic Auntie Marne, all cheek bones, patent
leather, and feather boas.”49
Hammer’s first overtly lesbian vampire film, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970),
was based on J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Victorian vampire novel Carmilia (1872), and at least
one lesbian film theorist has recently written quite eloquently about her own attraction to the
film when she was a teenager.30 Released as an American International Pictures-Hammer
Films co-production, the success of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS spawned a veritable
“boom-let" in English-language lesbian vampire films. Most of these films follow the
traditional generic narrative patterns and representational tropes of the classical horror film:
in a distant and historical European province, the monster arises and feeds, threatens the
ingenue (and/or the normalized heterosexual couple), and is eventually destroyed by
patriarchal agents (fathers, priests, Generals, boyfriends, etc.). Nationality is made an
issue in several of these Hammer films: in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, Carmilia is played
by Ingrid Pitt, an actress of Polish descent, whereas her young victims are almost all
steadfastly British. In the second film, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971), Carmilia is
played by another foreign actress, Yutte Stensgaard, again linking her monstrous otherness
“ Zimmerman 24.
48‘Review of DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS," Variety (May 26,1971).
“ Tanya Krzywirtska, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci?"A Queer Romance, eds. Paul Burston and
Colin Richardson (New \brk: Routledge, 1995)99-110.
179
to that of nationality (and to the lesbian vampire films made on the Continent). Although
no characters in either Hammer film utter the words “homosexual” or “lesbian”—and indeed
precisely because of this unspoken structuring absence-these two films manage to equate
lesbianism with vampirism almost directly. Their very titles are indicative of this: THE
VAMPIRE LOVERS clearly refers to the lesbian relationships the film delimits, while
LUST FOR A VAMPIRE focuses on a heterosexual male’s attraction to Carmilia, and his
attempt to draw her away from (and cure her of) her monstrously queer desires.
These desires are figured in terms of (what has been traditionally considered)
heterosexual male fantasies of hyper-feminine women rather chan stereotypical mannish
lesbians (as had been the case in previous lesbian vampire films such as DRACULA’S
DAUGHTER and BLOOD OF DRACULA). Yet, the Hammer films still tap into many
other cultural stereotypes about lesbians as enumerated by Bonnie Zimmerman: “lesbian
sexuality is infantile and narcissistic; lesbianism is sterile and morbid; lesbians are rich,
decadent women who seduce the young and powerless.”51 Primarily, the quasi-
lesbian/vampiric relationship in the Hammer films is between predator and prey, wherein
the younger, more innocent girl is drained of her life force and/or blood by an older, but
still feminine woman. This is most explicit in Hammer’s COUNTESS DRACULA (1971),
wherein the aged Countess’s beauty regime requires her to bathe in the blood of virgin
girls. Although this is the same premise from which DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS was
also adapted, COUNTESS DRACULA maintains her heterosexuality: she wants to stay
young so she can bed a handsome young soldier, played by late-period Hammer boy-toy
Sandor Eles. COUNTESS DRACULA does not seduce her female victims as much as
murder them outright, but Carmilia’s attacks in the films she appears in are almost always
figured as seductions between two nubile young women in diaphanous night gowns. As a
character in LUST FOR A VAMPIRE asserts, such queer monsters actively court “young
virgins-sometimes they woo them, slowly sucking their life aw ay ”
THE VAMPIRE LOVERS reveals Camilla’s lesbian tendencies slowly. Camilla
(who is using the name of Marcilla) is first introduced at a fancy dress ball, wearing a
vibrant red dress, and staring intensely at ingenue Laura. When boyfriend Carl realizes this
51 Zimmerman 23.
180
and points it out to Laura, a musical stinger and an abrupt cut signal to the spectator that
Marcilla/Carmilla’s desire for the heroine is part of her menace. Carmilia’s second victim is
a rather dim-witted ingenue named Emma (“German's so hard!”) who, in all of her
innocence, tumbles into bed with Carmilia after romping nude together through her
bedroom. However, while their playful chase is scored with a light twinkling harpsichord,
as soon as they fall on top of the bed, the scoring becomes somber and menacing. A bit
lata* on, Carmilia confesses her love for Emma, but the heterosexual ingenue Emma
protests against this kind of love: “It's not the same thing-its different.” As a properly
gendered daughter, Emma is interested in heterosexual romance: “Don't yea wish some
handsome young man would come into your life?” she asks, and Carmilia replies “No—
neither do you I hope.” But Carmilia has already been preying upon Emma, who
remembers these seductions only as a hazy dream (which might make a Freudian blush)
about a large gray pussy c a t: “It lies across me, warm and heavy, and I feel its fur in my
mouth. . . and then. . . it turns into you Carmilia. . . and then you embrace me and kiss
me.” Eventually, after vamping Emma's tutor as well, Carmilia is destroyed by patriarchal
agents, and the normalized heterosexual couple of Emma and Carl are reunited.
LUST FOR A VAMPIRE places the lesbian vampire in a girls’ school setting. As
noted previously, the girls’ school is a staple cinematic setting for lesbian intrigue, from
early manifestations such as MADCHEN IN UNIFORM and THE CHILDREN’S HOUR
(filmed for a second time in 1962 with its lesbianism more or less apparent), to its use in
genre films such as THE SEVENTH VICTIM and BLOOD OF DRACULA. It frequently
appears in even cheaper horror films, such as WEREWOLF IN A GIRL’S DORMITORY
(1961), the latter of which featured a male werewolf, but clearly showed in its advertising
art a woman turning into a beast and leering at (as the ad lines proclaimed): “Beauties! The
prey of a Monster’s Desires!”32 In LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, Carmilia is revived by a
Satanic ritual and heads straight to the neighboring girls’ boarding school for fresh blood.
Once there, another student, Susan, puts the moves on Mircalla (as she now calls herself),
and after a moonlight swim, she becomes the vampire’s first victim. (Thus even non-
**Reprinted in Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (New tbrk: Ballantine
Books, 1983)765.
181
vampiric lesbian desire still leads to death.) When rugged heterosexual Richard Lestrange
(!) arrives at the school to teach English (he bribes the rather faggy English teacher already
engaged for the post to stay away), he falls in love with Mircalla. He soon suspects that
she is a vampire, and sets out to cure her, daring her to “prove to me that you are not.”
They make love, and she pointedly reaches orgasm on screen, while on the soundtrack pop
singer Tracy croons about “Strange Love.” Apparently Lestrange thinks that heterosexual
intercourse will “cure” a vampire much as it supposedly will “cure” a lesbian. But
Lestrange’s “love” fails to cure Mircalla and she is soon back to vamping her fellow
students with renewed sexual vigor willing maidens continue to fall ecstatically under h<;-
kiss. When fellow teacher Janet tries to warn Lestrange about Carmilia, noting that “Susan
was infatuated with her too,” Lestrange snaps back “Just what kind of filthy accusations
are you trying to make?” Queer sexuality, lesbianism, and vampirism exist in the film in an
unthinking blur of signification: all are evil forces that the heterosexual male must oppose.
When Lestrange himself foils to do so, the townspeople themselves gather up their stakes
and swords and torches and head to Carmilia’s castle, priest in tow. She meets her fote
(again) when a burning beam from the flaming castle fells directly through her heart.
Despite the abundance in these films of female nudity and woman to woman
vampire sex, the films are steeped not in a lesbian sensibility, but rather a heterosexual male
one. Hammer's lesbian vampire films were all written and directed by men, and are in
many ways much more indicative of a straight man’s fear of women’s sexuality than they
are representative of any expression of lesbian desire. As a Hammer female “problem
subject,” Carmilia is potentially a monstrous subject around whom queer spectators might
rally, yet the filmmakers subvert her autonomy in explicit ways. According to generic
convention, one might expect the forces of “good” patriarchy to oppose her as they do, but
Carmilla’s monstrous subjectivity is further mitigated in both films by the presence of an
“evil” patriarchal figure, Count Kamstein, who is peripheral but pivotal to the films. The
spectator is led to believe that Count Kamstein is the head of Carmilla’s doomed family.
Repeatedly both films cut away from Carmilla’s exploits to single shots of this figure,
either taken from a low angle or else seated upon a horse, as if to suggest that he holds
some form of ultimate control over Carmilia. Others have theorized that this male figure
182
represents the ultimate “arbitrary guarantor" of the male look as enmeshed with the
camera’s gaze." At other times, this figure is accompanied by a woman, presumably the
Countess Kamstein, whose function within the narratives is to introduce Carmilia to polite
society and to the girls’ school. The Kam steins and their daughter Carmilia thus make up
an evil monster family (as opposed to a comedic monster family), and as such point to a
trend in horror films that would be explored increasingly throughout the 1970s. Herein,
however, they draw attention away from Carmilia and tend to negate or mitigate her
powers: imagine Count Dracula’s parents helping him with his nefarious doings. By the
third film in Hammer’s Carmilia trilogy, TWINS OF EVIL (1972), Carmilia has become a
supporting character, and the vampiric exploits chronicled are the most heterosexualized of
the series, now focusing on Count Kamstein and his designs on twin female ingenues.
That all of these Hammer lesbian vampire films were intended primarily for a
heterosexual male spectator has been asserted repeatedly. Hammer’s other successful line
of films at this time were prehistoric fantasies which always featured scantily clad young
women; these include SHE (1965), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THE
VENGEANCE OF SHE (1968), SLAVE GIRLS (1968, aka PREHISTORIC WOMEN),
THE LOST CONTINENT (1968), and WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH
(1970). Much like ORGY OF THE DEAD and other monster-sex artifacts of the period,
the appeal of these Hammer films was ostensibly directed to the straight male spectator
through soft-core nudity and sexual titillation. Even the ancillary products of Hammer’s
filmic production, such as the 1973 book The House o f Horror: The Story o f Hammer
Films, do this rather blatantly: the book features 16 full pages of nearly-nude cheesecake
photographs of “Hammer’s Leading Ladies.” Contemporary reviews of the films
themselves mark this appeal directly, via repeated assertions of just how erotic and
attractive the vampires really were (compared to the designation of DAUGHTERS OF
DARKNESS’s Delphine Seyrig as “butch”). As one male reviewer of THE VAMPIRE
LOVERS noted, “Vampirism, which has become a silly business on screen, is, at least,
easy on the eyes.”54 Roger Greenspun’s comments on Yutte Stensgaard’s Carmilia are
** Hutchings 164.
S4A. H. Weiler, “Review of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS," The New Ybrfr 77/nes (Rsbruary 4,1971).
183
much more heated: “she dresses with the times—Empire, clinging, filmy, very low cut,
high waisted, terrific-and she's absolutely ravishing."35 And the Playboy playmate twins
who starred in TWINS OF EVIL (Madeleine and Mary Collinson) were described in a
New York Times review as “nobly endowed enough to keep any red blooded boy
interested in vampirism."56 Only the Variety reviewer noted what I had always noted:
namely, that TWINS OF EVIL’s tall, dark, and hairy Count Kamstein, played by “Damien
Thomas and David Warbeck [as hero Anton] are handsome young actors to watch."57
Such sexualized responses to cinematic images are an idiosyncratic affair. If a gay
man can ignore a lesbian vampire film’s presumed appeal to straight male spectators and
enjoy the allures of their partially undraped male figures, surely some lesbian spectators
might also enjoy those of Carmilia and her lovers. Contemporary lesbian reviews of these
films, however, generally disliked them. Writing in the “Lesbiana" column of The Ladder,
author and editor Gene Damon occasionally mentioned the Hammer lesbian films, but
almost always to dismiss them. She noted the queer appeal of Le Fanu's novel Carmilia
but found THE VAMPIRE LOVERS to be “a male movie, for a male audience, and [it] is
almost too silly to comment on except for the fact that several of my readers have brought it
to my attention.”5* Actually, Damon’s readers seemed to be far more interested in the idea
of monster queers than Damon herself: they also wrote to her about DAUGHTERS OF
DARKNESS and THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (1970), but Damon hadn’t seen either
film, nor did she seem particularly interested in doing so. However, ho- column did print
one reader’s rather sophisticated review of THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED: “it was
fairly good as Gothic horror but, unfortunately, presents the secret cult image of
Lesbianism. The film is rated GP and many pre-teens and early teens attend, and thus the
movie helps plant or reinforce mistaken ideas and attitudes.”39
Andrea Weiss critiques Hammer’s lesbian vampires in a similar manner.
“ Roger Greenspun, ‘Review of LUST FOR A VAMPIRE," The New ytxk Times (September 4,
1971) 13:2.
56A. H. Weiler, “Review of TWINS OF EVIL," The New \brk Times (July 14,1972) 19:1.
57Jock., “Review of TWINS OF EVIL," Variety (October 20,1971).
“ Gene Damon, “Lesbiana," The Ladder 15: 9/10 (June/July 1971) 47-48.
"Quoted in Gene Damon, “Lesbiana," The Ladder 16:3/4 (December/January 1971/1972)
50.
184
According to her, they
lack the lesbian verisimilitude that would enable them to “pass” as lesbians; they
flirt with men and dress (and undress) to appeal to male desire. If they do not offer
the same image of erotic fascination for women that they are intended to provide for
heterosexual men, neither do they pose the same threat for lesbian viewers as they
do for men “
While I would not presume to attempt to define what constitutes lesbian desire, these
comments strike me as rather essentialist, especially in light of the wide variety of women’s
images that today might be considered lesbian. Carmilia and her lovers may not have
partaken of a (stereo)typical image of lesbianism in 1970, yet does this perforce preclude
that no lesbians did then (nor cannot now) find them or their exploits attractive? Given
recent debates over the objectification of women in film and pornography, the rise of
“lipstick lesbians,” and the emergence of a sadomasochistic lesbian erotica, Hammer’s
images of Carmilia might be potentially reappropriated to the queer cause in ways that
lesbian audiences of 1970 could not begin to envision. Weiss continues:
As a result, the lesbian spectator's relationship to the vampire takes a different form:
neither sexually desirable nor sexually threatening, the lesbian vampire is appealing
only for the power she wields. Instead of feeling endangered, lesbians can derive
vicarious enjoyment from the vampire’s dangerous powers. But due to her unique
position, the lesbian spectator doesn’t develop a fear of the vampire. And of
course, as a horror film, it then falls flat. Without the element of danger, the film
becomes a burlesque, to be appreciated primarily as camp.”61
While Weiss is correct about the identificatory pleasures of the films’ representation of
queer female power, there is still within her analysis an implied devaluation of camp style
and aesthetic, in this case by a queer critic herself.
As should be apparent by now, I understand camp to have the deconstructive force
Moe Meyer asserts when he reappropriates the word with a capital C. His “Camp” is
“based upon the delineation of a praxis formed at the intersection of social agency and
postmodern parody,” and as such is the “total body of performative practices and strategies
used to enact a queer identity, with the enactment defined as the production of a social
“ Weiss 106.
61Weiss 106.
185
visibility.”® More simply put, Camp is the process of “queer parody,” one of the ways (if
not the only way) that queers have been historically able to participate or appear within
dominant systems of representation. Thus, even in a system of representation as
presumably as heterocentrist and patriarchal as the Hammer lesbian vampire film, it is camp
(as Weiss notes) that “creates the space for an identification with the vampire’s secret,
forbidden sexuality which doesn’t also demand participation in one’s own victimization as
a requisite for cinematic pleasure.”10
Camp is both a process of textual construction and spectatorial reception, what
Susan Sontag identified as the difference between deliberate and unintentional camp. All of
the films discussed within the body of this work might be considered camp if one focuses
on the idea of queer readings as camp interpretations. On the other hand, many of these
films of the late 1960s deliberately force their spectators to interpret them as camp, and this
is precisely to what their critics have generally objected. Meyer identifies a dichotomy
between Pop camp, the popular cultural reappropriation of queer Camp, and queer Camp
itself.64 While this would seemingly essentialize the notion of Camp (only queers can
produce “true” Camp), I agree with Meyer that such Pop camp nonetheless retains its
subversive potential. Meyer argues that
the bourgeois subject of Pop camp must assume a queer position in order to account
for these dispossessed objects and becomes, in fact, queer himself It may be
the bourgeois subject who sings the aria but, like the terrifying phantom of the
opera, it is the queer who taught her how, and who still plays the “organ”
accompaniment behind the wall of enforced invisibility in the sewer system of
“history’s waste.”63
In horror movies specifically, camp may be the life raft queer spectators board in order to
save themselves from drowning in the narrative’s enforced destruction of the monster
queer, but deliberate Pop camp is also the mechanism which forces supposedly straight
“ Moe Meyer. ‘Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp," The Politics and Poetics of
Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New Mork: Routledge, 1994) 9,5.
■ Weiss 108.
64See also Sontag; Jack Babuscio, ‘Camp and the Gay Sensibility," Gays and Film, ed. Richard
Dyer (London: BFI, 1977) 40-57; Andrew Ross, 'U ses of Camp," No Respect: Intellectuals and
Popular Culture (New \brk: Routledge, 1989)135-170; and Mark Booth, Gamp(NewM)rk: Quartet
Books, 1983).
“ Meyer 13,17.
viewers to question many of the genre's central tenets regarding gender and sexuality.
Whether or not camp makes the films “fall flat" as horror films (and I am not sure what this
means exactly, although I think Weiss and others mean it to say that the films fail to
frighten), they still present the same images of monster queers. Whether the spectator
laughs or screams (and I don’t feel these responses are necessarily mutually exclusive) is
based on how that singular spectator approaches the text in the first place. It has been my
experience that queer spectators relate to images of themselves in many ways
simultaneously, perhaps with humor, and perhaps with fear, or (as is usually the case with
Hollywood depictions of homosexuals from this period) with some degree of revulsion.
The lesbian spectator may be less “afraid" of a lesbian vampire because she herself is
lesbian, but this fact itself nonetheless fosters a very powerful and pleasurable process of
identification. This pleasure is based upon reveling in the lesbian vampire’s power, as
Weiss attests, but also (ostensibly at least for some spectators) upon her demonstrated
eroticism. As Such, the queer pleasures of the horror film, mitigated through camp and
identification with the figure of the monster, are just as (if not more) important to the film’s
reception than is the experience of “fear.”
Towards a “homosexploitation’’ cinema?

As Weiss argued, one of the keys to enjoying lesbian vampire movies for queer audiences
in general and lesbians specifically lies in the spectator’s investment in the monster's
display of power-her supernatural charms and how she uses them against patriarchal or
heterosexist institutions. It is significant that while the classical monster queer was almost
always vanquished by the end of his/her filmic narrative, around this point in time the
monster queer began in some way to survive the final fade-out. The implications of this for
the horror film in general are quite broad: in some ways this development expresses a
certain cynicism or nihilism, a disbelief in the Hollywood formulas of happy endings
wherein heterosexuality would always reassert its normality. It is also the result of generic
variation: wouldn’t it be surprising if the monster turned out to be still alive for one final
scare? This was the premise of the final minutes of two American International Pictures
movies from this era, COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE (1970) and THE RETURN OF
187
COUNT YORGA (1971), both of which in their final seconds featured one member of the
normal couple turning upon the other in a vampiric lunge. (It should be noted that COUNT
YORGA, VAMPIRE began life as a sex film and that many of Yorga’s brides were 1960s
sex movie actresses; both films also dabble with lesbian titillation, although the focus of
each film is the Count’s traditional heterosexual interest in a female ingenue.66) Throughout
the 1970s, this shock ending was used more and more frequently until it quickly became a
cliche o f the genre’s modem incarnation. Granted, most of the classical monsters never
stayed dead for long, being resurrected for numerous sequels, but these newer genre films
refused io provide any sense of traditional closure, wherein the monster queer was laid to
rest and heterosexuality could persevere.
These subversive pleasures coincide with another that Hollywood was
experimenting with at this time. Looking to please new audioices and different types of
spectators, Hollywood stumbled onto what quickly became known as the “blaxploitation”
film cycle.67 While these films were quite varied in terms of their production histories, the
key to understanding the success of the blaxploitation film cycle was also power
specifically violence wielded by a formerly disempowered minority figure. As Ed
Guerrero has put it, “the central narrative ingredients of the Blaxploitation formula [were]
violent expressions of black manhood or womanhood, and a black-white confrontation that
ends with the oppressed black coming out spectacularly victorious.’’6* For the first time in
history, blaxploitation films put Hollywood's myth-making and fantasy-granting
machinery at the disposal of a black protagonist and through him, the black spectator. It
didn’t matter if the lead character of the film was a cop (SHAFT [1971]), a fugitive
(SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSS SONG [1971]), a drug-dealing gangster
(SUPERFLY [1972]), or a vampire (BLACULA [1972]): the key ingredient of the films’
success was the spectacle of a black male protagonist violently triumphing over racist white
“ Weldon 132.
"For an introduction to blaxploitation cinema, see Daniel Leab, Rom Sambo to Superspade:
The Black Experience In Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975); Ed Guerrero,
Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film ( Philadelphia: lemple University Press,
1993) especially pages 69-111; and Darius James, That's Blaxploitation (New \brk: S t Martirfe
Griffu 995).
“ Guerrero 110.
188
opponents. The specific exploitation sentiment I am trying to locate and describe is perhaps
best illustrated by the climactic scene of THE LIBERATION OF L. B. JONES (1970), in
which Yaphet Kotto pushes a white racist cop into a threshing machine The graphically
depicted murder is simultaneously horrifying and cathartic: revenge is sweet, and even
more importantly, it was profitable at the box office at this point in time, allowing black
spectators a form of displaced cinematic revenge upon racist America.
There is often confusion both within film studies and within popular culture over
the term “blaxploitation.” Some people refer to “blaxploitation film” as any movie of the
period that featured black casts and black stories, but I maintain that there is a world of
difference between SUPERFLY and SOUNDER (1972), a film which would be more at
home in a discussion of Hollywood “social problem” films. Similarly, a recent Los
Angeles Times article described the 1990s boom-let of gay films as a “Gaysploitation”
movement.69 Yet once again, I maintain there is a tremendous difference in appeal and
reception between films such as JEFFREY (1995) and THE LIVING END (1992). The
forma- is a warm-hearted romantic comedy, whereas THE LIVING END is about a two
angry HIV-positive men who go on a shooting spree. THE LIVING END encapsulates the
sort of exploitation sentiment I am trying to locate and describe, although, as noted below,
there were very few attempts to produce that type of openly gay violent revenge fantasy in
the early 1970s. Some of the era’s horror movies, howevo-, come close to it.
Blaxploitation film in its white-controlled studio-backed form (as compared to the
more independent black auteur production), was a money-making endeavor first and
foremost. Perhaps not surprisingly, the studio that produced or released many of these
films was the same American International Pictures that had beat so successful releasing
other types of B films, especially horror. Blaxploitation film is by definition a recycled or
reappropriated genre cinema, producing black gangster movies, black crime dramas, and
black horror films such as GANJA AND HESS (1973), BLACKENSTEIN (1973), and
BLACULA (1972). BLACULA is especially important to the evolution of the horror film
because it figures the monster as a sympathetic, romantic anti-hero. In a historical
“ Richard Natak Gaysptoitatjorf Rims Rnd a Nicely Profitable Niche," The Los Angeles
Times Calendar (December 10,1995) 29-31.
189
prologue, Count Dracula himself is revealed to be a racist, and the curse of vampirism that
he visits upon the proud African Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall) becomes a thinly
veiled metaphor for the white man’s oppression of blacks. In modem day Los Angeles,
Blacula finds his reincarnated lost love (a plot motif of the horror film that can be traced
back at least to Universal’s THE MUMMY [1932] but which would become increasingly
associated with the vampire as s/he becomes increasingly romanticized in later years) and
proceeds to woo her, while the L.A.P.D. tries to hunt him down. Eventually, BLACULA
dies a tragic death, choosing to walk into the sunlight once the white police officers have
murdered his princess. Although he is vanquished, his reign of terror, directed primarily
against the white police officers of Los Angeles, was undoubtedly among his strongest
appeals to black audiences.
Eventually, as the blaxploitation cycle began to wane, black women were also seen
to “kick whitey’s ass" in film such as COFFY (1973), (THE ZOMBIES OF) SUGAR
HILL (1974), and FRIDAY FOSTER (1975). A Native American character battling
oppressive white institutions was the formula of BILLY JACK (1971) and its sequels:
these films might perhaps be thought of as a sort of “Indian-ploitation” cinema. Bruce Lee
and other Asian warriors were also seen onscreen at this time in a spate of kung-fu movies,
while even straight white men worked at violent revenge fantasies in films such as DIRTY
HARRY (1971), WALKING TALL (1974), and DEATH WISH (1974). But was there an
analogous exploitation cinema for queer spectators at this point in time? Or at least the
semblance of such a “homosexploitation" sentiment-films in which the lead character is
understood as queer and fights back against a heterosexualized oppressor? The overt queer
was exploited in many films of this period, but he or she (with the exception of the lesbian
vampire) rarely got to attack the patriarchal order which oppressed him or her. BEYOND
THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) featured a murderous rampaging transsexual, but
his/her victims were a lesbian couple and a blond Adonis who refused to put out.
“Homosexploitation" may have been the sentiment behind the inept ultra-low budget PINK
ANGELS (1969?), wherein homosexual bikers travel across country to appear at a drag
show; however, the conclusion of the film, with the gay bikers hanged from a U.S. Army
f
General’s tree, severely mitigates “gainst a queer spectator’s pleasure. MYRA
190
BRECKINRIDGE (1970), with its transsexual heroAne sodomizing the Western ideal of
Hollywood masculinity also set out to be such a queer exploitation figure, but the violent
reaction that the film generated among critics and Hollywood’s old guard may have
curtailed other openly queer figures of exploitation.70 The film’s postmodern stylistic
which incorporated brief clips from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema was also ahead
of its time and may have further alienated audiences.
A much more usual Hollywood take on Hollywood homosexploitation can be
found in the mainstream hit EARTHQUAKE (1974), albeit in typically confused and
contradictory terms. Jody (Maijoe Gortner) is f!ie film’s “sex deviate"-he works by day as
a long haired grocer but puts on a wig to serve in the Army Reserves.71 His double life is
characterized as a mass of contradictions: he decorates his walls with psychedelic posters
and photographs of muscle men, as well as chains, knives, and bomb casings. His
housemates taunt him for being a fag, and the ominous sound cues which accompany him
throughout the Elm mark him for the spectator as unmistakably evil. (Gortner’s creepy
performance does the rest.) Yet, Jody has a moment of crazed glory later in the film,
when, as the Reservist, he taunts his housemates (who have been arrested for looting) as
fags themselves and then guns them down. While this might have been a violent
empowering moment that some homosexual spectators could have related to and even
applauded, everything in EARTHQUAKE works to position Jody as deranged and evil and
thus distance itself from that possible reading.
Jody can possibly be read as a repressed homosexual, gay in his long-haired life
but compelled to act straight when in the Army; his madness is understood (maybe) as a
result of this psychological split. Yet, the concepts of internalized homophobia and ego-
dystonic homosexuality, which w oe only beginning to be discussed in psychological
circles, were generally not part of the public’s understanding of homosexuality at this time.
As is typical of many Hollywood films, and still much societal understanding of
70See Charles Champlin, ‘Review of MYRA BRECKINRIDGE," The Los Angeles Times (June
25,1970) 8 for one such denunciation. The film created an uproar in the popular press and
among stars such as Loretta \bung whose visage appeared in the film without her consent. Many
pundits declared that Hollywood had lost its morals and, read twenty years later, it is apparent that
homophobia was the motivating force behind th6 attacks.
71Leonard Maltin, ed., Movie and Video Guide 7993(New Ybrk: Signet 1992) 346.
191
homosexuality, the dim fails to differentiate between male homosexuality itself and the
violence and horror which often seems to be a facet of its repression. (A few years later
CRUISING [1980] would make the same conflation of homosexuality, homosexual
repression, sadomasochism, and violence.72) Instead, EARTHQUAKE actively celebrates
a certain macho type of man's man; the intense homoerotic bonds that exist between other
characters (played by Charlton Heston, George Kennedy, Lome Greene, and Richard
Roundtree) are valued and valuable—these men are the heroes of the film. The
homoeroticism inherent in their bonds is kept latent, although when Heston and Kennedy
use a jack hammer to tunnel through a tight space during the film's climax, one might
wonder just how latent. The queer character Jody is in the film to deflect any hint of
homosexuality from these men-their homosocial bonds are good ones, while any hint of
homosexuality proper is linked with madness and violence.
Whither the queer avenger? While the lesbian vampire films may provide some
semblance of a homosexploitation sentiment before their traditional dosure(s), the
sentiment can also be located in at least three other honor films from this period, all of
which starred Vincent Price as a campy madman who busily avenges himself upon the
body of heterocentrist discourse via the bodies of its patriarchal agents. Yet, none of these
films makes its lead character explicitly homosexual; in fact, each narrative works to
heterosexualize him, although as I shall argue, in far less than convincing ways. Like
many of the late-period Hammer films, the overall tone of THE ABOMINABLE DR.
PHIBES (1971), DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN (1972), and THEATRE OF BLOOD
(1973) is one of deliberate camp. This facet, especially if one admits to its queerer
implications, may be what prompted British horror film critic David Pirie to nominate THE
ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES as “the worst horror film made in England since 1945.”73 In
actuality, the deconstructive camp of these three films, coupled with their narratives of
violent retribution, suggests that they might be best understood as filmic expressions
analogous to those found in blaxploitation cinema, affording for queer spectators the same
sorts of identificatory pleasures and cathartic release.
72For more on CRUISING, See Robin Wood’s careful examination of the film and its reception
in Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (New 'nbrk: Columbia University Press, 1986) 58-69.
73Pirie 175.
192
Repeatedly within the horror film genre, racial and sexual minorities have been
linked together in the cluster of signifiers which coalesce around the figure of the monster.
I do not wish to unproblemadcally contribute to that simplistic equation: the histories of
oppression for racial and sexual minorities can be shown to intersect and diverge in many
complex ways, both in the “real life" arena o f social politics and in their cinematic
representations. Yet, in the early 1970s, there was the attempt to forge a coalition between
black nationalists and homosexual activists,74 while in blaxploitation cinema itself,
BLACULA'S reign of terror against the L.A.P.D. could not have happened without the
(unwitting) assistance of the gay antique dealers who first bring the vampire to America.
Gay and black Americans were also forging bonds in the underground nightclubs of the
era, laying the groundwork for the disco explosion which would hit the mainstream a few
years later.
And all minority struggles, whether racial and sexual, might theoretically make use
of the trickster figure, a character popular in both African and Native American folklore
who uses wits and cunning in order to defeat more powerful opponents. In African-
American folklore, this figure has been traced back from the “Superspade” or “Bad-Ass
Nigger” characterizations of the blaxploitation films, through folk heroes such as Jack
Johnson, Staggerlee, and stories of “The Signifying Monkey,” to the mythic figure of Esu-
Elegbara. Interestingly, Esu was a primordial queer figure, “at once both male and female
. . . his (sic) enormous sexuality ambiguous, contrary, and genderless.”73 While this
queemess is often denied in the characterization of (frequently sexist) blaxploitation heroes,
it is nonetheless provocative in this context, and suggests that the trickster figure might be
well suited for expressing a queer revenge fantasy as well as a black one. (MYRA
BRECKINRIDGE certainly comes to mind as a queer trickster, and at least one structuralist
74Huey Newton, “A Letter to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the Womerfe
Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” Berkeley Tribe (September 5,1970), reprinted in
Joseph A. McCaffrey, ed., The Homosexual Dialectic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1972) 195-197.
7SOgundipe, quoted in Henry Louis Gates, ‘A Myth of Origins: Esu-Eiegbara and the
Signifying Monkey,” The Signifying Monkey(New Mark: Oxford University Press, 1988) 29. For
more on the trickster figure and his relation to African American humor, see Mei Watkins, On the
Real Side (New fork: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
193
accounting of Dr. Phibes classifies him as “a dark humor shadow trickster.”76) Another
link between monsters, queers, race, and the appeal of the blaxploitation hero is afforded
by Darius James, author of That’s Blaxploitation, when he chronicles how his own
childhood interest in monster movies gave way to a fascination with blaxploitation film,
suggesting once again that the liberatoiy identificatory pleasures that the movie monster
provides are frequently accessed by non-white, as well as non-straight, spectators.
Blaxploitation cinema also overlaps with queer politics through the discourse of
camp. Like the horror film and other camp artifacts, blaxploitation cinema is usually
understood by mainstream culture as disreputable: most of the films are cheaply made, '
badly acted, designed specifically to glorify violence and revel in bad taste. Their focus on
flashy style and surface over content also makes them ripe for camp decoding, and even
their non-monster villains often seem like they’ve stepped out o f a B honor movie. One of
my favorite examples of this is the Super Pimp Bell (Roger Robinson) in WILLIE
DYNAMITE (1974), whose blue velvet jumpsuit, long fingernails, and controlled
gesturings suggest a very kinky Bela Lugosi, what another critic has described as “a
hysterical mix of Count Blacula and Liberace.”77 Although he is not marked clearly as gay
within the narrative-he has no male lovers and his mannerisms and fashion sense seem
fairly consistent with the other (heterosexual) pimps-Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video
Guide does refer to the character as “an outrageous homosexual.”78 Other more obvious
queer villains in blaxploitation film include Shelley Winters and Stella Stevens as predatory
lesbian Dragon-Ladies in CLEOPATRA JONES (1973) and CLEOPATRA JONES AND
THE CASINO OF GOLD (1975), while John Colicos played a sadistic (white)
homosexual who took special glee in denigrating black manhood in DRUM (1976). The
very presence of such flamboyantly stereotyped homosexuals within blaxploitation film
would almost certainly ensure their ongoing status as camp objets, although it would be a
mistake to assume that all homosexual characters in blaxploitation films are either
monstrous or villainous. As some B movie horror films tend to do, blaxploitation film of
76James F lacrino, Psychological Reflections on Cinematic Terror. Jungian Archetypes in

Horror Films (Westport. Connecticut Praeger, 1994).
77James 81.
76Leonard Maltin, ed., Movie and Video Guide 1995(USA: A Signet Book, 1994) 1454.
194
the early 1970s created a space slightly outside mainstream Hollywood cinema in which all
sorts of social difference, be they racial or sexual, could be represented.
These factors all contribute to the blaxploitation film's campy gay aesthetic (at least
in terms of their reception, if not necessarily their production). To invoke Meyer’s
distinction, certainly they are Pop camp, if not queer Camp. Historically, however, the
films have rarely (if ever) been written about in these terms, even though it has been my
experience that camp is central to their appeal. Many African-American film scholars-
perhaps wanting to distance themselves from the homosexual connotations of camp-have
more often made recourse to the term “kitsch” when describing blaxploitation’s more
flagrant excesses, which is unfortunate since kitsch, still laboring under Clement
Greenberg's denunciation, lacks the more informed counter-hegemonic politics of camp.79
In another context, Manthia Diawara has written about what he calls “Afro-Kitsch" as a
double edged sword in the cultural politics of race, “cutting loose old forms from their
social networks and redeploying them in utterly new contexts,” even as “forums such as
these have become sites of temporary, feel-good, spaces for mass conversions that cover
our wounds without healing them, or redeeming us.”80 It is the nature of exploitation
filmmaking to make its points in simple, violent ways, and thus Diawara is correct in
noting how many films frequently reduce complex political issues to Manichean formulas.
Todd Boyd also notes the problematic nature of kitsch regarding blaxploitation cinema-
these films are primarily figured within popular culture as bad objects or guilty pleasures,
despite their popular appeal-and in so doing Boyd creates an analogy that reaches back
towards queer camp and one of its more famous practitioners:
The allure of [the blaxploitation film] THE MACK is very much like the sentiment
informing ED WOOD. Both films demonstrate the potential for pure kitsch to be
made into an art form as the demands of everyday life are momentarily displaced
into a cinematic world where perverted pleasure supersedes all other
considerations.81
79Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ Partisan Review6:5 (Fall 1939) 34-39.
“ Manthia Diawara, “Afro-Kitsch," Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press,
1992) 285. See also Donald John Cosentino, “Afrokitsch," Africa Explores: Twentieth Century
African Art, ed. Susan Vogel (New Mark: Center for African Art, 1991) 240-255.
" Todd Boyd, ‘To the Player’s Ball and Beyond. Right On," The Los Angeles Times Calendar
(Sunday, October 1,1995) 28.
195
That “perverted pleasure," the graphic violence or dogged resistance wielded so
nonchalantly against oppressors by black or queer “trickster” protagonists, is at the heart of
the exploitation sentiment I am describing, whether it be located in SUPERFLY or THE
ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES.
While the onscreen presence of a black action hero is self-evident, a homosexual
trickster figure might be somewhat harder to identify. Short of giving the figure an
onscreen same-sex partner (as did the lesbian vampire films, thus ensuring the queer’s
eradication via generic formula), in the Vincent Price horror films under question here, a
deliberate and over-arching camp aesthetic is used to nominate the protagonist as queer.
(Camp thus can become yet another form of the closet, if it is used to connotatively suggest
homosexuality without ever directly naming it.) The DR. PHIBES films and THEATRE
OF BLOOD are filled with deliberate artifice, theatricality, artistry, costumed performance,
and held together by the madly camp persona and characterization of Vincent Price as each
films’ (anti)hero. Price’s bigger-than-life performances and somewhat effeminate persona
have made him a favorite among queer spectators for years. From his roles as gothic
madmen in the 1940s to his Baka “the master-builder” in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
(1956—wherein he whips with lascivious glee a spread-eagled and bare-chested John
Derek), to his many neurotic hot-house flowers in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films
of the 1960s, Vincent Price’s leers and fluid eyebrows have always suggested a secret
kinkiness. Price’s real life persona—as art critic and master chef-also contributed to his
gay appeal, while his own brand of “Expressionist” acting challenged hegemonic notions
of taste. As one review of DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN proclaimed, “Price delivers one
of his priceless theatric performances, no doubt to the joy of all audiences for which chiller
is aimed.”82 One of the audiences “for which chiller is aimed” was undoubtedly one
comprised of gay male and/or queer spectators. As I noted previously, this audience was at
this point in time becoming increasingly defined within the film industry itself. For
example, the underground gay art film PINK NARCISSUS was reviewed in Variety on the
same day as was THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, and the critic’s comments regarding
PINK NARCISSUS seem equally valid for DR. PHIBES: “The distributor is undoubtedly
“ Whit, “Review of DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN," Variety(July 19,1972).
196
gambling that the rococo sensibility and art nouveau flavor. . . will appeal. . . to a gay
audience.”®
The two DR. PHIBES films, made in England but released by American
International Pictures, are yet two more examples of the trans-national, cross-cultural
queemess amidst which many of the era’s horror films were produced. Set in London and
Egypt of the 1920s and 1930s, the films tap into the Stonewall era’s interest in nostalgia,
specifically nostalgia for an imaginary history as filtered through the classical Hollywood
cinema. Sociologically, gay men w oe responsible for much of this nostalgia craze as it
swept the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The association of gay men with
antiques and nostalgia is complex and again related to camp, the discourses of which have
been tied to the excavation and celebration of what has been considered by mainstream
culture “historical waste.” Dealing in antiques might thus be understood as a materialist
manifestation of the camp strategy. As Andrew Ross succinctly puts it, camp is the “re
creation o f surplus valuefrom forgotten form s o f labor. ”“ Significantly, many of the
period artifacts which are associated most explicitly with gay culture of the early 1970s are
those dating to the art-deco and art-nouveau styles (and to some degree Victoriana), and are
perhaps as an attempt to preserve some form of historical homosexual expression from
these periods-periods which also have strong ties to the history of gothic horror. The
links between this historical excavation of homosexual artifacts and the queer monster are
specifically acknowledged in A.I.P.’s BLACULA—its gay characters are antique dealers
who acquire Dracula’s estate in order to sell it in their urban antique shop.
Campy gay Hollywood nostalgia appears in many films of this era, from
Hollywood genre homages such as WHAT’S UP DOC (1972), AT LONG LAST LOVE
(1975), YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974), and BLAZING SADDLES (1974), to the
savage deconstructive satire of MYRA BRECKINRIDGE and BEYOND THE VALLEY
OF THE DOLLS. The underground film work of John Waters, Kenneth Anger, Jack
Smith, and the Kuchar brothers also immerses itself in Hollywood’s cliches, while PINK
NARCISSUS itself partakes of what Richard Dyer has called an “intensified B-picture
“ Gold., "Review of PINK NARCISSUS, Variety (May 26,1971).

“ Ross 151.
197
Hollywoodiana.”®
5 Some of the more mainstream films of this ilk, like THE LEGEND OF
LYLAH CLARE (1968), make homosexuality an explicit part of a scandalous mystery,
while others appeal primarily to a less overtly queer Pop campiness. WHAT’S THE
MATTER WITH HELEN? (1971), itself a knock-off of WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO
BABY JANE? (1962), stars Debbie Reynolds, Shelley Winters, and Agnes Moorehead and
focuses on repressed lesbianism during the Golden Age of Hollywood The terrible queer
secret that Reynolds’ and Winters’ characters share is that their sons have been arrested and
executed for a Leopold/Loeb-type murder, yet another not unusual way to nominate male
homosexuality within the popular gestalt. However, for the spectator whose ear was
attuned to Hollywood gossip, the film carried further queer significance: Agnes Moorehead
and Debbie Reynolds were allegedly lesbian lovers.*
Similarly, THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, a genre-queering opus which
Variety aptly called an “anachronistic period honor musical camp fantasy," is also set in the
art nouveau era and celebrates the classical Hollywood horror film, and especially the
figure of the queer mad doctor.®7 Yet, as with the Hammer films, this period setting is
greatly colored by a mod/gay London aesthetic within which the film’s production history
and reception must be situated (director Robert Fuest and set designer Brian Eatwell had
both worked on The Avengers television series). From the film’s opening moments
wherein Dr. Phibes, in a satiny black hooded robe, swells up through the lavender marble
floor of his ballroom astride a glowing pink organ (and playing Wagner’s “War March of
the Priests"), to a more quiet moment wherein Phibes sniffs flowers and giggles girlishly
as one of his victims is eaten by rats, the character of Dr. Anton Phibes embodies a sort of
Ernest Thesiger-ish camp aura. (Perhaps a nasty sort of “curdled camp,” as another of my
colleagues has dubbed it.) Phibes’s stylistic reaches from the nineteenth-century dandyism
revived and celebrated by Oscar Wilde, through the modernist styles of the 1920s and
1930s (including the classical Hollywood horror film), to the mod gay styles of swinging
London. The revenge murders Phibes commits are accompanied by the imitation of period
“ Richard Dyer, Now \bu See It Studies on lesbian and Gay Film (New \brk: Routledge,
1990)165.
" See White 111 for a discussion of these rumors.
"Murt, ‘Review of THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES,’ Variety (May 2 6 , 1971).
198
music (provided by vocal impersonator Paul Frees) and/or Phibes’s mechanical clockwork
musicians; the murders are gruesome, but more importantly, flamboyantly stylish and
meant to invoke adulation of the clever mad doctor rather than pity for his victims. Phibes
is both villain and hero of the film -the credits list him as one of the two “Frotagonists”-
and most importantly, his victims are “respected" and actively heterosexualized members of
the medical profession, including a psychiatrist who gets his head shrunk by a tightening
frog mask. The exploitation appeal for a gay male spectator is obvious: the agents of
heterocentrist patriarchy are either doddering religionists (the Rabbi), buffoons (the police)
or the victimized doctors themselves, the same social forces responsible for the historical
oppression of monster queers both in the movies and in real life.
Like the “Bad-Ass Niggers" of the blaxploitation film, Dr. Phibes is a campy
superman: not only is he himself a mad medical doctor, but also a doctor of theology,
musicology, and law. Reappropriating the Bible for his own ends, he uses the Ten Curses
visited upon Egypt by God (the “G’Tach”) as his modus operundi; thus, his victims are
done in by blood, frogs, hail, locusts, and the like. (This device also links the film to Cecil
B. DeMille’s campy epic THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and recalls Price’s own
participation within it.) However, Dr. Phibes is also prototypically queer in that he
possesses no naturalized physical body: he is a quintessential cyborg in that he “lives” as a
combination of scarred human tissue and electronic devices.88 His face, which has been
mostly eradicated in a car crash (in which he was thought to have died) requires extensive
prosthetic make up in order to allow him to pass as human, and he eats and drinks through
a whole in the side of his neck. His voice is modulated through an electronic device which
he relays through a Victrola. His very existence transcends the human/non-human
dichotomy, as well as the living/non-living. As he tells his rival, “you cannot kill me Dr.
Vesalius-I am already dead.”
In both PHIBES films, the reason given for Phibes’s reign of vengeance is his dead
wife. In the first film, Phibes seeks revenge on the doctors who failed to save his wife
during an operation; in the second, those who get in his way as he travels to Egypt in
“ For an exploration of the cyborg metaphor, see Donna Haraway, *ACyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,'■Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New \brk: Routledge, 1991) 149-181.
199
search of the River of Life also meet nasty ends. True to gothic formulas, this necrophilic
love, which on one level heterosexualizes the gothic hero, also serves as the “excuse” for
him to engage in more homoerotic sadomasochistic exploits; the dead woman is the
instrument through which the two male protagonists conduct their rivalries. Phibes keeps
his dead wife in a mirrored coffin or glass case (the latter decorated with a Rolls Royce
grill), much as Boris Karloffs Hjalmar Poelzig had displayed his female conquests in THE
BLACK CAT (1934). As in that film, heterosexualized necrophilia is the queer desire that
can be named; homosexuality can only be suggested through a camp aesthetic manifested in
performance, design, and reception. The body of Victoria Regina Phibes, linked thusly to
the gothic and homosexual traditions of Victorian London, serves as a witty objective
correlative for the open secret of homosexuality itself (hidden, yet on display), as well as
the narrative’s “beard” for Phibes. (Beard is gay slang for a woman who marries or
accompanies a gay man in public for the specific purpose of deflecting rumors of his
homosexuality.) The discovery of Victoria’s body (or lack thereof) becomes, in each film,
a clue to unraveling the mystery of Phibes himself.
Phibes is assisted in his exploits not by a deformed hunchback, but by a beautiful
female assistant named Vulnavia, who never speaks but obeys her master’s every
command (which of course are never sexual—manifestly because Phibes is devoted to his
dead wife, but more logically because Phibes is a homosexual dandy). The spectator never
leams anything about Vulnavia; she exists to serve her master (as both murderous assistant
and dancing partner), but also to look fabulous, strike poses, and wear a string of
outlandish designer gowns that might make CLEOPATRA JONES green with envy.
Vulnavia is used by Phibes much as Sebastian Venable used his cousin Catherine Holly in
Tennessee Williams’s SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER: as bait for men. In THE
ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES she dances a striptease for Dr. Longstreet (Terry Thomas)
before Phibes arrives and drains his bodily fluids. In the sequel, she performs a similar
dance to lure a young explorer away from his desat camp, at which point he is
immobilized by Phibes in a huge gilt throne and stung to death by scorpions. Unlike
Catherine Holly however, Vulnavia lures Phibes’s victims into his murderous clutches and
not his sexualized embrace, although as 1 have been arguing, within the dominant tropes of
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the horror genre (and American film), those two embraces are not necessarily two different
things. Vulnavia is listed in the credits as “The Girl," but this too is a campy
acknowledgment of her non-traditional status. She is not the classical ingenue but the
villain’s accomplice; in fact, the first film offers no traditional normalized heterosexual
heroine (or couple) whatsoever. Also quite significant to Phibes’s appeal as a gothic
homosexploitation figure is that he is triumphantly victorious in all his plans: in the first
film, he completes his curses by sealing himself up in his tomb with Victoria, and in the
second, he and Victoria’s corpse head down the River of Life in a flower-laden barge. And
in case anyone in the audience missed the point that these films were meant to be read as
gay, both films’s final credits roll under versions of what some wags have dubbed the gay
male national anthem, “Over the Rainbow,” sung in the second film by Vincent Price/Dr.
Phibes himself.89
Price’s character in THEATRE OF BLOOD (which is set in modem day London),
is a hammy Shakespearean actor named Edward Lionheart. He too is alive, though thought
dead after an apparent suicide. Unlike Phibes however, Lionheart has no official
heterosexual romantic interest whatsoever, although he has a daughter named Edwina
(Diana Rigg) who might work similarly within the narrative to deflect suspicions of his
homosexuality. Yet, as in the DR. PHIBES films, the narrative beard is not strong enough
to overcome the gay resonances of Vincent Price and his characterization of Edward
Lionheart. Lionheart’s vengeance is carried out upon the theatre critics who have denied
his genius for so long; in other words, against a (mostly) heterosexual critical establishment
which has denied the value of camp performance. He is helped in these deeds by a group
of homeless people, further linking him to an underground and disempowered social group
(although they don’t appreciate his theatrics any more than do the critics). Like Phibes’s
reappropriation of the Bible, Lionheart here reappropriates Shakespeare and turns the
murders contained therein against the critics who have ignored him for so long.
True to the camp spirit, THEATRE OF BLOOD, like the PHIBES films,
deliberately foregrounds the performative nature of gender and sexuality. Lionheart and his
“ The video release of DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN has replaced Price’s version of “Over the
Rainbow" with incidental music from the film itselt presumably because of copyright technicalities.
201
daughter, both well-versed in stage craft, repeatedly adopt a series of disguises in order to
gain access to their victims. Edwina actually performs most of the film in male drag,
although at one point she lures one of their victims to his death as did PHIBES’s Vulnavia.
In a parody of subservient femininity, she vamps lecherous critic Trevor Dickman (Harry
Andrews), leading him to Lionheart’s living theatre production of The Merchant o f Venice
wherein, according to some minor textual alterations “and a rather large cut,”
Dickman/Antonio loses his heart to Shylock. Lionheart himself also plays upon
heterosexual foibles, as when, posing as a masseur, he makes critic Solomon Psaltery
(Jack Hawkins) think his wife (Diana Dors) is having sex with another man; Psaltery kills
her a la Othello.
Two of the film’s murders make explicit reference to male homosexuality. One of
the critics, Meredith Merridew, is an obvious gay stereotype. Merridew is played by
Robert Morley, who starred in the film of OSCAR WILDE (1960) after many years of
playing the part on stage. Merridew is flamingly effeminate, wears pink suits throughout
the film, and coddles two poodles (his “babies”) by dressing them up with pink hair
ribbons. He is murdered as the “Queen” of Titus Andronicus who was forced to eat her
children-in this case his two poodles that Lionheart has baked into pastry shells. (In this
particular murder, Price comes closest to his “real life” persona as master chef, especially in
a small throw-away moment where he cocks a single eyebrow, beats an egg, and smirks in
his signature way.) In the murder of the one female critic, Chloe Moon (Coral Browne),
Edwina and her father perform stereotypical gay male hairdressers in order to gain access to
her. Price as Lionheart as faggy beautician (wearing a frizzy wig, beads, and a flowing
blouse printed with male nudes) greets Miss Moon as follows: “Hello, I’m Butch. Hey!
Dishy, dishy hair! Can’t wait to get my hands on it!” Edward and Edwina take their victim
downstairs and proceed to fry her with electrified hair curlers (“something new from gay
Paree”), a gloss on Joan of Arc’s death at the stake in Henry VI, Part One. Typical of the
film’s gay black humor, before killing Miss Moon, Price as Lionheart as Butch tells her
“Oh, I wish you’d let me do something camp with the color, darling. I mean like flame,
with ash highlights!”
Coral Browne, it should be noted, played the predatory lesbian Mercy Croft in
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THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE, and the crippled fog-hag columnist in another late
1960s lesbian text, THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE. Those performances are easy to
recall when one watches her as Chloe Moon in THEATRE OF BLOOD, since Miss
Moon's sexuality is not characterized in any manifest way as lesbian or heterosexual. Still,
her onscreen murderous encounter with the faggy Vincent Price produced its own very
queer effects offscreen: Vincent Price and Coral Browne were married a short time after.
Given their filmic personas, it is hard to imagine this union as anything but queeriy tinged,
and a 1974 biography of Price does suggest that the marriage was not (me spurred by
heterosexual passion: “sources close to Price insisted that the rapport was based on mutual
cultural interests rather than romantic notions ”90 Those “mutual cultural interests”
apparently included a mid-1970s touring theatrical production of the drag comedy
Charley’s Aunt, in which they starred together alongside perennial Hollywood bachelor
Roddy McDowell. And, it seems especially fitting that one of their last public appearances
together was on the notorious 1988 Oscar telecast produced by gay entertainment magnate
Allen Carr, a spectacle so fabulously campy (dancing cocktail tables, Merv Griffin
warbling “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts,” Rob Lowe singing “Proud Mary” to
Snow White), that Carr was never asked to produce it again.91
No matter how their “real life” relationship manifested itself, the coupling of
Vincent Price and Coral Browne was and remains for many of their fans a queer alliance
indeed. And whatever his personal preferences in life may have been, Vincent Price
remains a powerful queer icon, from his roles as psychosexual maniacs at Twentieth
Century Fox in the 1940s, to his appearance as the eccentric mad scientist in Tim Burton’s
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS in 1990. Recently, in an article in the gay press on openly
gay silent film star Billy Haines, film historian Ed Sikov alleges that in 1939 the
Hollywood gossip mill knew of and subtly acknowledged Vincent Price’s homosexuality.91
80James Robert Parrish and Steven Whitney, Vincent Price Unmasked (Here \brk: Drake
Publishers, Inc., 1974) 136.
s<For an account of the awards show and its aftermath, see Mason Wiley and Damien Bona,
Inside Oscar. The Unofficial History o f the Academy Awards (N&n \t>rk: Ballantine Books, 1993)
728-751. Carr was the producer of the infamous 1980 Village People disco musical CANT STOP
THE MUSIC.
02William J. Mann, “Wisecracker,” San Francisco Frontiers 14:8 (August 17,1995) 27-28.
203
Citing an essay in Modem Screen entitled “Vincent’s Priceless Hat: Being the Revelations
of a Very Gay Fedora on His Even Gayer Boss,” which detailed Price’s free-wheeling
bachelor days in Europe, Sikov argues that Price’s marriage to Edith Barrett upon the eve
of his Hollywood career was a matter of expediency: if Price wanted a film career he would
have to have the proper heterosexual credentials.* In his later years, Vincent Price, who
had delivered the eulogy at homosexual actor Laird Cregar’s funeral in 1944, toured the
country with his own one-man show based upon the life and work of Oscar Wilde; entitled
Diversions and Delights, it had its world premiere in San Francisco and eventually moved
to Broadway. Wher. asked why his filmic characterizations meant as much as they did to
his fans, Price responded with a defense of the monster queer that linked him or her to any
type of disenfranchised spectator. The figure, he said,
is a monster but very human. A grotesque form with a beautiful soul. Full
sympathy from the audience but not allowed to claim the sympathy of his fellow
players. A loner who represents man’s inhumanity to man. Someone with whom
we identify without any knowledge of why, except that there is a mysterious
something in all of us in him 94
Despite how “grotesque” he or she might be to other characters within the diegesis, the
monster queer as Price understood him is a universalized figure, one whom the audience
rallies around and with whom they might easily identify. For some spectators, Vincent
Price’s queer avengers provide an empowering fantasy figure, a cunning trickster who
could turn dominant society’s most Holy texts into vehichles for spectacular (and stylish)
revenge-and get away with it. Like blaxploitation heroes from SWEETBACK to
BLACULA, Price’s queer avengers were violent killers, but according to the films’ logic
83Martha Kerr, “Vincent’s Priceless Hat Being the Revelations of a Very Gay Fedora on His
Even Gayer Boss,* Modem Screen 19:6 (November 1939) 64,66,68. The word ‘gay* shows up
quite frequently in the pages of Modem Screen around this time. “Gay* did have subcultural
resonance during this era, but it is hard to reconstruct its specific meanings in instances such as
this one. Perhaps the gossip magazines, which had a primarily female readership (if their
advertisements are any indication) used the word with such abandon in the hope of attracting gay
male readers, an early form of “gay window” advertising, a strategy for selling that covertly targets
homosexual audiences without offending or alerting others to this fact. Sikov maintains that the
use of the word ‘gay’ in this instance does signify homosexuality, and that such an article
exemplifies the growing clout of Hollywood gossip columnists to frighten or coerce both stars and
studios into cooperating with them.
“ Quoted in “A S. aciai Presentation by Vincent (The Fly) Price,* Silver Screen Horror (May
1977)7
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they were wholly within their rights to be so, deserving of respect and even admiration: “no
matter how horrendous, how monstrous, we hope we have endowed each role with
humanity___
Conclusion—Into the MADHOUSE

The last starring role Vincent Price enacted for A.I.P. during this period was in
MADHOUSE (1974), another British co-production, this time with Amicus Rims, a firm
that specialized in anthology horror movies based upon the EC comic books of the 1950s.
MADHOUSE was both a fitting rr.p to Price’s career at this point in time (it includes many
film clips from his previous A.I.P. outings) as well as a self-reflexive exploration of the
monster queer himself. It is also an uncanny foreshadowing on where the monster queer
would soon go now that the tenets and practices of intentional camp were beginning to set
him/her free from classical genre positionings. MADHOUSE M s within the WHAT
EVER HAPPENED TO? sub-genre of horror films and tells the story of Hollywood horror
movie star Paul Toombes, played by Vincent Price. In a prologue situated by an opening
title card as “Hollywood-some years ago,” Toombes's young fiancee Ellen is decapitated
by someone wearing Toombes’s Dr. Death costume. Toombes is apparently tried for
murder and acquitted, but (as we are told in “London, Today”) he became a sort of
disturbed “kook” who (like Bela Lugosi) allegedly wandered around the streets of
Hollywood in his monster drag. It is this “psychiatric condition” that makes him the chief
suspect in a series of murders that begin to occur when he arrives in England to resurrect
Dr. Death as a television series.
MADHOUSE is less deliberately campy than most of the films discussed above, yet
queer signifiers still abound. Toombes’s close friend Herbert Ray (Peter Cushing) wears
mod/gay apache scarves and wide collars while Price prowls through Herbert’s dark
mansion in a purple robe and pink pajamas (the latter was also his costume in an earlier
scene where he rejected the sexual advances of a buxom wanna-be starlet). The figure of
Dr. Death is constructed most explicitly as a universalized queer monster, the metaphoric
representation of human beings’ repressed psychosexual urges. As Toombes muses
85 Silver Screen Horror 7.
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during a television interview, his films are
not about the ordinary everyday world around us. They’re about a world that’s
deep inside of us—a world of impulses and instincts that we’ve been taught to
suppress They’re impulses that we don’t dare admit-impulses that sometimes
we don’t even know we have.
As usual, homosexual impulses are tied to murderous ones and coalesce around the figure
o f Dr. Death himself, a black robed avenger with a skull face. Through the course of the
film we discover that Dr. Death was the resultant “child’’ of the relationship between Paul
Toombes and Herbert Ray:
Herbert and I created him between us. No, we didn’t create him—he was there-we
found him in ourselves. We looked into the depths of our souls and he was there—
he was already there, and he will always be there.
MADHOUSE also has a narrative “beard” who mitigates Paul and Herbert’s monster queer
couple relationship, yet the film makes it fairly explicit that within the diegesis she has been
Herbert’s beard as well. Paul is surprised to learn that his ex-co-star Faye Carstairs
(Adrienne Corri) has become Herbert Ray’s wife. She apparently spends all of her time in
queer reveries amidst the spiders in the mansion’s purple and green-lit basement, listening
to the faded recordings of yesterday on an old Victrola. According to her backstory, Faye
had been badly burned and scarred during a sexual encounter with rough trade some years
earlier. She tells Paul she was led to such exploits because of Herbert's sexual disinterest
in her.
While the film thus acknowledges and decries the incidence of such sexualized
violence towards women, paradoxically it also partakes of such a sensibility all too
forthrightly. Like the queer avenger films which predate it, and the slasher films of the
1980s, MADHOUSE aestheticizes murder, especially against women. The main title
credits are played out over a series of stylized representations of Dr. Death menacing a
screaming blond woman with a long sharp knife. Many of the films' murders are
committed with phallic weapons (knives, pitchforks, and swords) and the corpses of
beautiful young women that the monster queer has killed are frequently fetishistically
displayed within the mise-en-scene. MADHOUSE’S first murder (the beheading of
Toombes’s fiancee Ellen) is even shot from a subjective point of view that situates the
206
spectator within the murderer’s mind, a device which would become the signature formal
trope of the 1980s slasher film. Yet, even as these films’ queer psycho-killers look ahead
to the slasher film, their gay sensibility and frequent self-reflexivity works to situate them at
a point far from the soon-to-be standard sadomasochistic misogyny o f most of those films.
MADHOUSE even concludes with a queer happy ending (of sorts), which also
foreshadows another incipient trope within horror at this time: the postmodernist urge to
conflate reality and the image. Paul Toombes as Dr. Death emerges from the film of his
“real life” fiery death, and confronts Herbert Flay. They fig’-.t, but it is Herbert’s abused
wife Faye who stabs him to death, and he is devoured by he* spiders. Paul Toombes then
makes himself up as Herbert Flay, ostensibly to go on playing Dr. Death in the television
series. Faye serves him his favorite dish, “sour cream and red herrings,” and the two
giggle monstrously as the credits roll to Vincent Price singing an old Gordon Clyde love
song: “When day is done, and shadows fall, I dream of you "*
During the years immediately before and after the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, the
monster queer, like the homosexual in general society, attained a new and unprecedented
level of visibility. However, for the most part, this newfound cinematic visibility
continued to be primarily confined to negative stereotypes. After the Production Code’s
demise in 1968, monster queers were more likely to be identified as explicitly gay or
lesbian, and these representations, conflated with the increasingly violent content of this
era’s horror films, made the linkage of monster and homosexual even more indelible. In
the late-period Hammer film VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972), for example, all of the classical
horror films’ connotative tropes are made explicit: its monsters are shape shifting gypsy-
vampire-animals who have explicit vampiric sex with just about everyone, including
children. As one of them says quite pointedly, “One lust feeds the other.” Despite these
more indelible markings, I have argued that through the processes of camp, some of these
monster queers can be understood as figures somewhat analogous to those in the
contemporaneous blaxploitation film cycle, wherein a disenfranchised minority figure
exacts a violent and gratifying revenge upon a dominant heterocentrist hegemony. Yet, in
" Like ‘Over the Rainbow” in DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN, this song has been dropped from
the video release of MADHOUSE, presumably due to copyright technicalities.
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most of these cases, the proto-gay male figures are never identified as such, and must be
read as homosexual by the spectator. (This is probably also the reason why he is often
allowed a “happy" aiding.) For women, the lesbian vampire of the period was equally
problematic: she was a powerful and appealing openly lesbian figure who preyed upon
patriarchal oppressors, yet she was almost invariably defined in tom s of heterosexual male
desire, and even more regularly than the male figures discussed, she met a “deserved" end
when patriarchy's phallus staked her queer pretensions.
Eventually, this period of campy baroque period horror came to ar end with a flurry
of films which pushed the conventions of the classical horror film to their limits, such as
Mel Brooks’s YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, Brian DePalma’s PHANTOM OF THE
PARADISE (with its flaming homosexual rock star Beef), and Andy Warhol’s FLESH
FOR FRANKENSTEIN and BLOOD FOR DRACULA (all 1974). Universal Studios
produced for NBC-TV the homo-tinged Frankenstein—The True Story, scripted by
homosexual lovers Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood. And ultimately THE
ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), which was not successful upon its initial
run, but which quickly developed a cult following, laid bare the queerer implications of the
genre for all to see. Period horror of the classical variety had now in some way been
deconstructed within the genre itself, and cinematic horror again shifted into a slightly
different realm, one that had been developing throughout the 1960s, but which would attain
prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Here I refer to what might be called horror films of
the quotidian, horror films which repeatedly suggested that the monstrous force was not
located in some minoritized, periodized Other, but rather was situated within the very
nucleus of social organization, the American family. In films like NIGHT OF THE
LIVING DEAD (1968), LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972), ITS ALIVE (1974), THE
TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), and THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977),
filmmakers such as Wes Craven, George Romero, Tobe Hooper, and Larry Cohen not
only brought horror into the home, but repeatedly suggested that it was created and
nurtured there in the first place, often by a specifically patriarchal capitalist ideology.
The commercial success of more mainstream disaster movies and A horror films
including JAWS (1975) also contributed to the demise of campy B horror, as did the
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popularity of the “devil made me do it” films such as THE EXORCIST (1973) and THE
OMEN (1976). Most of these films also placed their horror firmly within the familial
realm, yet in frequently reactionary ways.” Ultimately, these possession films’ monsters
were directly connected to Satan himself, Western Christianity’s ultimate minoritized Other
upon whom gets heaped the blame for all of humankind’s universalized evils. (When a
film was made which criticized the arbitrary violence of organized religion, 1974’s THE
WICKER MAN, it was considered so disturbing by its producers that it was for all intents
and purposes shelved until many years later.) That the hyper-textual Satan himself couH
be considered a “real life” monster is a testament to the faith (or desperation) of a Christen
nation; perhaps not surprisingly these films are also ripe with homosexual connotation,
many of them revolving around a homophobic fear of male penetration, a subject explored
at some length by Carol Clover in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws.98 (This was also
the thematic core of another of the era’s most successful “real life” horror films, John
Boorman’s DELIVERANCE [1972].) In light of the fracturing of the monster’s cultural
position into so many different clusters of meaning, perhaps it is not surprising to find a
static system of representation reasserting itself at this time, positing a strict Christian
binary of good and evil in what was becoming an increasingly blurred arena. Films such
as THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN and their many sequels repeatedly reassured
audiences that evil could indeed be located within minoritized Others, and successfully
overcome through reliance upon and dedication to religious doctrine. Simultaneously, as
the medical and psychiatric professions were (in some cases reluctantly) giving up their
claim to homosexuality as a medical illness, it was increasingly becoming the purview of
the growing fundamentalist Christian movement which, as we shall see, borrowed much of
its anti-gay rhetoric from the remarkably similar discourse of the Hollywood horror film.
87For an interesting comparison of THE EXORCISTs politics to another of the era’s occult
thrillers, see Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston, "Seeing is Believing: THE EXORCIST and
DON’T LOOK NOW," American Honors: Essays on the Modem American Honor Film, ed. Gregory
A. Waller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 44-61.
“ See especially Chapter Two, ‘Opening Up." Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws:
Gender in the Modem Honor Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) 65-113.
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Satan Spawn and Out and Proud:
Monster Queers in the Postmodern Era
One might think that after the release and cult popularity of a film like THE ROCKY
HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), the idea of the monster queer would be a harder one
to exploit, since audiences would already presumably have some awareness of the genre's
queerer undercurrents, and be perhaps somewhat less willing to acquiesce to the same sorts
of connotative demonization. Yet, the general public still maintains tremendous powers of
denial about matters homosexual (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”), and the filmgoing public has a
seemingly short memory for cultish deconstructions of popular culture: Hollywood’s
generic patterns die perhaps no more easily than does the Frankenstein monster himself.
The (homo)sexual implications of the monster movie still continue to lurk just barely
beneath the surface of social awareness, although as I shall argue within this chapter, they
continue to come ever-closer to being acknowledged and understood. Many people outside
of film studies-gay and straight alike—are now willing to acknowledge the queerer
undercurrents of the genre, but just as many are unable or unwilling to see the link.
Complicating the analysis of monster queers in the 1980s-era horror film are a host
of new cultural and theoretical forces which impacted upon the genre during these years.
The rise of a new era of political conservatism, the AIDS crisis, the politicization and
continued mainstreaming of gay and lesbian culture, and the development of queer theory
and praxis influenced the monster movies of this period in concrete, although often
contradictory ways. Renewed by the fears of and hysteria over AIDS and the rise of a
politically powerful right wing Christian fundamentalism, some horror movies returned to
the tactics of earlier decades and continued to use gay and lesbian signifiers to color their
monstrous and minoritized characterizations. The era’s most commercially successful
horror film sub-genre, the slasher film (and its offshoot, the neo-noir “fuck and die” film)
can easily be read as AIDS-era warnings about the dangers of unsanctioned sex and
sexuality, even as their first instances predate 1980s AIDS culture. Not surprisingly, the
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killers in many of these films turn out to be queers, either transvestites or transsexuals in
films like DRESSED TO KILL (1980), DEADLY BLESSING (1981), HEART OF
MIDNIGHT (1988), and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), or on occasion more
forthrightly lesbian and gay psycho-killers as in LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977),
WINDOWS (1980), CRUISING (1980), THE FAN (1981), and BASIC INSTINCT
(1992). According to Carol Clover in her ground breaking study of the slasher film, it is
the violent and blunt blurring of gender roles and sadomasochistic identificatory practices
which lie at the heart of these films’ appeal, even as other critics have also (correctly)
pointed out their extreme misogyny and homophobia.' The roots of these films can be
traced back well beyond PSYCHO to at least the 1940s, when Laird Cregar, Vincent Price,
et al. played queer homicidal maniacs. What is different about the reception of many of
today’s films is the social climate into which they are released. Self-professed queers,
including gay men and lesbians, are now more likely to protest outspokenly what they
perceive to be negative media stereotypes of themselves. Most recently SILENCE OF THE
LAMBS and BASIC INSTINCT were picketed and boycotted by queer activist groups in
highly visible ways; although both films’ popularity remained undiminished, these actions
have at least spurred public and industrial debate on the subject of negative gay and lesbian
media stereotyping.2
Indeed, the rise of queer social practice and theory (and their universalizing
assumptions about human sexuality) have led within the last ten years to an opposing trend
in cinematic homor, one that in some cases actively overturns the genre’s conventions in
order to argue that monster queers are actually closer to desirable human ‘‘normality" than
those patriarchal forces (religion, law, medicine) that had traditionally sought to demonize
them. The valorization of the monster queer as sexual outlaw, a counter-hegemonic figure
who forcefully smashes the binary oppositions of gender and sexuality and race, has
become a seminal stance among queer theorists and critics; one of the first important essays
on the subject was entitled “Tracking the Vampire” and explored the lesbian vampire as
’ Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modem Horror Film (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992).
2For a mainstream overview of the subject, see Janice C. Simpson, “Out of the Celluloid
Closet," Time (April 6,1992) 65.
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precisely such a figure.’ For many queer theorists, the debate has shifted beyond the
question of positive or negative media images, and onto questions of queer reading
practices and the machineries of cinematic pleasure. For example, some lesbians find
BASIC INSTINCT’Skiller queer to be an empowering figure, rather than merely a
negative stereotype, arguing that it is finally “a gas to see a woman on the screen in a
powerful enough position to let it all hang out and not be punished for it in the end.”4 Just
as some lesbians might find pleasure in the image of a lesbian vampire avenging herself
upon straight society, so might some spectators rally around the queer psycho-killer.5
Ultimately however, I would argue that the resultant connotative and cumulative effect of
such images on non-queer spectators remains retrogressive. Even as gay and lesbian
people become more visible in “real life,” killer queers continue to abound on the screen.
And even when the films themselves problematize these figures by linking them to social
oppression (as was the case with the queerly produced films THE LIVING END [1992],
SWOON [1992], or SISTER MY SISTER [1995]), they nonetheless still reaffirm for
uncritical audiences the semiotic overlap of homosexual and violent killer.
The 1980s was also the decade when the theories and practices of postmodernism
began to be discussed in academic and artistic circles; media analysts found postmodemity
a useful theoretical tool with which to examine various aspects of popular culture, including
the B monster movie.6 Here I want to make an immediate distinction between what others
3Sue Ellen Case, ‘Tracking the Vampire,” differences 3:2 (Summer 1991) 1-20.
4Amy Taubin, “The Boys Who Cried Misogyny," The Village Vb/ice (April 28,1992) 35-36. See
also the companion piece by C. Carr, ‘Reclaiming Our Basic Rights.’ Both essays were published
under the title ‘Ice Pick Envy.’
‘ The number of female monsters (as opposed to psychopaths) also reached unprecedented
levels during these years: is this development sexist, or egalitarian, or a bit of both? Usually it
depends on how the film manipulates its formal codes and how spectators respond to the female
monster is she empowering and attractive as in THE HUNGER (1982), or merely a pin-up
metaphor for male sexual anxieties as in SPECIES (1995)?
8For several divergent takes on the issue, see, among others, Philip Brophy, ‘Horrality-The
Textuality of Contemporary Horror Rims,” Screen 27:1 (January- February 1986) 2-13; Tania
Modleski, ‘The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Rim and Postmodern
T heory Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986) 155-166; Leo Braudy, ‘Genre and the Resurrection
of the Past" Native Informant (New\brk: Oxford University Press, 1991) 214-224; Christopher
Sharrett, ‘Postmodern Narrative Cinema: Aeneas on a Stroll,’ Canadian Journal of Pottical and
Social Theory 12:1-2(1988) 78-103.
212
have called a “co-opted” or “commercialized” postmodernism and one that might be thought
of as “utopian” or “deconstnictive.”7 While these categories are often difficult to define Get
alone recognize), the co-opted postmodern artifact more regularly and cynically recycles
images from previous eras without a critical stance. This is the postmodernism of naive
nostalgia, of “cultural exhaustion,” and can be evidenced by the plethora of recycled
monster movies of the 1980s: many o f the “classic” alien invasion films of the 1950s were
remade (THE THING [1982], INVADERS FROM MARS [1986], THE BLOB [1988]),
while other ostensibly original films basically retrofit the 1950s monster invasion film
without bothering to adjust themselves to changing social mores. TREMORS and
ARACHNOPHOBIA (both 1990) are two such films, ones that can easily be discussed as
“nostalgia films” by Fredric Jameson's criteria.8 They seek to evoke an era o f days-gone-
by, specifically the halcyon years of the old west and small town America. These films
represent a deliberate casting back to formal and thematic monster movie paradigms that
were successful in the 1950s. Both films feature groups of individuals who band together
to wipe out the monster. They posit a strict Us/Them dichotomy, for there is little chance
to understand their giant worms and killer spiders as part of “Us.” In their paranoid
depiction of the Other, these B monster movies can be seen as two of the most reactionary
American horror films of recent years, as well as two of the most popular.
On the other hand are a multitude of honor films which employed more radical
postmodern aesthetic practices to challenge the dominant formal notions of the horror film
genre and their ideological underpinnings. These practices (which have been spoken about
at length by others) include: [1] pastiche, with which I would include a high modern self-
reflexivity and/or the yearning for nostalgia already mentioned, [2] the slippage of the
signifier/death of the subject/death of the transcendental signified, and [3] schizophrenia as
a mode of presentation/reception (which can perhaps be theorized as a result of [1] and
71am drawing these terms from E. Ann Kaplan, "Introduction,’ Postmodernism and its
Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New \t>rk: Verso, 1988)1-9, which also discusses Hal Foster’s
related distinction between a postmodernism of reaction and one of resistance. See Hal Foster,
“Postmodernism: A Preface,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture {Port Townsend,
WA: The Bay Press, 1983) ix-xvi.
*See Fredric Jameson, ‘FOstmodemism and Consumer Society,” Postmodernism and its
Discontents 13-29, for a discussion of le mode retro and its reactionary political impetus.
213
[2]).’ In moving away from a monolithically constructed subject and its concomitant strict
adherence to binary oppositions, this type of “utopian” postmodern artifact opens onto the
theorization of “queemess” and celebrates the Bakhtinian camivalesque-a polyvocal
hodgepodge of images culled from different races, genders, and sexual positionings, as
well as both high and low art. As E. Ann Kaplan has put it,
feminism, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis have brought about a
significant cultural break we could call postmodern A ‘utopian’
postmodernism involves a movement of culture and texts beyond oppressive binary
categories and could not be imagined without the work of, among others, Bakhtin,
Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Kristeva, and Roland Barthes.10
This results in modes of presentation which convey information through multiple sound
and image bytes rather than a sustained argument:
The appropriation, misappropriation, montage, collage, hybridization, and general
mixing up of visual and verbal texts and discourse, from all periods of the past as
well as from the multiple social and linguistic fields of the present, is probably the
most characteristic feature of what can be called the “postmodern style."11
These new patterns of textual construction, applied to a genre system such as the horror
film, sometimes set preceding styles and representational tropes against one another in a
dialogic counterpoint, and allow for (and/or actively create) a deconstructive reading stance,
one that calls into question the formal paradigms and ideological assumptions of the
previous era’s cinematic expressions. George Romero’s MARTIN (1978) is exemplary in
this respect, contrasting the black and white gothic vampire fantasies of a troubled young
man against his actual practice of attacking women with razor blades in order to drink their
blood. Martin’s religiously-crazed uncle kills him by driving a stake through his heart, in
so doing suggesting the complicity of so-called “normality” in the construction of
“monsters” and the perseverance of social violence.
8 See. in addition to those cited above, Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New
fork: Routledge, 1989); Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984); Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed, Mark Poster (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1988); Todd Gitlin, ‘Postmodernism: Roots and Politics'Cultural Politics in
Contemporary America (New fork: Routledge, 1989); Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon:
The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
10E. Ann Kaplan, ‘ Introduction,’ Postmodernism and its Discontents 4.
" Susan Suleiman, Subversive intent Gender, Politics, and the Avant Garde (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990) 191.
214
Many of these radically postmodern films rupture their own diegetic narratives,
critique traditional models of subjectivity and cinematic suture, and (represent a world
without strict dichotomies of Self and Other. They revel in revealing their generic and
cultural assumptions, and in some way set the stage for films which upend the genre
altogether by making the monstrous figure heroic and the traditional forces of normality
banal, petty, or ultimately the “truly” monstrous.12 Both THE HOWLING (1980) and
GREMLINS (1984) combine well-wom generic motifs with self-reflexive pastiche, as
does WAXWORK (1988), a film that features within its running time generic mini-
narraLves that allow its protagonists to step in and out of different famous honor films.
Franc Roddam’s film THE BRIDE (1985), a sort of remake of BRIDE OF
FRANKENSTEIN (1935), casts pop heaitthrob Sting and infamous homosexual dandy
Quentin Crisp as Frankenstein and his assistant, a forthright recognition of the original
film’s homosexual subtext. Roger Corman’s FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (1990)
brings together Mary Shelley, Dr. Frankenstein, and his creation in a futuristic hyperspace
wherein the themes and conventions of the horror film are scrutinized. KILLER
KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE (1988) mocks the conventions of the 1950s science
fiction film, turning the monsters into clowns who attempt to take over the world with
popcorn guns and cotton candy cocoons. FADE TO BLACK (1980) features a
schizophrenic villain who practices generic pastiche: he murders his foes while costumed as
his favorite movie monsters. I MADMAN (1989) plays quite freely with the media
monster signifier as its villain leaps out of written texts and into the film’s diegesis without
a backward glance, while Wes Craven’s SHOCKER (1989) also features a trans-media
madman: Horace Pinker can enter and control the constructed media world of television.
And for better or worse, Wes Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) set off
a whole spate of horror films that constantly question the nature of reality; by shifting from
one subjective state to another (is it a dream or not?), films of this type effectively question
objectivity and processes of static signification.
12Ultimately, many of these films eschew the shocks and scares that the classic (and the
* com* 'dally co-opted postmodern) horror film still provides. Many of these films are perhaps
best derstood as “meta-horror” films: they serve as a gloss on the formal and thematic codes of
the genre: they are 'about” the horror film more than they ‘are" the horror film.
215
While much of the self-reflexive impetus that these films celebrate has been a
marker of the genre since its outset, these far more radical reformulations of the genre have
become possible in recent years because their producers and audiences were (and continue
to be) overly familiar with the genre’s signifying practices. “Original’’ television shows
(from Dark Shadows [1966-1971] to The Night Stalker [1974-1975] to most recently
The X-Files [1993-]) have incessantly reworked and recycled the genre’s classical narrative
formulas and representational tropes.13 Many of their producers and audience members
have grown up readog fan magazines such as Famous Monsters o f Filmland and revisiting
the horror films of i/revious eras on television, or through the advent of widespread video
cassette sales and rentals. Although Famous Monsters ceased publication for several years
during this period (supplanted by the more splatter-orientated Fangoria), other glossy
magazines such as Cinefex and Cinefantastique continued to cover the genre from fannish,
technical, and industrial viewpoints. In addition, computer Internet groups devoted to
horror have become commonplace, and literally hundreds of self-produced horror fanzines
have been circulated throughout this period. With titles such as Slimetime, Grind,
Trashola, or The Gore Gazette, many of these fanzines focus on recent horror films’ power
to outrage bourgeois sensibilities, even as others devote their pages to the patient
unearthing of lost cinematic treasures from previous eras. Many fans of the genre, as
Norine Dresser has documented in her book American Vampires, identify precisely with
the monsters’ outsider positioning and his/her queer sexual appeal.14
The increasing specialization of honor movie fans during the 1980s was mirrored
by the growth of an increasingly diversified gay and lesbian community. As more and
more gay and lesbian people continued to come out, it became harder not only to deny their
existence, but also to stereotype them. One “coming out” TV-movie, THAT CERTAIN
,3This list of TV shows would also include Lights Ouf(1949-1952), Suspense (1949-1954),
Tales of 7&morrow(1951-1953), Fear and Fancy (1953), The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), Thriller
(1960-1962), The Outer Limits (1963-1965), Night Ga//ery(1970-1973), and a host of more recent
shows including Tales From the Crypt, Friday the Thirteenth, and Freddy’s Nightmares. Many of
the classical horror stories have also been made into TV-movies. For an overview of this particular
format see Gregory A. Waller, “Made-for-Television Horror Rims,” American Horrors: Essays on the
Modem American Horror Rim, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987)
145-161.
'4Norine Dres&... American Vampires: Fans, Victims, Practitioners (New \brk: Vintage Books,
1989).
216
SUMMER, had been aired on network television in 1972, but it was not until the end of
that decade that homosexual characters began to appear on series television. Most of these
first instances of homosexual tele-visibility were rather stereotyped (Three’s Company
[1977-1984], Soap [1977-1981]), and/or tinged with the homosexual signifiers of previous
decades. For example, a 1979 ABC-TV News “Close Up,” which focused on
homosexuals, ran a disclaimer at the top of the hour, assuring its watchers that it did not
want to “make judgments about the men and women depicted,” yet the tropes of the horror
film (shadowy streets, darkened renters) still lurked at the edges of the show. While the
documentary eschewed the homephobic psychiatrists and psychological theories of
previous decades, and did acknowledge the existence o f homosexual communities in major
urban areas, it repeatedly focused on New Orleans and the spectacle of Mardi Gras (masks,
leather, sequins) in order to sensationalize its subjects (much as the media’s coverage of
gay pride events always seemed to showcase their most flamboyant participants). A gay
man who paints midgets is profiled, and another who collects dolls and toys is made to
seem like the creepy curator of a horror movie sideshow. Nonetheless, several of the
participants do suggest that heterosexuals might have much to learn about gender roles
from the more necessarily egalitarian homosexual relationships, and at least women and
people of color are included in the special (unlike CBS’s special report eleven years
earlier). By the 1990s, more recognizable and diverse images of homosexuals were being
seen on TV (Roseanne, L.A. Law ), although almost always as supporting characters, and
in many cases not without considerable backlash from anti-gay Christian consumer groups.
In film, the progress towards some form of acceptable visibility has been equally
tortuous. Vito Russo’s ground breaking book The Celluloid Closet was released in 1981,
surveying almost a century of tragic dykes, Nellie queens, and killer queers.13 The
documentary feature WORD IS OUT (1978) attempted to correct those images with a dose
of gay-positive realism, but far more popular with the filmgoing public was 1981 ’s French
import LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, with its comforting stereotypes of cross-dressing old
queens (it became the highest grossing foreign film of its era). Perhaps attempting to atone
15Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet Homosexuality in the Movies, Revised Edition (1981;
New \brk: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987).
217
for itself after the release of WINDOWS and CRUISING in 1980, Hollywood released a
small boom-let of more “gay-positive” films in the next few years, including MAKING
LOVE (1982), PERSONAL BEST (1982), VICTOR/VICTORIA (1982), and LIANNA
(1983). Disco, which had been primarily a gay and black cultural expression, had died
before the release of CAN T STOP THE MUSIC (1980), Allan Carr’s homosexual
homage to the classical Hollywood musical. The film was almost universally panned;
significantly, David Ansen in Newsweek called it “The first all-singing, all-dancing horror
film,” apparently having blocked THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW out of his
memory, although he obviously did recall enough of his cultural conditioning to know that
a homosexual musical should be discussed in terms of honor movies, despite the absence
of anything supernatural or monstrous in the film-aside from a male homosexual
sensibility, that is.
Throughout these years, the civil rights of gay and lesbian people became major
national debates, and mainstream magazines such as Newsweek and Time published
hundreds of articles on gay and lesbian issues. Esquire magazine, once a bulwark of male
machismo, is now chock full of glossy male semi-nudes, as are many other mainstream
magazines devoted to fashion or the entertainment industry. Today, a handful of gay and
lesbian magazines including The Advocate, Genre, Out, and Ten Percent attest to the
visibility of the homosexual community, even as these same magazines have often been
critiqued for tending to portray that heterogeneous community as primarily white, male,
and middle class. Queer independent cinema has been thriving in major urban areas since
the mid-1980s, and Hollywood is once again taking tentative steps towards creating more
diverse homosexual characters. Perhaps most dramatically, popular music has surpassed
its flirtation with bisexual chic in the 1970s, openly embracing queer styles and poses as
well as openly gay and lesbian performers. And the fight for gay and lesbian civil rights
now extends from the streets and gay ghettos of major urban areas to the Capitol Building,
where gay and lesbian political action committees lobby alongside everyone else.
Yet, if this decade is a new “Gay Nineties” as some have opined, it has not been
made so without terrible struggle and loss. While considerable gains have been made for
gay and lesbian civil rights within various professional groups and in the repeal of many
218
states’ anti-sodomy laws, anti-gay forces are more active than ever. As the medical and
psychiatric institutions have (for the most part) backed away from the disease model of
homosexuality, it has become the special purview of the religious right and their
supporters, many of whom pursue the subject with a moral fervor that defies both science
and logic. Recently, several states have mounted ballot initiatives which would effectively
deny civil rights protection to gay and lesbian people, while the Supreme Court’s infamous
1986 “Bowers v. Hardwick" decision reserved states’ rights to outlaw consenting sexual
acts between adults, going so far as to cite historical writing .; which described such
couplings as a “‘deeper malignity’ than rape As gay and lesbian people became
more visible (both in “real life" and in the media), the backlash against them has become
increasingly shrill. The cultural equation of monster and homosexual continues to be
exploited in new and vigorous ways, in the rhetoric of conservative politicians and the
religious right, and in many of the era’s horror films and monster movies. Conversely, the
ever-more atomistic and independent production conditions of recent years has also allowed
for an opposing voice, one informed by queer theory and practice, to be heard. While the
classical form of the horror film genre has always made it easy to demonize lesbians and
gay men, it remains to be seen just how successful queer artists’ attempts to reappropriate
the genre’s ideological imperatives will be.
More Monstrous Fags and Dykes

One of the most gratuitously homophobic horror films from this period is the low-budget,
independently produced FEAR NO EVIL (1981), a conservative religious outing which
pits the forces of good—a rather psychotic but ultimately justified Catholicism-against evil-
-in this case, as The New York Times described him, “a conspicuously effeminate high-
school senior who turns out to be the embodiment of Lucifer."17 True to form, this outsider
figure, Andrew Williams (Stefan Amgrim), is a pale, intellectual loner, and easily read as
18Chief Justice Warren Burger, “Bowers, Attorney General of Georgia v. Hardwick et al.,”
United States Reports 478: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term, 1985
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989)197.
17Tom Buckley, “Embodiment of Lucifer,” (Review of FEAR NO EVIL), The New Ibrk Times
(February 6,1981) C22:1.
an unhappy, young gay man. The film attempts to elicit no sympathy for him, nor does it
critique the structure of organized religion (as did George Romero’s MARTIN), but instead
eroticizes Andrew’s half-naked body as he kills dogs and drinks their blood. (Lucifer
himself, in the pre-credit sequence, is also figured as a bare-chested hunk, and is played by
the late gay actor Richard Jay Silverthom.) Approximately one third of the way into the
film a shower room sequence occurs wherein the high school bully, Tony, along with his
naked buddies, taunt Andrew in the gym showers: “Andrew sure is sexy I just love
his hair.” Tony mockingly asks for a date, and then a kiss. Rather improbably, Tony does
kiss Andrew, to the accompaniment of a rumbling, reverberating, grunting soundtrack and
swirling camera-work. (Apparently, the Devil really knows how to use his tongue.) The
scene has its pay off later in the film, when the Devil/Andrew again kisses Tony and causes
him to manifest female breasts (!). The implication here is unmistakably dear and totally in
line with traditional notions of gender and sexuality: Devil = homosexuality = gender
inversion. Upon manifesting the breasts, Tony does the only decent thing he can do
(according to the film’s retrograde ideology) and stabs himself to death. Ultimately
Andrew, all decked out in fabulous eye make up and a diaphanous, swirling, sheer black
cape-and-gown ensemble, is destroyed by a laser beam shooting crucifix. Somewhat
remarkably, the Variety review of FEAR NO EVIL actually praised the film for “its basis in
religious morality” and noted that its box office appeal would “be determined by careful
handling so as to draw the more thoughtful audience for which its themes are intended.”'8
Apparently those “more thoughtful audiences” included homophobes and other religious
bigots who enjoyed having their preconceptions reinforced as they watched the powers of
Absolute Good (Roman Catholicism) once again vanquish those of Absolute Evil (bestial
homosexuality). Queerer spectators would simply have to marvel and wonder at the film's
fascination with such matters in the first place. As Archer Winsten quipped in his review,
the film “can’t harm most sane adults, but it’s frightening to imagine what it might to do the
Moral Majority.”19
Indeed, by the 1980s, homosexuality per se had become less an issue for the
18Russ., “Review of FEAR NO EVIL," Variety (January 28,1981).

,BArcher Winsten, ‘Review of FEAR NO EVIL," New \brk Post (February 6,1981) 37.
220
medical and psychiatric professions, but it was increasingly argued against in Biblical terms
both by Christian (tele)evangelists and right wing politicians who found that demonizing
gay and lesbian people could get them elected. Orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant's
campaign against gay and lesbian civil rights raged throughout the latter part of the 1970s,
briefly predating the more intense attacks on homosexuals which would be fueled
throughout the 1980s by Jesse Helms, William Dannemeyer, Lou Sheldon, Jerry Falwell,
et al., most of whom were to find common ground in political action groups such as the
Moral Majority and its most recent (more deliberately mainstreamed) incarnation, the
Christian Coalition. Examining the discourse of the religious right from this era, it is e< ,y
to find iconographic and rhetorical elements from the horror film: as noted in previously,
anti-gay video tapes such as THE GAY AGENDA or THE HOMOSEXUAL
CONSPIRACY frequently use ominous musical cues and “shocking” images to instill fear
in their viewers. Another such anti-gay tract, a book from 1989 entitled Shadow in the
Land: Homosexuality in America, written by (then) Orange County Congressman William
Dannemeyer, also partakes of these tropes. In a little over 200 pages, Dannemeyer
manages to equate or conflate homosexuality with most of the classical Hollywood horror
film signifiers of depravity: all manner of sex perversion (bestiality, necrophilia,
pedophilia), as well as human sacrifice, Satanism, rape, and serial killing. Dannemeyer
also links homosexuality to Nazism and communism, which isn't surprising given that the
book as a whole is a reactionary plea to get things back to the way they were in the 1950s
when homosexuals stayed in their closets and straight white men controlled the reins of
power.
While it might be easy to dismiss Dannemeyer as a paranoid reactionary hate-
monger no longer in power, his views are quite common among many current Republican
politicians and shockingly close to mainstream political debates. Recent Republican
presidential candidate Pat Robertson regularly invokes (on his daily television show) the
same decades-old demonizing rhetoric: “many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler
were Satanists; many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.”20
"Quoted in Marvin Liebman, “Christian’ Bigotry Can Breed Violence,* The Los Angeles
Times (December 6,1995) B4.
221
Pat Buchanan, a 1996 Republican presidential candidate, noted in 1990 that “promiscuous
homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.”2' (Buchanan has also
avowed that “in a healthy society, [homosexuals] will be contained, segregated, controlled
and stigmatized,” making one wonder just whose political agenda is the one linked to
fascism.22) And while I have never met a gay man or lesbian into Satanism, the religious
right has apparently been quite successful in convincing many Americans that they are.
According to a recent Newsweek poll, “21% of all Americans and 43% of evangelical
Christians believe that the gay rights movement is an ‘incarnation of Satan.’”23
The rhetoric of the religious right often sounds as if it might be from an old vampire
movie. Dannemeyer writes in his bode that “We must not allow our children to be the
victims of an unnatural appetite that has become obsessive in our society.”24 Compare that
quote with the following monologue from Hammer Films’s KISS OF THE VAMPIRE,
released over twenty years earlier in 1964:
The corruption of human beings by the Devil can take many forms—some of them
so corrupt as to be beyond human belief When the Devil attacks a man or
woman with his foul disease of the vampire, the unfortunate human being can do
one of two things-either he can seek God through the Church and pray for
absolution, or he can persuade himself that his filthy perversion is some kind of
new and wonderful experience to be shared by the favored few. And then he tries
to persuade others to join his new cult.
Substitute the word homosexual for vampire, and it becomes apparent where Dannemeyer
and his fundamentalist Christian ilk have gotten their rhetorical flourishes. Certainly much
of the classical horror genre’s moralizing stance comes from religious dogma in the first
place, but how such fantastical and “make believe” monster movie moralizing gets applied
to “real life” issues can be quite disturbing. When Troy Perry, founder of the nation’s first
gay and lesbian church, initially came out to an elder of the Church of God of Prophecy,
the elder told him that he was “demon-possessed.”23 Conflating both the medical models
21Quoted in Asian Brooke, “The Killing Fields: Can Gay Genocide Happen in America?"
Frontiers 14:20 (February 9,1996) 30.
22Brooke 30.
23Noted in Liebman B4.
24William Dannemeyer, Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1989)19.
25Reported in “Religion: Hope for the Homosexual,” 77me96 (July 13,1970) 46.
222
of the past with a simplistic belief in Satanism, many right wing politicians, like
Dannemeyer, understand homosexuality as a Disease-of-the-Devil that sinful people accept
and willfully spread to innocent victims. Those who argue otherwise are only deluding
themselves into thinking their “filthy perversion” is some kind of “wonderful” minority
status. Indeed, Dannemeyer’s book adamantly adheres to the psychiatric models of the
1950s and 1960s, quoting from Edmund Burglar (sic) and arguing that homosexuality is a
contagious disease somehow transmitted via its open display. Apparently knowing more
about homosexual matters than the majority of practicing psychiatrists and psychologists,
Dannemeyer excoriates the APA for having allowed homosexual activists to storm their
annual conventions in the early 1970s, and for capitulating to an organized homosexual
conspiracy by depathologizing homosexuality. Not surprisingly, Dannemeyer decries the
idea of gay liberation in monster movie vocabulary: “Instead of remaining in the shadow
land of their own world, homosexuals came out in the open, admitting their sexual
differences and publicly proclaiming a pride in their behavior.”26
It was perhaps especially lucky for right wing ideologues that AIDS came along to
add fuel to their fiery invective. Now there really was a medical condition which could be
directly connected to homosexuality, instead of just the paranoid fear of one.
Dannemeyer’s book makes this clear, he slips freely between homosexuality, AIDS, and
other venereal diseases, as if they are interchangeable terms.27 Indeed, the onslaught of the
AIDS crisis (first mentioned in The New York Times in 1981) and the media's concomitant
construction of its doctors and sufferers as mad scientists, monsters, and victims, has
probably done more to further the cognitive equation homosexual = monster than any other
twentieth-century series of events. The narrative and representational patterns of the gothic
novel and monster movie have been readily applied to the situation at hand. From
respectable newspapers to the tabloids, gay-AIDS-monsters abound. During these years
The Sun and The Weekly World News featured headlines such as “Gay Vampire Catches
28Dannemeyer 136.
27The title of Dannemeyer’s book,Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America, was
inspired by Thomas Panaris 1936 book Shadow on the Land: Syphilis, which Dannemeyer
upholds as a model Ibr approaching and controlling AIDS. The analogy in the use of the title is
straightforward: Dannemeyer considers homosexuality to be a disease like syphilis.
223
AIDS” and “AIDS-Wary Vampires Pull in Their Fangs,”28while a recent article in
Mademoiselle about a man who allegedly knowingly infected a young woman was simply
entitled “The AIDS Monster.”2*
More serious critics have noted how the effects of AIDS upon the body have
created a useful metaphor for those on the right who always did relate to homosexuals as
diseased contagions. As Ellis Hanson notes, the disease has produced prominent and
“spectacular images of the abject, the dead who dare to speak and sin and walk abroad, the
undead with AIDS.”30 He finds that much of the media’s coverage of the crisis is tinged
with “late-Victorian vampirism” which colors not only the media’s ideological approach to
people living with AIDS but to all of homosexuality. Andrew Parker makes this point most
eloquently in his analysis of David Cronenberg’s RABID, a film with striking parallels to
the current media construction of the “AIDS plague,” but one which was released in 1976,
years before there was any social awareness of the syndrome. Parker’s point is not that
RABID refleas AIDS culture, but precisely vice versa: that the media has lifted traditional
honor film narratives almost in toto out of their fictional troughs and applied them to a
health crisis which activates so many of the same cultural fears. He continues:
The mass media and horror films have truly shared one script, mobilizing the same
lethal fantasies in their common efforts to deny the incoherence of a series of binary
contrasts: the human and the monstrous, the natural and the artificial, mind and
body, masculine and feminine, straight and gay, health and sickness, innocence and
depravity, victim and perpetrator, purity and pollution, redemption and retribution,
public and private, self and other, same and different, inside and outside, singular
and universal, national and alien.3'
While some recent horror films have mined this similarity with some degree of sensitivity
(David Cronenberg’s THE FLY [1986] among them), the majority of early 1980s horror
films, still following the genre’s traditional formulaic imperatives, have gone on to
“ Quoted in Dresser 104-105.

” Robert E. Sullivan, Jr., “The AIDS Monster," Mademoiselle 98:4 (April 92) 82-86.
“ Ellis Hanson, “Undead,” inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New
\brk: Routledge, 1991) 324.
31Andrew Parker, “Grafting David Cronenberg: Monstrosity, AIDS Media, National/Sexual
Difference," Media Spectacles, eds. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz
(New \brk: Routledge, 1993) 217-218. See also Katherine Park, ‘Kimberly Bergalis, AIDS, and the
Plague Metaphor," in the same book, 232-253; and Edward Guerrero, “AIDS as Monster in
Science Fiction and Horror Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Television 18:3 (Fal 1990) 86-93.
224
reinscribe and reinforce most of those same dualities even as queer theorists continue to
seek to deconstruct them.
In the vast majority o f Reagan-era horror films, monstrosity and queemess are still
linked in retrogressive ways. The modem horror films’ focus on visceral gore and bodily
fluids neatly dovetails into AIDS hysteria as well, even when the monster queer is a lesbian
rather than a gay man. The most famous lesbian vampire film of this period, THE
HUNGER (1982), is a good case in point. Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve play
attractive and sympathetic lesbian vampire lovers, yet the major seduction scene, set to
Delibes’s Lakme, is an excellent example of how the culture industry subtly constructs
homosexuality as monstrous. The scene slowly turns from tender and erotic to menacing
and evil, as ominous bass tones sound discordantly under the soothing classical music, and
flash cuts of red corpuscles punctuate the lovemaking. Soon enough, the blood flows, and
what had begun as a beautiful scene of making love ends as yet another monstrous horror
the “foul disease of the vampire” has been passed on once again. More regularly a
homosexual frisson is thrown into the period’s horror films as a cheap thrill, as in John
Carpenter’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987), wherein the Devil, confined in a glowing
green jar by a mysterious order of Catholic priests, begins to leak out and infect people.
One such infected woman enters another woman’s room at night, and her monstrous attack
on the sleeping woman is at first understood by the victim as an unwelcome lesbian
advance. As monstrous diseased Devil-ooze replaces more natural bodily fluids, the
conflation of homosexual and monster is once again cemented into the popular gestalt.
Homosexual-AIDS-horror is also at the thematic core of THE KISS (1988), a film that tells
the story of a worm-like parasite that must be transmitted from female carrier to female
carrier through an open-mouthed kiss. As in both the classical horror film and AIDS
discourse in general, the queer threat is constructed in terms both homophobic and racist,
since the monstrous contagion is pointedly figured as African in origin.
Not surprisingly fora sexist culture, male homosexuality is even more regularly
coded into the modem horror film, often, as in the classical horror film, through a
homoerotic sadomasochism. THE HITCHER (1986), for example, works an unspoken
homosexual threat into its tale of a pretty-boy hitchhiker (C. Thomas Howell), who is
225
obsessively toyed with by an even prettier psychopath (Rutger Hauer). As per usual, the
idea of homosexual attraction is displaced onto bloody violence and dismembered body
paits-one of which, a severed finger, almost makes it into Howell's character’s mouth
from a bag of French fries. In OMEN 3: THE FINAL CONFLICT (1981), the anti-Christ
mounts a life-size inverted crucifix as if to sodomize the figure of Jesus; the sequence ends
with Damien's bodily fluids dripping down Christ’s face.31 In David Cronenberg’s DEAD
RINGERS (1988), Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists who slowly go mad when a
woman intemupts their perfectly constructed relationship; the homosexual dimension of
their relationship (which was present in the true story upon which the film was based) is
muted by Cronenberg, although the rather stunning and tragic death scene in which the two
men lovingly disembowel one another serves yet again as a metaphoric displacement of
homosexuality onto the plain of highly graphic violence.
When homosexuality is figured in these films in more open, obvious ways, it is
usually done so with derogatory stereotypes played for comedic effect. In ONCE BITTEN
(1985), a beautiful female vampire (Lauren Hutton) seeks the blood of a virgin male (Jim
Carrey, in his pre-superstar days). Pointedly, the vampire’s manservant is a mincing black
fag (Cleavon Little), and the film is filled with jokes seemingly culled from adolescent
washrooms-the vampire apparently bites her victims while giving them a blow job. There
are also more than enough gags based on homosexual panic: a homophobic encounter by
our young protagonists with a transvestite in a Hollywood nightclub is played for laughs,
and later on an extended high school shower room sequence—in which Carrey’s buddies
have to see if he’s been bitten in the groin—leads to cries of “Fags in the showers!”
Interestingly, as has been evidenced twice already, the high school shower rooms appears
32Like so many homophobic cultural artifacts, the film is rather confused in its approach to the
subject Damien Thome (Sam Neiil) is linked to murderous, bestial, pedophilic, and homosexual
signifiers throughout the film. Even his attempt at ‘‘normal’’ heterosexual intercourse goes awry
when he apparently beats and sodomizes the woman in bed with him. \bt in a small bit of dialogue
thrown away earlier in the film, Damien smirks at a ‘faggot’ and sardonically quips ‘They’re all God’s
children,’ effectively using a homophobic remark to bolster his own anti-Christian identity, the way
a Republican Congressman might sneer at a Democrat’s aligning him/herself with gay and lesbian
causes. Of course, unlike Damien, most Republican Congressmen claim to have God on their
side, an iron-clad excuse for their own bigotry.
226
rather frequently in 1980s horror films (and teen sex comedies'3), but unlike the female
locker room scene at the beginning of Brian DePalma’s CARRIE (1976), which was used
to illustrate Carrie’s awakening sexual and paranormal powers, most of these erotically
charged shower room scenes invariably play on male homosexual panic.
The trope also shows up in the exceptionally queer A NIGHTMARE ON ELM
STREET, PART 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985). This film, the first sequel to Wes
Craven’s blockbuster saga of fire-scarred child molester Freddy Krueger, seems to exist
solely In order to work the frightening generic and social connections between horror and
(homosexuality. (Wes Craven, who created the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series,
had been a college English professor before his movie career, thus it is not unlikely that his
scripts would self-consciously invoke Freudian metaphors about sexuality.) Unlike the
other films in the series, the protagonist of FREDDY’S REVENGE is a teenage boy, one
whom Freddy spends most of the film trying to “get inside of.” Jesse is played with a
sweet gay boy aura by actor Mark Patton, who played the preoperative transsexual Karen
Black in Robert Altman’s COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN,
JIMMY DEAN (1982). Jesse is introduced as the new kid in town, a loner and an outcast,
and spends much of the film in his jockey shorts, sweat glistening off his bare chest as he
repeatedly wakes up from Freddy Krueger-inspired nightmares, which, as at least one
other author has noted, also suggests the imagery of AIDS-related night sweats.” The
film’s manifest homosexual is a sadistic gym coach, described to Jesse as a guy who
“hangs around queer S/M joints downtown he likes pretty boys like you.” Jesse
manages to take up a (rather improbable) homosocial/homosexual relationship with a jock
named Grady (whose come on to Jesse was pulling Jesse’s shorts off in gym class and
then wrestling him to the ground). Jesse also meets a girl named Lisa and together they
bond over a diary they find in the back of Jesse’s closet. This proves to be the diary of the
33For one of the few extant essays on the teen sex comedy, and its relation to the modem
horror film, see William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modem Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New
\brk: Columbia University Press, 1994). This is one of those frustratingly heterosexual books that
refuses to sustain a consideration of how homosexuality might figure into either of those genres,
despite the films’ frequent preoccupation with homosocial ties and homophobic disavowals.
3 ae Christopher Castiglia, “Rebel Without a Closet,"Engendering Men: The Question of
Male ominist Criticism, eds. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New \6rk: Routledge, 1990)
207-221.
227
girl who was first menaced by Freddy (in the first film); it too conflates burgeoning teenage
sexuality with horror. First Lisa reads from the diary: “His body is slim and smooth and I
know I shouldn’t watch him but that part of me that wants him forces me to.” Then Jesse
reads: “He comes to me at night-horrible-ugly-dirty-under the sheets with me, tearing at
my nightgown with his steel claws.” While these quotes ostensibly discuss the author’s
sexual experiences with her boyfriend and then with a monstrous maniac, it is significant
that they are graphically conflated here as they are in so many 1980s horror films,
especially the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, HALLOWEEN, and FRIDAY THE
THIRTEENTH serijs. Overwhelmingly, these films draws explicit parallels between
sexuality and frightening violence. It is also significant that Lisa reads the more “normal”
part (desire and guilt over lusting after her boyfriend) while Jesse reads the truly monstrous
part about Freddy. The fact that Jesse’s reading places him in the role of the girl further
feminizes him and gives a clue to his real disturbance: homoerotic feelings which are
displaced onto Freddy’s murderous rampages.
This becomes clear in the film’s first major homoerotic set piece, the murder of the
gym coach by Freddy/Jesse. The sequence begins with Jesse wandering through the rain
to the S&M club mentioned earlier. Jesse, dripping wet and with his shirt unbuttoned,
meets the coach (all dolled up in tight pants and a leather vest) and together they return to
the gym where Jesse (in some form of bizarre homo-horror movie foreplay) runs laps
while the coach watches. The coach tells Jesse to “hit the showers” and as he stands naked
under the spray the “supernatural” erupts: tennis rackets pop their strings, tennis balls shoot
out of their cans, and every kind of ball imaginable (plus a collection of athletic supporters)
fly off their shelves towards the coach. Jump-ropes snake over to the coach, latch onto his
wrists, and drag him into the showers next to Jesse. Then the coach’s clothes are ripped
off by unseen hands and gym towels snap at his ass until it is bloody. In the misty room,
Jesse is replaced by Freddy who uses his claw-glove to slash the coach’s body from
behind. The showers pour out blood. The sequence ends with Jesse, now drenched in
blood, screaming at the body and the claw-glove that he is now wearing. This sequence
might be read as a metaphoric homosexual panic attack, in which Jesse, having been
aroused by the po. ..bility of a sexual encounter with the coach, murders him rather than
228
admit to his homosexual feelings. Like a 1950s bug-eyed monster, Freddy pops out of
Jesse at the moment of (homo)sexual cognizance. As the embodiment of Jesse’s
internalized homophobia, Freddy keeps Jesse from indulging in homosexual acts, even if it
means killing the prospective partner. Yet, I would argue that for most moviegoers, this
exploitative scene does little more than firmly link once again the idea of homosexuality
with violence and murder. It titillates the audience with its homosexual foreplay, but
instead of reaching a sexual orgasm, the screen is showered with a bloody ejaculate.
The dynamics of homosevial repression and displacement also fuel the triangulated
relationship between Grady, Jess.-, and Lisa. When Jesse attempts to become intimate with
Lisa at her pool party, Freddy intervenes by causing Jesse’s tongue to become grotesquely
elongated. Repulsed, Jesse flees to Grady’s bedroom and asks to spend the night, because
he fears “something is trying to get inside my body.” Making the latent manifest, Grady
(wearing nothing but shorts) replies: “Yeah, and she’s female and she’s waiting for you in
the cabana-and you want to sleep with me.” Eventually Grady assents, but not before
suggesting that Jesse “go home and take a bottle of sleeping pills." In a society where the
suicide rate for gay and lesbian teenagers is approximately triple what it is for straight
teens, that line takes on especially cruel and irresponsible resonance. True to form
however, before they can spend the night together, Freddy erupts out of Jesse and murders
Grady. Freddy then returns to the pool party and wreaks havoc, signified by (among other
things) bursting hot dogs and spurting cans of white beer suds. Once again, the sexual act
itself seems to be displaced onto these violent signifiers, truly an orgy of violence.
Eventually, Lisa is able to purge Jesse of Freddy and his nocturnal influence-or is she?
The series’ trademark last minute narrative inversion finds Jesse yet again riding on a
school bus to hell, suggesting the ultimate failure of this type of sexual repression. Freddy
will be back, in more films than perhaps anyone might want or expect, although never
again as such an obvious and flamboyant homosexual metaphor.
My two opposing readings of FREDDY’S REVENGE (homosexual titillation
linked to bloody violence versus a more sophisticated explication of how internalized,
socially-inscribed homophobia can be a monstrous force) amply demonstrate how this type
of analytical project is dependent jpon not only the texts in question but also the preformed
reading protocols of the spectator. While the atomistic production conditions of the era
ensured that a wide range of ideological perspectives were brought to bear on the genre,
more often than not the increasingly homosexual content of the genre remained buried just
below the denotative surface of individual films: perhaps manifest for alert spectators, but
latent (and all the more powerfully demonizing) for others. Homosexuality is invariably
linked within these films with the monstrous, and since there are so few “normal”
homosexuals onscreen in any of these horror films, by default the image of the monster
queer becomes the image of homosexuality thaf moviegoers regularly encounter and come
to know. The exploration o f how homosexual.Ly might be figured within the genre (or
how “real life” homosexuals might look and behave) remained a closeted topic. One
excellent example of this is the Troma Team release, MONSTER IN THE CLOSET (1986,
shot in 1983). As the title implies, there might be something very queer about this film,
ostensibly a loving homage of B movie cliches, complete with a rubber-suited monster and
a slew of recognizable character actors including Claude Akins, Howard Duff, Henry
Gibson, Donald Moffat, John Carradine, Jesse White, and Stella Stevens. Yet, aside from
the film’s setting in San Francisco and the monster’s (unexplained) interest in canying off
the male hero instead of the female ingenue, there is very little exploration of the film’s
hinted-at subtext. Nevertheless, as social awareness of AIDS and homosexual politics
began to increase, the monster queer refused to stay buried in the (sub)text, and by the mid-
to-late 1980s, two more mainstream (and very financially successful) vampire films more
overtly acknowledged their thematic core of homosexuality.
Tom Holland's FRIGHT NIGHT (1985) deliberately plays with 1980s gay
signifiers in not-always homophobic ways, acknowledging the mainstreaming of gay and
lesbian people and concerns into American culture. And, although the monster queer is
vanquished by the film’s end, and heteronormativity is reasserted, FRIGHT NIGHT does
elicit sympathy and desire for the vampire/homosexual figures themselves. Director Tom
Holland makes a conscious use of homoerotics within the film to explore the idea of the
queer vampire, a fact recently attested to by now “out” lesbian cast member Amanda Bearse
at a Gay Pride event at the University of Southern California. Another queerly tinged
actor, Chris Sarandon, plays the vampire. Sarandon is a B-movie actor perhaps best
230
remembered for his Oscar-nominated role as A1 Pacino’s transsexual lover in Sidney
Lumet’s DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975), although he is also known for his role in THE
SENTINEL (1977)—a film which featured among its other thrills “nude lesbian
cannibals.”33 Rounding out the cast are Roddy McDowall as television and movie vampire
stalker Peter Vincent (a character whose name obviously suggests Vincent Price), and
William Ragsdale as Charlie, the cute boy protagonist who becomes so obsessed with the
handsome man who has just moved in next door, he even ignores his girlfriend who waits
anxiously for him in bed.
Sarandon’s vampire seems to be fairly ordinaiy: he is youthful, good-looking, and
even has an everyday name, Jerry Dandridge. A closeted vampire, Jerry and his
manservant Billy Cole are ironically posing as a gay male couple in order to infiltrate the
suburbs where Charlie lives. Billy and Jerry are further figured as bourgeois homosexuals
by their black Jeep, their smirking “bitchy” attitudes, their profession as antique
dealers/purveyors of gentrification, and their style of dress. Jerry wears an affected trench
coat, upturned collars and scarf; Billy prefers flannel shirts and jeans, and both men seem
to favor thick patterned sweaters. (“Homosexual antique dealers” was also the ostensible
cover of vampire Reggie Nalder and his manservant James Mason in the TV movie version
of Stephen King’s SALEM’S’ LOT [1979]. This metaphor was prevalent even in earlier
decades. During the 1960s, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre filmed a television pilot entitled
“Collector’s Item,” in which they played a pair of crime-fighting antique dealers. Perhaps
their monstrously fey personas came too close to denoting homosexuality, for the pilot was
never sold.)
Despite his necessarily conventional penchant for feeding on sexy young prostitutes
and longing for Charlie’s girlfriend Amy (the reincarnation of his long lost love, etc. etc.),
Jerry just as easily bites men and boys, most suggestively Charlie’s quasi-queer friend,
Evil Ed. (Stephen Geoffreys, the young actor who played Ed, was a Hollywood hustler
and sometime actor who allegedly died of AIDS-related illnesses and drug abuse several
years after filming NIGHT FRIGHT.) Visually, the vampire’s attacks are usually figured
” Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (Maw Mark: Ballantlne Books,
1983)18.
231
from behind, as if the vampire were going to sodomize his victims rather than bite them.
This is most pronounced in Jerry’s attack on Evil Ed, who is easily seduced by Jerry’s
come on: “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I know what it’s like being different. Only
they won’t pick on you anymore. Or beat you up. I’ll see to that. All you have to do is
take my hand. Here Edward, take my hand.” Ed, with tears in his eyes, reaches out, and
Jerry pulls him close and wraps him inside his trench coat. Here vampirism is made
appealing; it soothes and comforts the outsider while offering him the opportunity of
turning the tables on those who have persecuted him. Evil Ed becomes a vampire himself,
eventually appearing in clownish female drag before being staked by vampire hunter Peter
Vincent. In an extended special effects sequence, Ed turns back from a vampire/wolf
creature to his naked self; Peter Vincent, rather than being horrified or repulsed, is rather
fascinated, and weeps at the boy’s death.
Yet, despite the fairly manifest nature of the film’s homoerotics, most of the
mainstream reviews of FRIGHT NIGHT, more comfortable with a shadowy, connotative
homosexuality, referred to Jerry Dandridge not as a monster queer but more regularly as “a
dapper vampire” or a “soign6 neighbor,” euphemistically naming the homosexual by his
sleek elegance.16 In a special New York Times article on “Good Acting in Poor Movies,”
Janet Maslin dismissed the film as a whole, but did more or less call for more queer
monster roles and performances when she wrote that
the film does have Chris Sarandon as a dapper vampire and Roddy McDowall as
the over-the-hill thespian who claims to make vampire-hunting his speciality. Mr.
McDowall appears to be greatly enjoying the chance to ham up every syllable, and
as for Mr. Sarandon, he should really be doing this thing more often. He needn’t
draw blood, necessarily. But here, as in “Lipstick,” he’s both seductive and
sinister as a dissipated villain with an excellent bedside manner.17
Apparently, the deliberate camping of previous eras has now become “good acting,”
although coding monsters as homosexual is still a fair and enjoyable game. Despite its
fairly realist representation of what a gay male couple in the suburbs might look like, and
its rather sympathetic take on queer outsider figures, the film nonetheless still partakes of
” “Review of FRIGHT NIGHT” The New \bik Times (August 2,1985).

37Janet Maslin, “Rim View: Good Acting in Poor Movies,” The New \brk Timas (August 11,
1985).
232
the same demonizing tropes as do less sophisticated horror films: queemess is monstrous.
Another film that works the homosexual vampire theme in a very self-aware,
postmodern way is Joel Schumacher’s 1987 hit THE LOST BOYS.38 The real life social
tensions between queer culture and fascistic paramilitary groups are herein enacted by two
opposing groups of teenage boys, the punker vampires o f Santa Carla and the vampire-
hunting Frog brothers. And while the film maintains two ostensible heterosexual subplots
that involve its two female characters (Diane Wiest’s Mom and punker girl Star), its focus
remains with the boys themselves—on their interaction, desires, and queer behaviors. Tn^
lost boys and the other odd denizens of Santa Carla are introduced early in the film under
The Doors’s “People are Strange," which works to universalize these figures even as the
film will ultimately minoritize them and suggest that their eradication is both possible and
desirable. Chief among the queer signifiers pressed into service is the “look" of the
vampire’s themselves, a visual style lifted from punk and urban gay subcultures.3’ Black
leather, earrings for boys and other piercings, tattoos, facial stubble and/or goatee beards,
and copious amounts of hair bleach make this particular bunch of vampires look like gay
male pin ups. (The casting of teen heartthrobs Kiefer Sutherland, Corey Haim, Corey
Feldman, and Jason Patric does the rest.) Yet, its not just the vampires who seem gay, but
nominal hero Sam himself (Corey Haim) is coded so heavily as gay that one suspects the
production designer must have had a direct pipeline into gay culture. Throughout the film,
Sam wears a Mondrian-inspired bathrobe, a “Bom to Shop” t-shirt, and his bedroom wall
sports a sultry mid-1980s pin up of Rob Lowe baring his belly and pouting at the camera.
The story revolves around the seduction of “normal” teen Michael (Jason Patric)
into the world of the lost boys, led by bleached-blond David (Kiefer Sutherland). Michael
ostensibly becomes involved with the one woman the group includes (Star) because of
heterosexual attraction, yet a closer look at their meeting reveals something very queer
indeed. Michael and Star’s first looks at one another, which signal their sexual desire, take
” For other discussions on the queer vampire motif in THE LOST BOYS, see Elaine
Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siede (New Vbrk: Penguin Books,
1990) 183-184; and Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (New Vbrk: Routledge, 1994) 103-107
38For a seminal account of politics and subcultural styles, albeit in another national conte/a,
see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New Mark: Methuen, 1979).
233
place at a beach front concert and are repeatedly punctuated with shots of a sweaty, bare
chested, pumped-up male singer. These shots suggest that the female Star is being used to
buffer or triangulate male homoerotic desires, and in just a few more scenes, Michael and
David are playing “chicken” together. Then Michael challenges David to a fight: “Just you-
-just you-come on!” Making the homoeroticism of their male bonding apparent, David
salaciously responds “How far you willing to go, Michael?" Later on their lair, David
fucks with Michael’s mind (making him think the food he is eating is maggots and worms)
and then the other boys offer him their precious life fluid. “Drink some of this Michael-be
one of us!” As all the other boys chant his name, the screen dissolves into a hazy montage
of drug and alcohol use. Sex, or in this case its spectacular displacement, follows: soon all
the boys are hanging off a bridge as a train barrels over them. The lost boys exhort
Michael to “let go [and] come with us” as they drop from the bridge and float down into the
foggy night. The scene shifts to Michael waking up the next morning: the vampires’
homosexual kiss has been elided, but Michael now begins to show signs of a
transformation.
Throughout the sequences that follow, THE LOST BOYS enacts a monstrous
parody of a “real life” coming-out process. Little brother Sam is greatly disturbed by the
changes he sees in Mike: “Lose the earring Mike-its not you.... All you do is give attitude
lately-been watching too much Dynasty huh?” (Dynasty's campy narratives and openly
gay character were very popular among gay men at this time; many gay bars frequently held
special Dynasty theme nights.) Furthering the coming-out metaphor, Mike’s Mom also
tries to understand what he is going through, but Mike responds “I have more serious
things on my mind than girls and school.” But while Sam takes a bath, arousing spectators
in the audience, Mike’s vampiric urges also begin to emerge and he almost attacks his
naked brother. Sam’s dog Nanook protects him, but Sam confronts his brother before a
mirror, where he sees the “proof’ of Mike’s transformation. “You’re a creature of the
night, Michael! Just like out of a comic bode. You’re a vampire, Michael! My own
brother a goddamn shit-sucking vampire!” The substitution of shit for blood here is
interesting and revealing. The belief that homosexuals regularly eat feces continues to be
espoused by some of the more hysterical right wing anti-gay voices, such as discredited
234
psychologist Paul Cameron. In fact, the film picks up on several other anti-gay epithets
common among teenage boys of this era and reworks them into vampiric metaphors: thus
“dick-breath" becomes “death-breath,” and at the height of Sam’s discomfort over his
brother’s revelations, he shouts out to his peers “Look guys-my brother’s NOT a blood
sucker!” The Frog brothers, the self-styled paramilitary vampire hunters, demonstrate the
same sort of paranoid homosexual/vampire substitution in their rhetoric: “We’ve been
aware of some very serious vampire activity in this town for some tim e Santa Carla’s
become a haven for the undead In matter o f fact, we’re almost certain that ghouls and
vampires occupy high positions at city hall.” Their response to the crisis, as they tell Sam,
is death to all vampires: “Kill your brother-you’ll feel better.” This taps directly into the
perverted logic of a gay basher, killing the monster queer “out there” will ostensibly quell
homosexual feelings within oneself.
Eventually, the “head vampire” is revealed to be Max (Edward Herrmann), a kindly
video store-owner who has been romancing Mom in order to provide a mother for his lost
boys so that they may all function “just like one big happy family.” While this makes
ironic the notion of “traditional family values,” the film upholds such an ideal all too clearly
in another way, reconstructing Mike, Star, and the little boy vampire Laddie as a newly
formed nuclear family. (Apparently they were only “half vampires” until they made their
first kill.) This further marks the lost boys themselves as violent homosexuals, and, true to
the classical generic impulse, they are destroyed at the end of the film while the “normal”
family survives. Yet, in at least some if not most cases of spectatorial identification, the
appeal of THE LOST BOYS’ monster queer lifestyle for outweighed the normalizing
imperative of its final scenes: the film has been cited as the impetus for at least one murder
and one suicide, perpetrated by teenagers who were apparently so entranced by the film that
they wanted to emulate its characters and situations.'10 Perhaps they assumed, based upon
their cultural conditioning, that violence was the “proper” way to express their burgeoning
queer sexuality.
40Reported in Dresser 42.
235
The Queer Theory Monster Queer?
As THE LOST BOYS attests, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new type of monster
queer was appearing at the movies, one informed, either directly or indirectly, by the
practices and writings of gay and lesbian activists and academics, a body of work which
has become collectively known as “queer theory.” Queer theory seeks to reexamine and
redefine the social constructions of gender and sexuality and race, to move the cultural
understanding o f those topics beyond strict binarisms of male and female, straight and gay,
white and black, in order to deconstruct the implicit hierarchical valuations within those
oppositions. Forged in the mid-1980s as a response to the ongoing AIDS crisis,
developments in feminist, poststructuralist, and postmodernist theory, and as a critique of
the more traditional and essentialist notions of gay and lesbian studies and identities, the
more constructionist-oriented queer theory calls for a broader and more inclusive coalition
among those people and practices who have been traditionally excluded from white male
heterosexual privilege.41 As such, it embraces people who might otherwise self-identify as
gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, homosexual, omnisexual, asexual, etc. as well as
“straight” queers, people who might be primarily heterosexual but who still rail against the
sexism, racism, and homophobia that are the results of a world view posited on strict
dichotomies of Self and Other.* While queer activist groups such as Act Up and Queer
Nation meant for the reappropriation of the epithet “queer” to be confrontational (and has
thusly risked alienating some homosexual people who still recoil at the epithet), use of the
word is nevertheless an attempt to be more inclusive than the categories gay or lesbian
might otherwise imply. It is a word meant to describe an “oxymoronic community of
4<While seeking to de-ghettoize gay and lesbian concerns by invoking a broader spectrum of
human behaviors, queer theory has attempted to shift the discourse on human sexuality away
from a minoritizing, essentialist category of “being" to a universalizing, constructionist category of
“doing.” Detractors have argued that this tactic can only weaken a gay/lesbian position, allowing
the concerns of a specific sector of society to be assimilated into a broader hegemony and therein
ultimately domesticated and depoliticized. For some, the phenomenon of people self-identifying
as “straight queers” has only exacerbated this situation.
42For discussion of the ‘straight queer” phenomenon, see David Kamp, “The Straight Queer,"
C3Q63:7 (July 1993) 94-99, and Ann Powers, “Queer in the Streets, Straight in the Sheets,"
Utne Reader60 (November-December 1993) 74-80. The latter essay originally appeared in The
Village Vb/ce(June 29,1993).
236
difference,"43 “unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and
gender."44 According to the universalizing assumptions of queer theory, homosexuality
should be understood as part of a continuum of human behaviors, and not as an monolithic
preformed, static identity. As such, queer activists demand to be recognized as part of the
“natural order" of human existence-as one well known demonstration chant demands,
“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”
From the start, queer theory drew upon metaphors of monstrosity to illuminate its
deconstructive goals. Yet, as has been demonstrated repeatedly within these pages, such a
metaphor often comes with its own problems. While the notion of the monster queer or
sexual outlaw holds a great counter hegemonic force for social and semantic change, it is
concomitantly the same stance which opponents of gay and lesbian civil rights invoke to
demonize that cause. Whereas queer theorists and activists argue that all aspects of
consensual human sexuality, including those considered the most bizarre by conservative
pundits, should be explored and acknowledged for their ability to push at the boundaries of
traditional social practice and understanding, these are often the same aspects of human
sexuality which are excerpted out of context to illustrate the religious right’s emotional
claim that homosexuality is indeed frightening, alien, and inherently unnatural. It is
invariably the leather aficionado and/or sadomasochistic sex play (the very appeal of which
is meant to be extreme and frightening) that are routinely presented as examples of
“homosexual perversion" in anti-gay diatribes. The monster queer may be a sexy, alluring,
politically progressive figure to some, while to others, enmeshed in a more traditional
models of monsters and normality, s/he is still a social threat which must eradicated.
Outside of the academy or radical activist groups, it has been my observation that
the majority of gay and lesbian people do not want to be understood as monsters or
outlaws; they want instead to assimilate, to enjoy the same rights and privileges that they
perceive others as sharing. These two political stances are reflected in a myriad of social
issues facing queer people today. Should we as a community fight for the right to marry
and serve in the Armed Forces, or should we continue to oppose and critique the patriarchal
43 Louise Sloan, ‘Beyond Dialogue,' San Francisco Bay Guardian Literary Supplement, March
1991, quoted in Lisa Duggan, ‘Making it Perfectly Queer,’ Socialist flewew(April 1992) 19.
"Duggan 20.
237
assumptions which seem endemic to such institutions? The situation is analogous to that
faced by any minority group within dominant American culture-whether to assimilate to
prescribed “norms” or to remain “true” to some form of native, oppositional culture, as a
means of preserving and celebrating a unique cultural heritage or point of view. This
opposition between a truly counter-hegemonic stance and a subculture’s hesitant
negotiation and ultimate incorporation within the dominant hegemony plays out in many
complex ways across the fields of politics and popular culture. Cinematically, the situation
for monster queers is perhaps closest to the position of Native Americans within the
western genre. Like the monster queer, the American Indian has traditionally been bound
by cinematic convention into the genetically inscribed role of the villain, the counter-
hegemonic force which must be eradicated before white supremacy and normality can be
attained. However, over the years, some more realistic and sympathetic treatments of
Native Americans in Hollywood film have been produced, but what effect—if any-have
such revisionist representations had upon the “real life" status of Native Americans? Such
a reworking of the genre may be in part responsible for the genre’s declining popularity
since the 1960s, but whether or not more realistic and sympathetic representations have in
any way improved the conditions of existence for “real life” Native Americans is a much
harder question to answer. I would argue that such revisionism is a small step in the right
direction, but mostly it allows Hollywood to congratulate itself for its sensitivity, even as
the commercial film industry continues to shy away from films which might in any way
reflect the concerns of contemporary Native American culture.
For horror films and monster queers, there has been a similar shift in generic
patterns. Even as many recent horror films continue to use homosexuality to color their
monsters' exploits, there has also been an opposing trend: films that examine monstrosity
more critically, that make their monsters more universally sympathetic, and more akin to
human beings and their desires and drives than ever before. The teenage monster formula
of the late 1950s was reworked in recent teen monster comedies such as TEEN WOLF
(1985), TEEN WOLF TOO (1987), MY BEST FRIEND IS VAMPIRE (1988), MY
STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (1988), BIG MAN ON CAMPUS (1989), and ENCINO
MAN (1992); while capitalizing on teen angst as did their forerunners, most of these films
238
posit monsterity as acceptable or even “cool.” Yet, this friendly monsterity often still
denigrates homosexuality: “You’re not going to td l me you’re a faggot, are you?” asks the
TEEN WOLF’s best friend, to which he replies “No, I’m a werewolf.” As Vito Russo
noted, the “friend is greatly relieved. Better a werewolf than a faggot.”" The queer
monster is cool only as long as s/he still repudiates homosexuality, denying the very core
of meaning which often defines him or her in the first place.
More serious works such as David Lynch’s film THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)
and thw Broadway play which predated it also sought to reinscribe or recoup the social
meanxiig of the monster, arguing that physical deformity was no criteria for moral worth.
More regularly, the threat of gothic heterosexual rape that monsters once embodied has
softened throughout these years into romantic longing, as in John Badham’s 1979 version
of DRACULA (and its earlier Broadway incarnation), which made Frank Langella’s Count
an appealing and overtly eroticized figure who possibly even escapes from Van Helsing at
the end of the film. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s phenomenally successful stage musical The
Phantom o f the Opera also focused more on queer romance rather than the Phantom’s
horrific nature, treating its lead as a tragic gothic lover instead of an ugly murdering (and
raping) psychopath. Most of Hollywood’s recent big-budgeted remakes of the classical
horror movies have all re-fashioned their monsters with romanticized narratives and sexy
star appeal; for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992)
was called by some critics “sentimental, not scary,” precisely because it grafted a romantic
reincarnation love story (not present in the Stoker original but since the late 1960s an
increasingly popular trope) to the story of the bloodsucking aristocrat. Newsweek opined
that this was a new “high concept: Dracula as Beauty and the Beast.”46 Indeed, BEAUTY
AND THE BEAST, which had been best known to moviegoers from homosexual poet
Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film version, has been one of the most popular monster stories of the
current era, recycled both as a Disney cartoon (1991) and subsequent stage musical, and as
a CBS-TV serial drama (1987-1990). Both versions are extremely sympathetic to their
monstrous outsider figures and suggest that patriarchal excesses, not monstrous Otherness,
1 jsso 252.
46 Tom Mathews with Lucille Beachy, “Fangs for Nothing,’ Newsweek (November 30,1992) 74.
239
constitute the true core of villainy.47 Nevertheless, beneath the queerly bestial nature of
these romances, they all remain resolutely heterosexual, suggesting perhaps that any form
of heterosexuality-even one tinged by bestiality-is still more palatable to mainstream
audiences than is consensual homosexuality.
Writing recently about monsters as a metaphor for racial Otherness, black film
scholar Edward Guerrero has also noted this trend: “films containing sympathetic figures of
social and psychic otherness at the repressed core of alien monstrosity” have been “gaining
momentum” at the *>.ix office.48 Making this universalizing assumption about the monster
queer quite explicit, a recent Esquire article put it thusly: movie monsters today are
“lonely,” “as much in search of redemption as of revenge___ the modem vampire has
gone from terrifying to misunderstood, and, really, aren’t we all?”49 Newsweek has also
espoused such vampire-envy, calling the previously heinous sexual outlaws
irresistible. They are immortal, they have supernatural power and they are sexier
than just about anyone alive. They also force us to look into certain mirrors of
reality that we normally avoid. Their true power lies in what Anne Rice calls “a
fathomless well of metaphor.”50
Newsweek went on to tacitly acknowledge just what that metaphor might be describing
when it quoted Dracula expert Leonard Wolf, who asserted that the vampire’s bite “‘stands
for every conceivable union of men with women, men with men, women with women.’”31
In other words, that the vampire is a metaphor for queer sexuality.
Even the formal structures of many recent monster fictions permit their audiences
the pleasures of identifying with the monster queer, and not the traditional normative pose
of heterosexuality. This trend, always inherent in the genre from its outset, has become
more and more pronounced since the 1960s: now more than ever before, horror films work
to position the spectator alongside or within the monster and/or the monster’s point of
47For an account of these universalizing trends and their queerer undercurrents, see Cynthia
Erb, "Another World of the World of an Other? The Space of Ftomance in Recent Versions of
‘Beauty and the Beast," Cinema Journal24: 4 (Summer 1995) 50-70.
48Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993) 68.
48Mark Hess, ‘l.estat C'Est Moi," Esquire (March 1994) 72.
*°Tom Mathew; 'ith Lucille Beachy, “Fiangs for Nothing,” Newsweek (November 30,1992) 74.
51Quoted in ‘Pangs for Nothing," Newsweek (November 30,1992) 75
240
view. (While this certainly works in retrograde and sadistic ways, often aligning the
spectator through subjective camera work with the psychopathic slashers of the
HALLOWEEN series and its imitators, or through the witty remarks and colorful
rejoinders of Freddy Krueger, et al.), in other films it works to suggest that the monster
queer is really the center of attraction, indeed is the “hero” of many of these films. The
banal heterosexual couple of the 1930s classical Hollywood horror film no longer (or
rarely) exists within the genre's narratives; instead, they have become the monstrous queer
couple themselves, as in Mike N.chols WOLF (1994), where they trot off to have were-
puppies at the end of the film. ELVIRA, MISTRESS OF THE DARK (1988), which was
co-scripted by John Paragon, the campy queer genie of television's Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
(1986-1991), is another film which posits the monster queer as hero(ine) and exposes
traditional concepts of normality as undesirable.32 The film tells the story of the horror
movie hostess’s return to the small town of Falwell, Massachusetts in order to collect her
aunt’s inheritance. As the name of the village implies, most of the townspeople are uptight
religious bigots who condemn Elvira for her sexual and monstrous transgressions, mostly
manifested by her slinky black costumes and spicy double entendres. Elvira's queer
52 The monster as desirable and politically correct outsider figure can be found in other
spheres of popular culture, most notably within the music and fashion industries. "Goth” fashion
style and “goth rock” are popular urban phenomena during this era; it is not unusual to find a
Philadelphia nightclub calling itself ‘Vampire’ or a Los Angeles nightclub called “Gothic.” While
some of this monster rock expresses itself in heavy metal groups such as Samhain, Danzig, and
White Zombie (named after the Bela Lugosi film), perhaps its prototypical practitioner was the
group Bauhaus (who sang the song “Bela Lugosi's Dead” In the opening sequence of THE
HUNGER. Other groups and performers such as Depeche Mode and Morrissey filter gay angst
through the melancholia of the gothic hero; as Morrissey sings: “I am hated for loving/1 am
haunted for wanting.” The group Oingo Boingo also courts the pose of the monster queer. It
regularly takes its fans to a ‘Dead Manfe Party" at its annual Halloween concerts. Many of their
songs make direct reference to the classical Hollywood horror film, such as ‘No Spill Blood,”a
rousing chant based on ISLAND OF LOST SOULS and told from the perspective of the
manimaJs. Lead creative artist Danny Elfman is also a film composer, having scored BATMAN,
NIGHTBREED and numerous other gothic/horror films. Much of Oingo Boingo's music goes
beyond mere gothic homage by frequently calling attention to a critique of subjectivity, as did
many queer or gay or lesbian bands of the era. Whereas Oingo Boingo can sing out ‘Who do you
want to be today/ Who do you want to be?”, the B-52’s can answer in perfect postmodern
harmony, ‘Wanna be the Daughter of Dracula/ Wanna be the Son of Frankenstein/ Let’s meet and
have a baby now!”
Music and lyrics by Morrissey, ‘I am Hated for Loving,” VauxhaHandl (Sire Records Company,
1994). Music and lyrics by Oingo Fcingo, ‘No Spill Blood" and “Who Do \bu Want to Be?” from
Good For Ybur Soul(A&M Records, 1987). Music and lyrics by The B-52’s, “Song for a Riture
Generation,” Whammy! (Warner Bros. Records, 1983).
241
witching powers help the town overcome some of its sexual repressiveness via a magic
aphrodisiacal casserole which turns the townspeople into “hom-dogs.” The villain of the
piece turns out to be a white male patriarch who is also a closeted warlock, suggesting, as
in real life, that the most violently homophobic people are often themselves closeted queers.
One of the first horror films to make an explicit connection between monsters and
the activist politics of the queer community was British horror author Clive Barker's
NIGHTBREED (1990). In this film and the novel upon which it was based, Cabal, the
monsters are the heroes whereas the forces of rl.e patriarchal order are revealed to be the
“real” villains. The film also sets up a dialectic oetween the slasher film villain and the
“traditional” monster the former is unmistakably a human being who has gone mad for
various reasons, while the latter is a separate but “natural” species (or breed) who have
existed for centuries but have been branded monstrous by the “normal” human population:
a brief flashback montage sequence shows the monsters suffering at the hand of the
Catholic Inquisition. Barker, himself a gay man, makes his NIGHTBREED spectacularly
queer, chiefly through their visual design and dishy repartee: the monsters sport leather,
tattoos, body piercings, shaved heads and/or pony tails, Doc Marten boots, vests upon bare
chests, and van dykes (“Satan beards" or “queer beards”), a look that was being made
concurrently fashionable by Queer Nationalists, members of Act Up, and the visual
stylizations of queer theatre pieces such as Reza Abdoh’s Bogeyman* At one point in
NIGHTBREED, one rather campy monster comments to another “Love those tattoos!”
When the tattooed monster fails to respond, the first monster rolls his eyes and remarks
with exasperation, “Sailors!”
This queer activist fashion sense permeates Barker’s work as a whole, especially in
the HELLRAISER films, which riff on sadomasochism and the “urban primitive” culture
of body piercing and scarification. During the mid-1970s, Barker had been an
underground playwright in London and was once arrested by Scotland Yard for some of
" For an exploration of fashion and queer activism, see Mr. Blackwell, ‘Haute Queerture,” The
Advocate (January 28,1992) 30-34. As is the case with much subcultural style, this look has
been trickling into mainstream fashion ever since: es The Advocate noted, ‘if those mall
customers only knew they were dressing like last year’s queer.” See Bill Van F’arys, ‘Queer
Couture: Fashiorfe Reflection of the Gay Sensibility,” The Advocate (August 13,1991) 27.
242
his more extreme sadomasochistic illustrations.54 Yet Barker himself was surprised when
Pinhead, a character from the HELLRAISER series with a self-explanatory name, became
something of a sex symbol, at least according to the audience response cards that Barker
reviewed. As one critic wrote of Barker and Pinhead,
Robert Mapplethorpe's fetish fantasies may be too outre for Washington D.C.'s
Corcoran Gallery, but Pinhead's porcupine countenance graced America's
billboards and bus shelters not once but twice, the second time back by popular
demand for HELLBOUND. Score another point for genre leading the
mainstream.55
Yet, in most of Barker’s work, including his most recent film LORD OF ILLUSIONS
(1995), these queerer currents are still invariably used to delineate monsters. Like Robin
Wood's critique of David Cronenberg's oeuvre, Barker’s work may be understood by
some as once again demonizing (homo)sexuality by linking it to the monstrous.55 Yet
Barker defends this practice by dramatizing the seductive universalizing nature of the
monster queer in the first place:
All I've done is take a genre mired in Victorian values into a post-Last Exit to
Brooklyn world. Horror fiction tends to be reactionary. It’s usually about a return
to the status quo—the monster is the outsider who must be banished from the
sanctum. But over and over again, I've created monsters who come from the
outside and who call out to somebody to join them in the sanctum.57
Similarly, Barker is adamant about rewriting the genre to focus on its potential to dramatize
and evoke social, psychological (and physical) change:
Horror movies should not have happy endings, not in the classic sense. Hero and
heroine should not walk hand-in-hand into the sunset It’s important that
people be transformed in the action of the story. They may be transformed in a
very fundamental way: they may begin alive and end up dead, they may lose limbs,
they may lose their sanity. Within the context of my fiction, I think such changes
are upbeat.38
Nonetheless, while all this may be true of his works’ formal narrative patterns, too often
"Reported in Stephen Jones, ed., Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden (Lancaster, PA:
Underwood-Miller, 1991) 39.
55Maitland McDonagh, ‘Clive Barker &William Gibson: Riture Shockers,” Film Comment26:1
(January-February 1990)61.
“ See Robin Wood, ‘Cronenberg: A Dissenting View," The Shape of Rage: The Films of
David Cronenberg, ed. Piers Handling (New \fcxk: New \brk Zoetrope, Inc., 1983) 115-135.
"Quoted in Gregg Kilday, “Out in America: Rim: Clive Barker Raises Hell,’ Out (March 1995)
14.
“ Quoted in Jones 33.
243
the representation of Barker’s monster queers seems similar to those produced by right
wing ideologues: the deliberately repellent nature of his films’ visual style, a necessary
feature of modem splatter horror, still equates on many levels overt queemess with explicit
gory violence. And while this in itself may constitute a sort of polemic poetry of
putrescence of the Ron Athey sort, fa* many moviegoers it is still basically first and
foremost a shock effect meant to sicken the viewer, much as the rare homosexual onscreen
kiss invariably produces an audible response of revulsion from homophobic audiences.
Of all of Barker’s films to date, NIGHTBREED is the one which '■’..'constructs the
trope of the monster queer with the highest degree of political efficacy. Ii. it, the traditional
forces of “good” are represented by white men in business suits, priestly vestments, and
police uniforms, all of which mark them as fascists out to destroy the relatively peaceful
NIGHTBREED. As Barker stated in a prologue to the video tape release of
NIGHTBREED, he wanted the film to be “a film like no other, flipping all the conventions
of the horror movie, plunging you into a world of insanity and miracles, where dead men
can be heroes and monsters beautiful ” Thus, the film’s psychiatrist (played by horror
movie auteur David Cronenberg) is actually the film’s slasher movie type killer. The film’s
voice of religious authority is a drunken priest, and the red-necked police chief and his men
take sadistic glee in brutalizing the monsters they capture, referring to one queer monster-
boy as “it” before they beat and kill him. (The only mildly sympathetic cop is pointedly
played by an African-American actor.) The film’s project to invert the ideological
assumptions of the genre is baldly stated in the campy performance of lines such as these
from the police chief: “We’re going out there with God on our side. Whether its commies,
freaks, or Third World ‘Y’-chromosome mutants, we are there-the sons of the free! ” (His
speech and actions recall the similar satire of rural shotgun-toting zombie hunters in George
Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD [1978], a film that suggested that American consumer
culture had already turned “normal” citizens into mind-numbing, flesh-eating monsters.)
NIGHTBREED’s story itself dramatizes a coming-out narrative: its central
protagonist is a young man named Boone (Craig Sheffer), whose relationship with his
girlfriend is somewhat troubled due to his recurring dreams of monsters. As the film
progresses, he learns that he is actually one of them, i.e. not a normal heterosexual human
244
being but a normal monster queer. Meanwhile, his psychiatrist, who is secretly decimating
the community with a butcher knife, attempts to pin the crimes on his young patient. The
psychiatrist, like the police force and the priest, is a force of violent repression: his killer
drag consists.of a mask with buttons for eyes and a closed-zipper mouth, what one
reviewer called “a clear mix of Jason and the Ku Klux Klan.39 He is equally willing to
victimize the NIGHTBREED or heterosexual families, which are linked together in his
mind: “I’m here to destroy them___ I’ve cleaned up a lot of breeders—families like
cesspools—filth making filth making filth.” While his targeting of “breeders” suggests I f
might be understood as some form of queer avenger, in actuality, like many opponents of
homosexuality, he is phobic of all sexuality including both straight and monstrous,
although he eventually targets the monsters as being the most visible manifestation of his
fears. Ultimately the rdigio-medico-legal forces attack the monsters’ underground city,
and Boone, with his newfound monster pride, leads them into battle, making
NIGHTBREED a barely veiled metaphor of the need for queer people to come out and fight
back against the forces of society who would define difference as monstrous. As Boone
tells his followers, “If we want to survive, we can’t hide. Brothers and Sisters, it is time to
fight!”
Even when their politics are not as well defined (as in NIGHTBREED), all of
Barker's books and films explore the worlds of queer desire, from a “mystif” creature in
the novel Imajica, who is “able to assume the shape and gender of any human’s object of
obsession,”40to the “forbidden worlds” of sex and sadomasochism in the HELLRAISER
films. Barker is adamant about his interest in exploring the genre as a powerful metaphor
for queers, noting their special emotional appeal to individuals who long to break free from
the constrictions and constructions of normality: “I’ve always loved monsters. . . I think
there’s a comer of all of us who envy their power and would love to live forever, or to fly,
or to change shape at will.”41 In an interview in The Advocate, Barker comes closet to
“ David Edelstein, ‘Review of NIGHTBREED,” The New 'tbrkPost (February 17,1990) 16.
“ Jim Provenzano, “Interview: Dream Weaver Clive Barker," The Advocate (January 28,1992)
58.
ai Comments made by the author on the video tape release of NIGHTBREED. For another
take on Barker’s work, see ‘Clive Barker,” in Naomi Epel, ed., Writers Dreaming (N on \brk: Can. .
Southern Books, 1993) 31-42.
245
articulating his own theory of queemess, a political stance vehemently opposed to static
systems of representation.
My voice is in celebration of change—infinite, endless, exquisite change___ the
joy of ambiguity, the possibility that things are not fixed, that religious ideas are
protean. To set them in amber and then wear them about your neck, which is what
the church does, is grotesque The Bible is this extraordinarily rich collection
of images and ideas that has been turned into a series of dogmas and reductionist
philosophies by TV evangelists and men who wear dresses for a profession.62
Repeatedly in interviews, Barker has attacked the simplistic thinking of today's Christian
evangelists, arguing quite eloquently the politics of queemess:
It seems to me vital that in this age of the New Righteousness—when moral
rectitude is again a rallying-cry, and the old hypocrisies are gaining acolytes by the
hour-that we should strive to avoid feeding delusions of perfectibility and instead
celebrate the complexities and contradictions that, as I've said, fantastic fiction is
uniquely qualified to address. If we can, we may yet keep fiom drowning in a
wave of simplifications that include such great, fake dichotomies as good versus
evil, dark versus light, reality versus fiction. But we must be prepared to wear our
paradoxes on our sleeve.63
Barker best work challenges the genre's implicit demonization of queer sexuality, in so
doing not only exposing the institutions which carry on such oppressive practices, but the
processes of static binary thinking which support them. However, it is also equally likely
that he is simply producing more images of monster queers with which to frighten
mainstream America.
Another filmmaker whose cinematic output is helping to redefine the traditional
tenets of the horror film genre is Tim Burton, whose career has consisted of repeated
attempts to humanize the figure of the monster queer. Ostensibly a “straight queer," Burton
once characterized his own married sexuality thusly: “We sleep in separate bedrooms,
much like the Hays Code. When we kiss, we both have one foot on the ground at all
times. [AndJ we wear full protective gear.”64 Burton’s first two short films made for
Disney demonstrate a loving approach to the classical horror film genre, and specifically the
figure of the monster. VINCENT (1982) was a macabre but loving animated homage to
the spirit of ghoulishness as embodied by its narrator Vincent Price, while
“ Quoted in Provenzano 58.

“ Quoted in Jones 75.
“ David Breskin, ed., Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation (Boston: Faber and Faber,
1992) 363. See also Mark Salisbury, ed.. Burton on Burton (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1995).
246
FRANKENWEENIE (1984) rewrote the Universal Frankenstein films from the point of
view of a young boy who reanimates his dead dog. Burton’s first feature film, PEE-
WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE (1985) immediately became a queer cult film, while
BEETLEJUICE (1988) focused on a scatological ghost and a teenage girl obsessed with
the gothic. BATMAN (1989) and BATMAN RETURNS (1992) explore the darker
recesses of their caped crusader’s secret dual life; the latter film in particular has been read
as a vehicle exploring issues of queer cultural reappropriation.65 More recently Burton’s
production of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993) turned monsters into
lovable, singing and dancing stop-motion figures who learn to celebrate their place within
the natural order, while ED WOOD (1994) created a loving portrait of the infamously queer
monster movie maker of the 1950s.
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), however, is probably Burton’s most
sustained cinematic meditation on the figure of the monster queer. As one review summed
up the film’s message, it is about “the need for understanding people who seem different,
and about the way some folks really don’t fit into the usual social and personal molds, and
shouldn’t be expected to."66 Like Barker’s NIGHTBREED, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
inverts the classical generic paradigms of good and evil, positing its monster figure as a
misunderstood outsider fighting to retain some degree of humanity in the face of bourgeois
conformity (the tract home neighborhood where he takes up residence), violent patriarchy
(white male teenage Jim and his dysfunctional offscreen father), and Christian lunacy
(neighbor Esmeralda who immediately assumes Edward to be an emissary of the Devil).
Edward is a sort of warm and fuzzy Freddy Krueger equipped with the titular
scissorhands, but he has no interest in dispatching promiscuous teenagers-hejust wants to
be loved. Although never explicitly marked as gay, the film does posit the leather-wearing
Edward’s special talents as hedge trimming, poodle grooming, and hair styling, trades with
which gay men have been stereotypically associated. It also stars Vincent Price in his last
major screen role; still wearing the apache scarves of his early 1970s film work, Price plays
“ Alex Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 98-99.
“ David Sterritt, “Review of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS,” Christian Science Monitor(January
16,1991) 14.
247
the benevolent mad scientist who creates and nurtures Edward. In interviews, Burton has
been particularly candid about his youthful obsession with the image and persona of movie
monsters, and especially those portrayed by Vincent Price. Like many other filmgoers,
Burton identified with Price’s characters’ outcast status: “His movies probably spoke most
directly to me. In fairy tales and myths, the symbolism is not so much intellectual as
emotional. I could understand everything he was gping through.”67Indeed, Burton’s
disdain for the “normal” figures in his films has often caused his reviewers concern. The
New York Post opined that in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS “The normal becomes not
only abnormal, but abominable Burton (has] favored Edward among all his creations
and left the others to wither on the vine.”68 Other reviewers noted that there wasn’t much
chemistry between Edward and his onscreen heterosexual love interest Kim (Winona
Ryder); while many reviewers found this to be a fault in traditional Hollywood narrative
syntax, this fact nonetheless works to further the metaphor of the monster queer.69
Most of the film’s “normal” suburbanites at first welcome Edward, because he
brings a tremendous amount of style to their otherwise dull lives. Like gay hairdressers
and flamboyant entertainers, Edward is accepted as long as he keeps working (and stays in
the closet).70 However, when he will not or cannot play into their heterosexual fantasies,
he becomes an outcast once again. Homy neighbor Joyce (Kathy Baker) is immediately
attracted to Edward precisely because he is “completely different...so mysterious.” When
Edward cuts Joyce’s hair, the soundtrack segues into a tango, and Joyce’s curling toes
clearly demarcate her sexual response to him. However, when she is unable to seduce
Edward, she turns against him, and tells her neighbors that Edward attacked her. Kim’s
thuggish boyfriend opines that Edward “isn’t even human,” a common-enough refrain
"Quoted in Breskin 334.
“ Jami Bernard, ‘Review of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS," New \brkPost(December 7,1990)
65.
88 See, among others, Michael Wilmington, “Review of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS," The
Los Angeles Times (December 7,1990) Calendar 1, and David Denby, "Review of EDWARD
SCISSORHANDS," New tor* (December 10,1990) 101.
70This phenomenon has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout recent decades, from
Liberace to his Las Vegas heirs-apparent, magicians Siegfried and Roy. Par a brief but perceptive
account of how middle America ‘eats up’ homosexuality in flamboyant Las Vegas performers,
even as they go home to vote tor anti-gay ballot initiatives, see Luis Alfaro, ‘Queens of the
Desert," Los Angeles Reader {May 5,1995) 12.
248
heard in any number of recent documentaries about the state of gay and lesbian people in
America, almost always spouted by Christian bigots and/or teenage boys. Eventually, the
torch-carrying townspeople storm Edward’s gothic castle, where Edward is forced to kill
Jim in self defense. Kim convinces the townspeople that Edward too is dead, and they all
return to their homes. Yet, as the framing narrative posits, Edward remains alive and
inextricably linked to the natural order: the snow that blankets the little bourgeois suburb at
Christmas time comes from the shavings of his ice sculptures.
The screenplay for EDWARD SCISSORHANDS was written by Caroline
Thompson, who would go on to script the Hollywood film version of THE ADDAMS
FAMILY in 1991. Charles Addams’s well-known and universalizing family of perverse
eccentrics thus became another popular instance o f lovable monster queers on screen during
this period.71 Significantly, the second Addams Family movie, ADDAMS FAMILY
VALUES (1993), was written by gay author and playwright Paul Rudnick, and, as its title
implies, satirizes the idea of “family values” as it has been recently espoused by
fundamentalist Christians, who often invoke the concept specifically as a semantic weapon
against the gay and lesbian community. Rudnick, the journalistic bon vivanr who wrote
“Hollywood and Vinyl” for Esquire during the 1980s and who currently pens “Ask Libby”
for Premiere magazine, also wrote the play and film version of JEFFREY (1995), a gay
male romantic comedy. And, while ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES contains no openly gay
or lesbian characters, it revels in the politics of queemess. When baby Pubert is bom at the
film's start, the categories of gender are directly negated; referring to the sex of the
newborn, Gomez ignores the obvious and proudly declares “It’s an Addams!”
The film’s best sequences set up a comparison between the ghoulish Addams
Family and the white bread suburban world of middle class America. In part of the film,
Wednesday and Pugsley, through a misunderstanding, are salt to an exclusive camp for
71There is little personal information in print about the thrice-married Charles Addams,
although his cartoons which blur the line between normality and monstrosity speak for
themselves. Addamsfe macabre work is similar to that of another cartoonist, Edward Gorey, who
does cut quite a queer figure. As recently profiled in The New \brker, Gorey is a self-styled
recluse, balletomane, pop culture aficionado, and “fin-de-siecle dandy" who speaks in gender
neutral terms whenever discussing love or romance. See Stephen Schiff "Onward and Upward
with the Arts: Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense," The New \brker 68:38 (November 9,
1992) 84-94.
249
privileged children, whereat the nerds, geeks, racial minorities, and other queers are
quickly identified and separated out fiom the rest of the WASP children. As punishment
for being different, Wednesday and Pugsley are forced to do time in the “Harmony Hut,”
wherein they must endure repeated video screenings of BAMBI, THE LITTLE
MERMAID, LASSIE COME HOME, and the SOUND OF MUSIC. Ultimately,
Wednesday and Pugsley and the other minority children are forced to take part in the
camp’s racist Thanksgiving pageant. While the blond, blue-eyed children play the Pilgrim
settlers, the camp’s outcasts (“Mordecai, Yang, Esther, Consuela, and. . . Jamal”) play the
Native Americans; Wednesday, as Pocahontas, leads their revenge, turning the pageant into
a subversive melee. In another story strand, Uncle Fester marries a black widow killer and
tries to assimilate by moving into suburban America. Realizing his mistake, an apologetic
Fester returns home to the gothic mansion and sounds the voice of monster queer pride: “I
tried to be someone I’m not. I live in shame in the suburbs. I am an Addams!” Like many
other cultural artifacts of this and other eras, queemess lurks in monster drag at the edges
of the film. Yet, had homosexuality perse been nominated directly within the film’s queer
project, it is doubtful that the film would have been produced or received in the same
manner. In a case such as this one, keeping homosexuality within the closet of connotation
continues to marginalize and minoritize, even as it allows for other more general notions of
queemess to be warmly received by mainstream audiences.
Probably the most important development in recent queer honor has been the
growing popularity of Anne Rice’s 7Tie Vampire Chronicles, a series of novels which make
fairly explicit connections between homosexuality and vampirism.71 Beginning with the
publication of Interview with the Vampire in 1976, Anne Rice’s vampire novels have all
become bestsellers. Interview with the Vampire and its sequel The Vampire Lestar (1985)
first developed a following among gay and lesbian readers, while Queen o f the Damned
72The Vampire Chronicles consist of Interview with the Vampire (Now Mark: Ballantine
Books.1976); The \fampire Lestat (New \brk: Alfred A. Knopf 1985): Queen of the Damned (New
\brk: Ballantine Books, 1988); The Tale of the Body Thief (New \brk: Alfred A. Knopf 1992); and
Memnoch the Dew7(New Mjrk: Alfred A. Knopf 1995). For an overview of Rice’s life and writings
see Katherine Ramsland, Prism o f the Night (New\6rk: Dutton, 1991); Bette B. Roberts, Anne
Rice(New\brk: Twayne Publishers,1994); and “Anne Rice," Writers Dreaming, ed. Naomi Epel
(New \brk: Carol Southern Books, 1993)209-218.
250
(1988) was the first book of the series to become a runaway bestseller upon its initial
publication. Today, it is a rare gay and lesbian book store that does not cany her complete
oeuvre, which also includes books on witches, mummies, and historical figures, all of
whom are embellished with Rice’s particular brand of homoerotic prose. Mainstream
reviewers have repeatedly noted the queemess of Rice’s fictions as well as her fans, whom
they describe as they might THE LOST BOYS or G ive Barker’s NIGHTBREED:
“frenzied hipsters and punks sporting black leather, Mohawks, tattoos, and nose rings.”77
Rice hxTself also cultivates a gothic fashion sense: pale skin, long dark hair, white lace, and
black /elvet jackets comprise her public image. In interviews, she has been quite candid
about the queer theoretical project of her work: “I know my imagination definitely tends to
be in a realm where people transcend gender and they love people of their own gender.”74
She has also explored other sexual worlds besides that of the monster queer, having written
sadomasochistic erotica under the names Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure. She
champions such work as might other pro-pomography feminists: “One of the great
mysteries is the sadomasochistic imagination. To me, that is something to be explored, not
politicized and repressed, particularly for women.”75
The five novels which comprise The Vampire Chronicles (to this date) form a sort
of extended gay vampire soap opera, exploring the world of monsters, curses, and
homosexual love. They eschew traditional Van Helsing-type vampire hunters, and the
dichotomous moral universe of the classical horror film paradigm, focusing instead on the
romantic and existential dilemmas of their undead protagonists. Rice’s close friend John
Preston, who was until his recent death an outspoken pro-pomography gay essayist, called
her work explicit “metaphors for gay life and gay sex.”7* Rice’s male vampires love and
desire one another in unabashedly erotic terms; their hunger is a sexual bloodlust, and their
nocturnal ramblings make them seem like John Rechy’s sexual outlaws cruising the streets
in search of one more anonymous encounter. In one of the most sustained metaphoric
73Hess 72.
"Quoted in Gerald Raymond, “Anne Rice: Queen of the Vampire Chronicles," The New ytrk
Nati\$ (December 5,1988)17.
juoted in Raymond 18.
"Quoted in Raymond 18.
251
reworkings of the predatory homosexual/vampire myth, an exchange of bodily fluids is all
that is required to transform a human being into a predatory vampire him/herself.
Interview with the Vampire has even been called a parody of a gay “coming out” story,
wherein the first person narrator Louis leams to come to terms with his newfound lifestyle,
at first hating himself, then eventually finding solace and companionship with others of his
kind.77 Chronicling the relationship between the ego-dystonic Louis and the sensualist
Lestat as they attempt to raise a (vampire) child Claudia, Interview with the Vampire
showcases one of th,' most apparent examples of a domestic queer monster couple in the
current horror caniii.
Anne Rice herself makes no bones about the fact that her vampires are meant to be
universalized metaphors for “real” human beings-their lusts, their loves, and their romantic
entanglements. In interviews, she repeatedly refers to the vampire Lestat as her alter-ego,
suggesting not only the gender bending appeal of her fictions, but also their heroic status in
her eyes. Twice in the prologue to the video release of the film version o f INTERVIEW
WITH THE VAMPIRE (1994), she makes the point that the story “is not just about
vampires-it’s really about us.” The books not only explore human sexuality, but often
sustain philosophical musings on the meaning of human life in a secular age, as in Tale o f
the Body Thief (1992) and Memnoch the Devil (1995), in the latter of which Lestat comes
face to face (or fang to neck) with Jesus Christ himself. While that particular vignette has
raised some conservative Christian hackles, Rice has (like Clive Barker) been quite candid
about the negative effects of organized religion on modem life:
I have very strong, negative feeling against what I would call 'revealed religion'
1 think one of the greatest accomplishments of the twentieth century is the
movement away from these revealed religions To me the awful evil in our
human history is the sacrificing of human life over and over again to religious
reasons or pure ideas.78
Likewise, her work often dramatizes such ideas. According to one critic, Queen o f the
Damned argues that “with the elimination of religious superstition the human race is on the
"See Gelder 108-123. Gossip columnist Liz Smith also noted the vampire-as-homosexua!
metaphor and put itthusly in her syndicated column:‘with his moaning and pouting, [Louis]
seems very much ? ^ndidate for Oprah: ‘Vampires Who Hate the Life!’" ‘Nipping at the Vampire,”
The Los Angeles . >-es (November 14,1994) F2.
"Quoted in Raymond 18.
252
correct path of reason and enlightenment.”79
The fairly explicit homoerotics of Rice’s work are what allegedly kept
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE from reaching movie screens until 1994. Its tangled
production history and curious reception make it a compelling touchstone for concluding
thoughts on the monster queer in America in 1995, for even as explicitly gay as the novel
and film version seem to be to many viewers, there are still those who vociferously deny
those implications. According to Rice, Hollywood was for years afraid to make a movie of
Interview because they didn’t wart to “be accused of homosexuality in conjunction with
child molesting.’’80 Well-known Hollywood actors were supposedly afraid to play the parts
of Louis and Lestat, worried that the characters’ implicit homosexuality might tarnish their
chances for future heterosexual roles. One script treatment of the film acknowledged this
Hollywood homophobia and attempted to circumvent it in an unusual way: Rice herself
rewrote the part of Louis, changing his sex to female, in order specifically to
heterosexualize his/her relationship with Lestat. At the time, Rice felt it was the only way
to get the film made; Cher was considered for the part. Although it might have still been
spectacularly queer in its own way, Rice knew that her fans would be disappointed with
Louis’s sex change Eventually gay Hollywood mogul David Geffen attained control of
the project, and THE CRYING GAME (1992) director Neil Jordan was hired to direct,
ostensibly because he had shown the ability previously to handle such queer matters in an
acceptable (i.e. profitable) fashion. However, when Tom Cruise was announced in the
role of Lestat, Rice herself balked at the idea of a sunny macho icon playing her “dark
prince.’’81 Eventually, upon seeing the film, Rice changed her mind, and ran a long
“Personal Statement by Anne Rice Regarding the Motion Picture INTERVIEW WITH THE
VAMPIRE” in Variety, which was subsequently reprinted in other major newspapers. She
praised everyone connected with the film and claimed that
Fearlessly it presented the love shared by the fictional characters, Lestat, Louis,
Claudia and Armand; fearlessly it told the story of the making of the child Vampire
Claudia; fearlessly it allowed my tormented vampire outsiders to transcend gender,
and to speak fiom their souls about matters of life and death, love, loneliness, guilt
7BRaymond 18.
“ Quoted in Raymond 19. i
*' For an account of these struggles, see Hess 70-75.
253
and pain.c
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE works the queer monster tropes in usual (as
well as unusual) ways-“fearlessly” presenting its male vampires with loads of homosexual
connotation and bloody gore. Although Lestat’s penchant for little boys and Louis’s
homoerotic longing after his dead brother are downplayed or missing from the film (Louis
now has a dead wife), the film is very sympathetic to its queer vampires, and the bulk of its
running time is devoted to the vampires’ exploring their own queer identities, not trying to
outsmart some Van Helsing figure to whom they eventually succumb. Yet the idea of a
male couple (and a male couple raising a child) is once again firmly represented as
unnatural and steeped in violence, much of it directed against women. Traditional models
of gender invasion are invoked to suggest the vampire’s queer Otherness: the male
vampires are feminized through lighting, make up, and costumes. As one fashion critic
noted, “Without fangs, Lestat and Louis would pass for two ordinary fops The
feminine frills. . . magnify the story’s homoerotic elements ”c Interestingly, the
most terrifying moment in the film, based upon my screenings of the film with suburban
teenage audiences, occurs without fangs or bloodletting. Here I refer to the scene between
Louis (Brad Pitt) and Armand (Antonio Banderas), wherein the latter confesses his love
and desire for the former. Framed in a two shot, the actors’ full pouting mouths come
“dangerously” close to one another will they kiss? The unease of the audience during this
scene is palpable, and identical to their bodily response to the anticipation of horror. This
particular moment of terror is averted (the two withdraw without kissing), and the audience
breathes a sigh of relief~at least until the next time a handsome male vampire makes eyes at
another man. As in the classical horror film, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE draws
the spectator close to a frightening queer sexuality, then, in backing away from it, once
again reasserts “normality” (i.e. heterosexual values). However, by making its monsters
so explicitly a function of gay male sensuality, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE also
comes close to deconstructing the genre’s underlying thematic myth, making it apparent (to
Anne Rice, ‘To My Readers," The Los Angeles Times Calendar (Sunday, October 2,1994)
20-2i The statement first appeared in Varietyon September 23,1994.
“ Betty Goodwin, “Fangs with a Flourish," The Los Angeles Times (November 10,1994) E5.
254
some viewers, at least) that the fears that underlie many horror movie narratives are fears of
sexual difference in general and homosexuality specifically.
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE and the publicity surrounding it sparked
numerous questions within popular culture over exactly how spectators “read” or
understand the image of the monster queer in the 1990s. For some audiences, that line no
longer exists: many gay fans considered Tom Cruise’s acceptance of the role of Lestat as
more or less a coming out declaration, reading the film itself as more a gay love story than a
horror film. Others 'rather too overzealously, I feel) defend the idea that the film has
nothing to do with homosexuality: it is, after all, “just” a monster movie. Accordingly, the
boundary between “metaphor for gay sexuality” and “just a vampire movie” remains the
closet door in each viewer’s mind. In her syndicated gossip column, Liz Smith commented
upon INTERVIEW’S homoerotic vampires, and used them as a jumping off place for a
discussion of homosexuality in Hollywood cinema:
[DJoes their undead state make their sensual nuzzling socially acceptable for
unsophisticated audiences? Why beat around the bush? Why not just make a big,
beautiful, excellent homoerotic movie with big, big, stars? Ah, but would major
male stars ever choose roles that portrayed them as gay without the protective
covering of vampirism?*1
As Smith’s comments illustrate, in 1995 monster drag is still but another form of the
closet’s oppressive function: like an arranged marriage, or a homosexual star’s “beard" for
the Oscars, the monster movie is a “safe” but demonizing place in which queemess hides.
The sociocultural linkage of movie monsters and homosexuals exists not just within
horror movie culture, but has thoroughly permeated mainstream American culture, its
various gay and lesbian subcultures, and perhaps most importantly, the individual psyches
of people everywhere, whether they be horror movie fans or not Not long after the
successful release of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, International Male, a clothing
outlet that markets its designs primarily to gay men, began to feature “Arabesque” vests,
“Colonial” frock coats, and chenille evening scarfs, a look clearly inspired by the film’s
fashion design. Monster movie pinball machines can regularly be found in gay and lesbian
bars, and it is not unusual to see young urban gay men sporting tattoos of monsters or
“ Liz Smith, "Vampire’ and Gay Sexuality,” The Los Angeles Times (November 17,1994) F2.
255
other gothic signifiers. And the prevalence and appeal of the monster queer for gay men is
evident in recent personal ads such as this one: “COUNT DRACULA seeks Jonathan
Harker. Loves the night, mystery and new experiences. Romantic GWM, 28,5’9”, 165
lbs, captivating emerald eyes and dentist's smile."”
Queer people continue to react to the social construct of the monster queer in myriad
ways, from righteous anger at the ideological apparatuses that express such ideas, to campy
but dismissive acknowledgements of the concept, to the outright celebration of monster
queers as counter-hegemonic sercal outlaws. Yet, no matter how queer people themselves
react to this particular and oftentimes subtle form of mediated demonization, I would still
argue that the overall social effect of such images and discourses-even when couched
within a queer theoretical paradigm or a sympathetic genre narrative—has been and
continues to be the ongoing monsterization of homosexuality within mainstream American
culture. Until society at large begins to realize and understand how the signs and
signifying practices of the horror movie contribute to the social understanding of
homosexuality, the construct of the monster queer, as he or she haunts the movie screens
of America, will continue to oppress many members of society.
“ Personal ad, LA Reader, 1 9 ^ .
256
Epilogue
But the worst thing about growing up was the feeling of isolation. I realized I was
different-that I was gay-when I was about 8 years old. You start brooming afraid
of being found out, because you are constantly being told by your church-I was
raised Catholic~by your school, by the TV set, by the newspaper, that who you are
is bad. It’s a very terrifying thing for a child to go through. I kept waiting for this
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde moment—that I would become this ax-wielding, child-
molesting murderer. And it never happened. At about 12 years old I thought, this
is ridiculous—I’m not a monster, I’m me.'
A few years ago in Mondo Video a Go-Go, a los Angeles video store which specializes in
“psychotronic” videos, I stumbled across a homemade videotape entitled “(Gay) Dead Irish
Gay Basher."2 The tape is a very brief and amateurish narrative made by a group of
teenage boys calling themselves W E —Vivid Video Express. The story follows an
(allegedly) gay burglar/rapist who is killed by a (supposed) gay couple when he tries to
enter their home. A black-cloaked “anarchist" finds and reanimates the body and sends it
back to the house for revenge. Once there, amidst a gay and lesbian party (signified by
disco and folk music, same sex dancing, and a naively fumbling sex scene), a massacre of
beatings and stabbings ensues until the ghoul is again laid to rest. This curious home video
monster movie is hopelessly confused and contradictory, not only in its narrative structure,
but also in its politics. Whether the tape is “pro" or “anti” gay is impossible to determine;
nevertheless, the tape clearly demonstrates what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called a
“homosexual/homophobic knowing," a mass of contradictory feelings about same sex
attraction and internalized societal homophobia frequently experienced by those individuals
in the throes of the coming-out process.3 My subsequent conversations with gay male
student filmmakers and movie fans alike have unearthed similar artifacts, leading me to
’ *Q&A: Kevyn Aucoin," The Los Angeles Times (January 12,1995) E1,11. Kevyn Aucoin is
today a self-identified gay man and a successful fashion designer.
2For a discussion of the term “psychotronic” as well as a useful reference guide, see Michael
Waldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (New \brk: Ballantine Books, 1983)
3The coming-out process has been the focus of much recent gay-positive psychotherapy
and psychological research. See for example, John C. Gonsiorek, ed., Homosexuality and
Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Handbook ofAfiinnative Models (New \brk: The Haworth Press,
1982).
257
suspect that the conflation of burgeoning male homosexual identity and the violent
iconography of the slasher film (or monster movie) may be something more than an
isolated incidence. Instead it appears to be a more far reaching phenomenon to be found
among “proto-gay” teenage boys around the country.
Some of the artifacts I unearthed were created specifically to shock the sensibilities
of parents and teachers. “The Fork Murder Diaries,” for example (created by a gay male
student at Philips Exeter Academy in the early 1980s), is a graphic first person account of a
sadistic omnisexual homicidal pedophile. Other artifacts apt: ■ar to grow out of a desire to
emulate famous cinematic techniques, such as a compilation of home movie sequels to
PS YCHO that predate those produced by the Hollywood industry. Many of these tapes
frequently contain references to famous moments in other horror films-a homage to
CARRIE’Sclimactic kitchen scene within “(Gay) Dead Irish Gay Basher,” for example-
which effectively attest to the filmmakers’ fannish knowledge of the genre. Still others are
more “original,” such as the Polaroid Instant Movie DEMENTIA, which tells the story of a
gothic sadomasochistic master/servant relationship, compete with twisted staircases, red
hoods which conceal multiple identities, and the requisite series of gruesome murders.
These homemade artifacts reveal many cultural assumptions about homosexuality,
most of them, not surprisingly, culled from the history of the horror film. As usual, male
homosexuality is conflated with effeminacy: to be a gay male is to be weakened and
womanly. One such comic strip about an effeminate homosexual is entitled “Pinky Gay,”
and in the final panel its cross-dressing male homosexual is slashed to death with butcher
knives by two cartoon figures meant to represent the creators of the strip, both of whom
would subsequently claim gay identities in the following years. Homosexuality is also
linked with bestiality (“I’m here to ransack the house and rape the cat,” says the Irish Gay
Basher before he is killed), and with cannibalism (the protagonist of the Fork Murders eats
various parts of his victims). Homosexuality is also conflated with foreign nationality (the
Irish Gay Basher), pedophilia (the Fork Murders), and ultimately, in every case, violence
and murder are directly linked to gay sexuality: “Oh baby, more, oh” cries one naked victim
of the Irish Gay Basher as he is knifed to death. As in any number of recent mainstream
horror films, phallic instruments of violence replace human body parts in a twisted
258
rewriting of homosexual sex.
The common trait of all these artifacts is that they depict both a fascination with
homosexuality, and, at the same time, a violent reaction against it. As one developmental
psychologist has put it, in this form of defensive homophobia,
unconscious conflicts about one's own sexuality or gender identity might be
attributed to lesbians and gay men through a process of projection. Such a strategy
permits people to externalize their conflicts and to control their own unacceptable
urges by rejecting lesbians and gay men (who symbolize those urges) without
consciously recognizing the urges as their own.”4
Like many of the industrially produced films that define the English-langiage genre of
cinematic horror, films and videos such as “(Gay) Dead Irish Gay Basher” demonstrate
within their very creation and narrative development the psychosocial dynamics of
homosexual/homophobic knowing, allowing their makers the opportunity to play at being
gay within a safe, fictionalized zone of make believe. They invariably include acts of
violent retribution which effectively deny or negate the obsessive interest in homosexuality
which the rest of the artifact has demonstrated. By murdering their fictional homosexuals,
the creators of these tapes reaffirm their own real life “performance” of heterosexuality.
While this is ultimately a less violent reaction to repressed homosexual feelings than a “real
life” gay bashing or even murder, these homemade tapes do signal that (homo)sexuality in
American culture at this point in time is still a highly conflicted subject, one that always
seems to verge on the edge of violence.
Ultimately, the existence of these artifacts profoundly disturbs and saddens me.
The generic space of the violent horror film has historically been (and in many cases still is)
one of the few cultural spaces wherein queemess can be fairly openly addressed, yet, due
to the requisite form of the genre, queemess is almost always figured as destructive and
monstrous. Queemess is that thing vanquished by heteronormativity at the end of the
genre’s traditional narratives. The artifacts discussed above, and the horror movies which
they seek to emulate, are the reflection of a culture whose profound discomfort with
homosexuality creates monsters, both on the screen and in real life. Ours is a culture
4Gregory M. Herek, “Beyond Homophobia: A Social Psychological Perspective on Attitudes

loward Lesbians and Gay Men,” Bashers. Baiters & Bigots: Homophobia in American Society, ed.
John P. DeCecco (New \brk: Harrington Park Press, 1985) 10. This book is an .^valuable resource
on the psychological mechanisms and physical manifestations of homophobia.
259
wherein the most prominent gay “role models" are arguably John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey
Dahmer.5 It is a culture wherein consensual homosexuality is continually conflated with
rape, whether in the movies, a medical school lecture by a professor of psychiatry, or in the
Supreme Court’s infamous 1986 “Bowers v. Hardwick” ruling.6 It is a culture wherein
attempts to teach information regarding sex and sexuality are met with hysterical right wing
denunciations of sin and moral decline.7 It is a culture wherein support groups and
educational centers for young gay or proto-gay people are continually under attack as
“homosexual recruitment centers.” Recently, in Fountain Valley, California, a controv rsy
erupted when a local high school tried to institute exactly such a program. Frightened
parents and teens swung into action with derogatory placards and angry letters. Senior Joe
Khalil, who opposed the formation of such a group, told the press “It’s not prejudice. . .
we just don’t want them around us.” Demonstrating the dynamics of defensive
homophobia, he and his friends were worried that their high school would be viewed as a
“gay school.”8 When his plans to form a Heterosexual Student Alliance fizzled, Joe Khalil
announced his plans to start a Bestiality Gub.
In some ways, I guess one cannot really blame Joe Khalil and his consorts in their
efforts to deny gay and lesbian people their rights as human beings. To him, gay and
lesbian people aren’t human beings. They are monsters, or devils, equally likely to rape
your cat or murder your child. The image of the homosexual as monster has been firmly
cemented into the national gestalt, even for those individuals who will later self-identify as
gay or lesbian. While this might be understood by some queer people as a position of
sociocultural/textual power-the sexual outlaw as counter-hegemonic force-it is also
concomitantly an ongoing and exceedingly virulent stereotyping that continually bleeds into
5For a thoughtful account of how the Jeffrey Dahmer incident impacted upon Milwaukee’s gay
and lesbian community, see Martha A. Schmidt ‘Dahmer Discourse and Gay Identity: The Paradox
of Queer Rolltics," Critical Sociology20:3 (1994) 81-105.
61experienced the psychiatric lecture first-hand while a student at Jefferson Medical College
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the late 1980s. The department of psychiatry at this institute
of higher learning was overwhelmingly homophobic, and one instructor lectured the class on his
reparative therapy for homosexuality, a topic he classified, along with rape, as a ‘sexual disorder.”
7See, among many many other examples, George F. Will, ‘Dear Dr. Elders: The Closet is
Empty,” The Los Angeles Times (March 31,1994) B7.
*Nancy Wride, ‘A Family United,’ The Los Angeles Times (Wednesday, February 9,1994) >';1-
2.
260
Western culture’s “real life” understanding of homosexuality. For burgeoning proto-gay
identities, this formulation can have a tremendous personal psychological cost: isolated gay
teenagers often find their outcast status only reinforced by such images, and may fall into
self-defeating behaviors including depression, violent acting out, and suicide. These
homosexual/homophobic home movies, videos, diaries, and comic strips—which are
themselves meditations on or reflections of the industrially produced English-language
horror movie—attest rather frighteningly to the tenors inherent in American culture’s current
“understanding” of human sexuality, and to the dramatic need to do something about it.
For the critic of popular culture, one of the things that might be done about it is the
repeated deconstruction of the monster movie’s underlying ideological project. There is
some evidence to suggest that in recent years these assumptions are beginning to be
understood: the discussions that arose in the popular press over homosexuality and
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (or more recently homosexuality and BATMAN
FOREVER [1995]9) are an indication that this braided strand of cultural understanding may
be beginning to unwind. Even Disney films are now suspect. The cry of “negative
homosexual connotation” crept into some accounts of THE LION KING (1994-with its
fey British lion villain), and continued with the release of Disney’s POCAHONTAS
(1995).10 Why are Disney villains always foppish bachelors or evil unwed witches? In
9Frank DeCaro, ‘Old Debate: Super-heroes, Sexuality,* The Los Angeles 77mes(July 4,1995)
F-2. This article ran on Independence Day 1995 as a special commentary. The author notes what
many of the major film reviews of BATMAN FOREVER also noted, namely the way the film works as
an allegory for bisexuality or queemess in general, and the deliberate homoeroticization of the
dynamic duo by director Joel Schumacher.
'“See, among others, Tbdd Hayward, “The Lyin’ King,* Planet Homo69 [September 21,1994]
16-17. There is long tradition of Disney using horror film actors in their animated features, from
Bela Lugosi allegedly inspiring the demon Chemabog in FANTASIA (1940), to Vincent Price’s evil
Rattigan in THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE (1986). Ursula the Sea Witch in THE LITTLE
MERMAID was supposedly inspired by Divine, while two other homosexually coded actors, Hans
Conried and George Sanders, played epicene Disney villains in PETER PAN (1953) and THE
JUNGLE BOOK (1967). Queemess abounds in the Disney features, from the threat of pederasty
in PINOCCHIO (1940) to lesbian-coded monsters such as the wicked witch of SNOW WHITE
(1937) or Cruella DeVille in ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIONS (1961). And while none of
these characters are explicitly gay, the homophobic charge they carry is manifest These codings
were recently discussed at length by Jon Adams, ‘Critiquing the Cartoon Caricature: Disney, Drag
and the Proliferation and Commodification of Queer Negativity,” QUEER FRONTIERS, The Fifth
Annual National Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Graduate Student Conference, Los Angeles,
California, 1995.
261
recent years, Saturday Night Live has performed sketches about vampires and AIDS, and
another notable skit had characters naturally assuming that John Travolta’s Dracula
character was gay (he kept denying it, but his manservant Renfield was out and proud).
The resident queer couple on The Simpsons, Mr. Bums and Smithers, are themselves a
version of the domestic monster queer couple; not surprisingly, in The Simpsons
Halloween specials they have played Dracula and Renfield, as well as Dr. Frankenstein and
his assistant. And while these incidents of comedic monster queers might be indications of
how the idea of the monster queer is trivialized and/or reinforced, the satiric project of some
of these artifacts does in some small way work to deconstruct the assumptions behind the
concept.
In recent years, gay, lesbian, and queer culture has also approached the generic
systems of gothic honor in an attempt to draw out or exorcise the monster from the queer.
The gay male pornography industry has produced DOES DRACULA REALLY SUCK?
(1969), GAYRACULA (1983), and LOVE BITES (1988), the latter a non-pomo film
which rewrites generic imperatives from a gay male point of view and (somewhat
refreshingly) allows both Count Dracula and his servant Renfield to find love and
redemption with modem day West Hollywood gay boys. Written gay pom has also
produced gay vampire stories, mer-man fantasies, and a series of essays purporting to be
the diaries of a real life Dorian Gray." More ‘‘legitimate” gay horror literature such as
Jeffrey N. McMahan’s Somewhere in the Night and Vincent Virga’s Gaywyck also
expand classical gothic tropes to include gay men and women in ways other than strictly
monstrous.12 Lesbian vampire fiction, written by lesbians and for lesbians, has also
become more popular in recent years; some of these stories have been published in the new
anthology Daughters o f Darkness.13 (Science fiction and fantasy literature, which is not
” Some of these stories are listed in Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, eds., Urartian Worlds: a
Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall and
Co., 1990). The Dorian Gray stories appeared in Mandate in 1986 and 1987, the mer-man fantasy
in In Touch for Men34 (March-April 1978).
11Vincent Virga, Gayvvycfc(New Mark: Avon Books, 1980). Jeffrey N. McMahan, Somewhere
in the Night(Boston: Alyson Press, Inc., 1989).
13Pam Keesey, ed., Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories (United Sates: Cleis
Press Inc., 1993).
262
under the same generic imperatives to necessarily monsterize Otherness, has also
contributed a prolific amount of writing about what it means to be queer.14) The “new
queer cinema” has also attempted to redress the genre’s approach to queers. Todd
Haynes’s POISON (1991) works a black and white B honor movie pastiche into its
triptych of stories, again suggesting that this is one culturally encrypted space wherein
homosexuals are regularly figured.13 Jane Cottis and Kaucylia Brooke’s DRY KISSES
ONLY (1990) features a long sequence wherein two lesbian vampires comment upon their
cinematic representations, while fictional lesbian vampire films by women such as THE
MARK OF LILITH (1986) or BECAUSE THE DAWN (1988) also attempt to
reappropriate the genre for queer and feminist ends.
One of the more interesting (queer or otherwise) developments to happen to the
monster movie in recent years has been the appearance on television of Mystery Science
Theater3000, a postmodern reworking of the hosted horror movie showcase typified by
the likes of Vampira and Roland (aka Zacherley) in the 1950s and 1960s. What
differentiates MST3K from its predecessors is the degree to which it actively “talks back”
to the movies in question. While most of the traditional honor movie hosts reserved their
comments about the films they screened to commercial break bumpers and wrap around
segments, MST3K uses a process its creators have dubbed “Shadowrama” that effectively
allows three characters to talk back to the film in progress, superimposing the silhouettes of
14See, among others, the following anthologies: Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ed.,
Amazons! (New Mirk: DAW, 1979); Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ed., Amazons II (New Mirk: DAW,
1982); \fonda N. McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson, eds., Aurora: Beyond Equality
(Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett, 1977); Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu, eds., Despatches from
the Frontiers of the Female Mind (London: Womens Press, 1985); Joseph Elder, ed., Eros in
Orbit A Collection of All-New Science Fiction Stories about Sex (New \brk:Trident Press, 1973);
Marion Zimmer Bradley, ed., Free Amazons ofDa/kover(New Mirk: DAW, 1985); Jeffrey Elliot, ed.,
Kindred Spirits: An Anthology o f Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction Stories (Boston: Alyson,
1984); Susanna Sturgis, ed., Memories and Vision: Womens Science Fiction and Fantasy(New
Reedom, California: Crossing Press, 1989); Thomas Scortia, ed., Strange Bedfellows (New Mark:
Random House, 1972); Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ed., What Did Miss Darlington See? An
Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (fork: Feminist Press, 1989); Sam Moskowitz, ed.,
When Women flute (New Mirk: Walker, 1972); Camilla Decamin, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo, eds.,
Worlds Apart An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and fantasy (Boston: Alyson.
1986).
See Gaiter and Paleo for a more complete and annotated listing.
,s R)r an thoughtful discussion of POISON, see Edward R. O’Neill, “POISON-ous Queers:
Violence and Social Order,” Specfator15:1 (Fial 1994) 8-29.
263
a seated man and two robots across the bottom of the filmic and television screens. The
home viewer simultaneously watches the film and the outlines of commentators, whose
chief function is to heckle the unreeling film. And although not all of the films aired on
M ST3K fall into the monster movie category (some are westerns, biker flicks, and even an
occasional musical), the majority of the films are low budget horror films.
While cinematic purists may maintain that such a concept can only degrade the
original product and lead to anarchy in the nation's movie theatres, I would argue that this
process can and does work quite effectively to deconstruct many of the original films’ racist
and (hetero)sexist tropes, as well as address the genre’s overall form and function in quite
sophisticated ways.16 Generally speaking, the M ST3K hecklers make fun of the film’s
stalwart “normal’’ characters, more regularly giving voice to the monsters’ inner thoughts.
More specifically, gay humor and gay cultural references abound on the show, from quips
about Harvey Fierstein’s gravelly voice to campy parodies of musical theatre. A Steve
Reeves HERCULES film invariably elicits comments about posing straps, oiled chests,
and young male apprentices. In a scene from a Ray “Crash” Corrigan serial, one of the
characters observes that Crash, as he goes through a rigorous basic military training, “will
make a fine officer.” Immediately one of the silhouettes pipes up with the punch line:
“He’ll make several fine officers.” The show also touches upon the more mundane or
“real" issues of American culture though the screening of old health and social science
shorts, which are subjected to the same form of satiric deconstruction. In one “How to
Date” short from the 1950s, the commentators pick up on the homosocial implications of
the two depicted buddies, voicing the observation that they look like “Goofus and Gallant
on a date.” And, in a acknowledgment of how the genres of science fiction and horror
displace (homosexuality onto fantastic Other figures, in one remarkable skit the robots
Tom Servo and Crow “come out” to their human companion, confessing that they are—
robots.
Probably the “gayest” part of the show is its surround story, which sets up the
,eFor an overview of the MST3K phenomenon, see Richard Corliss, “Play MST for Me,” Film
Comments] :4 (July-August 1995) 26-35. For an earlier and more critical take, see Sean Griffin.
“Play MST-y for Me: The Discursive Excess of Mystery Science Theater 3000,’ Spectator 14:1
(Fafl 1993) 66-77.
264
premise and details the interactions of a mad scientist duo, Dr. Gayton Forrester and TV’s
Frank, as they torture Joel or Mike and the robots on the “Satellite of Love" by subjecting
them to forced screenings of bad movies. Although their “torture” of Joel or Mike (and
each other) gives Dr. Forrester and Frank the requisite generic degree of sadomasochistic
coloration (Dr. Forrester visibly “gets off" over inflicting an especially bad movie),
together they also manifest the queer couple’s domestic impulses. Forrester and Frank live
together in an undo-ground lair, ostensibly to further the cause of (mad) science, wherein,
true to classical generic form, they replicate the hierarchy of traditional gender roles
(male/female, master/servant, top/bottom, sadist/masochist). In vignettes throughout the
years, the two “mads” have exchanged Christmas gifts as in O. Henry’s famous short
story, done each other’s hair in atomic beehives, and sung Stephen Sondheim duets as part
of an impromptu swing chorus. Once, in the midst of doing their laundry, Frank took
special pains to locate a silk dress, which apparently belonged to him. Frank’s duties also
include scrubbing Dr. Forrester’s back, and the two have been known to snuggle up
together while watching teaijerkers on video, quickly changing the channel to professional
sports when they are discovered by the robots. Indeed, Dr. Forrester and Frank do just
about all they can do to make the sadomasochistic mad scientist couple of the classical
horror film seem as warm and cuddly and bourgeois as possible. When the actor playing
Frank left the show, Dr. Forrester sang a tender ballad called “Who Will I Kill?”,
expressing his love for Frank in the only way their generic tropes permit: through the
discourse of violence.
In another interesting example of gay input rewriting the cultural map of the horror
genre, the fan magazine Scarier Street (which bills itself as “The Magazine of Mystery and
Honor”) regularly situates essays on Peter Cushing or I WAS A TEENAGE
FRANKENSTEIN between articles on Armi stead Maupin's Tales o f the City or a piece
complaining that the new proposed film biographies of James Dean will apparently yet
again whitewash their subject’s less-than-straight sexuality. Like Films and Filming, the
British film journal of the Stonewall era that was aimed at gay male readers, Scarlet Street
seems to go out of its way to print the most revealing “beefcake” photographs of its male
subjects. In fact, Scarlet Street often reads like a gay male version of Famous Monsters
265
o f Filmland, complete with bad puns and similar tag lines. Perhaps not unexpectedly, as
this gay male sensibility has become more pronounced, recent letters to the editor have
begun to complain about the “‘rebels without their clothes’ kind of pictures. Stick to honor
and mystery photos, and leave the homoerotic stuff to Mapplethorpe."17 Another letter
chastised the magazine for becoming “‘the magazine of gay mystery and horror’" and
asserted that “implying that Ygor and the Monster and Holmes and Watson are that way is
both insulting to the artists who originally created such classic characters as well as being
irresponsibly delusional.”'8 Editor Richard Valley forcefully responded to these letters:
We do not ignore the fact that many of the artists we cover, from James Whale in
the ‘30s to Clive Barker in the ‘90s, were (or are) gay. We do not agree that
speculation over a fictional character’s sexuality is “insulting” to the creator of that
character. Scarlet Street has a sizable gay readership and a staff comprised of both
straight and gay writers — We’ll continue to run occasional “gay-themed
articles" in our pages, as well as “straight-themed articles"-though, for some
reason, nobody’s complained about the latter.19
Some fans of mystery and honor obviously still prefer to deny the queerer implications of
the genre, as difficult as that is becoming in light of recent films and critical stances.
What these developments hold for the future understanding of both the horror film
and the media representation of queer people in general is still open to speculation and the
eventual historical record. Will the queer monster be successfully deconstructed within
popular culture narratives, or will there always be a generic space for monster queers to
thrill jaded moviegoers? Will gay and lesbian people attain a level of social acceptance that
will finally lay to rest the homosexual-as-monster metaphor, or will we continue to be
demonized in ways both subtle and forthright for decades to come? Films like
NIGHTBREED, THE ADDAMS FAMILY, and INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
continue to provoke discussion on the nature of the monster queer, to nudge him or her out
of the closets and tombs ever so gently. Independent gay and lesbian film and video
practice continue to make inroads into heterocentrist assumptions and challenge heterosexist
,7 Oave Henderson, ‘Letter to the Editor," Scarlet Streef19 (Summer 1995) 14.
ames J. J. Janis, ‘Letter to the Editor," Scarlet Street19 (Summer 1995) 8.
,s Richard Valley, ‘Reply," Scarlet Street19 (Summer 1995) 8,12.
266
concepts, while gay and lesbian media fens continue to make their presence felt.'0 Articles
in the gay press such as “Children of the Night: The Natural Connection Between Horror
Films and Gay Audiences" have begun to appear with more regularity.21 And shows like
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 continue to demonstrate the ways and means of unwinding
the signifying codes of cinema. Yet, as I have indicated throughout this work, both
cultural critics and everyday moviegoers often seem all too willing to ignore the
homosexual implications of popular culture artifacts. Those people uncomfortable with the
topic will probably continue to practice such avoidance and denial, despite the ever-
increasing amount j f work and thought devoted to explicating queemess in popular culture.
I would like to think that when a “saturation point" finally arrives, and queemess can no
longer be denied or denigrated within the public sphere, that this work will have in some
small way contributed to the changing ways we think about homosexuality.
20For more on gay and lesbian media fens, see Henry Jenkins, “Out of the closet and into the
universe’ Queers and Star Trek’ Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who and Star Trek. eds.
John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins (New Mork: Routledge, 1995) 237-265; and Harry M. Benshoff
“Secrets, Closets, and Corridors Through Time: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender Through Dark
Shadows Fan Culture,”Theon'zing Fandom: Fens, Subculture, and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris
(Hampton Press, f *hcoming).
21William J. M. i, ‘Children of the Night: The Natural Connection Between Horror Rims and
Gay Audiences," Frontiers 14:13 (November 3,1995) 62-68.
267
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INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced

A Dissertation Presented to the

UMI Microform 9705075

This dissertation, written by

under the direction of h i* . Dissertation

Dean of Graduate Studies

Date ... 2J?.; i ?.§

Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film

Introduction: The Monster and the Homosexual 1

1. Defining the Monster Queer

3. Pods, Pederasts, and Perverts:

4. Exposing the Monster Queer to the Sunlight,

5. Satan Spawn and Out and Proud:

Bibliography (Works Cited) 267

In a 1984 study of anti-homosexual attitudes, the investigators broke heterosexuals’ fears

(2) Homosexuality as a threat to others—homosexuals have been frequently linked

(3) Homosexuality as a threat to the community and other components of culture—

In short, for many people in our shared English-language culture, homosexuality is a

Theorizing the Monster Queer

“Sue Ellen Case, ‘Tracking the Vampire," differences3:2 (Summer 1991) 3.

10Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer. Interpreting Mass Cu/fr/re(Minneapolis:

,3 Richard Dyer, “Gaysin Rim" Jump Cut 18 (August 1978) 16.

” For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Doty 17-38.

A Short History of the Homosexual and the Monster

53Reported in Richard Dyer, “Children of the Night" 48.

the confluence of contra-straight sexuality within the development of the gothic/horror

in the Classical Hollywood Horror Film

James Whale and THE OLD DARK HOUSE

” Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 39.

The Domestic Queer Couple: Re-Imagining Procreation

44Referenced in Stekel 29 as ‘ Jahttouch I sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. IX, 1908, p. 504.”

“ Hurlbut and Balderston, Scene B-15.

“ Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 69.

Karloff and Lugosi and the Sadomasochistic Queer Couple

“ Bige., “Review of MASK OF FU MANCHU,” Variety, December 6,1932. Compiled in Variety

73Mank, Karloff and Lugosi 57.

81Sedgwick, Between Men 76.

83‘Review of THE BLACK CAT Variety (May 22,1934).

Conclusion: De-Repressing the Homosocial Triangle in WHITE ZOMBIE

“ M -\A files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.

Curing the Monster Queer during World War II

’ “Medicine," Time (January 27,1941): 20.

“ "“FAREWELL, Noel Coward,' Esquire (December 1945) 35.

“ Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 330.

“ “Queer Brain Waves," Science News Letter 34 (June 18,1938) 394.

14Daniel Silverman and William R. Rosanoff ‘Electroencephalographic and Neurologic

” Bosley Crowther, "When Gentlemen Meet" (Review of FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE

Like Gerber’s understanding of the matter, these Universal FRANKENSTEIN films

Secret Societies and Shadowy Sailors at RKO

Paradoxically, institutionalized government discrimination may have helped to solidify the

53Quoted in Mank, Hollywood Cauldron222. DeWitt BodeenS career repeatedly dabbled in

"MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.

44'Science: Soldiers and Sex,’ Newsweek22 (July 26,1943) 72.

Conclusion: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

“ Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 330.

67MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, CA.

This review adapts itself to the prevailing “homosexuality-as-medical-illness” position,

(Re)Crlmtnalizing the Monster Queer In Cold War Culture

” “Medicine: Queer People,’ Newsweek 34 (October 10,1949) 52.

14"Medicine: A Delicate Problem,’ Newsweek 43 (June 14,1994) 100.