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Harry M Benshoff Monsters in The Closet Homosexuality and The Horror Film Inside Popular Film 1997 PDF 1 PDF
Harry M Benshoff Monsters in The Closet Homosexuality and The Horror Film Inside Popular Film 1997 PDF 1 PDF
Harry M. Benshoff
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College, but real heartfelt thanks to Carol and Kevin, Todd and
Raphael, David Scasta, and Barry Cohen. And of course, much love
and many thanks to Sean, who for three years has made my life a
Technicolor musical rather than a horror film.
Permission to reproduce photographs has kindly been granted by
the following: plates 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15 and 23 Copyright © by
Universal Studios, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Divi
sion of MCA Inc. All Rights Reserved; plate 5 Copyright © Turner
Entertainment Co. All Rights Reserved. Photo courtesy of Scarlet
Street magazine; plates 11 and 12 Copyright © 1943 RKO Pic
tures/Used by permission of Turner Entertainment Co. All Rights
Reserved; plate 13 Copyright © 1945 Turner Entertainment Co. All
Rights Reserved; plate 16 Permission by Susan Nicholson Hofheinz;
plates 17 and 26 courtesy of Scarlet Street magazine; plate 22 Art
work © Orion Pictures Corporation; plate 31 courtesy of Kevin
Glover and Aries Productions. Every attempt has been made to
obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper
acknowledgement has not been made, copyright-holders are invited
to inform the publisher of the oversight.
Introduction: The monster and
the homosexual
in his book on how the media in Great Britain have covered the
AIDS crisis, Simon Watney warns us that "Aids commentary does
not 'make' gay men into monsters, for homosexuality is, and always
has been, constructed as intrinsically monstrous within the heavily
over-determined images inside which notions of 'decency,' 'human
nature,' and so on are mobilized and relayed throughout the inter
nal circuitry of the mass media marketplace." The multiple social
4
the queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels
in the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomatically pro
scribed position of same-sex desire. Unlike petitions for civil rights,
queer revels constitute a kind of activism that attacks the dominant
notion of the natural. The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous,
the uncanny. Like the Phantom of the Opera, the queer dwells under
ground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to
look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music. 8
the case of monster movies and science fiction films, the narrative
elements 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,
fear of and revulsion towards the specifically maternal body with its
fluid 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
Introduction 7
havoc in the cinema. While some have critiqued this model as essen
tialist, Wood did note the importance of historical parameters in
understanding the relationship between normality and monsters,
asserting that "[t]he monster is, of course, much more protean,
changing from period to period as society's basic fears clothe them
selves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments." 21
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
ster into some sort of heroic figure) are all important questions
which Twitchell's account cannot address. (For example, Carol
Clover's recent work theorizes the slasher, possession, and rape-
revenge subgenres of the horror film from a psychoanalytic per
spective and finds their lure to be more of a cross-gendered
masochistic identification with the "final girl" victim, rather than a
simplistic sadistic identification with a misogynistic killer.) Fur
28
As the titular stars of their own filmic stories, perhaps it is the mon
sters that the audience comes to enjoy, experience, and identify
with; in many films, normative heterosexuality is reduced to a
12 Monsters in the closet
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 oth
erwise) which allows for and fosters the multiplicity of various read
ings and reading positions, including what has been called active
queer (or gay, or lesbian) reading practices. If we adopt Roland
Barthes's model of signification wherein the denotative meaning of
any signifier is simply the first of many possible meanings along a
connotative chain, then we can readily acknowledge that a multi
tude 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 les
bian spectator might be considered queer. The queer spectator's
"gay-dar," already attuned to the possible discovery of homosexu
ality within culture-at-large, here functions in relation to specific
cultural artifacts. As such, "Queer readings aren't 'alternative' read
ings, wishful or willful misreadings, or 'reading too much into
things' readings. They result from the recognition and articulation
of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture
texts and their audiences all along." In the case of horror films and
39
these films (most of them are now lost) focused more on the novel's
tropes of pictorial transformation or its thematic queerness, it is
nonetheless clear that they did help to construct a very definite
image of the monstrous male homosexual. For example, the poster
for the 1917 German version of The Picture of Dorian Gray shows
a figure consistent with that era's understanding of the male homo
sexual. Dorian Gray stands next to a vase filled with heart-shaped
leaves; the figure himself wears a stylish tuxedo, patent leather slip
pers, bracelets and makeup, has rounded hips, arms akimbo with
one on the pedestal and one on a hip, crossed legs, cocked head,
flowered lapel, and a slightly bored, bemused expression on his
face.56
time, however, many of Germany's artists had died or fled the con
tinent. Film-makers such as Karl Freund and Paul Leni (among
many others) brought the German Expressionist style to America
and specifically to the horror films of Hollywood's classical period.
Once there, it helped to create some of the defining examples of cin
ematic horror, upon whose foundations almost all of Hollywood's
later monster movies have been built.
In citing these historical "facts" I do not mean merely to suggest
a rather coarse or knee-jerk auteurism (queer works are produced
by queer authors), but rather to point out the confluence of contra-
straight sexuality within the development of the gothic/horror
genre. The idea that the homosexual was socially constructed as a
distinct type of person during the late nineteenth century, and
inflected culturally ever since, is a key tenet of this work, which
means to situate itself somewhere between the theoretical poles of
essentialist sexuality and social constructionism. These models are
readily mapped out by John Boswell and David M. Halperin in the
first two essays contained in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the
Gay and Lesbian Past. While Boswell argues that there have always
59
must attempt to put into play the many (often conflicting) "takes"
on homosexuality, the "positive mechanisms" which culturally con
struct 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 per
spectives 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 dis
courses, then, contribute to the ebb and flow of the meaning of the
concept "homosexual." It is my hope that by examining the mech
anisms of specific texts, the subjectivities of possible readers, and
other ancillary cultural discourses related to homosexuality, this
work will create a new and unique impression of what being gay or
lesbian has meant, and continues to mean, in twentieth-century
America.
Notes
1 See John Wayne Plasek and Janicemarie Allard, "Misconceptions of
Homophobia," in Bashers, Baiters, & Bigots: Homophobia in American
Introduction 25
Society, ed. John P. De Cecco (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985)
23-38.
2 For more on the phenomenon, see Kellie Gibbs, "Fundamentalist Hal
loween: Scared All the Way to Jesus," Out 29 (February 1996) 2 0 .
3 Some of these essays include: Ellis Hanson, "Undead," in inside/out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge,
1991) 324-340; Andrew Parker, "Grafting David Cronenberg: Mon
strosity, AIDS Media, National/Sexual Difference" and Katharine Park,
"Kimberly Bergalis, AIDS, and the Plague Metaphor," both in Media
Spectacles, eds Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca Walkowitz
(New York: Routledge, 1993) 2 0 9 - 2 3 1 and 2 3 2 - 2 5 4 .
Other writings on the connections between fictional monsters and
homosexuality (not cited directly below) include: Terry Castle, The
Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Rhona J . Berenstein,
Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in
Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Richard Dyer, "Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality,
Homosexuality as Vampirism," Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and
Popular Fiction, ed. Susannah Radstone (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1988) 4 7 - 7 2 ; Bonnie Zimmerman, "Daughters of Darkness:
Lesbian Vampires," Jump Cut 24/25 (1981) 2 3 - 2 4 ; Martin F. Norden,
"Sexual References in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein," Eros in the
Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film, ed. Donald
Palumbo (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) 141-150; Elizabeth
Reba Weise, "Bisexuality, The Rocky Horror Pictre Show, and Me," in
Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. eds Loraine Hutchins
and Lani Kaahumanu (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1991) 134-139; Patricia
White, "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting," in
inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York:
Routledge, 1991) 142-172; Diana Fuss, "Monsters of Perversion: Jef
frey Dahmer and The Silence of the Lambs," in Media Spectacles, eds
Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York:
Routledge, 1993) 1 8 1 - 2 0 5 ; Edward Guerrero, "AIDS as Monster in
Science Fiction and Horror Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Tele
vision 18:3 (Fall 1990) 8 6 - 9 3 .
4 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media,
second edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 4 2 .
5 Many of these essays have been reworked and published in Robin
Wood, Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986) 7 9 .
6 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
26 Monsters in the closet
tury construction(s) of that same desire and activity: gay and lesbian
refer to social identities. "Queer" is the most multifarious term, encom
passing homosexual, gay, lesbian and all other terms used for describ
ing contra-straight sexuality; thus most of the monsters depicted in
horror films are "monster queers" by virtue of their "deviant" sexual
ity. I also use queer to refer to a reading protocol, one described by
aspects of textual coding and active spectatorship that question or go
beyond normative, compulsory, white, male, heterosexist assumptions.
16 Margaret Tarratt, "Monsters from the Id," Films and Filming 17:3
(December 1970) 38-42 and 17:4 (January 1971) 4 0 - 4 2 . Reprinted in
Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986) 2 5 8 - 2 7 7 .
17 For a brief narrative history of Films and Filming, see Anthony Slide,
ed., International Film, Radio, and Television Journals (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1985) 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 . Slide notes the magazine's "definite
homosexual slant" and also the mild controversy it caused in 1971
when some readers began to object. See also "Letters," Films and Film
ing (July 1971) 4.
18 See "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic," Film Comment 14:1 (Janu
ary-February 1978), Reprinted in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Meth
ods, Volume Two (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985)
6 4 9 - 6 6 0 . One might wonder as to the degree his thinking about and
writing on the horror film was related to this process.
19 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), Gad Horowitz, Repression :
Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich,
and Marcuse (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
20 Watney 2 6 .
21 Wood 7 9 .
22 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1978) 12.
23 Foucault 27.
24 Foucault 114. Compare these thoughts with those of Herbert Marcuse
in "Chapter Three: The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness:
Repressive Desublimation," in One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1964) 5 6 - 8 3 .
25 Foucault 100.
26 For an overview of the theoretical arguments which developed within
and from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
see Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Boston,
MA: Unwin Hyman 1990). Many of the most important original essays
are collected in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and
28 Monsters in the closet
Janet Woolacott, eds, Culture, Society and the Media (New York:
Methuen, 1982) and Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and
Paul Willis, eds, Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson,
1980).
27 James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 7.
28 Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
29 Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision: Essays in
Feminist Film Criticism, eds Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp,
and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: University Publications of America,
Inc., 1984) 8 3 - 9 9 .
30 For an exploration of some of these issues, see Nick Browne, "The
Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach," in Movies and
Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1985) 4 5 8 - 4 7 5 .
31 Richard Dyer, "The Role of Stereotypes," in The Matter of Images:
Essays on Representation (New York: Routledge, 1993) 1 1 - 1 8 .
32 Clover 6.
33 Twitchell 69-70.
34 For a discussion of the Bakhtinian Carnival and how it relates to film
(and briefly Halloween), see Robert Stam, "Chapter Three: Film, Liter-
ature, and the Carnivalesque," Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural
Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989) 8 5 - 1 2 1 . Although he doesn't specifically talk about horror films,
several of the ten criteria he isolates for the cinematic expression of the
Carnivalesque are highly relevant to the genre.
35 For an interesting account of how gay and lesbian actors get marginal-
ized both within Hollywood narrative systems and industrial practice,
see Patricia White, "Supporting Character: The Queer Career of Agnes
Moorehead," in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on
Popular Culture, eds Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 9 1 - 1 1 4 .
36 For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Doty 1 7 - 3 8 .
37 See Dyer, "Homosexuality and Film Noir," in The Matter of Images:
Essays on Representations (New York: Routledge, 1993) 5 2 - 7 2 .
38 Doty xi-xii.
39 Doty 16.
40 For a historical overview of these figures, see Nicolas Kiessling, The
Incubus in English Literature: Provenance and Progeny (Seattle: Wash-
ington State University Press, 1977).
41 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) 1 7 1 .
Introduction 29
T he years from 1930 to 1936 saw the first flowering of the Hol
lywood horror film. The codes and conventions of the genre
that were developed and exploited during these years were to
become the basis for the monster movie's structure and appeal
throughout the remainder of the century. The early 1930s also
chronicled the depths of the Great Depression, the repeal of Prohi
bition, and the beginning of the end of a certain popular cultural
construction of homosexuality, one that defined homosexual
behavior more in terms of gender deviance rather than of sexual-
object choice. As in the construction of homosexuality in other
world cultures (such as the Mediterranean), American men during
the first third of this century who indulged in sex with other men -
but performed the active, insertive role - were still likely to be
considered "normal," whereas those men who performed the
"woman's role" were the ones most likely to be identified (and sub
sequently stereotyped) as homosexuals. Likewise, it was the man
nish lesbian who caught the public's attention and contributed to
the idea that homosexuality was somehow caused by the improper
alignment of spiritual gender and physical body. This view was held
by homosexuals as well as heterosexuals: in a 1932 rebuttal of a
virulent diatribe against homosexuality in the magazine The
Modern Thinker, pseudonymous author "Parisex" explained that
"The homosexual man does not shun women because he wants to
flee from the reality of normal sex life, but because he himself is
psychically a woman and his normal sex life is directed to the other
sex, another man, the only person to attract him." 1
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." In its first few years, the magazine ran cartoons and jokes
9
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 than
connotative was under attack in different quarters from various
social reformers. Broadway had been rocked with scandals in the
late 1920s over several gay and lesbian themed plays, and Radclyffe
Defining the monster queer 35
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 off-screen 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 went 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 risque connotations of monstrous attacks. Here, vio
lence 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
36 Monsters in the closet
The genre of gothic horror had been tinged with a queer presence
from its inception, not only in terms of its patterns of formal con
struction, 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 Stu
dios. 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 further to
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 mysteri
ous secrets. When the style is more sparingly used it is almost always
reserved for the monsters' lairs or for their moments of sexual trans
gression. The monstrously queer deviation of the gothic villain is
also clearly marked within the text by the presence of an assertively
"normal" heterosexualized couple, who serve as the center of a nat
uralized and normative heterosexual equilibrium which the queer
force disrupts. One or both members of this "normal" couple
Defining the monster queer 37
become involved in the villain's plot: the queer villain's desire for
one or both members of the couple is one of the main thematic
imperatives of the genre. However, by the end of the film, the vil
lain and/or monster is destroyed by a public mob or its patriarchal
representatives, and the "normal" couple are reinstated after safely
passing through their queer experience.
While the classical horror film encourages everyone in the audi
ence to understand these narrative patterns from a queer perspec
tive, it was probably easier for homosexual men and women to do
so on a more regular basis. Because of their already disenfranchised
location outside of the dominant culture, or their practice at lead
ing "double" lives, many homosexual spectators of the genre would
perhaps be more likely than heterosexual ones to identify with the
figure of the monster or villain, even as he or she was eventually
vanquished by the narrative's heterosexist agents. This facet of gay
and lesbian readership (making do with less than optimal represen
tations) is today still a facet of how non-straight people negotiate
popular media texts. It has necessitated the strategy of selective and
carefully chosen identificatory practices; for example, queer specta
tors may identify with a monster such as the lesbian vampire, enjoy
ing her exploits for the majority of the film's running time, while
ultimately discounting the patented narrative resolution and its con
comitant reinstatement of heterosexual norms. This strategy had its
analog in the flurry of underground gay novels which were written
during the early 1930s. While some of these novels managed to pro
vide a remarkable illustration of urban gay life and culture, most
also "ended with the death or suicide of the gay protagonist ... an
obligatory bow to convention, transparently intended to disarm the
moralists who might otherwise have tried to suppress the books." 19
Furthermore, not all horror films of this period insisted that their
monsters were wholly evil. In many of these films, ambivalence is
felt and expressed towards the monster - in some films he is unre
lentingly evil (for example Dr Mirakle in Murders in the Rue Morgue
(1932)), while in other instances the film-makers have created sym
pathy for him/her and even an occasional plea for understanding
38 Monsters in the closet
sons who "really are" gay; at the same time, it holds the universalizing
view that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable
identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are
strongly marked by same-sex influences and desires, and vice versa for
apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual iden
tity and modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance
the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is wide
spread and in the first place internal.
21
views with actor Alan Napier and Whale's former lover David
Defining the monster queer 41
his eventual expulsion from the Hollywood community and his sub
sequent 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 made 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 were 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.") While it is diffi
26
Plate 2 Ernest Thesiger, the outrageously campy character actor w h o set the
tone for the queer happening of The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935)
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 a maiden lady
from Balham [pun intended?]." Bride of Frankenstein
29
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!" Another 30
Plate 3 A queer couple: butch female vampire and fey manservant. Countess
Marya Z a l e s k a (Gloria H o l d e n ) a n d S a n d o r (Irving Pichel) in Dracula's
Daughter (1936)
(discussed below), perhaps the most obviously queer ones are those
wherein the homosexual pair set out to procreate without the aid of
woman. The act of procreation, read as sex, thus makes this partic
ular formula spectacularly queer.
The locus classicus of the queer "domestic" couple can be found
in James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. In the first
film, Dr Frankenstein creates life with the aid of a hunchbacked
assistant, Fritz. In the second, his marriage is interrupted when he is
blackmailed by Dr Pretorius into creating a mate for the monster.
(One "Numa Praetorius" was allegedly the author of a large German
sexological essay published in 1908.) Bride of Frankenstein
45
is most
explicit in its queer intentions, opening with a framing sequence
wherein Mary Shelley is coaxed by Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley to continue her tale. This particular erotic triangle feels little
need to suppress its homoerotic leanings. The "elegant three" are
decidedly foppish and repeatedly call each other "darling." Their
status as sexual transgressors is made clear: Lord Byron refers to
50 Monsters in the closet
Plate 4 In this still from Island of Lost Souls (1933), Charles Laughton's
salacious Dr Moreau seems overly interested in heterosexual hero Parker
(Richard Arlen), who, in turn, is interested in panther-woman Lota (Kathleen
Burke)
"Sex perversion"
Another classical horror film that exploits the theme of a male
couple seeking to create human life homosexually is 1933's Island
of Lost Souls. In this film, Dr Moreau and his male assistant Mont
gomery attempt to create normal human beings from animals
through "plastic surgery, blood transfusions, gland extracts, [and]
ray baths." That same year, "real-life" medical practitioners were
using similar therapies in their quest to create "normal" human
beings from homosexuals. One such doctor boasted that he could
have cured Oscar Wilde:
While much of the "mad" science of the classical horror film plays
like so much melodramatic hokum to today's audiences, reports
such as this one remind us that "cutting-edge" science of the era was
much closer to that depicted in the era's horror films than we would
perhaps otherwise imagine. Mad science and accepted standard
medical practice are sometimes only differentiated through histori
cal retrospection, and (as the next chapter will explore in greater
detail) this has often been the case with many so-called medical
"cures" for homosexuality.
A queer reading of Island of Lost Souls is encouraged by Charles
Laughton's performance as Dr Moreau. Laughton had just starred
in Cecil B. DeMille's Sign of the Cross (1932), where he played a
very obviously homosexual Roman emperor, or as the euphemisms
of the day would have it, a "voluptuary." As usual, in Island of Lost
53
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 sur
rounding not only homosexuality, but also race, gender, and colo
nialism, 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 of
Dr. Moreau in 1895. He claimed to have been thinking about the
trial of Oscar Wilde, and set out to create a parable regarding man's
bestial nature. (His choice of the name "Moreau" may have been
55
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
German army, bestiality was invoked to ostracize those involved
while concomitantly suggesting their depravity: "Dozens of car
toons employed dogs, pigs, and excrement, and one from France
Defining the monster queer 55
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 con
ceived of within 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 of 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. As noted
59
above, books that discussed sex had been 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. When homosexuality
60
Just as the medical and social reformist discourses of the era made
little differentiation between various queer acts, so did the era's
horror films, serving up a mixed bag of paraphilias along with their
monstrous signifiers. As one film review put it, "Colin Clive gives a
splendid performance as the mentally perverted Frankenstein
yet exactly what that perversion might have been was never
named. Any and all deviance from heteronormativity fell under
65
genre as villains and monsters lust after the hero and heroine and
stop at nothing to consummate their desires. Voyeuristic sado
masochism, which might describe a certain appeal o f the genre for
its spectators, is also prominent in several films, which reflexively
call into question the nature o f the genre itself: specific examples o f
this can be found in Mad Love, Freaks, Dr. X, and Mark of the Vam
pire.
O n e o f the most queerly perverse films o f the period, which
brings together homosexuality with almost all o f the aforemen
tioned tropes, is M G M ' s The Mask of Fu Manchu ( 1 9 3 2 ) . T h e film
stars Boris Karloff as the famous Asian criminal; he seems t o be per
petually surrounded by half-naked slave boys, both African and
Asian. O n e latter-day critic apprised the role as follows: "Karloff,
with his Ann-Margret smile, false eyelashes, Adrian-designed
gowns, dragon lady fingernails, and lisping, c o m e hither delivery,
has created a wild, kinky, archfiend o f a Fu; part Yellow Peril, part
Frederick's o f H o l l y w o o d . " Fu's main hench-person is his daugh-
66
Plate 5 Boris Karloff has his way with an immobilized Charles Starrett in this
notorious scene from The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
58 Monsters in the closet
ter Fah Lo See, played by Myrna Loy, who reportedly called the
script "obscene" and her character a "sadistic nymphomaniac." 67
foreign agents, and many of them play upon racist fears as well as
homophobic ones, conflating and blurring their stereotypical signi
fiers. It was not uncommon for audiences to think of foreign lands,
and Europe especially, as the site of sexual decadence, the birthplace
of Oscar Wilde and others of his ilk. In an anthropological essay
published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1930, for instance, the
author muses on "primitive" sexuality and then suggests that "The
whites are a highly strung race of extremists, and they would react
differently [to liberated sexuality]; they would become voluptuar
ies, as have some of the European people to whom greater sexual
license has been allowed. These people have developed to a state
where perversion is the rule ...". Frequently the queer couple is
71
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." As this review sug
72
gests, gender inversion and physical deformity were the things used
to frighten horror movie audiences in the 1930s. (Ironically, actor
David Manners, who played many of these films' stalwart heroes,
reportedly had to seek out Eva Le Gallienne to help him curb his
own effeminate tendencies, a fact which suggests from the outset
that these films' depiction of normality was just as fantastic and
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 born and trained in
Hungary, while Karloff left his native England to pursue a career in
acting across Canada and the United States. While Hollywood pub
licists constructed Karloff's image as that of a genteel Britisher,
Lugosi's image was figured as that of a European mystery man,
given to odd excesses, "decadence," and the supernatural. Both men
were never far from the stigma of racial Otherness. According to his
close friend Alan Napier, there was some reason to believe that
Karloff himself was the product of a illegitimate miscegenated rela
tionship:
When his mother was returning to England one time, she ... fell from
grace and had an affair in the Suez Canal with an Egyptian gentleman!
Whether Boris stated that he was the result of this adventure, or
whether my wife Gip and I surmised it, I cannot be sure. But it fits so
perfectly: the split with his family's middle class Victorian respectabil
ity to become an actor; his intellectual political liberalism combined
with a yearning for the British establishment ... it all adds up to the
portrait of one aware of being different by reason of "half-caste" ille
gitimacy . . .
74
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 Bogymen." This undoubtedly added to the off
76
their first film together (1934's The Black Cat), Karloff was receiv
ing 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
the stories' melodrama, the core o f the dramas actually rests within
the sado-masochistic relationship between the two male horror
stars. T h i s type o f homosocial/homosexual competition between
two men over a w o m a n (or a heterosexual couple), is often "as
intense and potent as the bond that links either o f the rivals to the
beloved," and suggests a slippage along the homosocial/homosexual
continuum as it has been theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. ' 7
This continuum for men (as c o m p a r e d to that for women) has often
been described as broken. As Sedgwick continues, it is hard to imag
ine "an intelligible continuum o f aims, emotions, and valuations"
linking (to use her example) Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms to a
loving gay couple, even as it is possible to imagine some form o f
(however troubled) continuum between lesbianism and "other
forms o f w o m e n ' s attention to w o m e n . " M a n y of these 1 9 3 0 s
80
Plate 6 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935). The film revels in
and climaxes with homoerotic and sadomasochistic scenes of torture.
1
Defining the monster queer 63
Plate 7 In the climax of The Black Cat (1934), Bela Lugosi "skins alive" the
half-naked body of his closely bonded rival, played by Boris Karloff
64 Monsters in the closet
lead to death.
The Black Cat also focuses on a sado-masochistic queer couple
who dabble in all sorts of queer romance: Satanism, incest,
necrophilia, and bestiality. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) and Dr
Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) are overly friendly enemies with an
old score to settle. Their relationship is defined almost solely in
terms of a series of homoerotic triangles: Poelzig has stolen Werde-
gast's wife when Werdegast was sent away to prison. Subsequently
he has married Werdegast's daughter, Karen, although this fact is
unknown to Werdegast. When Werdegast and the obligatory
normal couple are forced to spend the night at Poelzig's art-deco
castle, the two "old friends" suppress their hatred for one another
and instead exchange pleasant admiration: "Engineer Poelzig is one
of Austria's greatest architects" ... "Dr Werdegast is one of Hun
gary's greatest psychiatrists." Their mutual admiration evaporates,
however, when Poelzig attempts to enter Werdegast's bedroom in
the middle of the night: "Now Vitus, we have something to settle,
we two." He takes Werdegast to the cellar and shows him the
embalmed corpse of their (shared) dead wife. Symmetrically framed
around the body, the two men re-create a scene so common in
gothic novels, wherein, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, "male
rivals unite, refreshed in mutual support and definition, over the
ruined carcase [sic] of a woman." Their homosexual desire is fil
81
tered through death, and Poelzig and Werdegast realize that their
destiny is linked: "Are we not both the living dead?"
They decide to play a game of chess, a "game of death" which
(because of narrative demands and the logic of the homosocial tri
angle) must involve a woman as prize, this time the heterosexual
ized heroine. Poelzig wins the game and plans to sacrifice the
heroine to Lucifer later that night. Werdegast intervenes, the hero
and heroine escape, and Poelzig ends up bare-chested and strapped
to a rack in his dungeon. Werdegast moves close to him with a
scalpel, and, in a shadow shot, proceeds to "flail the skin from
[Poelzig's] body, bit by bit." One early draft of the film's script
would have placed the heterosexualized hero himself upon the rack,
and would have come to its climax with the already-skinned Poelzig
"turn[ing] with the last vestige of his strength and crawlfing] on his
belly toward Werdegast," thus reuniting the queer couple in death. 82
While The Black Cat was attacked by censors for its sadism (Variety
called it "dubious showmanship"), its climactic scene nonetheless
83
Plate 8 In this scene from White Zombie (1931), the monster is used to
mediate the homoerotic tension between Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi)
and Monsieur Beaumont (Robert Fraser)
Expressionist style were used in a very similar way in both Nazi Ger
many and 1930s Hollywood cinema: to signify decadence and
depravity.
lurks beneath them. In the film, the typical young, white, hetero
87
together, while the vulture cries again. The "normals" are safely
reunited and the queer couple, whose desire can only be spoken
through metaphors of violence and predation, are destroyed.
Although the classical horror films of the early 1930s were in
many cases actually created by homosexual film-makers, this fact
was seldom acknowledged outside of gay subculture(s), whose
members would have recognized the queer appeal of actors and
directors such as Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, and James
Whale. However, any queer pleasure spectators might have found
in the horror film was mitigated by the very nature of the genre's
classical form, wherein queer forces were routinely quelled by each
film's narrative resolution. While outright homosexuality was con
sidered taboo by the Production Code authorities, its signifiers still
crept into the classical horror film, along with a wide range of other
monstrous signifiers, including bestiality, miscegenation, incest,
sado-masochism, and rape. Like the popular culture of the day,
most classical horror films make little or no distinction between
homosexuality and any other form of "sex perversion": all are used
to titillate, to thrill, to repulse, and to demarcate the depravity of
the villain or monster. Many of these queer signifiers had already
been connected with homosexuality both within gothic horror and
within popular culture-at-large. However, the monster movie, once
it coalesced as a filmic genre system, proved to be a powerful and
efficient vehicle for disseminating such ideas and structures of feel
ing, and the themes and representational codes which were devel
oped during this period influenced almost all subsequent
English-language horror films.
The queer couple, which was to become a core narrative trope of
the genre, expressed itself in the classical Hollywood horror movie
in several different ways: as a vampire and his/her manservant, as a
doubled self (one "normal" and one queer), and as a mad scientist
and his assistant. Usually these couples were structured by strict
hierarchical codes derived from traditional racial and gender roles.
When they weren't trying to create life homosexually, these queer
couples spent their cinematic lives torturing one another, triangu
lating their desires through the heterosexualized normal couple.
This particular formation of classical Hollywood horror film facili
tates an exploration of the homosocial/homosexual continuum, and
suggests that the continuum's "break" is not so much an absolute
fracture as a dip into the social unconscious, from which the threat
70 Monsters in the closet
Notes
1 Parisex (pseudonym of Henry Gerber), "In Defense of Homosexuality,"
The Modern Thinker (1932). Reprinted in A Homosexual Emancipation
Miscellany c. 1835-1952 (New York: Arno Press, 1975) 2 8 8 .
2 John Addington Symonds, Studies in Sexual Inversion: Embodying "A
Study in Greek Ethics" and "A Study in Modern Ethics (Privately
Printed, 1928). Reprinted New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1975.
3 William Stekel, The Homosexual Neurosis, trans. James S. Van Teslaar
(Boston, MA: The Gorham Press, 1922).
4 Stekel 2 3 .
5 Stekel 2 8 6 .
6 G. W Henry, "Psychogenic factors in overt Homosexuality," American
Journal of Psychiatry 93 (1937) 9 0 3 , excerpted and discussed in Henry
L. Minton, "Femininity in Men and Masculinity in Women: American
Psychiatry and Psychology Portray Homosexuality in the 1930s,"/o«r-
nal of Homosexuality 13 (1986) 1-21.
7 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books,
1994). See also Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A His
tory of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin
Books, 1991), and Eric Garber, "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and
Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem," in Hidden From History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha
Vicinus, and George Chauncey, J r (New York: Meridian, 1989)
318-331.
8 For a brief narrative history of the magazine, see Dean Howd,
"Esquire," American Mass-Market Magazines, eds. Alan Nourie and
Barbara Nourie (New York: Greenwood Press, 1 9 9 0 ) 1 0 8 - 1 1 5 .
9 Esquire (autumn 1933) editor's page. The editors and publishers are
adamant about their magazine's masculinity: "we have tried to allow
this magazine to take on an easy natural masculine character - to endow
it, as it were, with a baritone voice." While "we feel that men have long
since ceased to believe there is anything effeminate or essentially
unbusinesslike about devoting a little care and thought and study to the
selection of clothes," the magazine was also quick to apologize to its
manly readers when it started running perfume ads, or endorsing pink
Defining the monster queer 71
John P. DeCecco (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985) 5). See also
Sandor Ferenczi, "The Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homoeroti-
cism)," in The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society , ed. Hen-
drik M. Ruitenbeek (Newark: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1963) 3 - 1 6 . As this
edition notes, Ferenczi's paper was originally delivered at the Third
Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association at Weimar,
October 1911, and published in a German psychoanalytical journal in
1914.
34 Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 4 6 .
35 "Review of The Old Dark House," Variety (November 1, 1932) in Vari
ety Film Reviews 1930-1933, Volume 4 (New York: Garland Publish
ers, Inc., 1983).
36 See Berenstein 6 0 - 8 7 for a fuller discussion of how classic horror was
marketed to the public. As she points out, romance and horror were
often conflated in the films' advertisements, a campaign strategy which
promised the spectacle of queer love.
37 Advertising copy appearing in the Motion Picture Herald 105:8
(November 2 1 , 1931) 41 and 105:11 (December 12, 1931) 6 3 .
38 Reported in George E. Turner, "Flash Gordon, an Interplanetary
Gothic," in The Cinema of Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. George
E. Turner (Hollywood: The ASC Press, 1989) 2 0 6 .
39 For example, "Algy the Aristocrat," a line drawing featured in the
period's advertisements for Reis sport shirts and pullovers, wears mar
celled hair, a foppish moustache, a supercilious expression, and is posed
with his arms akimbo - one hand on his hip, the other gesturing with a
lighted cigarette (Esquire (May 1935) 181). For a discussion of "arms
akimbo" and its relevance to gay culture, see Thomas A. King, "Per
forming Akimbo': Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice," in The
Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge,
1994) 2 3 - 5 0 .
40 See Chauncey 1 2 - 2 3 for a valuable discussion of these terms and their
evolution.
41 Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 5 2 .
42 Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Faragoh, in Philip J . Riley, ed.,
Frankenstein Universal Filmscripts Series (Absecon, NJ: Maclmage
Filmbooks, Inc., 1989) Scene H - 6 , page 5 2 .
43 This moment is especially interesting because the male victim thinks it
was his girlfriend who has bitten him: "Nikki - your eyes - I never saw
them so queer!" Only later do we find out that the bite came from the
male vampire Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi).
44 Paramount's and most later screen versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are especially interesting in this respect because
they actively set out to "heterosexualize" their dual character by the
74 Monsters in the closet
76 F.S.N., "Review of The Raven," The New York Times (5 July, 1935) 9:2.
77 Mank, Karloff and Lugosi xi.
78 Mank, Karloff and Lugosi x-xi.
79 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 2 1 .
80 Sedgwick, Between Men 2 - 3 .
81 Sedgwick, Between Men 76.
82 Reported in Paul Mandell, "Enigma of The Black Cat," The Cinema of
Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner (Hollywood:
The ASC Press, 1989) 182, 192.
83 "Review of The Black Cat," Variety (22 May, 1934).
84 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
85 Mandell 190.
86 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
87 An account of the racial implications of White Zombie can be found in
Tony Williams, "White Zombie: Haitian Horrors," Jump Cut 28 (April
1 9 8 3 ) 1 8 - 2 0 . Its production history is described in Michael H. Price
and George E. Turner, "The Black Art of White Zombie," The Cinema
of Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. by George E. Turner (Holly
wood: The ASC Press, 1989) 1 4 7 - 1 5 5 .
88 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
89 L. N., "Beyond the Pale" (Review of White Zombie), The New York
Times (29 July, 1932) 18:2.
2
shadows of the dead." The countess makes it quite clear that she
"wants to live a normal life - think normal things." Like an ego-dys-
tonic homosexual, she feels compelled to lead a double life, and
characterizes her subconscious urges as "horrible impulses."
Although she tries to suppress them repeatedly, eventually these
"overpowering command[s] - wordless - irresistible - and I had to
obey - it's too, too, ghastly ..." overcome her, and she is forced to
seduce her victims and drain their bodily fluids. Her surly manser
vant Sandor, a nay-saying bitchy queen and supreme fatalist about
their minoritized condition, is far less optimistic about her chances
for a cure.
Shock treatment 79
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 Van Helsing
would, 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 psychi
atry, Dr Garth."
Normality in the film is itself none too appealing. Dr Garth is an
active misogynist, and his "normal" heterosexual relationship with
Shock treatment 81
in many of these films, terror is tempered with more and more sym
pathy for the monster. RKO remade The Hunchback of Notre Dame
in 1939; already one of the most sympathetic of monsters, Quasi
modo 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 prop
erty in favor of lengthy opera sequences, and made its titular char
acter 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. Slowly, the love that dare not speak its name
10
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
panacea, and in film after film the talking cure was successful in
bringing peace and contentment to troubled lives. Mostly, psychia
trists were used to uphold the status quo of heterocentrist patri
archy, 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 hege
monic fold. Interest in helping monster queers rather than casting
them out forthrightly ("Burn the monster!") was both altruistic and
Shock treatment 85
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. He too played Nazis (Joan of Paris [1942]), fifth
27
columnists (This Gun for Hire [1942]), and even the Devil himself
in Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943). He had also been con
sidered for Vincent Price's role in Dragonwyck, and the role of
Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), two other famous queer movie
murderers of the era. In films such as The Lodger (1944), Hangover
28
Universal cures
Immediately before and during the years of World War II, Universal
Studio's horror films began to employ a more humanistic depiction
of their monsters. In the mid-to-late 1930s, Universal's classic mon
sters had ostensibly taken Brides and had Sons and Daughters; in the
1940s they set up several Houses together; as one review for Drac
ula's Daughter had put it, "Universal is making out quite a case for
the home life of the monsters." This bringing of the queer force
29
sal's highly successful run of Mummy sequels were almost all set in
America," and their newest monster (destined to become a "clas
sic"), The Wolfman (1941), is also Americanized, even though he
encounters his troubles in England. Significantly, his monstrous con
dition is now characterized as "a disease of the mind [that] can be
cured."
Somewhat remarkably, 1943's Son of Dracula, set in the Ameri
can South, tells the story of a young woman named Kay who know
ingly brings Dracula to her ante helium mansion in order to marry
him (the local Justice of the Peace officiating), in order to receive his
"gift" of immortality. In a dramatic shift, the normalized hero and
heroine of this film actively court queer passions. Dracula himself
has come to The United States because the Americans are such a
"young and virile race" - not only does he suck the blood of a south
ern patriarch, but he also attacks a small boy. Mirroring a social sit
uation for "real-life" queers, Kay's friends and guardians, who
consider her "morbid" personality dangerous, argue that "no one
could choose a thing so loathsome," and attempt to have her com
mitted in order to "protect her from herself." In an amusing and
early instance of the use of "politically correct" euphemisms, the
undead Kay corrects her boyfriend Frank when he starts to call
Dracula a "vampire": "Don't use that word Frank - we don't like it!
Say rather that we are undead - immortal." Unlike the Hollywood
90 Monsters in the closet
solely the stuff of the movie monster and the mad scientist, yet, as
was indicated above, these are precisely the types of experiments
that were being carried out in dignified scientific research centers.
The line between cutting-edge medical science of this period and
the melodrama of horror films becomes further blurred by accounts
such as the one that appeared in Science News Letter on "Queer
Brain Waves": "People who have 'queer ideas' show it in their brain
wave patterns as well as other more obvious ways. The queer or
abnormal brain wave patterns found in persons who have 'queer
ideas' and others who have phobias, or who show signs of paranoia
or other mental disturbances, were described by doctors
Again, as in many such reports from the 1930s, homosexuality is
rarely mentioned forthrightly; rather one must infer that particular
"sex perversion" from the word "queer," pointedly used three times
in the opening two sentences and even bracketed within quotations.
However, later on the same page, it becomes manifestly clear what
Dr Clifford Wright of Los Angeles is talking about: "Persons who
commit sex crimes suffer from disorders of the endocrine glands...
Abnormal condition of the sex glands and some of these other
glands which also influence sex activity could, Dr. Wright said,
cause deviations such as homosexuality and exhibitionism."" In
truth, the correlation between homosexuality and sex hormones
was studied intensively during the war years; no definite conclu
sions could be drawn from much of the research. Interest in hor
mone therapy for homosexuals eventually declined as it became
more and more scientifically discredited, yet the scientific journals
were full of articles such as "Electroencephalographic and Neuro
logic Studies of Homosexuals," or "Hormones of Homosexuals." 54
Seen in this light, the mad scientist's tamperings with organ grafts
and brain transplants, which form the bases for Universal's prof
itable ongoing Frankenstein films, takes on much queerer dimen
sions.
Hungarian accent, but the scenes and dialogue in question were also
very homoerotic. In the original shooting script, Larry 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 cli
mactic fire, and Larry himself is still an ego-dystonic werewolf, mis
erable because of his "condition." Sitting around a camp-fire in the
ice cave the two outcasts tentatively establish a relationship; as one
contemporary review subtitled "When Gentlemen Meet" campily
noted, "they both hit it off magnificently.'" The scene was tenderly
8
written and had the monster confide to Larry that "you are my
94 Monsters in the closet
and the wolfman appear at his door seeking professional help for
their "conditions." As always, their compulsions are expressed in
sexualized terms: Dr Edelmann tells Dracula that vampires are
"driven by some abnormal urge" which "upset their metabolism"
and "induces lustful appetites." At first, Dracula (who has come to
the doctor under the pseudonym Baron Latos) seems genuinely
interested in curing his unnatural lusts. "That's why I've come to
you - to seek release from a curse of misery and horror against
which I am powerless to fight alone." Eventually, however, his truer
nature asserts itself and he is back to entrancing the doctor's female
assistant. (True to form, as Meliza falls under the Baron's spell, her
piano-playing shifts from classical to atonal modernist.) The wolf
man is more serious about his cure. Depressed and suicidal because
of his own particular set of queer desires, he attempts to throw him
self off a cliff when he learns Edelmann may not be able to help him.
Eventually the good doctor diagnoses Larry's condition as a glan
dular-hormonal problem, exacerbated by pressure on the brain.
Luckily for both men, the doctor has been experimenting with a
procedure which will "soften any hard structure," and in so doing,
he is eventually able to soften Larry's aberrant phallicism by
expanding his cranium. Still, Larry is not without doubts about his
cure. When Nina, the hunchbacked assistant, tells him "After what
Dr Edelmann has done for you, only happiness lies ahead," Larry
can only fitfully mutter "I wonder . . . "
Things go wrong for everyone, however, when Dracula's lustful
nature begins to outweigh his desire for a cure. Reversing a transfu
sion, he gives Dr Edelmann some of his own blood. Now contami
nated by the monstrous fluids, Edelmann spends the rest of the film
in a sort of Jekyll/Hyde state. The doctor has become the very thing
he was attempting to cure: the disease of "monsterity," like homo
sexuality, is apparently catching. He murders townspeople on a
whim and revives the Frankenstein monster. "My blood has been
contaminated by the blood of Dracula. My soul and mind have been
seized by some nameless horror, the lust which changes me into the
thing which killed [villager] Siegfried tonight." Since there is no
normalized hero or Van Helsing figure in the film, it is Larry who
kills Edelmann and starts a fire in which the monster perishes yet
again.
This description attests to a rather remarkable transformation in
the genre's narrative structure: the wolfman is the hero of the film.
Shock treatment 97
vation:
Shock treatment 99
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
these less fortunate men and women received the infamous "blue"
discharge, which effectively denied them their GI honors and bene
fits. Lesbian historian Lillian Faderman notes how these men and
49
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. "
5
some audience members read a lesbian meaning into the action. I was
aware that could happen with the cafe scene, and Val got several let
ters after Cat People was released, congratulating him for his boldness
in introducing lesbiana to films in Hollywood ... Actually, I rather
liked the insinuation and thought it added a neat bit of interpretation
to the scene. Irena's fears about destroying a lover if she kissed him
could be because she was really a lesbian who loathed being kissed by
a man. '
5
Indeed, Irena's monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men
(specifically the psychiatrist who tries to cure her by making love to
her) serves as an often-cited metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the
films of this era. As the ad campaign would have it: "She was
54
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.'" Apparently, homosexual connotation was also part of
55
that formula, for many of the ensuing films can easily be read in
homosexual terms, from the queer couple triangulations of The
Body Snatcher (1945) to the lingering lesbianism of Irena's ghost in
Curse of the Cat People (1944). The final Lewton horror film,
Bedlam (1946), is filled with effeminate men and strong-willed
102 Monsters in the closet
time I was ever happy was when I was with you." Another memo
rable scene that makes the latent lesbian erotic menace manifest
occurs when chief Palladist and "odd woman" Mrs Esther Redi
invades young heroine Mary's shower and speaks threateningly to
her.
The linkage of homosexuals and witchcraft within popular
understanding has a long and tangled history. The analogy was cer
tainly present at the dawn of the classical period of Hollywood
horror films, as evidenced by a 1930 Scribners Magazine essay about
homosexuality entitled "Demoniac Possession." Certainly many of
56
the women (and men) put to death for witchcraft throughout the
preceding centuries might have been considered homosexual by
twentieth-century definitions. And it is part of gay folklore, apoc
ryphal or not, that the term "faggot" comes from the faggots
thrown onto the fires used to burn such victims at the stake. The
analogy has also been frequently used in recent years in order to
describe the ongoing discriminatory practices ("witch hunts")
against gay men and lesbians in government service. Somewhat sim
ilarly, The Seventh Victim invokes the analogy in ways more sympa
thetic to homosexuality. While it could have easily fallen into the
trap of using gay and lesbian signifiers to characterize its villains (i.e.
homosexual = Satanist, as did Universal's The Black Cat in 1934),
the film is much more complex than that. Contemporary reviews of
the film didn't comment upon the homosexual connotations, but
were still a bit baffled by the subtleties of the film: "just what the
sister was doing, of how that curious doctor figured in, or why that
egg head poet was so prescient or who came out with what - well,
don't ask us." In fact, it is part of the film's project to depict com
57
Plate 11 In The Ghost Ship (1943), the repressed Captain Stone's advances on
young Tom Merriam move from the friendly to the sadomasochistic
Shock treatment 105
Sailors have especially figured in gay erotic tradition ... for a number
of possible reasons: longer enforced periods spent in enclosed single-
sex environments suggest they may have greater homosexual experi
ence; their rootlessness accords with the anonymity and fleetingness
of much gay sexual contact and means they are not "tied down" to
marriage, family, and conformity; their knowledge of the world makes
them seem either exotic or broad-minded; the rigours of sailing pro
duce well-developed physiques. Even their clothing, perhaps by asso-
Plate 12 By the end of The Ghost Ship (1943), Stone's paranoia leads him to
this violent phallic assault upon Tom
106 Monsters in the closet
"You'll learn it. You'll even learn to take great joy in it." Later, after
Tom has turned against Stone, the darker side of these tutorials
becomes clear. Now Stone's pedagogy is actively threatening: "I'm
rather glad that you're on board. It will give me a chance to prove
certain theories of mine. You know, I'm sure that you will find them
very interesting and instructive." As is made clear through Richard
Dix's delivery of these lines, Captain Stone's initial friendship has
now taken on the threat of male rape or other violence, the forcing
upon Tom of a dangerous sexual knowledge.
One sequence involving a sailor with appendicitis brings many of
these motifs into sharp focus. The sequence begins when a sick
sailor (who just happens to be "Greek"), bare-chested and oily from
liniment applied by a fellow-sailor, faints from severe pain. A diag
nosis of appendicitis is made via radio, and the Captain and Tom
must prepare to operate with radioed instructions. Dressed in
gleaming white (Tom in his T-shirt), the two men prepare to open
and explore the body of the Greek sailor. At the last minute, Stone
freezes and cannot make the incision - cannot consummate the
physical act. Tom performs the operation, even though Stone takes
credit for it. Stone later explains that his actions were due to fear of
failure, but the sequence itself suggests his ultimate impotence, his
inability to consummate desire. His homosexual impulses, which he
keeps repressed, resurface in his paranoia. The possibility of
"normal" homosexual relations is displaced onto an obsession with
authority, and the sado-masochism of military discipline." One
moment that threatens to de-repress the homosexuality within the
text arises during a conversation between two sailors. Says one, in
speaking of the Captain's sovereignty at sea, "Why, he can even
marry you!" "Not me," quips the other, "I have a wife." (While this
particular double entendre slipped past the censors, in their initial
review of The Ghost Ship's script, the Production Code authorities
did caution that "there should be no 'pansy' gags attached to this
[sailor] business.")62
that women are clearly peripheral to the story, mere shadows in the
background of the drama taking place between the men. By making
the female non-corporeal, the film also emphasizes the physicality
of the men, as did the vignette with the Greek sailor's body. The
trope also places the women within a privileged space within the
genre - the shadows. As many critics have noted, women in horror
films are often aligned with the forces of darkness. We have seen
63
that in these films the terror that lurks in the shadows is primarily
psychological; in this case, it is Stone's fear of the "feminine"
impulse within himself (his homosexual desire) that these shadow-
women represent. It thus makes thematic sense that Ellen under
stands Captain Stone's problem, even as the narrative constructs her
as a somewhat deluded lonely heart who still thinks she can
"change" the Captain. She attempts to explain the situation to Tom:
"For fifteen years I've tried to give [Stone] love, instead of loneli
ness." Needless to say, Stone has continually rejected Ellen's
advances, and tells her (quite honestly) that "I'm afraid of my mind
. . . I don't trust it anymore ... Don't come close to me."
Stone's ego-dystonic homosexual desires have forced him to
remain aloof from life, and to become increasingly more isolated
and paranoid. Ellen fears that this could potentially happen to Tom
too, and tells him to "embrace warmth and life. A good joke, a
pretty girl." When Tom replies "I don't know any girls," Ellen
laughs: "That's clear enough." In an amazing bit of dialogue that
seems to validate the possibility of a positive homosexuality, Ellen
offers to introduce Tom to her younger sister. "And if you don't like
her," she continues, "she'll introduce you to other girls - and other
young men - young men who don't even know what the word
'authority' means." On one level Ellen is inviting Tom to join the
human community; on another she is making it clear that sexual
object choice is unimportant, that there are available young men
who have not perverted their sexual impulses into an obsession with
authority. What is important, as she tells Tom, is that he learn to
love someone, male or female, and not end up like the repressed
and obsessed Captain Stone. This rather enlightened attitude did
have its proponents in society at this time. Many of the psychiatrists
who "treated" homosexuals did so without the moral indignation of
later decades. In 1943, Newsweek even conceded that even though
medical officers were trying to keep homosexuals out of the army,
"It is possible that they may even turn out to be excellent soldiers."
64
110 Monsters in the closet
And once the war was oven, Newsweek printed findings that con
cluded that "homosexuals topped the average soldier in intelli
gence, education, and rating," and that "As a whole, these men were
law abiding and hard-working." 65
Plate 13 Hurd Hatfield and George Sanders in The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1945). Although the film was officially sanctioned by the Production Code
Office, some viewers still understood the film to be about "sex perversion."
"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 coun
try, 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." Breen was "shocked," but defended his office's
68
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 (both of homosexuality and of the work of Oscar
Wilde), wrote of The Picture of Dorian Gray that "the whole thing
... makes little or no intelligible sense," effectively distancing him
self from its un/spoken subject-matter. The Variety review was
70
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 Hat
field does the Gray part, he's singularly Narcissistic all the way.
71
Notes
1 "Medicine," Time (27 January, 1941): 2 0 .
2 Marion Joyce, "Flight From Slander," The Forum 100:2 (August 1938):
90-94.
3 For a brief overview of the magazine's history, see Ronnie W. Faulkner,
"Forum," in American Mass-Market Magazines, eds Alan Nourie and
Barbara Nourie (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) 1 2 6 - 1 2 9 .
4 "Hairy Chest is Not a Sign of the Masculine He-Man "Science News
Letter (8 May, 1937) 297.
5 Joyce 94.
6 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
7 Psychiatry in the horror genre can be traced back at least to Dr Seward
in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is significant, however, that in Universal's
1931 adaptation, his role is a relatively minor one. In Dracula's Daugh
ter and many of the horror films of the World War II years, the psychi
atrist replaces either or both of the roles filled by Jonathan Harker and
Professor Van Helsing - i.e. the normal male of the heterosexualized
couple and/or the voice of patriarchal authority. In other films, espe
cially those made at Universal Studios, the psychiatrist becomes a new
version of the mad doctor.
8 This is mirrored earlier in the film when Lily, the countess Zaleska's
female victim, dies in a hospital bed after Garth hypnotizes her and
forces her to recall her seduction: rather than implicate himself in her
death, however, he blames it totally on the countess.
9 Some of these films include The Walking Dead (1936), Dark Eyes of
London (1939), Black Friday (1940), The Monster and the Girl (1941),
the Kay Kyser musical You'll Find Out (1940), and Dick Tracy Meets
Gruesome (1947).
10 For the most comprehensive account of how homosexuality was con-
Shock treatment 115
structed and understood during the years of World War II, see Allan
Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women
in World War II (New York: Penguin, 1990). See also Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-
Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991) 1 1 8 - 1 3 8 , and John
D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a
Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983) 1-53.
11 See "Medicine," Time (3 April, 1944) 6 8 - 6 9 for one such report of the
trial. The author of the piece opines that "Psychiatric treatment some
times cures homosexuality, especially when it is not congenital."
12 The review continues: "In their saga of a souse, Brackett and Wilder
abandon the note of lavender. Their drunken hero does not start bend
ing his elbow to keep from putting his hand on his hip. He doesn't
hiccup to keep from 'yoo-hooing.'" This was undoubtedly comforting
news to Esquire's readers, many of whom were probably fairly heavy
drinkers, if the abundance of liquor ads in the magazine were any indi
cation of their readers' habits (Jack Moffit, "Movie of the Month,"
Esquire (November 1945) 101).
13 D'Emilio 24.
14 Berube 156.
15 See Berube 1 4 9 - 1 7 4 ; also the scientific treatise by Nicolai Gioscia,
"The Gag Reflex and Fellatio," American Journal of Psychiatry 107
(May 1950) 3 8 0 . Almost all of these tests were designed to identify
male homosexuals. For reasons too numerous to account for here, male
rather than female homosexuality seems to be the chief concern of
homophobic people and especially military policy, even in the 1990s.
16 Interestingly, one of the main texts on homosexuality during this period
was George W Henry's Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns
(New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1941). It is remarkable in that it pre
sents case histories culled from co-operative homosexuals recruited by
a "Miss Jan Gay"(!). It does not address treatment or intervention in
any systematic way, but a 1948 edition does suggest that "more homo
sexuals served with the Armed Forces than were eliminated before or
after induction. Many men had their first overt homosexual experience
while in the Armed Forces" (vii).
17 Berube 147: "From 1941 to 1945, more than four thousand sailors and
five thousand soldiers - mostly men - were hospitalized, diagnosed as
sexual psychopaths, and discharged from the service with the label of
homosexuality appearing on their military records. By contrast, the
total population of men in both the Army and the Navy who had been
convicted of sodomy from 1900 to the beginning of World War II had
numbered only in the hundreds."
116 Monsters in the closet
46 D'Emilio 24.
47 Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (New
York: Routledge, 1990) 1 1 1 .
48 Faderman 119.
49 Berube argues that the blue discharge could be used indiscriminately, to
purge the army of any soldier it deemed "undesirable." It was not only
used against homosexuals, but against racial and ethnic minorities as
well.
50 Faderman 126.
51 The Archbishop of Canterbury, quoted in "Great Britain: Question of
Consent," Time 70 (16 December, 1957) 2 2 - 2 5 .
52 Lewton is generally considered to be the auteur behind these films. I
have no intention of unproblematically accepting this supposition, but
constraints of space and time may unfortunately conspire to make it
appear so.
53 Quoted in Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 2 2 2 . DeWitt Bodeen's career
repeatedly dabbled in homoeroticism. He also wrote the screenplay for
Billy Budd (1962).
54 The production history of Cat People is recounted in George E. Turner,
"The Exquisite Evil of Cat People," in The Cinema of Adventure,
Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner (Hollywood,: The ASC
Press, 1989) 2 3 2 - 2 4 3 .
55 Reported in Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New
York: The Viking Press, 1973) 3 1 . That formula was further delineated
as follows: budgets were "limited to $150,000 per picture. The films
were to be 'programmers,' slated for placement on double features in
less than key theaters, with a running time not to exceed 75 minutes.
[The production] office was to dictate the titles of these films, based
upon a system of market pre-testing." This is why some of the most
subtle horror films ever made have exploitative titles such as I Walked
with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. See also J . P. Telotte, Dreams of
Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1985); and John Brosnan, "Lewton and Company," in
The Horror People (New York: New American Library, 1976) 7 3 - 8 5 .
56 Juanita Tanner, "Demoniac Possession," Scribner's Magazine 87 (June
1930) 6 4 3 - 6 4 8 . The essay attests to the subcultural usage of terms such
as "fairy," "invert," and "queer," and laments the fact that there is no
terminology available to discuss homosexuality which does not seem
steeped in social opprobrium. The author questions the singling out of
homosexuality as a special and exaggerated form of perversion:
"indeed when we have called it disgustingly immoral we have after all
failed to prove that it is worse than other forms of immorality which we
are accustomed to regard more leniently." From a feminist perspective,
120 Monsters in the closet
two of us were a visible couple on campus. Those who didn't know the
nature of our relationship would often query us about it, asking if we
were related: brothers, an uncle and nephew, or "just good friends."
The obvious possibility of homosexuality is denied in favor of increas
ingly outlandish theories.
70 Bosley Crowther, Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, The New York
Times (2 March, 1945) 15:2.
71 Char., Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Variety (7 March, 1945).
3
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."'
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 had something of a cottage industry treat
ing 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), Kinsey's Myth of Female Sexuality
(1954), Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (1956), and One
Thousand Homosexuals (1959). Typical of the paranoia of his day,
he asserts (his italics) that "the perversion has become more wide
spread through artificial creation of new recruits as a result of the dis
semination of misleading statistics . . . " His works repeatedly
124 Monsters in the closet
decade wore on, more and more debate about homosexuality was
featured in popular magazines: Time and Newsweek ran essays in
their medical columns about psychiatry and homosexuality, and by
1953 the news weeklies were reporting that "leading U.S. psychia
trists and other doctors are at last nearing agreement that homosex
uality is not an inherited taint... Nobody is born with it, and it is not
glandular in origin. It is not a disease in itself but a symptom of an
underlying emotional disorder.""
As homosexuality became more openly discussed throughout the
1950s, various professional experts argued for their right to define
and claim control over "the homosexual problem." Moralists saw it
as sin, psychiatrists as a curable mental illness, while still others
maintained that it was simply a crime against the state. All three of
these often warring positions can be found in a 1954 Newsweek
essay that begins by invoking the story of Sodom, touches on
Kinsey's findings, and then quotes from a member of the British
aristocracy who argues that Freudian thought has greatly damaged
Western civilization, complaining that in the past '"they called such
things sin; now they call them complexes.'" When these debates
14
bian 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. Somewhat paradoxi
22
some gay men and lesbians argued for their civil rights, based on the
view that homosexuality was an illness and should be treated as
such, and not as a crime against the state. This was certainly the case
with the 1951 publication The Homosexual in America: A Subjec
tive Approach by the pseudonymous Donald Webster Cory. The
book is introduced by Dr Albert Ellis, and the bulk of the text is a
sort of simultaneous apologia for homosexuality and a civil rights
plea by the now-married Cory. In the Preface to the Second Edition
(1959), Cory still maintains that the homosexual's "behavior (or
desire for such behavior) is a symptom of emotional maladjust
ment," and that "what greater help can he obtain than a better
understanding of his problems, a reorientation of his drives, while
at the same time one seeks to alleviate the social and legal pressures
that he faces?" 24
sexual dynamics and social tensions can be found in the era's mon
ster movies and horror films.
Sontag's schema, "The hero ... and his girl friend ... are disporting
themselves in some ultra-normal middle class surroundings... Sud
denly ... 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 Hol
lywood monster movie, and especially from that of the more psy
chological horror films of the preceding decade. First, 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 fantas
tic 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 nor
mality and the monstrous. As Annette Kuhn has mused on the topic,
such "things are not always quite so clear cut: boundaries can be
130 Monsters in the closet
films appear to maintain and celebrate normality, for critics like Tar
ratt there is almost always the sense that the monster represents the
eruption of a sexual force which cannot be contained by the het
erosexualized 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 con
nected to communism both in the popular press and in the public
gestalt from February of 1950, when hearings before the Senate
Appropriations Committee revealed that homosexuality had been
the reason for recent dismissals of government workers."' In an
essay entitled "Object Lesson," Time magazine, following the Con
gressional lead, compared the situation of homosexuals in the
United States government to that of Colonel Alfred Redl, the homo
sexual counter-intelligence chief of Austro-Hungary who had been
blackmailed into divulging secrets to the Russians during the years
before World War One. The US Congressmen "concluded sharply"
that the government "had been lazy or downright negligent about
cleaning house," and "recommended tighter laws and harsher pun
ishment for sex perversion in the District of Columbia."" 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.' In 1953, Time reported that
2
"the State Department has flushed out and dropped more than 300
employees on moral charges."" 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 commu
nist 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
Pods, pederasts and perverts 131
tropes, and suggests the repressed homosexual urges which may lie
at the heart of such homosocial bonds. Yet these films also differ
from the more standard monster invasion narratives of the era in
that the Creature (across the course of three films) becomes almost
as humanized and as domesticated as any monster of the 1930s or
1940s (and has thus insured his ongoing popularity?). In Revenge of
the Creature (1955), he is transplanted from his own alien world
and turned into an exchange commodity displayed for profit at
Florida's Ocean Harbor Oceanarium. By The Creature Walks
Among Us (1956), medical science forces the creature to adapt to
the "normal" human world by making him an air-breather, recalling
1940s monster movies tropes which sought to cure the monster
queer rather than destroy him. Yet in each film the Creature remains
the embodiment of an abstract sexual urge: his phallic design and
interest in a string of female starlets are his chief characteristics. The
ad copy for the first film makes this sexual threat clear, proclaiming
the Creature a "terrifying monster of the ages raging with pent-up
passions!" Joseph Breen at the Production Code Administration was
also a bit worried about the monster's overt phallicism, and sug
gested that the producers take care to "avoid any sexual emphasis
that might suggest bestiality."" As usual within the genre, the threat
of bestiality exists in a semantic blur with other forms of queer sex
uality.
A closer look at The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its
sequels reveals the exact form of the phallic urge which the monster
represents: the male-male erotic tension contained within the
homosocial triangle. (This homoerotic undercurrent would have
been even more pronounced had the role of Dr Carl Maia, the sci
entist who first unearths a fossilized Creature, gone to the produc
tion's original first choice, homosexual actor Ramon Novarro.)' In 6
ilar gift for overdetermined phallic symbols: when three men and a
woman crash land into the titular dinosaur-infested world, they
quickly realize that their only hope of escape hinges upon their abil
ity to straighten out or replace their helicopter's bent and broken
"push-pull rod.")
In most of these films, the homosocial worlds of scientists and
sailors are skewed by the presence of a woman: as one character in
the first Creature film warns about the initial expedition, "There's
just one problem - going into unexplored territory with a woman."
These lone women exist in the films ostensibly to defuse the homo
erotic tension of the situation, but ironically they more regularly
draw attention to it. The women themselves are linked to the mon
strous by way of their femininity, and it is through their presence
that the possibility of the triangle's male-male desire is filtered. In
the first film, Mark (Richard Denning) gets rather bitchy when he
sees his rival David (Richard Carlson) with the woman Kay (Julie
Adams): "Come on, David, you can play house later!" He scorns
not only the possible heterosexual couple, but the feminizing and
domesticating threat that it represents to the buddies' all-male
world. One brief sequence from the same film pulls all of this
together and firmly links the erotic tension of the homosocial trian
gle to that of the monsters which lurk in the jungle: David and Kay
are on deck, about to kiss, when their embrace is interrupted by the
cries of a wild animal. They attempt to kiss again, but this time they
are interrupted by Mark, who suddenly appears brandishing and
firing a spear-gun. Later Mark, who has become obsessed with
killing and/or capturing the Creature, sits on deck with David and
anxiously calls out "Come on! Come on!" David queries: "You talk
ing to me, Mark, or something out there?" "Both," answers Mark:
his desire for David, first triangulated through Kay, is now displaced
onto the Creature. If Mark can kill or capture the Creature, perhaps
he can keep his own sexual urges under control. Mark actually
stands in for the Creature a few minutes later, when, in the Crea
ture's lair, David (and the spectator) is shocked when Mark reaches
into frame and tries to grab David.
In all three of the Creature films, the narrative seems less con
cerned with the destruction of the monster than with reducing the
plurality of male suitors to a single man, in order to re-form the
proper heterosexual couple. (At the end of each film, the Creature
is hurt but shown either swimming away or heading for the sea.)
136 Monsters in the closet
The Creature Walks Among Us: as the Creature becomes more and
more humanized, it is decided by the paranoid Dr Barton that he
must now wear clothing, as if to mask or repress the queer sexual
threat which the Creature's naked form has come to embody.
Parker Tyler has also commented upon Suddenly Last Summer's use
of the monster movie's visual tropes, and laments the fact that
the audience never gets to see Sebastian or his monstrous activi
ties: "Even Creature Features give us a few good nips at skull
duggery ..." 44
In many films of this period, young men were at risk from deviant
Pods, pederasts and perverts 139
pathy, 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." '' Even men's magazines such as Chal
4
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 homosexu
ality-as-seductive-pederasty idea was becoming increasingly preva
lent 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 of the Innocent, his popular attack
on comic books, author and psychiatrist Fredric Werthem main
tained that Batman and Robin were role-modeling homosexuality
for young boys. Even the diminutive hero of Richard Matheson's
48
140 Monsters in the closet
famous science fiction novel The Shrinking Man finds himself the
recipient of a drunken homosexual's attentions. Perhaps most
49
of the older men involved were sentenced to prison for long jail
terms and one man was sentenced to life; his sentence was later
reduced. In the words of one of these men:
Time magazine reported that the boys did "it" for the money, and
while undoubtedly some of them did, the possibility that some of
these teenagers might have had sex for the pleasure of it cannot be
countenanced by the magazine. The essay concludes by noting that
Boise's city government was helping the boys by getting them after-
school jobs and special sessions with psychiatrists imported from
Denver.
As a response to these new perceptions, short educational films
such as Boys Beware were made by police departments and shown
in schools. Boys Beware (c. 1958) comprises four vignettes in which
older, slightly balding men entice pubescent boys back to their
apartments. (Ironically, the police officer in the film is also an older,
slightly balding man.) The voice-over tells us that two boys ended
up in custody with their "sick ... mentally ill... contagious" attack
ers, that one boy escaped, and that one was murdered. Homosexu
ality as pederasty was also a cornerstone of Dr Edmund Bergler's
rantings (again, italics are his): "The fight is for the young generation
of homosexuals, for the individual who has not yet completely fallen
Pods, pederasts and perverts 141
Yet although both the photograph and the text activate signifiers of
invisible communism and homosexual pederasty, this "average Joe"
turns out not to be a child-molesting queer, but rather a simple
wage-earner, who is berated by the advertisement for not having a
high-paying job. Upon reading further, we discover that he is not a
security risk to the government, but to his own family. It is evident
that good Americans are neither communist nor homosexual; how
ever, the advertisement makes it clear that poor-wage earners are
also suspect.
The processes of proper maturation for teenage boys were also
addressed during this era in a spate of juvenile delinquency films
which arose to address the various more concrete dangers that
youth might encounter (violence, gangs, anti-social and communist
142 Monsters in the closet
straight (wearing a normal face), and the care with which this must
be done. "Tonight I'm going to lead you out of this darkness. We'll
go among people - discreetly of course - and you'll be able to pick
the face that pleases you." Frankenstein and the monster go to the
local Lover's Lane (!) and spot a face they like, one that is "rather
handsome ... even drugged with passion, it has brightness, intelli
gence." Once he gets his new face, the teenage monster turns into a
self-absorbed narcissist: he spends the rest of the film gazing lovingly
into his hand-mirror. But Frankenstein doesn't seem to mind, glad
that his "quite, quite handsome" boy is happy.
Just what might Dr Frankenstein want from his handsome boy,
now that he is all pumped up and ready to go? Sadly, the film cannot
divulge that information, and the spectator is left to wonder. A spec
tator who regularly paged through the muscle magazines, or even
Adventure - The Man's Magazine of Exciting Fiction and Fact, how
ever, might have had some idea, especially if he had read an article
entitled "We Still Have Male Sex Slaves" published the same year
Teenage Frankestein was released. ' The essay mostly focuses on his
6
Dracula, Nancy's mother has died and her father has remarried too
quickly, so 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 night-
mare! A horrible urge comes over me. I feel a strength that's almost
frightening ... I must do something awful, but when I try to remem-
ber, all I can see is you!"
150 Monsters in the closet
The film from this series that most clearly depicts a pedophilic
homosexual villain is AIP'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 / Was a
Teenage Frankenstein; it purports to be a realistic "behind the
scenes" story of the make-up 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
Pods, pederasts and perverts 151
Plate 18 In this publicity still from How To Make a Monster (1959), Pete and
his teenage monsters share an intimate moment
152 Monsters in the closet
faces, and makes them into monsters. Larry confesses that "I'd hate
to have my girlfriend see me not necessarily because she would
be frightened by his make-up, but because Larry now has something
to be ashamed of - he has been forced from the dominant (hetero
sexual) order back into a regressive monstrous non-heterosexual
state. Pete's desire to take photographs of his creations creates a fris
son of voyeuristic pederasty that cannot be much more plainly
marked: while looking over a stack of photos, Pete says "I want to
take home some pictures of these boys - 1 like to study them. I enjoy
working with these teenagers. They've got spirit and they co
operate ... they put themselves into your hands." Pete and especially
Rivero are characterized as childlike and neurotic. Their world is
visual, concerned with appearances, surfaces, id-creatures, and a
traditionally feminine profession; heterosexuality has not yet been
inscribed. Later in the film the police will tell them, "Look -
We know you live in a world of make-believe. All right - Come out
of it!" However, whereas Rivero is firmly situated in this pre-
heterosexualized world (given all of the signifiers of effeminate
homosexuality), Pete (the "active" half of the couple) proves him
self to have a predatory power over both Rivero and his teenage
victims.
An early scene follows Pete and Larry as they walk arm-in-arm
from the make-up lab to the set. Pete constantly touches and
retouches his creation Larry/Werewolf; as a newly born monster
queer, Larry is both Pete's possession and sexual object. The two
pass before and significantly ignore a "cheesecake" actress, a studio
tour (reflecting Mr and Mrs Middle America taking in the fantastic
sights of the movie world), and a pair of male actors outfitted as
underwater explorers (who could be the homoerotic male leads of
a Creature from the Black Lagoon-type movie). The "beefcake" of
the divers is lingered over much more than the "cheesecake" of the
female starlet, and the divers seem to recognize some familiar aspect
in the queer duo of Pete and Larry/Werewolf. "Well, at least we look
normal," one remarks, to which the other replies, putting on his
face mask, "Yeah, don't we, though?" The image of the homoerotic
divers serves as a visual metaphor for Pete and Larry/Werewolf,
while their exchange explicitly acknowledges the phenomenon of
"invisible" homosexuals passing for straight. Once on the set,
Larry/Werewolf is introduced to an already made-up Tony/Franken
stein, a muscular young actor in a tight fitting T-shirt. The director
Pods, pederasts and perverts 153
is anxious to get them both on the set to stage his "Battle of the
Monsters." The theme of feminization and objectification of the
queer monster boys is again sounded when the director tells Pete, "I
want to see how these two beauties look together." As the "Battle of
the Monsters" commences and the two lock arms in a fierce
embrace, the scene abruptly cuts to Pete and Rivero. The metaphor
in the cut is obvious: Pete and Rivero are monsters, too; though
they are not wearing make-up (not being obviously flamboyantly
gay), there is something "monstrous" about them. The film's narra
tive engine and ideological counterpoint enters the film at this
point, when two studio executives arrive to tell Pete that they have
just taken over the studio and will no longer be needing his services.
"Monsters are finished," they tell him. "People want to hear music,
they want to laugh, they want to see pretty girls." What they do not
want to see, the executives imply, is monstrous metaphors for ear
lier stages of psychic development and/or alternative lifestyles.
Pete rises to the occasion in a self-reflexive defense of the horror
film, acknowledging that its appeal lies in regression to earlier stages
of development (primary, visual, pre-heterosexual) in order to
experience the thrill of the monstrous: "Even psychiatrists say that
in all these monster pictures there's not only entertainment, but for
some people, therapy. Well, you know we never get over our child
hood fear of the sinister - the terrifying faces we see in nightmares
- well, through these pictures we can live out our hidden fears. It
helps." As agents of the corporate patriarchy, this is the last thing
that the studio executives want to hear. Heterocentrist institutions
maintain their power through fear, intimidation, and the repression
of monstrously queer impulses that horror films attempt to de-
repress and celebrate. The scene explicitly links the patriarchal
order with capitalism, and Pete and his monstrous world as oppos
ing it. As Pete turns down the offer of severance pay, one of the
studio executives clucks "Turn down money - maybe you've been
living too long with monsters." Pete walks through a darkened
sound stage and decides what he must do, coming to rest in front of
posters for I Was a Teenage Frnkenstein and I Was a Teenage Were
wolf. Curiously, even as the film's visuals work to blatantly plug
those films, the character Pete is decrying money-grubbing studio
executives. This contradiction - between the reality of why How To
Make a Monster was made (to cash in on the financial success of the
above two films) and Pete's anti-capitalist observations - suggests a
154 Monsters in the closet
Marxist critique and raises a systemic tension that the film will
finally be unable to resolve.
Pete makes a decision to exact revenge upon the studio execu-
tives, revealing yet another signified of "monster-making." Up until
this point in the film, the title has referred to Pete's activity in
making-up actors for monster movies, and in seducing nominally
straight young men into queerly-tinged relations. Upon Pete's deci-
sion to plot revenge, he becomes a new monster - one formed from
the direct effects of the prevailing system (the executives closing
down the dream factory). According to this particular chain of sig-
nification, it is the prevailing system that "makes monsters" - as in
Robin Wood's argument, that which is repressed (in this case the
Hollywood monster movie) must eventually return. However, these
particular monsters are not going to be of the Imaginary/Make-
believe/Movie/Sexuality kind; they are going to be deadly. Back in
the make-up lab, Pete tells Rivero of his plan to control the young
actors through a special novocaine-based make-up: "Now - this
enters the pores and paralyzes the will. It will have the same effect
chemically as a surgical prefrontal lobotomy. It blocks the nerve
synapses. It makes the subject passive - obedient to my will." The
next day Pete applies the make-up to Larry. Along with hypnosis,
the make-up transformation effects a complete regression for Larry:
he is pulled back from the heterosexual order and becomes a mon-
ster queer. The action then switches to a screening room where
studio executive Nixon (a deliberate linkage of the real Richard M.
with the industrial patriarchy?) sits watching the rushes for the
"Battle of the Monsters." In a very explicitly constructed sequence,
the werewolf on the screen is replaced by a "real-life" werewolf -
one that Nixon and his backers have been complicitous in making.
Pete's harmless movie monsters have now become violent killers as
a direct result of the dominant system's attempt to repress them.
A later sequence in the police station depicts a confrontation
between a violent patriarchy and its passive victims. The police offi-
cers are brutish, overbearing, and unappealing; positioned within
the mise-en-scène as surrounding and dominating, they brusquely
interrogate and intimidate their suspects. A black woman's eye-wit-
ness account of murder is treated with skepticism, and the police are
condescending towards an old night-watchman who is hard of hear-
ing. Finally, they browbeat Rivero and almost succeed in cracking
him before Pete intervenes:
Pods, pederasts and perverts 155
within its filmic narrative, even as the physical film itself is a prod
uct of that same exploitative system. As such, the film contains
within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
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 marginal-
ization or monsterization. Even in his first exploitation film, the
autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953), ostensibly a story about
transvestism and transsexualism, Wood made recourse to mon
strous 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 night
mare 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 homosex
ual and the movie monster. The monster queer theme continues
throughout the film, as when the newly born "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
modern 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 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 fact that
160 Monsters in the closet
Plate 19 Bela Lugosi, as God, performs a miraculous sex change in this shot
from Ed Wood's autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953)
Glen and Glenda, like all the other Glens and Glendas, have an even
bigger problem. The homosexual, it is true, at times does adopt the
clothing or the make-up of a woman to lure members of his own sex.
But this is not so for the transvestite. The transvestite is not interested
in those of their own sex. The clothing is not worn to attract the atten-
Pods, pederasts and perverts 161
Plate 20 S a d o - m a s o c h i s t i c lesbian t i t i l l a t i o n in t h e Ed W o o d - s c r i p t e d
monster-nudie burlesque film Orgy of the Dead (1965)
164 Monsters in the closet
mony 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 weak
ness (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 cemetery. Shirley cannot under
stand why anyone would want to write horror stories:
the Difference (1966) and Watts - After (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 of a Transvestite (1967), and Death of a Transvestite
Hooker (1974). And no matter what the queer flavor of the day hap
pened 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 Un-namable," "the love that dare not speak
its name" has often been figured within mainstream culture in spec
tral, half-seen ways. Investigating the queerness of literary ghost sto
ries 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. With titles such as Who Walk in
77
Darkness
(1951), Women in the Shadows (1959), The Shades of Evil (1960),
Twilight Girl (1961), Twilight Lovers (1964), The Ghosts (1965),
and Sex in the Shadows (1965), lesbian pulp novels of the era - most
166 Monsters in the closet
Magazines such as Monster Sex Tales and Horror Sex Tales also pub-
lished 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 sado-masochistic 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 illus-
trated 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, "legiti-
mate" (i.e. non-sexual) reasons had to be invoked as cover for the
provocative poses. As Hooven puts it: "Wrestling, wrestling,
wrestling! Dressed, undressed, or halfway in between - why were
they always wrestling? ... Because [if the models] had been embrac-
Pods, pederasts and perverts 167
ized 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. 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
168 Monsters in the closet
of the Dead: "As it is with all the night people, they are destroyed by
the first rays of the sun. But upon the first appearance of the deep
shadows of the night, and when the moon is full, they will return to
rejoice in their evil lust! And take back with them any mortal who
might happen along . . . Who can say that we do not exist? Can
you?"
Notes
1 Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadel
phia: W B. Saunders, 1948).
2 Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953).
3 See, among many others, "Medicine: Shocker on Sex," Newsweek 3 0
(1 December, 1947) 5 2 ; "Medicine: How Men Behave," Time 51 (5
January, 1948) 66; "Manners and Morals: How to Stop Gin Rummy,"
Time 5 1 (1 March, 1948) 1 6 ; "Medicine: Kinsey Speaks Out,"
Newsweek 31 (12 April, 1948) 5 1 ; and O. Spurgeon English, MD,
"What Parents Can Learn From the Kinsey Report," Parents 23 (Octo
ber 1948) 2 6 , 144, 1 4 6 - 1 4 8 .
4 Quoted in "Medicine: Dr. Kinsey Misremembers," Time 51 (14 June,
1948) 82.
5 Quoted in "Manners and Morals: How to Stop Gin Rummy," Time 51
(1 March, 1948) 16.
6 Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1956) 7.
7 "Medicine: Curable Disease?" Time 68 (10 December, 1956) 76.
8 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 9.
9 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 3 0 0 .
10 Edmund Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals (Paterson, NJ: Pageant
Books, Inc., 1959) viii.
11 "Medicine: Queer People," Newsweek 34 (10 October, 1949) 5 2 .
12 Robert J . Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homo
phobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) 8.
13 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 28.
14 "Medicine: A Delicate Problem," Newsweek 43 (14 June, 1994) 100.
15 For an interesting and enlightened overview of the report and the topics
it discussed, see Eustace Chesser, Live and Let Live: The Moral of the
Wolfenden Report (London: Heinemann, 1958).
16 "Britain: Facing the Dark Facts," Newsweek 50 (16 September, 1957)
52.
Pods, pederasts and perverts 169
17 "Medicine: Lavender and Old Blues," Newsweek 54 (20 July, 1959) 82.
18 Esquire (July 1951) 134, (August 1951) 1 3 1 .
19 Advertisement for the Jowett Institute, Esquire (August 1951) 132. Also
with this special offer one could receive "Free! Jowett's Photo Book of
Famous Strong Men!"
20 The history of these magazines has recently been explored in F. Valen
tine Hooven, III, Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America
1950-1970 (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1995).
21 "A Delicate Problem," Newsweek (14 June, 1954) 9 9 .
22 See Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History, revised edition (New
York: Penguin, 1992) 4 0 6 - 4 2 0 for a first-hand account of these events,
and 420^433 for an interview with Barbara Gittings, the founder of the
New York Daughters of Bilitis.
23 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One, trans. Robert
Hurly (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 1 0 1 .
24 Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective
Approach, second edition (New York: Castle Books, 1960) xxiii. This is
essentially the same argument put forth in Man on a Pendulum: A Case
History of an Invert, "Presented by Dr. Israel J . Gerber, A Religious
Counselor" (New York: The American Press, 1955). The author of this
latter work, now also married, tells of the homosexual lifestyle and how
he was able to overcome it through counseling with a Rabbi.
25 George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
359-360.
26 See among many others Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Inter
pretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana Uni
versity Press, 1987); and Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing : How
Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983).
27 Noel Carroll, "Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology
of Fantastic Beings," Film Quarterly 34:3 (Spring 1981) 2 3 . Basically
the formula is outlined as follows: onset/discovery of the "thing," the
attempt to warn the general populace, confirmation of the "thing's"
presence and further evil mayhem, and finally a confrontation with and
destruction of the "thing." See also Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of
Disaster," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octa
gon Books, 1986) 2 1 0 - 2 1 1 . (I have collapsed some of her observations
from the larger-budgeted color formula plot into the following sum
mary.)
28 Annette Kuhn, "Border Crossing," Sight and Sound 2:3 (July 1992) 13.
See also Kevin Jackson, "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," Sight and
Sound 2:3 (July 1992) 1 1 - 1 2 .
2 9 Margaret Tarratt, "Monsters from the Id," Films and Filming 17:3
170 Monsters in the closet
45 Dyer 84.
46 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 2 9 .
47 Dr Shailer Upton Lawton, "Sex Secrets," Challenge 5:5 (August 1959)
47-18.
48 Fredric Werthem, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart &
Company, Inc., 1953) 1 8 8 - 1 9 3 .
49 Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man (Garden City, NY: Nelson Dou-
bleday, Inc., 1956) 5 2 - 5 7 .
50 "Crush the Monster," Idaho Daily Statesman (3 November, 1955).
51 "Crime: Idaho Underworld," Time 66 (12 December, 1955) 2 5 .
52 Anonymous account published in Katz 110. The scandal was covered in
a book-length report by John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice
and Folly in an American City (New York: Collier, 1968).
53 Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals 2 4 4 .
54 Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals 2 4 9 .
55 True War 2:2 (January 1958) 3.
56 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of Ameri
can Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988) 147.
57 For background information on the studio and its productions, see
Mark Thomas McGee, Fast and Furious: The Story of American Inter
national Pictures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1984)
and Robert L. Ottoson, American International Pictures: A Filmography
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985).
58 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 8.
59 The presuppositions of this psychoanalytic model - that homosexuals
were arrested at some stage of their psychosexual development - is also
allegedly responsible for their choice of children as sexual partners, or
at least their simple and child-like demeanors. This idea can also be
found in monster movie manifestations. For example, in Attack of the
Puppet People (1958), a kindly, old (but foreign and queer) doll-maker
(John Hoyt) is revealed to be an evil scientist, bent on shrinking normal
people down to his emotional, childlike level. This idea is also inherent
in Bride of Frankenstein's Dr Pretorius, who also had a collection of
such homunculi.
60 Producer Herman Cohen: "Our films concerned teenagers who had
doubts about their parents, their teachers or what-have-you. That these
doubts influence a teenager to go bad. I felt this would appeal to a
teenage audience, which it did" (reported in McGee 63).
61 Philip Cascio, "We Still Have Male Sex Slaves," Adventure 132:2 (Feb
ruary 1957) 4 6 - 4 7 , 89.
62 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 2 8 .
63 "Medicine: These Tragic Women," Newsweek 53 (15 June, 1959)
62-63.
172 Monsters in the closet
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 could have one of its ostensible vil
lains, a witch named Hazel (played by the proto-Eve Sedgwickian
"out" fat lady Mama Cass) sing what amounts to a psychedelic
queer anthem for lesbian witches and monsters everywhere:
174 Monsters in the closet
ster was really just like everyone else. Many queer people, such as
the horror fan quoted below, found in these shows the "permission"
or social space to be different:
I think The Munsters and The Addams Family were wonderful exam
ples of happily functioning families. They always got along and were
very loving towards themselves and the community. Being gay myself,
I feel different as a minority functioning in the world. I think these
families were positive role models for me: here's something different
functioning in the real world and enjoying it and dealing with it, and
it gave me hope that I could be different and live in the general world
too.*
Still, My Favorite Martian's Uncle Martin and Tim can easily be 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 under
stood as queerly inflected popular culture artifacts. 8
softened or eradicated, and the queer sexual threat that s/he had
previously represented was now contained within the institution of
the suburban US 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
176 Monsters in the closet
and more prominent within its pages, and art reviews covered all
sorts of avant-garde happenings, from a sculptor of male nudes to
an artist who painted with blood. (One can also find a reflection of
17
Indeed, the mod styles of the era, many of which were being
imported from London, posited men as "peacocks" ready to be
garbed in paisley caftans, Midnight Cowboy vests, or conspicuous
amounts of jewelry - what one photographic essay described as the
exciting "gleam of metal on men." In the back pages of the maga
19
zine, clothing shops that catered to gay men (such as the Ah Men
shop in West Hollywood) 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
ten, yet homophobic journalists more often than 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 ele
ment." A few years later the same pattern emerges by another
24
Many of these essays give the final (or near final) word to recovered
homosexuals, homophobic psychiatrists such as Socarides, gay-
27 28
The term "homophobia", which had been used in the popular press
at least since 1969, began to be discussed by some psychiatrists as
the true pathological condition, although many psychiatrists and
especially psychoanalysts continued to assert theoretical paradigms
for models of illness and cure, and some do so to this day.'" Even the
American Medical Association did not formally declare such repar
ative therapies inadvisable until 1994.
As I hope this brief overview has shown, the topic of homosexu
ality reached unprecedented levels of cultural visibility during the
period immediately before and after the Stonewall Rebellion. The
new-found visibility of organized gay and lesbian communities, and
the politics of "coming out loud and proud," caused tremendous
social change, especially in terms of the resultant commercialization
and celebration of gay urban culture throughout the 1970s. By
1972, there had been enough homosexual characters on-screen for
Parker Tyler to publish Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the
Movies, the first book-length study of queerness in cinema." Even a
fairly mainstream British film journal, Films and Filming, became
almost flamboyantly gay during this era. Under the editorship of
Robin Bean, ads for and reviews of the latest films (including many
of the horror films discussed below) nestled alongside nearly nude
and homoerotic photographs of the era's male stars. Yet as Vito
Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight 183
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 homo
sexuality (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 will
ing to depict on-screen 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 on-screen 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 is suggested that he has anal inter
course and/or sado-masochistic 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 shad
ows and more somber, ominous scoring. Certain homosexual
aspects of the 1945 version are rewritten in this adaptation, includ
ing the blackmailing of college chum and chemist Allen, which
results in Allen disposing of Basil Hallward'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
Satan spawn and out and proud 245
Plate 27 Typical lesbian horror, this time with a racist AIDS twist, in The Kiss
(1988). A u n t Felice (Joanna Pacula) attempts to pass on a deadly African
parasite via an open-mouthed kiss
Plate 28 The most homoerotic of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, Part 2:
Freddy's Revenge (1988), features Mark Patton as a sensitive t e e n a g e r
terrorized both by Freddy Krueger and a homosexual gym teacher
248 Monsters in the closet
lence. 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 dis
placed 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 imagin
able (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 be is now wearing. This sequence might be read as a metaphoric
homosexual panic attack, in which Jesse, having been aroused by
the possibility of a sexual encounter with the coach, murders him
rather than 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.
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 to 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 (unex
plained) interest in carrying off the male hero instead of the female
ingenue, there is very little exploration of the film's hinted-at sub
text. 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 main
stream (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 Ameri
can 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 homo-
erotics 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 remembered for his
Oscar-nominated role as Al 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.'" Rounding out the cast are
5
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 homo
sexuals 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 mon
strously 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 rein
carnation 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 Evil Ed, was
allegedly a Hollywood hustler and gay porno film star as well as a
"legitimate" actor, a very rare combination in Hollywood industrial
practice.) Visually, the vampire's attacks are usually figured 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 vam
pire/wolf creature to his naked self; Peter Vincent, rather than being
horrified or repulsed, is rather fascinated, and weeps at the boy's
death.
252 Monsters in the closet
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. 57
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 cast
ing of teen heart-throbs Kiefer Sutherland, Corey Haim, Corey
Feldman, and Jason Patric does the rest.) Yet it's not just the vam
pires 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 "Born 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 meet
ing reveals something very queer indeed. Michael and Star's first
looks at one another, which signal their sexual desire, take 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 homo-
eroticism of their male bonding apparent, David salaciously
responds "How far you willing to go, Michael?" Later in 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 spec
tacular 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
254 Monsters in the closet
earring, Mike - it's not you ... All you do is give attitude lately -
been watching too much Dynasty huh?" (Dynasty's campy narra
tives 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 trans
formation. "You're a creature of the night, Michael! Just like out of
a comic book. You're a vampire, Michael! My own brother a god
damn 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 psychologist Paul
Cameron. In fact, the film picks up on several other anti-gay epi
thets 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 Wood-sucker!" The Frog brothers, the self-styled paramilitary
vampire hunters, demonstrate the same sort of paranoid homosex
ual/vampire substitution in their rhetoric: "We've been aware of
some very serious vampire activity in this town for some time ...
Santa Carla's become a haven for the undead ... In matter of fact,
we're almost certain that ghouls and vampires occupy high posi
tions 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.
Satan spawn and out and proud 255
activist groups such as Act Up and Queer Nation meant the reap-
propriation of the epithet "queer" to be confrontational (and have
thus risked alienating some homosexual people who still recoil at
256 Monsters in the closet
tion about the monster queer quite explicit, a recent Esquire article
put it thus: movie monsters today are "lonely," "as much in search
of redemption as of revenge ... the modern 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 supernat
ural 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.'" Newsweek
50
went on tacitly to 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.'" In other words, that the vampire is a
51
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. The film tells the story of the
52
Yet, in most o f B a r k e r ' s work, including his most recent film Lord of
Illusions ( 1 9 9 5 ) , these queerer currents are still invariably used to
262 Monsters in the closet
Nonetheless, while all this may be true of his works' formal narra
tive patterns, too often 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 modern splatter horror, still equates on many levels overt
queerness with explicit gory violence. And while this in itself may
constitute a sort of polemic poetry of putrescence of the Ron Athey
sort, for many moviegoers it is still basically first and foremost a
shock effect meant to sicken the viewer, much as the rare homosex
ual on-screen kiss invariably produces an audible response of revul
sion from homophobic audiences.
Of all of Barker's films to date, Nightbreed is the one which
deconstructs the trope of the monster queer with the highest degree
of political efficacy. In this film 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 videotape release of Nightbreed, he wanted the film to be "a film
like no other, flipping all the conventions of the horror movie,
Satan spawn and out and proud 263
plunging you into a world o f insanity and miracles, where dead men
can be heroes and monsters beautiful . . . " T h u s the film's psychia
trist (played by horror movie auteur David Cronenberg) is actually
the film's slasher movie-type killer. T h e film's voice o f 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 c o p is pointedly played by an
African-American actor.) T h e film's project to invert the ideological
assumptions o f the genre is baldly stated in the campy performance
of lines such as these from the police chief: " W e ' r e going out there
with G o d on our side. W h e t h e r it's commies, freaks, or Third-World
' Y ' - c h r o m o s o m e mutants, we are there - the sons o f the free!" (His
speech and actions recall the similar satire o f rural shotgun-toting
zombie-hunters in G e o r g e R o m e r o ' s Dawn of the Dead ( 1 9 7 8 ) , a
film that suggested that US 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 B o o n e (Craig Sheffer),
Indeed, Burton's disdain for the "normal" figures in his films has
often caused his reviewers concern. The New York Post opined that
in Edward Scissorhand "The normal becomes not only abnormal,
but abominable ... Burton [has] favored Edward among all his cre
ations and left the others to wither on the vine." Other reviewers
68
noted that there wasn't much chemistry between Edward and his
on-screen 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
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 vivant
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 queerness. When
baby Pubert is born at the start of the film, 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 ghoul
ish Addams Family and the white-bread suburban world of middle-
class USA. In part of the film, Wednesday and Pugsley, through a
misunderstanding, are sent to an exclusive camp for privileged chil
dren, where the nerds, geeks, racial minorities, and other queers are
quickly identified and separated out from the rest of the WASP chil
dren. As punishment for being different, Wednesday and Pugsley
are forced to do time in the "Harmony Hut," where 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 USA. Realizing his mistake, an apologetic Fester
returns home to the gothic mansion and sounds the voice of mon
ster 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, queerness lurks in monster drag at the edges of
the film. Yet, had homosexuality per se 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, keeping homosexuality within the closet of connotation
continues to marginalize and minoritize, even as it allows for other
Satan spawn and out and proud 269
long dark hair, white lace, and black velvet jackets comprise her
public image. In interviews she has been quite candid about the
queer theoretical project of her work: "I know my imagination def
initely tends to be in a realm where people transcend gender and
they love people of their own gender." She has also explored other
74
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-pornography gay essayist, called her
work explicit "metaphors for gay life and gay sex." Rice's male
76
270 Monsters in the closet
I have very strong, negative feeling against what I would call 'revealed
religion' ... I think one of the greatest accomplishments of the twen
tieth 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
In the same way, her work often dramatizes such ideas. According
to one critic, Queen of the Damned argues that "with the elimina-
Satan spawn and out and proud 271
posedly 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 acknowl
edged 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. Even
tually 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 previously shown the abil
ity 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 play
ing her "dark prince." Eventually, upon seeing the film, Rice
81
changed her mind, and ran a long "Personal Statement by Anne Rice
Regarding the Motion Picture Interview with the Vampire" in Vari
ety, which was subsequently reprinted in other major newspapers.
She praised everyone connected with the film and claimed that
fying 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), where 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 iden
tical to their bodily response to the anticipation of horror. This par
ticular 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 some viewers, at least) that the fears that underlie
many horror movie narratives are fears of sexual difference in gen
eral 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
Satan spawn and out and proud 273
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 more as a gay love story than as a horror film. Others (rather
too over-zealously, 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:
does 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? 84
Notes
1 Carol J . Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modem
Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
2 For a mainstream overview of the subject, see Janice C. Simpson, "Out
of the Celluloid Closet," Time (6 April, 1992) 65.
3 Sue Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire," differences 3:2 (Summer 1991)
1-20.
4 Amy Taubin, "The Boys Who Cried Misogyny," The Village Voice (28
April, 1992) 3 5 - 3 6 . See also the companion piece by C. Carr,
"Reclaiming Our Basic Rights." Both essays were published under the
title "Ice Pick Envy."
5 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)?
6 For several divergent takes on the issue, see, among others, Philip
Brophy, "Horrality - The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films,"
Screen 27:1 (January-February 1986) 2 - 1 3 ; Tania Modleski, "The
Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern
Theory," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Cul
ture, ed. Tania Modleski (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986)
1 5 5 - 1 6 6 ; Leo Braudy, "Genre and the Resurrection of the Past," in
Satan spawn and out and proud 275
145-161.
14 Norine Dresser, American Vampires: Fans, Victims, Practitioners (New
York: Vintage Books, 1989).
15 Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, revised
edition (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1987[1981]).
16 Chief 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, DC: US Govern
ment Printing Office, 1989)197.
17 Tom Buckley, "Embodiment of Lucifer" (Review of Fear No Evil), The
New York Times (6 February, 1981) C 2 2 : l .
18 Russ., Review of Fear No Evil, Variety (28 January, 1981).
19 Archer Winsten, Review of Fear No Evil, New York Post (6 February,
1981) 37.
2 0 Quoted in Marvin Liebman, "'Christian' Bigotry Can Breed Violence,"
The Los Angeles Times (6 December, 1995) B4.
2 1 Quoted in Asian Brooke, "The Killing Fields: Can Gay Genocide
Happen in America?" Frontiers 14:20 (9 February, 1996) 3 0 .
22 Brooke 3 0 .
23 Noted in Liebman B4.
24 William Dannemeyer, Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989)19.
25 Reported in "Religion: Hope for the Homosexual," Time 96 (13 July,
1970) 4 6 .
26 Dannemeyer 136.
27 The title of Dannemeyer's book,Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in
America, was inspired by Thomas Parran's 1936 book Shadow on the
Land: Syphilis, which Dannemeyer upholds as a model for approaching
and controlling AIDS. The analogy in the use of the title is straightfor
ward: Dannemeyer considers homosexuality to be a disease like
syphilis.
28 Quoted in Dresser 1 0 4 - 1 0 5 .
2 9 Robert E. Sullivan, Jr, "The AIDS Monster," Mademoiselle 98:4 (April
1992) 8 2 - 8 6 .
30 Ellis Hanson, "Undead," in Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories,
ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991) 3 2 4 .
31 Andrew Parker, "Grafting David Cronenberg: Monstrosity, AIDS
Media, National/Sexual Difference," in Media Spectacles, eds Marjorie
Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Rout
ledge, 1993) 2 1 7 - 2 1 8 . See also Katherine Park, "Kimberly Bergalis,
AIDS, and the Plague Metaphor," in the same book, 2 3 2 - 2 5 3 ; and
Edward Guerrero, "AIDS as Monster in Science Fiction and Horror
Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Television 18:3 (Fall 1990)
Satan spawn and out and proud 277
86-93.
32 Like so many homophobic cultural artifacts, the film is rather confused
in its approach to the subject. Damien Thome (Sam Neill) 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. Yet 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.
33 For one of the few extant essays on the teen sex comedy and its relation
to the modern horror film, see William Paul, Laughing Screaming:
Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia Univer
sity Press, 1994). This is one of those frustratingly heterosexual books
that refuses to sustain a consideration of how homosexuality might
figure in either of those genres, despite the films' frequent preoccupa
tion with homosocial ties and homophobic disavowals.
34 See Christopher Castiglia, "Rebel Without a Closet," in Engendering
Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, eds Joseph A. Boone
and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990) 2 0 7 - 2 2 1 .
35 Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1983)18.
36 Review of Fright Night, The New York Times (2 August, 1985).
37 Janet Maslin, "Film View: Good Acting in Poor Movies," The New York
Times (11 August, 1985).
38 For other discussions on the queer vampire motif in The Lost Boys, see
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siecle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) 1 8 3 - 1 8 4 and Ken Gelder,
Reading the Vampire (New York: Routledge, 1994) 1 0 3 - 1 0 7 .
39 For a seminal account of politics and subcultural styles, albeit in
another national context, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning
of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979).
40 Reported in Dresser 4 2 .
41 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, essen-
tialist 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 soci
ety to be assimilated into a broader hegemony and therein ultimately
278 Monsters in the closet
for Oprah: 'Vampires Who Hate the Life!'" ("Nipping at the Vampire,"
The Los Angeles Times (14 November, 1994) F2).
78 Quoted in Raymond 18.
79 Raymond 18.
80 Quoted in Raymond 19.
81 For an account of these struggles, see Hess 7 0 - 7 5 .
82 Anne Rice, "To My Readers," The Los Angeles Times Calendar (2 Octo
ber, 1994) 2 0 - 2 1 . The statement first appeared in Variety on 23 Sep
tember, 1994.
83 Betty Goodwin, "Fangs with a Flourish," The Los Angeles Times (10
November, 1994) E5.
84 Liz Smith, "'Vampire' and Gay Sexuality," The Los Angeles Times (17
November, 1994) F2.
85 Personal ad, LA Reader, 1994.
!
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 becoming afraid of being found out, because you are con
stantly being told by your church - I was raised Catholic - by your
school, by the T V 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
home-made videotape entitled "(Gay) Dead Irish Gay-Basher." The 2
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 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 pro
jection. 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-
language 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 homosex
ual/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 vio
lent reaction to repressed homosexual feelings than a "real-life" gay
bashing or even murder, these home-made 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 in which queerness can be fairly openly addressed, yet,
because of the requisite form of the genre, queerness is almost
always figured as destructive and monstrous. Queerness is that thing
vanquished by heteronormativity at the end of the genre's tradi
tional narratives. The artifacts discussed above, and the horror
Epilogue 285
Plate 31 Former porno star Kevin Glover as Dracula seduces a West Holly
wood gay boy in Love Bites (1988), a recent attempt by gay film-makers to
rewrite the generic imperatives of the horror film
288 Monsters in the closet
lesbians and for lesbians, has also become more popular in recent
years; some of these stories have been published in the new anthol
ogy Daughters of Darkness." (Science fiction and fantasy literature,
which is not under the same generic imperatives necessarily to mon-
sterize Otherness, has also contributed a prolific amount of writing
about what it means to be queer.) The "new queer cinema" has
14
Generally speaking, the MST3K hecklers make fun of the film's stal
wart "normal" characters, more regularly giving voice to the mon
sters' 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 US 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 (homo)sexuality 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 premise and details the interactions of a mad sci
entist duo, Dr Clayton 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 sado-masochistic coloration (Dr For
rester 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 underground lair, ostensibly
to further the cause of (mad) science, where, true to classical generic
form, they replicate the hierarchy of traditional gender-roles
(male/female, master/servant, top/bottom, sadist/masochist). In
290 Monsters in the closet
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 siz
able 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 horror 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 mon
ster queer, to nudge him or her out of the closets and tombs ever so
gently. Independent gay and lesbian film and video practice con
tinue to make inroads into heterocentrist assumptions and chal
lenge heterosexist concepts, while gay and lesbian media fans
continue to make their presence felt. Articles in the gay press such
20
Notes
1 "Q & A: Kevyn Aucoin," The Los Angeles Times (12 January, 1995)
E l , l l . Kevyn Aucoin is today a self-identified gay man and a successful
fashion-designer.
2 For a discussion of the term "psychotronic" as well as a useful reference
guide, see Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1983).
3 The 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 of Affirmative Models (New York: The Haworth Press,
1982).
4 Gregory M. Herek, "Beyond Homophobia: A Social Psychological Per
spective on Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men," in Bashers,
Baiters & Bigots: Homophobia in American Society, ed. John P.
DeCecco (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985) 10. This book is an
invaluable resource on the psychological mechanisms and physical
manifestations of homophobia.
5 For 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 Politics,"
Critical Sociology 20:3 (1994) 8 1 - 1 0 5 .
6 I experienced the psychiatric lecture first-hand while a student at Jef
ferson 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."
7 See, among many many other examples, George F. Will, "Dear Dr.
Elders: The Closet is Empty," The Los Angeles Times (31 March, 1994)
B7.
8 Nancy Wride, "A Family United," The Los Angeles Times (9 February,
1994) E l - 2 .
9 Frank DeCaro, "Old Debate: Super-heroes, Sexuality," The Los Angeles
Times (4 July, 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 queerness in general, and the deliber
ate homoeroticization of the dynamic duo by director Joel Schumacher.
Epilogue 293
10 See, among others, Todd Hayward, "The Lyin' King," Planet Homo 69
(21 September, 1994) 1 6 - 1 7 . There is long tradition of Disney using
horror film actors in their animated features, from Bela Lugosi allegedly
inspiring the demon Chernabog 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). Queerness 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 man
ifest. 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 Confer
ence, Los Angeles, 1995.
11 Some of these stories are listed in Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, eds, Uran-
ian 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 merman fantasy in
In Touch for Men 34 (March-April 1978).
12 Vincent Virga, Gaywyck (New York: Avon Books, 1980). Jeffrey N.
McMahan, Somewhere in the Night (Boston, MA: Alyson Press, Inc.,
1989).
13 Pam Keesey, ed., Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories (Pitts
burgh, PA: Cleis Press Inc., 1993).
14 See, among others, the following anthologies: Jessica Amanda
Salmonson, ed., Amazons! (New York: DAW, 1979); Jessica Amanda
Salmonson, ed., Amazons II (New York: DAW, 1982); Vonda N. Mcln-
tyre and Susan Janice Anderson, eds, Aurora: Beyond Equality (Green
wich, CT: Fawcett, 1977); Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu, eds,
Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (London: Women's
Press, 1985); Joseph Elder, ed., Eros in Orbit: A Collection of All-New
Science Fiction Stories about Sex (New York:Trident Press, 1973);
Marion Zimmer Bradley, ed., Free Amazons of Darkover (New York:
DAW, 1985); Jeffrey Elliot, ed., Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay
and Lesbian Science Fiction Stories (Boston, MA: Alyson Press, 1984);
Susanna Sturgis, ed., Memories and Vision: Women's Science Fiction
and Fantasy (New Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1989); Thomas Scor-
tia, ed., Strange Bedfellows (New York: Random House, 1972); Jessica
Amanda Salmonson, ed., What Did Miss Darlington See? An Anthology
294 Monsters in the closet
Adams, Jon, "Critiquing the Cartoon Caricature: Disney, Drag, and the
Proliferation and Commodification of Queer Negativity." Queer Fron
tiers: The Fifth Annual National Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Graduate Stu
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Ned, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, New York: Harper & Row, 1983. 5 6 0 - 5 6 1 .
Babuscio, Jack, "Camp and the Gay Sensibility," Gays and Film, ed. Richard
Dyer, London: BFI, 1977, 4 0 - 5 7 .
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Index
Note: entries in bold italic type refer to films; entries in italic refer to
books/television programs; 'n' after a page reference indicates the number
of a note on that page.
narrative conventions of the horror Old Dark House, The (1932) 16,
film 3 6 - 7 , 77, 9 6 - 8 , 1 2 8 - 9 , 4 0 - 6 , 5 0 , 5 6 , 106
1 3 5 - 6 , 1 4 3 - 4 , 1 7 5 - 7 , 192, Omen, The (1976) 2 2 1
200-8, 221, 231-3, 258-60, Omen 3: The Final Conflict (1981)
262, 2 7 2 244
Native Americans 2 0 3 , 2 0 6 , 2 5 7 , On Being Different 180
268 Once Bitten (1985) 245
Nazimova, Alia 100 One 126
Nazism 2 1 , 6 5 - 6 , 8 4 - 7 , 124, One Million Years B.C. (1966) 196
240-1 One Thousand Homosexuals 123
Neanderthal Man, The (1953) Orgy of the Dead (1965) 157,
145 1 6 2 - 8 , 196
Necromania (1971) 157 Oscar Wilde 87
necrophilia 4 3 , 5 6 , 6 4 - 5 , 2 1 1 - 1 2 , Oscar Wilde (1960) 2 1 4
240 Out of the Fog 166
Nelson, Lori 133, 136 Over the Rainbow 213
Neurotic Counterfeit-Sex 123
Nichols, Mike 2 5 9 "pansy craze'Vpansy stereotype
Nicholson, James H. 143 3 3 - 4 , 4 6 - 7 , 5 8 , 8 5 , 108
Nightbreed (1990) 2 6 0 - 4 , 2 9 1 Paragon, John 2 6 0
Nightmare (1964) 176 paranoia 4 5 , 1 0 6 - 1 0
Nightmare Before Christmas Paranoiac (1963) 176
(1993) 266 "Parisex" 31
Nightmare on Elm Street, A Parker, Andrew 243
(1984) 2 3 5 , 2 4 7 pastiche 2 3 3 - 4
Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Patric, Jason 253
Freddy's Revenge (1985) Patton, Mark 2 4 6 - 8
246-50 pedophilia/pederasty 5 6 , 9 3 , 127,
Night of the Ghouls (1960) 157, 1 3 9 - 5 7 , 2 4 0 - 2 , 2 7 1 , 283
162-8 Peeping Tom (1960) 176
Night of the Living Dead (1968) Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
221 266
Night Stalker, The 235 Pee-Wee's Playhouse 2 6 0
Night Time Lez 165 Perkins, Anthony 137, 158
Nixon, Richard M. 154 Perry, Reverend Troy 1 8 1 , 2 4 1
Northanger Abbey 17 Personal Best (1982) 2 3 6
Nosferatu (1922) 2 1 , 68 phallic symbols 1 0 4 - 6 , 1 3 3 - 5 ,
nostalgia 2 0 9 - 1 0 , 2 3 2 - 3 205, 249, 284
Not of this Earth (1957) 128 Phantom of the Opera, The (1943)
Novarro, Ramon 133 82
Nurmi, Maila "Vampira" 162 Phantom of the Opera, The 258
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Oland, Warner 4 8 , 59 220
324 Index