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2018-10-22 |
Monsters in the Closet |
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{% assign tustin = site.data.cite.tustin2121 %} {% assign sf1 = site.data.cite.GilaTheArkanian %} {% assign tobi = site.data.cite.tobicat %}
{% include meta-history video=page %}A feature length video essay looking at the history of LGBT represenation in horror cinema.
Inspired by the book of the same name by Harry M. Benshoff
PATREON: [link]
TWITTER: [link]
{% include transcript-start %}
[Fade in on a projector fading in, pointed just past the camera.]
You're sitting in a packed theater. The lights go down, and you can hear a whisper of anticipation ripple through the crowd, but then it goes silent. Before the movie even begins, you're already on edge.
[Cut to black, then fade in on bed in a dark bedroom. A copy of the book It rests on a shelf.]
Or maybe you're sitting alone at night. In bed, you feel safe until you open up the book on your bedside table, a Stephen King classic that gives you chills even though you've read it ten times.
[Fade in on the arm of a couch. Someone is sitting in it, and the person’s arm is visible.]
You're curled up on your couch. It's late at night, the lights are off, and you're about to watch the latest episode of a TV show that gives you nightmares.
[Fade to black.]
These three situations all end with a smile as you laugh at yourself for being afraid.
[Clips from various horror movies.]
We love being afraid. Horror movies, books, and TV shows give us a thrill that's hardwired into us as human beings, the thrill of being afraid, having your pulse race, muscles tense, but knowing in the end that you're safe.
[Eerie music. On a white background, a red puddle of blood spreads outward. Appearing in the blood, in white text]:
Monsters
in the
Closet
[Fade to black.]
[Fade in on James in the dark, seemingly lit by a computer screen. Throughout, clips from the discussed movies play, interspersed with shots of James.]
I fell in love with horror movies when I was six years old. That's when I saw Friday the 13th: Part 7: A New Blood for the very first time. It was my first slasher movie and my first horror movie in general, and besides being kind of shocked to see blood on the screen for the first time, I wasn't the least bit scared. (Granted, Friday the 13th Part 7 is more akin to an X-Men movie than Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The main character literally kills Jason by using psychic powers.) But it was still a horror movie and a great gateway to the genre.
For the next two decades, I devoured that genre. I had a shelf dedicated to my horror movie VHSs, DVDs, and now Blu-Rays. Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all the greats. I eventually moved on to the grandparents of the horror genre, the Universal Monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man. And in my midteens, after letting everyone know that I was gay and getting to know more people in the queer community, I came to a realization:
Gays really love horror movies.
Of course, there are exceptions (I still can't get my roommate to watch 2017’s It), but for the most part, it seemed like every gay guy and girl absolutely adored horror movies, from the top-tier ones like The Exorcist, to the bottom-of-the-rung direct-to-video sequels, to The Leprechaun, Child's Play, and Sleepaway Camp. There's even a massive amount of gay-themed slasher movies on Netflix — usually involving frat brothers.
So, where did this gay fascination with horror come from? James Jenkins of Valancourt Books notes that the connection between gay fiction and horror goes all the way back to the gothic novels of the early 1800s. Many gothic authors, like Matthew Lewis, William Thomas Beckford, and Francis Latham, were gay, and that reflected in their work. According to Jenkins:
[Quote shown in small box, repeated blurred out for background. James mostly reads word-for-word, quote is exact on screen.]
The traditional explanation for the gay/horror connection is that it was impossible for them to write openly about gay themes back then (or even perhaps express them at all, since words like gay and homosexual didn't exist), so they sublimated them and expressed them in more acceptable forms using the medium of a transgressive genre like horror
fiction.
James Jenkins of Valancourt Books notes that the connection between gay fiction and horror goes back to the Gothic novels of the 1790s and early 1800s.[32] Many Gothic authors, like Matthew Lewis, William Thomas Beckford and Francis Lathom, were homosexual, and according to Jenkins "the traditional explanation for the gay/horror connection is that it was impossible for them to write openly about gay themes back then (or even perhaps express them, since words like 'gay' and 'homosexual' didn't exist), so they sublimated them and expressed them in more acceptable forms, using the medium of a transgressive genre like horror fiction."[32] Early works with clear gay subtext include Lewis's The Monk (1796) and both Charles Maturin's The Fatal Revenge (1807) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).[32] Somewhat later came the first lesbian vampire novella Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu[33][34][35] and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde, which shocked readers with its sensuality and overtly homosexual characters.[45] There is even gay subtext in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as the title character warns off the female vampires and claims Jonathan Harker, saying "This man belongs to me!"[32] The erotic metaphor of vampirism, inspired by Carmilla, has resulted in numerous vampire films since the 1970s strongly implying or explicitly portraying lesbianism.[113]
- Healey, Trebor (May 28, 2014). "Early Gay Literature Rediscovered". The Huffington Post. Retrieved May 31, 2014.
- Garber, Eric; Lyn Paleo (1983). "Carmilla". Uranian Worlds: A Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. G. K. Hall. p. 76. ISBN 978-0-8161-1832-8.
- LeFanu, J[oseph] Sheridan (1872). "Carmilla". In a Glass Darkly. London: R. Bentley & Son.
- LeFanu, J[oseph] Sheridan (1993). "Carmilla". In Pam Keesey (ed.). Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis Press.
In 1890, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine commissioned a short story by then-little-known author Oscar Wilde that would eventually become the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The story follows the titular Dorian Gray, who has had a portrait painted by an artist named Basil. Once he's seen the portrait, he wishes that it would grow old and age instead of him. And his wish having been granted, the portrait becomes a twisted reflection of Dorian's deviance and vices. The wish for eternal youth is certainly present in gay culture, but the dandyism of The Picture of Dorian Gray is much more obvious in other parts of the work. For instance, when Basil has his first meeting with Dorian Gray:
[Direct quotes of the novel appear on-screen. James reads these out in a low-pass filtered voice.]
When our eyes met, I felt I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
And then later, saying:
We were quite close...
Almost touching.
This is false. According to Wilde’s Wikipedia page, by 1890, Wilde had published a poetry collection, gone on a speaking tour of the US, written a play, and edited a monthly magazine. He’d also written multiple short stories.
The novel starts out in Basil's home where he and Lord Henry are spending a day together. In the middle of the room stands the portrait of Dorian, which leads to the two men talking about him. We learn that he is very important to Basil and the way in which he speaks about him is very personal and has a homoerotic undertone. Basil tells Lord Henry of the first meeting with Dorian:
When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself [...] Something seemed to tell me I was in the verge of a terrible crisis in my life [...] I grew afraid, and turned to quit the room. (13)
Artists are often referred to as eccentric and passionate, which can make this very astonishing reaction of his to be only fascination for an artistic object as it was said before. But these are very strong feelings of one man towards another. This fact can never be disregarded or diminished and sets the tone for homoeroticism. Basil's physical reaction can very well be seen as physical attraction and the fear he shows can be the fear that is associated with coming out, the fear of going against the norm and someone finding out.
As we learn more about Basil and Dorian's first meeting the homoerotic theme becomes more tangible. Basil says “we were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes met again” (14). This is a great indication that shows a meeting beyond aesthetics only. It shows an emotional, possibly even erotic, emotional connection between the men. In many ways this interaction can be seen as flirtatious and certainly not a manner in which men were supposed to relate to each other. It shows the men sharing looks and glances, noticing the physical closeness and feeling something for one another. Dorian seems to share this feeling. Basil says: “[Dorian], too, felt that we were destined to know each other” (14). Since Dorian feels the same way we can assume that what is shared between them is not a matter of an artist and his subject, but a man and another man. We also learn that Basil flatters Dorian and finds “strange pleasure in saying things that [he] know[s] [he] shall be sorry for having said” (19). If we now consider the fact that Basil flatters Dorian constantly by giving him compliments, an interpretation of this as courtship is not that farfetched. A heterosexual friendship between two men does not consist of this kind of flirtation and courtship. Basil saying to Dorian something he will regret having said also indicates that he has uttered words he would normally not say to anyone else. Thus, it seems clear that his feelings for Dorian are something new and unfamiliar to him. Presumptions that this is some sort of sexual identity being awakened are easily made.
Later in the novel, Lord Henry, a dear friend of the artist Basil, says to Dorian:
You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheeks with shame.
Shame has a very central role in the novel as well, being closely connected to secrecy. Rasmussen says that the “relationship between inclusivity and coming out, [is] a relationship that often situates the closet as a zone of shame and exclusion” (144). Lord Henry, when issuing his powerful influence over Dorian, notices the distress the young man undergoes and he also says,
{% assign timecode = "5:00" %}You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, daydreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheeks with shame. (26)
Oscar Wilde does not present any of the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray as overtly homosexual. In fact, Lord Henry is married, and Dorian begins dating an actress, but he's more in love with the art of her acting. In fact, when she tells him that she'll stop acting to be with him, he dumps her, and he's not the slightest bit upset to hear about her suicide.
The Picture of Dorian Gray comes across as a very effeminate novel, both in its presentation and in the way the characters are described. The novel is in fact presented in a rather 'straight' fashion when the homoerotic theme is downplayed when not explicitly stated. But effeminacy comes across not only in the way the characters are presented, but in the language Wilde uses to show a rather “feminine” world. Wilde does not present any of the characters as homosexual. In fact, Lord Henry is married and Dorian falls in love with an actress, but both these relationships are very superficial. It is a very straight language in that sense, but on a closer look we see it is not the case. By writing in the manner that he does, Wilde himself shows an effeminate streak as it will be shown further down.
In 2005, Joseph Carroll, professor of philosophy and literature at the University of Missouri, wrote,
Among heterosexuals, feminine characteristics act as a stimulus or trigger for male sexual desire. One chief reason effeminacy can be easily integrated with a homoerotic persona is that effeminacy indirectly suggests that the effeminate male could himself be an object of male desire.
Feminine behaviour by men has more or less always been looked down upon, even during Wilde's time. Standfort points out that “feminine characteristics are less valued than masculine ones, in general, but especially in men” and that “transgressions into femininity by men are more negatively valued than transgressions into masculinity by women” (599). Schaffer believes that male aesthetes to “justify this behaviour, they had to create a visual style which metonymically associated themselves with women while distinctly affirming their superiority” (42). This means that during those days it was more acceptable to take on this feminine and aesthetic lifestyle for men like Wilde, who is believed to have been a dandy. Carroll states,
Among heterosexuals, feminine characteristics act as a stimulus or trigger for male sexual desire. One chief reason effeminacy can be easily integrated with a homoerotic persona is that effeminacy indirectly suggests that the effeminate male could himself be an object of male desire. (296)
Early in the story, before the more supernatural elements kick in, Dorian is upset that the portrait will forever remain beautiful and young, while he will wither and age.
The tears welled in his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he were praying.
Joseph Carroll finds scenes of women lying prone and weeping are common enough in Victorian fiction, but scenes depicting males in that posture are vanishingly rare.
Once the novel saw its final publication, at least for the 1800s, critics zeroed in on the effeminacy of the novel, especially the main character. Over the next century, critics and fans would discover the more overt homosexuality in Oscar Wilde's most famous work.
Following the release of the novel the reviews that criticised it paid attention to the effeminacy of Dorian Gray. In the novel when Dorian is displeased he “made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy” (24). One reviewer calls the characters puppies, noting Dorian's behaviour in the previous quote to be improper for a boy of twenty years (Mason, 18).
Carroll, likewise, views Dorian's behaviour to be more fit for a woman than for a man, no matter his age. In the novel Dorian is upset that the painting will forever remain beautiful while his beauty and youth will wither: “The tears welled in his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying. (35). Carroll finds “[s]cenes of women lying prone and weeping are common enough in Victorian fiction; scenes depicting males in that posture are vanishingly rare” (297).
Now, instead of pulling quotes from novels and intellectual articles for the rest of the video, I'm going to start focusing on more modern interpretations of gay horror. And I'd like to talk about the world’s the most famous monster... that you never knew was analogously queer.
Frankenstein: "IT'S ALIVE!!" Grabbed by two people "In the name of god! Now I know what it feels like to be God!"
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. Victor Frankenstein, the titular mad scientist, shows little to no interest in his wife-to-be and is determined to create life on his own: his own perfect man. (Something explored without subtlety in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) But when digging up the body parts that he'll eventually use to compile the monster, he makes sure to pick the... sexiest body parts he can find. He wants an Adonis, just like Frank-N-Furter.
Once born against his own free will, as we all are, Frankenstein's monster is rejected by its creator as something terrible, a regretful mistake that ought to be done away with. He even flees from the monster because it's so hideous. Frankenstein's reaction to the birth of his creation isn't that far off from the reaction of many overly religious parents when they find out that their child is gay. They look at them as monsters: ungodly. And although most of these parents don't actually attempt to kill their children (though that does happen) they may cut them out of their lives; an emotional murder, if you will.
But at the same time, there is a homoerotic subtext between Victor Frankenstein and his monster. The monster tracks down his creator, and Victor discovers that the monster is intelligent, well-read, and curious. He is, ostensibly, everything a man like Victor would want a lover. There's a direct connection between them. Victor's repulsion toward the monster could read as the Victorian equivalent of “no fats, no fems”.
Every time Frankenstein's creature (sometimes referred to as Adam) is seen by the local population, he's met with horror. He hasn't done anything to them, but they look at him as a monster anyway. And rejection drives him to become the monster they see him as. Eventually, Adam begs Victor to create for him a mate. He just wants someone like him, someone who knows his struggles, someone to share his life with. He, like any other person, deserves as much. (Sound familiar?)
Though Victor initially agrees, he eventually destroys the potential bride. Adam the monster is not allowed to have a mate, not allowed to have someone to love and be loved by, because he's a monster. He's not like normal people. He doesn't deserve to have what everyone else does. Because... he is different. And so, you see the parallels between Frankenstein's monster... and being gay.
Now, this all changed a little bit with the film adaptation. James Whales, himself a gay director, helmed 1931’s Frankenstein and its 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein. Whales, oddly, made sure to remove the more overt homoerotic subtext between Victor and his monster by adding the character of Fritz for Victor to speak with and by making the monster mute, and also making Victor much more socially active. Off-topic, but Fritz is the character we've all come to known as Igor, for some reason. Also, Victor is inexplicably renamed Henry in the movie, but I'm gonna stick to calling him Victor for the sake of consistency. Victor is also much more socially active in the movies, as I said, adding a further layer of separation between him and the monster.
In both Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, Whale emphasises Victor's heterosexuality by replacing Victor's solitary relationship with the Creature by a more social and public one. The possibility of any social interaction between Victor and the Creature that might result in a homosocial / homosexual subtext is basically removed by Whale since, whereas Shelley's Creature is highly intelligent and intellectually attractive for Victor, Whale's monster cannot speak in the 1931 film, and can barely articulate a few words in the 1935 sequel. Whale's 1935 film also offers the Creature a female companion, if only for a limited time, when in the novel Victor destroys the fen1a1e creature he is working on, thus eliminating any potential heterosexual competition for the Creature's attention. In both films, Whale also chooses to have Victor proceed with his experiments with the help of either Fritz or Dr Pretorius, and other characters actually witness his work. This socially active Victor prevents consequently any reading of his personal motive in his making of the creature and the possible relationship that would ensue. Whale still hints at Victor's possible homosexuality in his relationship to Fritz, and most specifically in ali his scenes with Dr Pretorius, a character culturally encoded as 'deviant', i.e. homosexual, who thus underscores Whale's subtle, ironic retelling of Shelley's story - he replaces Victor's homosexual interest in the Creature with another man.
Victor's relationship with his wife-to-be, Elizabeth, is also much more prominent in the films. She's an active part of his life, even being there for the birth of the monster.
Indeed, the films never seem to question Victor's sexuality but, on the contrary, repeatedly emphasized his heterosexuality, whereas the novel leaves this aspect of Victor's character more open to discussion. The novel’s Victor is obsessed with the creature who repeatedly makes his pulse beat faster and his brows sweat.
The character of Elizabeth in both Whale's films and Branagh's 1994 film reinforces further Victor's heterosexuality. Each film implicates Elizabeth in Victor's experience, and thus removes the option of a homosexual reading of the creation scene. Whale modifies this scene in both films to incorporate an audience, one which includes Elizabeth. In fact, in Whale's Frankenstein, Victor at first refuses to permit Dr Waldman and his friend Victor Moritz to disturb his experiment, and he specifically instructs Fritz not to allow anyone in. However, when Elizabeth asks him to open the door, he yields and actually shows loving concern for her. The tone that Frankenstein uses to talk to Moritz also differs significantly from the one he uses with Elizabeth, another instance of his heterosexual attachment to her. As for Branagh, although he does not include Elizabeth in his creation scene, he adds an extra scene beforehand. Fearing that Victor might be involved with another woman, Elizabeth decides to go to Geneva to ask him to come home with her. Although Victor stays to pursue his experiment, the preceding scene is reinforces Victor's commitment to Elizabeth. To a large extent, bath directors seem to offer readings of the novel that emphasize the characters' heterosexuality without including Shelley's critique of her male characters, and her deliberate openness regarding questions of sexuality.
Indeed, the films never seem to question Victor's sexuality but on the contrary repeatedly emphasize his heterosexuality whereas the novel leaves this aspect of Victor's character more open to discussion. The novel's Victor is obsessed with the Creature, who repeatedly makes his pulse beat faster and his brow sweat. For instance, Victor declares: '1 remembered also the nervous fever with which 1 had been seized just at the ti me that 1 dated my creation' ( 49). Victor also reacts nervously when his father comments:
In 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein, the queerness is more obvious. An old friend of Dr. Frankenstein's, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, interrupts the evening of his wedding with the request that they partner up to create life, stopping Victor from consummating the marriage with his bride. The two men go off to [air quotes] “use his creativity” and become the same-sex parents of a monster, Frankenstein the bringer of life and Pretorius the nurturer. Though Frankenstein is reluctant to admit it, the thought of creating life with Pretorius, and thereby stifling the female necessity inherent in the process, inspires him. Whales’ decision to cast two known bisexual actors in the roles only furthers the queer reading. Film historian David Scales said,
[quote appears on-screen]
“There is an overriding fantasy of male–male procreation. There is the persistent undercurrent of men creating life without women.”
It’s true that Pretorius does interrupt the evening of Frankenstein’s wedding with the request they partner up in an attempt to create life, disabling Henry’s chance of consummating with his bride. Elizabeth (Velerie Hobson) is left by herself while the two men go off to “use his creativity” and become the same-sex parents of a monster; Henry Frankenstein the bringer of life, and Pretorius the nurturer. Though Frankenstein is reluctant to admit it, the thought of creating life with Pretorius and thereby stifling the female necessity inherent in the process inspires him. Whale’s decision to cast two known bisexual actors in the roles only further the reading of subtext.
Skal expounds upon this component of the Frankenstein films. “There is an overriding fantasy of male-male procreation,” Skal says. In the original Frankenstein (1931), the good doctor pieces together his creation with the help of his deformed male assistant. “It is homoerotic, or at least, autoerotic,” Skal explains. “There is the persistent undercurrent of men creating life without women.”
The original cut of Bride of Frankenstein was actually 15 minutes longer than the one we have now, which sits at just over an hour long. That's because the ending was drastically edited and changed. The reason for this was that it conflicted with the Hayes production code, the era's version of the MPAA. What went against the code? Well, it was originally made obvious that the heart of the monster’s bride was taken from Frankenstein's wife, Elizabeth. This would imply that Frankenstein and Pretorius’ mutual goal was predicated on the destruction of Frankenstein's heterosexual relationship, that he literally sacrificed Elizabeth for the realization of his other ambitions. Effectively, he would have chosen a homosexual partnership over marriage, and since gay anything was a big no-no for the Hays Code, that had to be cut down. Instead, Elizabeth is actually present for the ending and escapes the destruction of the lab, along with Dr. Frankenstein, while the monster’s would-be bride and the overtly queer-coded Dr. Pretorius are left to perish. Gotta let that breeding pair escape, right?
Bride of Frankenstein’s original cut was fifteen minutes longer than the final version, as its original ending was edited down to avoid conflict with the production code due to even more obtuse anti-hetero subtext. One alteration came in the film’s ending, where it was originally implied the bride’s heart was taken from Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s other bride. This would imply that Frankenstein and Pretorius’ mutual goal was predicated on the destruction of Frankenstein’s heterosexual relationship, that he literally sacrificed Elizabeth for the realization of his other ambitions. Effectively, he would have chosen a homosexual partnership over marriage. (It’s also possible the plot point would merely serve as a sharp and terrifying twist.)
The very next year in 1936, Universal Pictures released a sequel to 1931's Dracula entitled Dracula's Daughter, a film that featured an obviously lesbian antagonist in Countess Marya Zaleska, the titular Dracula's daughter. Lesbian vampires have been a staple of the genre since 1872's novella "Carmilla" which predated Dracula by almost three decades, but this was the first time that it was being shown on film. The lesbian elements were so obvious that the Hays Production Code office actually demanded changes be made to the script before the movie even went into production. The scene that caused the biggest issues was between the Countess and model Lilli.
The lesbian vampire has been a trend in literature dating back to Joseph Sheridan le Fanu's 1872 novella "Carmilla". Dracula's Daughter marked the first time that the trend was incorporated into a film.[34] The lesbian implications of Dracula's Daughter were obvious from the start and were of great concern to the Production Code Administration. PCA head Breen took special notice of the scene between the Countess and her model, Lili, writing, "This will need very careful handling to avoid any questionable flavor."[35] The day before the scene was to be shot, Universal's Harry Zehner asked Breen to read a draft of the scene. In response, Breen wrote: [...]
Lilli: I suppose you'll want these pulled down, won't you?
Countess: Yes.
[Lilli pulls down the straps of her dress as the Countess approaches her.]
Countess: Finish your wine, it'll warm you.
[Lilli drinks from the offered glass.]
Countess: Stand by the fire for a moment. You mustn't catch cold.
[Lilli moves to the fire, then turns around to look at the Countess, who is staring at her intently.]
Lilli: Why are you looking at me that way? Won't I do?
Countess: Yes, you'll do very well indeed. Do you like jewels, Lilli? This is very old and very beautiful. I'll show it to you.
[Lilli stares at the Countess, transfixed, a light shining in her eyes.]
Lilli: I don't think I'll pose tonight, I... I think I'll go if you don't mind.
[The music swells as the Countess approaches her.]
Lilli: Please don't come any closer!
[Lilli puts a hand to her own cheek and screams.]
Production code enforcer Joseph Breen wrote to the producers,
[James reads aloud the quotes in a haughty voice with a grainy, low quality microphone or audio filter.]
This will need very careful handling to avoid any questionable flavor.
The whole sequence will be treated in such a way as to avoid any suggestion of perverse sexual desire on the part of Marya or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon Lilli.
[...] PCA head Breen took special notice of the scene between the Countess and her model, Lili, writing, "This will need very careful handling to avoid any questionable flavor."[35] The day before the scene was to be shot, Universal's Harry Zehner asked Breen to read a draft of the scene. In response, Breen wrote:
The present suggestion that ... Lili poses in the nude will be changed. She will be posing her neck and shoulders, and there will be no suggestion that she undresses, and there will be no exposure of her person. It was also stated that the present incomplete sequence will be followed by a scene in which Lili is taken to a hospital and there it will be definitely established that she has been attacked by a vampire. The whole sequence will be treated in such a way as to avoid any suggestion of perverse sexual desire on the part of Marya or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon Lili.[35]
Universal played up the lesbian angle in the advertising for the film though, with posters for it declaring, "Save the women of London from Dracula's Daughter!" Some critics of the day picked up on the lesbian content and tore the film apart for it. The New York World-Telegram angrily noted the countess's tendency to wander around giving the eye to sweet young girls.
Gay film historian Vito Russo noted in his book The Celluloid Closet that Universal highlighted Countess Zaleska's attraction to women in some of its original advertising for the film, using the tag line "Save the women of London from Dracula's Daughter!" He further cited Countess Zaleska as an example of the presentation of the "essence of homosexuality as a predatory weakness".[36] Some reviewers of the day picked up on and condemned the lesbian content, including the New York World-Telegram which noted the Countess's tendency to wander around "giving the eye to sweet young girls".[37] Other reviews missed it entirely, including the aforementioned The New York Times which advised "Be sure to bring the kiddies."[23] Entertainment Weekly describes the encounter between the Countess and Lili as "so hot it's impossible to imagine how it ever got past '30s censors"[25] whereas Time Out London finds only a "subtle suggestion" of lesbianism.[38] Horror scholar Skal notes that the scene has come to be seen as a "classic 'lesbian' sequence, although of a decidedly negative stripe".[39] The scene between Countess Zaleska and Lili was included in the 1995 documentary film adaptation of Russo's book.
Further gay subtext can be gleamed from 1941's The Wolf Man. The idea of being a normal man by day and then a deviant at night was one that clung to the identities of a lot of gay men at the time and now. And, you know, kind of birthed furries.
So as you can see, classic horror represented the queer experience, whether the initial authors intended it to or not. The sense of hiding, being rejected and doomed to never know true love. Of being looked at as a monster in the eyes of the public, even if you've never done anything to hurt them; the monster coming for your children, the mad scientist going against nature, the beast unable to control its own urges, the creature born against God's will. That's what being gay was and, to some extent, still is. And so we identified with the monsters, not so much the heroes.
But we wouldn't be the monsters forever. In a time when the gay community was being ravaged by AIDS, a bloodborne disease not entirely separated from the plague-bringing vampire birthed by Bram Stoker, Hollywood would, unbeknownst to itself, make us the hero.
American horror movies went through a revolution of sorts during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, shifting to more sci-fi than horror. Aliens from other worlds and creatures born of nuclear fallout peppered cinemas across the country. Movies about the horrors of the nuclear bombs, such as Godzilla, were easy enough to figure out. There wasn't a whole lot of subtext to Godzilla being a byproduct of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sci-fi and alien movies were a bit more cleverly coded though. Although never clearly stated, aliens were communists. They were the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans or Vietnamese. They were infiltrating the wholesomeness of America and preparing to destroy it from within. They represented the other, the un-American, which for conservatives at the time meant a whole lot more than just communists. It also meant civil rights leaders, women's rights activists, and homosexuals. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from the Other World[sic: The Thing from Another World], and even Plan 9 from Outer Space directed by the infamously queer Ed Wood are just some examples of such films.
This is false. Per the Wikipedia article on the original Godzilla film and the Overly Sarcastic Productions video on kaiju, Godzilla was canonically a byproduct of nuclear testing, not the US bombing Japan.
Godzilla isn't an American horror movie, it's a Japanese film. A heavily re-edited Americanized version of the film, called Godzilla, King of Monsters, was created and released in the U.S. in 1957, two years after the original. Per Wikipedia, "overt references to the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb, such as the bombing of Nagasaki, the Bikini Island tests, radioactive contamination of tuna by American and Russian bomb tests, were omitted." The original Japanese version was not officially available in the United States until the 2000s. However, the Americanized version did retain some of the original political content - Godzilla is said to have been "resurrected due to the repeated experiments of H-bombs," the monster is still a fairly clear allegory for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (see the opening narration: "This is Tokyo, once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which, up until a few days ago, was entirely beyond the scope of man's imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which, at this very moment, still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world."), and the use of the "oxygen destroyer" clearly mirrors the debate over if/when nuclear weapons should be used.
To clarify, Ed Wood was only attracted to women, but regularly crossdressed and self-identified as a transvestite.
After the Vietnam War, horror began to take a more inward look at America. Movies like Psycho, which I'll talk more about in Part 3, Night of the Living Dead, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre looked at the horror that already existed in America, the homegrown evils. Night of the Living Dead for instance was a barely veiled allegory for the burgeoning American right wing - the racists and bigots refusing to pass on, even returning from the dead. The introspection of horror and the 60s and 70s made a lot of people in America very uncomfortable. The horror was no longer coming from without, but from within. Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left, all showing how "normal" Americans can turn, how they could easily become corrupted, evil, willing to kill their own countrymen.
Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were all released during the Vietnam War, not after.
Then in the late 70s and early 80s, a new form of horror arrived in America, one that, at least at first, seemed to leave good Christian Americans alone: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
- AIDS. On June 5, 1981, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported clusters of pneumonia among gay men in New York and Los Angeles. Over the next 18 months, otherwise healthy men of a certain sexual persuasion began dropping dead in every major city in the country. The CDC initially called this GRID - Gay Related Immune Deficiency
. It wasn't until August of 1982 that it was officially named AIDS. It would be another two years before the cause of the syndrome, a retrovirus called the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, was discovered.
The AIDS epidemic officially began on June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by a form of Pneumocystis carinii (now recognized as a distinct species Pneumocystis jirovecii) in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.[83]
Over the next 18 months, more PCP clusters were discovered among otherwise healthy men in cities throughout the country, along with other opportunistic diseases (such as Kaposi's sarcoma[84] and persistent, generalized lymphadenopathy[85]), common in immunosuppressed patients.
In June 1982, a report of a group of cases amongst gay men in Southern California suggested that a sexually transmitted infectious agent might be the etiological agent,[86] and the syndrome was initially termed "GRID", or gay-related immune deficiency.[87]
Health authorities soon realized that nearly half of the people identified with the syndrome were not homosexual men. The same opportunistic infections were also reported among hemophiliacs,[88] users of intravenous drugs such as heroin, and Haitian immigrants – leading some researchers to call it the "4H" disease.[89][90]
By August 1982, the disease was being referred to by its new CDC-coined name: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).[91]
As far as I can tell, the CDC never used the name GRID. According to Wikipedia, the press coined it as GRID, while the CDC referred to it as "the 4H disease" for a while because it seemed to target "homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs and Haitians." Also, the virus was discovered one year later in 1983, not two years later, though it wasn't named HIV until 1986.
In the meantime, political pundits across the country on both the right and left declared that AIDS was a moral punishment. Since the vast majority of people affected at first were gay men, they proclaimed that the disease was God's way of punishing the sinners, that only the truly righteous would escape the plague. Believe it or not, a lot of priests, mostly televangelists, would actually charge parishioners a fee to guarantee that they wouldn't get the disease. Their reasoning for it was that "well, you might have come in contact with someone with it and even just being a near one of those sinners was enough for God to kill you." [sarcastically] Because that's what Jesus would do.
This is an absolutely wild claim for which I can find no evidence.
As half of America panicked over AIDS and the other half welcomed it as a biblical cleansing or at best ignored its existence, a new trend had developed in American horror movies: the teenage slasher. The slasher movie grew out of the fear-of-your-fellow-Americans genere, namely The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and really found its place in pop culture with the 1978 release of Halloween. John Carpenter's masterpiece jumpstarted the slasher genre and also created a template that, in the time of AIDS, would become the most prevalent theme in horror: namely, the virgin lives.
Basically every slasher movie in the late 70s and early 80s followed this format, exemplified by the Friday the 13th series in which camp counselors are murdered, literally for having sex. You see, a pair of counselors were off doing the dirty when Jason Voorhees, a developmentally challenged camper, was swimming. When he began to drown, they weren't there to save him because they were having sex. His mother then kills the counselors in question, and when the camp reopens many years later, she returns to exact her vengeance on a new generation of horny teenagers. Then she gets her head cut off, and Jason, all grown up, comes to kill the counselors who killed his mom, the ones who didn't let him drown...? See, apparently Jason survived the drowning and has been living in the woods around Crystal Lake ever since for like two decades, and has never told anyone that he was alive, never tried to find his mother... just kind of built a house for himself out there... Yeah the logic doesn't really add up.
Suffice it to say, the moral of the Friday the 13th series was have sex and get a machete to the head. This became uber-obvious once aids became widely known, it wasn't just a moral issue to not have sex before marriage, it was a life-or-death one, at least for the people who didn't assume that only gays got AIDS. [laughs]
Then came Wes Craven's seminal work A Nightmare on Elm Street, telling the story of teenager Nancy Thompson as she is stalked by a killer that can murder you in your dreams. A Nightmare on Elm Street continued to play into the fear-your-fellow-Americans genre; Freddy Krueger, the killer, was once upon a time just another man working in the town of Springwood, but eventually it was discovered that he was a child killer, and later confirmed in the series a child molester. When his murder trial ended in a mistrial due to the police failing to get the proper search warrant, the parents in Springwood exacted vigilante justice against Krueger, burning him alive. But Freddy didn't stay dead, and returned to Springwood as a dream demon hunting down the children of those who had killed him. Nancy was one of those children. At the end of the movie Krueger is defeated and Nancy lives happily ever after, except for a tacked on stinger ending that Wes Craven hated until the day he died.
Less than a year later, now without the involvement of Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was released, the most "inadvertently" gay horror movie ever made.
[Clip of the main character, a teenage boy named, Jesse dancing to music, thrusting his hips to close his dresser drawer with his backside.]
No, that's not the gayest part.
[Clip of Jesse standing in the shower; cut to a towel flying into the locker room as if possessed by a ghost, and whipping Coach Schneider on his bare rear.]
Gayer....
[Clip of a distressed Jesse saying, "Something is trying to get inside my body."]
Gayer...
[Clip of Jesse, wearing an unbuttoned shirt and standing in a dimly lit gay bar. The bartender passes him a bottle and Jesse pours himself a drink, before someone approaches him from behind and grabs him by the wrist. Pan up to reveal Coach Schneider in a leather outfit, staring at Jesse.]
A leather bar. And the director to this day says that he didn't realize how gay the movie was when he was making it. [laughs]
Freddy's Revenge breaks with the traditional formula of the slasher movie by having the main character be a male, Jesse. Definitely an interesting move in 1985, but one that just doesn't quite work. Jesse's family has recently moved to Springwood, coincidentally into the house that Nancy lived in in Part One. Shortly after moving into the house, Jesse begins to have nightmares that he soon discovers are eerily similar to the ones the house's former occupant had. Finally, Jesse meets Freddy directly in a dream, and spends the rest of the movie trying to stay awake and convince people that he's possessed by the child killer. Freddy is defeated in the end, of course, but not until the movie has completely subverted the slasher genre by turning Jesse, and not his would-be girlfriend Lisa, into the damsel in distress. In fact, the movie ends with Lisa needing to come to Jesse's rescue. Jesse is quite obviously put in the female role in the movie.
The gayness of the film was immediately picked up by the queer audience, and even became a favorite to have on TVs and gay bars in the late 80s. Besides the leather bar scene - and honestly, how could you not tell that that scene was gay? These are the same people who thought Freddie Mercury was the epitome of masculinity - there are plenty of other obvious nods to Jesse being gay. When Jesse and Lisa come closest to actually having sex, he panics and runs away because there's another man's tongue in his mouth. So he runs to the house of his male friend Grady, where he proclaims,
Jesse: Something is trying to get inside my body.
And Grady replies,
Grady: And you want to sleep with me?
Remember, they had no idea that this was gay.
Well, that's not entirely true. The film's screenwriter, David Chaskin, was gay and purposely wrote gay subtext into the film, though he denied it for years. He eventually admitted that "Homophobia was skyrocketing and I began to think about our core audience — adolescent boys — and how all of this stuff might be trickling down into their psyches. My thought was that tapping into the angst would give an extra edge to the horror."
The actor portraying Jesse, Mark Patton, has stated that the film put the brakes on his career in Hollywood. After playing a gay teenager in 1982's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and then playing an obviously coded gay character in Freddy's Revenge, Patton believes that he was typecast as gay, effectively killing his career at a time when conservatism was flourishing in America and gay equaled AIDS. Patton actually retired from acting after the release of Freddy's Revenge, becoming an interior designer.
Patton has claimed the film's gay subtext was increased through script rewrites as production progressed. "It just became undeniable," he told BuzzFeed in 2016. "I'm lying in bed and I'm a pietà and the candles are dripping and they're bending like phalluses and white wax is dripping all over. It's like I'm the center of a [...] bukkake video." He has felt betrayed since he knew the filmmakers were aware he was gay, but closeted, and thus had considerable leverage over him in having him perform a role that, combined with his performance as a gay teen in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean the year before, led to him being typecast as gay, which called attention to what he was trying to avoid discussing and would have forestalled him getting any significant roles in 1980s Hollywood.[12]
In particular, Patton blames Chaskin, who he says claimed the subtext arose from how Patton played the part. "I love when [he] uses the word 'subtext,'" he complained. "Did you actually go to a freshman English course in high school? This is not subtext." In 2016 he said Chaskin "sabotage[d]" him. "Nobody ever affected my confidence — the boys that threw rocks at me, nobody — but this man did." Chaskin denied for years that there was a gay subtext in his screenplay, instead he at one point told a reporter that Patton simply had played the part "too gay". The emotional stress of the film led Patton to leave acting shortly afterwards for a career in interior decorating.[12]
While Chaskin has tried to reach out and apologize to Patton over the years, with limited success, he maintains that Patton's "interpretations of Jesse were choices that he made ... I have to believe that he 'got it' and that was how he decided to play it." In 2010, Chaskin finally admitted it was a deliberate choice on his part. "Homophobia was skyrocketing and I began to think about our core audience—adolescent boys—and how all of this stuff might be trickling down into their psyches," he explained. "My thought was that tapping into that angst would give an extra edge to the horror."[12]
David Chaskin is not gay. I looked far and wide but could find no mention of him being gay, and his comments about the film appear to come from a heterosexual perspective; in a 2007 interview, Chaskin says the film's subtext "was intended to play homophobic rather than homoerotic" and that "one might argue that the entire movie is a metaphor -- Jesse is, in the end, finally able to control the monster inside him (his latent homosexuality) with the love of a good woman. Maybe they should show this film at one of those evangelical deprogramming sessions where they try to “fix” gay people into regular Americans." In light of these comments and the homophobic stereotypes in the film itself, James' comments on the film are perhaps overly generous. The "basis" of this video essay, Harry Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet, is more critical of the film.
Patton's character in Come Back to the Five and Dime is more accurately characterized as a pre-transition transgender girl. (Patton plays the character as a teen, and a different actor, a cis woman, plays her as an adult.) Though "gay teen" more-or-less works as well, at least for how it was perceived at the time.
Oddly enough, James omits mention that Mark Patton is gay, while claiming that Chaskin is gay. The film itself didn't "put the brakes on" Patton's acting career - he could have still gotten roles, and was actually offered a role as a gay character on a TV show - but the emotional stress of dealing with homophobia and being forced to hide his sexuality, all during the AIDS crisis, led to him choosing to quit. People like Chaskin took advantage of Patton because he was closeted.
In 2010, Robert Englund, Freddie himself, said of the movie, “...The second Nightmare on Elm Street is obviously intended as a bisexual-themed film. It was the early '80s...
Jesse's wrestling with whether to come out or not and his own sexual desire was manifested by Freddy. His friend is the object of his affection. That's all there in the film.” A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge has become a cult classic, especially in the gay community, and although gay characters wouldn't appear in any Nightmare films going forward, it did remain an oddly inclusive slasher franchise. But before the decade of the 1980s ended, another movie would whet the appetite of gay horror fans.
In a February 2010 interview with Attitude magazine, Englund said "... the second Nightmare on Elm Street is obviously intended as a bisexual themed film. It was early '80s, pre-AIDS paranoia. Jesse's wrestling with whether to come out or not and his own sexual desires was manifested by Freddy. His friend is the object of his affection. That's all there in that film. We did it subtly but the casting of Mark Patton was intentional too, because Mark was out and had done Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean."[13]
The Lost Boys, released in 1987, is basically a Helix Studios movie with a bit more of a budget and a lot less sex. After moving to the town of Santa Clara, our protagonist, Michael, falls in with a crowd of typical 1980s bad boys who happened to be vampires because he has a crush on the one girl in the group, Star, even though none of the other guys in the group show any interest in her whatsoever. Michael decides it must be because they all have vampire girlfriends of their own. Exactly.
Soon, Michael meets the head vampire of the group, David, who tricks Michael into drinking some of his bodily fluids — blood, obviously. They're vampires; what else could it possibly be?
After moving to the flamboyant new town of Santa Carla, Michael falls in with a crowd of bad dudes after being attracted by the gang's sole female member, Star. Strangely, none of the fellas in the gang seems to be showing any interest in her, forcing Michael to conclude that they're all in serious relationships with other female vampires.
Michael follows Star back to the vampires' lair, where the leader of the pack, David, tricks Michael into swallowing some of his bodily fluids. Or maybe it's not a trick, and Michael is just so impressed at having been invited over to Jack Bauer's house that he does it voluntarily.
It doesn't take long for Star to completely disappear from the story, except for a forced sex scene that I'm convinced was a request by the producers, and Michael starts donning the vampire crew's trademark single earring. Gay history lesson: in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, gay men would get one of their ears pierced to show other gay men that they were available for sex when they were in cruising areas. But they would get their right ear pierced, and all the guys in this movie have their left ear pierced, so, completely different, obviously. Completely different. Not the same at all. Completely different. And what is with that poster of Rob Lowe on the closet door? Would any straight teenager have that on their wall? Really?
And this shot [of main character Michael and his younger brother Sam holding each other tight, Michael's lips practically touching Sam's cheek]; I don't know, I was an only child, but I don't think brothers get quite this close. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all those stepbrother videos that I totally haven't watched online are way more factual than I thought. Also, single ear piercing.
Pretty soon, Star is nowhere to be seen, and Michael demonstrates his loyalty to vampire-Jack Bauer by jumping off a bridge. He then lets his family know about his new lifestyle by coming home sporting the international sign of vampire-gang membership: a single ear piercing. Even his younger brother, Sam, who prides himself on his flamboyant "young Elton John" wardrobe, seems shocked by this.
Later, there's a rushed sex scene with Star which is obviously added to draw attention away from the flaming sexual tension between Michael and pale-Jack Bauer. However, it's not enough to distract us from the moment that propelled this movie onto the list. A moment that makes the gleaming man with his saxophone and studded codpiece seem as hetero as Brett Favre.
The moment to which we refer comes when Sam opens his not-at-all-metaphorical closet, resulting in a shot which has led to years of speculation by experts. That's Rob Lowe, folks.
As a horror movie, The Lost Boys isn't exactly scary, but it definitely kick-started a lot of gay kids into puberty. There's also the underlying connection to the AIDS epidemic: the movie was released at the height of the epidemic, in 1987, and the presence of a monstrous disease, in this case, vampirism, spread by bodily fluids was not lost on the film's director, out gay filmmaker Joel Schumacher, who, a decade later, would become famous for codpieces and bat nipples.
https://www.cracked.com/article_17097_the-5-most-unintentionally-gay-horror-movies.html para 15
On the other hand, Schumacher is openly gay and was responsible for putting the nipples and enormous dong on the batsuit.
That same year, Friday the 13th Part 7: A New Blood was released, which, in and of itself, isn't very gay but had a shocking amount of gay cast members, especially for the time, including the main character’s love interest.
[Said love interest, Nick, is standing in a doorway. Tina Shepard, the main character, is standing next to her mother - Nick and Mrs. Shepard converse awkwardly while Nick and Tina stare blankly at each other throughout.]
Nick: Hi. Nick.
Mrs. Shepard: Hi. I’m Amanda Shepard. Nice to meet you.
Nick: Nice to meet you.
Mrs. Shepard: So, have you been having fun up there?
Nick: Yeah, a bunch of us got together to throw my cousin Michael a surprise birthday party. I came over to invite your daughter.
Oh, the burning passion.
The 90s was pretty much a dead zone for gay horror, but in 2005, we got the first truly gay horror movie with Hellbent. There's no subtext here; this is as gay as horror gets. The majority of the movie takes place in a West Hollywood Halloween party, for God's sake! And the movie? Well, the movie’s ridiculous, but in a good way. Most of the characters are more preoccupied with getting laid than the killings that are actually going on around them, which, admittedly, is a convention of the slasher genre, but for some reason, in Hellbent, it feels even more silly than usual. “Oh, there's a crazed killer out there murdering my friends. I need a hookup as soon as possible!” One thing I can say for the movie, though, is that although it was made in the early 2000s, it actually feels like a mid-80s classic slasher movie. It ignores the more polished aesthetic of horror movies at the time for a more grainy, retro feel. It was likely just a byproduct of having such a low budget, but I definitely count it in the movie's favor.
The next year, in 2006, we got The Covenant, featuring an almost entirely all-male cast, with female characters appearing mostly as out-of-focus figures in the background. The Covenant follows the story of a group of male witches who are all about to turn 18, at which point they will ascend, meaning they will access their true powers. The leader of the group, Caleb, is obsessively targeted by the new guy in school, Chase. You're right, they do sound like Sean Cody models.
By the way, Chase is played by Sebastian Stan, a.k.a. the Winter Soldier, a.k.a. Bucky Barnes, a.k.a. Captain America's one true love. Stucky A&F.
Caleb is the leader of a gang of "undercover" male witches who spend a lot of time showering together. He is obsessively targeted by a mysterious stranger, Chase, the new kid at their exclusive private school.
We don't want to read too much into the fact that the school's female students are featured mostly as blurry, indistinct figures in the background. Why read anything at all when we have an all-male naked locker room fight scene to watch?
Anyway, back to the plot. It turns out that Chase is also a witch, and some nasty supernatural occurrences start happening around town once he gets there, which puts Caleb on edge. We eventually learned that Chase is behind it all and that he wants to consume the other witches’ magic to make himself more powerful. He wants their essences inside of him. In the climactic fight scene, the two witches hurl liquid-y globs of opaque magic at each other in the rain. Eventually, Chase is defeated, and Caleb drives off with a girl.
There's also this scene. [Tracking shot in a public-school shower. One character hits another in the rear with a towel whip.] And this one. [Close up of two characters. One says, “Brother.” They kiss.] But this movie is totally straight, guys. There's nothing gay about it. Nothing. It doesn't even have a gay director or writer like Freddy's Revenge or The Lost Boys. I mean, it was made by Renny Harlin, director of The Long Kiss Goodnight and Die Hard 2, and also Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4.
Chase becomes desperate to consume Caleb's magic, when he learns that Caleb has a special magic that will only fully develop once he turns 18. Chase stalks him, threatens his friends and eventually holds him down and kisses him.
This brings us to the final conflict, and the point at which the film pretty much whips the audience in the face with the homoerotic symbolism: In the climactic scene, the two men hurl magic translucent white globs of power at each other as Chase begs for Caleb's consent.
The only reason I can figure that this movie is so damn homoerotic is that the producers were trying to make a movie aimed at teenage girls and that this was right around the time that the Harry/Draco slash fiction really started to take off.
In this case, at least, all of the homoerotic subtext lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes prominently above it) seems to be a strange, misguided attempt to appeal to the young women who this film was plainly aimed at. The filmmakers must have spent some time in some chat rooms, and decided that homoerotic fanservice is all that is needed to sell tickets in these modern times.
To be fair, the obligatory girl-girl make-out scenes in modern slasher flicks demonstrates that producers don't have a much higher opinion of male horror fans.
Now, before I bring this video to a close, I'd like to mention a movie that I watched, and you shouldn't. In doing my research for this, I was told over and over again to watch the movie 1313 Haunted Frat from 2011, and I did. Basically, a frat house filled with boys walking around with their grandpa's white underwear is being haunted by a crazy woman who possesses them. That's it. There's no end of the story, there's no story, there's barely a plot, there's less acting talent than in a typical porn shoot, and I don't know what the hell this is, to be honest. This scene here, this goes on for 15 minutes. He walks around the house like this for 15 minutes! In this shower scene, 8 minutes! In this random-ass scene of proto-Zac Efron touching himself, 7 minutes! The bulk of the movie’s 1 hour and 15 minute runtime is made up of scenes like this. The other five or so minutes are made up of this guy trying to get his frat brothers to help him write a history of the frat and discovering that it was built on the site of a destroyed mental institution. I was convinced that I was watching a porno that had all the sex cut out, honestly. I mean, the acting, the directing, the blocking, they're all porno quality. No, no, that's mean. The blocking is actually much worse than it is in a porno. Now that you've been warned off of ever watching this disaster of a photo play, I'll do the actual ending to the video.
1313 Haunted Frat is part of a whole series of horror films beginning with "1313." They're all directed by David DeCoteau, who has a long, long history of making low budget, direct-to-video films. Since about the year 2000, he's made many, many extremely low budget homoerotic horror films, targeted at an audience of young women and gay men. In 2011, the year 1313 Haunted Frat was released, he also made (as in, directed, wrote, and produced) five other 1313 films. In 2012, he made 8 1313 films alongside several other movies. DeCoteau is also openly gay.
I am uncertain what kinds of sources may have recommended this movie to James.
Throughout the 20th century and early into the 21st, gayness has remained coded in horror movies, with some minor, very nice exceptions. Jesse from A Nightmare on Elm Street isn't gay, but he's gay. The boys from The Lost Boys and The Covenant aren't gay, but they're gay. Actual gay characters did show up in some movies, like David in The Bride of Chucky, Luis in American Psycho, and Tom in Scream 3 and Robbie in Scream 4, but they were all supporting characters with no real arc and not a whole lot to do in the story. Like every other genre in Hollywood, the LGBT community has mostly been left out of horror movies. Unless we're in a doomed love affair, a la Brokeback Mountain, or doomed to die in general, like in Milk or Boys Don't Cry, LGBT characters don't get a whole lot of attention. Considering how niche the horror genre is, it's kind of amazing that we've gotten as much mainstream attention as we have, even when it's as coded as it is. It's usually pretty hidden, but if we look hard enough, we can find ourselves in these movies. Sometimes, we don't have to look that hard at all. But there is one instance in which Hollywood has been more than happy to portray the LGBT community in both horror and mainstream movies. It's not a new trend; in fact, it's been around long before the gay-rights movement brought us into public light. We can always be the main draw for a movie if we're the killer.
Tom Prinze in Scream 3 is not gay. The original script has a scene where he asks out a female character and then a male character (both reject him), but the scene was not in the actual movie and may or may not have been filmed. In Scream 4, Robbie Mercer isn't gay either. While discussing horror movie tropes with friends, it's said that the only way to be safe in a horror movie is to be gay; later, as the killer threatens him, Robbie desperately claims that he's gay, "if it helps." (It does not help.) The implication is that Robbie is lying in order to avoid being murdered.
Male news anchor: James Miller will serve 10 years’ probation after killing his neighbor in East Austin.
[Cut]
Female news anchor: The defense argued Miller stabbed his neighbor when Spencer allegedly came on to him. The prosecution argued blood evidence didn't match Miller's story.
[Cut]
Female news anchor: The jury agreed with the defense’s stance that he serves no threat to the community. Male news anchor: Miller's defense is also known as the gay panic defense, and while it's a rare defense, it is legal in most states.
Original clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrfMbu-VTmU James' version has a weird filter over it as well as several cuts, may be from another uploader.
Additionally, the cuts makes it seem like Miller only received the probation (from a jury recommendation). According to the full video, the judge added six months in prison, community service, fines, and additional restrictions on the first year of probation.
The gay panic defense is a legal tactic used by people who have usually been accused of murder. The defendant accuses the victim of being gay and having approached them sexually. They claim that they find the same-sex advances so offensive and frightening that it brings on a psychotic state characterized by unusual violence.
The gay panic defense[1] is a legal defense, usually against charges of assault or murder. A defendant using the defense claims they acted in a state of violent temporary insanity because of unwanted homosexual advances from another individual.[2] The defendant alleges to find the same-sex sexual advances so offensive and frightening that it brings on a psychotic state characterized by unusual violence.
The first known use of this defense was in 1954, when a flight attendant named William Simpson was murdered by two men, Charles Lawrence and Richard Killen, in Miami, Florida. The two men had been posing as hitchhikers and robbing people who picked them up. They'd been doing this for months. But instead of robbing Simpson, they realized that he was gay and murdered him. The two men were convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder after Simpson was characterized as a pervert during the trial. The gay panic defense has been used to successfully limit the sentences of or altogether acquit murderers of LGBT people in America ever since. Gay panic: because there is nothing scarier than a queer person. And for a long time, Hollywood agreed.
In August 1954, William T. Simpson, a 27 year old air steward for Eastern Air Lines, was murdered by Charles W. Lawrence and Lewis Richard Killen in a "lovers' lane" area of North Miami, Florida. For months, Lawrence had been posing as a hitchhiker on Biscayne Boulevard; after he was picked up, Killen would trail the car in a green Chevrolet and rob the driver who had picked up Lawrence. During the course of the investigation, Milt Sosin, a reporter for The Miami News, wrote that Lawrence and Killen had chosen the area deliberately to target homosexual victims. Lawrence confessed to shooting Simpson while "resisting his advances" and stated that "Simpson started to get nervous ... I didn't mean to shoot him. I mean[t] to fire through the windshield and frighten him and keep him there. I must have hit him."[33] Lawrence and Killen were convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder, possibly due to negative local press coverage of homosexuality and the characterization of Simpson as "a pervert" during the trial.[34]
The Wikipedia article indicates that Lawrence and Killen targeted gay men for their robberies, so it’s unlikely “they realized that [Simpson] was gay” only after the attack started.
Members of the LGBTQ community have been used as villains by Hollywood since before film had sound. If I tried to dive into every movie with a gay, bi, lesbian, or transgender villain, this video would never get finished, so I'm going to focus on a few prominent films that really grabbed the public's attention, starting in 1948 with Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. Adapted from the play of the same name, which itself was based on the true story of Leopold and Loeb, a gay couple who, in 1924, murdered a 14-year-old boy just to see if they could get away with it. Spoiler alert: they don't. Rope follows Brandon and Phillip, two college students who murder one of their classmates as an intellectual exercise. They want to prove their superiority over the common man by committing the perfect murder. The sexual tension between Brandon and Phillip is obvious to anyone with functioning eyes and ears.
Two brilliant young aesthetes, Brandon Shaw (Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Granger), strangle to death their former classmate from Harvard University, David Kentley (Dick Hogan), in their Manhattan penthouse apartment. They commit the crime as an intellectual exercise; they want to prove their superiority by committing the "perfect murder".
Phillip: Brandon, how did you feel during it?
Brandon: I don’t know. Really, I don’t remember feeling very much anything until his body went limp and I knew it was over, and then then I felt tremendously exhilarated. How did you feel?
Hitchcock, in fact, wanted to see how far he could push the American rating system with the film. The couple's interaction is so intense at times that it’s been compared to watching a sex scene. To maintain that, Hitchcock actually shot the film so that it appears to be one long 80-minute take. He did this so that once the film was put before the Hays Code, the then ratings board, they wouldn't be able to really force him to edit any of the movie out, sexual tension or not, without destroying the artistic value of the film. It's a pretty clever move, really.
Jimmy Stewart plays Rupert in the movie, the couple’s professor, and joins them for a dinner party, the table of which has been set over a chest containing their victim's body. It's alluded to several times in the film that he is more than just their professor and that he has had a sexual relationship with one, if not both, of our murderers.
Rope is one of Hitchcock's least successful films at the box office, its financial failure being attributed to the gay undertones. It also perpetuated two damaging stereotypes of gay men: that of the dangerous, if not psychotic, homosexual and that of the gay man who thinks he's better than everyone else, the superior. Brandon and Phillip’s assumption that they could get away with murder, even with the victim’s corpse in the same room as a dinner party, shows their belief that homosexuals are superior to heterosexuals. This was a belief amongst straight people at the time. It was a sort of, “Ooh, those gays think they're better than us!” It was especially prevalent in England. I guess they were still sore over the whole Oscar Wilde thing. Rope wouldn't be the last time Hitchcock dealt with the LGBT community, though. He did so again in possibly his most famous film.
This is false. I can find no source corroborating this claim.
The Wikipedia article notes that Hitchcock did utilize long shots of up to ten minutes and disguised some of the cuts by panning/tracking so that an object would block the entire screen. However, since a reel of film only lasts twenty minutes, the cuts between film reels were deliberately not disguised and Hitchcock would change to a different camera setup. Therefore, the film appears to be five long takes, each 15-20 minutes each, and the last one about 5 minutes.
It was the beginning of the 1960s. Following a decade of pure Americana suburbs, white picket fences, and I Love Lucy, a time where every white man had a job, women cooked dinner, and even married couples couldn't be shown sleeping in the same bed together on TV. A clean, proper image was paramount, with men in suits and women dressed smartly in skirts and blouses, hair coiffed, pearls at the neck.
Before examining the plot, performances, and technical aspects of Psycho, it is important to frame the film in the cultural context of the day. The 1950s is generally regarded as representing the height of achieving the American ideal with an emphasis on conformity.10 After the Great Depression and World War II, the 1950s became an era of prosperity, and middle-class America emerged and thrived as the market became flooded with goods. There were enough jobs to support the growing consumer appetite, and television brought the idealized image of the American family into many homes as Ozzie and Harriet and other shows demonstrated the pleasures of family life. In keeping with enduring Victorian values, sexuality was not discussed. Society, including public schooling, emphasized traditional masculine and feminine roles with men being the family breadwinners and women, even if they worked, being expected to keep their place in the home. Media at the time did not explore alternative sexualities, and even heterosexual married couples were not portrayed as acting sexually. For example, despite being married, Lucy and Desi Arnaz had separate beds on the I Love Lucy show, and we never see Ozzie and Harriet or June and Ward Cleaver in the bedroom at all. Sex was off limits except for underground and back-alley publications of “girly” magazines and pulp fiction novels. A clean, proper image became paramount, with men in suits and women dressed smartly in skirts and blouses, hair coiffed and pearls at the neck. Diversity was not embraced, as homogeneity was viewed as making society stronger.11 There were certainly rebels who challenged the zeitgeist of repression and conformity, from Beat novelists like Jack Kerouac to provocative rock and rollers like Elvis Presley. However, these and other such figures were seen as deviant and their work viewed as contributions to the “corruption” that led to 1960s counterculture.
The horrors of World War 2 and the upheaval of the 1960s and 70s seemed a world away in either direction. And into this period of safe white bread suburban heteronormativity came Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The film tells the story of Marion Crane, a secretary that absconds with $40,000 from her employer, her stay at the secluded Bates Motel, and the aftermath.
Psycho is famous for two things: killing its main character halfway through the movie, and the most memorable shower scene this side of the X rating. But Marion Crane isn't the character that people walk away from Psycho talking about. It’s Norman Bates, the manager of the Bates Motel, and his extremely unhealthy relationship with his mother. “Well, a boy's best friend is his mother.”
Core to the theme of Psycho is that a seemingly normal person can harbor many secrets. Marion's unhappiness with her life, Norman's deeply disturbed nature: both are well hidden from the outside world until they're not.
Central to the plot of Psycho is the idea that an ordinary person can harbor many secrets, making his or her appearance seem theatrical. Hall13 refers to Butler’s concept of identity as performance and, while Hitchcock predates Butler, this notion is very evident in how he directed the development of the central Bloch/Stefano characters in Psycho. Even as the film ends and the murderer is exposed, private conversations within his/her mind conceal what appears to be a disturbed but calm “victim” of faulty psychological development. The opening montage sets the scene for the dark things that take place inside ordinary towns and inside the minds of ordinary people.
Marion meets Norman when escaping from her boring, unhappy life. A thin but attractive man, Norman is courteous and kind to Marion as he checks her into the motel, although he shows some odd tendencies, such as his connection with his domineering mother.
Norman spends most of the film as a sympathetic figure, due mostly to his portrayal by Anthony Perkins, himself a gay actor. Hitchcock was actually aware of Perkins’ homosexuality when he cast him as Norman Bates. Although he wasn't out because it was the 60s, it was well-known around Hollywood, or at least rumored, that Perkins had dated Tab Hunter, a 1950s heartthrob.
So, when it's revealed at the end of the movie that Norman is not only the killer but also has multiple personalities, the other personality being that of his now-revealed-to-be-dead mother, it was a shock to audiences. And although it's more than obvious that Norman is a madman, many people walked away from Psycho looking at Norman as an example of that horrifying group of people they hear about in the cities: those homosexuals and transvestites. A fear that Hollywood spent the next two decades perpetuating with movies like The Detective, Vanishing Point, Freebie in the Beam, and Dressed to Kill.
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is a thin but attractive figure who is courteous and kind as he assists Marion with an overdue break from her trip. We discover that he lives with his mother in an ominously large Victorian mansion and that he spends his time caring for the motel that has become all but deserted due to the opening of a new highway. Norman invites Marion to the house to eat, and as she is settling into her room, she hears what seems to be a confrontation between Norman and his mother at the house. Mother is lambasting Norman for inviting a girl into the house and accuses him of violating sexual mores by doing so. In a few moments, Norman appears with a tray of sandwiches, visibly shaken from the run-in with Mother. Marion follows him into the motel’s parlor and, sitting among a sinister collection of stuffed raptors, offers an empathetic ear. It is here in the shadows that we and the birds of prey bear witness to a conversation about internal psychological turmoil, with Marion realizing that she has made a mistake, announcing her return to Phoenix to right her wrong. Norman, however, lets us know that he has been developmentally derailed and that he feels trapped and angry. He says, “We’re all in our private traps. Clamped in them. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it we never budge an inch.” Reading queerly, Norman is making a statement about the impact of cultural expectations on identity. More particularly, he is expressing what Sullivan15 refers to when discussing Cohen’s observation that multiple systems of oppression collide to, “regulate the lives of most people.”16 Norman’s life has been regulated. He is trapped (like the stuffed birds in the parlor) in a world where he appears to have freedom; however, because of oppressive systems including his own self-regulation, he is anything but free.
[The information about Perkins] is mentioned in the Bright Lights article, but the phrasing is different enough that I hesitate to call it plagiarism.
But Hollywood's fearmongering of the LGBT community would soon turn deadly with the 1980 release of Cruising. In the sweltering heat of a New York summer, severed body parts of murdered gay men are appearing in the Hudson River. Because of his resemblance to the victims, the NYPD puts Officer Steve Burns, played by Al Pacino, on the case. So, Al Pacino moves to the gay area of town, goes to a few leather bars, makes friends with a gay guy, and spends most of the movie ignoring his wife while hunting down the mystery killer, who spends the movie killing gay men. Eventually, it's revealed that the killer is himself a gay man with schizophrenia. He's arrested, but then the gay guy Al Pacino had become friends with turns up dead, and the movie ends with a not-so-subtle hint that Al Pacino may have been the killer all along.
In New York City during the middle of a hot summer, body parts of men are showing up in the Hudson River. The police suspect it to be the work of a serial killer who is picking up homosexual men at West Village bars like the Eagle's Nest, the Ramrod, and the Cock Pit, then taking them to cheap rooming houses or motels, tying them up and stabbing them to death.
Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who resembles the victims' dark-haired, slim figure image, is sent deep undercover by Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) into the urban world of gay S&M and leather bars in the Meatpacking District in order to track down the killer. He rents an apartment in the area and befriends a neighbor, Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), a struggling young gay playwright who does tech support to pay the bills. Burns's undercover work takes a toll on his relationship with his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen), due to both his refusal to tell her the details of his current assignment and Burns' developing friendship with Ted, who himself is having relationship problems with his jealous and overbearing dancer boyfriend Gregory (James Remar).
Nancy is Steve Burns' girlfriend, not his wife.
Cruising was not well-received by gay audiences. Even while it was being filmed, there were protests following the production. The protests were initially started by Arthur Bell, a gay journalist who wrote a series of articles on which the film was actually based. Protesters would play loud music near the production, let off air horns, and chant, disrupting the audio recording. They'd also point large mirrors down on the production from the top of buildings in order to mess with the lighting of outdoor shots.
Throughout the summer of 1979, members of New York's gay community protested against the production of the film. Protests started at the urging of gay journalist Arthur Bell, the writer whose series of articles on unsolved murders of gay men inspired the film.[11] Gay people were urged to disrupt filming, and gay-owned businesses to bar the filmmakers from their premises. People attempted to interfere with shooting by pointing mirrors from rooftops to ruin lighting for scenes, blasting whistles and air horns near locations, and playing loud music. One thousand protesters marched through the East Village demanding the city withdraw support for the film.[12] As a result of interference, the movie's audio largely was overdubbed in order to remove the noise caused by off-camera protesters.[13]
Once production wrapped, the MPAA saddled the film with an NC-17 rating, forcing director William Friedkin, who also directed 1970s’ very gay The Boys in the Band, to cut 40 minutes from the film in order to secure an R rating.
The Motion Picture Association of America originally gave Cruising an X rating. Friedkin claims he took the film before the MPAA board "50 times" at a cost of $50,000 and deleted 40 minutes of footage from the original cut before he secured an R rating.[3] The deleted footage, according to Friedkin, consisted entirely of footage from the clubs in which portions of the film were shot and consisted of "[a]bsolutely graphic sexuality...that material showed the most graphic homosexuality with Pacino watching, and with the intimation that he may have been participating."[4] In some discussions, Friedkin claims that the missing 40 minutes had no effect on the story or the characterizations,[3] but in others he states that the footage created "mysterious twists and turns (which [the film] no longer takes)", that the suspicion that Pacino's character may have himself become a killer was made more clear and that the missing footage simultaneously made the film both more and less ambiguous. When Friedkin sought to restore the missing footage for the film's DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer had it. He believes that UA destroyed the footage.[3] Some obscured sexual activity remains visible in the film as released, and Friedkin intercut a few frames of gay pornography into the first scene in which a murder is depicted.
The X rating was used by the MPAA from 1968 until 1990, and is essentially equivalent to today's NC-17, indicating that the film is only suitable for adults.
Upon release, the LGBT community continued to protest the film, many claiming that its portrayal of the gay community as a sex-crazed group of sodomites would destroy any good will that the community had developed, not to mention the gay killer, which was playing into the already developed fear of the LGBT community.
Then, in April of 1980, two months after the release of the film, one of the bars featured in the movie was attacked. A lone gunman armed with a submachine gun entered the bar and emptied two clips into the crowd before being stopped. Twelve people were injured, and two lost their lives. Throughout the summer of 1980, there were several attacks on gay men in the United States, with the attackers all pointing out that they had seen Cruising and that it inspired them.
According to a 2013 book by film professor R. Hart Kylo-Patrick,[28] "Two months after the film's release, a bar prominently displayed in the movie came under attack by a man with a sub-machine gun, killing two patrons and wounding 12 others. Friedkin refused to comment on the attack." A 2016 article in The New York Times identifies the culprit of this shooting as Ronald K. Crumpley, formerly a New York City Transit Police officer.[29] He first shot two people outside a delicatessen with an Uzi, then walked a few blocks where he shot into a group of men standing outside The Ramrod, a gay bar. In total he shot right persons, two of whom died. Crumpley was said to have stated to police after his arrest: “I’ll kill them all — the gays — they ruin everything." He was found "not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect" and spent the rest of his life at a psychiatric hospital, dying in at the age of 73 in 2013. The New York Times article from 2016 does not mention Cruising or Friedkin.
After Cruising failed to recoup its budget at the box office and the toxic reaction toward the film, Hollywood started to reduce the amount of gay villains in movies, but transgender characters were still open for exploitation. 1983's Sleepaway Camp, one of a dozen or so Friday the 13th rip-offs, opened on two children, Angela and Peter, boating on a lake with their father and his boyfriend. Okay, cool. But there's an accident, and one of the children dies. Eight years later, we find out that Peter was the child who died, and Angela, now being raised by her Aunt Martha, has become extremely introverted. She, along with some relatives, go to the camp near the lake where the accident occurred, and, in Friday the 13th rip-off style, people start turning up dead. But the big twist in the end isn't that it was Jason's mom killing people all along. Instead, we find out that Peter didn't die in the accident. It was actually Angela who died, and once their Aunt Martha got custody from their gay dad, she began raising Peter as Angela. Why?
[Aunt Martha speaks to a young child in a light blue polo shirt with bandages covering their head - Peter, or "Angela". The child looks at the ground as Aunt Martha talks and the camera moves in an arc, circling her.]
Aunt Martha: You see, I always wanted a little girl. But, of course, when my husband left — oh, well, that’s all water under the bridge, as I always say. Water under the bridge. But it certainly will be a nice little surprise when Richie comes home to find a little girl in the house. Yes, I've always dreamed of a little girl just like you. I mean, we already have a boy, so another one simply would not do. Oh, no, absolutely not.
[Text on screen: “Someone’s CRAZY.”]
So, is Angela/Peter transgender? No. The character is disturbed and suffers from a particularly traumatic case of PTSD, but they're not transgender, though audiences took Angela/Peter as a transgender character, which further fed into the public assumption that transgender people were sick, depraved, and likely homicidal, a fear that would reach a breaking point in 1991.
Released on Valentine's Day, Silence of the Lambs, adapted from the novel by Thomas Harris, tells the story of Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee who finds herself in the middle of the biggest manhunt in the country. There's a man killing and skinning women, a man the press has started calling Buffalo Bill. Clarice enlists the help of famed psychiatrist and infamous murderer Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter to help her track down Buffalo Bill, who was a former patient of his before Hannibal was locked up. Clarice tracks down the psychotic killer, rescues his final victim, and kills him in self-defense.
[Clip: “We interrupt this program to bring you a special report.”]
Silence of the Lambs is actually the first movie to be labeled a psychological thriller. It was a horror movie when it first came out and was even called that by the director, but a year later, when it got the Best Picture nomination at the Oscars and then eventually won, the Academy and members of the Academy started calling it a psychological thriller instead of a horror movie because they didn't like the idea of the Academy's biggest award, Best Picture, going to a horror movie. And so, the term “psychological thriller” was born.
[Clip: “We now return to your regularly scheduled program.”]
This is false. The Wikipedia article for Rope quotes a contemporaneous review that calls the film a psychological thriller.
A copy of the contemporaneous review of Rope, from Harrison's Reports, can be found here, where the film is described as "an exceptionally fine psychological thriller." Rope was released in 1948, over 40 years before Silence of the Lambs 1991 release. The first use of the term "psychological thriller" that I could find was in a magazine published in 1945, describing a novel called "Crying at the Lock." The term continued to be used throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s in order to describe plays, novels, and films, well before The Silence of the Lambs.
The Silence of the Lambs is indeed, according to Wikipedia, "the first (and so far only) Best Picture winner widely considered to be a horror film, and only the third such film to be nominated in the category, after The Exorcist (1973) and Jaws (1975)."
In both the novel and film, Buffalo Bill, whose real name is Jame Gumb, is portrayed as something close to a transgender person, at least on the surface. He appears to want to be a woman, creating a bodysuit out of the flesh of his victims, but as it’s stated in both the film and book, he is not transgender. Hannibal Lecter says,
Hannibal: Billy is not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be. He's tried to be a lot of things, I expect.
Gumb is certainly a deranged character and is, in the very least, bisexual, having been in a relationship with one of Hannibal's male patients as well as women in the past, but his identity as a transgender character is far more questionable. He has a self-loathing that is well beyond anything typical. His own self-hatred drives him to want to be something else, anything else, than what he actually is. Although he's likely more gay than bisexual, he has an obsession with women stemming from his mother abandoning him as a child. He would eventually find out that she was an alcoholic prostitute but went on to create a beauty queen image of his mother in his head, the perfect woman, a woman that anyone would want to be, including him. Buffalo Bill was not a transgender individual but, as Lecter said, he wanted to be. He applied for gender reassignment surgery at multiple hospitals but was universally declined because of his mental state. Despite what Republicans think, you can't just get a sex change. There's a massive amount of psychological testing before doctors will move forward with the procedure, especially in the case of male-to-female gender confirmation. So, when Bill was denied this procedure, he decided to make himself into a woman any way he could.
Transgender men have to go through just as much psychological testing as transgender women in order to receive gender affirming care.
There was massive backlash against the film upon release, as the LGBT community accused the movie of both transphobia and homophobia. The director, Jonathan Demme, did his best to defend the film, but most people still look at it as a piece of overtly anti-LGBT cinema. Although it was stated very clearly that from a psychological perspective, Buffalo Bill is not a transgender person, it's still a thorny situation. Bill's gender identity is only commented on by cisgender people in the book and film, and so cisgender people are in essence deciding whether or not a person is transgender. Trans activists argued that if Buffalo Bill thinks he is transgender, then he is, and it's not the place of the cisgender characters to decide. Which would mean that Bill is a terrible representation of transgender women, who, for the most part, are very passive and nonviolent. In fact, trans women are infinitely more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than the perpetrator of one, and therefore, the argument that Silence of the Lambs is a transphobic film holds some weight.
In addition to crazed killers, Silence of the Lambs portrays transgender women as imposters. After analyzing the Buffalo Bill case files, Hannibal Lecter muses, “Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual, but his pathology is a thousand times more savage and more terrifying.” This quote enforces the idea that other people can determine a person’s gender identity. Although Jame Gumb was a ruthless murderer who skinned people alive, if she identified as a woman, she was a woman. If a person thinks they are transgender, they are. In real life, transgender people’s identities are often scrutinized by cisgender people. There is a fascination with the genitals of transgender people, based upon the erroneous idea that one’s sexual organs determine gender. In a recent interview with Orange is the New Black actress Laverne Cox and RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Carmen Carrera, Katie Couric asked Carrera, “Your private parts are different now, aren’t they?” This display of cisgender privilege (a cisgender actress would never be asked about her genitals) threatened to derail an otherwise constructive discussion about gender. Ultimately, the condition of Carrera’s genitalia bears no relation to her womanhood.
[Trans women are very passive and nonviolent] is a claim Clarice Starling makes in the movie, not one supported by evidence.
Regarding this type of transgender character in fiction, LGBT activist Savannah Stobbs said, “Transgender women are often represented as psychotic killers as a lazy method of responding to mainstream society's fear of gender nonconforming people. This popular trope in film reinforces the idea that being transgender is unnatural and perverted, and pathologizes gender fluidity."
But on the other hand, with Buffalo Bill being so obviously insane, can his own feelings about his gender identity be valid? He is detached from reality, and in the book, it is stated quite clearly that even if he had gotten the gender confirmation surgery, he would have eventually found a different reason to at least harm people, if not outright kill them, because he is psychotic, unhinged. His gender identity has nothing to do with that.
Jame Gumb’s gender identity is handled in a number of very problematic ways. First, her character is a classic example of the killer transgender trope, also famously present in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Transgender women are often represented as psychotic killers as a lazy method of responding to mainstream society’s fear of gender nonconforming people. This popular trope in film reinforces the idea that being transgender is unnatural and perverted, and pathologizes gender fluidity. It’s a stowaway on the Hollywood global distribution machine, reaching into countless theaters and homes around the world and embedding transphobia in the minds of a wide array of viewers.
Transgender people are frequently demeaned, misgendered, and denied healthcare because they are regarded as "insane." Some transphobes argue that the very act of identifying as a different gender makes one insane. Others say that people with mental illness cannot possibly make such a major decision for themselves. Autistic people especially are targeted in this manner. Transgender people who are in prison, at least in the United States, are also often denied gender affirming healthcare, not to mention safe accomodations.
In the book, it is noted by a specialist who saw Bill about the gender confirmation surgery that he did not present any of the characteristics of a transgender woman, furthering the argument, in the fiction at least, that he is not transgender. And of course, Buffalo Bill is not a real person. He is a character created by an author and then interpreted by filmmakers. Thomas Harris did not write a transgender character but an extremely psychologically disturbed one, a character with a horrifying childhood, lifelong emotional instability, and violent tendencies. A psychopathic character that hates himself so much that he's willing to torture, kill, and fillet women to be someone else. There could be a debate to be had whether or not Buffalo Bill is a transgender character, but the most important thing might be how his character was perceived by audiences, and many audiences did see him as a transgender character. Buffalo Bill’s presence can still be felt today in bathroom laws across the United States and in the fearmongering of right-wing conservatives. Buffalo Bill has even been mentioned by Fox News commentators when trying to defend the discriminatory bathroom laws, with some Republicans even nicknaming North Carolina's bathroom law HB 2 “the Buffalo Bill.” So, even though Thomas Harris and Jonathan Demme did not intend for Bill to be a trans character, he is now ingrained in the public consciousness as the worst possible example of the transgender community. A highly unrealistic one.
I can find no contemporaneous evidence of this nickname. This claim is likely false.
LGBT villains would remain a staple in Hollywood films for years to come. The bisexual Catherine Tramell in 1992’s Basic Instinct drew the ire of lesbian and bisexual groups especially, pointing out how bisexuals had minimal, if any, representation in mainstream media and how the biggest bisexual character was a murderous, narcissistic psychopath. But where Cruising, which did portray some LGBT characters as human and sympathetic, failed at the box office, Basic Instinct portrayed a murderous bisexual woman and was box office gold, taking in three hundred and fifty million dollars in 1992. That's over half a billion dollars when you adjust it for inflation. Hollywood brought out the bisexual villains several more times in the 1990s, most notably in The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1999, but none of them had quite as much success as Basic Instinct.
Cruising performed "moderately" at the box office according to Wikipedia; it had a budget of $11 million and a box office of $19.8 million.
So, as you can see, the LGBT community has been fodder for Hollywood's villain machine for almost a century. We can be portrayed as the terrifying other, the corrupted city dwellers that the suburbanites have fled from. But Hollywood itself has strayed away from portraying gay characters as villains in more recent years. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Buffalo Bill in a cinema near you in 2018. In fact, there's another remake of Psycho in the works, and they've already said that Norman will not be dressing as his mother in this version. So, things have gotten better. Mainstream media no longer portrays us as monsters. Teenage girls and their moms were the biggest audience for this year's Love, Simon. But with GLAAD’s 2018 survey of LGBT representation in cinema showing that our percentage of representation on the big screen is lower now than it has been in over a decade, maybe we need to ask the question, is no representation better than bad representation?
I can’t find any evidence of this movie existing. The only reference I can find to a 2018 Psycho remake is Psycho (2018) | Fanon Wiki | Fandom, which is explicitly a fan idea for a remake. The TV show “Bates Motel” did have Norman act as his mother without switching clothes, but that series ended in 2017.
[Love, Simon]'s audience on opening weekend was 58% females and 59% under 25 ('Black Panther' Keeps Box Office Treasure From Tomb Raider (deadline.com)). I’m not sure how the math works out for “teenage girls and their moms” being the biggest demographics.
The cited survey on film representation is GLAAD's 2018 Studio Responsibility Index. However, this survey only looks at releases from the seven major film studios (20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and Warner Brothers), not all films from that year.
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