Perhaps because I spent my formative years reading books by Clive Barker and Poppy Z Brite, I have always felt that LGBTQ has a place in horror. That said the community isn’t always represented fairly. The close association between trans women and mentally unstable serial killers is extremely problematic, but this has been discussed on other articles such as “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Trans Woman” by Mey and will not be discussed here.
 
Sapphic love
 
Vampire lore contained scenes of same sex yearning that spoke strongly to me as a bisexual teenage girl. Not only Carmilla (my namesake) but frequently the sexualities of Hammer Horror’s starlets seemed far more liberated than those found in other genres of the popular media. In retrospect it’s easy to see that vampiric lesbians represented a fear of women’s liberation and “perverts” who would kill their children, but thankfully I missed that fearful subtext at the time and saw the sensual beauty instead. I understood that this was a way other people felt, not just me. That’s the power of representation, even when it isn’t perfect.
 
Representation and Demonisation
 
So, it doesn’t surprise me that LGBTQ people are drawn to horror in spite of the all too frequent negative representation they receive there. At least we are represented. Our status as fellow human beings who actually exist and share space in the world is acknowledged even if we are, more often than not, the antagonists. After all the baddies in horror are more exciting than the heroes. Another argument might be made that as someone whose sexuality is demonised in heteronormative culture it is easier to identify with demons than the humans who fear them.
 
Other voices
 
In my own work I write about a spectrum of gender and sexuality. I use horror to consider the personal struggles for freedom in an intolerant world. Horror allows us to sympathise with a myriad of characters, emotions and motivations. It gives voice to those who do not comfortably fit in the mainstream world. It offers narratives which include more perspectives than any other genre with the exception of fantasy and often, at least for me, horror and fantasy are strongest when linked.
 
Depending on how deeply you look, you can find LGBTQ subtext throughout horror and sometimes it is positive. It can be about overcoming bullies, breaking away from toxic families, facing past or present trauma, and standing out from the crowd. While these themes deal with what it is to be human they can feel all the more poignant to someone made constantly aware of their difference from the norm. Horror also teaches us that we have a responsibility to survive, and perhaps that is the most important message that we can take away.
 

 
 
Carmilla Voiez is a proudly bisexual and mildly autistic introvert who finds writing much easier than verbal communication. A life long Goth, living with two kids, two cats and a poet by the sea.
She is passionate about horror, the alt scene, intersectional feminism, art, nature and animals. When not writing, she gets paid to hang out in a stately home and entertain tourists.

Carmilla grew up on a varied diet of horror. Her earliest influences as a teenage reader were Graham Masterton, Brian Lumley and Clive Barker mixed with the romance of Hammer Horror and the visceral violence of the first wave of video nasties. Fascinated by the Goth aesthetic and enchanted by threnodies of eighties Goth and post-punk music she evolved into the creature of darkness we find today.

Her books are both extraordinarily personal and universally challenging. As Jef Withonef of Houston Press once said - "You do not read her books, you survive them."
 
Carmilla’s bibliography includes Starblood (Vamptasy Publishing, Dec 2018), Starblood the graphic novel, Psychonaut the graphic novel, The Ballerina and the Revolutionary, Broken Mirror and Other Morbid Tales. Her work has been included in Zombie Punks Fuck Off (Clash Books), Slice Girls (Stitched Smile), and Another Beautiful Nightmare (Vamptasy).

For more information and to follow Carmilla on Social Media please follow these links 

 www.carmillavoiez.com
https://www.facebook.com/Author.Carmilla.Voiez/
https://twitter.com/carmillavoiez
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/carmillav/starblood-the-graphic-novel/
https://www.quora.com/profile/Carmilla-Voiez#
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4893389.Carmilla_Voiez
https://www.amazon.com/Carmilla-Voiez/e/B00AMZKZ5I
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Carmilla-Voiez/e/B00AMZKZ5I/

As part of our LGBTQ+ Month in horror drive we have challenged a number of authors who identify as being straight to write a short story featuring an LGBTQ+ character or a story that tackles some of the issues of LGBTQ+ .  Today we welcome Gary McMahon with his story Without a Prayer.  

Story Notes:
 
This is a story about homophobia. About unreasonable, unarguable hate. I also hope it shows some nuance regarding the subject, illustrating that some people are driven by forms of hatred and prejudice that even they don’t understand – they are simply conditioned to hate what is different, and they buy into that mindset without even questioning it. Blind faith can be a bad thing, especially when it reinforces prejudices.


​Mike was washing the dishes when he heard someone knocking at the door. He glanced over his shoulder, towards the kitchen doorway, the hallway beyond, and Ken’s study, but there was no movement at that end of the house.
            The knocking came again, slightly more insistent, but not by much: just a hasty rapping of knuckles on wood.
            “Okay, okay…I’m coming.” He dried his hands on a tea towel and hurried out of the kitchen. Through the etched-glass panel on the front door, he could make out the shape of a man.
            Mike opened the door. The man who stood there was tall and thin; he was looking sideways, along the dirt road that eventually led into town, so Mike could examine his profile. Long nose, narrow face, short-cropped dark hair, a fashionable well-trimmed beard.
            “Hi.”
            The man turned to face him. “Hello. Are you Mike?”
            “Yes. Can I help you?”
            The man smiled, rummaged inside his long coat. Then the gun was in his hand and pointing at Mike.
            “What?”
            “Get back in the house.” The man was still smiling. “Now. Or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
            Mike backed away, his hands coming up in a weak defensive gesture.
            “Good boy.” The man stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him. “Now, where’s the other one?”
            Mike tried not to give anything away, but he felt his head twitch as he thought about Ken, in the study.
            “Call him out here. No panic in your voice. Just call to him.” He waved the gun about, as if to remind Mike that it was there. He didn’t need the prompt.
            “Ken.”
            No answer.
            Louder this time: “Ken, can you come out here?”
            A muffled response: “What is it?”
            “Just come here, please. I need you.” Never had those words been so true.
            The study door opened. Mike didn’t have the nerve to look behind him, but he imagined Ken stalking along the hallway towards the front of the house, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, his handsome face set in a mild frown.
            “What is…hello. What’s up?”
            The man took a single step to his right, ensuring that Ken saw the gun.
            Mike finally turned to face Ken, his shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry…I let him in.”
            Ken calmly took off his reading glasses, slipped them into the inside jacket of the old cardigan he wore when he was writing, and stared at the visitor. “What do you want?”
            The man smiled. “Now that’s the big question here, isn’t it? What do I want? Let’s all get comfortable and I might tell you.”
            They moved into the living room. There was nothing else to do, no way to object when the man with the gun was so thoroughly in charge.
            “Sit down,” said the man. “One on each side of the room, separate chairs.”
            Mike sat on the big armchair near the door; Ken walked slowly to the sofa beside the conservatory that looked out onto the garden. He sat down on the edge of the seat, perching there, his hands clenched into tight fists.
            “You look like you might be trouble,” said the man. “I’m not doing this to cause you pain, but it will hurt. It’s simply a way of cutting off your rebellion before it even comes.”
            He shot Ken in the left knee.
            Mike watched in fascinated horror as Ken’s knee popped in a little red explosion and he went down onto his side, clutching the damage. Screaming wordlessly.
            Mike wanted to stand but was too afraid to try. “Bastard!”
            The man shook his head. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. I took no pleasure from that, but it was necessary, to establish the ground rules.”
            Ken was still screaming, but at a reduced volume.
            “Leave us alone!” Mike wanted to go to his husband, but he was too afraid. He was always too afraid. Ken was the brave one, the tough guy, the one who always stood up tall. And now he had been neutralised as a source of any kind of fight-back.
            The man walked across the room and stood at the conservatory doors. He turned his head and looked out at the garden, taking in the scene. “You people have an eye for beauty, don’t you?”
            And in that moment, Ken knew why the man was here. He understood all of it, in detail.
            “Please,” he said, hating himself for begging. “Don’t kill us.”
            Ken had stopped screaming. Instead, he was sobbing quietly.
            Outside, the sky was darkening. The evening was coming on. The man turned back to face them, the gun held loosely in his hand. “Tend to your friend. Do you have bandages? A first aid kit?”
            “It’s in the kitchen.”
            “Get it. You have thirty seconds. If I hear you trying to escape, or make a phone call, I’ll kill him. You know I’m not lying.”
            Ken looked up. His eyes were empty. There wasn’t even fear in them; he was beyond that.
            Mike got up and went to the kitchen.
            When he came back, he cleaned and dressed Ken’s wound.
            “We’ll be okay,” said Ken, wincing. “We’ll get out of this. I promise.”
            Mike looked at his beautiful face, his soft lips. “Don’t promise things you can’t deliver.”
            “Hurry up,” said the man. “It’s getting dark.”
            Mike finished up and went back to his sofa. He tried to smile at Ken, but his mouth didn’t want to make that kind of shape. “We’re fine. We’re good,” he said.
            Ken nodded. The fear had returned to his eyes. That was a good sign; Ken was at his best when he was afraid. Fear made him strong. It enlarged him.
            The man walked to the centre of the room, and, surprisingly, sat down on the floor. He crossed his legs and placed the gun on one thigh, still holding it in a loose grip.
            “I have come here,” he said, because of the dream.
            “I know,” said Mike. “I’ve seen this on the news.”
            The man nodded. “I had the dream two nights ago. It showed me you and your…friend. It told me your names, where you lived. The voice in the dream told me I had to kill you, because what you are doing is wrong. It’s against God.”
            Ken laughed, but it was filled with pain. “Fucking hell, man. Can you even hear yourself?” he slammed his hand on the arm of the sofa. “Kill the faggots and find a route to heaven – is that it? Rid the world of the gay plague and then you can sit at the foot of Christ?”
            The man continued to look at Mike. “I really don’t want to do this, but I’ve seen what happens to the ones who ignore the dream. I’ve witnessed the mess they make.”
            Mike recalled YouTube footage of two people exploding into red spray on a train station platform. A woman whose body came apart like rotten fruit in a supermarket aisle. A fat man in a baggy suit who turned a bus windows crimson as he liquified on his way to work. Nobody knew why it was happening, but it had started six months ago, when a fifteen-year-old girl had detonated a home-made bomb in a Barcelona gay club.
            After that, nobody could stop talking about the dream, and what it told people to do.
            “I know,” he said. “We’ve seen it, too.”
            Ken sat up, taking a deep breath. “You stupid prick. It’s all bullshit. Nothing to do with a dream. There’s something else going on – something we don’t know about. It’s some kind of radical terrorist thing.”
            The man looked so infinitely sad; his eyes were filled with tears. “I’m afraid not. The dream is real. This is God’s work. He wants you all eradicated rom the earth. He wants the world cleansed of your evil. He has chosen random agents to fulfil his wishes, and I’m one of them.”
            “We aren’t evil,” said Mike.
            “I know,” said the man. “Neither am I.”
            It was full dark now; the conservatory windows had turned into black mirrors, reflecting the horror of the situation. Mike wished they’d stayed in the city, among the crowds, instead of running here to the country house Ken’s parents had left him when they died. They both thought they’d be safe here. Safe and sound.
            “Just let us go. Nobody will ever know. There aren’t any neighbours for miles. Who would even see?”
            “God would see,” said the man. “God would know.” His dark clothes were creased, as if he’d slept rough for a night or two as he made his way here. His big-knuckled hands were pale. The gun was as black as sin.
            “God doesn’t exist,” said Ken, trying to get up. “He’s a fiction. Stop this shit now. You can if you want to. Stop using religion as an excuse for your hatred.”
            The man began to stand but changed his mind and moved into a low crouch, sitting back on his haunches. “But God is real,” he said, sadly. “I know He is, because He made me into one of His angels. His glorious random angels.”
Slowly, he took off his coat. Still crouching, he unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off his lean, muscled frame. His skin was so white, and his torso hairless.
From the top of his smooth shoulder blades, two small wings unfurled. They were like the wings of a crow; lithe, grimy and black-feathered. Dust rose from the feathers and hung in the air as the wings flapped lazily, making a sound like softly clapping hands.
            “What the hell…” Ken tried again to stand, but his knee gave way under him and he fell off the sofa cushion, bracing his hands against the floor to attempt to push himself upright.
            “Do you see now?” said the man. “Do you understand?”
            Mike was unable to move. He sat there, staring in wonder at the man with the wings.
            “I am so, so sorry,” said the man, his wings moving stiffly. He pivoted, raised the gun, and shot Ken in the forehead. Blood spray splattered the wall behind him, creating an inscrutable pattern, and he slumped heavily to the floor.
            Mike slid off the sofa and fell to his knees. The air seemed to rumble as if from the approach of a train. His ears filled with pressure. Something was coming; something bigger than them all, a thing that was so much worse than all of this. Maybe it would be better if he wasn’t here to meet it when whatever it was arrived…
He raised his shaking hands and clasped them together in a godless prayer. “You don’t want to do this,” he said. “I can tell you don’t.”
            The man pursed his lips, shook his head.
            “I know,” he said, quietly. “But I have to.”
            Mike felt nothing as the bullet entered his skull, passed through his brain, and shut off the lights forever. He knew nothing as his life slipped away. He thought nothing as even the darkness vanished from view.
 
/end
30th Nov 2018

How do we even begin? That has been the problem vexing and frustrating me since Jim McLeod first came to me with the idea of inspiring a discussion of LGBTQ themes in horror media. Where do we begin? And how do we avoid falling into typical traps (take that however you wish) that have claimed so many of those that have trodden these paths before?

The only way of having this discussion and making it worthwhile is by exploding it from the inside: being a gay man who has been in love with horror media in all of its forms since early childhood, I can't pretend any delusion of objectivity -or even equanimity- on either front: both are significant, powerfully emotive, interwoven facets of my self-definition, my imagination, my consciousness, my state of being. As such, any attempt to analyse them outside of subjectivity and personal resonance is doomed to failure.

Furthermore, it's far too easy to allow this discussion to descend into ruts so well-worn, they're practically malebolge at this point, and in all the ways the term implies (go read your Dante, people).

In the current climate, politically and tribally charged as it is, it's all too easy to slip into proscribed parameters of discussion, for contemplations of LGBTQ identity and operation to become exclusively politicised or socio-cultural screeds; discussions that are most certainly worth having, that are, in many respects, essential to our continued safety and survival, but which are also currently saturated, so bloated with proscription and rote and rhetoric, it's difficult to perceive anything beyond them.

Thus, this is my intention: to regard the matter from within, to sing to you from the guts of the beast, and, perhaps, to rip them open, facilitating a kind of strange and violent auto-Caesarian.

So, first of all, I am a gay man. That is how I identify, in general discussion, meaning that I am primarily attracted to other men, romantically, aesthetically and sexually (it's actually rather dull and pedestrian, when you get down to it). Second of all, material which is generally co-opted or categorised under the label of “horror” (a primarily market-driven reduction, but that's a discussion for another time) excites and arouses and inspires me perhaps more than any other. It is what I imagine, in moments of idle day-dreaming, when I close my eyes and allow my sub-conscious free reign, it is what I consume and devour with the most relish, what I adore and find myself stirred by.

To many, any interrelation between these two factors might seem incidental, contrived or entirely non-existent: what does identifying as this or that have to do with the material one consumes and produces?

Well, like almost everything relating to human beings and the complexities and contradictions that inform us, nothing and everything. It is a powerfully intricate, ambiguous, densely clotted and entangled matter, that, even if I can't unpick, I hope to shed some light upon through these articles.

First of all, does identifying as LGBTQ affect one's taste in horror, one's proclivity for it? Does it have some sincere significance for the kind of horror one consumes and/or produces?

I don't know. Not with any great certainty or clarity (if such things are even possible in this instance), but what I can tell you is what I perceive on a personal and anectdotal level:

What do I love as a gay man who adores horror, and does that differ markedly from what I would adore were I to identify as straight? Without the benefit of inter-dimensional scrying capabilities (occult, technological or otherwise), it's problematic to theorise. All I can tell you is that: there are certain concerns and preoccupations that are not specific or exclusive to being gay but which are innate it; issues and concerns that our straight counterparts likely don't experience in the same way or to the same degree. This, in turn, must have some effect on our states of mind, on the media and stories that resonate with us, but also the manner in which we perceive and interpret that input.

Whilst it might seem something of an anectdotal generalisation, one consistency I have come across amongst LGBTQ horror fans and creators is that they have more of an inclination towards the ambiguous than their straight counterparts: just as, traditionally, culturally pervasive narratives of gender and sex don't necessarily apply to us (though that factor has begun to erode with increasing acceptance of LGBTQ people as part of mainstream culture in certain areas), so too do we tend (though not universally) to refute the standard or proscribed narratives and traditions of the fiction we create and consume. There is a tendency for monsters to be romanticised in horror written by LGBTQ creators, for factors that are more traditionally marketed as entirely negative to be gateways to other conditions, for transgression to be a means of courting transcendence rather than punishment or reprisal.

This makes a great deal of sense when you consider that, traditionally, we have always been denied access to the states that traditional narratives proscribe: there is no place for us in those structures. Art and fiction are therefore arenas where we can deface and expose them, call their hyopcrises into question, turn them on their heads and, if we can't burrow our ways in, tear them down completely.

Likewise, the ideological and moral ambiguity that tends (again, not universally) to pervade LGBTQ horror, science fiction and fantasy is born from a pervasive desire to write our own place and purpose: to be self-authored in ways that, typically speaking, those who identify as straight don't have to be (having ready made meta-narratives as part and parcel of general culture).

Once again, I would emphasise that this is not exclusive to identifying as LGBTQ, and certainly not in horror fiction and media: any state or condition that forces one outside of mainstream cultural narratives tends to have a similar effect: it erodes the certainties that are marketed to us because we are forced into a position where we have to see them for the empty and hypocritical confections they actually are. There is a very dangerous argument inherent: that the state of denial, oppression, abuse and even violence that LGBTQ individuals traditionally face as part of culture also places us in positions of consideration and distance that are, generally speaking, denied to our straight counterparts, and this is as true in horror as it is anywhere else.

Clive Barker, arguably the most iconic and successful gay man in horror fiction, explores this factor explicitly in his work Sacrament, which, despite being written and published in the early 1990s, provides a structure of exploration (as opposed to debate or argument) is so far removed from what we still suffer under in mainstream venues and proscribed parameters as to make them seem entirely regressive:

Here, identifying as LGBTQ isn't reduced to the level of politics: it is elevated to its own metaphysics. Here, Barker celebrates the state of being lost, cast adrift, that so many of us experience and lament, whilst at the same time refusing to ignore its negative aspects:

There is suffering here aplenty, a gulf that exists between us and our forebears (which is an almost universal trait of being LGBTQ), that sense of being rudderless and without scope or direction in a world that demands, demands, demands we be simple, certain, almost caricature in our absolutism.

Barker dares to state that being rudderless, being removed from our parents, our societies, the structures and states they proscribe, can be as powerfully positive as it is negative: it allows us that state of self-authorship that straight men and women are often denied. Barker dares to suggest that there is a shamanistic metaphysics inherent to the condition (though, once again, not exclusive to it), that in turn feeds and informs how we perceive and interact with the world at large.

This simultaneous desire to break and leave the world yet to also be a part of it, to court a kind of acceptance from what consistently abuses us, is a problematic tension that can't but help inform our states of mind and imagination, the fantasies we create and chime with.

This factor is reflected regularly in the fiction of another prominent LGBTQ creator in horror circles: Billy Martin (AKA Poppy Z. Brite), whose work has similarly deviant and transgressive qualities to Barker's, offering similar refutations to proscribed narratives and states of being, but is far more ambiguous in the manner in which it markets them:

Whereas Barker preoccupies himself with blowing apart the parameters in our minds, with insisting to us that not only do we not require the states and structures we so often clamour for acceptance from in our political discourses, we can be more than they ever imagined, Martin takes a more intimate, Earthly view of matters, even in his fiction that involves fantastical or supernatural elements:

Lost Souls, the novel with which Martin made his name, is a rapacious, amoral, scintillatingly sensuous vampire romance (from a time long before the likes of Twilight reared its hideously sparkling head) in which lost and immortal youths find not definition, but exactly the opposite in a state of almost limitless excess, in which the sexuality of young gay men is married to the appetite and lack of stricture that the vampire enjoys, leading to a condition of ecstasy but also malaise, in which nothing means very much, nothing has weight or consequence.

This is as much a commentary from the entrails of LGBTQ sub-cultures as it is anything else: whilst not explicitly didactic or finger-wagging, Lost Souls does present a quietly cautionary parable in which the excesses that young, freshly awoken LGBTQ men (in particular) traditionally revel in can lead to a kind of spiritual malaise, a fomentation in which there is nothing to anchor the self, nothing to measure one's desires by or derive greater meaning from.

Again, these are peculiarly LGBTQ concerns expressed through the medium of what is traditionally labelled as horror fiction. Once again, we are presented with a scenario in which the “monsters” are the protagonists, in all of their amorality, violence, rampancy and excess.

This is not uncommon in LGBTQ fiction in general, let alone horror fiction: being so often cast as the unwelcome outsider, as the token “monster” by so many traditional systems, narratives and cultures (to the point that, in some instances, we are very much cast as the fairy tale demons from the woods), it's hardly surprising that so many of us embrace and explore that identity to its fullest, expressing it through the fiction we write, feeding it with the stories we consume.

Through the series that follows, I hope to explore this phenomenon more deeply and -hopefully- inspire discussion on the matter that transcends (or at least steps aside from) the more typical, familiar parameters that we've grown sick and tired of straining against.

So, until next time, I retire to the belly of the beast, hoping that, even if you can't join me there, perhaps you'll hear me singing from its bowels.