LGBTQ MONTH IN HORROR: A VIEW FROM THE ENTRAILS

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.