My experience of queerness in horror fiction began with a vampire’s victim.
I don’t actually recall the first time I read Carmilla, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella about a lonely lesbian vampire and the girl who falls in love with her. I remember being fourteen or fifteen, already having read the story, regarding it as a kind of validation I didn’t fully understand. Le Fanu tells the tale in the first person, narrated by the girl, Laura, which gives it an added air of intimacy. I was a lonely kid myself and spent a lot of time at the library. One day in 1983 or thereabouts, I picked up a collection of essays about horror fiction—I wish to God I could remember the author’s name—and began reading a piece on Carmilla. My eyes slammed to a stop on a sentence that referred to the story’s narrator as “he.”
Now, I didn’t know anything about misgendering or queer erasure. I just knew I felt a literal pain in my heart, a kind of dull stabbing. I may have made some kind of noise; memory wants me to add a librarian glancing at me, but that could be embellishment. I was too consumed by rage to care either way. Laura’s father refers to her several times as his daughter; Carmilla describes her as “‘a beautiful young lady, with golden hair and large blue eyes, and lips—your lips—you, as you are here.’” Her name is Laura, for Chrissake! But this now-nameless critic had apparently found it easier to ignore all that than to imagine that passages like, “Her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever,’” might be written by one female character about another.
Years later, I would realize that the critic was probably bothered by more than just the possibility of lesbianism. Le Fanu’s male characters are largely ineffective, and the action of the story is moved forward by the women due to their love for one another. At the time, I only knew I had found something rare and important, and this jackass was trying to take it away from me. I flipped to the biographical notes, already planning the letter I would write to shut the stupid SOB down, and was crushed to learn that he was dead.
As much as Carmilla meant to me, it wasn’t the story I truly wanted, because I wasn’t a lesbian. I didn’t have the vocabulary or the experience to say what I was. I knew I was supposed to be a girl, and didn’t yet know that was negotiable. I wasn’t good at what my peers considered girl stuff, but I wasn’t a tomboy either. My favorite movie was Cabaret. All I really knew was that I was some kind of queer. Though that word hadn’t yet been fully reclaimed, I liked it for its inclusiveness. I tried to convince myself that I was bisexual, but at heart I knew I wasn’t sexually attracted to women. The stories I was most drawn to were those of gay men. It doesn’t make any kind of logical sense that a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in the South should identify with an aging, drug-addicted New York City drag queen, but in Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel Dancer From the Dance, the drag queen character, Sutherland, tells his young protege, “We are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it.” I vowed that I wouldn’t live in despair because of what I was—but what was I?
Well, for one thing, I was a voracious reader, and I was becoming a writer. I don’t recall choosing to concentrate on horror fiction, but I can see now that I was zeroing in on it. As reading material, it clashed oddly with the gay-related stuff I’d been seeking out. Stephen King is still one of my favorite writers, but his early work could be rough on gay folks. The Shining’s Mr. Ullman is a “fat fairy.” A minor character in Firestarter is summarily dismissed as “a fucking faggot.” Gordon Lachance in “The Body” compares bad writing to “going faggot.” Even the gut-wrenching gay bashing scene in It just had to have the victim’s partner wearing satin pants and eyeshadow. While I was aware that characters’ viewpoints don’t necessarily align with the author’s, there did seem to be a fair bit of knee-jerk straight-man distaste in these portrayals. These days, King supports LGBTQ+ rights, but his early work required a certain amount of cognitive dissonance on my part.
King’s influence on modern horror fiction goes far beyond his own fiction. In his 1981 analysis of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, he discussed numerous other authors and provided a reading list of books he considered notable. I’d wager that at least seventy-five percent of today’s horror writers treated that list like a bible. I certainly did. It pointed me toward the work of Harlan Ellison, Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, and Michael McDowell, among others. Ellison was even harder on the gays than King, though later in life he became a staunch ally. Jackson’s work had undercurrents of lesbianism so subtle I wasn’t sure they were really there. Straub and Campbell both included gay characters in their work, but the characters often had terrifyingly difficult lives. Paul Kant in Straub’s If You Could See Me Now (1977) is harassed in his small hometown, his dog killed. Roy Craig in Campbell’s The Face That Must Die (1982) is murdered by a homophobic psychopath. Though McDowell was gay himself, his queer characters are sometimes discreet to the point of ambiguity, perhaps reflecting his experience growing up gay in 1950s Alabama. When it came to homosexuality in horror fiction, Carmilla was more explicit than most of what was being written in the 1980s.
Since my early teens, I had written mostly about male characters, and there were almost always undercurrents of sexual tension between them. I now feel that the mysteries and revelations of sex are at the heart of most of my work, sometimes evident, sometimes buried deep inside the piece like those candy hearts old Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls were supposed to have. Characters’ attraction to each other provides a great deal of my narrative tension and interest, whether it’s a couple falling in love or a pair of longtime partners. I find that if I let a piece of fiction get too sexy too early, the tension is ruined and the whole thing goes to hell. I’m not opposed to writing erotica, but I tend to lose interest unless there’s a story wrapped around it.
In my earliest published fiction, though, I didn’t dare to portray any explicitly gay relationships. I think I had some idea that it wouldn’t be allowed. The story that showed me otherwise was Clive Barker’s “In The Hills, The Cities,” published in volume 1 of his Books of Blood collections. The story’s protagonists, Judd and Mick, are a gay couple. They argue, they have careers, they make love. They do not engage in tortured introspection about their sexuality. While they do die in the story, their deaths have nothing to do with their sexual orientation. They are obviously the creations of someone who knows gay relationships and culture. “In The Hills, The Cities” is one of the finest stories in modern horror, but I didn’t realize that until many years later—I was just excited to read a horror story with characters like me. For that was how I thought of gay men: like me. I knew I wasn’t one and tried not to impose myself upon them, but I felt that I had been the victim of an oversight.
Not too long after reading the Books of Blood, I started what would become my first novel. I soon found that being circumspect about my characters’ sexuality wasn’t going to work anymore. What may be intriguingly ambiguous in a short story can come off as cutesy and coy in a longer work. I flung caution to the wind and began letting my characters have lots and lots of gay sex.
When the novel was published in 1992, one of the most frequent interview questions I got was, “Why all the homosexuality?” Since I appeared to be a feminine-presenting young woman in a straight relationship, I suppose the curiosity was understandable, but I didn’t understand why they harped on the point so much. Characters are people. Lots of people are gay. Gay characters shouldn’t be unusual. At that time, though, horror fiction hadn’t seen a lot of them, and the ones that did pop up tended to be evil and/or die horribly (or were already dead, as Anne Rice’s homoerotic vampires). I started answering the questions as best I could, saying I was a gay man who happened to have been born in a female body. It felt true to me and it seemed pretty straightforward at the time, but people seemed to think it was some sort of gimmick, so I mostly quit talking about it.
Today, someone would probably ask me if I was transgender, but trans people were still pretty invisible then. I didn’t (knowingly) have a trans friend until 1993. She gave me Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: A Game of You, with the wonderful trans character Wanda. I devoured it, never suspecting that twenty years later I would find myself defending it from accusations of transphobia. (This is an issue we’re facing now: we want gay, queer, gender-nonconforming characters in our fiction, but we often tear writers apart when they portray the characters imperfectly. While it’s vital to provide voices and venues for queer horror writers, we are always going to be a small faction within a small genre, and real inclusiveness will necessarily include straight and cisgender authors writing about queer characters.)
For my part, it turned out that yes, I was transgender. I started physically transitioning from female to male at age 44, relatively late in life. I believe writing about male characters all those years was a subconscious way of guiding myself to that decision. Half out of my mind with depression and chronic pain, I had stopped writing fiction for several years after the failure of the New Orleans federal levees following Hurricane Katrina, and I now suspect that I needed to quit for a while in order to reach the critical “transition or die” moment well known to trans people. I had been living those lives through my fiction, and when I couldn’t do it anymore, I had to take that real-life step.
So why start writing again after almost twenty years? Well, I started reading more contemporary horror fiction after concentrating on other genres for a while, and I was delighted to find a cornucopia of diverse authors writing about queer characters. As well as queer authors like Julia Armfield, Aaron Dries, Craig Laurance Gidney, Eric LaRocca, Jennifer McMahon, Sumiko Saulson, Judith Sonnet, and many more, big-name straight/cisgender writers like Paul Tremblay, Brian Keene, and (again) Ramsey Campbell are populating their work with queer protagonists. I wanted to be a part of this blossoming. I wanted to take the experiences I’ve had over the past dozen years, the things I’ve learned living as a man in a gay relationship, and weave them into stories. Not all the experiences have been good—I could write a nasty little tale about navigating men’s public restrooms before fully passing as male—but they have all been honestly earned, and such experiences often make good fiction.
I’ve come to believe that horror is, or ought to be, an inherently queer genre. That doesn’t necessarily mean every writer must have LGBTQ+ characters, but in a genre as malleable as horror, queer characters shouldn’t come as a surprise. They can no longer be erased as that long-ago critic of Carmilla tried to do. Horror writers and readers seek out the weird. We explore the boundaries of good and evil, sometimes doing away with that Manichean dichotomy entirely. We cultivate an understanding of the unusual. We travel the borderlands, and—as gay people do with “traditional” relationships, as trans people do with gender, as queer people may do with the human body in general—we redefine the borders.
The potential is almost limitless.
