Gay Shame and Monster Pride

I have an idea for a final paper that might be titled what this post is titled. Ever since Black, Brown & Queer on Film, I've thought a lot about gay pride and gay shame and my position in relation to those topics.

What I find most compelling about horror movies is that I can't tell whether viewers are enjoying the disruption of the "status quo" or if they are terrified of it and enjoy being frightened. I doubt that many people haven't identified or sympathized with the villains, because as this reading says, the monsters are often more complex than the human victims or heroes. What is the 'lure of the deviant" to those who don't feel they live "a marginalized and oppressed position within the cultural hegemony" (98)? Horror films often make my straight peers able to view heterosexualized characters the way I view them in most media: ignorant to larger patterns, generic, lacking depth, and easily defeated by a simple questioning of social norms (even if that manifests as a monster or serial killer). Horror films often have such generic hetersexual casts that I wouldn't be surpised if gay people were watching them simply for that humorous depiction and not their identification with the monster.

I wonder if queer people can recieve a "pleasurable power-wish fulfillment" by any other means than movies that also "have perhaps done much to cement into place the current social construction of homosexuals as unnatural, predatory, plague-carrying killers" 98). The effort to stop demonizing marginalized groups often disrespects the way queer communities find joy in and love these films, but I think there is space to understand how damaging it can be to only see yourself as the monster in the most pervasive form of media.

Horror film characters and Cryptids have become more important gay icons than popular musicians, if you ask certain Gen Z kids. They worship monsters and draw them with various LGBT flags and put them on stickers, as the main example I've seen of this. This phenomenon is uniquely less dark but quite related, I think. When gay pride is normalized but you still feel like a monster, monster pride is there. I'm eager to watch The Creature From the Black Lagoon, as I enjoyed The Shape of Water and I'm excited to discuss how the addition of romantic tropes complicates these themes.

These readings validate a lot of perspectives that I think many queer people have regarding horror movies (queer in sexuality and/or as defined by Benshoff which is "ultimately what opposes the binary definitions and prescriptions of a patriarchal heterosexism. Queer can be a narrative moment, or a performance or stance which negates the opposite binarisms of the dominant hegemony" 93).

Never before have I made the connections to the Aids crisis and vampirism that Benshoff made, and in general to the discussions surrounding homosexuality, disease, and monstrosity. The ending half of Nosferatu was shocking with the plot becoming about plague, and it felt dark and personal considering the times we're in.

Thank you so much for reading!