ON BEING QUEER FOR FEAR

“Early on, the alleged enormity of our ‘sin’ justified the denial of our existence, even our physical destruction.  Our ‘crime’ was not merely against society, not only against humanity, but ‘against nature’ – we were outlaws against the universe.  Long did we remain literally and metaphorically unspeakable, ‘among Christians not to be named’ – nameless. To speak our name, to roll that word over the tongue, was to make our existence tangible, physical: it came too close to some mystical union with us, some carnal knowledge of that ‘abominable’ ghost, that lurking possibility within.”

Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History (1976)

Much of mainstream American society still finds queerness uniquely threatening – which means they find me uniquely threatening.  Not just me, not even mostly me or particularly me, but definitely me, right here on my sofa, covered in tortilla chip crumbs and rewatching Hannibal for the millionth time.  Right now, in my home state of Texas, our elected officials have mobilized rapidly to “protect” schoolchildren from the so-called threats of drag queen storytime, trans girls playing JV field hockey, and books that might vaguely mention the fact that someone like me exists, but these same officials seem once again willing to do not much, in comparison, to protect those same children from murderers wielding AR-15s.  The potential of dead children seems to threaten their vision of society less than the potential that their kids might turn out to be like me. 

I get it.  Nobody should ever watch Tetsuo: The Iron Man the amount of times that I have, especially when they still need to finish their homework for their online Japanese class. But even among most who consider themselves allies, the outrage at these attempts to eliminate people like me from society comes largely as a murmur of “love is love” and mumbled prayers that one day we will be able to live just as they do, just with the genders changed and the children adopted, grateful to be accepted into their society despite our unfortunate affliction. And, after all, aren’t all those rainbow logos in June so cute?

The particularly terrifying thing about queerness to so many is, just like in Black Christmas, the call is coming from inside the house. I’m right here, baby! Queer people can appear in your family without any warning. Queerness might even be inside you. And when queerness comes, it can threaten all of the hierarchies that seem to hold our society together – the ones so many have sacrificed so much of themselves to maintain.  Queerness dares to say that biology, productivity, and hierarchy aren’t the only reasons for intimacy.  Queerness says pleasure can be more important than duty.  Queerness says that the divine power of creation is inside us all.

Okay, maybe that sounds a little overblown, but most queer people didn’t initially take on this radical mantle entirely by choice.  People made a big deal about how we wanted to live, and we made a big deal of ourselves, tortilla chip crumbs and all.  We rejected the traditional hierarchies of family and relationships and all of their associated rules and proscribed roles mostly because they rejected us first.  In many ways, we discovered our creative power and agency in this world because we had no choice but to do so in order to survive.  Our survival (and not just surviving, but thriving!) often comes as a shock to those who toss us out.  They could never imagine a different type of world because they never had to.  And to those at the tops of these hierarchies, anyone knowing that these hierarchies could be toppled and replaced with something that is better for more people is the most terrifying thing there is.

It comes as no surprise, then, that queerness and horror media have been so inextricably intertwined. Some of this comes from non-queer creators expressing the terror we stoke in them, and queer people defiantly claiming these representations as their own. Some of this comes from queer people finding horror as the only place where we are allowed to portray those like ourselves. Given this, the new Shudder docuseries Queer For Fear, which explores the history of horror as connected to queerness, is a long time coming.

I was fortunate to kick off pride month by attending a panel about Queer For Fear, featuring its executive producer and long-time object of my admiration Bryan Fuller, as well as his collaborators Nay Bever and Steak House. All three shared remarkable insights about the breadth and depth of queer horror, which made me even more excited to watch Queer For Fear this fall, and grateful that they and their other collaborators finally made this – for us, about us, and by us.

Our Love Can Destroy This Whole Fucking World

I, like many other queer people, instinctively felt an affinity for horror at a young age. While I didn’t yet have the right words to describe what I came to later learn were my queerness and my neurodivergence, I felt inexplicably drawn to the villains and outsiders in horror (and sci-fi and fantasy and the like). Something about these characters was like me – something that I didn’t see in the protagonists and heroes I knew I was supposed to identify with.  I found very little in media then that seemed to be for or about anyone like me, but to the extent I did, it was always the weirdos and monsters and creatures. Especially the creatures.

By creatures, I mean all of those monsters who are slimy and scaly and alien.  Think The Creature from the Black Lagoon, or xenomorphs, or the kraken, or even the big daddy of all the creatures, Cthulhu.  There’s something human-like about them, but it’s gone all strange and creepy.  Before I had the words or concepts to figure out what the weirdness I felt was, I knew my humanity had tentacles.  I felt it deeply in my body.  That was me – a creepy queer.  Something weird and dark and strange had fused to me and I would never be able to disentangle it from myself – I would only be able to follow the long weird journey of figuring it all out.  Sorry about the slime trail.

Oh, I certainly knew I wasn’t supposed to identify with these creatures.  I knew that largely wasn’t their intended purpose.  They were there to show everyone what was to be hated and feared. And yes, I learned that lesson, too – only I learned that what was to be hated and feared was what I am.  So, for a long time, I tried to distance myself from this connection I felt with the creatures of horror, just as I tried to distance myself from my own queerness.  I thought this distance would lead me toward happiness, but I only wallowed deeper into dissociation, dysphoria, and depression.  Trying to become something more acceptable to others didn’t work.  I didn’t gain the new self everyone wanted me to have.  Instead, I just withered into shadow.

The joyful embrace of what others try to villainize about us, and in turn the joyful embrace of the villains they made of us, is an incredible act of queer resistance.  It definitely felt that way for me.  I took these creatures from the hands of those who would use them as weapons against me, and slipped them on over the shadow of a self I had left without them.  And, lo and behold, I was strong – I was always strong, of course, but I had to embrace what made me that way.  I may have been known as a creature now, but what I gained helped me weather the risk and to really, finally, live and exist in the world and be seen by others and recognized by those like myself.  That recognition and connection is what felt most important.

I feel this especially as a creepy queer – two kinds of subversive weirdness coming together.  Not all queer people feel creepy and creaturey inside, and not all queer people embrace horror as theirs, and not all creepy kids are queer, but those creepy queers are definitely my people.  We embrace what is dark and weird about this world and find beauty and meaning in it in an uncommon way.  I’m still figuring out the meaning of and depth of this connection, but each queer horror fan I meet and each bit of queer horror history I learn helps me feel a little bit more of the energy of the creepy queer mycelial network that binds us. In our bits of isolation throughout space and time, we have always been connected.  I felt even more excited attending this panel and learning the breadth of the series, the amazing array of fans and creators involved, and in particular, experiencing the passion and knowledge that Fuller, Bever, and House shared. They know this, they get this, and they feel this, and I left so excited to mainline some serious creepy queer goodness this fall.  This will be a feast in a world of tasty but limited snacks.

A Rare Gift

I’m particularly excited for Fuller’s involvement in Queer for Fear simply because, of all creators in television and film, his is the work in which I feel the most seen.  Throughout his career, even when he hasn’t been able to include canonically queer characters or stories, his work has always relentlessly explored and deconstructed the nature of intimacy and the intimate hierarchies that abound.  The disaffection his characters feel when faced with the traditional offerings of life is the disaffection I have felt.  The questions his characters ask are the questions I often ask.  And the joy his characters find in the weird and beautiful things that are uniquely theirs are my joy.

This starts with his work on Star Trek: Voyager, where he devoted much of his attention to Seven of Nine’s story. Seven of Nine’s struggle to understand and navigate the complexities of human intimacy after living so long outside it among the Borg collective resonated with many queer and neurodivergent viewers alike. Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls both told the stories of outsiders whose lives were made even queerer (as in unusual) by the supernatural events they encountered that further complicated their intimate lives. Pushing Daisies took this supernatural queerness even further, situating its heterosexual protagonist couple in the campiest, gayest possible world and saddling the possibility of their intimate touch with mortal danger – a feeling familiar in many different ways to queer people.

But it was with Hannibal, Fuller’s first horror series, that he reached (for now, at least) his galaxy-brain queer apex.  This is quite a feat, especially considering the rather non-queer (even anti-queer) underpinnings of the source material and the popular films starring Anthony Hopkins, at least as I felt them.  The Hopkins films were my first exposure to Hannibal Lecter, and I didn’t find much emotional resonance in them, despite their quality.  Hopkins’s Lecter to me has always seemed a bit like a dark mode Frasier Crane.  Both seem designed in their own ways to villainize the invasion of “European” liberal intellectual dandyism into American culture – a decidedly conservative sensibility.

In creating Hannibal, Fuller remarkably took parts of something made to demonize him as a queer person and rearranged it into something more beautiful and decidedly, textually, canonical queer – a beautiful, fabulous Frankenstein’s monster of a show. He had the opportunity to take what so many queer people have done for so long internally as fans (and sometimes in fanworks for the community) and make it into the show itself. 

Fuller’s Hannibal focuses mostly on the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham – one that was explored very little in Thomas Harris’s novels and the existing films.  Fuller has often said that he initially intended this portrayal of the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham as an exploration of intimacy between heterosexual men – a topic he has said is of particular interest to him as it is outside his experience as a gay man.  This initial goal itself was queer – an extension of the earlier explorations and deconstructions of intimate hierarchies in Fuller’s other work.  Indeed, one of the greatest harms heteropatriarchal norms and the fear of queerness bring to men is isolating them from the intimacy and emotional support of other men, limiting the permissibility of such expressions to within romantic relationships with women.  This ideal of masculinity is perhaps most notably and pithily expressed in Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft” – “He’s a complicated man / But no one understands him but his woman.” So, to me, Fuller’s initial goal to rip these particularly destructive hierarchies a bit was a noble and queer one.

But, much to my delight, things got much queerer than that.  As the show progressed, Fuller moved away from his goal of portraying heterosexual male friendship.  He instead chose to follow the on-screen chemistry between the characters, fostered by the performances of Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy, and affirm their queer love as canon.  This embrace of the organic development of a relationship, outside of the labels and definitions of its origin, also feels queer and relationship anarchist in nature – it certainly feels central to my own queerness, at any rate.  We follow emotions and connections as they develop, instead of forcing them into existing labels, opening ourselves up to the infinite possibilities of human relations.  And here, we get to experience the unbounded, unlabeled, truly queer love between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.

Fuller has occasionally been criticized for his statements that Will Graham is a “heterosexual character,” but to me, it seems rather obvious that Graham would identify himself this way, regardless of his feelings for Lecter. And indeed, to me, I find emotional resonance in this queer experience. Graham is acutely aware of the feelings and needs of others, but seems to have very little room for or knowledge of his own. He ascertains from others the role expected of him and does his best (with mixed results) to play it.  It is only when he connects with Lecter that he begins to become aware of the monstrous truth within him – one that he deeply fears embracing. Here, it is both his queerness and true monstrousness that Graham fears – an intensifying piggyback on the queer allegory of gothic romance –  but by intertwining the two, this emotional queer horror becomes more resonant.

It is this keen understanding of the emotional realities of queerness that has always drawn me to Fuller’s work.  Recently, I’ve also come to appreciate Fuller bringing this same queer emotional understanding to the works of others in horror.  Most notable for me have been his recent appearances on Fangoria’s The Kingcast podcast discussing his queer readings of Salem’s Lot and Christine.  All of this leaves me feeling like I am definitely excited for any opportunity to have Fuller explore any aspect of queer horror he wants to in as much detail as he would like – so, yay for Shudder giving him more opportunity to do that.  I feel so connected to him on this point because, like me, he is such an emotional, empathetic, and enthusiastic fan, and I aspire to the confident vulnerability he brings to the table.  Also, as a neurodivergent weirdo, I simply take immense pleasure in hearing people I like infodump about their favorite topics (Fuller’s obsessive adoration of Stephen King is obvious and incredibly charming).

My favorite of the two episodes was the one about Christine.  His queer reading of Christine drew upon an experience he places outside his own – the transfeminine experience.  He places Christine herself within the lineage of trans women’s Fictionmania-style erotic fantasies of being transformed into a feminine object. In doing so, he expresses great empathy and understanding of the what underpins these fantasies – the particular exhaustion trans women experience in the face of the relentless onslaught of transmisogyny.  The intensity and pervasiveness of transmisogyny is so often ignored and misunderstood, and the sexuality of trans women is so often cruelly demonized, so it felt refreshing and important to me to hear one of my most admired creators speak with such kindness and insight about it.  It was certainly not a view of Christine I ever considered, and after listening to the episode, I enjoyed re-reading Christine from this new perspective.  Shortly after this episode aired, I learned that Fuller was working on a film adaptation of Christine – cue my excited fannish squealing.

I’m hopeful that this insight and empathy will extend to Queer for Fear, both from Fuller as well as his collaborators. Instead of digging around various places for bits of queer horror history and connection, I feel like I’ll have a chance to gain a lot of new information and new perspectives on things I already knew all in one place – not just the crumbs, but the whole damn meal.  My weird little brain will enjoy the feast.