Monsters in the Closet - A History of LGBT Representation in Horror Cinema (Video essay)

you're sitting in a PAC theater the lights go down and you can hear a whisper of anticipation ripple through the crowd but then it goes silent before the movie even begins you're already on edge or maybe you're sitting alone at night in bed do you feel safe until you open up the book on your bedside table a Stephen King classic that gives you chills even though you've read it ten times you're curled up on your couch it's late at night the lights are off and you're about to watch the latest episode of a TV show that gives you nightmares these three situations all end with a smile as you laugh at yourself for being afraid we love being afraid horror movies books and TV shows give us a thrill that's hardwired into us as human beings the thrill of being afraid having your pulse race muscles tense but knowing in the end that you're safe I fell in love with horror movies when I was six years old that's when I saw Friday the 13th part 7 a new blood for the very first time it was my first slasher movie and my first horror movie in general and besides being kind of shocked to see blood on the screen for the first time I wasn't the least bit scared granted Friday the 13th part 7 is more akin to an x-men movie than Texas Chainsaw Massacre the main character literally kills Jason by using psychic powers but it was still a horror movie and a great gateway to the genre for the next two decades I devoured that genre I had a shelf dedicated to my horror movie VHS a--'s DVDs and now blu-rays Halloween Friday the 13th Nightmare on Elm Street Hellraiser Texas Chainsaw Massacre all the greats I eventually moved on to the grandparents of the horror genre the Universal Monsters Dracula Frankenstein the Wolfman the mummy and the Invisible Man and in my mid-teens after letting everyone know that I was gay and getting to know more people in the queer community I came to a realization gays really love horror movies of course there are exceptions I still can't get my roommate to watch 2017 it but for the most part it seemed like every gay guy and girl absolutely adored horror movies from the top-tier ones like The Exorcist to the bottom of the rung direct-to-video sequels to the Leprechaun child's play and sleepaway camp there's even a massive amount of gay themed slasher movies on Netflix usually involving frat brothers so where did this gay fascination with horror come from James Jenkins of vallencourt books notes that the connection between gay fiction and horror goes all the way back to the gothic novels of the early 1800s many gothic authors Lake Matthew Lewis William Thomas Beckford and Francis Latham were gay and that reflected in their work according to Jenkins the traditional explanation for the gay horror connection is that it was impossible for them to write openly about gay themes back then or even perhaps express them at all since words like gay and homosexual didn't exist so they sublimated them and express them in more acceptable forms using the medium of a transgressive genre like horror in 1890 Lippincott's monthly magazine commissioned a short story by then little-known author Oscar Wilde that would eventually become the novel the Picture of Dorian Gray the story follows the titular Dorian Gray who has had a portrait painted by an artist named basil once he's seen the portrait he wishes that it would grow old and age instead of him and his wish having been granted the portrait becomes a twisted reflection of Dorian's deviance and vices the wish for eternal youth is certainly present in gay culture but the dandyism of the Picture of Dorian Gray is much more obvious in other parts of the work for instance when basil has his first meeting with Dorian Gray when our eyes met I felt I was growing pale a curious sensation of Terror came over me I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that if I allowed it to do so it would absorb my whole nature my whole soul my very art itself and then later saying we were quite close almost touching later in the novel Lord Henry a dear friend of the artist basil says to Dorian you mr. gray you yourself with your rose red you thin your rose white boy hood you have had passions that have made you afraid thoughts that have filled you with terror daydreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheeks with shame Oscar Wilde does not present any of the characters in a picture of dorian gray as overtly homosexual in fact Lord Henry is married and Dorian begins dating an actress but he's more in love with the art of her acting in fact when she tells him that she'll stop acting to be with him he dumps her and he's not the slightest bit upset to hear about her suicide in 2005 Joseph Carroll professor of philosophy and literature at the University of Missouri wrote among heterosexuals feminine characteristics act as a stimulus or trigger for male sexual desire one chief reason a feminine see can be easily integrated with a homoerotic persona is that a feminine see indirectly suggests that the effeminate male could himself be an object of male desire early in the story before the more supernatural elements kick in Dorian is upset that the portrait will forever remain beautiful and young while he will wither and aged the tears welled in his eyes he tore his hand away and flinging himself on the divan he buried his face in the cushions as though he were praying Joseph Carroll finds scenes of women lying thrown and weeping are common enough in Victorian fiction but scenes depicting males in that posture are vanishingly rare once the novel saw its final publication at least for the 1800s critics zeroed in on the effeminacy of the novel especially the main character over the next century critics and fans would discover the more overt homosexuality in Oscar Wilde's most famous work now instead of pulling quotes from novels and intellectual articles for the rest of the video I'm going to start focusing on more modern interpretations of gay horror and I'd like to talk about the worlds the most famous monster that you never knew was analog ously queer Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the modern prometheus Victor Frankenstein the titular mad scientist shows little to no interest in his wife-to-be and is determined to create life on his own his own perfect man something explored without subtlety in the Rocky Horror Picture Show but when digging up the body parts that he'll eventually use to compile the monster he makes sure to pick the sexiest body parts he can find he wants an Adonis just like Frank inverter once born against his own free will as we all are Frankenstein's monster is rejected by its creator as something terrible a regretful mistake that ought to be done away with he even flees from the monster because it's so hideous Frankenstein's reaction to the birth of his creation isn't that far off from the reaction of many overly religious parents when they find out that their child is gay they look at them as monsters ungodly and although most of these parents don't actually attempt to kill their children though that does happen they may cut them out of their lives an emotional murder if you will but at the same time there is a homoerotic subtext between Victor Frankenstein and his monster the monster tracks down his creator and Victor discovers that the monster is intelligent well-read and curious he is extensively everything a man like Victor would want a lover there's a direct connection between them Victor's repulsion toward the monster could read as the Victorian equivalent of no fats no fems every time Frankenstein's creature sometimes refer to as Adam is seen by the local population he's met with horror he hasn't done anything to them but they look at him as a monster anyway and rejection drives him to become the monster they see him as eventually Adam begs Victor to create for him a mate he just wants someone like him someone who knows his struggles someone to share his life with he like any other person deserves as much sound familiar though Victor initially agrees he eventually destroys the potential bride Adam the monster is not allowed to have a mate not allowed to have someone to love and be loved by because he's a monster he's not like normal people he doesn't deserve to have what everyone else does because he is different and so you see the parallels between Frankenstein's monster and being gay now this all changed a little bit with the film adaptation James Whale himself a gay director helmed 1931 s Frankenstein and it's 1935 sequel the Bride of Frankenstein whales oddly made sure to remove the more overt homoerotic subtext between Victor and his monster by adding the character of Fritz for Victor to speak with and by making the monster mute and also making Victor much more socially active off-topic but Fritz is the character we've all come to known as Igor for some reason also Victor is inexplicably renamed Henry in the movie but I'm gonna stick to calling him Victor for the sake of consistency Victor is also much more socially active in the movies as I said adding a further layer of separation between him and the monster Victor's relationship with his wife-to-be Elizabeth is also much more prominent in the films she's an active part of his life even being there for the of the monster indeed the films never seem to question Victor's sexuality but on the contrary repeatedly emphasized his heterosexuality whereas the novel leaves this aspect of Victor's character more open to discussion the novels Victor is obsessed with the creature who repeatedly makes his pulse beat faster and his brows sweat in 1935 s the Bride of Frankenstein the queerness is more obvious an old friend of dr. Frankenstein's doctor Septimus Pretorius interrupts the evening of his wedding with the request that they partner up to create life stopping Victor from consummating the marriage with his bride the two men go off to use his creativity and become the same-sex parents of a monster Frankenstein the bringer of life and Pretorius the nurturer the Frankenstein is reluctant to admit it the thought of creating life with Pretorius and thereby stifling the female necessity inherent in the process inspires him Welles decision to cast to known bisexual actors in the roles only furthers the queer reading film historian David scales said there is an overriding fantasy of male male procreation there is the persistent undercurrent of men creating life without women the original cut of Bride of Frankenstein was actually 15 minutes longer than the one we have now which sits at just over an hour long that's because the ending was drastically edited and changed the reason for this was that it conflicted with the Hayes production code the era's version of the MPAA what went against the code well it was originally made obvious that the heart of the monsters bride was taken from Frankenstein's wife Elizabeth this would imply the Frankenstein in Pretorius is mutual goal was predicated on the destruction of Frankenstein's heterosexual relationship that he literally sacrificed Elizabeth for the realization of his other ambitions effectively he would have chosen a homosexual partnership over marriage and since gay anything was a big no-no for the Hays Code that had to be cut down instead Elizabeth is actually present for the ending and escapes the destruction of the lab along with dr. Frankenstein while the monster would be bride and the overtly queer coded dr. Pretorius are left to perish gotta let that breeding pair escape right the very next year in 1936 Universal Pictures released a sequel to 1931 s Dracula entitled Dracula's daughter a film that featured an obviously lesbian antagonist and countess maria zalewska the titular Dracula's daughter lesbian vampires have been a staple of the genre since 1872 s novella Carmilla which predated Dracula by almost three decades but this was the first time that it was being shown on film the lesbian elements were so obvious that the Hays production code office actually demanded changes be made to the script before the movie even went into production the scene that caused the biggest issues was between the countess and model Lily Warren you [Music] stand by the fire for a moment mustn't catch cold [Music] are you looking at me that way when I do yeah sure do very well indeed do you like Jules Lily he's very old and very beautiful for show to you I don't think I'll pass tonight I think I'll go if you don't mind [Music] production code enforcer Joseph green wrote to the producers this will need very careful handling to avoid any questionable flavor the whole sequence will be treated in such a way as to avoid any suggestion of perverse sexual desire on the part of Maria or of an attempted sexual attack by her upon delay Universal played up the lesbian angle in the advertising for the film though with posters for it declaring save the women of London from Dracula's daughter some critics of the day picked up on the lesbian content and tore the film apart for it the New York world telegram angrily noted the countess's tendency to wander around giving the eye to sweet young girls further gay subtext can be gleamed from 1941 s The Wolfman the idea of being a normal man by day and then a deviant at night was one that clung to the identities of a lot of gay men at the time and now and you know kind of birth furries so as you can see classic horror represented the queer experience whether the initial authors intended it to or not the sense of hiding being rejected and doomed to never know true love of being looked at as a monster in the eyes of the public even if you've never done anything to hurt them the monster coming for your children the mad scientist going against nature the beast unable to control its own urges the creature born against God's will that's what being gay was and to some extent still is and so we identified with the monsters not so much the heroes but we wouldn't be the monsters forever in a time when the gay community was being ravaged by AIDS a blood-borne disease not entirely separated from the plague bringing vampire birth by Bram Stoker Hollywood would unbeknownst to itself make us the hero American horror movies went through a revolution of sorts during the 1950s 60s and 70s shifting to more sci-fi than horror aliens from other worlds and creatures born of nuclear fallout peppered cinemas across the country movies about the horrors of the nuclear bombs such as Godzilla were easy enough to figure out there wasn't a whole lot of subtext to Godzilla being a byproduct of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the sci-fi and Alien movies were a bit more cleverly coded though although never clearly stated aliens were communists they were the Russians the Chinese the Cubans or Vietnamese they were infiltrating the wholesomeness of America and preparing to destroy it from within they represented the other the unamerican which for conservatives at the time meant a whole lot more than just communists it also meant civil rights leaders women's rights activists and homosexuals invasion of the body snatchers the thing from the other world and even plan 9 from outer space directed by the infamous leak we read would are just some examples of such films after the Vietnam War horror began to take a more inward look at America movies like psycho which I'll talk more about in part 3 Night of the Living Dead and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre looked at the horror that already existed in America the homegrown evils Night of the Living Dead for instance was a barely veiled allegory for the burgeoning American right wing the racists and bigots refusing to pass on even returning from the dead the introspection of horror and the 60s and 70s made a lot of people in America very uncomfortable the horror was no longer coming from without but from within tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes The Last House on the Left all showing how normal Americans can turn how they could easily become corrupted evil willing to kill their own countrymen then in the late 70s and early 80's a new form of horror arrived in America one that at least at first seemed to leave good Christian Americans alone acquired immunodeficiency syndrome aids on June 5th 1981 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported clusters of pneumonia among gay men in New York in Los Angeles over the next 18 months otherwise healthy men of a certain sexual persuasion began dropping dead into every major city in the country the CDC initially called this grid gay-related immune deficiency it wasn't until August of 1982 that it was officially named AIDS it would be another two years before the cause of the syndrome a retrovirus called the human immunodeficiency virus was discovered in the meantime political pundits across the country on both the right and left declared that AIDS was a moral punishment since the vast majority of people affected at first were gay men they proclaimed that the disease was God's Way of punishing the sinners that only the truly righteous would escape the plague believe it or not a lot of priests mostly televangelists would actually charge parishioners a fee to guarantee that they wouldn't get the disease their reasoning for it was that well you might have come in contact with someone with it and even just being a near one of those sinners was enough for God to kill you because that's what Jesus would do as half of America panicked over AIDS and the other half welcomed it as a biblical cleansing or at best ignored its existence a new trend had developed in American horror movies the teenage slasher the slasher movie grew out of the fear of your fellow Americans onra namely the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and really found its place in pop culture with the 1978 release of Halloween john carpenter's masterpiece jump-started the slasher genre and also created a template that in the time of AIDS would become the most prevalent theme in horror namely the virgin lives basically every slasher movie in the late 70s and early 80's followed this format exemplified by the Friday the 13th series in which camp counselors are murdered literally for having sex you see a pair of counselors were off doing the dirty when Jason Voorhees developmentally challenged camper was swimming when he began to drown they weren't there to save him because they were having sex his mother then kills the counselors in question and when the camp reopens many years later she returns to exact her vengeance on a new generation of horny teenagers then she gets her head cut off and Jason all grown up comes to kill the counselors who killed his mom the ones who didn't let him drown see apparently Jason survived the drowning and has been living in the woods around Crystal Lake ever since like two decades and has never told anyone that he was alive never tried to find his mother just kind of built a house for himself out there and yet the logic doesn't really add up suffice it to say the moral of the Friday the 13th series was have sex and get a machete to the head this became Ober obvious once aids became widely known it wasn't just a moral issue to not have sex before marriage it was a life-or-death one at least for the people who didn't assume that only gays got AIDS then came Wes Craven's seminal work a Nightmare on Elm Street telling the story of teenager Nancy Thompson as she is stalked by a killer that can murder you in your dreams a nitron Elm Street continued to play into the fear your fellow Americans genre Freddy Krueger the killer was once upon a time just another man working in the town of Springwood but eventually it was discovered that he was a child killer and later confirmed in the series a child molester when his murder trial ended in a mistrial due to the police failing to get the proper search warrant the parents in Springwood exact advisee lanty justice against Krueger burning him alive but Freddy didn't stay dead and returned to Springwood as a dream demon hunting down the children of those who had killed him Nancy was one of those children at the end of the movie Krueger is defeated and Nancy lives happily ever after except for attacked on stinger ending that Wes Craven hated until the day he died less than a year later now without the involvement of Wes Craven and Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Freddy's revenge was released the most inadvertently gay horror movie ever made [Music] no that's not the gayest part gayer something is trying to get inside my body gayer [Music] [Music] a leather bar and the director to this day says that he didn't realize how gay the movie was when he was making it Freddy's revenge breaks with the traditional formula of the slasher movie by having the main character be a male jesse definitely an interesting move in 1985 but one that just doesn't quite work Jesse's family has recently moved to spring wood quints identity into the house that Nancy lived in in part one shortly after moving into the house Jesse begins to have nightmares that he soon discovers are eerily similar to the ones the houses former occupant had finally Jesse meets Freddy directly in a dream and spends the rest of the movie trying to stay awake and convince people that he's possessed by the child killer Freddy is defeated in the end of course but not until the movie has completely subverted the slasher genre by turning Jesse and not his would-be girlfriend Lisa into the damsel in distress in fact the movie ends with Lisa needing to come to Jesse's rescue jesse is quite obviously put in the female role in the movie the gayness of the film was immediately picked up by the queer audience and even became a favorite to have on TVs and gay bars in the late 80s besides the leather bar scene and honestly how could you not tell that that scene was gay these are the same people who thought freddy mercury was the epitome of masculinity there are plenty of other obvious nods to Jesse being gay when Jesse and Lisa come closest to actually having sex he panics and runs away because there's another man's tongue in his mouth so he runs to the house of his male friend Grady where he proclaims something is trying to get inside my body and Grady replies and you want to sleep with me remember they had no idea that this was gay well that's not entirely true the film screenwriter David Chaston was gay and purposely wrote gay subtext into the film though he denied it for years he eventually admitted that homophobia was skyrocketing and I began to think about our core audience adolescent boys and how all of this stuff might be trickling down into their psyches my thought was that tapping into the angst would give an extra edge to the horror the actor portraying Jesse Mark Patton has stated that the film put the brakes on his career in Hollywood after playing a gay teenager and 1982's come back to the five-and-dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean and then playing an obviously coded gay character in Freddy's revenge Patton believes that he was typecast as gay effectively killing his career at a time when conservatism was flourishing in America and gay equaled AIDS Patton actually retired from acting after the release of Freddy's revenge becoming an interior designer in 2010 Robert Englund Freddie himself said of the movie the second Nightmare on Elm Street is obviously intended as a bisexual themed film it was the early 80s Jesse's wrestling with whether to come out or not and his own sexual desire was manifested by Freddy his friend is the object of his affection that's all there in the film a Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Freddy's revenge has become a cult classic especially in the gay community and although gay characters wouldn't appear in any nightmare films going forward it did remain an oddly inclusive slasher franchise but before the decade of the 1980s ended another movie would whet the appetite of gay horror fans The Lost Boys released in 1987 is basically a helix Studios movie with a bit more of a budget and a lot less sex after moving to the town of Santa Clara our protagonist Michael falls in with a crowd of typical 1980s bad boys who happened to be vampires because he has a crush on the one girl in the group star even though none of the other guys in the group show any interest in her whatsoever Michael decides it must be because they all have vampire girlfriends of their own exactly soon Michael needs to head vampire of the group David who tricks Michael into drinking some of his bodily fluids blood obviously they're vampires what else could it possibly be it doesn't take long for star to completely disappear from the story except for a forced sex scene that I'm convinced was a request by the producers and Michael starts donning the vampire cruise trademark single earring gay history lesson in the 1950s 60s and 70s gay men would get one of their ears pierced to show other gay men that they were available for sex when they were in cruising areas but they would get their right ear pierced and all the guys in this movie have their left ear pierced so completely different obviously completely different not the same at all completely different and what is with that poster of Rob Lowe on the closet door would any straight teenager have that on their wall really and this shot I don't know I was an only child but I don't think brothers get quite this close but maybe I'm wrong maybe all those stepbrother videos that I've totally haven't watched online are way more factual than I thought also single ear piercing as a horror movie The Lost Boys isn't exactly scary but it definitely kick-started a lot of gay kids into puberty there's also the underlying connection to the AIDS epidemic the movie was released at the height of the epidemic in 1987 and the presence of a monstrous disease in this case vampirism spread by bodily fluids was not lost on the film's director out gay filmmaker Joel Schumacher who a decade later would become famous for codpieces and bat nipples that same year Friday the 13th part 7 a new blood was released which in and of itself isn't very gay but had a shocking amount of okay cast members especially for the time including the main characters love interest yeah a bunch of us got together to throw my cousin Michael surprise birthday party I came over to invite your daughter oh the burning passion the 90s was pretty much a dead zone for gay horror but in 2005 we got the first truly gay horror movie with hell-bent there's no subtext here this is as gay as horror gets the majority of the movie takes place in West Hollywood Halloween party for God's sake and the movie well the movies ridiculous but in a good way most of the characters are more preoccupied with getting laid than the killings that are actually going on around them which admittedly is a convention of the slasher genre but for some reason in hell-bent it feels even more silly than usual oh there's a crazed killer out there murdering my friends I need a hookup as soon as possible one thing I can say for the movie though is that although it was made in the early 2000s it actually feels like a mid 80s classic slasher movie it ignores the more polished aesthetic of horror movies at the time for a more grainy retro feel it was likely just a byproduct of having such a low budget but I definitely count it in the movie's favor the next year in 2006 we got the Covenant featuring an almost entirely all-male cast with female characters appearing mostly as out-of-focus figures in the background the Covenant follows the story of a group of male witches who are all about to turn 18 at which point they will ascend meaning they will access their true powers the leader of the group caleb is obsessively targeted by the new guy in school chase you're right they do sound like Sean Cody models by the way chase is played by Sebastian Stan aka the Winter Soldier aka Bucky Barnes aka Captain America's one true love Stuckey AAF anyway back to the plot it turns out the chase is also a witch and some nasty supernatural occurrences start happening around town once he gets there which puts caleb on edge we eventually learned that Chase is behind it all and that he wants to consume the other witch's magic to make himself more powerful he wants their essences inside of him in the climactic fight scene the two witches hurl liquidy globs of opaque magic at each other in the rain eventually chase is defeated and caleb drives off with a girl there's also this scene [Music] and this one just you know brother but this movie is totally straight guys there's nothing gay about it nothing it doesn't even have a gay director or writer like Freddy's revenge or The Lost Boys I mean it was made by Renny Harlin director of the long kiss good night and die hard 2 and also Nightmare on Elm Street part 4 the only reason I can figure that this movie is so damn homoerotic is that the producers were trying to make a movie aimed at teenage girls and that this was right around the time that the Harry Draco slash fiction really started to take off now before I bring this video to a close I'd like to mention a movie that I watched and you shouldn't in doing my research for this I was told over and over again to watch the movie 1313 haunted frat from 2011 and I did basically a frat house filled with boys walking around the grandpa's white underwear is being haunted by a crazy woman who possesses them that's it there's no end of the story there's no story there's barely a plot there's less acting talent than in a typical porn shoot and I don't know what the hell this is to be honest this scene here this goes on for 15 minutes he walks around the house like this for 15 minutes in this shower scene 8 minutes in this random ass scene of proto Zac Efron touching himself 7 minutes the bulk of the movies 1 hour and 15 minute runtime is made up of scenes like this the other five or so minutes are made up of this guy trying to get his frat brothers to help him write a history of the frat and discovering that it was built on the site of a destroyed mental institution I was convinced that I was watching a porno that had all the sex cut out honestly I mean the acting the directing the blocking they're all poor no quality no no that's mean the blocking is actually much worse than it is in a porno now that you've been warned off of ever watching this disaster of a photo play I'll do the actual ending to the video throughout the 20th century and early into the 21st gayness has remained coated in horror movies with some minor very nice exceptions Jesse from a knight Ron Elm Street - isn't gay but he's gay the boys from the Lost Boys and the Covenant aren't gay but they're gay actual gay characters did show up in some movies like David in the Bride of Chucky Lewis and American Psycho and Tom and scream 3 Robbie and scream 4 but they were all supporting characters with no real arc and not a whole lot to do in the story like every other genre in Hollywood the LGBT community has mostly been left out of horror movies unless we're in a doomed love affair a la Brokeback Mountain or doomed to die in general like in milk or boys don't cry LGBT characters don't get a whole lot of attention considering how niche the horror genre is it's kind of amazing that we've gotten as much mainstream attention as we have even when it's as coated as it is it's usually pretty hidden but if we look hard enough we can find ourselves in these movies sometimes we don't have to look that hard at all but there is one instance in which Hollywood has been more than happy to betray the LGBT community in both horror and mainstream movies it's not a new trend in fact it's been around long before the gay rights movement brought us into public light we can always be the main draw for a movie if we're the killer James Miller will serve 10 years probation after killing his neighbor in East Austin the defense argued Miller stabbed his neighbor when Spencer allegedly came on to him the prosecution argued blood evidence didn't match Miller story the jury agreed with the defensive stance that he serves no threat to the community Miller's defense is also known as the gay panic defense and while it's a rare defense it is legal in most states the gay panic defense is a legal tactic used by people who have usually been accused of murder the defendant accuses the victim of being gay and having approached them sexually they claimed that they find the same-sex advances so offensive and frightening that it brings on a psychotic state characterized by unusual violence the first known use of this defense was in 1954 when a flight attendant named William Simpson was murdered by two men Charles Lorenz and Richard killin in Miami Florida the two men had been posing as hitchhikers and robbing people who picked them up they'd been doing this for months but instead of robbing Simpson they realized that he was gay and murdered him the two men were convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder after Simpson was characterized as a pervert during the trial the gay panic defense has been used to successfully limit the sentences of or altogether acquit murderers of LGBT people in America ever since gay panic because there is nothing scarier than a queer person and for a long time Hollywood agreed [Music] members of the LGBTQ community have been used as villains by Hollywood since before film had sound if I tried to dive into every movie with a gay bi lesbian or transgender villain this video would never get finished so I'm going to focus on a few prominent films that really grabbed the public's attention starting in 1948 with Alfred Hitchcock's rope adapted from the play of the same name which itself was based on the true story of Leopold and Loeb a gay couple who in 1924 murdered a 14 year old boy just to see if they could get away with it spoiler alert they don't rope follows Brandon and Phillip two college students who murder one of their classmates as an intellectual exercise they want to prove their superiority over the common man by committing the perfect murder the sexual tension between Brandon and Phillip is obvious to anyone with functioning eyes and ears how did you feel during it very much anything till his body went limp and I knew it was over and then then I felt tremendously exhilarated how did you feel Hitchcock in fact wanted to see how far he could push the American rating system with the film the couple's interaction is so intense at times that has been compared to watching a sex scene to maintain that Hitchcock actually shot the film so that it appears to be one long 80 minute take he did this so that once the film was put before the Hays Code was then rating his board they wouldn't be able to really force him to edit any of the movie out sexual tension or not without destroying the artistic value of the film it's a pretty clever move really Jimmy Stewart plays Rupert in the movie the couples professor and joins them for a dinner party the table of which has been set over a chest containing their victim's body it's alluded to several times in the film that he is more than just their professor and that he has had a sexual relationship with one if not both of our murderers rope is one of Hitchcock's least successful films at the box-office its financial failure being attributed to the gay undertones it also perpetuated two damaging stereotypes of gay men that of the dangerous if not psychotic homosexual and that of the gay man who thinks he's better than everyone else the superior Brandon and Phillips assumption that they could get away with murder even with the victims corpse in the same room as a dinner party shows their belief that homosexuals are superior to heterosexuals this was a belief amongst straight people at the time it was a sort of ooh those gays think they're better than us it was especially prevalent in England I guess they were still sore over the whole Oscar Wilde thing rope wouldn't be the last time Hitchcock dealt with the LGBT community though he did so again in possibly his most famous film it was the beginning of the 1960s following a decade of pure Americana suburbs white picket fences and I Love Lucy a time where every white man had a job women cooked dinner and even married couples couldn't be shown sleeping in the same bed together on TV a clean proper image was paramount with men in suits and women dressed smartly and skirts and blouses hair quaffed pearls at the neck the horrors of World War 2 in the upheaval of the 1960s and 70s seemed a world away in either direction and into this period of safe white-bread suburban heteronormativity came Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho you the film tells the story of Marion crane a secretary that absconds with $40,000 from her employer her stay at the secluded Bates Motel and the aftermath psycho is famous for two things killing its main character halfway through the movie and the most memorable shower scene this side of the ex rating the Marion crane isn't the character that people walk away from psycho talking about its Norman Bates the manager of the Bates Motel and his extremely unhealthy relationship with his mother a boy's best friend is his mother corta the theme of psycho is that a seemingly normal person can harbor many secrets Marion's unhappiness with her life Norman's deeply disturbed nature both are well hidden from the outside world until they're not Marion meets Norman when escaping from her boring unhappy life a thin but attractive man Norman is courteous and kind to Marion as he checks her into the motel although he shows some odd tendencies such as his connection with his domineering mother Norman spends most of the film as a sympathetic figure due mostly to his portrayal by Anthony Perkins himself a gay actor Hitchcock was actually aware of perkins homosexuality when he cast him as Norman Bates although he wasn't out because it was the 60s it was well known around Hollywood or at least rumored that Perkins had dated Tab Hunter a 1950s heartthrob so when it's revealed at the end of the movie that Norman is not only the killer but also has multiple personalities the other personality being that of his now revealed to be dead mother it was a shock to audiences and although it's more than obvious that Norman is a madman many people walked away from psycho looking at Norman as an example of that horrifying group of people they hear about in the cities those homosexuals and transvestites a fear that Hollywood spent the next two decades perpetuating with movies like the Detective vanishing point freebie in the beam and dressed to kill but Hollywood's fear-mongering of the LGBT community would soon turn deadly with the 1980 release of cruising in the sweltering heat in New York summer severed body parts of murdered gay men are appearing in the Hudson River because of his resemblance to the victims the NYPD puts Officer Steve Burns played by Al Pacino on the case so Al Pacino moves to the gay area of town goes to a few leather bars makes friends with a gay guy and spends most of the movie ignoring his wife while hunting down the mystery killer who spends the movie killing gay men eventually it's revealed that the killer is himself a gay man with schizophrenia he's arrested but then the gay guy Al Pacino had become friends with turns up dead and the movie ends with a not so subtle hint that Al Pacino may have been the killer all along cruisin was not well-received by gay audiences even while it was being filmed there were protests following the production the protests were initially started by Arthur Bell a gay journalist who wrote a series of articles on which the film was actually based protesters would play loud music near the production let off air horns and chant disrupting the audio recording they'd also point large mirrors down on the production from the top of buildings in order to mess with the lighting of outdoor shots once production wrapped the MPAA saddled the film with an nc-17 rating forcing director William Friedkin who also directed 1970s at very gay the boys in the band to cut 40 minutes from the film in order to secure an R rating upon release the LGBT community continued to protest the film many claiming that its portrayal of the gay community as a sex-crazed group of sodomites would destroy any goodwill that the community had developed not to mention the gay killer which was playing into the already developed fear of the LGBT community then in April of 1980 two months after the release of the film one of the bars featured in the movie was attacked a lone gunman armed with a submachine gun entered the bar and emptied two clips into the crowd before being stopped 12 people were injured and two lost their lives throughout the summer of 1980 there were several attacks on gay men in the United States with the attackers all pointing out that they had seen cruising and that it inspired them after cruising failed to recoup its budget at the box office in the toxic reaction toward the film Hollywood started to reduce the amount of gay villains and movies but transgender characters were still open for exploitation 1983's sleepaway camp one of a dozen or so Friday the 13th ripoffs opened on to children Angela and Peter voting on a lake with her father and his boyfriend okay cool but there's an accident and one of the children dies eight years later we find out that Peter was the child who died and Angela now being raised by her aunt martha has become extremely introverted she along with some relatives go to the camp near the lake where the accident occurred and in Friday the 13th ripoff style people start turning up dead but the big twist in the end isn't that it was Jason's mom killing people all along instead we find out that Peter didn't die in the accident it was actually Angela who died and once their Aunt Martha got custody from their gay dad she began raising Peter as Angela why you see I always say water under the bridge but it certainly will be a nice little surprise when Richard comes home to find a little girl in the house yes I've always dreamed of a little girl just like you I mean we already have a boy so another one simply would not do Oh No absolutely not so as Angela / Peter transgender no the character is disturbed and suffers from a particularly traumatic case of PTSD but they're not transgender though audiences took Angela / Peter as a transgender character which further fed into the public assumption that transgender people were sick depraved and likely homicidal a fear that would reach a breaking point in 1991 released on Valentine's Day Silence of the Lambs adapted from the novel by Thomas Harris tells the story of Clarice Starling a young FBI trainee who finds herself in the middle of the biggest manhunt in the country there's a man killing and skinning women a man the press has started calling Buffalo Bill Clarice enlists the help of famed psychiatrist and infamous murderer Hannibal the cannibal Lecter to help her track down Buffalo Bill who was a former patient of his before Hannibal was locked up Clarice tracks down the psychotic killer rescues his final victim and kills him in self-defense to bring you a special report Silence of the Lambs is actually the first movie to be labeled a psychological thriller it was a horror movie when it first came out and was even called that by the director but a year later when it got the Best Picture nomination at the Oscars and then eventually won the Academy and members of the Academy started calling it a psychological thriller instead of a horror movie because they didn't like the idea of the Academy's biggest award Best Picture going to a horror movie and so the term psychological thriller was born in both the novel and film Buffalo Bill whose real name is Jamie Gumb is portrayed as something close to a transgender person at least on the surface he appears to want to be a woman creating a bodysuit out of the flesh of his victims but as it stated in both the film and book he is not transgender Hannibal Lecter says belly is not a real transsexual but he thinks he is he tries to be he's tried to be a lot of things I expect gum is certainly a deranged character and is in the very least bisexual having been in a relationship with one of Hannibal's male patients as well as women in the past but his identity as a transgender character is far more questionable he has a self-loathing that is well beyond anything typical his own self-hatred drives him to want to be something else anything else than what he actually is although he's likely more gay than bisexual he has an obsession with women stemming from his mother abandoning him as a child he would eventually find out that she was an alcoholic prostitute but went on to create a beauty queen image of his mother in his head the perfect woman a woman that anyone would want to be including him Buffalo Bill was not a transgender individual but as Lecter said he wanted to be he applied for gender reassignment surgery at multiple hospitals but was universally declined because of his mental state despite what Republicans think you can't just get a sex change there's a massive amount of psychological testing before doctors will move forward with the procedure especially in the case of male to female gender confirmation so when bill was denied this procedure he decided to make himself into a woman any way he could there was massive backlash against the film upon release as the LGBT community accused the movie of both transphobia and homophobia the director Jonathan Demi did his best to defend the film but most people still look at it as a piece of overtly anti LGBT cinema although it was stated very clearly that from a psychological perspective Buffalo Bill is not a transgender person it's still a thorny situation Bill's gender identity is only commented on by cisgender people in the book and film and so cisgender people are in essence deciding whether or not a person is transgender trans activists argued that if Buffalo Bill thinks he is transgendered then he is and it's not the place of the cisgender characters to decide which would mean that bill is a terrible representation of transgender women who for the most part are very passive and non violent in fact trans women are infinitely more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than the perpetrator of one and therefore the argument that Silence of the Lambs is a transphobic film holds some weight regarding this type of transgender character in fiction LGBT activist Savannah Stobbs said transgender women are often represented as psychotic killers as a lazy method of responding to mainstream society's fear of gender non-conforming people this popular trope in film reinforces the idea that being transgender is unnatural and perverted and pathologize 'as gender fluidity but on the other hand with Buffalo Bill being so obviously insane can his own feelings about his gender identity be valid he is detached from reality and in the book it is stated quite clearly that even if he had gotten the gender confirmation surgery he would have eventually found a different reason - at least harm people if not outright ly kill them because he is psychotic unhinged his gender identity has nothing to do with that in the book it is noted by a specialist who saw bill about the gender confirmation surgery that he did not present any of the characteristics of a transgender woman furthering the argument in the fiction at least that he is not transgender and of course Buffalo Bill is not a real person he is a character created by an author and then interpreted by filmmakers Thomas Harris did not write a transgender character but an extremely psychologically disturbed one a character with a horrifying childhood lifelong emotional instability and violent tendencies a psychopathic character that hates himself so much that he's willing to torture kill and fillet women to be someone else there could be a debate to be had whether or not Buffalo Bill is a transgender character but the most important thing might be how his character was perceived by audiences and many audiences did see him as a transgender character Buffalo Bills presence can still be felt today in bathroom laws across the United States and in the fear-mongering of right-wing conservatives Buffalo Bill has even been mentioned by fox news commentators when trying to defend the discriminatory bathroom laws with some Republicans even nicknaming North Carolina's bathroom law HB - the Buffalo Bill so even though Thomas Harris and Jonathan Demi did not intend for Bill to be a trans character he is now ingrained in the public consciousness as the worst possible example of the transgender community highly unrealistic one LGBT villains would remain a staple in Hollywood films for years to come the bisexual Catherine Tramell in 1992 s Basic Instinct drew the ire of lesbian and bisexual groups especially pointing out how bisexuals had minimal if any representation in mainstream media and how the biggest bisexual character was a murderous narcissistic psychopath but we're cruising which did portray some LGBT characters as human and sympathetic failed at the box office Basic Instinct portrayed a murderous bisexual woman and was box-office gold taking in three hundred and fifty million dollars in 1992 that's over half a billion dollars when you adjusted for inflation Hollywood brought out the bisexual villains several more times in the 1990s most notably in the talented mr. Ripley in 1999 but none of them had quite as much success as Basic Instinct so as you can see the LGBT community has been fodder for Hollywood's villain machine for almost a century we can be betrayed as the terrifying other the corrupted city dwellers that the suburban Knights have fled from but Hollywood itself has strayed away from portraying gay characters as villains in more recent years you'd be hard-pressed to find a Buffalo Bill in a cinema near you in 2018 in fact there's another remake of psycho in the works and they've already said that Norman will not be dressing as his mother in this version so things have gotten better mainstream media no longer portrays us as monsters teenage girls and their moms were the biggest audience for this year's loved Simon but with glads 2018 survey of LGBT representation and cinema showing that our percentage of representation on the big screen is lower now than it has been in over a decade maybe we need to ask the question is no representation better than bad representation [Music] you

Channel: James Somerton

Views: 439,693

Rating: 4.9472437 out of 5

Keywords: Halloween, Horror movies, gay, lgbt, video essay, documentary, queer, Lesbian

Id: 4zPCM14-SCQ

Length: 56min 35sec (3395 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 21 2018