Monsters in the closet
Homosexuality and the horror film
Harry M. Benshoff
Manchester University Press
Manchester a n d N e w Y o r k
Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin's Press
Copyright © Harry M. Benshoff 1997
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 4 0 0 , 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
Distributed exclusively in the USA
by St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 0 7 1 9 0 4 4 7 2 3 hardback
0 7 1 9 0 4 4 7 3 1 paperback
First published 1997
01 0 0 99 98 97
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset in Sabon with Frutiger
by Northern Phototypesetting Co Ltd, Bolton
Printed in Great Britain
by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow
Contents
List of plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The monster and the homosexual
1 Defining the monster queer in the classical Hollywood
horror
film
2 Shock treatment: Curing the monster queer during
World War II
3 Pods, pederasts, and perverts: (Re)criminalizing the
monster queer in Cold War culture
4 Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight, circa the
1969 Stonewall Rebellion
5 Satan spawn and out and proud: Monster queers in the
postmodern era
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
page vi
vii
1
31
77
122
173
230
282
295
313
Plates
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
James Whale
Ernest Thesiger
Sandor and Marya from Dracula's Daughter
Island of Lost Souls
The Mask of Fu Manchu
The Raven
The Black Cat
White Zombie
Shadow shot of Marya from Dracula's Daughter
Son of Frankenstein
The Ghost Ship - chessboard
The Ghost Ship - knife attack
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
Publicity shot from Revenge of the Creature
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
Gary Conway (Teenage Frankenstein)
in beefcake
magazine
How To Make a Monster
Glen or Glenda
Orgy of the Dead
(The Secret of) Dorian Gray
The Vampire Lovers
Twins of Evil
Theatre of Blood
Diversions and Delights (Vincent Price stage show)
Fear no Evil
The Kiss
Freddy's Revenge
Pinhead from Hellraiser
Nightbreed
Love Bites
page 40
42
49
52
57
62
63
66
78
92
104
105
111
131
134
145
147
151
160
163
184
194
197
215
216
240
245
247
261
263
287
Acknowledgements
M
y thanks go out first and foremost to the faculty and staff of
the Critical Studies department at the University of Southern
California's School of Cinema-Television. All of the people I have
had the pleasure to work with there over the last few years have
contributed in some way to this project, but I would especially like
to thank Lynn Spigel, Marsha Kinder, and Leo Braudy for their
insights, thoughtful suggestions, and encouragement on this partic­
ular project. Michael Renov and David James were also instrumen­
tal in the early stages of this project, and as always, Lee Stork did a
great job helping me guide this project through the various channels
of academia.
Library and research professionals also need to be thanked, espe­
cially Ned Comstock and Steve Hanson, but also Peggy, Bill, and the
rest of the staff at USC's CNTV library and archive. The staff at the
Margaret Herrick Library were also very helpful. I would also like
to thank the owners and staffs of the following Los Angeles video
stores: Mondo Video A-Go-Go, Video West, and Eddie Brandt's.
Without resources such as these, this project would have come to
nought.
Others who have contributed to this project include Alex Doty,
Rhona Berenstein, Kevin Glover, Richard Valley and Scarlet
Street
magazine, Matthew Frost and the folks at Manchester University
Press, and especially Mark Jancovich, who steered this project
towards a publisher when it was barely conceived. Thanks for the
vote of confidence!
I would like to thank my family and friends and all those who
have encouraged me over the years to pursue my interests in film
and television studies: Charles, Chuck, David, Donna, Jeff, Karen,
Dana, Clark, Janice, Mary, James, Steve, Eric, Cindy, Rich, Michael,
Robert and John, Maureen, Holly, Vicky, Angelo, and all the rest of
my wonderful friends and colleagues at USC and elsewhere. Special
ironic thanks to the Department of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical
viii
Acknowledgements
College, but real heartfelt thanks to Carol and Kevin, Todd and
Raphael, David Scasta, and Barry Cohen. And of course, much love
and many thanks to Sean, who for three years has made my life a
Technicolor musical rather than a horror film.
Permission to reproduce photographs has kindly been granted by
the following: plates 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 15 and 23 Copyright © by
Universal Studios, Inc. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Divi­
sion of MCA Inc. All Rights Reserved; plate 5 Copyright © Turner
Entertainment Co. All Rights Reserved. Photo courtesy of Scarlet
Street magazine; plates 11 and 12 Copyright © 1943 RKO Pic­
tures/Used by permission of Turner Entertainment Co. All Rights
Reserved; plate 13 Copyright © 1945 Turner Entertainment Co. All
Rights Reserved; plate 16 Permission by Susan Nicholson Hofheinz;
plates 17 and 26 courtesy of Scarlet Street magazine; plate 22 Art­
work © Orion Pictures Corporation; plate 31 courtesy of Kevin
Glover and Aries Productions. Every attempt has been made to
obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper
acknowledgement has not been made, copyright-holders are invited
to inform the publisher of the oversight.
Introduction: The monster and
the homosexual
I
n a 1984 study of anti-homosexual attitudes, the investigators
broke heterosexuals' fears of gay and lesbian sexuality into three
topic areas:
(1) Homosexuality as a threat to the individual - that someone you
know (or you yourself) might be homosexual.
(2) Homosexuality as a threat to others - homosexuals have been
frequently linked in the media to child molestation, rape, and
violence.
(3) Homosexuality as a threat to the community and other com­
ponents of culture - homosexuals supposedly represent the
destruction of the procreative nuclear family, traditional
gender roles, and (to use a buzz phrase) "family values."
1
In short, for many people in our shared English-language culture,
homosexuality is a monstrous condition. Like an evil Mr Hyde, or
the Wolfman, a gay or lesbian self inside of you might be striving to
get out. Like Frankenstein's monster, homosexuals might run ram­
pant across the countryside, claiming "innocent" victims. Or worst
of all, like mad scientists or vampires, who dream of revolutioniz­
ing the world through some startling scientific discovery or preter­
natural power, homosexual activists strike at the very foundations
of society, seeking to infect or destroy not only those around them
but the very concepts of Western Judeo-Christian thought upon
which civil society is built. For the better part of the twentieth cen­
tury, homosexuals, like vampires, have rarely cast a reflection in the
social looking-glass of popular culture. When they are seen, they
are often filtered through the iconography of the horror film: omi­
nous sound cues, shocked reaction shots, or even thunder and light­
ning. Both movie monsters and homosexuals have existed chiefly in
Monsters in the closet
2
shadowy closets, and when they do emerge from these proscribed
places into the sunlit world, they cause panic and fear. Their closets
uphold and reinforce culturally constructed binaries of gender and
sexuality that structure Western thought. To create a broad analogy,
monster is to "normality" as homosexual is to heterosexual.
Ostensibly based upon these melodramatic fears, as well as a host
of others, the conservative right-wing and Fundamentalist Christian
sectors of American society have sought to demonize homosexuals
within all aspects of civil(ian) life, as well as more specialized sec­
tors such as the military and institutionalized pedagogy. They do so
primarily by painting the gay and lesbian community in shocking,
horrifying colors. The Gay Agenda (1993), a recent anti-gay propa­
ganda videotape (which was produced in Antelope Valley, Califor­
nia by a Christian group calling itself the Springs of Life Ministry),
uses discredited "experts" purportedly to tell the truth about what
depraved creatures homosexuals actually are: carefully selected
footage from gay and lesbian pride festivals "document" their
claims. The point comes across loudly and clearly: homosexuals are
violent, degraded monsters and their evil agenda is to destroy the
very fabric of American society. Many members of Congress, who
received this tape gratis from the helpful Springs of Life Ministry,
seemed to find its argument compelling and reasonable, especially
during the recent national hysteria surrounding the question of
whether or not homosexuals should be legally discriminated against
within the Armed Services. A similar use of horror movie iconogra­
phy has recently been employed by other Fundamentalist Christian
groups in seasonal Halloween "Hell Houses." In an attempt to
frighten teenage patrons into conforming to heterosexual norms,
the traditional Halloween haunted house tour is reappropriated for
anti-gay propaganda. Instead of showcasing vampires and were­
wolves, these "Hell Houses" now use monstrous effects to delineate
the horrors of homosexuality and AIDS.
2
The AIDS crisis, which has spurred Christian compassion from
some quarters, has also significantly fueled this "homosexual as
monster" rhetoric: now more than ever, gay men are contagions vampires - who, with a single mingling of blood, can infect a pure
and innocent victim, transforming him or her into the living dead.
Some people have always considered anything that opposes or lies
outside the ideological status quo intrinsically monstrous and
unnatural. Perhaps expectedly, an ideological approach to fictional
Introduction
3
monsters frequently bleeds into an accounting of real life horrors
such as AIDS: recent critical essays on the mass media have demon­
strated how the representational codes and narrative tropes of the
monster movie (plague, contagion, victimization, panic) have been
grafted onto much television and newspaper coverage of AIDS. Yet,
in his book on how the media in Great Britain have covered the
AIDS crisis, Simon Watney warns us that "Aids commentary does
not 'make' gay men into monsters, for homosexuality is, and always
has been, constructed as intrinsically monstrous within the heavily
over-determined images inside which notions of 'decency,' 'human
nature,' and so on are mobilized and relayed throughout the inter­
nal circuitry of the mass media marketplace." The multiple social
meanings of the words "monster" and "homosexual" are seen to
overlap to varying but often high degrees. Certain sectors of the
population still relate homosexuality to bestiality, incest, necro­
philia, sadomasochism, etc. - the very stuff of classical Hollywood
monster movies. The concepts "monster" and "homosexual" share
many of the same semantic charges and arouse many of the same
fears about sex and death.
True to the postmodern condition, it seems clear from the pre­
ceding examples that the melodramatic formulas and patterns of
representation to be found in the horror film have slipped into the
realm of "real-life" politics. And while horror films and monster
movies are frequently dismissed as children's fare or vacuous, mean­
ingless escapism, the demonization (or "monsterization") of homo­
sexuals in American society is a very serious life and death issue.
One might well wish that American society could dismiss anti-gay
propaganda like The Gay Agenda as easily as it does the latest B
horror film. To do so would require the unmasking of another insti­
tutionalized power hierarchy, one embedded in the form of media
texts themselves: documentaries (no matter how propagandistically
they are produced) are usually perceived as somehow inherently
true, while fictional film and television shows, in an attempt perhaps
to bolster their own significance, maintain their own hierarchies of
meaningfulness. Thus, "political significance" in fictional film and
television is reserved for realist "social problem" formats, while
horror movies, like soap operas and comic books, lie at the bottom
of those particular media hierarchies. What these denigrated arti­
facts might have to say about the culture they encode and provoke
is frequently ignored and/or discounted. In what follows, however,
3
4
4
Monsters in the closet
I will be insisting that there is much to learn from looking at such
texts, and arguing that the figure of the monster throughout the his­
tory of the English-language horror film can in some way be under­
stood as a metaphoric construct standing in for the figure of the
homosexual. However, while this work will argue that thefigureof
the monster can frequently be equated (with greater or lesser
degrees of ease) with that of the homosexual, what this means from
decade to decade and from film to film can be shown to change dra­
matically, according to the forces behind their production as well as
the societal awareness and understanding of human sexuality as it is
constructed in various historical periods.
Theorizing the monster queer
In the 1970s, in a series of essays exploring the horror film, critic
Robin Wood suggested that the thematic core of the genre might be
reduced to three interrelated variables: normality (as defined chiefly
by a heterosexual patriarchal capitalism), the Other (embodied in
the figure of the monster), and the relationship between the two.
According to Wood's formulation, these monsters can often be
understood as racial, ethnic, and/or political/ideological Others,
while more frequently they are constructed primarily as sexual
Others (women, bisexuals, and homosexuals). Since the demands of
the classical Hollywood narrative system usually insist on a hetero­
sexual romance within the stories they construct, the monster is tra­
ditionally figured as a force that attempts to block that romance. As
such, many monster movies (and the source material they draw
upon) might be understood as being "about" the eruption of some
form of queer sexuality into the midst of a resolutely heterosexual
milieu. By "queer," I mean to use the word both in its everyday con­
notations ("questionable ... suspicious ... strange ...") and also as
how it has been theorized in recent years within academia and social
politics. This latter "queer" is not only what differs "in some odd
way from what is usual or normal," but ultimately is what opposes
the binary definitions and proscriptions of a patriarchal heterosex­
ism. Queer can be a narrative moment, or a performance or stance
which negates the oppressive binarisms of the dominant hegemony
(what Wood and other critics have identified as the variable of
"normality") both within culture at large, and within texts of horror
and fantasy. It is somewhat analogous to the moment of hesitation
5
Introduction
5
that demarcates Todorov's Fantastic, or Freud's theorization of the
Uncanny: queerness disrupts narrative equilibrium and sets in
motion a questioning of the status quo, and in many cases within
fantastic literature, the nature of reality itself.
Sociologically, the term queer has been used to describe an "oxy­
moronic community of difference," which includes people who
might also self-identify as gay and/or lesbian, bisexual, transsexual,
transvestite, drag queen, leather daddy, lipstick lesbian, pansy, fairy,
dyke, butch, femme, feminist, asexual, and so on - any people not
explicitly defining themselves in "traditional" heterosexual terms.
Queer seeks to go beyond these and all such categories based on the
concepts of normative heterosexuality and traditional gender roles
to encompass a more inclusive, amorphous, and ambiguous contraheterosexuality (thus there are those individuals who self-identify as
"straight queers"). Queer is also insistent that issues of race, gender,
disability, and class be addressed within its politics, making inter­
racial sex and sex between physically challenged people dimensions
of queer sex also, and further linking the queer corpus with the
figure of the Other as it has been theorized by Wood in the horror
film. Queer activism itself has been seen as unruly, defiant, and
angry: like the mad scientists of horror films, queer proponents do
want to restructure society by calling attention to and eventually
dismantling the oppressive assumptions of heterocentrist discourse.
As one theorist has noted,
6
7
the queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels
in the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomatically pro­
scribed position of same-sex desire. Unlike petitions for civil rights,
queer revels constitute a kind of activism that attacks the dominant
notion of the natural. The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous,
the uncanny. Like the Phantom of the Opera, the queer dwells under­
ground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to
look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music.
8
Queer even challenges "the Platonic parameters of Being - the bor­
ders of life and death." Queer suggests death over life by focusing
on non-procreative sexual behaviors, making it especially suited to
a genre which takes sex and death as central thematic concerns.
Other film genres - the melodrama, the musical - also lend them­
selves to such queer theorization, yet few do so as readily as the fan­
tastic genres. While each of these genres are very different in many
9
Monsters in the closet
6
ways, they are similar in that they create a ready-made (non-realist)
hyperspace for their spectators, diegetic worlds in which hetero­
centrist assumptions may be as "real" or as "make-believe" as magic
and monsters. As Alexander Doty has noted, " e v e r y o n e ' s pleasure in
these genres is 'perverse,' is queer, as much of it takes place within
the space of the contra-heterosexual and the contra-straight." In
the case of monster movies and science fiction films, the narrative
elements themselves demand the depiction of alien "Otherness,"
which is often coded (at the site of production and/or reception) as
lesbian, gay, or otherwise queer. As one bibliographic review of the
genre notes,
10
Fantastic literature has always contained depictions of homosexuality,
both female and male. It has also contained portraits of androgynes,
transsexuals, gender-switching people, and alien sexuality that is
clearly not heterosexual. In the centuries before writers could deal
explicitly with homosexuality, they used fantastic literature's various
forms to disguise homoerotic passions.
11
In this respect, horror stories and monster movies, perhaps more
than any other genre, actively invoke queer readings, because of
their obvious metaphorical (non-realist) forms and narrative for­
mats which disrupt the heterosexual status quo.
Yet, as products of a patriarchal culture, these artifacts also tend
to narrow the scope of the word queer by reflecting the dominant
culture's masculinist bias, wherein all of queer's multifarious plu­
rality is most frequently signified in terms of (white) men and male
homosexuality. The female here serves as the source of the mon­
strous taint: the male homosexual or queer is monstrous precisely
because he embodies characteristics of the feminine, either in out­
ward displays or in the selection of a sexual object choice tradition­
ally reserved for women. (Julia Kristeva reached this conclusion
with her study of the "abject" - "that which does not 'respect bor­
ders, positions, rules' ... that which 'disturbs identity, system,
order.'" Kristeva centrally locates the abject in patriarchal culture's
fear of and revulsion towards the specifically maternal body with its
fluid boundary-crossing potential; it destroys rigid territoriality and
undermines binary oppositions, just as queer theory insists.)
12
Furthermore, in accordance with the masculine/feminine model
in which Hollywood homosexuality is/was usually depicted, gay or
quasi-gay couples in film are often made to mimic heterosexual
Introduction
7
role-models. This stereotype has broad implications, as Richard
Dyer points out:
Where gayness occurs in films it does so as part of dominant ideology.
It is not there to express itself, but rather to express something about
sexuality in general as understood by heterosexuals ... how homosex­
uality is thought and felt by heterosexuals is part and parcel of the way
the culture teaches them (and us) to think and feel about their hetero­
sexuality. Anti-gayness is not a discrete ideological system, but part of
the overall sexual ideology of our culture.
13
The stereotype of the butch and femme halves of the homosexual
couple (or the monster queer couple) reflects the inherent sexism in
the heterosexual model: the sexist ideology enforces the belief that
men and women cannot be equal by disallowing the possibility of a
relationship between two (same-sex) equals. This coded inequality
of the sexes becomes one of the bases for the dominant ideology's
fear and loathing of male homosexuals. According to this model,
one man "must" feminize himself (give up the phallus) and act as the
"woman" to another man. Reflecting this, as well as other cultural
and formal sexist imperatives, the majority of homosexual figures in
the American cinema (especially during the classical period) have
been and still are coded as masculine with some type of feminine
and/or monstrous taint. In horror films, monsters which might be
understood as displaced lesbian figures occur far less frequently
(although perhaps they are more readily acknowledged, as in the
construct of the overtly lesbian vampire). Also rarer in Hollywood
cinema, though certainly present, are those monsters which might
be understood as reflecting the fears of androgyny or transsexual­
ism. Yet, because American culture has generally constructed its
ideas about and fears of homosexuality within a framework of male
homosexuality, the majority of the monsters investigated in the fol­
lowing pages reflects this bias. As such, what this work will be
chiefly investigating might be considered a "subset" of queer: (pri­
marily male) homosexuality, even as it draws from the expanding
body of queer theory and historiography of twentieth-century gay
and lesbian experience.
14
15
Earlier critical thinking on the monster movie frequently drew
upon metaphysical or psychoanalytic concepts relating to the
genre's twin obsessions, sex and death. Some earlier writing on the
links between cinematic horror and (homo)sexuality used a
8
Monsters in the closet
Freudian model of repression as a theoretical rubric. In Margaret
Tarratt's groundbreaking essay of the early 1970s, "Monsters from
the Id," the author examined Hollywood monster movies of the
1950s and persuasively postulated that the monster represented an
eruption of repressed sexual desire. Thus, 1951's The Thing (from
Another World) develops explicit parallels between the monster in
question and the libidinous nature of the film's male lead, Captain
Hendry. The monster serves as a metaphoric expression of
Hendry's lusts; it is a displaced and concretized figure of phallic
desire. Even a cursory glance at the monster movies of this era will
repeatedly reveal this trope: The Creature from the Black
Lagoon
(1954), The Giant Gila Monster (1959), and most of their scaly
brethren seem to "pop up" like clockwork whenever the hero and
heroine move into a romantic clinch. The ideas put forth by Tarratt
became common and useful tools to understanding the functioning
of the genre, but what is perhaps less well known was that her essay
was initially published in the British journal Films and Filming,
which was produced and marketed primarily for and to a gay male
readership.
During the 1970s and 1980s, in a series of articles and books,
Canadian film scholar Robin Wood further developed Tarratt's
ideas, expanding them generally to all horror films, and specifically
to the films of 1970s horror auteurs such as Larry Cohen, Wes
Craven, and Tobe Hooper. (Robin Wood is himself a gay man who
makes certain distinctions between his pre- and post- "coming out"
work in film criticism.) Drawing on Herbert Marcuse's and Gad
Horowitz's readings of Marx and Freud (in Eros and
Civilization
and Repression, respectively), Wood invokes concepts of basic and
surplus repression to sketch a model of life under patriarchal capi­
talism. According to this model, society cannot be formed or con­
tinue to exist without a certain amount of basic repression. Surplus
repression, on the other hand, is used by those in control to keep all
"Others" subjugated to the dominant order. The Other reciprocally
bolsters the image of "normality": as Simon Watney has observed,
"Straight society needs us [homosexuals]. We are its necessary
'Other'. Without gays, straights are not straight." According to
Wood's readings of the American horror film, it is easy to see these
Others cast in the role of the monster: repressed by society, these
sociopolitical and psychosexual Others are displaced (as in a night­
mare) onto monstrous signifiers, in which form they return Jo wreak
16
17
18
19
20
Introduction
9
havoc in the cinema. While some have critiqued this model as essen­
tialist, Wood did note the importance of historical parameters in
understanding the relationship between normality and monsters,
asserting that "[t]he monster is, of course, much more protean,
changing from period to period as society's basic fears clothe them­
selves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments."
For many, the repressive hypothesis explicit in Tarratt's and
Wood's readings of the genre was overturned by the work of the
French theorist Michel Foucault, who, in The History of Sexuality
(1978) argued that sexuality is in fact not repressed by society, but
rather explicitly constructed and regulated via a series of discourses
which include those of the medical, legal, religious, and media
establishments. While many of these discourses have the same effect
on certain sectors of society as might be argued under the repressive
hypothesis (the exclusion from the public sphere, dehumanization,
and monsterization of certain forms of sexuality), Foucault argues
that "it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive
element from which one would be able to write the history of what
has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch." In
a by now famous turn of phrase, Foucault noted of "repression" that
"[t]here is not one but many silences." (This does not mean that
basic psychoanalytic concepts such as sexual repression and ego­
dystonic homosexuality will not be discussed within the following
pages. Indeed, homosexual repression - as it might exist within an
individual psyche rather within society at large - is still a potent for­
mulation in how one might understand the homosexual and/or
homophobic dynamics of many horror films.)
Like Wood, Foucault was a homosexual cultural critic who drew
upon (and eventually expanded) a Marxist understanding of how
society regulates human sexuality, developing a more precisely his­
toricized formulation which examines how power and knowledge
are embedded in the practice of social discourse. Shifting the debate
from the repression of sex to the production of sexuality, Foucault
noted that ours is now a culture wherein "the politics of the body
does not require the elision of sex or its restriction solely to the
reproductive function; it relies instead on a multiple channeling
into the controlled circuits of the economy - on what has been
called [by Marcuse] a hyper-repressive desublimation." As sex and
sexuality become more ever-present in the public sphere, they are
nonetheless regulated into certain cultural constructions through
21
22
23
24
10
Monsters in the closet
powerful social discourses. Yet, as Foucault further asserts,
we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments
whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more pre­
cise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between
accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant
discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive
elements that can come into play in various strategies.
25
As British cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall have pointed out, the
multiplicity of these discourses and their multiple sites of reception
also allow for the active negotiation of these issues. Thus, when
talking about a cultural product or "discursive object" such as a
filmic genre system, one would be wise to take into consideration
the historical discourses not only of production (where meanings
are encoded) but also those of reception (where meanings are
decoded according to a multiplicity of different reading positions).
One recent popular account of the monster movie that fails to
take under consideration the issues of history and active spectatorship can be found in James Twitchell's 1985 book Dreadful
Plea­
sures. After asserting that most monster movies are made for and
viewed by a predominately teenage audience (and how many Hol­
lywood films are not?), Twitchell argues that horror films are "really
formulaic rituals coded with precise social information needed by
the adolescent audience. Like fairy tales that prepare the child for
the anxieties of separation, modern horror myths prepare the
teenager for the anxieties of reproduction."
According to
Twitchell, the films function to encode patterns of "normal" sexual­
ity that are in alignment with the dominant ideology; the monster is
seen as the product of misdirected or inappropriate sexual energy.
The vampire and werewolf myths therefore address the horror that
results from being "too" sexual and/or appetitive, or the horror that
results from desiring an "inappropriate" sexual object, chiefly
defined by Twitchell as an incestuous one. While a provocative read­
ing of the genre, Twitchell's analysis rests upon a certain essential­
ized portrait of the genre's audience, and an overvalued attention to
the classical horror film's climax and denouement, in which the
monster is traditionally vanquished by the forces of normality. How
the genre might function tactically against the ideological status quo
(by encouraging identification with the monster, by allowing the
monster to live at the film's end, or by turning the figure of the mon­
26
27
11
Introduction
ster into some sort of heroic figure) are all important questions
which Twitchell's account cannot address. (For example, Carol
Clover's recent work theorizes the slasher, possession, and raperevenge subgenres of the horror film from a psychoanalytic per­
spective and finds their lure to be more of a cross-gendered
masochistic identification with the "final girl" victim, rather than a
simplistic sadistic identification with a misogynistic killer.) Fur­
thermore, while TwitchelPs book focuses on explicating metaphors
for incest taboos, masturbation, and promiscuity, he fails to address
in any depth the topic of homosexuality within the genre, despite
the fact he almost has to ignore it (willfully?) in his discussion of the
cinematic Frankenstein myth. Twitchell sees Dr Frankenstein's
obsessive need to create life without heterosexual reproduction as a
myth about the "dangers" of onanism. Yet why Dr Frankenstein is
obsessed with creating his very own man, or why the good doctor
usually has a closely bonded male assistant by his side, remain elu­
sive questions, ones commonly overlooked by a heterocentrist cul­
ture and the textual readings that support it.
How actual practices of spectatorship interact with the narrative
patterns of a genre system must then be considered when discussing
the queer pleasures of a horror film text itself. Where does the
viewer of monster movies position him/herself in relation to the
text? The overtly heterosexualized couple of the classical horror
film of the 1930s might be said to represent the most common (or
intended?) site of spectatorial identification for these particular
films, yet as many theorists have pointed out, it is more likely that
specific shot mechanisms within the film's formal construction will
link the spectator's gaze to that of the gothic villain or monster.
Furthermore, there is more to the processes of spectatorial identifi­
cation than patterns of subjective shots and cinematic suture. For
example, the heterosexualized couple in these films is invariably
banal and underdeveloped in relation to the sadomasochistic vil­
lain(s), whose outrageous exploits are, after all, the raison d'etre of
the genre. To phrase it in Richard Dyer's terms, in the horror film,
it is usually the heterosexualized hero and heroine who are stereo­
typed - painted with broad brush strokes - while the villains and
monsters are given more complex, "novelistic" characterizations.
As the titular stars of their own filmic stories, perhaps it is the mon­
sters that the audience comes to enjoy, experience, and identify
with; in many films, normative heterosexuality is reduced to a
28
29
30
31
12
Monsters in the closet
trifling narrative convention, one which becomes increasingly
unnecessary and outmoded as the genre evolves across the years.
As I shall be arguing throughout this work, the cinematic mon­
ster's subjective position is more readily acceded to by a queer
viewer - someone who already situates him/herself outside a patri­
archal, heterosexist order and the popular culture texts that it pro­
duces. While it is nearly impossible to reconstruct actual historical
audiences, recent studies have attempted to discuss the demograph­
ics of the modern horror film audience, albeit within severe hetero­
sexist assumptions which in themselves ignore or denigrate the
possibility of queer spectators. While the gender of an audience is
relatively easy to calculate, the various sexualities of a group are
much harder to qualify and most demographic accounts never even
try. It has been argued that in recent horror movie audiences (i.e.
mostly slasher films), men somewhat outnumber women, as they
probably also do at westerns, action films, gangster sagas, and war
movies. Younger people predominate (especially if one observes
these audiences, as some have done, on Friday evenings, more com­
monly known as "date night"). Drawing on these studies, Carol
Clover describes the typical audience for recent horror films as fol­
lows, from most common type to least: "young men, frequently in
groups but also solo; male-female couples of various ages (though
mostly young); solo 'rogue males' (older men of ominous appear­
ance and/or reactions); and adolescent girls in groups." Yet what
this information tells us about how individual audience members
might position themselves to the horror film genre's victims and vil­
lains is negligible. To her credit, Clover puts the typology "rogue
males" in the quotation marks that it deserves; the term is
Twitchell's, and he identifies these men as the disturbed and dis­
turbing individuals who cheer at the psycho-killer's gratuitous acts
of violence towards women. It is disturbing to attend a screening of
a bloody slasher movie where this happens; however, it is even more
disturbing to suggest that this response is essentially the product of
(as Twitchell calls them) "sour Humbert Humberts." Subtle fagbashing aside (these lone men are sexually immature, sadistic,
pedophilic creeps), Twitchell fails to entertain the possibility that
everyone in the audience may be there to identify in some way or
another with the monster, just as Clover has argued that a masochis­
tic identification with the victim might also cut across strictly gen­
dered categorizations.
32
33
Introduction
13
These accounts amply demonstrate the complexity of such issues
with regard to slasher films and their presumed heterosexual male
spectators, but what of other types of monsters, and other types of
spectators? Surely some of those individuals and groups of young
men and women are queer (either sexually or philosophically), just
as others are resolutely straight. The focus of this work - for a hope­
fully welcome change - presupposes a queer spectator who attends
these genre films for pleasure and entertainment. What does it mean
if lesbians identify with the beautiful female vampires of The
Hunger (1983), or if gay men go to see Tom Cruise bite Brad Pitt in
Interview with the Vampire (1994)? In what ways does this happen
and what is the "price paid" in culture-at-large for yet another
depiction of monstrous predatory homosexuals? Identification with
the monster can mean many different things to many different
people, and is not necessarily always a negative thing for the indi­
vidual spectators in question, even as some depictions of queer
monsters undoubtedly conflate and reinforce certain sexist or
homophobic fears within the public sphere. For spectators of all
types, the experience of watching a horror film or monster movie
might be understood as similar to that of the Carnival as it has been
theorized by Bakhtin, wherein the conventions of normality are ritualistically overturned within a prescribed period of time in order
to celebrate the lure of the deviant. Halloween functions similarly,
allowing otherwise "normal" people the pleasures of drag, or mon­
strosity, for a brief but exhilarating experience. However, while
straight participants in such experiences usually return to their day­
light worlds, both the monster and the homosexual are permanent
residents of shadowy spaces: at worst caves, castles, and closets, and
at best a marginalized and oppressed position within the cultural
hegemony. Queer viewers are thus more likely than straight ones to
experience the monster's plight in more personal, individualized
terms.
What then exactly makes the experience of a horror film or mon­
ster movie gay, lesbian, or queer? There are at least four different
ways in which homosexuality might intersect with the horror film.
The first and most obvious of these occurs when a horror film
includes identifiably gay and/or lesbian characters. These characters
might be victims, passers-by, or the monsters themselves, although
gay and lesbian people (to this point in time) have never been placed
in the role of the normative hero or heroine. Broadly speaking, the
34
35
14
Monsters in the closet
appearance of overtly homosexual film characters doesn't occur
until the late 1960s and early 1970s, following the demise of the
Production Code and its restrictions against the depiction of "sex
perversion." Films such as Blacula (1972), Theatre of Blood (1973),
or The Sentinel (1977) fall into this category. In these films, gay or
lesbian characters fall victim to the monster just as straight charac­
ters do, although somewhat disturbingly their fates are frequently
deemed "deserved" by the films they inhabit, often solely on the
basis of their characters' homosexuality. Other films such as The
Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), The Vampire Lovers (1971), or The
Hunger (1983), characterize their vampires as specifically homosex­
ual or bisexual. These films have perhaps done much to cement into
place the current social construction of homosexuals as unnatural,
predatory, plague-carrying killers, even as they also might provide a
pleasurable power-wish fulfillment fantasy for some queer viewers.
The second type of homo-horror film is one written, produced,
and/or directed by a gay man or lesbian, even if it does not contain
visibly homosexual characters. Reading these films as gay or lesbian
is predicated upon (what some might call a debased) concept of the
cinematic auteur, which would argue that gay or lesbian creators of
film products infuse some sort of "gay sensibility" into their films
either consciously or otherwise. Yet such questions of authorship,
which are certainly important and hold bearing on this particular
study (for example the films of James Whale or Ed Wood) will
herein be of lesser importance, since it is not necessary to be a selfidentified homosexual or queer in order to produce a text which has
something to say about homosexuality, heterosexuality, and the
queerness that those two terms proscribe and enforce. A variation
on the homo-horror auteur approach is that in which a gay or les­
bian film star (whether "actually" homosexual or culturally per­
ceived as such) brings his/her persona to a horror film. Classical
Hollywood cinema is full of such performers, who, regardless of
their off-screen lives, bring an unmistakable homosexual "air" to
the characters they create: Eric Blore, Franklin Pangborn, Robert
Walker, George Sanders, Judith Anderson, Eve Arden, Greta Garbo,
and Marlene Dietrich, to name just a few. The characters created in
1930s horror films by Charles Laughton or by Vincent Price in the
1960s and early 1970s best typify this type of homo-horror film.
The third and perhaps most important way that homosexuality
enters the genre is through subtextual or connotative avenues. For
36
Introduction
15
the better part of cinema's history, homosexuality on screen has
been more or less allusive: it lurks around the edges of texts and
characters rather than announcing itself forthrightly. In films such as
White Zombie (1932), The Seventh Victim (1943), or How To Make
a Monster (1958), homosexuality becomes a subtle but undoubtedly
present signifier which usually serves to characterize the villain or
monster. This particular trope is not exclusive to the horror film. It
has been pointed out in films noir, action films, and in other films
wherever homosexuality is used to further delineate the depravity
of the villain.37 Alexander Doty has argued against this model of
connotation, suggesting that it keeps gay and lesbian concerns mar­
ginalized: "connotation has been the representational and interpre­
tive closet of mass culture queerness for far too long ... [This]
shadowy realm of connotation ... allows straight culture to use
queerness for pleasure and profit in mass culture without admitting
to it.' Accordingly, in many of these films, queerness is reduced to
titillation, frisson, fashion, or fad. The "love that dare not speak its
name" remains a shadowy Other which conversely works to bolster
the equally constructed idea of a normative heterosexuality.
But it is also precisely this type of connotation (conscious or oth­
erwise) which allows for and fosters the multiplicity of various read­
ings and reading positions, including what has been called active
queer (or gay, or lesbian) reading practices. If we adopt Roland
Barthes's model of signification wherein the denotative meaning of
any signifier is simply the first of many possible meanings along a
connotative chain, then we can readily acknowledge that a multi­
tude of spectators, some queer, some not, will each understand the
"denotative" events of a visual narrative in different ways. For Doty,
then, there is the (fourth) sense that any film viewed by a gay or les­
bian spectator might be considered queer. The queer spectator's
"gay-dar," already attuned to the possible discovery of homosexu­
ality within culture-at-large, here functions in relation to specific
cultural artifacts. As such, "Queer readings aren't 'alternative' read­
ings, wishful or willful misreadings, or 'reading too much into
things' readings. They result from the recognition and articulation
of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture
texts and their audiences all along." In the case of horror films and
monster movies, this "complex range of queerness" circulates
through and around the figure of the monster, and in his/her rela­
tion to normality.
38
39
Monsters in the closet
16
These approaches to finding homosexuals in and around the text
are hardly mutually exclusive - in fact, these factors usually work in
some combination to produce a text which might easily be under­
stood as being "about" homosexuality. James Whale's The Old Dark
House (1932), directed by and starring homosexual men, would be
one such film that combines these approaches: while it might be
possible for some spectators to miss the homosexual undercurrents
which fuel the plot (since no character is forthrightly identified as
overtly homosexual), for other spectators these themes readily leap
off the screen. Conversely, other films which have no openly homo­
sexual input or context might still be understood as queer by virtue
of the ways in which they situate and represent their monster(s) in
relation to heterosexuality. Ultimately, then, this project rests upon
the variable and intersubjective responses between media texts and
their spectators, in this case spectators whose individualized social
subjectivities have already prepared and enabled them to acknowl­
edge "the complex range of queerness" that exists in the Englishlanguage monster movie.
A short history of the homosexual and the monster
In many ways, the development of the gothic form and the social
understanding of homosexuality have followed concurrent and
often commingling paths. Before the codification of the classical
Hollywood horror film, and before the late nineteenth-century
"invention" of the homosexual as a distinct type of person, it is
apparent that Western and non-Western cultures alike had some sort
of terminology for and/or knowledge of both the monstrous and
same-sex love. In many cultures, such as that of ancient Greece, the
two clusters of meaning had little in common; monsters were often
terrible beasts encountered on perilous journeys, and (male) homo­
sexual acts were an accepted element of the structuring patriarchy
(although overtly sexualized monsters such as the incubus and suc­
cubus do date from these eras). Out of necessity and prudence, this
work focuses on the distinctly Western, modern/ist, nineteenth- and
twentieth-century constructions of the monster and the homosex­
ual, and their considerable overlap. The histories of these concepts
are complex, but the origins of Western literary horror are usually
traced to the mordant verses of the mid-eighteenth-century Grave­
yard Poets or the appearance of the "first" gothic novel, The Castle
40
Introduction
17
of Otranto, in 1764. In that era, the term "homosexuality" was as
yet unknown; if and when same-sex desire was acknowledged as a
possible form of human sexuality, it was usually understood as a
preference for a specific range of sexual behaviors and not as an
entire identity. In many cultural artifacts of the time (including the
early gothic novels), contra-straight sexual behavior was often
linked to members of the crumbling aristocratic class who had the
means to indulge in whatever forms of pleasure they could imagine.
Most significantly, when "homosexuality" (which appeared in the
scientific lexicon in 1869) reached common English parlance in the
1880s and 1890s, Victorian England was in the middle of a gothic
renaissance whose legacy can still be felt in today's horror films.
Still, even before this momentous cultural event, the confluence
of contra-straight sexuality with the development of the gothic,
both in terms of its production and its thematic concerns, is strik­
ing. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, "the Gothic was the first
novelistic form in England to have close, relatively visible links to
male homosexuality ...". She points to the fact that many of the
writers of the first wave of gothic novels (William Beckford,
Matthew "Monk" Lewis, Horace Walpole) might be understood to
have been homosexual by today's understanding of the word. A
"case can be made about each that he was in some significant sense
homosexual - Beckford notoriously, Lewis probably, Walpole
iffily." Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, was cer­
tainly eccentric, if not forthrightly homosexual: his personal life
exhibited tendencies that we might now view as indicative of a gay
camp sensibility. One biographer describes the bachelor dandy as a
"gentle, sickly, effeminate boy" who grew into a "whimsical man
[who] found it difficult to avoid flights of fancy," such as spending
most of his adult life constructing a mock medieval castle, a gothic
fantasy world, at his home, Strawberry Hill. Whether or not Wal­
pole was homosexual by today's understanding of the term remains
unknowable; however, by virtue of his apparent gender-bending
and his focus on the performative aspects of role-playing, he might
more readily be called queer, a term more historically distant but
perhaps more descriptively accurate.
Many of the gothic works of this first wave (which were more or
less satirized in Jane Austen's Northanger
Abbey,
written in
1797-98 but not published until 1818) focused on a young heroine
and an older, sexualized male threat. Yet many also contained more
41
42
43
44
Monsters in the closet
18
obviously queer menaces, albeit in ways displaced through the
gothic signifiers of death, decay, and the double. William Beckford,
who had been "hounded out of England in 1785 over charges
involving a younger man," published Vathek in 1796, and this
work can easily be read as an allegory about homosexual procliv­
ity. M. G. Lewis's The Monk (also published in 1796) found the
form becoming increasingly explicit, and it garishly featured reli­
giously repressed sexual hysteria and a transsexual demon. A few
years later at the Villa Diodati, two of history's most enduring mon­
sters entered the literary canon when a rather queer congress
decided to write some ghost stories. The sexual eccentricities of
John Polidori ("The Vampyre" (1819)), Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein
(1818)) are
well documented, and many read Polidori's sexually predatory
Vampyre Lord Ruthven as a thinly disguised portrait of the bisexual
libertine Lord Byron. Frankenstein
itself has become something of a
counter-hegemonic classic; feminists and queers alike have plumbed
its depths to underscore a scathing critique of male hubris in which
the attempt to create life without the aid of procreative sexual union
results in disaster for all. Though rarely filmed in any manner
approaching the novel's complexity of metaphysical argument, this
core idea - that of a mad male homosexual science giving birth to a
monster - can be found to a greater or lesser degree in almost every
filmic adaptation.
After several relatively dormant decades, gothic writing flour­
ished again during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Also at
this time, homosexual "underworlds" began to be acknowledged in
many European cities, and early sexologists such as Richard von
Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs began to argue that samesex relations should be understood in terms medical rather than
criminal. Ulrichs wrote essays on the natural etiology of same-sex
feelings, arguing in 1862 that "Urnings" (his word for a passive,
effeminate, male homosexual) were a biologically determined
"Third Sex." Like the mad scientist of the Hollywood horror film,
Ulrichs was interested in the effects of blood transfusion, and won­
dered in print whether or not exchanges of bodily fluids might make
an Urning into a "normal" man, and vice versa. Ulrichs also per­
haps unwittingly contributed to the monster-homosexual equation
in 1869 when he wrote "Incubus: Urning-love and blood lust" in
response to a particularly violent rape and murder of a five-year-old
45
46
47
19
Introduction
48
boy. While Ulrichs's aim was to explore and differentiate Urning
love from murderous pederasty, the Zastrow case of 1869 (as it
became known) and Ulrichs's discussion of it, only helped to link
same-sex relations with concepts of the monster both ages old (the
Greek Incubus) as well as more modern (the sexual psychopath).
For years after the trial, the common parlance of the day used the
term "Zastrow" (the name of the accused murderer) in place of
"Urning." Also less well known is that towards the end of his
career Ulrichs wrote an explicitly homosexual vampire story entitled "Manor," which was published in 1885: true to what would
become narrative convention, the story ends with its male lovers
embracing, but only in death.
Like "Manor," the works of the late nineteenth century's gothic
renaissance were even more explicit than their predecessors regarding the conflation of the monstrous with some form of queer sexuality. J. Sheridan Le Fanu wrote his lesbian vampire tale "Carmilla"
in 1872, and Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1887. This latter tale has recently
received an excellent queer exegesis from Elaine Showalter, who
uses unpublished manuscripts to argue that Jekyll's repressed Mr.
Hyde was meant to be read as homosexual. Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1897), which arguably created the most enduring of monsters, features an elegant and seductive count who preys not only upon the
bodies of men and women, but also on the very being of his victims,
transforming them into creatures as sexually monstrous as himself.
This might be understood as mirroring the culture's invention of the
homosexual: the vampire's victims not only indulge in vampiric sex,
but now become a new and distinct type of individual/monster
themselves.
Around this same time, the association of homosexual behavior
with elitism, death, and decay existed dramatically in an entire
movement of poets and painters who became known as "The Decadents." Centering their work on abnormal loves, necrophilia, and
the ever-present image of the woman's corpse, the school was
simultaneously morbid and queer. As cultural historians have noted,
the term "Decadence" itself became "a fin-de-siècle euphemism for
homosexuality." The (mostly) male Decadents celebrated themselves as pale, thin, delicate, aestheticized, and emotional creatures,
turning upon one popular "scientific" construction of homosexuality at that time: that of gender inversion, "anima muliebris in cor49
50
51
52
Monsters in the closet
20
pore virili inclusa," a woman's soul trapped in a man's body. The
Decadent monster queer is also invariably sad, like the tragic gothic
and romantic heroes from whom he descends. This sad young
slightly effeminate man can be found throughout the twentieth-cen­
tury history of homosexuality and is a staple of horror films as well.
In the 1950s this character was especially susceptible to the seduc­
tions of older, forthrightly "evil" men, and in the 1970s and 1980s
he was often figured as an ostracized high-school student and loner.
This image of the pathetic and slightly sinister homosexual
dandy was perhaps cemented into place through the life and work
of Oscar Wilde. Wilde was linked to the Decadents through social
connections as well as through The Yellow Book, a literary magazine
which was featured heavily in his 1895 trial for sodomy and itself
became synonymous with homosexual scandal. But it is Wilde's
1891 book The Picture of Dorian Gray that contains the quintes­
sential imagery of the monster queer - that of a sexually active and
attractive young man who possesses some terrible secret which must
perforce be locked away in a hidden closet. The common gothic
trope of the "unspeakable" was now (partially, incompletely) derepressed; it had become, in the words of Wilde's young lover Lord
Alfred Douglas, "the love that dare not speak its name."
Monsters, and especially the imagery of the vampire, continued
to be linked with homosexuality during the early years of the twen­
tieth century. Der Eigene, a German male homosexual magazine
published between 1896 and 1931, "contained much vampire
imagery in its fiction and at least one complete vampire story." And
Lillian Faderman has demonstrated how vampiric imagery crept
into a slew of novels at this time in order to pathologize or "monsterize" women's "romantic friendships." In the 1910s, when nar­
rative cinema began to explore the monstrous, the gothic literature
of the nineteenth century was pressed into service. Edison filmed
Frankenstein
in 1910, and D. W. Griffith adapted Edgar Allan Poe's
"The Tell-Tale Heart" as The Avenging Conscience
in 1914. How­
ever, by far the most filmed horror story of the period was Oscar
Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. According to horror film histo­
rian Gregory William Mank, there were at least seven adaptations
of the novel during the 1910s: "a 1910 Danish version; a 1913 US
adaptation; a Russian film in 1915, as well as another American ver­
sion; a British 1916 film, starring Henry Victor, with an appearance
by 'the devil'; and, in 1917, versions from both Germany and Hun53
54
Introduction
21
55
gary (the latter possibly featuring Bela Lugosi)." Whether or not
these films (most of them are now lost) focused more on the novel's
tropes of pictorial transformation or its thematic queerness, it is
nonetheless clear that they did help to construct a very definite
image of the monstrous male homosexual. For example, the poster
for the 1917 German version of The Picture of Dorian Gray shows
a figure consistent with that era's understanding of the male homo­
sexual. Dorian Gray stands next to a vase filled with heart-shaped
leaves; the figure himself wears a stylish tuxedo, patent leather slip­
pers, bracelets and makeup, has rounded hips, arms akimbo with
one on the pedestal and one on a hip, crossed legs, cocked head,
flowered lapel, and a slightly bored, bemused expression on his
face.
It was the Germans who would ultimately create the distinctive
"look" of the horror film by wedding its queer characters and occur­
rences to a visual style drawn from modernist painting, one that
eventually became known as a cinematic style in its own right,
German Expressionism. The nightmarish subjectivity explored in
the twisted and distorted mise-en-scene
of these films proved to be
a key visual analog to the literature of horror and monsters, as well
as to the hidden recesses of the human psyche and sexuality. Many
of the German "Schauerfilme" of the era explored gothic themes
such as the homosexual creation of life (The Golem (filmed in 1914
and 1920)), while others focused on homoerotic doubles and mad­
ness (The Student of Prague (1913), The Picture of Dorian
Gray
(1917), and perhaps most famously The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919)). One of the leading filmic Expressionists of this era, F. W.
Murnau, was homosexual; he made film versions of both The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula, released in
Germany as Der Januskopf
(1920) and Nosferatu
(1922). German
Expressionism and modern art in general was and still is frequently
linked with homosexuality, not only through the historical sexual­
ity of many of its practitioners, but also through its subject-matter,
and its opposition to "normality" as constructed through realist
styles of representation. Nazi Germany made these links most clear
in 1937 when it invited its citizens to denounce and mock mod­
ernist art at a Berlin exhibit snidely entitled "Degenerate Art." The
aim of the exhibit was to demonstrate how Aryan culture had been
polluted by primitivism and the modernist style practiced (of
course) by Jews, homosexuals, and other social deviants. By that
56
57
58
Monsters in the closet
22
time, however, many of Germany's artists had died or fled the con­
tinent. Film-makers such as Karl Freund and Paul Leni (among
many others) brought the German Expressionist style to America
and specifically to the horror films of Hollywood's classical period.
Once there, it helped to create some of the defining examples of cin­
ematic horror, upon whose foundations almost all of Hollywood's
later monster movies have been built.
In citing these historical "facts" I do not mean merely to suggest
a rather coarse or knee-jerk auteurism (queer works are produced
by queer authors), but rather to point out the confluence of contrastraight sexuality within the development of the gothic/horror
genre. The idea that the homosexual was socially constructed as a
distinct type of person during the late nineteenth century, and
inflected culturally ever since, is a key tenet of this work, which
means to situate itself somewhere between the theoretical poles of
essentialist sexuality and social constructionism. These models are
readily mapped out by John Boswell and David M. Halperin in the
first two essays contained in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the
Gay and Lesbian Past. While Boswell argues that there have always
been individuals whom today we might describe as "homosexual" that is, people who prefer sexual activity with members of their own
sex, Halperin's view (and mine) suggests that how this specific pref­
erence is understood from era to era is shaped by a myriad of soci­
etal concerns. In attempting to combine or mediate these positions,
it might be acknowledged that some form of innate and hardwired
"[b]iological sexuality is the necessary precondition for human sex­
uality. But biological sexuality is only a precondition, a set of poten­
tialities, which is never unmediated by human reality, and which
becomes transformed in qualitatively new ways in human society."
In other words, whether or not we understand the existence of
homosexuality to be biological or social in origin (or some combi­
nation thereof), the idea of homosexuality being perverse or mon­
strous is clearly the construction of historical and social ideas.
As such, the very language we use to describe and make sense of
our world works to mediate our understanding of homosexuality.
The historical progression of words such as "sodomite," "urning,"
"invert," "homosexual," "gay," "lesbian," and "queer" reflect in
themselves the changing understanding of our approach to human
sexuality across the years. And even within set eras, such words
mean different things to different groups of people. Thus, while the
59
60
23
Introduction
term "homosexuality" entered the scientific lexicon a little over one
hundred years ago, the word "homosexuality" was still not used in
common American parlance for another fifty years or so. And it was
rarely popularized in the homosexual underground, which gener­
ally preferred a plethora of slang terms including the word "gay,"
which in turn didn't enter mainstream vocabularies until (in some
cases, most notoriously that of The New York Times editors' policy)
the 1980s.
Other representational systems, such as Hollywood film genres,
are also tied in complex ways to the material culture of the times
which produce and receive them. They convey ideas and ideologies,
and perhaps more subtly "meanings and values as they are actively
lived and felt," what Raymond Williams has called "structures of
feeling." These structures of feeling are often contradictory and
always in flux (Williams further delineates them as emergent, dom­
inant, and residual), and they allow for the theorization of how con­
cepts such as monstrosity or homosexuality might be seen to change
and evolve through time:
61
62
The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evi­
dence of forms and conventions - semantic figures - which, in art and
literature, are often among the very first indications that a new struc­
ture is forming ... this is a way of defining forms and conventions in
art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process:
not by derivation from other social forms and pre-forms, but as social
formation of a specific kind which may in turn be seen as the articula­
tion (often the fully available articulation) of structures of feeling
which as living processes are much more widely experienced."
63
As such, and also because of the active historical suppression of
information related to the topic of homosexuality, it has become in
many cases both necessary and efficacious to search in the shadows
for the "semantic figures" which relate to the lived experiences of
those whom today we might call queer. As one recent queer theo­
rist most emphatically asserts: "Sexual identity is heterogeneous
and is gleaned from many cultural sites, including bad, old
movies."
In the following pages, I will be constructing a sort of epochal
analysis as suggested by Raymond Williams, exploring in greater
detail the confluence of thinking about homosexuality and the
movie monster within different historical periods and within differ64
Monsters in the closet
24
ent series of horror films. Yet I also mean to avoid constructing a
naive teleological argument (i.e. one that asserts a progressive,
"march-towards-enlightenment" model of history), for many of the
issues under contestation during the classical period remain
endemic to the forms and representations of the genre today. The
history I write is one of conjunctural moments, of emergent and
residual traces, that reflect in twisted and distorted ways the social
understanding of the concept "homosexuality." As Foucault has
advised, when constructing a history of sexuality, "we must begin
with these positive mechanisms, insofar as they produce knowledge,
multiply discourse, induce pleasure, and generate power; we must
investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation, and try
to discover how the related facts of interdiction or concealment are
distributed in respect to them." Thus, during any given epoch, one
must attempt to put into play the many (often conflicting) "takes"
on homosexuality, the "positive mechanisms" which culturally con­
struct it. There are "official" medical or scientific ideas (which
themselves often contradict each other), as well as varied legal and
religious discourses referent to homosexuality. There are the per­
spectives of homosexual or queer people themselves: how might the
individuals who belonged to various historical queer subcultures
have reacted to the films under question? In between those two
poles - of those who set themselves up as the official arbiters of
homosexuality, and those individuals who know their lives with
some degree of intimacy, lies yet another position, one that might
be called the popular impression of homosexuality, one most closely
linked to the media construction of homosexuality not only in the
"factual" press, but also in the fictional cinema. All of these dis­
courses, then, contribute to the ebb and flow of the meaning of the
concept "homosexual." It is my hope that by examining the mech­
anisms of specific texts, the subjectivities of possible readers, and
other ancillary cultural discourses related to homosexuality, this
work will create a new and unique impression of what being gay or
lesbian has meant, and continues to mean, in twentieth-century
America.
65
Notes
1 See John Wayne Plasek and Janicemarie Allard, "Misconceptions of
Homophobia," in Bashers, Baiters, & Bigots: Homophobia
in American
Introduction
25
Society, ed. John P. De Cecco (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985)
23-38.
2 For more on the phenomenon, see Kellie Gibbs, "Fundamentalist Hal­
loween: Scared All the Way to Jesus," Out 29 (February 1996) 2 0 .
3 Some of these essays include: Ellis Hanson, "Undead," in inside/out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge,
1991) 324-340; Andrew Parker, "Grafting David Cronenberg: Mon­
strosity, AIDS Media, National/Sexual Difference" and Katharine Park,
"Kimberly Bergalis, AIDS, and the Plague Metaphor," both in Media
Spectacles, eds Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca Walkowitz
(New York: Routledge, 1993) 2 0 9 - 2 3 1 and 2 3 2 - 2 5 4 .
Other writings on the connections between fictional monsters and
homosexuality (not cited directly below) include: Terry Castle, The
Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality
and Modern
Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Rhona J . Berenstein,
Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in
Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Richard Dyer, "Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality,
Homosexuality as Vampirism," Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and
Popular Fiction, ed. Susannah Radstone (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1988) 4 7 - 7 2 ; Bonnie Zimmerman, "Daughters of Darkness:
Lesbian Vampires," Jump Cut 24/25 (1981) 2 3 - 2 4 ; Martin F. Norden,
"Sexual References in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein," Eros in the
Mind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film, ed. Donald
Palumbo (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) 141-150; Elizabeth
Reba Weise, "Bisexuality, The Rocky Horror Pictre Show, and Me," in
Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. eds Loraine Hutchins
and Lani Kaahumanu (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1991) 134-139; Patricia
White, "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting," in
inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York:
Routledge, 1991) 142-172; Diana Fuss, "Monsters of Perversion: Jef­
frey Dahmer and The Silence of the Lambs," in Media Spectacles, eds
Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York:
Routledge, 1993) 1 8 1 - 2 0 5 ; Edward Guerrero, "AIDS as Monster in
Science Fiction and Horror Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Tele­
vision 18:3 (Fall 1990) 8 6 - 9 3 .
4 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media,
second edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 4 2 .
5 Many of these essays have been reworked and published in Robin
Wood, Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986) 7 9 .
6 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
26
7
8
9
10
11
12
Monsters in the closet
1973) especially 2 5 - 4 0 ; Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in The Stan­
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. XVII, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955)
219-252.
This trope of the genre has been theorized by a great many people in
a variety of ways. For example, Noel Carroll has focused on rot, ooze,
slime, and blood as generic motifs which suggest transition and trans­
gression, concluding that "What horrifies is that which lies outside cul­
tural categories" - in short, the queer) Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of
Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990) 35).
Louise Sloan, "Beyond Dialogue," San Francisco Bay Guardian Literary
Supplement (March 1991), quoted in Lisa Duggan, "Making it Perfectly
Queer," Socialist Review (April 1992) 19.
Sue Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire," differences 3:2 (Summer 1991)
3.
Case 3.
Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Cul­
ture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 15.
Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo, Uranian Worlds: a Guide to Alternative Sex­
uality in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall
and Co., 1990) vii.
Quoted from Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjec­
tion, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press,
1982), in Barbara Creed, "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An
Imaginary Abjection," Screen 2 7 (January-February 1986) 4 4 - 7 0 .
Expanding upon Kristeva's ideas, Creed notes that "definitions of the
monstrous as constructed in the modern horror text are grounded in
ancient religious and historical notions of abjection - particularly in
relation to the following religious 'abominations': sexual immorality
and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice;
murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest." This
list accurately describes the constellation of factors that surround and
circulate through the social constructions of both the homosexual and
the monster.
13 Richard Dyer, "Gays in Film," Jump Cut 18 (August 1978) 16.
14 For more on this and related points, see Barbara Creed, "Dark Desires:
Male Masochism in the Horror Film," in Screening the Male: Exploring
Masculinity in Hollywood Cinema, eds Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark
(New York: Routledge, 1993) 1 1 8 - 1 3 3 .
15 A brief note on terminology. Generally speaking, in the following pages
I use the term "homosexual" in a somewhat clinical sense, to refer to a
predisposition towards same-sex desire and sexual activity. I use the
words "gay" and "lesbian" in reference to the specific twentieth-cen-
Introduction
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
tury construction(s) of that same desire and activity: gay and lesbian
refer to social identities. "Queer" is the most multifarious term, encom­
passing homosexual, gay, lesbian and all other terms used for describ­
ing contra-straight sexuality; thus most of the monsters depicted in
horror films are "monster queers" by virtue of their "deviant" sexual­
ity. I also use queer to refer to a reading protocol, one described by
aspects of textual coding and active spectatorship that question or go
beyond normative, compulsory, white, male, heterosexist assumptions.
Margaret Tarratt, "Monsters from the Id," Films and Filming 17:3
(December 1970) 38-42 and 17:4 (January 1971) 4 0 - 4 2 . Reprinted in
Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986) 2 5 8 - 2 7 7 .
For a brief narrative history of Films and Filming, see Anthony Slide,
ed., International Film, Radio, and Television Journals (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1985) 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 . Slide notes the magazine's "definite
homosexual slant" and also the mild controversy it caused in 1971
when some readers began to object. See also "Letters," Films and Film­
ing (July 1971) 4.
See "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic," Film Comment 14:1 (Janu­
ary-February 1978), Reprinted in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Meth­
ods, Volume Two (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985)
6 4 9 - 6 6 0 . One might wonder as to the degree his thinking about and
writing on the horror film was related to this process.
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), Gad Horowitz, Repression :
Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich,
and Marcuse (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
Watney 2 6 .
Wood 7 9 .
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1978) 12.
Foucault 27.
Foucault 114. Compare these thoughts with those of Herbert Marcuse
in "Chapter Three: The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness:
Repressive Desublimation," in One-Dimensional
Man: Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1964) 5 6 - 8 3 .
Foucault 100.
For an overview of the theoretical arguments which developed within
and from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
see Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Boston,
MA: Unwin Hyman 1990). Many of the most important original essays
are collected in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran and
28
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
Monsters in the closet
Janet Woolacott, eds, Culture, Society and the Media (New York:
Methuen, 1982) and Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and
Paul Willis, eds, Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson,
1980).
James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 7.
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision: Essays in
Feminist Film Criticism, eds Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp,
and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: University Publications of America,
Inc., 1984) 8 3 - 9 9 .
For an exploration of some of these issues, see Nick Browne, "The
Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach,"
in Movies and
Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1985) 4 5 8 - 4 7 5 .
Richard Dyer, "The Role of Stereotypes," in The Matter of Images:
Essays on Representation (New York: Routledge, 1993) 1 1 - 1 8 .
Clover 6.
Twitchell 69-70.
For a discussion of the Bakhtinian Carnival and how it relates to film
(and briefly Halloween), see Robert Stam, "Chapter Three: Film, Literature, and the Carnivalesque," Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural
Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989) 8 5 - 1 2 1 . Although he doesn't specifically talk about horror films,
several of the ten criteria he isolates for the cinematic expression of the
Carnivalesque are highly relevant to the genre.
For an interesting account of how gay and lesbian actors get marginalized both within Hollywood narrative systems and industrial practice,
see Patricia White, "Supporting Character: The Queer Career of Agnes
Moorehead," in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on
Popular Culture, eds Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995) 9 1 - 1 1 4 .
For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Doty 1 7 - 3 8 .
See Dyer, "Homosexuality and Film Noir," in The Matter of Images:
Essays on Representations (New York: Routledge, 1993) 5 2 - 7 2 .
Doty xi-xii.
Doty 16.
For a historical overview of these figures, see Nicolas Kiessling, The
Incubus in English Literature: Provenance and Progeny (Seattle: Washington State University Press, 1977).
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) 1 7 1 .
Introduction
29
42 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 9 1 .
43 Sedgwick 92.
44 E. F. Bleiler, "Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto,"
Three
Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, & The Vampyre, ed. E.
F. Bleiler (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966) vii, x.
45 Sedgwick 9 2 .
46 A fuller queer exegesis of Vathek was recently offered by Jason Tougaw
in his paper "Owning Our Own Devils: Jeffrey Dahmer, Vathek and
Gay Male Subjectivities," presented at Queer Frontiers: The Fifth
Annual National Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Graduate Student Confer­
ence, Los Angeles, 1995.
47 See Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs: Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston, MA: Alyson
Publications, Inc., 1988) 77.
48 Kennedy 1 3 6 - 1 4 4 .
4 9 Kennedy 138.
50 Showalter 1 0 5 - 1 2 6 .
51 For a fuller account of the novel's homoerotic aspects, see Christopher
Craft, "Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram
Stoker's Dracula," Representations 8 (Fall 1984) 1 0 7 - 1 3 3 .
52 Showalter 1 7 1 .
53 Reported in Richard Dyer, "Children of the Night" 4 8 .
54 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: Marrow,
1981).
55 Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 2 9 8 .
56 Reproduced in Phil Hardy, ed., The Overlook Film
Encyclopedia:
Horror (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1986) 2 0 . For a discussion of
"arms akimbo" in relation to queer politics, both historically and today,
see Thomas A. King, "Performing 'Akimbo': Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice," in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe
Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994) 23-50.
57 See Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1969).
58 See Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1973).
59 John Boswell, "Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories," and
David M. Halperin, "Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics, and
Power in Classical Athens," both in Hidden From History: Reclaiming
the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and
George Chauncey, J r (New York: Penguin, 1989) 1 7 - 3 6 and 3 7 - 5 3 .
60 Robert Padgug, "Sexual Matters: Rethinking Sexuality in History,"
Hidden From History 57.
30
Monsters in the closet
61 See Halperin 3 8 - 4 0 for a brief overview of the evolution of these terms.
62 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 1977) 1 2 8 - 1 3 5 .
63 Williams 1 3 3 .
64 Tanya Krzywinska, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci?" in A Queer Romance,
ed. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1995)
106.
65 Foucault 7 3 .
1
Defining the monster queer in
the classical Hollywood horror
film
T
he years from 1930 to 1936 saw the first flowering of the Hol­
lywood horror film. The codes and conventions of the genre
that were developed and exploited during these years were to
become the basis for the monster movie's structure and appeal
throughout the remainder of the century. The early 1930s also
chronicled the depths of the Great Depression, the repeal of Prohi­
bition, and the beginning of the end of a certain popular cultural
construction of homosexuality, one that defined homosexual
behavior more in terms of gender deviance rather than of sexualobject choice. As in the construction of homosexuality in other
world cultures (such as the Mediterranean), American men during
the first third of this century who indulged in sex with other men but performed the active, insertive role - were still likely to be
considered "normal," whereas those men who performed the
"woman's role" were the ones most likely to be identified (and sub­
sequently stereotyped) as homosexuals. Likewise, it was the man­
nish lesbian who caught the public's attention and contributed to
the idea that homosexuality was somehow caused by the improper
alignment of spiritual gender and physical body. This view was held
by homosexuals as well as heterosexuals: in a 1932 rebuttal of a
virulent diatribe against homosexuality in the magazine The
Modern Thinker, pseudonymous author "Parisex" explained that
"The homosexual man does not shun women because he wants to
flee from the reality of normal sex life, but because he himself is
psychically a woman and his normal sex life is directed to the other
sex, another man, the only person to attract him."
1
Medical science at this time was still considerably removed from
the sphere of popular culture: its treatises on sexuality were sold
only to professional men, and not to the general public. While most
Monsters in the closet
32
doctors agreed that homosexuality should be treated as a medical
rather than a criminal problem, opinion varied to a great degree as
to the causes and best "treatment" of the condition. The argument
that had been put forth in Germany by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,
Magnus Hirschfeld, and others - namely, that a homosexual incli­
nation was inborn and natural, a biologically predisposed "third
sex" - had been seriously challenged by the advent of Freudian psy­
choanalysis. (Books which were more sympathetic to a "natural"
model of homosexuality were invariably written in carefully
worded language, banned outright, and/or published privately, such
as the 1928 monograph Studies in Sexual Inversion,
which
reprinted several essays on "Greek Ethics" by John Addington
Symonds.) Since Freud and most of his followers had acknowl­
edged a bisexual stage in the formation of the adult subject, many
psychoanalysts of the 1920s and 1930s argued that homosexuality
was an immature stage of adult sexuality: through proper psycho­
analytic treatment, the homosexual could be cured, or more
precisely brought to a "mature" stage of sexual functioning.
Psychoanalyst William Stekel's views were among those influencing
the medical community of the era. In his 1922 book The Homosex­
ual Neurosis (which was "For sale only to Members of the Medical
Profession"), Stekel begins by refuting Magnus Hirschfeld's claims
that homosexuality is an inborn condition, and ends with an impas­
sioned plea for the acceptance of psychoanalysis as a medical sci­
ence. Interpreting various case studies and dreams, Stekel
associates homosexuality with epilepsy (which he understands not
as a somatic disorder but as a "particular form of hysteria",) as well
as with sadism, masochism, incestuous desires, jealousy, paranoia,
criminality, and regression to baser animalistic instincts: all states or
aspects of human existence that would more or less comprise the
catalog of the classical Hollywood horror film's themes and obses­
sions.
2
3
4
While most psychoanalysts placed the etiology of homosexuality
within the parent-child unit, there was little consensus as to the
exact dynamics required for the production of homosexuality: too
much or too little mother love, too much or too little attention from
father, etc. Stekel reviews many of these positions and eventually
concludes that "The homosexual neurosis is a flight back to one's
own sex induced by a sadistic predisposition towards the opposite
sex." According to Stekel's model, male homosexuals have a deep5
Defining the monster queer
33
seated fear and hatred of women, and presumably lesbians have a
similar hatred of men. It is from this hatred that the homosexual's
perverse appetites arise, as well as the host of anti-social behaviors
which commonly accompany him or her (such as a woman desiring
a career). Inherent in these dynamics (although not often recog­
nized as such at the time) is the now obvious construction of social
definitions of masculinity and femininity as themselves inherently
inborn and natural. It was deviation from these cultural norms that
was considered pathological by many psychoanalysts. As one psy­
chiatrist advised in 1937, in order to avoid producing homosexual
offspring,
the father should be an understanding, tolerant, but virile and decisive
male. The mother should have the gentleness, patience and passivity
usually associated with womanhood. Any mixture, such as an effemi­
nate father and an aggressive masculine mother is likely to be discon­
certing to the child and accentuate homosexual tendencies.
6
Thus deviance from traditional gender roles was understood as both
a cause and a symptom of homosexuality. More than an explanation
of how and why homosexuality occurs, this model might more aptly
be understood as a means of policing and enforcing traditional
gender roles.
While these "scientific" debates raged throughout the 1920s and
early 1930s, the figure of the effeminate male homosexual was both
highly visible in "sophisticated" urban sets, and simultaneously
under siege in the streets and meeting-places of New York and other
major cities. Recent histories have argued that while people far
removed from urban cultures may have remained relatively igno­
rant of homosexuality, the pansy and the bull-dagger were fairly vis­
ible figures in the urban (night)life of the first several decades of the
twentieth century. However, after the stock market crash of 1929,
the "lesbian chic," "pansy craze," and fashionable experimental
bisexuality of the 1920s began rapidly to evaporate as the country
turned towards more pressing concerns, such as finding food and
shelter. Economic imperatives curtailed the possibilities of middleclass lesbian relationships (women were expected to give up their
jobs to men), while the newly created (legal) alcohol industry,
whose previous prohibition was understood to have led to all sorts
of lawlessness, both inebriate and sexual, helped to ensure that
unprecedented numbers of gay men and lesbians would be legally
7
Monsters in the closet
34
persecuted. The mere suspicion of being a homosexual was now
enough to warrant entrapment and arrest for "disorderly conduct,"
and in New York City and other vicinities, the newly formed State
Liquor Authorities used homosexuality as an excuse to regulate
drinking establishments.
Still, even after the demise of the "pansy craze," subtle and equiv­
ocal hints of male homosexuality could occasionally be found in the
popular press. Esquire magazine, for example, had been founded in
autumn 1933 with the goal of becoming "the common denomina­
tor of masculine interests - to be all things to all men." Apparently,
at least for the first few years, this included homosexual men.
Esquire was a unique venture in that it showcased men's fashion
(and eventually even interior design and cooking columns),
although according to its original editorial policy, "it never intends
to become, by any possible stretch of the imagination, a primer for
fops." In its first few years, the magazine ran cartoons and jokes
about pansies and eunuchs, as well as occasional essays on homo­
sexual men such as Cole Porter, tennis ace "Big Bill" Tilden, or
painter Paul Cadmus; in most of these stories it is possible to discern
homosexual innuendo (or just as easily ignore it). A story in the
first issue, "Stonewall and Ivy," is indicative of the type of homo­
sexual connotation the magazine dabbled in during this era: it tells
the story of a college football coach's successful campaign to ruin
his star athlete's heterosexual relationship in order to ensure that
the young man continues to play ball with the coach." The story
becomes even more gay when one sees the biographical note and
photograph of its author, Robert Buckner. Perched on a rock in a
swimsuit with one arm akimbo (as opposed to the dignified head
shots of the other pipe-smoking authors) Buckner unmistakably
comes across as a gay camp: "I love birds, children, rainbows, and
oh so many things.'" And, if one looks very closely, one can also
find, tucked in between the magazine's usual ads for liquor and
guns, an occasional advertisement for "nude studies of the world's
finest physiques" - apparently muscular male nudes, as attested to
by a photograph advertising "Tony Sansone's Body Culture
Studio."
8
9
10
12
13
During the early 1930s, homosexuality that was more visible than
connotative was under attack in different quarters from various
social reformers. Broadway had been rocked with scandals in the
late 1920s over several gay and lesbian themed plays, and Radclyffe
Defining the monster queer
35
Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness,
published in 1928, was
also the target of censorship campaigns. The perceived immorality
of the movies had led to the creation of the Production Code in
1930, which forbade (among other things) the depiction or mention
of homosexuality, or "sex perversion," as it was classified. Yet, until
the Code came to be enforced in 1934 through the Production
Code Administration's Seal of Approval provision, Hollywood film
did contain a few visibly gay characters. Most of these representa­
tions are still essentially connotative - representing sexuality
through the common stereotypes of effeminate men and mannish
women - and thus perhaps they are not all that different from those
made during the era of the Code. After 1934, however, openly (or
more broadly connotated) homosexual characters were banished
from the screen, words such as "pansy" and "fairy" in reference to
men were stricken from potential scripts, and homosexual charac­
ters "officially" ceased to exist in the manifest world of cinematic
representation, banished to the shadowy realms of inference and
implication. Movie villains were also obliged to behave in slightly
better ways, although their essential monstrosity, like that of homo­
sexuals, could still be suggested on screen in more subtle, connota­
tive ways.
Film historians have long debated the effects of censorship on the
classical Hollywood cinema, and many recent critics have taken a
Foucauldian approach to the situation in order to investigate
exactly what particular silences may have meant. For example, in
regard to the "fallen woman" film cycle of the era, Lea Jacobs has
argued that audiences came to understand how a narrative ellipse
could signify an off-screen sexual liaison. In relation to the horror
film, Rhona J . Berenstein has also argued that the self-censorship
Hollywood dabbled in (both before and after the Code went into
effect) often produced similar effects upon the spectators' reading
protocols:
14
15
16
implying versus representing elements of the storyline serves a dual
function in classic horror. First, it satisfied censors, who were rather
shortsighted in their equation of sight with knowledge, and, second,
it heightened the risque connotations of monstrous attacks. Here, vio­
lence and romance are generally conflated and both are hidden from
direct view... this device invited spectators to assume that what
occurred offscreen was as significant as what happened onscreen and
that offscreen events were not solely acts of violence (the monster
36
Monsters in the closet
attacking the heroine) but were displays of romantic/sexual desire as
well (the monster seducing the heroine).
17
Similarly, when a male monster approaches a male victim and the
film cuts away from the scene, the audience is left to speculate upon
the precise nature of the attack: is it sexual, violent, or both? For a
spectator predisposed towards a queer reading protocol, these nar­
rative ellipses open up a range of possible meanings. And as censor­
ship became more pronounced after 1934, this only increased the
connotative queerness of the genre. "Unspeakable" (or unseen) hor­
rors and the "love that dare not speak its name" moved into closer
proximity through the silences imposed by the Production Code
Administration. As Berenstein puts it, "sexually illicit meanings
were reinforced by the ... use of indirect representation and created
in some instances by the PCA's insistence on deletions and substitu­
tions."
18
The genre of gothic horror had been tinged with a queer presence
from its inception, not only in terms of its patterns of formal con­
struction, but also through the work and sensibilities of the queer
men and women who created the texts. In Hollywood, this was
little different: openly homosexual James Whale directed four of
the classical period's most famous horror films for Universal Stu­
dios. His films and others' exploited not only homosexual signifiers
in conjunction with their gothic villain's crimes, but often a whole
range of queer sexual behaviors. The stories usually chronicle the
exploits of a single male gothic villain (or even more readily this
figure and his male companion) who alone or together exhibit some
form of queer sexuality - that is to say, a sexuality which deviates
from the standard heterosexualized drive. The look of the genre,
adapted from the German Expressionist cinema, helped further to
demarcate a space of psychosexual transgression. True to the tropes
of gothic literature, the physical spaces inhabited by the classical
Hollywood monsters reflect their twisted natures and dark mysteri­
ous secrets. When the style is more sparingly used it is almost always
reserved for the monsters' lairs or for their moments of sexual trans­
gression. The monstrously queer deviation of the gothic villain is
also clearly marked within the text by the presence of an assertively
"normal" heterosexualized couple, who serve as the center of a nat­
uralized and normative heterosexual equilibrium which the queer
force disrupts. One or both members of this "normal" couple
Defining the monster queer
37
become involved in the villain's plot: the queer villain's desire for
one or both members of the couple is one of the main thematic
imperatives of the genre. However, by the end of the film, the vil­
lain and/or monster is destroyed by a public mob or its patriarchal
representatives, and the "normal" couple are reinstated after safely
passing through their queer experience.
While the classical horror film encourages everyone in the audi­
ence to understand these narrative patterns from a queer perspec­
tive, it was probably easier for homosexual men and women to do
so on a more regular basis. Because of their already disenfranchised
location outside of the dominant culture, or their practice at lead­
ing "double" lives, many homosexual spectators of the genre would
perhaps be more likely than heterosexual ones to identify with the
figure of the monster or villain, even as he or she was eventually
vanquished by the narrative's heterosexist agents. This facet of gay
and lesbian readership (making do with less than optimal represen­
tations) is today still a facet of how non-straight people negotiate
popular media texts. It has necessitated the strategy of selective and
carefully chosen identificatory practices; for example, queer specta­
tors may identify with a monster such as the lesbian vampire, enjoy­
ing her exploits for the majority of the film's running time, while
ultimately discounting the patented narrative resolution and its con­
comitant reinstatement of heterosexual norms. This strategy had its
analog in the flurry of underground gay novels which were written
during the early 1930s. While some of these novels managed to pro­
vide a remarkable illustration of urban gay life and culture, most
also "ended with the death or suicide of the gay protagonist ... an
obligatory bow to convention, transparently intended to disarm the
moralists who might otherwise have tried to suppress the books."
Like Code-abiding Hollywood films in general and horror films
specifically, these novels felt obliged to punish their sexual trans­
gressors, even as the pleasures of the text for homosexual readers
were deeply connected to the exercising of such transgressive pos­
sibilities in the first place.
19
Furthermore, not all horror films of this period insisted that their
monsters were wholly evil. In many of these films, ambivalence is
felt and expressed towards the monster - in some films he is unre­
lentingly evil (for example Dr Mirakle in Murders in the Rue Morgue
(1932)), while in other instances the film-makers have created sym­
pathy for him/her and even an occasional plea for understanding
Monsters in the closet
38
(for example, King Kong (1933), or Boris Karloff's portrayal of the
Frankenstein monster). This ambivalence about the figure of the
monster corresponds in many ways to the cultural ambivalence with
which the homosexual was then understood: while some people
found the night-clubbing pansy a threat to the moral fiber of the
country, others found him an amusing diversion. Much as the reallife homosexual was simultaneously tolerated and oppressed,
treated both as the object of thrilling titillation and as social pariah,
so were movie monsters of the classical period.
Monsters and homosexuals were also linked by way of their mys­
terious origins. In accordance with the prevailing construction of
homosexuality as a matter of gender inversion rather than sexual
object choice, medical studies continued to write about homosexu­
ality as a disorder primarily having to do with gender nonconfor­
mity, even as the experts differed as to whether this was the result
of nature or nurture. The origins of movie monsters were similarly
contested: were they man-made creatures such as Frankenstein's
monster, or part of a natural, but hitherto unexplored, territory,
such as the werewolf? This "minoritizing" versus "universalizing"
construction of both monsters and homosexuals can be found in the
1930s and continues to exist in today's horror films and in cultureat-large, where two opposing schools of thought vie for dominance:
the minoritizing view considers the monster queer irrevocably
Other and outside the "Natural Order," while the universalizing
position suggests that the monster queer is a naturally occurring
force or aspect of being that can potentially be found in everyone,
everywhere.
20
Queer theory's construction of a minoritizing versus universaliz­
ing model to explore the social construction of homosexuality
attempts to forge a conceptual shift away from debates over essentialist views of human sexuality, which, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
has argued, rest on theoretically slippery ground. While not simply
wanting to replace one binary model with yet another, nor discredit
the very real minoritized experience of those who choose to selfidentify as gay or lesbian, Sedgwick points out that the social debate
over homosexuality underscores "a radical and irreducible incoher­
ence" in how dominant society defines the homosexual. This defin­
ition simultaneously
holds the minoritizing view that there is a distinct population of per-
Defining the monster queer
39
sons who "really are" gay; at the same time, it holds the universalizing
view that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable
identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are
strongly marked by same-sex influences and desires, and vice versa for
apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual iden­
tity and modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance
the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is wide­
spread and in the first place internal.
21
This is the thesis of Sedgwick's Epistemology
of the Closet, wherein
she argues that much of Western culture can be understood to be
organized around a series of binary and hierarchical oppositions
that stem from the enforcement of a heterosexual/homosexual
dichotomy, even as the tenets this binary are based upon are tacitly
understood to be contradictory. Is homosexuality an irrevocable
alien Other to heterosexuality, or is homosexuality part of a natural
continuum of human sexual behavior to which we all belong, in
whose desires we all potentially share? The latter position would
seemingly be the conclusion drawn by Dr Alfred Kinsey when he
constructed his six-point scale of human sexuality, or that of psy­
choanalysis when it speaks of the polymorphous perversity of the
Pre-Oedipal subject.
In the horror film, similar debates rage over questions of normal­
ity and nature, self and Other, minoritization and universalization.
On the one hand, medical science is often responsible for con­
structing monsters, in the way that medical discourses have perhaps
"invented" the homosexual. On the other, science is repeatedly
invoked in these films in order to show that there are things within
the natural world which should be reckoned with and ultimately
accepted. (From Werewolf of London (1935): "Nature is very toler­
ant - she has no creed.") The vampire's ability to spread his mon­
strous condition openly acknowledges the universalizing potential
of his queer sexuality, even as the narratives of the stories which
contain him work to reinforce his minoritization and eventual
destruction. In the classical Hollywood horror film, science is some­
times used to suggest that "normality" needs to update its thinking
on queer matters, but these discovered "truths" are usually shown
to lead to tragedy and are ultimately classified as "things man was
not meant to know." As such, in film after film, the monster queer
of the classical horror film is taken out of his coffin or tomb, per­
haps celebrated by some producers and spectators as a thrilling
Monsters in the closet
40
Plate 1 James Whale, the openly g a y Hollywood director w h o fashioned
some of Universal's most famous and enduring monsters
deviation from mundane heterosexuality, but eventually firmly
replaced within his closet.
James Whale and The Old Dark House
A discussion of homosexuality and the classical Hollywood horror
film often begins (and all too frequently ends) with the work of
James Whale, the openly gay director who was responsible for fash­
ioning four of Universal Studio's most memorable horror films:
Frankenstein
(1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible
Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
Drawing on inter­
views with actor Alan Napier and Whale's former lover David
22
Defining the monster queer
41
Lewis, historian Gregory William Mank draws a rather homopho­
bic portrait of James Whale as "an arch, bitter homosexual, who
had created his own public 'self' that in time increasingly became a
monster ...". Napier has also gone on record describing Whale as
"enigmatic - with a taint of sado-masochism in his homosexuality,
which doubtless became more dominant as success adversely
affected his career." While it is difficult to know how hyperbolic
or factual these accounts are, filtered as they are through several
layers of heterosexist presumption, it is clear that Whale's homo­
sexuality was common knowledge in Hollywood. Allegedly, in his
later years, Whale was dubbed "the Queen of Hollywood" by indus­
try wags. Whether or not Whale's homosexuality contributed to
his eventual expulsion from the Hollywood community and his sub­
sequent suicide, as many have suggested, most critics will agree that
there is to be found within Whale's work something that might be
termed a "gay sensibility." What this might mean is the sensibility of
a man who recognizes his status as a sexual outsider, someone who
acknowledges his difference from the heterosexualized hegemony,
and uses that distanciation as a way to comment upon it. One of the
ways the gay community has traditionally done this is through
campy black humor, and Whale's work is no exception. His films
are filled with jibes against Christian morality and heterocentrist
pretension.
23
24
25
Whale also made it a habit to employ in his films openly gay or
gay-seeming actors, many of whom he had known through his stage
work in London in the 1920s. The homosexual Charles Laughton
and his wife Elsa Lanchester were good friends of his, and both
actors worked in James Whale horror films. Colin Clive (Whale's
Dr Frankenstein) and Dwight Frye (his hunchbacked assistant) also
convey a certain gay aura in their performances, although each man,
like Laughton, was married. (Leslie Halliwell does refer to Colin
Clive as Whale's "nervous fellow-homosexual.") While it is diffi­
cult - and perhaps ultimately impossible - to reconstruct the actual
historical sexuality of any of these personages, many of whom
might have married for appearance's sake, as did Laughton, their
personas and performances are still easily read as queer. And
undoubtedly the gay underground gossip networks (which would
also have been aware of Whale's homosexuality) relayed such sus­
picions and interpretations, much as they do today about certain
closeted Hollywood stars. Another (also married) actor whom
26
27
Monsters in the closet
42
Plate 2 Ernest Thesiger, the outrageously campy character actor w h o set the
tone for the queer happening of The Old Dark House (1932) and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935)
Whale consistently hired was his friend Ernest Thesiger, whose
fame in England, according to one author, "rested in his female
impersonations." Like many of the pansy entertainers in New York
City of the 1920s, Thesiger was known in London for his queer
appeal; one review of his performance in Doctor Faustus (1925)
noted that he played the role of Mephistopheles "like a maiden lady
from Balham [pun intended?]." Bride of Frankenstein
co-star
Valerie Hobson coyly said of him in a latter-day interview, "I don't
think he had a very strong 'male' approach to things!" Another
(possibly apocryphal) story concerning Thesiger's sexuality reports
that he had a habit of entering Hollywood parties and loudly query­
ing "Anyone fancy a spot of buggery?"
28
29
30
31
Defining the monster queer
43
While Thesiger is probably most famous for his role as Dr Prefo­
rms in Whale's Bride of Frankenstein,
he also used his pansy persona
to great effect three years earlier in one of the director's most flam­
boyantly gay and least seen horror films, The Old Dark House. For
varying reasons (legal and otherwise), The Old Dark House had
been kept out of circulation for many years; it was not released on
commercial videotape until 1995. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is also
the film which most spectacularly shows the imprint of Whale's
"gay sensibility." The Old Dark House partakes of the conventions
of the "clutching hand" thriller, a subgenre of horror which was
popular on the stage and screen during the 1920s and 1930s, per­
haps best exemplified by The Cat and the Canary (1927). In the
former, a group of "normal" people find themselves trapped in a
mysterious mansion wherein madmen and monsters abound. But in
Whale's film (as in all of his horror films) "the normals" are as
eccentric as the denizens of the house, and the horror inside is
revealed to be an explicit function of queer sexuality and its
attempted repression.
Incest, necrophilia, male and female homosexuality, androgyny,
sadomasochism, and orgiastic behavior are all hinted at to greater
or lesser degrees and used to characterize the house and its denizens
as queer. At the top of the dark and oppressive house lies its 102year-old patriarch, Roderick Femm. Whale facilitates a queer read­
ing of the film by having chosen actress Elspeth Dudgeon to enact
the role, making manifest the gender-bending sexuality inherent in
the family name. Roderick's son, Horace Femm, is played by Ernest
Thesiger in a fruity effete manner ("I am rather a nervous man").
He is figured as existing outside the law, both natural and divine:
not only is he supposedly wanted by the police (we never learn
why), he sarcastically refers to his sister's habit of saying grace as a
"strange tribal habit." Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore) herself is a
rather butch deaf religious zealot obsessed with "the sins of the
father" that she feels have damned the house. Over the course of the
film it becomes clear that at one point in time the house had been
the frequent site of all sorts of unmentionable sexual exploits.
Unlike the dead daughter Rachel Femm, Rebecca, presumably
because of her religious interests, had been excluded from the
sexual pleasures the house had afforded others. "No beds!" she
repeatedly cries to the visiting "normals," as if to expunge or repress
the very place of the horror. Yet she barely conceals her own lesbian
32
44
Monsters in the closet
desires when she chastises the heroine's perceived lack of morality:
"You're wicked too. Young and handsome, silly and wicked. You
think of nothing but your long straight legs and your white body
and how to please your man. You revel in the joys of fleshly love,
don't you!?" Whale accentuates the perversity of this and other
scenes by shooting Rebecca Femm through a series of increasingly
distorted lenses; at the climax of her speech she places her hand on
the heroine's breast and then leaves the room. Also lurking in the
house is Morgan (Boris Karloff), the mute and drunken butler who
may or may not be an illegitimate son of the house.
In place of the traditional happy heterosexual couple who acci­
dentally enter a world of horror, Whale's initial protagonists are a
threesome, Mr and Mrs Waverton (Raymond Massey and Gloria
Stuart) and their companion Penderel (Melvyn Douglas). With their
witty badinage, they suggest the sophisticated urban menage à trois
of Noel Coward's Design for Living, which was popular on the stage
at the time and would be filmed in Hollywood the following year.
The bitchy and petulant Wavertons are far from a happy couple;
yet, when Horace invites Mr Waverton to his bedroom ("There are
one or two things that I should very much like for you to see"),
Waverton declines. Penderel is marked by his flippant attitude,
mocking both their situation and the generic conventions of the film
in which they find themselves (the rain storm, the desolate country­
side). Penderel is further linked with the denizens of the house by
his war experiences which have left him "slightly soiled" with a
"twisted smile." He later confesses to having "not much sympathy
with fish out of water, although I happen to be one myself." He is
especially linked to the effeminate Horace, accepting his offers of
gin and potatoes with relish. Soon however, the narrative actively
heterosexualizes Penderel via the character Gladys Perkins (Lilian
Bond), a faux society lady who shows up at the house with Sir
William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton). Porterhouse is not inter­
ested in Gladys sexually because (so we are told) he is obsessed with
the memory of his dead wife, an "acceptable" reason for lack of het­
erosexual interest, one that effaces a commoner cause that
Laughton himself exhibited. This possibility is touched on as Pen­
derel and Gladys discuss Porterhouse/Laughton: even though he has
funneled his lack of heterosexual interest into making
money/acting, they conclude that Porterhouse/Laughton is actually
very lonely, even though he ironically "likes people to think he's
Defining the monster queer
45
ever so gay." This double entendre,
activated by the doubling of
Laughton with his character, is typical of the sly gay humor that
defines Whale's ironic sensibility.
Ultimately, the most dangerous member of the family, Saul, is
released from his locked room and faces off with Penderel. Saul too
seems to recognize a fellow spirit in Penderel: "I am a clever man
also. That is why we understand one another. That is why you
understood so quickly that I wanted to kill you. We understand each
other so well, don't we, my friend?" Saul is best understood as a
repressed homosexual as theorized by Freudian psychoanalysis:
paranoid to the point of trying to eradicate the unacceptable object
of desire. He tells Penderel the story of Saul and David (one of the
more homoerotic male couples in the Bible) before he attempts to
kill Penderel with a long knife. ("Like you?", queries Saul: "My
friend, I love you!") Ultimately, the two men tussle and both fall
from the staircase. Saul dies and Morgan tenderly carries his body
away, again suggesting some sort of relationship tinged with the
queer: father and son? jailer and prisoner? brothers? lovers? all of
the above? One recent account of this sequence, Whale's "most
wicked vignette," describes the scene thus: "Hugging the cadaver,
the mad butler breaks down and weeps pitifully. Then Morgan picks
up Saul and miserably minces up the steps, rocking him, his hips
swaying effeminately, as if he were some nightmarish mother
cradling a dead, horrific infant." Gladys cradles the broken Pen­
derel, and in an ironic inversion of Frankenstein's
most famous bit
of dialogue, cries out "He's alive! He's alive, I tell you! He's alive!"
Only this time the line refers not to the creation of a queer monster,
but rather to the fact that Penderel has overcome the queerness of
The Old Dark House (and that within himself) and been "reborn"
into a heterosexual union with Gladys, who has vowed to make him
"a useful person."
While the film thus ends with two requisite (relatively) happy het­
erosexualized couples, Whale subverts the generic imperative by
giving the last "line" to Charles Laughton's Sir William Porterhouse,
who loudly snores over Penderel's proposal of marriage. Audiences
of the day also apparently shared Whale's attitude towards the
"normals." Variety reported that the audience "was audibly derisive
of the love scenes between [Melvyn] Douglas and Lilian Bond."
And as if picking up on the film's queerer undercurrents, or perhaps
as an allusion to Whale's homosexuality, the Variety review also
33
34
35
Monsters in the closet
46
chose to single out Karloff's performance by noting that he "by no
means impresses as a sissy by stature, demeanor, and surliness."
The domestic queer couple: Re-imagining procreation
Not all of the Hollywood horror films of the classical period are as
explicitly homosexual as is James Whale's The Old Dark House. Yet
there are no shortage of queer moments or inferences, such as the
mannish lesbian couple who accompany Renfield on his Transylvanian coach ride in Dracula (1931), or the odd wedding of Oscar
Wilde and the Grand Guignol which occurs in Mad Love (1935)
when crazed Dr Gogol (Peter Lorre) realizes, like Wilde's Reading
Gaol captive, that "each man kills the thing he loves." Dracula, the
film which had begun the successful cycle of sound horror films, had
been released on Valentine's Day with the ad-line "The strangest
love story ever told." Frankenstein
was also sold with queerly
tinged ad-lines, suggesting of the doctor himself that "No woman's
kiss has touched his lips," or that he would be somehow forced to
choose between "The Lady or the Monster!" And as the decade
wore on, homoerotic, bare-chested sado-masochistic imagery
became a staple of fantastic serials: Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Ray
"Crash" Corrigan, et al. were frequently tied up, oiled up, and
posed for the spectator's delectation. Buster Crabbe, the bleached
blond lead of many of these serials, reportedly was thought so
"pretty" that he got "wolf whistles from guys."
However, it is more regularly the monster or villain of these films
who can be understood as queer, even when he supposedly lusts
after the female ingenue. Often he is tinged with the era's signifiers
of male homosexual culture, being finely acculturated, somewhat
dandified, and given to bizarre modes of dress, make-up, and
deportment. He is shown to love the arts, both through his modernist set design and his obsessive organ playing, a pun on male masturbation which has circulated for decades. Regularly, the gothic
villain is touched with a European decadence or a British air, both
of which constituted a certain subcultural fashion at the time among
male homosexuals." Flowers and things "horticultural" were also a
coded signifier for male homosexuality. In The Invisible Man, director James Whale's mise-en-scène
prominently forces (seemingly
incongruous) flowers into a scene wherein the Invisible One's
friends wonder about his disappearance. In Mark of the Vampire
36
37
38
39
Defining the monster queer
47
(1935), police inspector Lionel Atwill denigrates effeminate town
doctor Donald Meek with the snide observation, "You're no moonflower - you're a morning glory." The flower is also the key signi­
fier of the homoerotic male couple's lycanthropy in Werewolf
of
London: the incredibly rare bloom of the "Marifesa lupina lumina"
is the only thing that can keep the two men from acting upon their
bestial urges.
Also, the words "gay" and "queer" (which were part of a homo­
sexual lexicon at this time) show up with alarming regularity in the
horror films of this period. While it might be argued that they are
being used in their broader, "straight" definitions, it is more than
probable, given the amount of homosexual input many of these
films received, that they are further evidence of homosexual codings
in popular culture at this particular point in time. James Whale,
who certainly would have known the connotations of the word, at
one point used it to describe Boris Karloff's "queer, penetrating
personality." In the shooting script for Frankenstein,
which con­
structs an explicit dialectic between the doctor's odd "experiments"
and his plans for a socially sanctioned heterosexual marriage, the
old Baron refers to his son's lab as a "queer sort of place for a son
of mine to be in." A few years later in Columbia's Return of the
Vampire (1943), vampire Armand Tesla is referred to as "a queer
sort of duck," and his male victim, panting and delirious, calls the
vampire's eyes "queer." A party guest in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1932) comments of Dr Jekyll that it is "very queer that he's not
here," immediately following his unexpected transformation in a
public park into Mr Hyde. The Invisible Man's disappearance is also
considered "a queer thing" by the film's "normals," and the titular
character in The Mummy (1932) is described as "queer" by its patri­
archal heroes, one of whom jokingly (but accurately) suggests that
the mummy had been buried alive because he "got too gay with one
of the vestal virgins." Even if the explicitly homosexual connotation
of the word "gay" is denied, because of its earlier linkage with pros­
titution, "gay" still resonated with the thrill and deviance of unsanc­
tioned sexuality.
40
41
42
43
Ultimately, the classical period produced several iconographic
queer monsters whose homosexual undertones would become more
and more prevalent as they were remade and adapted across the
years. These figures include the homosexual or bisexual vampire
(Dracula, Dracula's Daughter
(1936), Mark of the Vampire);
the
Monsters in the closet
48
seemingly "normal" man who becomes a monster or has a hidden
monstrous self (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Werewolf of London);
and the mad scientist, who, with the frequent aid of a male assistant,
sets out to create life homosexually - without the benefit of hetero­
sexual intercourse (Frankenstein,
Island of Lost Souls (1933), and
Bride of Frankenstein).
Together the mad scientist and his sidekick
became a major generic convention that is easily read as queer: the
secret experiments they conduct together are chronicled in private
diaries and kept locked away in closed cupboards and closets. These
sidekick figures include Fritz in Frankenstein,
Montgomery in
Island of Lost Souls, Janos in Murders in the Rue Morgue, and Dr
Wong in Mad Love. Even outside of the mad scientist narrative,
queer couples still abound: consider Renfield's relationship to Drac­
ula, Beaumont and Legendre in White Zombie,
or "The Nubian"
and The Mummy. Each of these servants is devoted to his master; in
fact, they are often under some kind of supernatural spell which
keeps them in their masters' thrall. As the filmic horror cycle began
to wane around 1934-1935, the queer couple became even more
pronounced: fellow-monsters Henry Hull and Warner Oland bat­
tled to the death in Werewolf of London, Karloff and Lugosi starred
together in The Black Cat, The Raven, and The Invisible Ray, and
perhaps most flamboyantly, Dr Septimus Pretorius teamed up with
Dr Frankenstein to create the Bride of Frankenstein.
A few ostensi­
bly "heterosexual" queer couples are also present during this period
(but no lesbian ones): The Mask of Fu Manchu and Mark of the Vam­
pire both feature incestuous Father-Daughter couples, and Drac­
ula's Daughter has an overly coiffed, surly queen for a manservant.
44
The hierarchies inherent in most of these relations again reflect
the construction of homosexuality at that time: rather than afford­
ing the possibility of two equal partners attracted on the basis of
sexual object choice, homosexuality was understood to be con­
structed around strict gender hierarchies. One man would be
assumed to be the femme to the other man's butch. This hierarchy
works its way through the genre (and culture-at-large) in a set of
binary oppositions which include but aren't limited to active/pas­
sive, dominant/submissive, master/servant, top/bottom, sadist/
masochist, white/non-white, physically "normal"/deformed, and
ultimately, straight/gay or "normal"/queer. While many of the clas­
sical horror films take the sado-masochistic relationship between
their male leads to be the singular driving force of their narratives
Defining the monster queer
49
Plate 3 A queer couple: butch female vampire and fey manservant. Countess
Marya Z a l e s k a (Gloria H o l d e n ) a n d S a n d o r (Irving Pichel) in Dracula's
Daughter (1936)
(discussed below), perhaps the most obviously queer ones are those
wherein the homosexual pair set out to procreate without the aid of
woman. The act of procreation, read as sex, thus makes this partic­
ular formula spectacularly queer.
The locus classicus of the queer "domestic" couple can be found
in James Whale's Frankenstein
and Bride of Frankenstein.
In the first
film, Dr Frankenstein creates life with the aid of a hunchbacked
assistant, Fritz. In the second, his marriage is interrupted when he is
blackmailed by Dr Pretorius into creating a mate for the monster.
(One "Numa Praetorius" was allegedly the author of a large German
sexological essay published in 1908.) Bride of Frankenstein
is most
explicit in its queer intentions, opening with a framing sequence
wherein Mary Shelley is coaxed by Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley to continue her tale. This particular erotic triangle feels little
need to suppress its homoerotic leanings. The "elegant three" are
decidedly foppish and repeatedly call each other "darling." Their
status as sexual transgressors is made clear: Lord Byron refers to
45
Monsters in the closet
50
himself as "England's greatest sinner", while Mary (in dialogue cut
from the release print), asserts that Shelley is "reviled by society as a
monster himself" because of his unorthodox sexual praxis. In a fur­
ther bit of dialogue which was also cut, Mary hints at their open
relationship: "We are all three infidels, scoffers at all marriage-ties,
believing only in living fully and freely in whatever direction the
heart dictates. Such an audience needs something stronger than a
pretty little love story." Indeed, such an audience needs to see a tale
of queer sexuality, but at this point in time it can only be rendered
through the conventions of the Hollywood horror film.
46
Bride of Frankenstein's
Dr Septimus Pretorius is one of the most
visibly gay characters in American film of the period. Even though
the enforcement of the Production Code one year earlier expressly
forbade such a depiction, Pretorius is easily read as gay according to
the genre's queer reading protocols. Not only is Pretorius a homo­
sexual according to film's narrative logic (it is Pretorius who enters
Frankenstein's bridal chamber and steals him away from Elizabeth),
but also in terms of the characterization and star persona of Ernest
Thesiger. Pretorius/Thesiger oozes a gay camp aura over the entire
film, his "fluttery, limp-wristed gestures and prissy remarks" hinting
at unknown vices. His line readings frequently verge on double
entendre, as when he tells Henry "I had hoped that we might
together probe into the mysteries of life and death." Likewise, in
dialogue cut from the release print, Pretorius reminds Henry that
"You were my pupil - you shared all my experiments - my secret
experiments." Frankenstein's servant Minnie introduces him to
Frankenstein (and to the spectator) with the line "He's a very queer
looking old gentleman." As did Thesiger's Horace Femm in The Old
Dark House, Dr Pretorius pointedly drinks gin ("Its my only vice"),
suggesting the cultural connection between the bootleg gin of Pro­
hibition and the pansy-friendly speakeasy. And he defends his
unorthodox scientific practices as a gay man might defend his sexu­
ality: "Those who experiment in the creation of living organisms
have been accused of impiety, even of blasphemy. Of course, as you
and I, and all men of learning know, such accusations are only made
by the narrow, the bigoted, and the superstitious." As Pretorius
tells Frankenstein, "Science, like Love, has her little surprises."
Taking Henry back to his apartment (appropriately situated at the
end of a twisted, bent staircase and hallway), Pretorius puts the
moves on Henry. In one of the film's most famous sequences, they
47
48
Defining the monster queer
51
drink a toast "To a world of Gods and Monsters," and Pretorius
shows Frankenstein not his etchings but his scientific handiwork: a
"pleasing variety" of bottled homunculi. Not surprisingly, his "first
experiment turned out to be a Queen." Also included in the array is
a Devil, an oversexed King, and a Bishop who wakes from a nap and
immediately begins to denounce all in sight.
In an ironic reversal, Karloff's monster is the most heterosexual
character in the film. He certainly desires his female mate more than
Frankenstein desires his. Yet the monster does share an intense
homosocial friendship outside the boundaries of society when he
meets up with another social outcast, a blind beggar. The beggar is
so pleased to have found a friend that he puts him to sleep in his
own bed, and offers a prayer to God: "Our Father, I thank Thee that in Thy great mercy Thou hast taken pity on my great loneliness
- and out of the silence of the night hast brought two of Thy lonely
children together." Whale emphasizes this tender scene with a glow­
ing crucifix above the bed, whose radiance lingers as the scene fades.
(Other writers have discerned the implication of fellatio in this
scene as the old man kneels before the monster.) Whale constructs
the Monster as a Christ figure (both here and in another sequence
where he is almost "crucified"), a misunderstood martyr who is tor­
mented and tortured at the hands of the social mob. Joseph Breen,
at the Production Code Administration, was especially concerned
with the religious symbolism that Whale had worked into the film,
as well as the more gruesome aspects of the story. In the letters he
sent Whale, he objected to the degree of violence in the film, shots
of Mary Shelley's breasts, and seemingly innocuous things such as a
shot of a rat or the use of the word "entrails." There is no indica­
tion whatsoever that he was aware of the homosexual sensibility in
which the film seems to have been steeped. Indeed, Rhona J. Berenstein argues that the Breen Office may even have unwittingly con­
tributed to the film's overall homoerotic project by insisting that the
word "mate" in reference to the female monster be dropped from
the script. "Friend" replaced "mate," supposedly desexualizing the
possible heterosexual relationship between the male and female cre­
ations, but in effect sexualizing all the other male-male bonds, most
of which are also described in terms of friendship. As Berenstein
suggests, "if the monster's rapport with the bride is sexual, then
homoerotic connotations are produced, not deleted, by this partic­
ular censorship effort."
49
50
51
Monsters in the closet
52
Plate 4 In this still from Island of Lost Souls (1933), Charles Laughton's
salacious Dr Moreau seems overly interested in heterosexual hero Parker
(Richard Arlen), who, in turn, is interested in panther-woman Lota (Kathleen
Burke)
"Sex perversion"
Another classical horror film that exploits the theme of a male
couple seeking to create human life homosexually is 1933's Island
of Lost Souls. In this film, Dr Moreau and his male assistant Mont­
gomery attempt to create normal human beings from animals
through "plastic surgery, blood transfusions, gland extracts, [and]
ray baths." That same year, "real-life" medical practitioners were
using similar therapies in their quest to create "normal" human
beings from homosexuals. One such doctor boasted that he could
have cured Oscar Wilde:
We could have subjected the overactive thymus to X-ray radiation,
atrophied the gland and suppressed the overactivity of its function which was one of the principal causes of Wilde's lack of sexual nor­
mality. Then we could have built up the masculine characteristics, by
means of proper combinations of post-pituitary, adrenal, and testicu­
lar extracts.
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Defining the monster queer
While much of the "mad" science of the classical horror film plays
like so much melodramatic hokum to today's audiences, reports
such as this one remind us that "cutting-edge" science of the era was
much closer to that depicted in the era's horror films than we would
perhaps otherwise imagine. Mad science and accepted standard
medical practice are sometimes only differentiated through histori­
cal retrospection, and (as the next chapter will explore in greater
detail) this has often been the case with many so-called medical
"cures" for homosexuality.
A queer reading of Island of Lost Souls is encouraged by Charles
Laughton's performance as Dr Moreau. Laughton had just starred
in Cecil B. DeMille's Sign of the Cross (1932), where he played a
very obviously homosexual Roman emperor, or as the euphemisms
of the day would have it, a "voluptuary." As usual, in Island of Lost
Souls, Laughton, with much winking and smirking, manages to milk
every salacious drop out of each line he speaks. He slyly notes that
(heterosexual hero) Edward Parker will "be wanting a cold shower"
after his encounter with one of Moreau's hairy "manimals." When
he remarks that his assistant Montgomery is "a fair sort of sailor,"
it is hard to miss the activated connotation of the word "sailor",
especially since the film has introduced Montgomery within a pan­
ning shot of several shirtless seamen. It is Montgomery who first
"acquires" heterosexual hero Parker, picking him up from a ship­
wreck and taking him back to his cabin to be nursed back to health;
Montgomery later tells Parker that he looks "Splendid!" Neither
Moreau nor Montgomery exhibit heterosexual desire, although the
former exhibits an active bitchy misogyny, as when (idly lounging
on an operating table) he tells Parker of his difficulties in getting his
creations to speak: "Someday I'll create a woman and it will be
easier."
53
But Moreau already has created a woman, Lota, from a female
panther. He decides to use Parker as a sexual surrogate - to see if
former animal Lota can be sexually responsive in some form of
normal (or is it queer?) heterosexual relation. Moreau's pleasure in
becoming a voyeur is evident, and can be seen in Laughton's per­
formance as he lurks in the shadows outside Parker's room, relish­
ing a cigarette as he watches the mating of man and beast-woman.
When Parker's financée Ruth arrives at the island in search of him,
Moreau sets about a plan for having her become intimate with
Ouran, a hairy half-ape manimal Moreau secretly lets into the com-
Monsters in the closet
54
pound. The dynamics between Parker/Lota and Ruth/Ouran (both
cases of what might be considered heterosexual bestiality?) are
strikingly different and indicative of the era's assumptions about
gender: whereas Parker is actively attracted to the almost totally
human Lota and kisses her out of desire, the ape-man Ouran
embodies nothing more than the threat of bestial rape for Ruth. The
"manimals" also seem to represent sublimated fears of black-white
miscegenation, as has been noted by some critics concerning other
period horror films including King K o n g . Moreau, in his gleaming
white suit, thus not only suggests homosexuality, but also a Western
patriarchal colonial force on the island (quite literally the lawgiver
and voice of the father). His creations (and especially Ouran) are
the embodiment of his animalistic phallicism which is conflated
within the film with Moreau's homocentric megalomania.
As this assessment indicates, like many of the era's horror films,
Island of Lost Souls activates and blurs together discourses sur­
rounding not only homosexuality, but also race, gender, and colo­
nialism, here filtered through metaphors of bestiality (not to
mention cannibalism and vivisection). H. G. Wells created a similar
slippage of signifiers when he wrote the source novel The Island of
Dr. Moreau in 1895. He claimed to have been thinking about the
trial of Oscar Wilde, and set out to create a parable regarding man's
bestial nature. (His choice of the name "Moreau" may have been
an acknowledgement of the writings of another Frenchman, Dr Paul
Moreau, who in an 1877 analysis of sexual inversion also compared
homosexuality to bestiality.) Island of Lost Souls takes this blurring
of bestiality and homosexuality as one of its central thematic con­
cerns. Moreau and Montgomery live amidst the hairy, wild, brutish
manimals, having produced them by unnatural sexual means. While
the equation between bestiality and racial Otherness is fairly well
known in the history of racism, the "phenomenon has an additional
dimension in connection with homosexuality ... [since] the term
'sodomy' has comprised both bestiality and homosexuality
throughout the history of Christian Europe." This linkage can be
found in the popular culture (and not just gothic horror texts) of the
last several centuries and throughout this one as well. For example,
during one early twentieth-century homosexual scandal in the
German army, bestiality was invoked to ostracize those involved
while concomitantly suggesting their depravity: "Dozens of car­
toons employed dogs, pigs, and excrement, and one from France
54
55
56
57
Defining the monster queer
55
featured a pig-faced man, effectively completing the transformation
of human into subhuman." While sexual activity of any kind links
together homo sapiens with all other species, ironically this idea is
often denied or displaced onto one specific non-procreative form of
sexuality: male homosexuality, which was (and still is) often con­
ceived of within the popular gestalt as a form of degeneration or
regression to baser, animalistic instincts.
These confusions were the direct result of ignorance and social
taboos against speaking about sex in the early 1930s. When
Random House decided to publish Havelock Ellis's Studies in the
Psychology of Sex in 1936 as a four-volume set specifically meant for
public consumption, it was hailed as a major event and reported in
magazines such as Time and The American Mercury.
As noted
above, books that discussed sex had been regularly banned (as had
Ellis's original volume Sexual Inversion) and/or sold only to medical
professionals. This move towards a more public market for books
on sexuality fueled an ongoing debate surrounding sex education in
schools. Most of these debates didn't even mention homosexuality,
but instead focused on venereal disease and unwed heterosexual
intercourse; often they concluded with the conservative admonition
that girls didn't need to "pet" to be popular. When homosexuality
was mentioned, it was as part of a larger constellation of sexual per­
versions, as in reports of a "sex crime wave" that swept the nation
in 1937. Although most of the crimes discussed were heterosexual
rapes or attacks on female children by older men, the reader is
meant to understand that the classification of "sex perverts and
degenerates of all types" includes homosexuals:
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61
The number of people convicted of such offenses is comparatively
small... but the number of people who commit them is very large. We
have in our institutions (this was in January, 1937) less than forty men
known to be homosexuals. Anyone who knows anything about the
subject at all knows that there are thousands of homosexuals in New
York City.
62
The implication is that homosexuals constitute the same threat to
society as do rapists and child molesters, and that there are literally
"thousands" of them waiting to commit such a crime. As the reports
further opine, such men may be "feebleminded," "senile," "neu­
rotic," or perhaps they suffer from "sleeping sickness," "epilepsy,"
or "organic brain diseases." They are "human rattlesnakes coiled
63
Monsters in the closet
56
64
in the path of unsuspecting women and children."
Just as the medical and social reformist discourses of the era made
little differentiation between various queer acts, so did the era's
horror films, serving up a mixed bag of paraphilias along with their
monstrous signifiers. As one film review put it, "Colin Clive gives a
splendid performance as the mentally perverted Frankenstein
yet exactly what that perversion might have been was never
named. Any and all deviance from heteronormativity fell under
the Production Code's rubric of "sex perversion," and all would
continue to be linked with homosexuality throughout the course of
the twentieth century, both in horror films and culture-at-large.
Same-sex relations are repeatedly linked with the horrors of rape
and murder, a social tangle that is still being simultaneously braided
and unwound today. The possibility of a healthy loving relationship
between people of the same sex is nowhere to be found in the clas­
sical Hollywood cinema. By default, the images of the classical Hol­
lywood horror film which link homosexuality with violence and
monstrosity were some of the strongest signifiers in circulation, and
remain so to this day.
While all forms of on screen "sex perversion" were curtailed
somewhat after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934,
the linkage of homosexuality with each of these other sexual behav­
iors had already been firmly established. Even after 1934, the same
tropes were employed, only in less flagrant ways. Aside from Island
of Lost Souls, bestiality is explicit or hinted at in Murders in the Rue
Morgue, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, King Kong, The Black Cat, and
Werewolf
of London.
Incest is explicit or hinted at in Mark of the
Vampire, The Mask of Fu Manchu, The Old Dark House, and The
Black Cat. Pedophilia (which will become a more common trope of
the genre in the following decades) is hinted at in the monsters' (off­
screen) attacks on children in Frankenstein
and Dracula. Cannibal­
ism and oral sexuality (which will also become more prevalent as
the years go by) is a central concern of the vampire narrative, while
necrophilia, actual or thematic, is perhaps the most pervasive sexual
perversion of the horror film and can be found in Dracula,
Franken­
stein, White Zombie,
Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Mummy,
The Ghoul, The Black Cat, Bride of Frankenstein,
Mark of the Vam­
pire, Mad Love, The Raven, and Dracula's
Daughter.
(From The
Mummy: "Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love
with?") And in each film, sadomasochism becomes endemic to the
65
Defining the monster queer
57
genre as villains and monsters lust after the hero and heroine and
stop at nothing to consummate their desires. Voyeuristic sado­
masochism, which might describe a certain appeal o f the genre for
its spectators, is also prominent in several films, which reflexively
call into question the nature o f the genre itself: specific examples o f
this can be found in Mad Love, Freaks, Dr. X, and Mark of the Vam­
pire.
O n e o f the most queerly perverse films o f the period, which
brings together homosexuality with almost all o f the aforemen­
tioned tropes, is M G M ' s The Mask of Fu Manchu ( 1 9 3 2 ) . T h e film
stars Boris Karloff as the famous Asian criminal; he seems t o be per­
petually surrounded by half-naked slave boys, both African and
Asian. O n e latter-day critic apprised the role as follows: "Karloff,
with his Ann-Margret smile, false eyelashes, Adrian-designed
gowns, dragon lady fingernails, and lisping, c o m e hither delivery,
has created a wild, kinky, archfiend o f a Fu; part Yellow Peril, part
Frederick's o f H o l l y w o o d . " Fu's main hench-person is his daugh66
Plate 5 Boris Karloff has his way with an immobilized Charles Starrett in this
notorious scene from The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
58
Monsters in the closet
ter Fah Lo See, played by Myrna Loy, who reportedly called the
script "obscene" and her character a "sadistic nymphomaniac."
Together the incestuous father and daughter share quite visible
sexual excitement over the sight of the film's hero (Charles Starrett)
being stripped and whipped. ("Faster! Faster!", cries Fah Lo See as
Fu Manchu watches from the shadows.) Throughout the film Fu
Manchu tortures his enemies in highly creative ways: one is
strapped spread-eagled under a huge bell (where he is teased with
fresh fruits but fed salt water), one is fed to alligators in an elabo­
rate counterbalance device, while yet another is set to meet his fate
via opposing walls of spikes which slowly close around him - the
"slim silver fingers" of death. Karloff's delivery of that line, dis­
torted through his infamous lisp, as "the thlim, thilver fingerth,"
firmly links the pansy stereotype to the sado-masochistic exploits of
Fu Manchu.
The film's most memorably homosexual scene comes when Fu
Manchu straps down the film's hero (wearing nothing but a loin
cloth), strokes his bare chest, and injects him with a special serum.
As Fah Lo See stands by watching and smoking, Fu Manchu tells the
young man that "This serum, distilled from dragon's blood, my own
blood, the organs of different reptiles, and mixed with a magic brew
of the Sacred Seven Herbs, will temporarily change you into the
living instrument of my will. You will do as I command!" Like those
of the homosexual and the vampire, one mingling of such (bestial)
bodily fluids is enough to turn the hero into the monster's simu­
lacrum. Audiences of the day apparently appreciated the overtly
sensationalized exploits, and according to one review "laugh[ed]
where they oughtn't." In more recent years, "Karloff's gay, lisping
dragon of a Fu Manchu, looking like Carmen Miranda from hell in
his fruit basket hat," has also upset Asian-American audiences.
When MGM decided to re-release the film in 1972, one group
protested at the film's racism by pointing out the same constellation
of signifiers which mark it as a classical Hollywood horror film in
the first place: "Fu Manchu is an ugly, evil homosexual with fiveinch fingernails while his daughter is a sadistic sex fiend."
67
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Karloff and Lugosi and the sado-masochistic queer couple
As has been suggested repeatedly, almost all of the monsters and vil­
lains from the classical period are the products of foreign lands or
Defining the monster queer
59
foreign agents, and many of them play upon racist fears as well as
homophobic ones, conflating and blurring their stereotypical signi­
fiers. It was not uncommon for audiences to think of foreign lands,
and Europe especially, as the site of sexual decadence, the birthplace
of Oscar Wilde and others of his ilk. In an anthropological essay
published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1930, for instance, the
author muses on "primitive" sexuality and then suggests that "The
whites are a highly strung race of extremists, and they would react
differently [to liberated sexuality]; they would become voluptuar­
ies, as have some of the European people to whom greater sexual
license has been allowed. These people have developed to a state
where perversion is the rule ...". Frequently the queer couple is
itself an interracial one, a trope that invariably recasts a light/dark
racial hierarchy along with a gendered one. Many of the classical
(foreign, but still white) villains have non-white racial others as their
consort(s): "Black Janos" to Bela Lugosi's Dr Mirakle in Murders in
the Rue Morgue, "The Nubian" to Karloff's Mummy, Dr Wong to
Peter Lorre's Dr Gogol in Mad Love, Dr Yogami to Henry Hull's
Werewolf of London, Fu Manchu's African bodyguards, or Murder
Legendre's black zombie slaves in White Zombie. These films and
others repeatedly link sexual transgression to racial transgression,
as does today's universalizing and coalitionist use of the word
"queer". While this suggests the possibility of a wide-ranging queer
spectatorship based on the politics of race as well as sexuality and
gender, it also simultaneously monsterizes both the queer and the
racial Other. It also tends to deny the cultural formations and types
of expression and/or oppression specific to separate groups.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the actors tapped to play the
villains and monsters of the classical (and later) horror films were
also foreign-born or bred: Peter Lorre, Ernest Thesiger, Conrad
Veidt, Colin Clive, Charles Laughton, Warner Oland, Erich von
Stroheim, and most famously Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Most
of these actors played foreign characters in non-horror films as well:
Karloff played an Asian detective in a series of Mr. Wong films, as
did Peter Lorre in the Mr. Moto films. Peter Lorre, even more than
the others, seemed to embody the swishy, neurotic, homosexual for­
eigner, as attested by his roles as the ringlet-haired spy in Alfred
Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936) or the perfumed Egyptian Joel
Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Lorre, like many of these
actors, managed to make a career out of suggesting both racial and
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Monsters in the closet
sexual otherness, and this was noted even at the time of his films'
initial releases. A Time magazine review of Mad Love in 1935 notes
this queer appeal directly, even comparing Lorre's acting skills to
those of another homosexually coded actor: "Lorre, perfectly cast,
uses the technique popularized by Charles Laughton of suggesting
the most unspeakable obsession by the roll of a protuberant eyeball,
an almost feminine mildness of tone, an occasional quiver of thick
lips set flat in his cretinous, ellipsoidal face." As this review sug­
gests, gender inversion and physical deformity were the things used
to frighten horror movie audiences in the 1930s. (Ironically, actor
David Manners, who played many of these films' stalwart heroes,
reportedly had to seek out Eva Le Gallienne to help him curb his
own effeminate tendencies, a fact which suggests from the outset
that these films' depiction of normality was just as fantastic and
unreal as their depiction of monstrosity.)
72
73
Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, the reigning stars of the era's
horror films, were also marked ethnic others who were typed by the
Hollywood industry as monsters. Lugosi was born and trained in
Hungary, while Karloff left his native England to pursue a career in
acting across Canada and the United States. While Hollywood pub­
licists constructed Karloff's image as that of a genteel Britisher,
Lugosi's image was figured as that of a European mystery man,
given to odd excesses, "decadence," and the supernatural. Both men
were never far from the stigma of racial Otherness. According to his
close friend Alan Napier, there was some reason to believe that
Karloff himself was the product of a illegitimate miscegenated rela­
tionship:
When his mother was returning to England one time, she ... fell from
grace and had an affair in the Suez Canal with an Egyptian gentleman!
Whether Boris stated that he was the result of this adventure, or
whether my wife Gip and I surmised it, I cannot be sure. But it fits so
perfectly: the split with his family's middle class Victorian respectabil­
ity to become an actor; his intellectual political liberalism combined
with a yearning for the British establishment ... it all adds up to the
portrait of one aware of being different by reason of "half-caste" ille­
gitimacy . . .
74
Karloff supposedly revealed this anecdote to his sunbathing friend,
declining to join him because "his skin was dark enough as it was."
Whether these anecdotes are "true" or not, it nevertheless is well
Defining the monster queer
61
apparent that Karloff and Lugosi both played a broad variety of
monsters as well as ethnically other character parts precisely
because of their deviance from a WASP ideal.
The teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the mid-1930s in
a series of horror vehicles furthered the concept of a monstrously
queer sado-masochistic male couple. This type of queer couple,
unlike their domestic counterparts, was not interested in creating
life together but rather in torturing one another to death. Nonethe­
less, a hierarchical master/servant dichotomy still manifests itself in
these films - and even in their advertising campaigns. For example,
a later film in which they starred together milked the queer poten­
tial of their relationship with the ad line "The Hero of Horror, BORIS
K A R L O F F , joins forces with the Master of Menace, BELA L U G O S I , in
the UNHOLIEST PARTNERSHIP This Side of the Grave!" But rather
than figure the two as equal partners, Karloff and Lugosi were more
regularly billed and sold during the 1930s as the "screen's Number
One and Two Bogymen." This undoubtedly added to the off­
screen rivalries which mirrored those on-screen. For whatever rea­
sons - talent, his thick Hungarian accent, his need to present
himself as an aloof member of the Hollywood royalty - Lugosi
never enjoyed the same success in Hollywood that Karloff did, and
allegedly referred to Karloff as "my rival." Even by the time of
their first film together (1934's The Black Cat), Karloff was receiv­
ing top billing and higher pay. According to many reports, Lugosi
deeply resented Karloff, and that animosity may be responsible for
much of their bitter filmic characterizations. Nonetheless, their
pairing led to substantial box-office profits, and, as one latterday historian notes, "a queer, sublime chemistry in their work
together."
While all of the queer couples in 1930s horror films may be
understood to be sado-masochistic to some degree, two of these
Karloff-Lugosi vehicles present a very homoerotic sado-masochism
as their central horrific conceit. In The Black Cat (1934) and The
Raven (1935), a violent homoerotic triangle between the two vil­
lains and the heterosexualized couple is developed and explored; in
both films, the heroine is supposedly the object of the villains' lusts,
but any form of sexual consummation is displaced onto murder and
torture - the heroine is to be sacrificed to the devil in The Black Cat
and crushed to death with her lover in The Raven. And while the
normal couple ostensibly represents the identificatory focal point of
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76
77
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Monsters in the closet
62
the stories' melodrama, the core o f the dramas actually rests within
the sado-masochistic relationship between the two male horror
stars. T h i s type o f homosocial/homosexual competition between
two men over a w o m a n (or a heterosexual couple), is often "as
intense and potent as the bond that links either o f the rivals to the
beloved," and suggests a slippage along the homosocial/homosexual
continuum as it has been theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. '
This continuum for men (as c o m p a r e d to that for women) has often
been described as broken. As Sedgwick continues, it is hard to imag­
ine "an intelligible continuum o f aims, emotions, and valuations"
linking (to use her example) Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms to a
loving gay couple, even as it is possible to imagine some form o f
(however troubled) continuum between lesbianism and "other
forms o f w o m e n ' s attention to w o m e n . " M a n y of these 1 9 3 0 s
h o r r o r films depict their male couples at the very precipice of this
h o m o s o c i a l / h o m o s e x u a l divide; the break in the continuum is fig­
ured in symbolic ways, most regularly as a displacement which sub­
stitutes hatred for love, violence for tenderness, and death for life.
7
80
Plate 6 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935). The film revels in
and climaxes with homoerotic and sadomasochistic scenes of torture.
1
Defining the monster queer
63
In both The Raven and The Black Cat, any potential h o m o s e x u a l
desire is displaced onto sado-masochistic behavior. And while the
representation o f this partakes o f many o f the same aspects o f roleplaying and gamesmanship that today demarcate sado-masochistic
sexual practice, the films fail (as does H o l l y w o o d cinema in general)
to make any differentiation between a consensual sado-masochistic
sexual experience and the more simple (and c o m m o n ) conflation o f
homosexuality with violence, terror, and death. In The Raven, Bela
Lugosi's Dr Vollin sadistically tortures Boris Karloff's Bateman with
a scalpel, rearranging his facial nerves in order t o deform his visage.
Once uglified, Dr Vollin torments Bateman with a phalanx o f mir­
rors; later he whips him with a riding crop. According t o the plot,
all of this is done in the name o f (queer) love: Vollin has saved a
young girl's life and has subsequently fallen in " l o v e " with her.
W h e n she spurns him, he puts his collection o f Edgar Allan Poe tor­
ture devices to use with the aid o f henchman Bateman. At the
climax, the normals are saved and the villains die at each other's
hands; heterosexuality endures while violent queer relationships
Plate 7 In the climax of The Black Cat (1934), Bela Lugosi "skins alive" the
half-naked body of his closely bonded rival, played by Boris Karloff
Monsters in the closet
64
lead to death.
The Black Cat also focuses on a sado-masochistic queer couple
who dabble in all sorts of queer romance: Satanism, incest,
necrophilia, and bestiality. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) and Dr
Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) are overly friendly enemies with an
old score to settle. Their relationship is defined almost solely in
terms of a series of homoerotic triangles: Poelzig has stolen Werdegast's wife when Werdegast was sent away to prison. Subsequently
he has married Werdegast's daughter, Karen, although this fact is
unknown to Werdegast. When Werdegast and the obligatory
normal couple are forced to spend the night at Poelzig's art-deco
castle, the two "old friends" suppress their hatred for one another
and instead exchange pleasant admiration: "Engineer Poelzig is one
of Austria's greatest architects" ... "Dr Werdegast is one of Hun­
gary's greatest psychiatrists." Their mutual admiration evaporates,
however, when Poelzig attempts to enter Werdegast's bedroom in
the middle of the night: "Now Vitus, we have something to settle,
we two." He takes Werdegast to the cellar and shows him the
embalmed corpse of their (shared) dead wife. Symmetrically framed
around the body, the two men re-create a scene so common in
gothic novels, wherein, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has noted, "male
rivals unite, refreshed in mutual support and definition, over the
ruined carcase [sic] of a woman." Their homosexual desire is fil­
tered through death, and Poelzig and Werdegast realize that their
destiny is linked: "Are we not both the living dead?"
81
They decide to play a game of chess, a "game of death" which
(because of narrative demands and the logic of the homosocial tri­
angle) must involve a woman as prize, this time the heterosexual­
ized heroine. Poelzig wins the game and plans to sacrifice the
heroine to Lucifer later that night. Werdegast intervenes, the hero
and heroine escape, and Poelzig ends up bare-chested and strapped
to a rack in his dungeon. Werdegast moves close to him with a
scalpel, and, in a shadow shot, proceeds to "flail the skin from
[Poelzig's] body, bit by bit." One early draft of the film's script
would have placed the heterosexualized hero himself upon the rack,
and would have come to its climax with the already-skinned Poelzig
"turn[ing] with the last vestige of his strength and crawlfing] on his
belly toward Werdegast," thus reuniting the queer couple in death.
Instead, the film ends with the normal heterosexualized couple
escaping and then joking together on their continuing train trip.
82
65
Defining the monster queer
While The Black Cat was attacked by censors for its sadism (Variety
called it "dubious showmanship"), its climactic scene nonetheless
serves as another prime example of a monstrous 1930s couple con­
summating their unnatural desires as only they were allowed:
through violence and death.
The extant triangulation of the heroine through the desires of
Werdegast and Poelzig, and the degree of overall queerness of the
film, would have been much stronger had the film not undergone
extensive reshooting before its theatrical release. In scenes origi­
nally filmed, Werdegast is equally as monstrous as Poelzig, desiring
the heroine for himself. (Lugosi apparently objected to being cast
yet again as a sexually obsessed madman.) The film's scripted intro­
ductory wedding sequence was to have featured a homosexual pho­
tographer, until the Production Code authorities cautioned against
this and the entire sequence was scrapped. The role of Werdegast's
daughter Karen was also considerably "toned down" in the release
print: originally she was to have been an almost animalistic "catperson." Perhaps most interesting was a scene which suggested the
queerness of the Satanic cultists. Director Edgar Ulmer's original
description of them was to make them appear "as aberrant as pos­
sible. A stable of misfits, members of the decadent aristocracy of the
countryside." Their gender-bending was to have been made appar­
ent by the addition of a character named Frau Goering, "to be
played by a man, the dark fuzz on her lip suggesting Hitler's mous­
tache." The Production Code authorities quickly crushed those
ideas: "it would be well to avoid any suggestion of German nation­
ality in presenting these people. Also, in this scene, care should be
taken to avoid any suggestion of homosexuality or perversion of
any of the characters." Nonetheless, the scene (like the film itself)
remains a high point of German Expressionist design, from
Karloff's angular make-up and costuming to the inverted, doubled,
and skewed crucifix which comprises his Satanic pulpit. Jewish
director Ulmer's vision of the scene was reportedly inspired not
only by his anti-fascist sentiments, but also by the woodcuts of
Aubrey Beardsley, an artist of the Decadent School renowned for
illustrating editions of Oscar Wilde's work. Ulmer's resultant vision
would have succeeded in conflating homosexuality with Nazism,
yet another monstrous signifier of same-sex desire which continues
to circulate through popular culture. It is perhaps ironic (or fright­
ening?) to realize that the spectre of homosexuality and the German
83
84
85
86
66
Monsters in the closet
Plate 8 In this scene from White Zombie (1931), the monster is used to
mediate the homoerotic tension between Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi)
and Monsieur Beaumont (Robert Fraser)
Expressionist style were used in a very similar way in both Nazi Ger­
many and 1930s Hollywood cinema: to signify decadence and
depravity.
Conclusion: De-repressing the homosocial triangle in White
Zombie
While the figure of the homosocial triangle is usually theorized to
explain how male homosociality serves to bolster patriarchy, it can
also be invoked as a device used to mask a sublimated or repressed
homosexual desire. In The Raven and The Black Cat, the queer cou­
ples' desires are displaced onto violence and torture, while in a film
such as White Zombie, the break in the homosocial/homosexual
continuum is linked to another gothic signifier - that of the preda­
tory bird. Made in 1931 by an independent producing team who
shot much of their film on sets left over from Dracula, Victor
Halperin's White Zombie is remarkable in that it plots several
homosocial triangles before revealing the homosexual desire that
Defining the monster queer
67
87
lurks beneath them. In the film, the typical young, white, hetero­
sexual couple is triangulated through the separate desires of Murder
Legendre (Bela Lugosi) and Monsieur Beaumont (Robert Fraser).
While both Legendre and Beaumont ostensibly vie for the atten­
tions of the young wife, Madeline (Madge Bellamy), eventually
homosexual desire is revealed as the "true" form of evil which
Murder Legendre practices.
Legendre first spies the young about-to-be-married couple in a
coach, and his desires are immediately linked to the horrific: his
male zombies come shuffling up behind him as he "cruises" Made­
line and Neil. Beaumont, who is less directly linked to the queerly
supernatural, is hysterically infatuated with Madeline and begs her
to marry him even as he walks her to the altar to meet Neil. Still,
there are warnings about his intentions which raise the spectre of
queer sexuality: a priest warns the couple that it is unnatural for a
man like Beaumont to want to "play fairy godfather to a young
couple like you, unless ...". When Madeline rejects Beaumont, he
administers Legendre's zombie drug in order to "kill" her. Does he
do so to gain control over Madeline, or in order to be rid of her so
that he might enjoy a relationship with Neil? The slippage between
the male and female as objects of queer desire is echoed in a scene
in Legendre's sugar-mill, which he staffs with zombies: previous
enemies whom Legendre has "taken" and made his supernatural
servants. He tries to entice Beaumont with his male zombies: "You
could make good use of men like mine on your plantation." Flus­
tered, Beaumont, who has refused to shake Legendre's hand, replies
"No, that's not what I want." "Then perhaps you want to talk about
the young lady
offers Legendre. Beaumont does, but Legendre
does not: "There was a young man with her . . . " Beaumont offers to
give Legendre anything he wants if Legendre will help him win
Madeline from Neil. In answer, Legendre reaches out and touches
Beaumont's shoulder, then looks to his zombie servant. A tilt shot
from foot to head of the bare-chested zombie answers his gaze, and
in an objective medium shot, Legendre leans over and whispers his
price in Beaumont's ear. "No - not that!", cries Beaumont, but he
takes the drug anyway, and uses it in the very next scene. (Interest­
ingly, this tilt shot of the zombie "from feet to hairy chest" was one
of the Studio Relations Committee's suggested deletions.)
Madeline "dies" but is revived by Legendre and Beaumont and
the three of them retreat to Legendre's castle in "the Land of the
88
68
Monsters in the closet
Living Dead." Once there, the triangle is reformulated: Beaumont
and Legendre vie for Madeline's affections, but Legendre now
seems less interested in her ("I have other plans for Mademoiselle")
than in Beaumont himself. It is at precisely this moment that the
homosocial suddenly shifts to the homosexual. Legendre drugs
Beaumont and tells him forthrightly "I have taken a fancy to you,
Monsieur." Out of nowhere a vulture appears at the window and its
cry pierces the air. Initial reviews of the film were unable to follow
the symbolic logic of this move, even as one of them did note the
key to the code: "to go on would only lead to a description of why
the eagles [sic] screamed, and that would prove very little, indeed,
in the orderly scheme of life. There was, in short, no great reason."
On the contrary, the bird signifies the emergence of Legendre's
homosexual desire. (The vulture as symbol also figures significantly
in Freud's reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci's historical homo­
sexuality.) Beaumont now realizes what is happening, and under­
stands the vulture as a symbol of Legendre's homosexual plotting:
"The vulture! You! No - not that, not that!" The scene fades to
black, and when we return, Beaumont has lost his tie and is wear­
ing a different (white) jacket. During the ellipse something terrify­
ing has transpired which has caused him to lose his clothing; in
losing his tie, Beaumont is further symbolically feminized, and it is
now possible that he has become the titular White Zombie,
not
Madeline.
In a scene to be repeated in horror films throughout the rest of
the century, one member of the horrific queer couple now sadisti­
cally taunts the other who is suffering at his hands: "Can you still
hear me? It is unfortunate you are no longer able to speak ... You
see, you are the first to know what is happening ... None of the
others did ... You refused to shake hands once. Well, well, we
understand each other better now." Immediately preceding this
scene had unfolded a sequence reminiscent of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), wherein the hero and entranced heroine reach out to
one another telepathically. Using dissolves and wipes, director
Halperin contrasts Neil and Madeline's "normal" heterosexual
desire with the sado-masochistic queer desire between Legendre
and Beaumont. Now that he has "taken" Beaumont, Legendre (like
a homosexual with an anti-heterosexual "agenda") tries to make
Madeline stab her husband. The thrust is stopped by the hand of the
old priest, and eventually Legendre and Beaumont fall over the cliff
89
Defining the monster queer
69
together, while the vulture cries again. The "normals" are safely
reunited and the queer couple, whose desire can only be spoken
through metaphors of violence and predation, are destroyed.
Although the classical horror films of the early 1930s were in
many cases actually created by homosexual film-makers, this fact
was seldom acknowledged outside of gay subculture(s), whose
members would have recognized the queer appeal of actors and
directors such as Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, and James
Whale. However, any queer pleasure spectators might have found
in the horror film was mitigated by the very nature of the genre's
classical form, wherein queer forces were routinely quelled by each
film's narrative resolution. While outright homosexuality was con­
sidered taboo by the Production Code authorities, its signifiers still
crept into the classical horror film, along with a wide range of other
monstrous signifiers, including bestiality, miscegenation, incest,
sado-masochism, and rape. Like the popular culture of the day,
most classical horror films make little or no distinction between
homosexuality and any other form of "sex perversion": all are used
to titillate, to thrill, to repulse, and to demarcate the depravity of
the villain or monster. Many of these queer signifiers had already
been connected with homosexuality both within gothic horror and
within popular culture-at-large. However, the monster movie, once
it coalesced as a filmic genre system, proved to be a powerful and
efficient vehicle for disseminating such ideas and structures of feel­
ing, and the themes and representational codes which were devel­
oped during this period influenced almost all subsequent
English-language horror films.
The queer couple, which was to become a core narrative trope of
the genre, expressed itself in the classical Hollywood horror movie
in several different ways: as a vampire and his/her manservant, as a
doubled self (one "normal" and one queer), and as a mad scientist
and his assistant. Usually these couples were structured by strict
hierarchical codes derived from traditional racial and gender roles.
When they weren't trying to create life homosexually, these queer
couples spent their cinematic lives torturing one another, triangu­
lating their desires through the heterosexualized normal couple.
This particular formation of classical Hollywood horror film facili­
tates an exploration of the homosocial/homosexual continuum, and
suggests that the continuum's "break" is not so much an absolute
fracture as a dip into the social unconscious, from which the threat
70
Monsters in the closet
of homosexuality emerges in symbolic terms. It is from this partic­
ular part of the continuum, that which has been forced below the
ordered surface of consciousness and/or social convention, that the
uncanny acquires so much of its charge, and conversely, that homo­
sexuality is often figured in nightmarish, horror-movie terms.
Notes
1 Parisex (pseudonym of Henry Gerber), "In Defense of Homosexuality,"
The Modern Thinker (1932). Reprinted in A Homosexual
Emancipation
Miscellany c. 1835-1952 (New York: Arno Press, 1975) 2 8 8 .
2 John Addington Symonds, Studies in Sexual Inversion: Embodying "A
Study in Greek Ethics" and "A Study in Modern Ethics (Privately
Printed, 1928). Reprinted New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1975.
3 William Stekel, The Homosexual Neurosis, trans. James S. Van Teslaar
(Boston, MA: The Gorham Press, 1922).
4 Stekel 2 3 .
5 Stekel 2 8 6 .
6 G. W Henry, "Psychogenic factors in overt Homosexuality," American
Journal of Psychiatry 93 (1937) 9 0 3 , excerpted and discussed in Henry
L. Minton, "Femininity in Men and Masculinity in Women: American
Psychiatry and Psychology Portray Homosexuality in the 1930s,"/o«rnal of Homosexuality
13 (1986) 1-21.
7 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
(New York: Basic Books,
1994). See also Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A His­
tory of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin
Books, 1991), and Eric Garber, "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and
Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem," in Hidden From History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha
Vicinus, and George Chauncey, J r (New York: Meridian, 1989)
318-331.
8 For a brief narrative history of the magazine, see Dean Howd,
"Esquire," American Mass-Market Magazines, eds. Alan Nourie and
Barbara Nourie (New York: Greenwood Press, 1 9 9 0 ) 1 0 8 - 1 1 5 .
9 Esquire (autumn 1933) editor's page. The editors and publishers are
adamant about their magazine's masculinity: "we have tried to allow
this magazine to take on an easy natural masculine character - to endow
it, as it were, with a baritone voice." While "we feel that men have long
since ceased to believe there is anything effeminate or essentially
unbusinesslike about devoting a little care and thought and study to the
selection of clothes," the magazine was also quick to apologize to its
manly readers when it started running perfume ads, or endorsing pink
Defining the monster queer
71
shirts for men.
10 Gilbert Seldes, "The Park Avenue Hill-billies," Esquire (April 1935) 7 9 ,
116; Vincent Richards "The Astonishing Mr. Tilden," Esquire (August
1937) 5 1 , 1 7 6 ; Harry Saltpeter (!) "Paul Cadmus: Enfant
Terrible,"
Esquire (July 1937) 105.
11 Robert Buckner, "Stonewall and Ivy," Esquire (Autumn 1933) 25ff.
12 "Backstage with Esquire," Esquire (Autumn 1933) 7.
13 Esquire (October 1937) 22.
14 For a history if these incidents, see Kaier Curtin, "We Can Always Call
Them Bulgarians": The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the
American Stage (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1987).
15 Because of heterocentrist histories, censorship, and the relative cultural
scarcity of Pre-Code Hollywood cinema, it is easy to forget that homo­
sexuals were ever part of Hollywood film before the 1960s. I can still
recall my utter shock at seeing two men dance together in Wonder Bar
(1934), which has recently been screened around the country as part of
the Warner Brothers "Forbidden Hollywood" retrospective. While
others may disagree, I personally feel that outright filmic genocide is a
far worse fate than any degree of marginalization or stereotyping. I
often wonder how different the course of life for twentieth-century gay
and lesbian people might have been had the Production Code not for­
bidden their filmic existence.
16 For a fuller account of the Production Code and the debates surround­
ing it, see Leonard J . Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the
Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and The Production Code from the
1920s to the 1960s (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990); Vito Russo,
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality
in the Movies, revised edition
(New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Chon Noriega, "'SOMETHING'S
MISSING HERE!': Homosexuality and Film Reviews during the Pro­
duction Code Era 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 6 2 , " Cinema Journal 3 0 : 1 (Fall 1990)
2 0 - 4 1 ; Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the
Ideology of Containment (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1983)
9 4 - 1 1 7 ; and Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen
Woman Film 1928-1942
(Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1991).
17 Rhona J . Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality,
and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia Uni­
versity Press, 1996) 83.
18 Berenstein 87.
19 Chauncey 3 2 4 - 3 2 5 .
20 Two of these medical studies from the 1930s are discussed in Henry L.
Minton, "Femininity in Men and Masculinity in Women: American
Psychiatry and Psychology Portray Homosexuality in the 1930s," Jour-
72
Monsters in the closet
nal of Homosexuality
13 (1986) 1-21.
21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Los Angeles: Uni­
versity of California Press, 1990) 8 5 .
22 Two rather sketchy biographies of Whale are extant: James Curtis,
James Whale (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1982); and Mark
Gatiss, James Whale: A Biography (New York: Cassell, 1995). There is
also a recently released novel based on the life of James Whale by
Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein (New York: Penguin, 1995).
23 Gregory William Mank, Karloff and Lugosi:The Story of a Haunting
Collaboration
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1990) 12.
24 Quoted in Mank, Karloff and Lugosi 10.
25 Gregory William Mank, Hollywood Cauldron (Jefferson, NC: McFar­
land & Company, Inc., 1994) 34.
26 Leslie Halliwell, The Dead That Walk (London: Grafton Books, 1986)
114.
27 For more on gay and lesbian personages during Hollywood's classical
era, see Boze Hadleigh's two books of interviews: Conversations With
My Elders (New York: St Martin's Press, 1986) and Hollywood
Les­
bians (New York: Barricade Books, 1994).
28 Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 3 9 .
2 9 Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 3 9 .
30 Quoted in Philip J . Riley, ed., The Bride of Frankenstein Universal Filmscripts Series (Absecon, NJ: Maclmage Filmbooks, 1989) 2 3 .
31 Reported in Anthony Slide, "James Whale", Stallion 3 1 . Stallion was a
gay men's porno magazine and this particular clipping is housed in a
folder on Ernest Thesiger at the Gay and Lesbian Archives at the Uni­
versity of Southern California, Los Angeles.
32 "Nervousness" was at this time a signifier of failed masculinity: "real
men" have steady nerves. A Camel cigarette ad which ran in Esquire
during this era makes the point quite clearly when it asks "Are you a
pencil chewer?" and then reminds its readers that "right or wrong,
people put their own interpretations on them [jangled nerves]. So it
pays to watch your nerves" by smoking "Camel's costlier tobaccos
[which] never jangle your nerves - no matter how many you smoke."
33 The theoretical key to this phenomenon has been around at least since
1 9 1 1 , when Sandor Ferenczi, expanding upon Freud's observations on
homosexuality and the Oedipal phase, concluded that (as a modern
psychologist puts it): "heterosexual men's feelings of aversion, hostility,
and disgust toward male homosexuality really are reaction-formations
and symptomatic of defense against affection for the same sex" (quoted
from Gregory M. Herek, "Beyond 'Homophobia': A Social Psycho­
logical Perspective on Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men," in
Bashers, Baiters, and Bigots: Homophobia
in American Society,
ed.
Defining the monster queer
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
73
John P. DeCecco (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985) 5). See also
Sandor Ferenczi, "The Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homoeroticism)," in The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society , ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (Newark: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1963) 3 - 1 6 . As this
edition notes, Ferenczi's paper was originally delivered at the Third
Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association at Weimar,
October 1911, and published in a German psychoanalytical journal in
1914.
Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 4 6 .
"Review of The Old Dark House," Variety (November 1, 1932) in Vari­
ety Film Reviews 1930-1933,
Volume 4 (New York: Garland Publish­
ers, Inc., 1983).
See Berenstein 6 0 - 8 7 for a fuller discussion of how classic horror was
marketed to the public. As she points out, romance and horror were
often conflated in the films' advertisements, a campaign strategy which
promised the spectacle of queer love.
Advertising copy appearing in the Motion Picture Herald 105:8
(November 2 1 , 1931) 41 and 105:11 (December 12, 1931) 6 3 .
Reported in George E. Turner, "Flash Gordon, an Interplanetary
Gothic," in The Cinema of Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. George
E. Turner (Hollywood: The ASC Press, 1989) 2 0 6 .
For example, "Algy the Aristocrat," a line drawing featured in the
period's advertisements for Reis sport shirts and pullovers, wears mar­
celled hair, a foppish moustache, a supercilious expression, and is posed
with his arms akimbo - one hand on his hip, the other gesturing with a
lighted cigarette (Esquire (May 1935) 181). For a discussion of "arms
akimbo" and its relevance to gay culture, see Thomas A. King, "Per­
forming Akimbo': Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice," in The
Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge,
1994) 2 3 - 5 0 .
See Chauncey 1 2 - 2 3 for a valuable discussion of these terms and their
evolution.
Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 5 2 .
Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Faragoh, in Philip J . Riley, ed.,
Frankenstein Universal Filmscripts Series (Absecon, NJ: Maclmage
Filmbooks, Inc., 1989) Scene H - 6 , page 5 2 .
This moment is especially interesting because the male victim thinks it
was his girlfriend who has bitten him: "Nikki - your eyes - I never saw
them so queer!" Only later do we find out that the bite came from the
male vampire Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi).
Paramount's and most later screen versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are especially interesting in this respect because
they actively set out to "heterosexualize" their dual character by the
74
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
Monsters in the closet
addition of two women, one virginal and one whorish, neither of
whom is present in the original story. Many popular theatrical versions
of the work also heterosexualized the story, long before Hollywood
did. Nevertheless, the film and most of its latter-day adaptations can
still easily be read as a story about a man battling his own queer sexual
urges. For a full reading of the novel's homosexual components, see
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle (New York: Penguin Books, 1990) 1 0 5 - 1 2 6 .
Referenced in Stekel 29 as "Jahrbuch f. sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol.
IX, 1908, p. 5 0 4 . "
William Hurlbut and John H. Balderston, in Philip J . Riley, ed., The
Bride of Frankenstein
(Universal Filmscripts Series) (Absecon, NJ:
Maclmage Filmbooks, 1989) Scene A2-A6.
Halliwell 125.
Hurlbut and Balderston, Scene B - 1 5 .
Bram 133.
Gerald Gardner, The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from
the Hays Office, 1934-1968 (New York: Dodd-Mead, 1987) 6 5 - 7 2 .
Berenstein 87.
La Forest Potter, Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities (New
York: Robert Dodsley, 1933) 147. Reprinted in Jonathan Ned Katz, ed.,
Gay American History, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 1992)164.
"Voluptuary" and "morbidity" were words frequently used to connote
homosexuality at this time. For example, in a Harper's Monthly Magazine essay from 1930, the author compares "primitive" sexuality at the
Puka-Puka trading station to that of the "civilized world", noting offhandedly that "With the exception of old Bones, the local voluptuary,
there is no sex morbidity at Puka-Puka (Robert Dean Frisbie, "The Sex
Taboo at Puka-Puka," Harper's Monthly Magazine 162 (December
1930) 96).
See Ed Guerrero, "Slaves, Monsters, and Others," in Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) 4 1 - 6 8 .
Reported in Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at
the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin Books 1990)178.
See Symonds 1 2 1 - 1 2 7 for a discussion of Dr Paul Moreau's Des Aberrations du sens génésique, fourth edition (1877).
James D. Steakley, "Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and
the Eulenburg Affair in Wilhelmin Germany," in Hidden From History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds Martin Duberman, Martha
Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr (New York: Penguin, 1989) 2 5 5 .
Steakley 2 5 5 .
See, among others, "Medicine: Studies for All," Time 27 (9 March,
Defining the monster queer
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
75
1936) 5 9 - 6 0 ; Ernest Boyd, "The Most Civilized Englishman," The
American Mercury 38 (May 1936) 1 2 0 - 1 2 4 ; and Havelock Ellis, "Stud­
ies in Sex: A History," The American Mercury 37 (January 1936) 1 4 - 2 1 .
Time's "Studies for All" is noteworthy because its mentions trans­
vestism in a fairly sympathetic light. Also of note is that the article
points out that the now "childless widower" Dr Havelock Ellis "main­
tained separate homes" from his wife during the years of their mar­
riage.
For a typical take on the era's approach to sex education in the schools,
see "Education: Open Sexame," Time 36 (13 November, 1939) 6 1 . The
essay reviews the federally approved manual High Schools and Sex Edu­
cation and notes that "The authors recommend that pupils and teach­
ers discuss prostitution,
masturbation, illegitimacy, divorce."
Homosexuality is never mentioned.
"Medicine: Pedophilia," Time 30 (23 August, 1937) 4 2 - 4 4 . Other sim­
ilar articles are cited below.
"Crimes Against Children," The Literary Digest 124 (2 October, 1937)
16.
"Mental Hygiene: Night Club Patrons Cry 'Criminal' at 'Peeping
Toms': Conflicting Attitudes Toward Sex Complicates Matter of Sex
Crimes; Certain Types Require Medical Care," Science News Letter 32
(27 November, 1937) 3 4 6 .
"Sex Crime Wave Alarms U.S.: Police Grope for Method to Stem Rising
Tide of Perversion," The Literary Digest 124 (10 April, 1937) 5.
Leo Meehan, "Review of Frankenstein" Motion Picture Herald 105:7
(14 November4, 1931) 4 0 .
Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 6 9 .
Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 65, 6 8 .
Bige., "Review of Mast of Fu Manchu," Variety, 6 December, 1932, in
Variety Film Reviews 1930-1933, Volume 4 (New York: Garland Pub­
lishers, Inc., 1983).
Mank, Hollywood
Cauldron55.
"Letter from the Japanese-American Citizens League to M G M ,
requesting the removal of The Mask of Fu Manchu from Metro's cata­
logue, 1972, reprinted in Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 5 4 .
Robert Dean Frisbie, "The Sex Taboo at Puka-Puka," Harper's Monthly
Magazine 162 (December 1930)100.
Quoted from a Time magazine film review in Mank, Hollywood
Caul­
dron 148.
Mank, Karloff and Lugosi 57.
Quoted in Mank, Karloff and Lugosi 18.
Trailer for The Body Snatcher (1945), reported in Mank, Karloff and
Lugosi 274.
76
Monsters in the closet
76
77
78
79
F.S.N., "Review of The Raven," The New York Times (5 July, 1935) 9:2.
Mank, Karloff and Lugosi xi.
Mank, Karloff and Lugosi x-xi.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 2 1 .
Sedgwick, Between Men 2 - 3 .
Sedgwick, Between Men 76.
Reported in Paul Mandell, "Enigma of The Black Cat," The Cinema of
Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner (Hollywood:
The ASC Press, 1989) 182, 192.
"Review of The Black Cat," Variety (22 May, 1934).
MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
Mandell 190.
MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
An account of the racial implications of White Zombie can be found in
Tony Williams, "White Zombie: Haitian Horrors," Jump Cut 28 (April
1 9 8 3 ) 1 8 - 2 0 . Its production history is described in Michael H. Price
and George E. Turner, "The Black Art of White Zombie," The Cinema
of Adventure, Romance, and Terror, ed. by George E. Turner (Holly­
wood: The ASC Press, 1989) 1 4 7 - 1 5 5 .
MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
L. N., "Beyond the Pale" (Review of White Zombie), The New York
Times (29 July, 1932) 18:2.
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
2
Shock treatment: Curing the
monster queer during World
War II
D
racula's Daughter (1936), although the most obviously "les­
bian" monster movie of the classical period, has several strik­
ing formal patterns which make it important to a discussion of how
the monster movie changed during the years surrounding and
during World War II. While the film retains its classical status by
linking homosexual desire to the usual Hollywood horror film sig­
nifiers of depravity (bestiality, necrophilia, sado-masochism, incest,
racial Otherness, modernism, and the construction of the queer
couple), it also looks ahead to a new set of signifiers which would
become the chief foci of the monster movie's narrative during the
war years - an increasing domesticization of the monstrous figures,
the idea of monstrous communities, less interest in the so-called
"normal" couple, and a more vigorous interest in psychiatry or
medical science as a tool for treating and/or eventually "curing" the
monster. Like the debate over homosexuals, monsters were increas­
ingly figured as a problem best approached through medical and/or
psychiatric intervention, rather than legal or religious means. Yet,
while many of the World War II era horror films insist that the mon­
ster queer can be cured (or at least understood) through psycho­
logical means, many others reflect a deep ambivalence about the
figure of the psychiatrist himself, as well as his "psychiadabra," as
one 1941 Time magazine article succinctly put it.
Perhaps because of her female status, Dracula's daughter, the
countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) is one of the most equiv­
ocal monsters of the classical period; in fact, she actively desires to
be cured of her condition. This "condition" is directly expressed in
terms of her queer sexuality, her non-traditional gender role, and
death: she longs to be "free - free to live as a woman. Free to take
my place in the bright world of the living, instead of among the
1
78
Monsters in the closet
Plate 9 In Dracula's Daughter (1936), the Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria
Holden) pointedly seeks to be cured of her unnatural desires, which include
the vamping of both men and women
shadows of the dead." The countess makes it quite clear that she
"wants to live a normal life - think normal things." Like an ego-dystonic homosexual, she feels compelled to lead a double life, and
characterizes her subconscious urges as "horrible impulses."
Although she tries to suppress them repeatedly, eventually these
"overpowering command[s] - wordless - irresistible - and I had to
obey - it's too, too, ghastly ..." overcome her, and she is forced to
seduce her victims and drain their bodily fluids. Her surly manser­
vant Sandor, a nay-saying bitchy queen and supreme fatalist about
their minoritized condition, is far less optimistic about her chances
for a cure.
Shock treatment
79
While some "real-life" homosexuals probably were interested in
curing themselves at this point in time, many others were not inter­
ested at all, if a remarkable first-person essay from the Forum is any
indication. The Forum was a magazine of political and social com­
mentary that prided itself on tackling controversial issues such as
evolution and the separation of Church and State.' One particular
Forum article from 1938 chronicles its author's life as a butch
woman (she refuses to use the label "lesbian" because of its negative
connotations) and recounts in vivid detail terrible social ostracism,
sexist employers, unhappy and suicidal lesbians, and a barbaric
encounter with the medical profession. She might have drawn some
support for her disgust with medical models of homosexuality had
she read an item in a 1937 Science News Letter entitled "Hairy
Chest is Not a Sign of the Masculine He-Man," a short essay which
debunked the idea of essentialist gender-roles: "Gradually, as they
are attacked by scientific study, many so-called sex differences are
melting away." Yet the wheels of medical progress grind slowly, and
it would be another decade at least before many people started to
realize that nonconformity to traditional gender roles did not nec­
essarily correlate with sexual object choice. Nonetheless, while the
author of the Forum essay probably would have found
Dracula's
Daughter's desire for a cure to be misguided, she nonetheless might
still have identified with other counter-hegemonic monsters of the
classical Hollywood horror film (or even Sandor), since she charac­
terizes herself as "constantly having to fight against an overwhelm­
ing disgust with humanity," precisely because of its unjust and cruel
legacy of oppression towards women and queers.
2
4
5
Dracula's
Daughter's
expressionist lair is an artist's studio in
London's Chelsea district, which along with her queer sexuality,
interest in music, and bohemian lifestyle, easily suggests to the spec­
tator a connection with New York City's Greenwich Village and its
burgeoning homosexual community. (A thorough history of
London's gay neighborhoods has yet to be written; Chelsea
nonetheless was known as a place of similar social and sexual trans­
gression.) In actuality, the countess preys upon both men and
women, although her vamping of artist's model Lily (Nan Grey, that
same year also one of Universal's Three Smart Girls) and secre­
tary/heiress Janet Blake are her most often remembered conquests.
These are also the scenes that caused the most discomfort at the
Breen office. Several versions of a (very different) script had initially
Monsters in the closet
80
been rejected by the Production Code authorities because of their
"very objectionable mixture of sex and horror." When the final ver­
sion of the script was approved, the Breen office noted that the
seduction scene between the countess and Lily would "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 Marya or of an attempted
sexual attack by her upon Lily. " Yet, for the attuned spectator, the
lesbian implication is as unavoidable as was the male homosexual
connotation in other contemporary horror films: countess Zaleska
triangulates her desire through the "normal" couple just as did her
monstrous male counterparts. And while she ostensibly wants the
tough-talking psychiatrist, Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) to cure her,
the climax of the film occurs when she threatens to seduce his girl­
friend Janet.
6
The debate over normality, and the monster's etiology, are acti­
vated in the film as per usual, but the place of that discourse is now
much closer to home. Professor Van Helsing is still on hand to
explain the ways of the vampire, but the chief voice of hegemonic
"normality" has shifted from an eccentric "expert" to an institu­
tionalized medical discourse which works in tandem with Scotland
Yard rather than with folkloric talismans. This change is indicative
of a larger shift in this and later films, away from foreign exotic
lands and singular exotic characters to a more localized, familiar
setting and identifiable state apparatuses of "normality," both
repressive (the police force) and ideological (psychiatry). Thus,
rather than staking first and asking questions later, as Van Helsing
would, Dr Garth has faith in his profession's ability to "normalize"
any untoward obsessions: "Like any disease of the mind, it can be
cured ... through sympathetic treatment." Like many so-called
"cures" for homosexuality, this "sympathetic treatment" apparently
consists of denial and "will-power." Garth tells the countess she
must "meet it [and] fight it" if she is ever to be free of "it." True to
generic conventions, her unconscious sexual urges are conflated
with the unnatural (or supernatural), yet the countess herself does
suggest their universalizing potential: "Perhaps there are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamed about in your psychi­
atry, Dr Garth."
7
Normality in the film is itself none too appealing. Dr Garth is an
active misogynist, and his "normal" heterosexual relationship with
81
Shock treatment
Janet is based as much on mutual antagonism as on attraction. The
film also conflates unproblematically a romantic interest between
patient and doctor and a professional one: Garth and the countess
have a strong sexual interest in each other, as their many pointed
gazes that cinematically dissolve into a fireplace make apparent.
Drawing upon another common construct of the era's fascination
with psychiatrists (as well as the psychoanalytic processes of trans­
ference), the confused countess has fallen in love with her analyst.
Despite her phallic powers of seduction (symbolized through her
hypnotic jewel), and her rather butch, severe costuming (at least
when she is on the prowl), countess Zaleska, like many other postCode 1930s female characters, is rather weak-willed. She actually
seeks less to be "cured" of her obsession than to supplant one form
of unconscious mental control (Dracula's "spell") with another (the
discourse of modern psychiatry in general and the patriarchal con­
trol of Dr Garth in particular). This is made manifest when she
acknowledges that a cure is impossible, but still wants Dr Garth to
be her eternal companion. The climax is played out back in Tran­
sylvania, where the seemingly ubiquitous Universal Studios peasants
are celebrating yet another fertility rite - this time a wedding.
Sandor, who has been promised eternal life, becomes jealous when
the countess offers it to Garth, and Sandor shoots her with a cross­
bow before he himself is shot and killed by a uniformed policeman.
Van Helsing and Dr Garth stand by helplessly; their power to force
the eradication of monsters is strong, but they are no longer the
actual physical agents of the monsters' destruction. This is left
either to the monsters themselves (such tragic people will eventually
cause their own deaths), or to the proper socially sanctioned repres­
sive state apparatuses; after all, psychiatry is supposed to help
people, not destroy them. Perhaps most significantly, the film's final
shot is a tight close-up of countess Zaleska's face, not the patented
shot of the normal couple's embrace, suggesting both an increasing
interest in the figure of the monster and a decreasing need for "nor­
mality" to have the final word.
8
Dracula's Daughter thus looks ahead to the themes and motifs of
the World War II monster movie. For various reasons (The United
Kingdom's new restrictions on horror films, Universal Studios
undergoing a change of management, the public's attention to "reallife" sex crimes in 1937-1938), cinematic horror went into a brief
decline in the late 1930s, until successful re-releases of
Frankenstein
Monsters in the closet
82
and Dracula in 1938 renewed public interest in the genre. Starting
with the rather expensive production of Son of Frankenstein
in
1939, filmic horror underwent a revival that lasted throughout the
years of World War II. Both the major studios and the minors (as
well as "Poverty Row" studios such as Monogram, Republic, and
Producers Releasing Corporation) found that monsters were again
extremely profitable at the box office. Searching for new formulas,
the studios began to mix and match monsters, and even produced a
series of gangster-horror films, "queering" both genres by wedding
two of the most phallocentric and homoerotic genres into one. Yet,
in many of these films, terror is tempered with more and more sym­
pathy for the monster. RKO remade The Hunchback
of Notre
Dame
in 1939; already one of the most sympathetic of monsters, Quasi­
modo was made even more so by Charles Laughton's moving (and
queerly tinged) performance. Universal's remake of The Phantom of
the Opera (1943) also downplayed the horrific aspects of the prop­
erty in favor of lengthy opera sequences, and made its titular char­
acter into an innocent musician who is cruelly wronged by the
world. Similarly, MGM cast nice-guy Spencer Tracy in their remake
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941). And in Columbia's Return of the
Vampire (1943), a female doctor has sympathy rather than disdain
for a wolfman: his hairy palms indicate that he has fallen under the
vampire's queer spell, an almost too-obvious metaphor for
onanism, which itself had been linked by many psychiatrists (as well
as lay people) to the development of sexual perversion.
9
Public awareness of homosexuality reached a new height during
these years, primarily due to the new set of social conditions
wrought by the war. Slowly, the love that dare not speak its name
was being spoken, albeit in ways almost always obscurantist, puni­
tive, and homophobic. The linkage of homosexuality with violence
and disease remained strong. For example, the famous Lonergan
murder case of 1944 (in which a supposedly happily married hus­
band killed his wife) was highly publicized in the popular press, and
much was made over the murderer's alleged homosexuality, the
psychiatric evaluation of it, and how the condition might lead to
murder. In another example, a 1945 Esquire review of The Lost
Weekend could opine that the film was superior to its source novel
since it left out the implications of its protagonist's homosexuality,
arguing that "The souse and the pansy are two different people."
However, it was the government's decision to use psychiatrists in an
10
11
12
Shock treatment
83
attempt to "weed out" homosexuals from the Armed Services that
actually made millions of people openly confront an issue that for
many had hitherto only been whispered about. Recruits were now
required to acknowledge, categorize, and reveal their sexuality to a
medical examiner. In "an era when silence most typically character­
ized society's approach to same-sex eroticism, the military medical
examination was a significant exception. For gay and non-gay men
alike, it represented the first and perhaps only time that they faced
such inquiries in a public setting."
Working under the assumptions of the gender-inversion model of
homosexuality (as well as the idea of homosexual predator and
straight prey), it was feared that one or two homosexuals might turn
an entire military unit into pansies, rendering them unable to fight
like men. This new policy thus tacitly acknowledged a universaliz­
ing model of human sexuality (since it was an attempt to "contain"
the "virulent" threat of homosexuality among supposedly "normal"
men), even as it maintained a minoritizing belief that there was such
a thing as a "true" homosexual. This paradox was regulated by the
psychiatric identification of "true" homosexuals through "scientific
means." Most regularly this meant observing men for effeminate
tendencies: "Effeminacy was by far the most common characteristic
psychiatrists attributed to the typical homosexual." However, a
barrage of bizarre methodologies based on the assumption that a
"true" male homosexual always partook of passive, "female" sexual
pleasures were also employed. (These included tests for "patulous
rectums" and repressed gag reflexes.)" Thus, even as it was
acknowledged that the same-sex environments of the Armed Ser­
vices might lead "normal" men and women into such vices, it was
the "habitual" effeminate male homosexual or the mannish lesbian
who was most often singled out for persecution. When "normalseeming" men and women (i.e. those who conformed to traditional
ideals of masculinity and femininity) were caught in homosexual sit­
uations, they were more likely to be given another chance, since
they weren't really "true" homosexuals, but had simply given in to
understandable, situational temptations. (It should be acknowl­
edged that gay men and especially lesbians were sometimes toler­
ated within the Armed Forces during the war years, because they
were needed; undoubtedly the "mannish-ness" of the identified les­
bians was seen as a positive [if deviant] aspect of their condition.
However, once the war was over, the organized persecution of gay
13
14
Monsters in the closet
84
men and lesbians would become increasingly frequent.)
"Persecution" is not too strong a word to use when discussing
these military and psychiatric interventions." While psychiatry was
supposedly invoked in order to provide a more humane way of
dealing with queer people (or "sexual psychopaths", as they would
become known in the value-laden military-psychiatric parlance), in
truth it resulted in the imprisonment or forced hospitalization of
thousands of individuals, and the destruction of tens of thousands
of careers and lives. But psychiatry's most damaging and cruel
legacy is to be found in the "sympathetic treatments" it has pre­
scribed throughout the twentieth century for its diagnosed homo­
sexuals: shock treatment, castration, vasectomy, testicular
irradiation, ovariectomy, nerve section, gender realignment therapy,
electrical or emetic aversion therapy, hormone injections, and even
lobotomy. Most of these therapies were based on the gender inver­
sion model of homosexuality and were designed to "remove" the
feminine taint from male subjects, or vice versa, the masculine from
female subjects. While Nazi doctors experimented on their impris­
oned subjects in Europe, similar types of irresponsible "mad sci­
ence" were practiced on the home front (and would continue to be
practiced even after the war) both upon patients who gave their
"consent," and upon those who were deemed unable to give their
consent. Other individuals were exposed to such mad science when
their parents signed them over to psychiatrists in the hopes of a
promised cure; many were forced to endure treatments which made
those of the period's horror films seem almost mundane.
Partly this came about because psychiatry had become such a
popular topic in all spheres of popular culture, including the
movies. Psychiatry was considered by many to be the modern
panacea, and in film after film the talking cure was successful in
bringing peace and contentment to troubled lives. Mostly, psychia­
trists were used to uphold the status quo of heterocentrist patri­
archy, as in (perhaps most infamously) 1944's Lady in the Dark, in
which psychiatrist Barry Sullivan assures corporate executive
Ginger Rogers that she would be much happier at home with a man
to "dominate" her. In horror films, the figure of the psychiatrist was
a bit further removed from such realist issues, but he too confronted
social deviates and attempted to bring them back into the hege­
monic fold. Interest in helping monster queers rather than casting
them out forthrightly ("Burn the monster!") was both altruistic and
16
17
18
19
Shock treatment
85
self-serving. Fighting a war against fascism meant that Americans
had to take a long hard look at their own social practices, as well as
be able to mobilize a strong, unified force against the enemy. The
Hollywood war film especially dramatized the need for overcoming
individual differences and bonding against a common enemy,
although the sentiment can easily be found in a multitude of genres.
Other spheres of popular culture also resorted to endorsing tra­
ditional gender roles as both a model of mental health and a patri­
otic ideal, even as the needs of the war economy were forcing
women out of the home and into the factory. Esquire magazine
butched itself up considerably during the war years: gone are the
ads for male nudes and jokes about pansies. Instead, the glossy
"Vargas girl" feature was added to the magazine, delivering to
"real" men an objectified image of femininity that figured women as
soft and pliable sex kittens, even as the advertisers in the back of the
magazine began to sell slacks for women. One interesting example
of heterosexism as patriotic ideal ran in Esquire in 1945. Entitled
"FAREWELL, Noel Coward," the short essay is part of a "Who's Hot,
Who's Not"-type feature, and attempts to (re)define American mas­
culinity by denigrating Noel Coward: "we haven't time to toy with
the less healthy facets of our emotions." The tirade continues:
"Where is the man? Your brilliance strikes us as a little tawdry. Like
sequins in the morning sunlight. And your concept of human values,
like your singing voice, sounds strangely off-key." Coward's
homosexuality is not named directly, but it is clear from this essay
that in a time of war, men need to be traditional masculine men; i.e.
they cannot have questionable "human values" or be associated
with femininity. Although the piece itself reads like bitchy gay dish,
it definitely argues that non-traditional gender roles are bad for the
war effort, concluding that "There are crises that can't be met in a
silk dressing gown."
The demonization of male effeminacy was strongly felt in the
Hollywood films of the era. While the depiction of homosexuality
per se was still taboo under the Production Code, homosexual con­
notation crept into the movies of the war years as it did in the pre­
vious decade: often it was used to further delineate Nazi villains as
evil, as in the characterization of the effeminate German spy in
Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). Much as the monster queers of
the 1930s had been linked to European decadence, this idea became
even more pronounced during the war years. Popular magazines of
20
Monsters in the closet
86
the day created a clear dichotomy between sexually normal Ameri­
cans and the unmentionable sexual deviances of the Nazis:
There is impressive support for the theory that the whole Nazi move­
ment arose in large measure out of the sexual frustrations of some
groups in the German population. Certainly, distorted personalities
have been prominent among the leaders of the movement and orgias­
tic "paganism" has been encouraged among the Nazi youth. A telltale
hatred for the morality of the Western Christian world runs through
the writings of the Nazi leaders.
21
In film, the links between Nazism and homosexuality might be best
exemplified by the career of character actor Martin Kosleck, whose
roles, in retrospect, seem to be divided between portrayals of Nazis
(specifically Goebbels in Confessions
of a Nazi Spy (1939), The
Hitler Gang (1944), and Hitler (1962)), and queerly tinged outsider
figures in films such as The Mad Doctor (1940), The Mummy's
Curse
(1944), The Spider (1945), and The Frozen Ghost (1946). (Kosleck
would play mad scientists well into the next decades in films such as
The Flesh Eaters (1964) and Agent for HARM.
(1966)). Kosleck's
on-screen persona was slightly effeminate and his German accent
hinted at a secret sexual depravity forcefully coded in many films as
homosexual. In Berlin Correspondent
(1942), for example, his Nazi
villain orders two bare-chested storm troopers to torture his victim,
while in House of Horrors (1946), he plays a fey cat-loving artist in
Greenwich Village who falls into a murderous relationship with a
grotesquely deformed man he fishes out of the river and befriends
(Rondo Hatton, who in real life did suffer from acromegaly). When
members of the critical establishment deny the Kosleck character's
genius, his friend sets out to murder them, a plot very similar to the
very gay Theatre of Blood produced years later in 1973. The film
also embeds an explicit comparison between homo- and heterosex­
uality into its coding of artistic styles: the "normal" heroic Ameri­
can male artist paints naturalistic cheesecake, while Kosleck's
character creates modernist impressions of masculinity by sculpting
his friend's visage. One of the most interesting examples of the
Nazi-queer-monster can be found in Columbia's Return of the
Vampire (1943) in which the vampire Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi) is
directly linked to the German threat, both in World War I and in
World War II.
22
Queers also began appearing with increased frequency in the
Shock treatment
87
23
gothic romances and proto-noir films of the war period. In many
of these films there is a connotative slippage between
homicidal
maniacs and homosexual
ones, just as the popular press epithets
"sex criminal" and "pervert" were understood to include homosex­
uals along with rapists and murderers. Vincent Price, whose persona
would become increasingly important to the American horror film
as the years went by, first became a star during this period. His oily,
slightly effeminate presence and mellifluous voice code him as
queer, and in films like The Invisible Man Returns
(1940), The
House of the Seven Gables (1940), Laura (1944), Shock (1946) and
Dragonwyck
(1946), he harbored hidden secrets behind locked
doors. Years later in Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality
in the
Movies,
gay critic Parker Tyler would comment upon Price's
"[r]ather schmaltzy versions of high-toned sissy types," acknowl­
edging that for certain audiences of the period, Vincent Price,
Clifton Webb, Monty Woolly, and other "professional sissies"
always connoted some degree of homosexuality. This is also the
period when Peter Lorre, George Sanders, Tom Conway, Anne
Revere, Judith Anderson, and Agnes Moorehead played movie vil­
lains, often including Nazis; each of these actors (along with many
others less well known) suggested queerness in their characteriza­
tions by virtue of their gender-bending personas.
24
25
Another typecast queer villain in non-monster horror films was
Laird Cregar, an effeminate and obese actor who died at the age of
28 and who (as one of my colleagues has quipped) "makes your gaydar jump right off the scale." Cregar had come to Hollywood's
attention after starring in a local stage production of Oscar
Wilde,
and was by most accounts a troubled homosexual himself, a man
who yearned for leading-man stardom yet realized that his physical
presence and personal life would probably never allow such a
thing. One of his first screen roles was as bullfighting aficionado in
Blood and Sand (1941), "a gay iguana, gaudy in his sun bonnet,"
who has a barely concealed sexual response to Tyrone Power's
studly matador. He too played Nazis (Joan of Paris [1942]), fifth
columnists (This Gun for Hire [1942]), and even the Devil himself
in Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943). He had also been con­
sidered for Vincent Price's role in Dragonwyck,
and the role of
Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), two other famous queer movie
murderers of the era. In films such as The Lodger (1944), Hangover
Square (1944), and I Wake Up Screaming
(1941), Cregar played
27
27
28
88
Monsters in the closet
"sexual psychopaths," human monsters that predate the sexually
confused killers of the 1980s slasher film. In I Wake Up Screeming,
for example, Cregar's corrupt police inspector is called a "ghoul" by
the film's heroine and the mise-en-scène
continually figures him
within shadows and the imagery of death; hero Victor Mature refers
to him (ironically?) as "a gay dog." The Lodger, based on the history
of Jack the Ripper, also barely conceals a homosexual subtext:
Cregar's psychopath waxes rhapsodically over a portrait of his dead
brother, calling it "something more beautiful than a beautiful
woman."
The "real-life" maniacs and villains that these queerly tinged
character actors created during this period stand in stark contrast to
the more traditional and fantastic monsters which were still being
produced at Universal and elsewhere. In many ways, the more realist Nazis and psychopaths of these proto-noir
films are much closer
to the public's concept of homosexuals than are the vampires and
werewolves of the era's B monster movies. Yet almost all of these
films share the idea that monsters, either "real-life" or fantastic,
might be understood, if not cured, by way of psychological methodology. Because of this, the classical movie monsters were no longer
to be feared in quite the same way. While during the classical period
monsters were primarily evil characters who sinned against God,
Mankind, and the Natural Order, now they were "tragic" figures
who, with the proper care, might be cured of their "unnatural
lusts." The films made at Universal Studios, while ostensibly continuing their monster sagas of the 1930s, reflect a growing interest
in psychiatry as a tool for correcting social deviance, but ultimately
suggest that their monstrous contagions are beyond medical intervention. Those made at RKO under Val Lewton reflect a growing
awareness of homosexuality, homosexual communities, and the
dynamics of homosexual oppression as it was played out in society
and the military. Indicative of these shifts towards an increasingly
complex understanding of the monster, there was also less focus on
a happy heterosexualized closure for the films - many eschewed the
"normal" couple altogether and instead focused solely on their
queer protagonists, suggesting, as will the horror films of later
decades, that it is the monster queer whom the audience really
comes to see and identify with, and not the heterosexualized heroes
and heroines.
Shock treatment
89
Universal cures
Immediately before and during the years of World War II, Universal
Studio's horror films began to employ a more humanistic depiction
of their monsters. In the mid-to-late 1930s, Universal's classic mon­
sters had ostensibly taken Brides and had Sons and Daughters; in the
1940s they set up several Houses together; as one review for Drac­
ula's Daughter had put it, "Universal is making out quite a case for
the home life of the monsters." This bringing of the queer force
into the realm of the hegemonic sphere also necessitated a geo­
graphic shift from the far reaches of Transylvania to a location
closer to home. While many of Universal's monster sequels main­
tained their mythic European settings, American characters and
American locations became much more prevalent in the films. A
series of films based upon Inner Sanctum
radio plays did so by
bringing the terror state-side and making it a function of psycho­
logical anxiety and crime rather than shambling monsters. Univer­
sal's highly successful run of Mummy sequels were almost all set in
America," and their newest monster (destined to become a "clas­
sic"), The Wolfman
(1941), is also Americanized, even though he
encounters his troubles in England. Significantly, his monstrous con­
dition is now characterized as "a disease of the mind [that] can be
cured."
29
50
Somewhat remarkably, 1943's Son of Dracula, set in the Ameri­
can South, tells the story of a young woman named Kay who know­
ingly brings Dracula to her ante helium mansion in order to marry
him (the local Justice of the Peace officiating), in order to receive his
"gift" of immortality. In a dramatic shift, the normalized hero and
heroine of this film actively court queer passions. Dracula himself
has come to The United States because the Americans are such a
"young and virile race" - not only does he suck the blood of a south­
ern patriarch, but he also attacks a small boy. Mirroring a social sit­
uation for "real-life" queers, Kay's friends and guardians, who
consider her "morbid" personality dangerous, argue that "no one
could choose a thing so loathsome," and attempt to have her com­
mitted in order to "protect her from herself." In an amusing and
early instance of the use of "politically correct" euphemisms, the
undead Kay corrects her boyfriend Frank when he starts to call
Dracula a "vampire": "Don't use that word Frank - we don't like it!
Say rather that we are undead - immortal." Unlike the Hollywood
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Monsters in the closet
horror film's traditional pattern of narrative closure, Frank eventu­
ally chooses to burn Kay to death rather than save (or join) her. The
heroine herself, having become queerly sexualized, must be put to
death.
In Universal's many mad scientist films, a paradoxical relation­
ship towards science was still expressed, and their queer couples
became increasingly domesticated. Usually the plots of these films
revolve around the attempts of medical science to cure the monsters
(rather than create them in the first place), somehow to make them
"normal" enough to be integrated into society. The curative powers
of science had been featured a few years before World War II in The
Invisible Ray (1936). In it, Dr Janos Rukh (Boris Karloff) becomes
exposed to "Radium X " and is slowly transformed into a maniacal
glow-in-the-dark killer. While his monstrous condition is the result
of a scientific mishap, science is also his salvation: Dr Felix Benet
(Bela Lugosi) is able to render Rukh temporarily "normal" with a
"counteractive" serum. Like a homosexual with a double life, Rukh
is adamant that his secret be kept in the closet: "Tell no one of this!
Promise me!" Furthering the metaphor, Rukh's radioactivity gives
him ample reason to avoid his young wife, and later in the film he
solicits a man in the street in order "to do you a benefit - the great­
est benefit one man can do another." As the logic of paranoia dic­
tates, Rukh murders the man as part of his plot to appear dead.
Karloff as Rukh ("I have been called - unorthodox") has already
been "homosexualized" by the presence of his domineering mother.
Ultimately Rukh kills Benet and causes his own death when his
mother confronts him about his "condition." Like the scientific dis­
coveries of the Frankenstein films and the mad-science melodramas
they inspired, the Radium X in The Invisible Ray contains the
potential for both good and evil. The prologue to The Invisible Ray
explicitly situates the story within the realm of science, and figures
"radioactivity" as another form of "dangerous knowledge." Like
the knowledge of homosexuality in the 1930s, radioactivity is best
"whispered [about] in the cloisters of science," even though it may
one day "startle the universe as fact." Thus, even as these things may
be part of the natural world, they still evoke much anxiety and are
ultimately figured (through the narrative's tragic course) as things
"man was not meant to know."
The idea of bathing subjects in mysterious rays, subjecting them
to chemical injections, or even transplanting organs, seems to be
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solely the stuff of the movie monster and the mad scientist, yet, as
was indicated above, these are precisely the types of experiments
that were being carried out in dignified scientific research centers.
The line between cutting-edge medical science of this period and
the melodrama of horror films becomes further blurred by accounts
such as the one that appeared in Science News Letter on "Queer
Brain Waves": "People who have 'queer ideas' show it in their brain
wave patterns as well as other more obvious ways. The queer or
abnormal brain wave patterns found in persons who have 'queer
ideas' and others who have phobias, or who show signs of paranoia
or other mental disturbances, were described by doctors
Again, as in many such reports from the 1930s, homosexuality is
rarely mentioned forthrightly; rather one must infer that particular
"sex perversion" from the word "queer," pointedly used three times
in the opening two sentences and even bracketed within quotations.
However, later on the same page, it becomes manifestly clear what
Dr Clifford Wright of Los Angeles is talking about: "Persons who
commit sex crimes suffer from disorders of the endocrine glands...
Abnormal condition of the sex glands and some of these other
glands which also influence sex activity could, Dr. Wright said,
cause deviations such as homosexuality and exhibitionism."" In
truth, the correlation between homosexuality and sex hormones
was studied intensively during the war years; no definite conclu­
sions could be drawn from much of the research. Interest in hor­
mone therapy for homosexuals eventually declined as it became
more and more scientifically discredited, yet the scientific journals
were full of articles such as "Electroencephalographic and Neuro­
logic Studies of Homosexuals," or "Hormones of Homosexuals."
Seen in this light, the mad scientist's tamperings with organ grafts
and brain transplants, which form the bases for Universal's prof­
itable ongoing Frankenstein films, takes on much queerer dimen­
sions.
54
By 1939, the year Son of Frankenstein
was released, the sado­
masochistic monstrous couple so often played by Karloff and Lugosi
had considerably softened into a friendlier domesticity. The film ini­
tiates a very queer relationship between the Monster and Ygor
(Karloff and Lugosi again) that was popular enough to be reprised
in the next film of the series. While their relationship is still tinged
with violent signifiers, a physically loving aspect of their relation­
ship is hinted at as Ygor constantly touches and strokes the monster.
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Monsters in the closet
Plate 10 In Son of Frankenstein (1939), the monster (Boris Karloff) forms an
open bond of love with Y g o r (Bela Lugosi), a move which works to soften
the sado-masochistic coloration of the queer monster couple
Ygor hesitatingly tells Frankenstein, "He's my - friend. He - he does
things for me." Ygor is also frightfully possessive ("No - you cannot
take him away!") and at one point pushes Dr Frankenstein aside
while the latter is attempting to take the monster's pulse: "He is
well enough for me - and you no touch him again!" True to form,
their queer desire is ultimately channeled into the monster's mur­
derous rampages (Ygor uses the monster for his own purposes of
revenge against the townspeople). The fact that sexual politics are
part of the film's appeal to terror is announced early in the film,
when Baron Wolf von Frankenstein's American wife inquires as to
the peculiar arrangement of beds in the master chambers. A maid­
servant tells her, "when the house is filled with dread, place the beds
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93
at head to head," as if all "dread" is the result of improper sexual
interactions facilitated by easy bed-hopping."
Dr Wolf von Frankenstein is distraught because the monster only
obeys Ygor's commands and not his own. Ygor's control over the
monster is thought by Wolf to be "hypnosis - or something more
elemental perhaps." Ultimately Wolf realizes that the monster
"loves Ygor and obeys him." Meanwhile, the monster's selfloathing (he is displeased with his "ugliness" and his status as a
social outcast) works to characterize him as a humanized monster
and further elicit spectator sympathy. When Wolf shoots Ygor, the
monster's cry of anguish is heartfelt, and he seeks to replace his
friend with Frankenstein's toddler son, Peter, in the process activat­
ing pedophilic connotations which are still mostly latent in the
genre at this time (but will become much more pronounced in the
horror films of the 1950s). Perhaps not surprisingly, these queer
themes were even more explicit in an earlier draft of the screenplay:
in that, since his previous Bride had spurned him, the monster
demands that Frankenstein reanimate a dead young soldier to be his
special friend."'
Frankenstein
meets the Wolfman
(1943) also would have pre­
sented a very queer relationship between the titular creatures, had
not all scenes of the Frankenstein monster's dialogue been cut
before the film's release. For this particular sequel, Bela Lugosi was
cast as the monster. In the previous film of the series, Lugosi (as
Ygor) had succeeded in having his brain put into the body of the
monster, so it is somewhat "logical" that the monster should now
speak with Lugosi's voice. According to historians on record in the
published script edition of the film, Lugosi's finished scenes were
thought laughable by studio executives and were excised from the
release print.' This occurred ostensibly because of the actor's thick
Hungarian accent, but the scenes and dialogue in question were also
very homoerotic. In the original shooting script, Larry Talbot (The
Wolfman) finds the Frankenstein monster frozen in an ice cave. The
monster is weak and almost blind as a result of the last film's cli­
mactic fire, and Larry himself is still an ego-dystonic werewolf, mis­
erable because of his "condition." Sitting around a camp-fire in the
ice cave the two outcasts tentatively establish a relationship; as one
contemporary review subtitled "When Gentlemen Meet" campily
noted, "they both hit it off magnificently.'" The scene was tenderly
written and had the monster confide to Larry that "you are my
7
8
Monsters in the closet
94
friend ... I need friends - so do you. We can help each other."
Despite his warm feelings for Larry, the monster is misanthropic
and angry with the society that has hounded him for so long: "I shall
use it [a new brain] for the benefit of the miserable people who
inhabit the world, cheating each other, killing each other; without
a thought but their own petty gains. I will rule the world! I will live
to witness the fruits of my wisdom for all eternity."" This type of
powerful wish-fulfillment fantasy is certainly part of the genre's
appeal to disenfranchised minorities; situated here within the
increasingly domestic space of the monstrously queer couple, the
implications are hard to overlook.
As the film progresses, the monster develops quite an attachment
for Larry, one perhaps more fitting for a jealous lover than a mon­
ster bent on the destruction of humankind. When Larry does so
much as move away from the monster to the other side of the room,
the monster nervously calls out "Wait! Don't leave me - wait!" The
script continues: "I was afraid you'd run away . . . " Left on his own,
the monster wanders into the villagers' Festival of the New Wine
and causes panic, but Larry saves him and takes him home to the
ruined castle. Later, snuggled up together in blankets "found in
Frankenstein's closet," the monster tells Larry he came into town
because "I was afraid you'd left me - I thought you'd found
[Frankenstein's] diary and run away." The monster's strength is
eventually restored by mad science, but he and the wolfman, in a
fatal embrace, together get washed away in a giant flood set by an
angry townsman. Although the monster and the wolfman are less
vile and violent towards each other in this film (compared to the
sado-masochistic exploits of Karloff and Lugosi during the classical
period), their monstrous relationship must still must end in death here a sort of double suicide as each half of the queer couple
destroys the other. The film offers no good reason for this develop­
ment except the demands of the generic narrative pattern and the
film's graphic advertising campaign, which had promised such a
"battle of the monsters" complete with a muscular and hairy Wolf­
man in a ripped-open tee shirt.
Other films from this series demonstrate psychiatry's newfound
popularity. In Ghost of Frankenstein
(1942), Dr. Frankenstein is
characterized for the first time as a psychiatrist: the plaque on his
gate reads "Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein, MD - Diseases of the
Mind." Dr Ludwig (the second son of Frankenstein, played by the
40
41
42
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always fey Cedric Hardwicke) lives in his own competitive, hierarchal, homosocial world with two other doctors, Dr Kettering and
Dr Bohmer (the latter played by Lionel "Pinky" Atwill). The mon­
ster is humanized more than ever before, befriending a small child
rather than killing one (as he does in the original Frankenstein),
and
even walking into the town square without the requisite villagers
screaming in fear. Instead, they treat him as a mentally ill vagrant,
not a monster, and he even appears in a (somewhat) civilized court
of law. Ygor blackmails Dr Ludwig (his connection to the the mon­
ster is the terrible secret that must be kept hidden) into helping him
cure the monster via a (healthy) brain transplant. Ygor is at first jeal­
ous of the doctor's attentions: "No, no, no - you cannot take my
friend away from me. He's all that I have - Nothing else. You're
going to make him your friend, and I will be alone." Eventually,
Ygor hits upon a better plan and cajoles Dr Bohmer into placing his
(Ygor's) brain into the body of the monster. This act comes with its
own queer connotations; as Ygor tell the doctor, "You can make us
one - we'll be together always - my brain and his body together!"
Ygor in turn describes his plan to the monster as an act of selfless
love: "Tonight, Ygor will die for you!" Oddly enough, the monster
doesn't seem to care for this plan, and, in a moment of (homosex­
ual?) panic, he kills Ygor, and kidnaps the small girl he had
befriended earlier in the film. He takes the girl to Ludwig and indi­
cates that it is her brain he wants. The gender-bending possibilities
of that particular operation would have to wait another twenty-five
years to be explored in Hammer Films' Frankenstein
Created
Woman (1967), because it is Ygor's brain that is placed within the
monster's cranium, and not the little girl's. Had the monster's plan
been enacted, audiences would have been treated to a very unusual
walking example of the gender inversion model of male homosex­
uality - "anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa" - literally a
young girl's brain inside the monster's hulking masculine body.
While this would undoubtedly have been a terrifying development
for the series, it was apparently not the type of horror Universal Stu­
dios was interested in showcasing so forthrightly.
While the classical monsters continued to be more humanized
and normalized in House of Frankenstein
(1944), the film that most
clearly makes a case for the possibility of psychiatrically curing them
is 1945's House of Dracula. '•' In it, a good-hearted Dr Edelmann
runs a sort of half-way house for wayward monsters. Both Dracula
1
96
Monsters in the closet
and the wolfman appear at his door seeking professional help for
their "conditions." As always, their compulsions are expressed in
sexualized terms: Dr Edelmann tells Dracula that vampires are
"driven by some abnormal urge" which "upset their metabolism"
and "induces lustful appetites." At first, Dracula (who has come to
the doctor under the pseudonym Baron Latos) seems genuinely
interested in curing his unnatural lusts. "That's why I've come to
you - to seek release from a curse of misery and horror against
which I am powerless to fight alone." Eventually, however, his truer
nature asserts itself and he is back to entrancing the doctor's female
assistant. (True to form, as Meliza falls under the Baron's spell, her
piano-playing shifts from classical to atonal modernist.) The wolf­
man is more serious about his cure. Depressed and suicidal because
of his own particular set of queer desires, he attempts to throw him­
self off a cliff when he learns Edelmann may not be able to help him.
Eventually the good doctor diagnoses Larry's condition as a glan­
dular-hormonal problem, exacerbated by pressure on the brain.
Luckily for both men, the doctor has been experimenting with a
procedure which will "soften any hard structure," and in so doing,
he is eventually able to soften Larry's aberrant phallicism by
expanding his cranium. Still, Larry is not without doubts about his
cure. When Nina, the hunchbacked assistant, tells him "After what
Dr Edelmann has done for you, only happiness lies ahead," Larry
can only fitfully mutter "I wonder . . . "
Things go wrong for everyone, however, when Dracula's lustful
nature begins to outweigh his desire for a cure. Reversing a transfu­
sion, he gives Dr Edelmann some of his own blood. Now contami­
nated by the monstrous fluids, Edelmann spends the rest of the film
in a sort of Jekyll/Hyde state. The doctor has become the very thing
he was attempting to cure: the disease of "monsterity," like homo­
sexuality, is apparently catching. He murders townspeople on a
whim and revives the Frankenstein monster. "My blood has been
contaminated by the blood of Dracula. My soul and mind have been
seized by some nameless horror, the lust which changes me into the
thing which killed [villager] Siegfried tonight." Since there is no
normalized hero or Van Helsing figure in the film, it is Larry who
kills Edelmann and starts a fire in which the monster perishes yet
again.
This description attests to a rather remarkable transformation in
the genre's narrative structure: the wolfman is the hero of the film.
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The heterosexualized normal couple of the classical Hollywood
horror film is no longer a key component of the formula. In House
of Dracula, the doctor's assistant Meliza is the most "normal" indi­
vidual in the film, but she is aligned with the psychiatric/monstrous
forces from the outset. Like a "fag hag," Meliza seems to have a
thing for queer men, falling first for Dracula and then for Larry; in
so doing she is used by the narrative to buffer any manifest homo­
erotic interplay between the monsters themselves. All of the other
principles are monsters or are linked with them. Professor Edel­
mann, who would have been the Van Helsing figure of earlier films,
here succumbs to the lure of the monsters. His pretty but hunch­
backed assistant Nina is also an odd amalgam of monster and hero­
ine (she dies at the end). And the voice of the townspeople, the
peasant Steinmuhl, is a badly scarred individual reminiscent of
Dwight Frye's Renfield or his psychotic lab assistants. Most surpris­
ingly, the film's final moment offers no "normal heterosexualized
couple," aside from the recently cured Larry and Meliza. The wolf­
man himself has become the male half of the formerly "normal"
heterosexualized couple.
What this precisely means (and to whom) is open to much
interpretation. Would gay and lesbian spectators have found these
monsters' cures as laughable, as damaging, or as futile as those per­
formed on real-life homosexuals? Most reviewers of the era dis­
missed these films forthrightly, not bothering to consider their
implications. Undoubtedly many spectators also would have dis­
missed them, while perhaps some, attuned to a queer reading pro­
tocol, may have recognized in these stories of reparative therapy a
ghastly analog to real life situations. Many people of the era were
critical of psychiatry's new-found mission, yet most of them lacked
the vocabulary or space or fortitude to voice such a critique. One
such man (Henry Gerber) attacked the profession in 1944 in an
anonymous letter to Time magazine:
44
The subsidized psychiatrist - yes-man - always wears a policeman's
badge under his white frock. Psychiatry is a political device to drag
those to the concentration camp - euphemistically camouflaged under
the term "state hospital" - who have not committed a crime but who
are guilty of the heinous offense of refusing to be suckers and to be
exploited. Those who refuse to believe the political, religious and
moral fairytales current in our conventions, are styled psychopaths,
degenerates, perverts, radicals, infidels, etc. '
4
Monsters in the closet
98
Like Gerber's understanding of the matter, these Universal Franken­
stein films present a paranoid - or is it accurate? - "take" on the
psychiatric project, and suggest that the attempted "curing" of mon­
sters often leads to further trouble. The fact that monster movie
psychiatrists usually fall sway to the monsters' charms in and of
itself suggests a suspicion that the profession was in some way
linked to the social deviants that it treated. (There were plenty of
gay psychiatrists even during World War II.) Like the military's offi­
cial policies on homosexuality, these films acknowledge the univer­
salizing potential of the monster queer, suggesting that the
"normals" might be attracted to him. The monster is "normalized"
to the extent that he might even become the ostensible hero of the
genre, but at what cost? For example, it is Larry's "cure" that allows
him to defeat Edelmann in House of Dracula (although he will be a
wolf again three years later in Abbott and Costello meet
Franken­
stein (1948)). Is the monster or homosexual only able to perform
the hero's function once s/he has been cured, i.e. dragged back into
the realm of normality? The idea that the monster queer can be the
hero (or anti-hero) of the genre will become increasingly prevalent
in the horror films of the post-Stonewall era, yet the idea has been
inherent in the genre for many of its readers since its inception. It
was especially prevalent during the horror films of World War II,
many of which begin to eschew the normal heterosexualized couple
altogether. These films do represent a complicated and complicat­
ing shift in how society viewed the monster, away from ostracized
Other to tragic neurotic. The brief bit of compassion offered to him
or her within these films may be reflective of organized psychiatry's
attempt to deal with homosexuality in more humane terms; how­
ever, as in real life, many of these good intentions proved to have
disastrous results.
Secret societies and shadowy sailors at RKO
One of the biggest changes brought about by World War II was the
ever increasing number of individuals and communities specifically
identified as homosexual. As one historian puts it: "World War II
created a substantially new 'erotic situation' conducive both to the
articulation of a homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolu­
tion of a gay subculture." Richard Dyer expands upon this obser­
vation:
46
Shock treatment
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The war involved mass mobilisation, throwing men together with men
in the military and women together with women in both the military
and on the home front. It created conditions in which homosexual
experience became almost commonplace and in which people might
easily realise they were gay and well known to be so.
47
In other words, despite the Armed Services' determination to "weed
out" homosexuals during the recruiting process, such attempts reg­
ularly failed and many gay men and lesbians found themselves (and
others like them) in uniform. For those who could "pass" as
straight, or for those whose deviances were overlooked, tentative
communities of homosexuals arose within the heterocentrist world
of the Armed Services. The contributions of some gay men and les­
bians even became valued, and in some cases "female independence
and love between women were understood and undisturbed and
even protected." * Others were hunted out and expelled. Many of
these less fortunate men and women received the infamous "blue"
discharge, which effectively denied them their GI honors and bene­
fits. Lesbian historian Lillian Faderman notes how these men and
women
4
49
were loaded on "queer ships" and sent ... to the nearest U.S. port.
Many of them believed that they could not go home again. They
simply stayed where they were disembarked, and their numbers
helped to form the large homosexual enclaves that were beginning to
develop in port cites such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
and Boston. "
5
Paradoxically, institutionalized government discrimination may
have helped to solidify the urban gay and lesbian community and its
emerging sense of identity.
The idea of homosexuals forming secret societies and coteries
was prevalent during the pre-Stonewall decades. While this notion
would develop into the idea of homosexuals forming almost com­
munist cell-type structures during the 1950s, other commentators
understood that the "secret society" of homosexuals was necessary
as a means of survival. The Archbishop of Canterbury, writing in the
1950s as part of the debates surrounding the Wolfenden Report,
made this point clear, even as he still made recourse to horror film
rhetoric:
There are, I believe, groups of clubs of homosexuals with an organi­
zation of their own, and a kind of freemasonry from which it is not all
100
Monsters in the closet
that easy to escape. So long as homosexual offenses between consent­
ing adults are criminal and punishable by law, the pressure of this kind
of freemasonry will remain and will operate powerfully, for it gains
strength from the fact that it must remain a secret society to avoid the
law. Into this kind of nightmare world - for it is a nightmare world there can be no entrance for the forces of righteousness until ... they
are delivered from the fears, the glamour, and even the crusading
spirit of the rebel against law and convention who claims to be a
martyr by persecution."
While this shadowy, "nightmare world" of homosexuals would
become a regular model of straight society's representation of gay
and lesbian people in later decades, it is possible to locate a more
contemporary formation of the idea within several "horror" films
produced by Val Lewton at RKO between 1942 and 1946. These B
films were not (as my quotation marks imply) horror films similar
to those that had been produced in Hollywood during the 1930s, or
even similar to those produced at Universal Studios during the
1940s. They feature no hulking monsters and few Transylvanian
crypts: instead they dwell upon implied monsters and psychological
horror. They focus on tone over shock effect, and feature complex
and elegant literary designs that make them similar to finely crafted
short stories. Allusions to high art abound: poems by John Donne
and paintings by Hogarth and Boecklin are peppered throughout
the films. Visually, the films employ chiaroscuro lighting and
Expressionist effects, all of which suggest that these films might be
understood as a link between classical horror films of the 1930s and
the later 1940s films noir which would soon supplant them, espe­
cially at RKO. Like the films noir, the Lewton horror films depict a
paranoid and pessimistic world wherein traditional roles of gender
and sexuality are perpetually in flux. Also like film noir, characters
frequently find psychological terror within shadowy corridors and
behind locked doors, and often the narrative is concerned with the
investigation of a female subject, in many cases by a psychiatrist,
played in two of the films by George Sanders's equally fey brother,
Tom Conway.
The man most often credited for the success of these films was
producer Val Lewton. Lewton was the nephew of Hollywood les­
bian Alia Nazimova - producer and star of the notorious "all-homo­
sexual" Salome (1923); her lovers included Natasha Rambova, Mrs
Rudolph Valentino. In his earlier years, Lewton had earned his
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Shock treatment
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income writing pornographic novels; undoubtedly these personal
and cultural factors helped to situate Lewton in a unique historical
position from which he helped to craft films that employed
homo/sexual subtexts. Often in these films, homosexual signifiers
help to characterize a terrible secret or a group of odd fellows, a
trope that both draws on and foregrounds the phenomenon of the
closet, wherein monster queers who are not "out" may choose to
"hide." At other times, an implied homosexuality is part of the mys­
terious relationship that exists between two people. For example, in
Cat People, Lewton's first RKO horror film, "odd girl" Irena is heterosexually frigid, but has a strange alliance with a mysterious
woman who shares her particular national and spiritual heritage, as
well as her "corrupt passions." Their only exchange pointedly takes
place during Irena's wedding celebration: the catwoman gives her
an incredulous stare and greets her as "my sister." Screenwriter
DeWitt Bodeen, noted after the release of the film that
some audience members read a lesbian meaning into the action. I was
aware that could happen with the cafe scene, and Val got several let­
ters after Cat People was released, congratulating him for his boldness
in introducing lesbiana to films in Hollywood ... Actually, I rather
liked the insinuation and thought it added a neat bit of interpretation
to the scene. Irena's fears about destroying a lover if she kissed him
could be because she was really a lesbian who loathed being kissed by
a man. '
5
Indeed, Irena's monstrous ability to turn into a panther and kill men
(specifically the psychiatrist who tries to cure her by making love to
her) serves as an often-cited metaphor for lesbian sexuality in the
films of this era. As the ad campaign would have it: "She was
marked with the curse of those who slink and court and kill by
night!"
After the commercial success of Cat People, Lewton's team set
out to create similar shockers according to the successful formula:
'"a love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual
violence.'" Apparently, homosexual connotation was also part of
that formula, for many of the ensuing films can easily be read in
homosexual terms, from the queer couple triangulations of The
Body Snatcher (1945) to the lingering lesbianism of Irena's ghost in
Curse of the Cat People (1944). The final Lewton horror film,
Bedlam (1946), is filled with effeminate men and strong-willed
54
55
102
Monsters in the closet
women, yet does not necessarily demonize either. Instead, it offers
a fairly sophisticated critique of the British class system, and the
film's moral seems to be that one shouldn't be frightened of people
who are different from oneself, that they too deserve human com­
passion as much as anyone. Boris Karloff as Master Sims, the cor­
rupt ruler of Bedlam, brings his usual lisping, shuffling, sado­
masochistic persona to the film. Sims seems to enjoy torturing his
inmates, happily beating a young man who thinks he is a dog, and
even presents a nearly nude, gilded young man to an audience of
aristocrats - yet his actions are shown to be the result of his own
paranoia and place within the class system. Other characters include
Lord Mortimer (Billy House), an obese noble "voluptuary" with a
black servant-boy and no discernible interest in women (it is made
clear he only values women for their ability to make witty conver­
sation), and the heroine's effeminate friend Varney (Skelton
Knaggs). Some of the dialogue gets quite dishy, with Master Sims
and Lord Mortimer exchanging bitchy barbs, and the film's nomi­
nal hero is a Quaker whose religious beliefs ironically prevent him
from doing anything too heroic. Above all hovers the question of
psychological sanity and the possible abuse of institutionalization:
heroine Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) is banished to the asylum because
she offends the powers that be, not because she exhibits a patho­
logical condition.
The Seventh Victim (1943, also written by DeWitt Bodeen) is a
somewhat less well-known Lewton horror film; it centers on a
secret coven of Satanists who may or may not also be homophiles.
The film makes extensive use of quasi-lesbian characters in its girls'
school opening and at the "La Sagesse" cosmetics factory. There is
nothing in the film to characterize the Palladists (the men and
women of the Satanist group) as heterosexual; instead they use
secret symbols to identify one another and are terrified of being
exposed. ("Why, you fool! That symbol is us! She was asking about
us!") The Palladists can easily be read as gay and lesbian, especially
since they are pointedly living in Greenwich Village. Fashions, hair­
styles, and behavioral mannerisms further distinguish these people
as being not quite "normal." Remarkably for the era, Jacqueline
Gibson, who has let the secret of the group slip to her psychiatrist
(and is therefore marked to become the titular "seventh victim"), is
characterized as having had a loving relationship with another
woman. This woman later confides to Jacqueline that "The only
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time I was ever happy was when I was with you." Another memo­
rable scene that makes the latent lesbian erotic menace manifest
occurs when chief Palladist and "odd woman" Mrs Esther Redi
invades young heroine Mary's shower and speaks threateningly to
her.
The linkage of homosexuals and witchcraft within popular
understanding has a long and tangled history. The analogy was cer­
tainly present at the dawn of the classical period of Hollywood
horror films, as evidenced by a 1930 Scribners Magazine essay about
homosexuality entitled "Demoniac Possession." Certainly many of
the women (and men) put to death for witchcraft throughout the
preceding centuries might have been considered homosexual by
twentieth-century definitions. And it is part of gay folklore, apoc­
ryphal or not, that the term "faggot" comes from the faggots
thrown onto the fires used to burn such victims at the stake. The
analogy has also been frequently used in recent years in order to
describe the ongoing discriminatory practices ("witch hunts")
against gay men and lesbians in government service. Somewhat sim­
ilarly, The Seventh Victim invokes the analogy in ways more sympa­
thetic to homosexuality. While it could have easily fallen into the
trap of using gay and lesbian signifiers to characterize its villains (i.e.
homosexual = Satanist, as did Universal's The Black Cat in 1934),
the film is much more complex than that. Contemporary reviews of
the film didn't comment upon the homosexual connotations, but
were still a bit baffled by the subtleties of the film: "just what the
sister was doing, of how that curious doctor figured in, or why that
egg head poet was so prescient or who came out with what - well,
don't ask us." In fact, it is part of the film's project to depict com­
plex erotic relationships that ultimately defy the traditional narra­
tive demands of a happy heterosexual Hollywood ending. The
secret symbol of the Palladists is a skewed triangle inside a parallel­
ogram, suggesting expanded romantic triangles and quadrangles,
rather than the enforced binaries of heterocentrist culture. The
climax of the film involves an extended cross-cut sequence between
Dr Judd and Jason and a scene wherein the Palladists try to get
Jacqueline to drink poison. Thematically, the two men lay their
cards on the table while the Palladists try to keep their secret by
forcing Jacqueline's suicide. Ultimately, Jacqueline does hang her­
self, and the Palladists continue their shadowy existence. Remark­
ably for a Hollywood film of this era, they are not punished in any
56
57
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Monsters in the closet
way. Ironically, it is a line spoken by one o f the Palladists that lingers
in the mind and exposes the film's ultimate ideological project:
"Wrong? W h o knows what is wrong or right?" T h e inability to
answer that question resonates with the inability of the characters
to k n o w o n e another. ("I thought I knew her. Today, I found out
such strange things.") "Just because I've kept a secret from you
doesn't make a monster o f m e , " says one character, but she is
wrong. In the world o f these films, human beings are ultimately
unknowable; the things that make them monstrous are, quite liter­
ally, their secrets: the unknown or repressed issues o f human sexu­
ality that they keep in darkened closets and secret societies. It is the
keeping o f secrets, not necessarily the secrets themselves, which
leads to destruction.
This theme b e c o m e s the central one in the fifth Val Lewton
h o r r o r film, The Ghost Ship ( 1 9 4 3 , directed by M a r k Robson and
written by D o n a l d Henderson Clarke), which contains one of the
Plate 11 In The Ghost Ship (1943), the repressed Captain Stone's advances on
young Tom Merriam move from the friendly to the sadomasochistic
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most sustained homosexual plots o f any film o f this period. T h e film
focuses on sailors, sexual repression, and the trope o f the double; in
so doing, it recalls other h o m o e r o t i c literary antecedents such as
Herman Melville's "Billy Budd" and J o s e p h Conrad's " T h e Secret
Sharer." Richard Dyer has noted that sailors have always occupied
a privileged niche in the popular mythology o f homosexuality, as
well as in homosexual literary history from the G r e e k Argonauts to
Genet's Querelle de Brest:
58
Sailors have especially figured in gay erotic tradition ... for a number
of possible reasons: longer enforced periods spent in enclosed singlesex environments suggest they may have greater homosexual experi­
ence; their rootlessness accords with the anonymity and fleetingness
of much gay sexual contact and means they are not "tied down" to
marriage, family, and conformity; their knowledge of the world makes
them seem either exotic or broad-minded; the rigours of sailing pro­
duce well-developed physiques. Even their clothing, perhaps by asso-
Plate 12 By the end of The Ghost Ship (1943), Stone's paranoia leads him to
this violent phallic assault upon Tom
106
Monsters in the closet
ciation, seems more erotic - open-necked tops suggesting broad
chests; trousers worn tight at the crotch and made of moulding serge;
the flap fly; bell bottoms which emphasise, by their oddity, naval cos­
tume as costume."
As is appropriate for a sailor's tale with homoerotic undercurrents,
The Ghost Ship does indulge in a bit of visual beefcake surrounding
bare torsos and tight T-shirts. Interestingly, the one port at which
the ghost ship docks is named "San Sebastian," a name linked
repeatedly throughout history with male queers and immortalized
by homosexual artists including Caravaggio, Tennessee Williams,
Yukio Mishima, and Derek Jarman. The Ghost Ship is also filled to
the brim with overdetermined phallic signifiers. Gleaming knives
are featured prominently, first seen (in the film's opening shot) in
the window of "Rubin's Seamen's Outfitting Co.," and eventually in
the climactic knife-fight. Other phallic signifiers foregrounded by
the text include hypodermic needles, scalpels, guns, spikes, and
cigars. One of the film's most striking sequences involves a large
cargo-hook that swings out of control during a storm at sea: it
serves as an apt metaphor for untethered and uncontrolled phallic
power, and as such comes to represent the obsessed Captain Stone's
monomania.
Like the crazed Saul in James Whale's The Old Dark House, Cap­
tain Stone can be understood much as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reads
Claggart in "Billy Budd": a man with homosexual impulses but also
severe internalized homophobia. Thus while Claggart and Stone
both desire a young seaman (Billy or Tom), they are simultaneously
repulsed by their desire. In the psychological sense, Stone, like Clag­
gart, may "be described by some such condensation as 'homosexualhomophobic knowing.' In a more succinct formulation, paranoia.""'
As the tale progresses, Stone grows ever more paranoid and almost
confesses the nature of his internal conflict: "I've done things I
couldn't remember doing. I've had moments when I felt that I was
on the verge of losing control. Of doing some terrible, stupid, ugly
things." We learn that the previous third mate died in bed from
some kind of convulsion. A crew member further hints at a closeted
secret when he speaks of the dead mate: "He didn't want to die he was always telling funny stories." Eventually, Stone's conflicted
desires lead him to have Tom bound and gagged in his bunk, hypodermically injected with a sedative, and prepared for the consum-
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mation of death at the point of Stone's long knife.
However, even before the spectator has been introduced to Cap­
tain Stone and his ego problems, the narrative has featured charac­
ters who in some way comment on Stone's secret obsessions. In the
opening shots of the film, Tom Merriam meets a blind musician and
then a mute "Finn," played by character actor Skelton Knaggs, who
also played the swishy Varney in Bedlam (1946) as well as a denizen
of the queer underworld in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). As
the mute tells us (in a voice-over which privileges his internal mono­
logue for the spectator): "I am cut off from other men, but in my
own silence I can hear things they cannot hear, know things they
cannot know." The blind man (who is also amazingly prescient) and
the Finn serve in the narrative as displaced homosexual figures: dif­
ferent from "normal" men, yet possessing a secret knowledge of
their own. They have accepted their difference, however, in a way
that Stone has not.
During the first third of the film, a courtship of sorts takes place
between Captain Stone and his new third mate. The interaction
between Stone and Tom is riddled with thinly veiled homosexual
implication. The narcissism implicit in psychoanalytic models of
homosexuality can be found in Stone's approach to hiring Tom: "I
chose you, Merriam. Your history could have been my own." He
wants to mold the young officer in his own image. The mise-enscene further accentuates the doubling of the two men: one striking
two-shot frames them on either side of Stone's mounted motto:
"He who does not heed the rudder shall meet the rock." Stone is the
rock in question, and the men who do not heed his authority
throughout the film are murdered by him. Stone first courts Tom
with friendly banter: "You know, that's one of the nice things about
long voyages - time for talk, time for friendship." However, again
raising the possibility that Stone's intentions are not altogether
"honorable," radio operator Sparks warns Tom that "There's a
friendliness that tries to get you to thinking wrong." Tom is initially
an apt pupil as Stone lectures about authority, and the "difference
between being a man and being a boy," a master/pupil arrangement
that recalls Socratic methods as well as initiation rituals. Stone, as
the older man, falls into the more masculine role of teacher and
leader while Tom is the feminized student; Stone's repeated pro­
nunciation of Merriam as "Miriam" makes this relationship obvi­
ous. Stone gleefully extols the privileges of masculine authority:
Monsters in the closet
108
"You'll learn it. You'll even learn to take great joy in it." Later, after
Tom has turned against Stone, the darker side of these tutorials
becomes clear. Now Stone's pedagogy is actively threatening: "I'm
rather glad that you're on board. It will give me a chance to prove
certain theories of mine. You know, I'm sure that you will find them
very interesting and instructive." As is made clear through Richard
Dix's delivery of these lines, Captain Stone's initial friendship has
now taken on the threat of male rape or other violence, the forcing
upon Tom of a dangerous sexual knowledge.
One sequence involving a sailor with appendicitis brings many of
these motifs into sharp focus. The sequence begins when a sick
sailor (who just happens to be "Greek"), bare-chested and oily from
liniment applied by a fellow-sailor, faints from severe pain. A diag­
nosis of appendicitis is made via radio, and the Captain and Tom
must prepare to operate with radioed instructions. Dressed in
gleaming white (Tom in his T-shirt), the two men prepare to open
and explore the body of the Greek sailor. At the last minute, Stone
freezes and cannot make the incision - cannot consummate the
physical act. Tom performs the operation, even though Stone takes
credit for it. Stone later explains that his actions were due to fear of
failure, but the sequence itself suggests his ultimate impotence, his
inability to consummate desire. His homosexual impulses, which he
keeps repressed, resurface in his paranoia. The possibility of
"normal" homosexual relations is displaced onto an obsession with
authority, and the sado-masochism of military discipline." One
moment that threatens to de-repress the homosexuality within the
text arises during a conversation between two sailors. Says one, in
speaking of the Captain's sovereignty at sea, "Why, he can even
marry you!" "Not me," quips the other, "I have a wife." (While this
particular double entendre slipped past the censors, in their initial
review of The Ghost Ship's script, the Production Code authorities
did caution that "there should be no 'pansy' gags attached to this
[sailor] business.")
62
Stone's failure to love either hetero- or homosexually is made
explicit by the lone female character in the film. Ellen, one of Cap­
tain Stone's only two friends, is introduced first as a photograph on
Stone's desk, then as a shadow, and finally as a whole woman. She
is the only speaking female character to be seen on screen through­
out the entire film. The depiction of women in this highly stylized
manner resonates with several possible meanings. First, it marks
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109
that women are clearly peripheral to the story, mere shadows in the
background of the drama taking place between the men. By making
the female non-corporeal, the film also emphasizes the physicality
of the men, as did the vignette with the Greek sailor's body. The
trope also places the women within a privileged space within the
genre - the shadows. As many critics have noted, women in horror
films are often aligned with the forces of darkness. We have seen
that in these films the terror that lurks in the shadows is primarily
psychological; in this case, it is Stone's fear of the "feminine"
impulse within himself (his homosexual desire) that these shadowwomen represent. It thus makes thematic sense that Ellen under­
stands Captain Stone's problem, even as the narrative constructs her
as a somewhat deluded lonely heart who still thinks she can
"change" the Captain. She attempts to explain the situation to Tom:
"For fifteen years I've tried to give [Stone] love, instead of loneli­
ness." Needless to say, Stone has continually rejected Ellen's
advances, and tells her (quite honestly) that "I'm afraid of my mind
. . . I don't trust it anymore ... Don't come close to me."
63
Stone's ego-dystonic homosexual desires have forced him to
remain aloof from life, and to become increasingly more isolated
and paranoid. Ellen fears that this could potentially happen to Tom
too, and tells him to "embrace warmth and life. A good joke, a
pretty girl." When Tom replies "I don't know any girls," Ellen
laughs: "That's clear enough." In an amazing bit of dialogue that
seems to validate the possibility of a positive homosexuality, Ellen
offers to introduce Tom to her younger sister. "And if you don't like
her," she continues, "she'll introduce you to other girls - and other
young men - young men who don't even know what the word
'authority' means." On one level Ellen is inviting Tom to join the
human community; on another she is making it clear that sexual
object choice is unimportant, that there are available young men
who have not perverted their sexual impulses into an obsession with
authority. What is important, as she tells Tom, is that he learn to
love someone, male or female, and not end up like the repressed
and obsessed Captain Stone. This rather enlightened attitude did
have its proponents in society at this time. Many of the psychiatrists
who "treated" homosexuals did so without the moral indignation of
later decades. In 1943, Newsweek
even conceded that even though
medical officers were trying to keep homosexuals out of the army,
"It is possible that they may even turn out to be excellent soldiers."
64
110
Monsters in the closet
And once the war was oven, Newsweek
printed findings that con­
cluded that "homosexuals topped the average soldier in intelli­
gence, education, and rating," and that "As a whole, these men were
law abiding and hard-working."
Eventually Tom is rescued from his bondage by the silent Finn,
who kills Stone in a knife-fight. The Finn, who has been figured by
the narrative as a mysterious red herring, turns out to be Tom's
savior. (Again, people are not always what they seem.) The specta­
tor is once again privileged to hear the Finn's thoughts as he proudly
stands next to Tom on the bridge of the ship. "The boy is safe and
his belief in men and men's essential goodness is secure. He stands
beside me in command. All's well..." The idolatry afforded to Tom
by the Finn is unmistakably cast with homoeroticism and fetishization: the Finn is blissfully happy just being in the same cabin with
Tom. Tom leaves the ship and meets Ellen's sister, but the traditional
happy (heterosexual) ending is subverted through the mise-enscene: the sister appears, as did Ellen, in the shadows, and the film
ends before she appears on camera.
65
Conclusion: The Picture of Dorian Gray
The points of intersection between filmic horror and the societal
understanding of homosexuality changed dramatically during the
years of World War II. The medicalization of homosexuality had
been occurring for decades, but the idea that it should be the
purview of psychiatric specialists was given a tremendous boost
during the war by the Armed Forces' decision to have psychiatrists
attempt to detect and discharge homosexuals from their ranks. In
historicizing these particular films, it can be seen that the issues sur­
rounding homo/sexuality and psychiatry were a growing popular
concern among film-makers. The Frankenstein
series produced at
this time at Universal Studios grew increasingly homoerotic and
often replaced the figure of the mad surgeon with that of a psychi­
atrist, although more often than not he still fell victim to the spread­
ing contagion of monsterity. Val Lewton's films, especially The
Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship, offer complex meditations on
the nature of human sexuality, meditations that have proven to be
quite sophisticated for their time, and not necessarily homophobic.
(Compare them to The Uninvited
(1944), in which the evil ghost
haunting a young girl is revealed to be an express function of a past
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Plate 13 Hurd Hatfield and George Sanders in The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1945). Although the film was officially sanctioned by the Production Code
Office, some viewers still understood the film to be about "sex perversion."
lesbian relationship.) Within the guise of the psychological horror
film, The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship make profound state­
ments on the deleterious effects of the enforced secrecy and the
repression of homosexuality within individuals, within the military,
and within society at large.
Like their counterparts made at Universal, most of the Val
Lewton horror films were dismissed by critics without much
thought. A much more typical Afilmapproach to the period's treat­
ment of monsters and homosexuals (and which critics had little
choice but to confront) can be found in MGM's 1945 production
of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, itself a novel produced
Monsters in the closet
112
under severe codes of "acceptability." The film partakes of many of
the same tropes as other World War II era horror films: an interest
in psychological processes such as guilt and repression, and a more
humanized depiction of its monsters - here quite literally the queer
amoral dandies Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) and Lord Henry
Wotton (George Sanders). (Laird Cregar, already famous for play­
ing the homosexual psychopaths discussed above, had been briefly
considered for the role of Lord Henry.) True to the classical Hol­
lywood formula, homosexual monster Dorian Gray is associated
with a foppish effeminacy, violent murder (s), the animalistic (a
character calls him "bestial, sodden, and unclean"), as well as racial
exotica (the Egyptian cat, interest in Buddhism, the writings of
Omar Khayyam), and deformity (a misshapen dwarf leads him into
one of London's dark and mysterious dives).
66
As if to throw this all into clearer relief (unlike a Lewton film),
MGM has considerably heterosexualized the tale, primarily
through the pointed use of a normalized heterosexual couple
(Donna Reed and Peter Lawford) who barely escape from Dorian
Gray's aura of evil and survive to bear witness to his tragic, mon­
strous (and deserved) end. The film's advertising campaign also
played up a heterosexual angle: representations of female victims in
filmy nightgowns were draped across posters, while tag lines such as
"Women were his prey ... romantic thrills his bait!" hinted more at
heterosexual than homosexual chicanery. When artist Basil Hallward confronts Dorian about the "moral leprosy" which seems to
have overtaken both him and his portrait, and refers to a "wretched
boy in the guards who committed suicide," Dorian (and the script)
is quick to suggest that he killed himself over a woman, not threats
of blackmail or internalized homophobia. Since homosexuality
cannot be spoken forthrightly, it must manifest itself through
Dorian's monstrosity and clever connotative tropes: the play with
Lord Henry's cane (which becomes erect at his first sighting of
Dorian), Lord Henry's capturing of a butterfly as an objective cor­
relative to his capturing of Dorian Gray's soul and "young Adonis"
body, and the placement of The Yellow Book within the story (it is
called "vile, evil, corrupt, [and] decadent" by Basil Hallward).
Repeatedly the characters talk of the "curious stories" and "hideous
things" that surround Dorian Gray, the "monstrous" and "strange
rumors about his mode of life," and his "visits to the abyss" that
exist in the "half-world of London." Yet the "H" word itself cannot
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113
be spoken, and not even a "queer" or a "gay" is slyly bandied about.
Perforce, "monster" stands in for "homosexual."
In short, in The Picture of Dorian Gray - possibly the most overtly
queer film of the period - homosexuality is both everywhere and
nowhere to be seen. From the beginning, the Breen Office was alert
to the story's homosexual content, and in a pre-production memo
dated 13 September, 1943, insisted that "For obvious reasons, it will
be absolutely essential that there will be no possibility of any infer­
ence of sex perversion, anywhere in this story." The film-makers
"complied," and upon its release the film received its Production
Code Seal of Approval. It was even rated A-2 by the Legion of
Decency. Yet after the film was actually in release around the coun­
try, the Legion of Decency wrote to Breen suggesting that they had
all missed something. Based upon a few perceptive film reviews and
public response, the Legion now realized that "there were portions
in the picture which could be interpreted as conveying implications
of homosexuality." Breen was "shocked," but defended his office's
approval of the film as a psychological drama about the wages of
sin. As this exchange amply demonstrates, this kind of connotative
homosexuality was (and for many still is) in the eye of the beholder.
As I have suggested, by 1945 it was becoming increasingly difficult
to be truly ignorant of homosexuality, yet the power of both social
and individual denial of homosexuality seems to know no bounds.
Denial is also a useful means to show that you yourself have not
been infected with the dangerous knowledge of homosexuality.
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who certainly should
have known better (both of homosexuality and of the work of Oscar
Wilde), wrote of The Picture of Dorian Gray that "the whole thing
... makes little or no intelligible sense," effectively distancing him­
self from its un/spoken subject-matter. The Variety review was
somewhat more positive, calling the film "daring" but also a "critic's
picture." The review cautiously continues:
67
68
69
70
the morbid theme of the Wilde story [is] carefully but also somewhat
boldly adapted to the screen ... [Gray is] a subject any psychoanalyst
would like to lay his hands on. In the adaptation, Albert Lewin, who
directed, has very subtly but unmistakably pegged Gray for what he
was, but it may go over the heads of a lot of people anyway ... As Hat­
field does the Gray part, he's singularly Narcissistic all the way.
71
This review adapts itself to the prevailing "homosexuality-as-med-
114
Monsters in the closet
ical-illness" position, even as it, too, refuses to say exactly what
Gray was "pegged" as. However, the little slip about any psychoan­
alyst wanting to lay his hands on the young Dorian Gray seems to
give the game away. The "open secret" of homosexuality that was
(and is) required for the social construction of "true" versus "situa­
tional" homosexuals, allows the medical, military, and media dis­
courses to construct the queer as monstrous Other (and vice versa).
In so doing, it masks the "normal" person's universalizing desire for
the minoritized queer, the normal couple's desire for the monster's
special charms, or, as implied above, the psychoanalyst's desire for
his homosexual patient's body.
Notes
1 "Medicine," Time (27 January, 1941): 2 0 .
2 Marion Joyce, "Flight From Slander," The Forum 100:2 (August 1938):
90-94.
3 For a brief overview of the magazine's history, see Ronnie W. Faulkner,
"Forum," in American Mass-Market Magazines, eds Alan Nourie and
Barbara Nourie (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) 1 2 6 - 1 2 9 .
4 "Hairy Chest is Not a Sign of the Masculine He-Man "Science News
Letter (8 May, 1937) 297.
5 Joyce 94.
6 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
7 Psychiatry in the horror genre can be traced back at least to Dr Seward
in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is significant, however, that in Universal's
1931 adaptation, his role is a relatively minor one. In Dracula's Daugh­
ter and many of the horror films of the World War II years, the psychi­
atrist replaces either or both of the roles filled by Jonathan Harker and
Professor Van Helsing - i.e. the normal male of the heterosexualized
couple and/or the voice of patriarchal authority. In other films, espe­
cially those made at Universal Studios, the psychiatrist becomes a new
version of the mad doctor.
8 This is mirrored earlier in the film when Lily, the countess Zaleska's
female victim, dies in a hospital bed after Garth hypnotizes her and
forces her to recall her seduction: rather than implicate himself in her
death, however, he blames it totally on the countess.
9 Some of these films include The Walking Dead (1936), Dark Eyes of
London (1939), Black Friday (1940), The Monster and the Girl (1941),
the Kay Kyser musical You'll Find Out (1940), and Dick Tracy Meets
Gruesome (1947).
10 For the most comprehensive account of how homosexuality was con-
Shock treatment
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
115
structed and understood during the years of World War II, see Allan
Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women
in World War II (New York: Penguin, 1990). See also Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Penguin, 1991) 1 1 8 - 1 3 8 , and John
D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities:
The Making of a
Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970
(Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983) 1-53.
See "Medicine," Time (3 April, 1944) 6 8 - 6 9 for one such report of the
trial. The author of the piece opines that "Psychiatric treatment some­
times cures homosexuality, especially when it is not congenital."
The review continues: "In their saga of a souse, Brackett and Wilder
abandon the note of lavender. Their drunken hero does not start bend­
ing his elbow to keep from putting his hand on his hip. He doesn't
hiccup to keep from 'yoo-hooing.'" This was undoubtedly comforting
news to Esquire's readers, many of whom were probably fairly heavy
drinkers, if the abundance of liquor ads in the magazine were any indi­
cation of their readers' habits (Jack Moffit, "Movie of the Month,"
Esquire (November 1945) 101).
D'Emilio 24.
Berube 156.
See Berube 1 4 9 - 1 7 4 ; also the scientific treatise by Nicolai Gioscia,
"The Gag Reflex and Fellatio," American Journal of Psychiatry 107
(May 1950) 3 8 0 . Almost all of these tests were designed to identify
male homosexuals. For reasons too numerous to account for here, male
rather than female homosexuality seems to be the chief concern of
homophobic people and especially military policy, even in the 1990s.
Interestingly, one of the main texts on homosexuality during this period
was George W Henry's Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual
Patterns
(New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1941). It is remarkable in that it pre­
sents case histories culled from co-operative homosexuals recruited by
a "Miss Jan Gay"(!). It does not address treatment or intervention in
any systematic way, but a 1948 edition does suggest that "more homo­
sexuals served with the Armed Forces than were eliminated before or
after induction. Many men had their first overt homosexual experience
while in the Armed Forces" (vii).
Berube 147: "From 1941 to 1945, more than four thousand sailors and
five thousand soldiers - mostly men - were hospitalized, diagnosed as
sexual psychopaths, and discharged from the service with the label of
homosexuality appearing on their military records. By contrast, the
total population of men in both the Army and the Navy who had been
convicted of sodomy from 1900 to the beginning of World War II had
numbered only in the hundreds."
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Monsters in the closet
18 See Berube, but also Jonathan Ned Katz, "Treatment: 1 8 8 4 - 1 9 7 4 , "
Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.SA., revised
edition (New York: Penguin, 1992) 1 2 9 - 2 0 1 .
19 For a somewhat celebratory overview of the figure of the psychiatrist in
American film, see Krin Gabbard and Glen O. Gabbard, Psychiatry and
the Cinema (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). The
authors are brothers: Krin is a professor of comparative literature and
classics while Glen is a practicing psychoanalyst. The work is immured
in a somewhat unproblematic acceptance of the entire psychiatric pro­
ject. For example, they identify "The Golden Age" of movie psychiatry
as the late 1950s and early 1960s wherein there was a "growing con­
viction in American culture that psychiatrists were authoritative voices
of reason, adjustment, and well-being" (84).
20 " F A R E W E L L , Noel Coward," Esquire (December 1945) 3 5 .
2 1 George W. Herald, "Sex is a Nazi Weapon," The American Mercury 54
Qune 1942) 6 5 7 - 6 5 8 .
22 Kosleck was apparently married for many years to "the wealthy and
titled Eleonora von Mendelssohn," although by a 1982 account he was
sharing "a house in West Hollywood with a friend. It is filled with his
antiques collection and the oils he has painted." His good friends
include Angela Lansbury and he considers himself to be Carol Burnett's
greatest fan (reported in Richard Lamparski, Whatever Became Of
8th Series [New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1982] 161).
Trying to reconstruct the actual historical sexuality of Hollywood
actors and actresses is always a tricky business. Studio publicity depart­
ments and arranged marriages of convenience work to heterosexualize
many individuals who otherwise might have been or continue to be
queer in their actual desires. One place I have found interesting "clues"
regarding certain individuals is in books such as Richard Lamparski's
Whatever Became of
series. Kerwin Mathews, for instance, who
played the rugged heroes in the fantasy films The Seventh Voyage of
Sinbad (1958), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), and Jack the Giant
Killer (1962), is discussed in one of Lamparski's books as follows:
"Kerwin Mathews has lived in San Francisco since 1970. He manages
Pierre Deux, a shop in the midtown area specializing in antiques and
fine fabrics ... Kerwin Mathews has remained a bachelor." While these
facts in and of themselves hardly constitute an "outing," and indeed
might be considered an unnecessary essentialization of gay male
lifestyles in the 1970s and 1980s, I nonetheless find them provocative
and pregnant with meaning within the context of Mathews's overall
career (Whatever Became Of . . J 8th Series [New York: Crown Publish­
ers, Inc., 1982]).
23 For a closer look at queers in film noir, see Richard Dyer, "Homosexu-
Shock treatment
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
117
ality and Film Noir," The Matter of Images: Essays on
Representations
(New York: Routledge, 1993) 5 2 - 7 2 .
Discussing the perversities of Clifton Webb's famous turn as Mr.
Belvedere, Parker Tyler acknowledges the logical outcome of conflating
horror/science fiction tropes with queer ones: "Can't you imagine the
Webb baby-sitter a monster who converts human babies into animated
toys for little girls on Mars? - and the police not destroying him till he
has consumed at least ninety minutes doing his dreadful thing? But
what am I saying? Take a look at the next installment of that perennial
T V favorite, The Addams Family, whose character Uncle Fester is an
ugly, bald, middle-aged version of the classic sissy-boy, girl-shy and girlcrazy, mental age about nine. Transparently he has just read What
Everyone Always Wanted to Know About Sex [sic], precocious boy-doll
that he is" (Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality
in the
Movies [1973; New York: Da Capo Press, 1993] 3 3 0 , 3 3 6 - 7 ) .
See Patricia White, "The Queer Career of Agnes Moorehead," in Out
in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, eds
Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, (Durham, NC: Duke Univer­
sity Press, 1995) 9 1 - 1 1 4 for a discussion of Moorehead's career as well
as interesting thoughts about the marginalization of such characters and
character actors within mainstream Hollywood film.
See Mank, Hollywood Cauldron (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Com­
pany, Inc., 1994) 2 4 4 - 2 4 6 for an account of Cregar's sexuality. He
apparently had a chorus boy lover, and frequently appeared in drag at
Hollywood parties. At Danny Kaye's Oscar party in 1943, Cregar won
a mock Oscar for "Best Female Impersonation of the Year."
Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 2 4 4 .
Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 3 3 0 .
Frank S. Nugent, Review of Dracula's Daughter, The New York Times
(18 May, 1936) 14:2.
These films include Calling Doctor Death (1943), Dead Man's Eyes
(1944), Weird Woman (1944), Frozen Ghost (1945), Strange Confes­
sion (1945), and Pillow of Death (1946).
Of The Mummy's Hand (1940), The Mummy's Tomb (1942), The
Mummy's Ghost (1944), and The Mummy's Curse (1944), only the first
is set in Egypt. For a closer examination of how these films adapt the
classical horror film's parameters, see Bruce Kawin, "The Mummy's
Pool,"F7/m Theory and Criticism, Third Edition , eds Gerald Mast and
Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 4 6 6 - 4 8 1 .
As Kawin notes, The Mummy's Ghost is especially interesting in that
the Mummy actually gets the girl at the end of the film.
"Queer Brain Waves," Science News Letter 34 (18 June, 1938) 3 9 4 .
"Temporary Death," Science News Letter 34 (18 June, 1938) 3 9 4 .
118
Monsters in the closet
34 Daniel Silverman and William R. Rosanoff, "Electroencephalographic
and Neurologic Studies of Homosexuals," Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease 101 (April 1945) 3 1 1 - 3 2 1 ; E. L. Sevringhaus and John
Chornyak, "Hormones of Homosexuals," Sexology 12 (December
1946) 7 4 0 - 7 4 1 .
35 True to generic form, Mrs Frankenstein remains clueless as to the queer
goings-on, apparently used to such distractions, but nonetheless inad­
vertently voicing the problem: "He's deep in some experiment ... He's
terribly preoccupied now but just as soon as his problem's solved he'll
be gay as a lark again. He's like that!"
36 The monster searches for a new mate that the townspeople will accept:
"I - hear - you - say - Father - all - right - people - not - understand. We
- make - nice - man - people - all - like - us" (Willis Cooper, The Son of
Frankenstein
(Original Shooting Script), ed. Philip J . Riley (Holly­
wood: Maclmage Filmbooks, 1990) 89. See also 8 5 - 9 1 , 1 7 4 - 1 7 5 , and
179-196.)
37 See Philip J . Riley, ed., Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman [The Original
Shooting Script], by Curt Siodmak, production background by Gregory
Wm Mank (Hollywood: Magiclmage Filmbooks, 1990).
38 Bosley Crowther, "When Gentlemen Meet" (Review of Frankenstein
Meets the Wolfman), The New York Times (6 March, 1943) 8:3.
39 Siodmak, in Riley (ed.) 64.
40 Siodmak, in Riley (ed.) 100.
4 1 Siodmak, in Riley (ed.) 100.
42 For production background and a version of the original shooting
script, see Philip J . Riley, ed., The Ghost of Frankenstein (The Original
Shooting Script) by W Scott Darling (Hollywood: Maclmage Filmbooks, 1990).
43 For production background and a version of the original shooting
script, see Philip J . Riley, ed., House of Dracula (The Original Shooting
Script) by Edward T. Lowe (Hollywood: Maclmage Filmbooks, 1993).
44 Many of my closest and dearest friends strongly object to the term "fag
hag," arguing that its derogatory connotations convey a sexist and
homophobic ideology. I can only agree, although I tend to use the term
as I do "queer," attempting to reinscribe the former label of oppro­
brium as a positive term. I use the word here and elsewhere in a descrip­
tive, hopefully non-pejorative sense.
45 Anonymous letter to Time magazine, dated 5 April, 1944, reprinted in
Jonathan Ned Katz, ed.,Gay/Lesbian
Almanac (New York: Harper &
Row, 1983) 5 6 0 - 5 6 1 . Gerber, under his own name, wrote another such
letter to the American Mercury magazine in June, 1947, "debunking
erroneous conceptions about the much-maligned homosexual" (Henry
Gerber, "Homosexuals," American Mercury 65 (June 1947) 1 2 3 - 1 2 4 ) .
Shock treatment
119
46 D'Emilio 24.
47 Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (New
York: Routledge, 1990) 1 1 1 .
48 Faderman 119.
49 Berube argues that the blue discharge could be used indiscriminately, to
purge the army of any soldier it deemed "undesirable." It was not only
used against homosexuals, but against racial and ethnic minorities as
well.
50 Faderman 126.
51 The Archbishop of Canterbury, quoted in "Great Britain: Question of
Consent," Time 70 (16 December, 1957) 2 2 - 2 5 .
52 Lewton is generally considered to be the auteur behind these films. I
have no intention of unproblematically accepting this supposition, but
constraints of space and time may unfortunately conspire to make it
appear so.
53 Quoted in Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 2 2 2 . DeWitt Bodeen's career
repeatedly dabbled in homoeroticism. He also wrote the screenplay for
Billy Budd (1962).
54 The production history of Cat People is recounted in George E. Turner,
"The Exquisite Evil of Cat People," in The Cinema of Adventure,
Romance, and Terror, ed. George E. Turner (Hollywood,: The ASC
Press, 1989) 2 3 2 - 2 4 3 .
55 Reported in Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New
York: The Viking Press, 1973) 3 1 . That formula was further delineated
as follows: budgets were "limited to $150,000 per picture. The films
were to be 'programmers,' slated for placement on double features in
less than key theaters, with a running time not to exceed 75 minutes.
[The production] office was to dictate the titles of these films, based
upon a system of market pre-testing." This is why some of the most
subtle horror films ever made have exploitative titles such as I Walked
with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. See also J . P. Telotte, Dreams of
Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1985); and John Brosnan, "Lewton and Company," in
The Horror People (New York: New American Library, 1976) 7 3 - 8 5 .
56 Juanita Tanner, "Demoniac Possession," Scribner's Magazine 87 (June
1930) 6 4 3 - 6 4 8 . The essay attests to the subcultural usage of terms such
as "fairy," "invert," and "queer," and laments the fact that there is no
terminology available to discuss homosexuality which does not seem
steeped in social opprobrium. The author questions the singling out of
homosexuality as a special and exaggerated form of perversion:
"indeed when we have called it disgustingly immoral we have after all
failed to prove that it is worse than other forms of immorality which we
are accustomed to regard more leniently." From a feminist perspective,
120
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
Monsters in the closet
the author suggests that uncontrolled sexual possessiveness is the truly
immoral behavior, and suggests that we now "stop talking and thinking
about sex as sex, now that the word has come to have such contradic­
tory meanings, and talk more intelligibly of physical attraction and
mental attainment ... We shall think less of love as possession, more of
it as live-and-let-live kindness."
Bosley Crowther, Review of The Seventh Victim, The New York Times
(18 September, 1943) 1 1 : 3 .
Also among its alleged sources was an unsolicited screenplay manu­
script, whose authors sued Lewton and RKO following the film's pre­
miere. They eventually won their suit and the film was withdrawn from
theatrical exhibition. Prints of The Ghost Ship are still very hard to find,
although in 1994 it played as part of a Val Lewton retrospective in Los
Angeles.
Dyer, Now You See It 112. Interestingly, "Sailors' anxieties about the
boyishness, tightness, and effeminacy of their uniforms surfaced during
the war when thousands of sailors wrote letters to Yank about changing
the Navy enlisted men's uniforms" (Berube 319).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Los Angeles: Uni­
versity of California Press, 1990) 97.
This phenomenon can be seen in any number of all-male situations,
from prisons to boys' schools to the military. Sex is used as a weapon to
demonstrate power relations. The possibility of open (loving) homo­
sexuality is vociferously denied, while the repressed impulse returns in
jokes and colloquialisms. "Cocksucker
became a favorite putdown
among G.I.'s during the war. When a G.I. was reprimanded by superi­
ors, he was said to have 'had his ass reamed.' To 'tangle assholes' meant
to argue or fight; 'asshole buddies' were close pals. Recruits playfully
called each other 'sweetheart'" (Berube 37).
MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
See Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Re-Vision:Essays in
Feminist Film Criticism, eds Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp,
and Linda Williams (Maryland: University Publications of America,
Inc., 1984) 8 3 - 9 9 .
"Science: Soldiers and Sex," Newsweek 22 (26 July, 1943) 72.
"Medicine: Homosexuals in Uniform," Newsweek 29 (9 June, 1947)
54. Lest I paint too rosy a picture, this article also reinscribes stereo­
typical notions of active/passive homosexuals, linkage to mental disor­
der, and the rationale of cure.
Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 3 3 0 .
MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
A personal anecdote: in college I had a somewhat older lover and the
Shock treatment
121
two of us were a visible couple on campus. Those who didn't know the
nature of our relationship would often query us about it, asking if we
were related: brothers, an uncle and nephew, or "just good friends."
The obvious possibility of homosexuality is denied in favor of increas­
ingly outlandish theories.
70 Bosley Crowther, Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, The New York
Times (2 March, 1945) 15:2.
71 Char., Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Variety (7 March, 1945).
3
Pods, pederasts and perverts:
(Re)criminalizing the monster
queer in Cold War culture
I
n many ways, the 1950s might be thought of as the darkest
decade of the twentieth century both for monsters and for homo­
sexuals, as well as for for anyone else who might have considered
him/herself somehow outside the hegemonic construction of nor­
mality. The 1950s have been described as a decade of conformity
and containment, both at home (women were being re-contained
within the domestic sphere) and abroad (the spread of communism
had to be checked). And while racial minorities began to address the
issue of their civil righrs, social difference for the most part was still
feared and suspected; many Americans chose to move within the
lockstep patterns of a white bread suburban middle-class culture
rather than risk the repercussions of being singled out as somehow
(in the sentiments of the era's monster invasion films) "one of Them
and not one of Us." Indeed, a strict Self/Other dichotomy seemed to
permeate the culture of the era, both for movie monsters and for
homosexuals. The qualified compassion that had been directed
towards queer monsters during the years of World,War II evapo­
rated in the blazing heat of McCarthyism; a new paranoia sur­
rounding difference, be it political or sexual, added to a socially
oppressive atmosphere which fueled not only greater social perse­
cution of homosexuals, but also, conversely, the beginnings of an
organized homosexual civil rights movement.
The post-war era also saw a newly inflected model of homosexu­
ality gain prominence, one that acknowledged that all gay men
weren't necessarily sissies and that all lesbians weren't necessarily
butch. While this might ostensibly represent a movement away from
understanding homosexuals as diseased and minoritized "sexual
psychopaths," in truth the newly discovered "invisibility" or "passability" of homosexuals only led to further hysteria. Homosexuals
Pods, pederasts and perverts
123
were now apparently everywhere - far more common than anyone
had hitherto suspected. The 1948 Kinsey Report on Male Sexuality
reported that 37 per cent of adult men surveyed had had at least one
post-adolescent homosexual encounter. The statistics for women,
reported in 1953, were a bit lower: 13 per cent of women surveyed
reported homosexual experiences to orgasm. Kinsey also argued
that human sexuality could not adequately be described by terms
such as homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality, and instead
theorized a seven-point sliding scale which corresponded to an indi­
vidual's complex relationship to both homosexual and heterosexual
feelings. These statistics and ideas were widely reported and dis­
cussed at length in the popular press of the day.' Many critics, and
especially psychiatrists, were quick to question zoologist Kinsey's
findings, arguing that his sample was biased (it included only white
college graduates in six north-eastern and mid-western states) and
that his interviewing techniques did not take into account the flaws
and discrepancies of human memory. One such critic, psychiatrist
Lawrence S. Kubie, went on the attack in Time magazine and ulti­
mately accused Kinsey of denigrating the psychiatric profession as a
whole. He further added that "The implication that because homo­
sexuality is prevalent we must accept it as 'normal' or as a happy
and healthy way of life, is wholly unwarranted." Columnist
Dorothy Thompson also warned that the report holds "the danger
of being used to justify unbridled license. If this interpretation is
drawn from a report so dubiously representative, its results may do
more evil than good."'
While the medical community as a whole remained divided as to
the causes of homosexuality (most theories still focusing on too
much or too little mother- or father-love), many members of the
psychiatric profession were all too ready to exploit the idea of
"curing" homosexuality for profit. One such doctor was Edmund
Bergler, who apparently had something of a cottage industry treat­
ing homosexuals and then writing books about them. A few of his
books from this period (all for sale to the general public) include
Neurotic Counterfeit-Sex
(1951), Kinsey's Myth of Female
Sexuality
(1954), Homosexuality:
Disease or Way of Life? (1956), and One
Thousand Homosexuals
(1959). Typical of the paranoia of his day,
he asserts (his italics) that "the perversion has become more
wide­
spread through artificial creation of new recruits as a result of the dis­
semination
of misleading
statistics
. . . " His works repeatedly
1
2
4
Monsters in the closet
124
attacked Kinsey's findings and attempted to soothe his worried
readers by asserting unequivocally that "it has recently been discov­
ered that homosexuality
is a curable illness."* Bergler's works also
deny the possibility of bisexuality, calling the idea "as rational as one
declaring a man can at the same time have cancer and perfect
health." Read today, Bergler's writings themselves seem fueled by a
neurotic hysteria found more regularly among Fundamentalist
preachers and right-wing politicians. Unlike the more coolly
detached "scientific" medical positions espoused in earlier decades,
the rhetoric employed by Bergler is now one of moral anger and
Christian righteousness. To him, there is no doubt that homosexu­
ality is a contagious disease, "a neurotic distortion of the total per­
sonality", and that "there are no healthy homosexuals."" Tapping
into another well of demonizing tropes, Bergler also reminds his
readers that Hitler's SS men were mostly homosexuals, and that the
guards in concentration camps were "frequently recruited from the
ranks of homosexual criminals.'" Sadly, the work of nascent
homophile groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daugh­
ters of Bilitis was relatively unknown to the country at large, but
Edmund Bergler's thoughts were printed by major publishers,
reviewed in professional journals such as Psychiatric Quarterly, and
discussed in the United Press and Time magazine. "
In contradistinction to Bergler's assertion that the media was glam­
orizing homosexuality, the popular culture of the 1950s was little
interested either in civil rights for homosexuals or even in non-judg­
mental medical models. During the first few years of the decade, the
media returned to criminalizing homosexuality with a vengeance,
and did so by linking it to murder, communism, pedophilia, and a
totally foreign and minoritized Otherness (all of which was reflected
in the era's monster movies, much as it had been during the 1930s).
A 1949 Newsweek
article entitled "Queer People" begins thus: "The
sex pervert, whether a homosexual, an exhibitionist, or even a dan­
gerous sadist, is too often regarded merely as a 'queer' person who
never hurts anyone but himself. Then the mangled form of some
victim focuses public attention on the degenerate's work." The very
next year HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee)
announced that sex deviates in government positions were security
risks that needed to be eradicated. Ultimately "more homosexuals
and lesbians were expelled from the federal government in the 1950s
than were suspected communists and fellow travelers." As the
7
1
11
12
Pods, pederasts and perverts
125
decade wore on, more and more debate about homosexuality was
featured in popular magazines: Time and Newsweek
ran essays in
their medical columns about psychiatry and homosexuality, and by
1953 the news weeklies were reporting that "leading U.S. psychia­
trists and other doctors are at last nearing agreement that homosex­
uality is not an inherited taint... Nobody is born with it, and it is not
glandular in origin. It is not a disease in itself but a symptom of an
underlying emotional disorder.""
As homosexuality became more openly discussed throughout the
1950s, various professional experts argued for their right to define
and claim control over "the homosexual problem." Moralists saw it
as sin, psychiatrists as a curable mental illness, while still others
maintained that it was simply a crime against the state. All three of
these often warring positions can be found in a 1954
Newsweek
essay that begins by invoking the story of Sodom, touches on
Kinsey's findings, and then quotes from a member of the British
aristocracy who argues that Freudian thought has greatly damaged
Western civilization, complaining that in the past '"they called such
things sin; now they call them complexes.'" When these debates
became more sharply focused in 1957 around the UK's controver­
sial Wolfenden Report (which suggested that the government
decriminalize prostitution and homosexual acts between consenting
adults), Newsweek
opined that "It is far from certain that the [US]
public is ready for such a drastic revision in its moral code." This
conflation of homosexuality and the United Kingdom had existed in
the popular press long before the issuance of the Wolfenden Report.
In 1954, the UK was rocked by two homosexual scandals, one
involving actor John Gielgud and another involving Lord Montagu
of Beaulieu and London film producer Kenneth Hume. While Giel­
gud was arrested for "persistently importuning male persons on the
streets of Chelsea," Montagu and Hume were charged with assault
against two young boys. The US news magazines that covered these
stories almost always invoked the figure of Oscar Wilde, implying
that homosexuality was more or less a foreign affair. This trend
lasted at least throughout the end of the decade: in 1959,
Newsweek
reported on a British psychiatric survey which claimed that Oxford
was rife with homosexuality. "Absolute rubbish!" said Sir Maurice
Bowra, warden of Wadham College. "It's very hard to tell what the
proportion of Oxford homosexuality is, but my guess is that it is
jolly small."
14
15
16
17
Monsters in the closet
126
American masculinity, as exemplified by men's magazines such as
Esquire (and more pulpy imitators such as Stag, Sir!, Saga,
Show­
down for Men, etc.) continued to be defined via "true adventure sto­
ries" of intense homosocial bonding and the ever-increasing
objectification of women as sex objects. (Masculinity in films, dis­
cussed below, was apparently less sure of itself.) Esquire rarely spoke
about homosexuality during the 1950s, although its back pages did
begin to advertise kinky sex novels such as Love me Sailor, My Sister
and I, and a sado-masochistic cartoon serial called Diana's
Ordeal.'"
Advertisements for Charles Atlas-type bodybuilding courses were
also in abundance in most of these magazines, yet even their version
of hyper-masculinity often came under suspicion of homosexuality.
Certainly many homosexual men would have sent for their "easy to
follow, picture-packed courses," not only for the exercises
described, but also for the erotic visual thrills of men in posing
straps." (Skimpy brief underwear could also be ordered from the
back pages of most of these magazines.) Eventually, during the ensu­
ing years, such "physical culture" brochures and magazines evolved
into a sort of gay male proto-pornography industry, perhaps best
exemplified by mail-order firms such as the Athletic Model Guild
and magazines such as Physique Pictorial, Tomorrow's
Man, and
Vim.
Another important voice on the subject of homosexuality began
to be heard more forcefully in the 1950s - that of homosexuals
themselves. Perhaps in response to the crises in civil liberties such as
those perpetrated by HUAC, homophile organizations such as the
Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were founded in the
early 1950s, and the newly formed homosexual magazine One was
even mentioned in a 1954 Newsweek
essay. An underground les­
bian magazine, Vice Versa, had been briefly circulated in the late
1940s, and The Ladder, the official newsletter of the Daughters of
Bilitis, was published from 1956 until 1972. Somewhat paradoxi­
cally perhaps, many of these groups accepted and made recourse to
the medical discourse of earlier decades which classified them as
mentally ill. Yet as Michel Foucault has noted in another context,
this apparent acquiescence to a model of sexual psychopathy still
made "possible the formation of a 'reverse' discourse: homosexual­
ity began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy
or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using
the same categories by which it was medically disqualified." ' Thus
10
21
22
2
Pods, pederasts and perverts
127
some gay men and lesbians argued for their civil rights, based on the
view that homosexuality was an illness and should be treated as
such, and not as a crime against the state. This was certainly the case
with the 1951 publication The Homosexual
in America: A Subjec­
tive Approach
by the pseudonymous Donald Webster Cory. The
book is introduced by Dr Albert Ellis, and the bulk of the text is a
sort of simultaneous apologia for homosexuality and a civil rights
plea by the now-married Cory. In the Preface to the Second Edition
(1959), Cory still maintains that the homosexual's "behavior (or
desire for such behavior) is a symptom of emotional maladjust­
ment," and that "what greater help can he obtain than a better
understanding of his problems, a reorientation of his drives, while
at the same time one seeks to alleviate the social and legal pressures
that he faces?"
Yet, groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of
Bilitis remained relatively unknown to the public at large. And a
book like Cory's could easily be read in conjunction with those by
Edmund Bergler, reinforcing the idea that homosexuality was a
mental illness that could be and should be cured. Eventually these
and other critical voices held more sway with the public's under­
standing of human sexuality than did Kinsey's findings or his sug­
gestions. All of this pathologizing media publicity helped to create
a very different image of the homosexual than had existed in previ­
ous decades. As George Chauncey puts it:
24
As a result of such press campaigns, the long-standing public image of
the queer as an effeminate fairy who one might ridicule but had no
reason to fear was supplemented by the more ominous image of the
queer as a psychopathic child molester capable of committing the
most unspeakable crimes against children. The fact that homosexuals
no longer seemed so easy to identify made them seem even more dan­
gerous, since it meant that even the next-door neighbor could be one.
The specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible com­
munist, haunted Cold War America.
25
Rather than understand the presence of "normal" homosexuals as
evidence of a universalizing stance on homosexuality, the paranoia
of the era constructed homosexuals as secret and subversive agents
linked to communism, posing as normal in order to infiltrate small­
town USA and prey upon new victims, most readily figured as
teenagers and children. And as in previous decades, many of these
128
Monsters in the closet
sexual dynamics and social tensions can be found in the era's mon­
ster movies and horror films.
Pods: queer sexual threat in the 1950s monster invasion film
As a whole, the films of the 1950s are usually considered escapist
fantasies, with little of the social commentary that could be found
in some films of the 1930s, let alone the "social problem" films of
the late 1940s. While horror films had subsided in popularity
during the immediate post-war years (in a way supplanted by the
more realist films noir), they became exceedingly lucrative again in
the 1950s, due to a queer hybridization with the science fiction
genre, which created a spate of what might be called monster inva­
sion films. These films have most often been discussed as represen­
tative of Cold War fears: their monsters are often unleashed by
nuclear power, or else they can be understood to represent the fear
of communist infiltration. Morphologically, the monsters of these
films were usually irredeemable Others: scaly, slimy, tentacled, veg­
etative, insectoid, or reptilian - in many cases quite literally Not of
This Earth (1957). Most of these alien-invasion monsters lacked
even the rudimentary human qualities that marked Frankenstein's
monster, Dracula, or the wolfman, let alone the imperfect and com­
plex human monsters of Val Lewton's horror films.
The opposite (and less frequently used) trope of the alien invasion
film finds Them looking just like Us. The few "good" aliens of the
1950s almost invariably take human form: for example, Michael
Rennie in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), or the sexy and there­
fore none-too-deadly Cat Women of the Moon (1954). But more
regularly these human-seeming monsters are like the emotionless
pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), outwardly
human but actually a totally different form of life. These humanlooking monsters have been thought to reflect a paranoid fear of
both mindless US conformity and communist infiltration, wherein a
poisonous ideology spreads through small-town USA like a virus,
silently turning one's friends and relatives into monsters.
The overriding tension of these films, whether the monster could
pass as human or not, was the clash between Us (normal US citizens)
and Them (alien monsters). The narrative formula for most of these
films was surprisingly similar: "normal" small-town USA (usually
represented by an actively heterosexualized couple - here staging a
26
129
Pods, pederasts and perverts
comeback after their dormancy in World War II era horror films) is
menaced by something unknown, something queer. Several differ­
ent critics have described this formulaic "Discovery Plot" in some
detail, including Noel Carroll and Susan Sontag. According to
Sontag's schema, "The hero ... and his girl friend ... are disporting
themselves in some ultra-normal middle class surroundings... Sud­
denly ... strange lights hurtle across the sky." The hero and heroine
discover the presence of the Thing and attempt to warn the local
authorities, without effect. (As for the closeted homosexual, the
monster queer's best defense is often the fact that the social order
actively prefers to deny his/her existence.) "Meanwhile, It continues
to claim other victims in the town, which remains implausibly
located from the rest of the world." Sooner or later the monster
menaces the heroine, and just in the nick of time the hero finds the
Thing's Achilles' heel and succeeds in destroying it. With the queer
threat thus vanquished, normality once again reigns supreme. That
the Thing has invariably come to earth in order to conquer and/or
reproduce itself is a requirement of the form, and many of the films
make their monsters' queer sexuality quite explicit by dwelling on
invading rocket-ships, oozing pods, cocoons, egg-sacs, birthingchambers, and the like.
This formula is somewhat different from that of the classical Hol­
lywood monster movie, and especially from that of the more psy­
chological horror films of the preceding decade. First, the monsters
are usually far less humanized and therefore more easily read in
metaphoric terms. For example, the giant irradiated egg-laying ants
of Them (1954) easily suggest the fear of nuclear technology run
amok, as well as a fear of female sexuality. In many cases, the films
evoke multiple systems of explanation for their monstrous horrors,
in so doing blurring or "queering" the usual explanatory binaries
(technology/nature, male/female, science/religion) of earlier fantas­
tic narratives. Also, in contradistinction to the domestic monsters of
the 1940s, the monster films of the Cold War era regularly assert
that the source of the horror comes from somewhere "out there" as
opposed to internal sources; they struggle to mark a strict division
between Self and Other as do the monster movies of no other
period. Yet in trying so hard to divide and (ultimately) conquer, the
films themselves often give way to interesting conflations of nor­
mality and the monstrous. As Annette Kuhn has mused on the topic,
such "things are not always quite so clear cut: boundaries can be
27
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Monsters in the closet
permeable, and it is sometimes difficult to determine who or what
belongs on which side of the divide." Indeed, as Margaret Tarratt
eloquently argued in her seminal analysis of the topic, these "Mon­
sters From the Id" seem to be in some way a product of the
"normal" characters' sexual energies, representing social and/or
individual anxieties over sex, gender, and sexuality. While the
films appear to maintain and celebrate normality, for critics like Tar­
ratt there is almost always the sense that the monster represents the
eruption of a sexual force which cannot be contained by the het­
erosexualized normal couple. The monster always seems to raise its
scaly head and pop into view just as the hero and heroine are about
to move into a romantic clinch.
As previously indicated, homosexuality became directly con­
nected to communism both in the popular press and in the public
gestalt from February of 1950, when hearings before the Senate
Appropriations Committee revealed that homosexuality had been
the reason for recent dismissals of government workers."' In an
essay entitled "Object Lesson," Time magazine, following the Con­
gressional lead, compared the situation of homosexuals in the
United States government to that of Colonel Alfred Redl, the homo­
sexual counter-intelligence chief of Austro-Hungary who had been
blackmailed into divulging secrets to the Russians during the years
before World War One. The US Congressmen "concluded sharply"
that the government "had been lazy or downright negligent about
cleaning house," and "recommended tighter laws and harsher pun­
ishment for sex perversion in the District of Columbia."" Three
years later the McCarthy hearings were still emphasizing the idea of
evil and invisible homosexual subversives. All of this this led to an
increasing number of witch-hunts against gay men and lesbians both
in the military and in civil service.' In 1953, Time reported that
"the State Department has flushed out and dropped more than 300
employees on moral charges."" By mid-decade, McCarthy and his
tactics had been more or less discredited, but the anti-homosexual
furor he had whipped up failed to subside as easily.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the 1950s films with commu­
nist infiltration subtexts can also be read as allegories about the
invisible homosexual - especially a film such as I Married a Monster
from Outer Space (1958), in which a newly-wed husband (Tom
Tryon), secretly a monster queer, finds it preferable to meet other
strange men in the public park rather than stay at home with his
28
29
2
Pods, pederasts and perverts
131
wife. The invisible homosexual was a phenomenon attested to more
directly in other popular cultural artifacts. In the March 1958 issue
of the men's magazine Sir!, for example, along with the usual soft­
core cheesecake photographs of women and tales of stirring "true
adventure," one can read an article entitled "It's the Day of the Gray
Flannel Fag." The piece warns that "Not All Homos Are Easy to
Spot. Many Have Muscles, Are He-Men in Everything - Except
Sex,'" and echoes the same fear of homosexuality dramatized in I
4
132
Monsters in the closet
Married a Monser from Outer Space. According to the piece, an esti­
mated 15-20 per cent of men are "homos" and only "4 per cent are
so effeminate they are recognizable." It continues: "They design
dresses, decorate homes, sell antiques, make the rounds of Broad­
way producers' offices. But what throws unsuspecting women is
that they also can be found heading Wall Street firms, boxing in
Madison Square Garden and playing baseball. There's no telling
where a gray flannel he-man fag will turn up." Curiously for a men's
magazine, the article is supposedly addressed to women: "Lady,
take a good look at that date you're having cocktails with. Is he a
real guy? Or is he a he-man homo?" However, since it is fairly safe
to assume that few women would be reading Sir! - A Magazine for
Males, it is easy to conclude that the essay is meant more as a cau­
tionary warning to Sirl's male readers rather than as advice to
women. The article offers "clues" which might be used to separate
the real man from the "neurotic muscleman," thus effectively polic­
ing the homosexual/homosocial boundary line. For example, read­
ers of the essay learn that male homosexuals "can make even a
Brooks Brothers suit look fussy ... have a clipped, arty way of speak­
ing," and have perfect hair (either that or "Napoleonic bangs").
Homosexuals tend to linger over man-to-man handshakes, and
"their pat on another man's back is a caress." Yet complicating this
simple checklist is a half-page photograph of a male bodybuilder's
bulging bare back. This is not a surprising image in and of itself,
since Sir!, like most of its ilk, featured several advertisements per
issue for Charles Atlas and other bodybuilding courses, as well as
frequently very homoerotic illustrations accompanying many of
their "true adventure" stories. Yet here the beefcake supposedly sig­
nifies "homosexual" rather than "real man." The presence of the
essay suggests a profound insecurity over the construction of mas­
culinity at this time. Hyper-masculinity as well as hypo-masculinity
were now both suspect as possible signifiers of homosexuality.
Despite the essay's attempt to police the homosocial/homosexual
divide by offering helpful hints as to the identification of "true"
homosexuals, its presence in such an intensely homosocial milieu
calls into question the very dynamics of homosociality in the first
place.
Universal-International's most successful monster of this period,
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), spawned two sequels
within three years and exemplifies many of these new tensions and
Pods, pederasts and perverts
133
tropes, and suggests the repressed homosexual urges which may lie
at the heart of such homosocial bonds. Yet these films also differ
from the more standard monster invasion narratives of the era in
that the Creature (across the course of three films) becomes almost
as humanized and as domesticated as any monster of the 1930s or
1940s (and has thus insured his ongoing popularity?). In Revenge of
the Creature (1955), he is transplanted from his own alien world
and turned into an exchange commodity displayed for profit at
Florida's Ocean Harbor Oceanarium. By The Creature
Walks
Among Us (1956), medical science forces the creature to adapt to
the "normal" human world by making him an air-breather, recalling
1940s monster movies tropes which sought to cure the monster
queer rather than destroy him. Yet in each film the Creature remains
the embodiment of an abstract sexual urge: his phallic design and
interest in a string of female starlets are his chief characteristics. The
ad copy for the first film makes this sexual threat clear, proclaiming
the Creature a "terrifying monster of the ages raging with pent-up
passions!" Joseph Breen at the Production Code Administration was
also a bit worried about the monster's overt phallicism, and sug­
gested that the producers take care to "avoid any sexual emphasis
that might suggest bestiality."" As usual within the genre, the threat
of bestiality exists in a semantic blur with other forms of queer sex­
uality.
A closer look at The Creature from the Black Lagoon and its
sequels reveals the exact form of the phallic urge which the monster
represents: the male-male erotic tension contained within the
homosocial triangle. (This homoerotic undercurrent would have
been even more pronounced had the role of Dr Carl Maia, the sci­
entist who first unearths a fossilized Creature, gone to the produc­
tion's original first choice, homosexual actor Ramon Novarro.)' In
each film, a pair of male scientists (Richard Carlson and Richard
Denning, John Agar and John Bromfield, Rex Reason and Jeff
Morrow) vie for the attentions of a female (Julie Adams, Lori
Nelson, Leigh Snowden), while hunting for the Creature. The men
are constantly linked with the Creature, swimming around in the
murky waters with him, ostensibly sharing his lust for the female
lead, and frequently serving as "red-herring" shocks by coming into
the frame suddenly while the Creature is on the loose. Like the allmale world of The Ghost Ship, in the Creature films there is no
shortage of jocular homosocial camaraderie, swimsuited beefcake,
6
134
Monsters in the closet
Plate 15 Homoerotic hunks battling a phallic monster was the successful
formula of the Creature from the Black Lagoon films. Rather queerly, this
publicity still from Revenge of the Creature (1955) mistakenly identifies its
hunk as Lori Nelson, the female lead of the film
and overdetermined phallic signifiers, all o f which are used to
subdue or capture the Creature: knives, spear-guns, hypodermic
needles, rifles, poison-tipped spears, air tanks, air hoses, cattleprods, and even an underwater squirt-gun which shoots out
" r o t e n o n e , " a creamy liquid knock-out drug. (Universal's The Land
Unknown ( 1 9 5 7 ) follows a similar narrative pattern as well as a sim-
Pods, pederasts and perverts
135
ilar gift for overdetermined phallic symbols: when three men and a
woman crash land into the titular dinosaur-infested world, they
quickly realize that their only hope of escape hinges upon their abil­
ity to straighten out or replace their helicopter's bent and broken
"push-pull rod.")
In most of these films, the homosocial worlds of scientists and
sailors are skewed by the presence of a woman: as one character in
the first Creature film warns about the initial expedition, "There's
just one problem - going into unexplored territory with a woman."
These lone women exist in the films ostensibly to defuse the homo­
erotic tension of the situation, but ironically they more regularly
draw attention to it. The women themselves are linked to the mon­
strous by way of their femininity, and it is through their presence
that the possibility of the triangle's male-male desire is filtered. In
the first film, Mark (Richard Denning) gets rather bitchy when he
sees his rival David (Richard Carlson) with the woman Kay (Julie
Adams): "Come on, David, you can play house later!" He scorns
not only the possible heterosexual couple, but the feminizing and
domesticating threat that it represents to the buddies' all-male
world. One brief sequence from the same film pulls all of this
together and firmly links the erotic tension of the homosocial trian­
gle to that of the monsters which lurk in the jungle: David and Kay
are on deck, about to kiss, when their embrace is interrupted by the
cries of a wild animal. They attempt to kiss again, but this time they
are interrupted by Mark, who suddenly appears brandishing and
firing a spear-gun. Later Mark, who has become obsessed with
killing and/or capturing the Creature, sits on deck with David and
anxiously calls out "Come on! Come on!" David queries: "You talk­
ing to me, Mark, or something out there?" "Both," answers Mark:
his desire for David, first triangulated through Kay, is now displaced
onto the Creature. If Mark can kill or capture the Creature, perhaps
he can keep his own sexual urges under control. Mark actually
stands in for the Creature a few minutes later, when, in the Crea­
ture's lair, David (and the spectator) is shocked when Mark reaches
into frame and tries to grab David.
In all three of the Creature films, the narrative seems less con­
cerned with the destruction of the monster than with reducing the
plurality of male suitors to a single man, in order to re-form the
proper heterosexual couple. (At the end of each film, the Creature
is hurt but shown either swimming away or heading for the sea.)
136
Monsters in the closet
The Creature's embrace invariably kills the inappropriate suitor,
leaving Richard Carlson, John Agar, and Rex Reason to ponder the
meaning of life and love and "happily ever after" with Julie Adams,
Lori Nelson, and Leigh Snowden. Still, the films' overall project to
investigate queer desire is echoed in lines from Revenge of the Crea­
ture: "Some things should remain unknown ... Love is such a mys­
tery I cannot find it out." Repeatedly, the films seem to be asking
about monstrous male-male bonds and then demonstrating that
they must be destroyed before the normative heterosexual couple
can be established.
These male rivalries are especially intense in the final film, Crea­
ture Walks Among Us, in which at least three men vie for the atten­
tions of Helen Barton (Leigh Snowden): her drunken overzealous
husband Dr Barton (Jeff Morrow), who humanizes the Creature
only to pen him in a cage, compassionate scientist Dr Morgan, (Rex
Reason), and lusty ship's Captain Grant (Gregg Palmer), who mas­
ters Barton's yacht, the "Vagabondia III" from San Francisco. The
reference to San Francisco may be a clue to Dr Barton's sexual psy­
chopathy: he distrusts his wife, calls her "useless" and "worthless,"
and has paranoid fantasies that she is sleeping with the handsome
Captain Grant. Dr Barton is easily read as a repressed homosexual,
and although the concept of sexual repression was not as topical as
homosexual security risks during this era, an occasional reference to
such ideas can be found: a 1953 Time article noted that in "every
human personality there are both masculine and feminine traits,"
and that psychiatrists still feel that "those who protest most loudly
against deviations in others are the least sure of their own sexual
adjustment."" In The Creature Walks Among Us (and note the uni­
versalizing metaphor of the title), Dr Barton murders Captain Grant
(consummating his repressed homosexual desire?) and then is him­
self killed by the Creature, who has been rather idly standing by
while the men played out their sexual dramas. The film strains to
make an analogy between Dr Barton's bestial behavior and that of
the now more sympathetic Creature. In its final moments the film's
characters reflect upon the fate of humankind: "I guess the way we
go depends upon what we're willing to understand about our­
selves." Helen, raising the spectre of repressed sexual desire,
quickly adds "And willing to admit." The themes of sexual repres­
sion, explored through many of these Cold War monster movies in
metaphoric terms, is perhaps best exemplified by a small detail of
Pods, pederasts and perverts
137
The Creature Walks Among Us: as the Creature becomes more and
more humanized, it is decided by the paranoid Dr Barton that he
must now wear clothing, as if to mask or repress the queer sexual
threat which the Creature's naked form has come to embody.
Pederasts: American International Pictures and the teenage
monster
The male beefcake on display in the Creature films was not an iso­
lated phenomenon, but rather another aspect of the changing trends
of Cold War movie-making. As many critics have pointed out, in the
films of this era the male body starts to become almost as spectacularized as the female body, so that the films objectify and homoeroticize on-screen masculinity for a male spectator." Simultane­
ously, Hollywood films promoted a new version of masculinity in
general: a softer, more vulnerable type of man than that which had
gone before. Exemplified by the personas and filmic characteriza­
tions of stars like James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Farley Granger,
Sal Mineo, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, and Marlon Brando,
this new type of leading man was more sensitive and compassion­
ate; often he is internally conflicted, and given to feminizing traits
such as emotionalism and occasionally even tears. Not surprisingly,
this new type of man could easily be read as queer by those audi­
ences inclined to do so, especially since the "real-life" sexualities of
these actors was in many cases also non-straight, and probably dis­
cussed at length in certain homosexual and/or Hollywood circles.
The appearance of Hollywood beefcake photos within the pages of
Physique Pictorial and Vim also enhanced the possibility that gay
men of the 1950s might have read these stars' personas and perfor­
mances as homosexual."
The "sensitive young man" existed in 1950s culture beyond the
movies and their ancillary products. In a review of underground
homosexual novels of the era, Richard Dyer has noted how the
iconography of the troubled youth was explicitly used to denote the
young male homosexual, a representation "both irredeemably sad
and overwhelmingly desirable." Like the image of the movie mon­
ster, for the queer spectator seeking identificatory pleasures, these
images "can be complex, varied, intense and contradictory, an
image of otherness in which it is still possible to find oneself." Thus
the sad young man's "delicious melancholia" might be both con40
Monsters in the closet
138
comitantly oppressive and empowering to a gay male spectator.
Like the monster queer, the sad young man of these novels was
often doomed from the outset, obliged by both narrative structure
and social opprobrium to a tragic death or "twilight" existence. Yet
at the same time, the sad young man also "offered an image of holy
sensitivity, stunning good looks, overwhelming erotic experience
and escape from the dreariness of real manliness."
As Dyer's essay argues, the spectre of a monstrous homosexuality
lurked underneath Hollywood's new image of the sensitive, spectacularized young man. Perhaps most famously, Rebel Without a
Cause (1955) activates many of these concerns: James Dean's Jim
Stark is a sensitive (i.e. troubled) teen whose problems result from
his weak and effeminate father, while his friend Plato (Sal Mineo) is
a thinly veiled homosexual. The infamous shipboard gymnasium
production number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) more play­
fully suggests homophobic fears: Jane Russell sings and dances
amidst a bevy of swimsuited bodybuilders, but can't find any men
who desire her. ("Doesn't anyone want to play?"). In much darker
terms, The Strange One (1957), set in a military boarding school,
hinted that homosexuality might be the cause of its lead character's
sadism, while the utter horror of a young man's homosexuality was
linked to both pedophilia and cannibalism in the 1959filmversion
of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer. Vito Russo's com­
ments on Suddenly Last Summer are especially telling: the homo­
sexual poet
41
42
Sebastian Venable is presented as a faceless terror, a horrifying pres­
ence among normal people, like the Martians in War of the Worlds or
the creature from the black lagoon. As he slinks along the streets of
humid Spanish seacoast towns in pursuit of boys ("famished for the
dark ones"), Sebastian's coattail or elbow occasionally intrudes into
the frame at moments of intense emotion. He comes at us in sections,
scaring us a little at a time, like a movie monster too horrible to be
shown all at once. '
4
Parker Tyler has also commented upon Suddenly Last Summer's use
of the monster movie's visual tropes, and laments the fact that
the audience never gets to see Sebastian or his monstrous activi­
ties: "Even Creature Features give us a few good nips at skull­
duggery ..."
In many films of this period, young men were at risk from deviant
44
Pods, pederasts and perverts
139
sexual feelings. Even as the Production Code authorities attempted
to expurgate "homosexuality" per se from the film version of Tea
and Sympathy
(1956) - focusing instead on the euphemism of its
young protagonist's effeminacy - this move fooled few spectators
and simultaneously reinforced a stereotypical (and reassuring) blur­
ring of effeminacy and male homosexuality. And, while these con­
cerns over the proper gendering of youth ostensibly "applied to
women as much as men ... men were constructed as the main focus
of anxiety. The worry was whether boys would become successful,
mature, adult males; the possibility that they might turn out queer
was one of the dangers along the way." Films such as Tea and Sym­
pathy, Rebel Without a Cause, and the German import The Third
Sex repeatedly asserted that a good heterosexual liaison was all that
was required to "straighten out" a "sexually confused" young man.
The idea of "saving" young men from their homosexual tendencies
was a popular one in both scientific and lay circles. Time argued that
psychiatric treatment was best for these troubled boys: "If the boy
is in his early teens and not set in his ways, a few hours of give and
take interviews may suffice." '' Even men's magazines such as Chal­
lenge occasionally broached the subject. In a 1959 article by
"Shailer Upton Lawton, Consulting Psychiatrist," the author notes
that "Perhaps nothing terrifies a man more than the secret worry
that he may be a homosexual. This worry is usually based on one or
two homosexual experiences indulged in between the ages of 12
and 15, when more than 27 per cent of boys have such contacts."
The doctor recounts a worried patient's fears and how he soothed
them: "I made him understand that no man can be classified as a
homosexual simply because he has had such an experience in youth,
as long as his desires are at present directed toward women."
Implicit in these films and essays is the idea that "normal" young
men (who engage in "normal" homosexual experimentation during
adolescence) would only turn into "true" homosexuals if older
"true" homosexuals continued to lead them astray. This homosexu­
ality-as-seductive-pederasty idea was becoming increasingly preva­
lent during the post-war period. Famous tennis champion "Big Bill"
Tilden had been convicted of sex with teenage boys repeatedly in
the late 1940s, and in Seduction of the Innocent, his popular attack
on comic books, author and psychiatrist Fredric Werthem main­
tained that Batman and Robin were role-modeling homosexuality
for young boys. Even the diminutive hero of Richard Matheson's
45
4
47
48
140
Monsters in the closet
famous science fiction novel The Shrinking Man finds himself the
recipient of a drunken homosexual's attentions. Perhaps most
egregiously, in 1955 a homosexual scandal erupted in Boise, Idaho,
and shocked the nation with its allegations of homosexual under­
worlds soliciting teenage boys for sex. Editorials with titles such as
"Crush the Monster" appeared in the Idaho Daily Statesman,™ and
the story quickly spread to newspapers across the country. Time
reported that Boise, "usually thought of as a boisterous, rollicking,
he-man's town ... had sheltered a widespread homosexual under­
world that involved some of Boise's most prominent men and had
preyed on hundreds of teen-age boys for the past decade. " Several
of the older men involved were sentenced to prison for long jail
terms and one man was sentenced to life; his sentence was later
reduced. In the words of one of these men:
49
S1
There was a hysteria in Boise about young teen-age boys being
seduced by older men; that's what they conveyed to the public. The
city paper, The Idaho Daily Statesman, embellished on this. It kept
emphasizing older men and young boys; it kept saying there was a sex
ring of older men who were enticing these boys. There was no such
thing; no such ring existed. The boys who were arrested in Boise all
knew exactly what they were doing."
Time magazine reported that the boys did "it" for the money, and
while undoubtedly some of them did, the possibility that some of
these teenagers might have had sex for the pleasure of it cannot be
countenanced by the magazine. The essay concludes by noting that
Boise's city government was helping the boys by getting them afterschool jobs and special sessions with psychiatrists imported from
Denver.
As a response to these new perceptions, short educational films
such as Boys Beware were made by police departments and shown
in schools. Boys Beware (c. 1958) comprises four vignettes in which
older, slightly balding men entice pubescent boys back to their
apartments. (Ironically, the police officer in the film is also an older,
slightly balding man.) The voice-over tells us that two boys ended
up in custody with their "sick ... mentally ill... contagious" attack­
ers, that one boy escaped, and that one was murdered. Homosexu­
ality as pederasty was also a cornerstone of Dr Edmund Bergler's
rantings (again, italics are his): "The fight is for the young
generation
of homosexuals,
for the individual who has not yet completely fallen
Pods, pederasts and perverts
141
5
under the spell of homosexuality's alleged 'glamor.'" ' Like today's
fundamentalist Christian activists, Bergler blames the media for dis­
seminating too tolerant a picture of homosexuality and thereby
putting children at risk:
This cannot be too strongly stressed: The conspiracy of silence which
surrounds homosexuality, and is - with negligible exceptions - main­
tained by the daily press, magazines, radio, television, has the end
effect of promoting homosexuality. If information is unavailable, if
false statistics are left uncontradicted, if new recruits are not warned
by dissemination of the fact that homosexuality is but a disease, the
confirmed homosexual is presented with a clear field for his opera­
tions - and your teen-age children may be the victims.
54
The general conflation of homosexuality, communism, and child
molestation during this period might best be attested to by an adver­
tisement for the International Correspondence Schools which
appeared regularly in the pulpy men's magazines of the era. At the
top of the full-page ad is a picture of a 30-something man crouch­
ing next to a small boy. The man has his arm around the boy, and
together they hold a watering hose at waist-level. A bold-face cap­
tion captures the readers' attention with the proclamation: "This
man is a 'security risk'!" The text continues:
55
Age, 2 9 . Married. Two children. High school education. Active in
local lodge, church, veterans' organization. Employed by large manu­
facturing concern. Earns $82 a week.
Sounds like an average Joe. And he is. Too average!
Yet although both the photograph and the text activate signifiers of
invisible communism and homosexual pederasty, this "average Joe"
turns out not to be a child-molesting queer, but rather a simple
wage-earner, who is berated by the advertisement for not having a
high-paying job. Upon reading further, we discover that he is not a
security risk to the government, but to his own family. It is evident
that good Americans are neither communist nor homosexual; how­
ever, the advertisement makes it clear that poor-wage earners are
also suspect.
The processes of proper maturation for teenage boys were also
addressed during this era in a spate of juvenile delinquency films
which arose to address the various more concrete dangers that
youth might encounter (violence, gangs, anti-social and communist
142
Monsters in the closet
agitators), while its subspecies the teenage monster movie began
specifically to address in metaphoric terms the kinds of dangers that
more mainstream films could not. In his book Teenagers and Teenpics, Thomas Doherty argues that the "horror teenpics" (or
"weirdies", as the Hollywood industry referred to them) became
popular after the very successful US release of Hammer Films' Curse
of Frankenstein
in 1957. Itself a rather homoerotic retelling of the
Frankenstein myth, Curse of Frankenstein
began a successful horror
film cycle which Hammer would exploit well into the 1970s. Arriv­
ing from the UK the same year as the Wolfenden Report, it is hard
not to understand it as bringing a taint of explicit and eroticized
British (homo)sexuality to US horror film audiences. Indeed, as
Doherty notes, "sex is the open secret of every weirdie, the intrin­
sic perversity, or weirdness, of a ripe desire for sexual congress min­
gled with a virginal dread of closure.""
Whereas Tea and Sympathy
had to suggest homosexuality
through the metaphor of effeminacy, the late 1950s teenage mon­
ster films suggested a homosexual threat through the medium of
monsters. The monster as sexualized threat to children or teenagers
(as opposed to a sexualized threat directed at a heterosexual couple)
was becoming more manifest in the genre as the years went by.
Upon its initial release, Frankenstein
(1931) had censored its infa­
mous child murder, although the off-screen suggestion of what the
monster actually did to Little Maria was perhaps worse than the cut
footage (he gently tosses her into the water, hoping she will float
like the other "flowers"). Yet during the film's successful re-release
seven years later (amidst a media flurry of "sex crime" stories), this
aspect of the film was ballyhooed in a theatrical trailer that showed
the monster and Little Maria walking hand-in-hand while the nar­
ration described "a monster turned loose ... to prey upon the inno­
cence of children." Son of Frankenstein's
monster menaced the
Baron's toddler son on screen in 1939, and the Son of Dracula killed
a small boy in 1943. That same year, in a narrative situation almost
exactly like those of the teenage monster films released fifteen years
later, George Zucco's mad scientist character turned a young male
student into The Mad Ghoul via strange medical experiments. Even
the creatures in the 1950s monster invasion films were more ready
than not to menace children: Them's giant ants badly traumatize a
little girl, while Invaders from Mars (1953) placed a small boy at the
center of its narrative. However, while most of these younger chil-
Pods, pederasts and perverts
143
dren were depicted as wholly innocent victims, the teenage monster
movies made at American International Pictures in the late 1950s
usually suggested that there was something wrong with these young
people in the first place, much as David Bruce in The Mad Ghoul
was represented as somehow "not quite right" even before his trans­
formation into monster queer. And perhaps the most famous horror
film of this period, and certainly one of the most influential films
ever made, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) forever etched into its
audiences' minds an almost textbook example of a stereotypical
teenage homosexual (complete with a harsh overbearing mother
and absent father) - not as a young man who desires other men, but
as a knife-wielding, cross-dressing, psychopathic murderer.
The studio responsible for the 1950s teenage monster movie
craze was American International Pictures." Founded as a small dis­
tribution company in 1954 by Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H.
Nicholson, AIP quickly moved into film production when they hit
upon a successful formula: producing genre films so cheaply that
they would almost invariably turn a profit. Often starting with an
exploitable film title and a flashy advertising campaign (as had Val
Lewton's RKO horror film unit), scripts were then written to flesh
out the outre premises and quickly filmed by directors such as Roger
Corman and Herbert L. Strock. However, whereas Lewton's films
artfully surpassed the promise of their cheesey titles, AIP's horror
films rarely did. Films such as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1956),
It Conquered
the World (1956), and Viking Women and the Sea Ser­
pent (1957) reveled in the pleasures of rubber-suited monsters and
scantily-clad women. Teenage audiences, which were just beginning
to be courted by the major Hollywood studios, were targeted
directly by AIP with films such as Rock All Night (1956), Teenage
Doll (1957), and High School Big Shot (1958). Thus it is perhaps not
surprising that AIP, itself something of a queerly constituted film
production company (compared to the decorum and propriety of
Hollywood's major studios), would soon hybridize both genres into
the teenage monster movie.
Beginning with the phenomenal box office success of I Was a
Teenage Werewolf in 1957, AIP (and other smaller production com­
panies) quickly churned out similar entries including J Was a
Teenage Frankenstein
(1957), Teenage Caveman
(1958), Teenage
Monster (1957), Teenage Zombies
(1957), and Teenagers
from
Outer Space (1959). In many of these films, adult scientists and
Monsters in the closet
144
teachers prey upon same-sex teenagers and attempt to turn them
into monsters, suggesting a ghoulish analog to Dr Edmund Bergler's
assertion that Kinsey's researches had legitimated and thus fueled
an increase in homosexual behavior. This is an almost complete
inversion of the formula of the World War II era horror film,
wherein scientists were (at least ostensibly) trying to help and/or
cure the monster queer. Specifically, AIP's teenage monster movies
can be understood as metaphoric reworkings of the increasingly
common idea that older homosexuals were out to recruit young
people into their ranks. As Dr Bergler had put it, the rising plague
of homosexuality in 1950s USA was partly due to the fact that
"there has been a new type of recruit observable in the last few
years. These are youngsters in their late teens or early twenties,
'borderline' homosexuals in whom the decision 'to be or not to be'
a homosexual hangs in the balance." The German film The Third
Sex dramatized this formula almost exactly - without the camou­
flage of monsters - and subsequently it could not be widely distrib­
uted under the stipulations of the Production Code. In it, young
men are seen to fall under the sway of older homosexual men who
like modern art, musique concrete,
and demonstrations of GrecoRoman wrestling. As in previous decades, the modernist impulse is
indicative of the homosexuals' depravity, but here it is also used as
a sort of recruiting tool, luring young men of artistic temperament
into the homosexual world.
In I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
teenager Michael Landon falls
under the hypnotic sway of scientist Whit Bissell. True to generic
imperatives, Bissell and his male assistant comprise a queer mad sci­
entist couple, and together they work out their nefarious deeds
through the body of the young protagonist. Teenage Werewolf also
taps into a psychoanalytic model of homosexuality when it links
Michael Landon's psychological condition to his bestial, primordial
urges. Landon first comes to Bissell in order to learn to control his
violent urges, and Bissell promptly suggests a course of regressive
hypnotherapy. Some of the period's psychoanalytic treatment
models for homosexuality were based on the belief that via thera­
peutic regression to an earlier stage of development, the conflict
responsible for the subject's homosexuality could be isolated,
understood, and dismantled. This would then "cure" the homosex­
ual, or at least facilitate the subsequent restructuring of his/her
psyche towards a heterosexual alignment. ' In the monster movie
58
5 1
Pods, pederasts and perverts
145
Plate 16 Older male couples preyed upon t e e n a g e boys in many 1950s
monster movies. In / Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Whit Bissell puts the
moves on Michael Landon and turns him into a monster
generically, and in Teenage Werewolf
specifically, such regression to
immature stages o f psychosexual development more often than not
leads to some form o f c o n c o m i t a n t bestial devolution, at which
point the monster queer invariably escapes the control o f the doctor
and runs amok. Inherent in both the werewolf myth and the
Jekyll/Hyde story, this concept o f bestial regression can also be
found in other 1 9 5 0 s monster movies such as The Neanderthal
Man
( 1 9 5 3 ) and Monster of the Campus ( 1 9 5 8 ) .
In most of the teenage monster movies, even though the teenage
character is figured as the monster, s/he is much more humanized
and likable than the older homosexual scientist couple, w h o are
constructed in the films as drawing the impressionable youths into
their world o f terror. Indeed, part o f the appeal o f the teenage mon­
ster movie to its primarily youthful audience was and is its deliber­
ate linkage o f monster and teenager: the angst o f the adolescent
expresses itself through monstrous signifiers as easily as does that o f
the homosexual. Just as a queer spectator might revel in the joys o f
monstrous rampages that overthrow heterocentrist presumption, so
146
Monsters in the closet
might teenagers enjoy a monster of their very own, one given to
venting passions both sexual and violent, especially when the
teenage monster's rages are directed against adult authority figures.
The subjectivity implied by the (soon to be) formulaic "7 Was a ..."
title suggests that audience identification was shifting (or had
already shifted) away from the "normals" towards that of the mon­
ster. It also suggests other properties such as 7 Was a
Communist
for the FBI (1951) or the television show 7 Led Three
Lives
(1953-1956), both of which purported to deliver subjective experi­
ences of how political deviants operated. However, while those
properties were understood by most spectators to be rabidly anticommunist and pro-hetero-capitalist, 7 Was a Teenage
Werewolf
(and many of its less-monstrous ilk) frightened a lot of civic-minded
adults, who called for their censorship. Arguing (perhaps rightly)
that these teenage exploitation movies were anti-social, their cen­
sorship campaigns echoed those of Edmund Bergler (or Fredric
Werthem) when they asserted that the media was "glamorizing" and
legitimating homosexuality.
Yet, aside from the subversive pleasures the teenage monster
movie may have held for its younger audiences, these films contin­
ued to use homosexual connotation in fairly straightforward and
traditional ways - to make their older villainous authority figures
that much more unappealing. In Teenage Frankenstein,
the mad sci­
entist couple is tinged with queerness from the outset. When
Frankenstein "proposes" to "close ally and fellow-worker" Dr Karlton his plan to create life, he defends it as "simply an intelligent
adaptation of the principle of selective breeding. After all, if you
breed morons you beget morons, but when brilliant people mate
..." Here he looks at Karlton and the implication is perfectly queer:
two such brilliant scientists should be able to create homosexually a
simply fabulous young man. Frankenstein is also something of a
chicken hawk, insisting that his newly made man be strong and
youthful (he also wants it to call him "Sir"). "I shall use only the
ingredients of youth! ... If I can create - out of different parts - a
youth whom I shall instruct and control, I'll prove that only in
youth is there any hope for the salvation of mankind." When he
reads of a tragic airplane crash that took the lives of a track team,
Frankenstein sighs deeply and waxes rhapsodically: "All those fine
young athletic bodies! All those hours of training for strength,
speed, endurance!" Once the monster (Gary Conway) is assembled
60
Pods, pederasts and perverts
147
Plate 17 Gary C o n w a y as he a p p e a r e d in a 1950s physique m a g a z i n e .
C o n w a y ' s body w a s similarly o b j e c t i f i e d t h r o u g h o u t / Was a Teenage
Frankenstein (1958)
and awakened, Frankenstein buys him a set o f barbells ("our main
concern is with your physique") and watches eagerly as the monster
develops his form through bare-chested workouts. Indeed, the
teenage monster's workout regimen would n o t have appeared out
of place in the pages o f Physique Pictorial or Tomorrow's
Man.
Obligatorily, Dr Frankenstein is given a heterosexual love interest,
a nurse/secretary named Margaret, whose unhappy lot it is to answer
the phones and see to it that Frankenstein is not disturbed; as he tells
her (standing in front o f a large vase o f flowers), "I want to see no
one but my assistant, Dr Karlton." Eventually, she discovers
Frankenstein's secret by entering the locked laboratory and opening
up the slab-drawer upon which the monster rests. H e becomes erect
- sitting up into the camera for a full " s h o c k " close-up - and M a r ­
garet runs away. Nonetheless, the very n e x t day she is picking out
engagement rings, although Frankenstein now orders his monster to
kill her. M u c h is made o f the fact that the monster cannot pass in
normal society ("walk among people") until the doctor finds him a
pleasing face to wear. Indeed, it has been his goal to "bring forth a
perfectly normal human being - able to walk among normal people
undetected." This suggests the phenomenon o f queers passing as
Monsters in the closet
148
straight (wearing a normal face), and the care with which this must
be done. "Tonight I'm going to lead you out of this darkness. We'll
go among people - discreetly of course - and you'll be able to pick
the face that pleases you." Frankenstein and the monster go to the
local Lover's Lane (!) and spot a face they like, one that is "rather
handsome ... even drugged with passion, it has brightness, intelli­
gence." Once he gets his new face, the teenage monster turns into a
self-absorbed narcissist: he spends the rest of the film gazing lovingly
into his hand-mirror. But Frankenstein doesn't seem to mind, glad
that his "quite, quite handsome" boy is happy.
Just what might Dr Frankenstein want from his handsome boy,
now that he is all pumped up and ready to go? Sadly, the film cannot
divulge that information, and the spectator is left to wonder. A spec­
tator who regularly paged through the muscle magazines, or even
Adventure - The Man's Magazine of Exciting Fiction and Fact, how­
ever, might have had some idea, especially if he had read an article
entitled "We Still Have Male Sex Slaves" published the same year
Teenage Frankestein was released. ' The essay mostly focuses on his­
torical harems of male eunuchs in exotic foreign lands, yet the
accompanying photograph is right out of homophobic Middle
America, showing a shirtless white boy standing upon an auctionblock, head bent down submissively, while a middle-aged man in
slacks and cigarette gestures with his free hand in the direction of
the boy's crotch. The tone of the article is shocked and condemna­
tory, although it does tell the reader who might be interested where
to find such sex for sale, reluctantly adding that "Male prostitutes
are available in many European cities, such as Berlin and London.
In both Germany and England professional homosexuals have
reached alarming numbers." But apparently this sort of thing does­
n't happen in the USA - according to the text - although the pho­
tograph seems to suggest otherwise.
Sharing a double bill with Teenage Frankenstein
was Blood of
Dracula, AIP's lesbian entry in the subgenre of teenage monster
films. The film is set in an all-girl boarding school (which just hap­
pens to be run by a Mrs Thoxndyke)
and brings together many dif­
ferent strands of US post-war culture, especially fears of nuclear
technology/holocaust, the rising power of the young, and the hint
of forbidden sexuality. While the queer sexual metaphor for vam­
pirism lurks at the manifest edges of the film, on a more latent level
the film is filled with vaginal symbols such as Miss Branding's
6
149
Pods, pederasts and perverts
amulet (her supposed connection to Dracula), or the final image of
Miss Branding's charred notebook, placed within the
mise-en-scène
at a young girl's waist level and looking suspiciously like a charred
and desiccated womb. Actually, Blood of Dracula has very little to
do with Dracula per se, and the word is even used as a common
noun and not a personal name ("It looks like she was bitten by a
Dracula"); this semantic blurring might indicate that for some producers and audiences at this time, "Dracula" had become synonymous with "vampire," or some other deviant sexual being.
Located historically between Dracula's
Daughter
in the 1930s
and the more explicit lesbian vampire boom of the early 1970s,
Blood of Dracula remains a little-known variation on the lesbian
vampire theme, but one which fits within the homosexuality-aspederasty model of the era. The story revolves around an evil blackrobed science teacher named Miss Branding who tries to hypnotize
teenage girls as part of her perverse experiments. In an amazing bit
of (il)logic, Miss Branding is conducting experiments that will
unleash the destructive force in each and every one of us (again
through hypnotic regression), thereby making the world safe from
nuclear aggression. For her work, Miss Branding needs a special
kind of subject, "a special kind of girl - with special potentials ... I
must find someone with the natural fire - explosiveness - close to
the surface - a disturbed girl perhaps, but with a will of her own."
According to these films, young people that are troubled to begin
with - Nancy comes from a broken home, Michael Landon's
Teenage Werewolf \s a "hothead" unable to control his temper - are
especially vulnerable to the lures and promises of older same-sex
adults, whether they be teachers or doctors. This idea was also part
of the cultural construction of "real-life" homosexuality - as Time
opined in 1953, homosexuality is "commonest in families that have
been disrupted by the death of one parent, by divorce or separation,
or by constant bickering between husband and wife." In Blood of
Dracula, Nancy's mother has died and her father has remarried too
quickly, so it is not all that surprising when Nancy reverts to a hairy
bestial vampire and begins to kill at Miss Branding's command. Still,
she is confused during her (normal) waking hours, and asks Miss
Branding for help: "Who am I? What am I doing? I'm living a nightmare! A horrible urge comes over me. I feel a strength that's almost
frightening ... I must do something awful, but when I try to remember, all I can see is you!"
62
Monsters in the closet
150
As this one lesbian vampire film attests (compared to the handful
of queer male monster movies), lesbianism was far less prominent
in the popular culture of the 1950s than was male homosexuality. It
was not until 1959 that "the first published report of the psycho­
analysis of a Lesbian" was reviewed in Newsweek
magazine. Its
author, Dr Richard C. Robertiello, asserted the standard psychiatric
line: homosexuality is "a symptom of an emotional illness" brought
on by anxieties resulting from "damaging childhood experiences."
The book, and the review, also promulgate the active/passive nature
of homosexual relationships and the efficacy of cure. "Under psy­
choanalysis, [lesbian subject] Connie revealed through interpreta­
tion of her dreams and through free association, the well-known
Freudian pattern of an unresolved Oedipal conflict. Her basic wish
was for a man's love." Blood of Dracula also pits Nancy's "basic"
desire for her boyfriend Glenn against the unnatural force
unleashed by Miss Branding. Once tainted by Miss Branding's manhating hypno-lesbianism, Nancy can no longer relate to Glenn and
complains to Miss Branding that "what I feel for Glenn you'll never
understand ... I know who you are and I know what you've done to
me. When I was in his arms, instead of feeling what I should, I
almost killed him!" Ultimately, both Nancy and Miss Branding are
destroyed by their own folly, and the final lines of the film state in
generic aphorism that "There is a power greater than science that
rules the earth, and those who twist and pervert knowledge for evil
only work out their own destruction." While the Production Code
Administration probably applauded that sentiment, they missed
altogether the lesbian implications of the film. They were chiefly
bothered by the fact that the film discussed evolution and therefore
"tend[ed] to give credence to an erroneous philosophy of the origin
of human life."
The film from this series that most clearly depicts a pedophilic
homosexual villain is AIP's How To Make a Monster,
released in
1958 on the top half of a double bill with Roger Corman's Teenage
Caveman. How to Make a Monster was an obvious attempt to cash
in on the popularity of I Was a Teenage Werewolf
and / Was a
Teenage Frankenstein;
it purports to be a realistic "behind the
scenes" story of the make-up artist responsible for bringing the
Teenage Werewolf and Teenage Frankenstein to the screen. What is
remarkable about How To Make a Monster,
however, is the wide
range of signifieds to which the signifier "monster" becomes
61
64
Pods, pederasts and perverts
151
attached, and the complexity with which it manipulates these signi­
fiers. Monstrosity is again used traditionally to depict the film's vil­
lains as queer. However, through its self-reflexivity and its shifting
processes o f signification, the t e x t also acknowledges a psychoana­
lytic model underlying the act o f making a monster queer, and the
ideological systems at w o r k within both the H o l l y w o o d industry
and culture-at-large which simultaneously create and demonize the
monster queer. Ultimately, the film hints at the revolutionary poten­
tial o f "making monsters" against those same ideological forces.
In the film, Pete, the make-up man, and his assistant Rivero are
coded from the outset as being a queer mad scientist couple, c o m ­
plete with its requisite butch/femme stereotyping. T h e subservient
Rivero coos about Pete: " H e ' s the greatest . . . Always the master's
touch . . . For twenty-five years he's been the master!" Pete and
Rivero are older men w h o "prey" upon teenage boys. In this
respect, Pete's making-up o f teenage monster stars Tony and Larry
can be read as an exploitative seduction - even rape - as well as fem­
inization. Breathing heavily, Pete strokes their brows, paints their
Plate 18 In this publicity still from How To Make a Monster (1959), Pete and
his teenage monsters share an intimate moment
152
Monsters in the closet
faces, and makes them into monsters. Larry confesses that "I'd hate
to have my girlfriend see me
not necessarily because she would
be frightened by his make-up, but because Larry now has something
to be ashamed of - he has been forced from the dominant (hetero­
sexual) order back into a regressive monstrous non-heterosexual
state. Pete's desire to take photographs of his creations creates a fris­
son of voyeuristic pederasty that cannot be much more plainly
marked: while looking over a stack of photos, Pete says "I want to
take home some pictures of these boys - 1 like to study them. I enjoy
working with these teenagers. They've got spirit and they co­
operate ... they put themselves into your hands." Pete and especially
Rivero are characterized as childlike and neurotic. Their world is
visual, concerned with appearances, surfaces, id-creatures, and a
traditionally feminine profession; heterosexuality has not yet been
inscribed. Later in the film the police will tell them, "Look We know you live in a world of make-believe. All right - Come out
of it!" However, whereas Rivero is firmly situated in this preheterosexualized world (given all of the signifiers of effeminate
homosexuality), Pete (the "active" half of the couple) proves him­
self to have a predatory power over both Rivero and his teenage
victims.
An early scene follows Pete and Larry as they walk arm-in-arm
from the make-up lab to the set. Pete constantly touches and
retouches his creation Larry/Werewolf; as a newly born monster
queer, Larry is both Pete's possession and sexual object. The two
pass before and significantly ignore a "cheesecake" actress, a studio
tour (reflecting Mr and Mrs Middle America taking in the fantastic
sights of the movie world), and a pair of male actors outfitted as
underwater explorers (who could be the homoerotic male leads of
a Creature from the Black Lagoon-type
movie). The "beefcake" of
the divers is lingered over much more than the "cheesecake" of the
female starlet, and the divers seem to recognize some familiar aspect
in the queer duo of Pete and Larry/Werewolf. "Well, at least we look
normal,"
one remarks, to which the other replies, putting on his
face mask, "Yeah, don't we, though?" The image of the homoerotic
divers serves as a visual metaphor for Pete and Larry/Werewolf,
while their exchange explicitly acknowledges the phenomenon of
"invisible" homosexuals passing for straight. Once on the set,
Larry/Werewolf is introduced to an already made-up Tony/Franken­
stein, a muscular young actor in a tight fitting T-shirt. The director
Pods, pederasts and perverts
153
is anxious to get them both on the set to stage his "Battle of the
Monsters." The theme of feminization and objectification of the
queer monster boys is again sounded when the director tells Pete, "I
want to see how these two beauties look together." As the "Battle of
the Monsters" commences and the two lock arms in a fierce
embrace, the scene abruptly cuts to Pete and Rivero. The metaphor
in the cut is obvious: Pete and Rivero are monsters, too; though
they are not wearing make-up (not being obviously flamboyantly
gay), there is something "monstrous" about them. The film's narra­
tive engine and ideological counterpoint enters the film at this
point, when two studio executives arrive to tell Pete that they have
just taken over the studio and will no longer be needing his services.
"Monsters are finished," they tell him. "People want to hear music,
they want to laugh, they want to see pretty girls." What they do not
want to see, the executives imply, is monstrous metaphors for ear­
lier stages of psychic development and/or alternative lifestyles.
Pete rises to the occasion in a self-reflexive defense of the horror
film, acknowledging that its appeal lies in regression to earlier stages
of development (primary, visual, pre-heterosexual) in order to
experience the thrill of the monstrous: "Even psychiatrists say that
in all these monster pictures there's not only entertainment, but for
some people, therapy. Well, you know we never get over our child­
hood fear of the sinister - the terrifying faces we see in nightmares
- well, through these pictures we can live out our hidden fears. It
helps." As agents of the corporate patriarchy, this is the last thing
that the studio executives want to hear. Heterocentrist institutions
maintain their power through fear, intimidation, and the repression
of monstrously queer impulses that horror films attempt to derepress and celebrate. The scene explicitly links the patriarchal
order with capitalism, and Pete and his monstrous world as oppos­
ing it. As Pete turns down the offer of severance pay, one of the
studio executives clucks "Turn down money - maybe you've been
living too long with monsters." Pete walks through a darkened
sound stage and decides what he must do, coming to rest in front of
posters for I Was a Teenage Frnkenstein and I Was a Teenage Were­
wolf. Curiously, even as the film's visuals work to blatantly plug
those films, the character Pete is decrying money-grubbing studio
executives. This contradiction - between the reality of why How To
Make a Monster was made (to cash in on the financial success of the
above two films) and Pete's anti-capitalist observations - suggests a
154
Monsters in the closet
Marxist critique and raises a systemic tension that the film will
finally be unable to resolve.
Pete makes a decision to exact revenge upon the studio executives, revealing yet another signified of "monster-making." Up until
this point in the film, the title has referred to Pete's activity in
making-up actors for monster movies, and in seducing nominally
straight young men into queerly-tinged relations. Upon Pete's decision to plot revenge, he becomes a new monster - one formed from
the direct effects of the prevailing system (the executives closing
down the dream factory). According to this particular chain of signification, it is the prevailing system that "makes monsters" - as in
Robin Wood's argument, that which is repressed (in this case the
Hollywood monster movie) must eventually return. However, these
particular monsters are not going to be of the Imaginary/Makebelieve/Movie/Sexuality kind; they are going to be deadly. Back in
the make-up lab, Pete tells Rivero of his plan to control the young
actors through a special novocaine-based make-up: "Now - this
enters the pores and paralyzes the will. It will have the same effect
chemically as a surgical prefrontal lobotomy. It blocks the nerve
synapses. It makes the subject passive - obedient to my will." The
next day Pete applies the make-up to Larry. Along with hypnosis,
the make-up transformation effects a complete regression for Larry:
he is pulled back from the heterosexual order and becomes a monster queer. The action then switches to a screening room where
studio executive Nixon (a deliberate linkage of the real Richard M.
with the industrial patriarchy?) sits watching the rushes for the
"Battle of the Monsters." In a very explicitly constructed sequence,
the werewolf on the screen is replaced by a "real-life" werewolf one that Nixon and his backers have been complicitous in making.
Pete's harmless movie monsters have now become violent killers as
a direct result of the dominant system's attempt to repress them.
A later sequence in the police station depicts a confrontation
between a violent patriarchy and its passive victims. The police officers are brutish, overbearing, and unappealing; positioned within
the mise-en-scène as surrounding and dominating, they brusquely
interrogate and intimidate their suspects. A black woman's eye-witness account of murder is treated with skepticism, and the police are
condescending towards an old night-watchman who is hard of hearing. Finally, they browbeat Rivero and almost succeed in cracking
him before Pete intervenes:
Pods, pederasts and perverts
PETE:
COP:
RIVERO:
COP:
RIVERO:
155
He told you he was only my assistant.
You shut up and let him talk for himself, [lewdly] Sure he's
your assistant - we know that - how far does his assistance
go? [to Rivero] Who do you live with?
I live alone ...
Ever been married?
No.
Clearly the cops are gay-baiting their suspects: the homosexuality
implied in the insinuating question "How far does his assistance
go?" and the focus on Rivero's unmarried status indicate that the
police suspect some form of sexual deviancy. Yet once Pete and
Rivero have left the interrogation, the cops seemingly revert to con­
fused schoolboys:
COP 1:
COP 2:
COP 1:
Something weird about that old Pete.
And his assistant Rivero.
Maybe that's what comes from spending all of your adult
life with monsters.
The policemen and the film itself cannot acknowledge homosexual­
ity openly. If that were to happen socially, the tools of gay-baiting,
blackmail, and coercion that the closet mentality fosters would no
longer be of use as political weapons.
By the climax of the film, Pete has degenerated into a glassy-eyed
and obsessed gothic hero and the boys have become the traditional
objectified and helpless damsels in distress. Pete shows the boys his
shrine - the gallery of his greatest masks and make-ups from past
films. Pete glides about the room, lighting candles, intoning spookily about "My family - my children - I'm devoted to them. I've
arranged them here with great care - as you see. Later I'll tell you
their history - how each one came about. But now let's just look at
them. This room is like a cathedral for me." Even Rivero realizes
that Pete has lost control, but he still stands by his man: "You young
men should feel honored!" he says, beaming all the while. Larry and
Tony realize that they are at the mercy of a madman who wants to
possess them more fully - in this case make life masks of them for
his shrine. Tony admits that something is very wrong: "Old Pete's
got ways about him. I don't know - strange ways. Like when he was
making me up for the picture - putting on the foundation cream."
The boys suspect Pete of some perversity but they cannot speak the
terrible truth either.
156
Monsters in the closet
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Rivero attempts to tell Pete that he
thinks Pete has made a mistake in bringing the boys to his home.
Pete cannot accept Rivero's taking an active (vocal) role in the pro­
ceedings and stabs Rivero in the belly with a knife, asserting his
dominance within the active/passive nature of their relationship.
The boys are clearly spooked by all of this and make feeble excuses:
"Larry and me have sort of a dinner date." (With each other? Have
they been converted?) "We don't feel quite right in here ... Now
look Pete - you did something to us ... We don't want you or your
influence." Pete tries to explain that the three of them are all tied
together by the murders at the studio. Pete brings out a knife, and
the phallic signifier sends the boys into a homosexual panic: a strug­
gle ensues and the room is set on fire. Pete dies with his melting cre­
ations a la Vincent Price in House of Wax (1953), and the cops
break down the door and rescue/apprehend Larry and Tony. The
hard-boiled cops snarl: "Take 'em downtown!" It is unclear whether
the boys are guilty or innocent of murder, and the film is unable or
unwilling to answer that question. Either way, from the point of
view of the film's capitalist patriarchy, the boys have met with an
even worse fate - they have been tainted by the signifier "monster."
The resolution of the film, as just noted, does not offer a satisfac­
tory closure. There are too many unanswered questions, unresolved
tensions, and unspoken structuring absences. The film is unable
even to resolve its attitude towards its monster queers: Pete and
Rivero are made freakish and unappealing, yet the film explicitly
invites audience identification with them (though even more so with
the teenage monsters). It uses stereotypes and the usual coded con­
ventions to connote homosexuals as strange and monstrous, yet the
film also makes a plea for tolerance: early in the film Pete says, "The
good Lord created saints and he also created sinners. He created the
lamb and the fawn, but he also created the wolf and the jackal. Who
can judge which is the most praiseworthy?" This is before Pete
becomes a murderer, but here again the script takes pains to show
that it is the dominant order that is responsible for this transforma­
tion. There are lines in the script that decry Hollywood's capitalist
exploitation, yet the film itself is a product of that same process.
Ultimately, the film acknowledges that it is the patriarchal power
structure (both within Hollywood and society at large) that keeps
homosexuals and women in a place of submission, primarily by con­
structing their images in specific ways. As Robin Wood and other
Pods, pederasts and perverts
157
Marxist cultural theorists have argued, the "logical aim of both
movements" (Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation) is "to attack
and undermine the dominant ideological norms on all levels ... This
attack, for instance, could - indeed, should - be directed at the eco­
nomic structures of capitalism that support the norms, as they are
embodied in the structure of the film industry itself as well as in its
products." This is precisely what How To Make a Monster achieves
within its filmic narrative, even as the physical film itself is a prod­
uct of that same exploitative system. As such, the film contains
within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
65
Perverts: Ed Wood and "the twilight people"
The original story for How To Make a Monster was allegedly writ­
ten by (and then stolen from) a Hollywood "wanna-be" and mon­
ster movie aficionado named Edward D. Wood, Jr. Ed Wood was
(by most accounts) a heterosexual male transvestite whose name
today might not be remembered at all if it were not for the queerer
tastes of B-movie fans, who, over the last twenty years or so, have
patiently unearthed his work and championed it as some sort of
apex in the art of bad movie-making. Wood's best-known films, all
of which were independently financed and shot outside of the
studio system, were poverty-stricken genre epics or cheap exploita­
tion films; refracted through Wood's particular queer sensibility and
apparent lack of artistry, his films are championed by many movie
fans precisely because of their ability baldly to expose the cliches
and formulas of the Hollywood system. Almost all of Ed Wood's
work had an interesting way of conflating the monstrous and the
sexual, and while his film work traversed a number of different
genres (western, crime, teenage rebel), he is often best remembered
for his science fiction/horror films, Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan
Nine from Outer Space (1956), and Night of the Ghouls (1958). His
monstrous approach to sex became ever more apparent as his career
continued a downward spiral throughout the 1960s - from Night of
the Ghouls in 1958 (a fairly straightforward ghost-hoax narrative)
to Orgy of the Dead in 1965 (basically a "cooch" movie showcasing
a series of female strippers within a gothic frame story) to a film like
Necromania
in 1971 (an X-rated nudie with allegedly hard-core
footage shot in a coffin).
The existence of a film-maker like Ed Wood acknowledges the
66
67
Monsters in the closet
158
way that queer individuals wanting to work within the Hollywood
system often became marginalized (the lack or presence of "talent"
notwithstanding). Hollywood's closet mentality has thrived during
most of its history and is today still a potent tool working to keep
queerness invisible within mass culture. The history of Hollywood
is rife with the stories of queer individuals who were dropped from
major studios' A-lists because of their personal lives. Directors such
as James Whale and George Cukor both lost projects because of
their sexual orientation (Cukor perhaps most infamously when
Clark Gable asked that he be removed from Gone with the Wind
(1939)), while actors and actresses who didn't fit traditional notions
of "proper" gender were often relegated to playing supporting
characters, villains, or to B-movies in general. Anthony Perkins
never lost the monster queer stigmata he acquired in Psycho (even
after his heterosexual marriage), and Hurd Hatfield, who had
played Dorian Gray in 1945, similarly noted that "The film didn't
make me popular in Hollywood. It was too odd, too avant-garde,
too ahead of its time ... The decadence, the hints of bisexuality, and
so on, made me a leper. Nobody knew I had a sense of humor, and
people wouldn't even have lunch with me."' The changing modes
of movie-making throughout the 1950s and 1960s - more inde­
pendent films and films produced outside of Hollywood's sphere of
influence - frequently provided work opportunities for queer artists
who were no longer welcome within the mainstream Hollywood
industry.
Actor George Nader, who was a handsome leading man "type,"
is a good case in point: Nader was allegedly "sold out" to the
tabloids in the 1950s as a concession for their keeping silent about
Rock Hudson's closeted homosexuality. (Nader and his companion
Mark Miller were beneficiaries in Rock Hudson's will upon his
death in 1985.) Consequently, Nader spent most of his career
making films either abroad or in the backwaters of Hollywood, usu­
ally cheap monster/sci-fi films such as The Human
Duplicators
(1965), The Million Eyes of Su-Muru (1967), House of WOO Dolls
(1967), and Beyond Atlantis (1973). Yet even before his brief run as
a Universal B-player in the 1950s, Nader had starred in one of the
"classic" bad monster movies of all time, Robot Monster
(1953),
suggesting even then a tie between queer film-makers and the less
sexually-policed world of the low-budget independent or "Poverty
Row" monster movie. As Nader himself described those years, "We
8
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Pods, pederasts and perverts
lived in fear of an expose, or even one small remark, a veiled sug­
gestion that someone was homosexual. Such a remark would have
caused an earthquake at the studio." Apparently keeping a level
head about being "out," Nader made the most of his B-movie career
and even went on to write a gay robot love story, Chrome, in 1978,
which has subsequently become something of queer cult novel, yet
another example of homosexual artists using the fantastic genres as
a space in which to figure queer desire.
Ed Wood was certainly no exception to the vagaries of marginalization or monsterization. Even in his first exploitation film, the
autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953), ostensibly a story about
transvestism and transsexualism, Wood made recourse to mon­
strous signifiers, primarily through the casting of Bela Lugosi, but
also through the inclusion of iconographic horror movie elements
such as thunder and lightning, ominous musical cues, and a night­
mare sequence complete with a menacing Devil. In the broadest
sense, cross-dressing Glen's double life and his special standing as a
sexual outlaw suggest both the era's construction of the homosex­
ual and the movie monster. The monster queer theme continues
throughout the film, as when the newly born "Ann" (whose sex
change has been referred to as "the tortures of the damned") is
described by the narrator as a "happy, lovely young lady that
modern medicine and science had created almost as a Frankenstein
monster." Glen/Glenda is literally terrorized by the constructs of
masculinity and femininity in his/her nightmare, when the nursery
rhymes "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" and "What Are Little
Girls Made Of?" haunt the character in distorted, threatening
voices. Despite the liberal platitudes spoken by various characters in
the film (such as "love is the only answer" and "maybe society
should try to understand them as human beings") the linkage of
queer sexuality with the monstrous remains an indelible coloration
of the film. Indeed, even producer George Weiss recalled that there
was a problem getting some transvestites and transsexuals to appear
in and/or promote the film, "because Lugosi signified 'horror' and
any sex change, therefore, was horror. There were a lot of people
who thought the same thing."
Yet while the film might have been a very early vehicle for the idea
of "queer" as it was developed some thirty years later, it frequently
draws harsh distinctions between the types of "strange people" it
wants you to accept as "normal." Much is made of the fact that
70
71
160
Monsters in the closet
Plate 19 Bela Lugosi, as God, performs a miraculous sex change in this shot
from Ed Wood's autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953)
"Glen is engaged to be married to Barbara, a lovely, intelligent girl,"
and that really they are just "two perfectly normal people about to
be married and lead a normal life together." If transvestism and
transsexualism (which, in the world of the film, at least, unproblematically reinscribe traditional gender roles) are normal, the film
also suggests what is abnormal. Three times, like Peter denying
Christ, the film points out that "Glen is not a homosexual. Glen is
a transvestite, but he is not a homosexual. Transvestism is the term
given by medical science to those persons who desperately wish to
wear the clothing of the opposite sex, yet whose sex life in all cir­
cumstances remains quite normal."
A bit later the film actually
depicts two male homosexuals cruising under a street lamp, while
the narrator points out (in typical Wood-en dialogue) that
Glen and Glenda, like all the other Glens and Glendas, have an even
bigger problem. The homosexual, it is true, at times does adopt the
clothing or the make-up of a woman to lure members of his own sex.
But this is not so for the transvestite. The transvestite is not interested
in those of their own sex. The clothing is not worn to attract the atten-
Pods, pederasts and perverts
161
tion of their own sex but to eliminate themselves from being a
member of that sect.
Visually, Glen is shown rebuffing the advances of a homosexual man
who later appears in his/her nightmare. Finally, an exchange
between the psychiatrist and the police inspector raises the point
one final time:
INSPECTOR:
DOCTOR:
Did this Glen have any homosexual tendencies?
Absolutely not. It's very seldom that a true transvestite
does.
This information was probably news to gay transvestites, although
undoubtedly comforting to heterosexual ones.
Thus, even while attempting to create a broad coalition of queer
people (in this case transvestites and transsexuals and the people
who love them), Glen or Glenda still feels the need to construct the
male homosexual as the ultimate Other to be excluded. The male
homosexual was an easy target in 1953, since he was under siege in
Washington, DC as a threat to national security. As if acknowledg­
ing and wanting to counter those charges, should they be leveled at
himself, Wood has his narrator state that Glen is actually "more of
a credit to his community and his government" when he is allowed
to dress as a woman. The film also works to reinscribe traditional
gender roles rather than to deconstruct them, as when the newly
born "Ann" is taught how to be a woman: she learns how to do her
hair, how to walk like a woman, and what the "duty of a woman in
her sex life" is to be. (Plan Nine from Outer Space espouses a simi­
lar sexist philosophy when space alien Eros contends that women
are only "for advancing the race.") Glen or Glenda's wholly benev­
olent patriarchal figures (doctors, psychiatrists, police inspectors,
and the scientist/God figure played by Bela Lugosi) unproblematically suggest that transvestites and transsexuals can be cured of their
afflictions, either through gender realignment surgery or through
psychoanalysis. Indeed, medical science is praised throughout the
film, and is used to make a plea for tolerance and understanding of
these queer monster people, much as it had been used in some
World War II era horror films, or by the members of fledgling homo­
sexual civil rights groups in the 1950s.
Yet, one must remember that Glen or Glenda's universe is still
ruled by Bela Lugosi: God himself is a movie monster. And it is
Monsters in the closet
162
nearly impossible to discern what type of reaction Glen or Glenda
may have elicited from straight or queer audiences during its initial
releases; today the film cannot be viewed without the mitigating
positionalities of camp and the "cult of trash" which surrounds such
baroque cinematic endeavors. Precisely because of his films'
excesses and inconsistencies, many find Wood's work to be subversive of the dominant social order (not to mention Hollywood film
style). And indeed, the pleasures for queer spectators are many.
Wood never shied away from delivering beefcake in his movies - he
gets several of his stalwart heroes out of their shirts (including a preHercules
Steve Reeves in Jailbait
(1954)), and frequently Wood
himself can be discerned doubling in drag for his actresses in his
films' action sequences. Wood's films both romanticized the figure
of the mad scientist and incorporated pleas for social tolerance and
understanding, often espoused by his queer outsider figures. In
Bride of the Monster, Wood writes and directs Bela Lugosi's Dr Eric
Vornoff with a rare compassion that manages to shine through the
film's otherwise cheesey mise-en-scène. Plan Nine From
Outer
Space has been read as a bargain-basement Day the Earth
Stood
Still, complete with space aliens who attempt to subdue the earth
before it can destroy the entire universe through the construction of
a "solaronite" bomb. The fact the the male alien of Plane Nine is
named Eros (and performed by an actor credited as Dudley
Manlove) adds greatly to the campy ambience. Indeed, Wood's
stock company of actors themselves constituted a sort of protoqueer family. John "Bunny" Breckinridge, who played the Supreme
Alien Commander in Plan Nine was a pre-operative transsexual,
while the skeletal Maila "Vampira" Nurmi was a member of Hollywood's beatnik avant-garde - her friends included alleged homosexual masochist James Dean. ' Drug-addicted Bela Lugosi, fruity
swami Criswell, and the obese professional wrestler Tor Johnson
rounded out Wood's bizarre entourage. Their "real-life" relationships were most recently re-created in Tim Burton's loving film
biography Ed Wood
(1994), although the idea of a monstrously queer but loving family of Hollywood misfits didn't seem
to play any better to mainstream audiences in 1994 than it did in the
1950s.
The one film of Ed Wood's which comes closest to articulating
a theory of queer monsters is 1965's Orgy of the Dead, which Wood
did not direct but did write the screenplay for (adapting it from his
72
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74
Pods, pederasts and perverts
163
novel). In this, a writer of horror stories takes his girlfriend Shirley
out to an old cemetery in the dead of night, in order to find inspi­
ration. After a car crash they awake to find themselves captured by
a werewolf and a mummy, who bring them to a clearing wherein the
Emperor of the Night (Criswell) and his female sidekick the Black
Ghoul (Fawn Silver) are forcing dead women to perform burlesque
routines. At its most elemental level, Orgy of the Dead is a mild stag
film, a series of women stripping and dancing for the Emperor, the
camera, and the heterosexual male spectator. The Black Ghoul
watches too, but the lesbian overtones here function as they usually
do in straight male pornography - primarily as a means of further
titillating the heterosexual male spectator. As Criswell intones, "I
will watch ... a fitting climax to an evening's entertainment," the
Black Ghoul briefly menaces Shirley by ripping off her shirt and
brandishing a knife, but the normal couple is saved when the sun
suddenly rises and the ghouls turn into skeletons. Although incor­
porating lesbian titillation, the film only briefly acknowledges and
then repudiates the threat of male homosexuality, when Criswell
proclaims that "No one wishes to see a man dance!"
It is through Wood's approach to matters both monstrous and
Plate 20 S a d o - m a s o c h i s t i c lesbian t i t i l l a t i o n in t h e Ed W o o d - s c r i p t e d
monster-nudie burlesque film Orgy of the Dead (1965)
164
Monsters in the closet
sexual that a proto-queer theory might be discerned. CriswelPs
opening monologue, like the entire film, makes an explicit parallel
between people who are sexual and people who are monsters:
I am Criswell. For years I have told the almost unbelievable, related
the unreal, and shown it to be more than a fact. Now I tell a tale of
the threshold people - so astounding that some of you may faint! This
is the story of those in the twilight time - once human - now monsters
- in a void between the living and the dead. Monsters to be pitied!
Monsters to be despised! A night with ghouls - the ghouls reborn from
the innermost depths of the world.
As in most of his films, Wood here asserts the universalizing pres­
ence of queer monsters. Even when some ghosts are shown to be a
hoax, as in Night of the Ghouls, "real" monsters still get the final
word. In the world of Ed Wood's films, such things are "more than
a fact." And while a traditionally equivocal take on the morality of
monsters is herein espoused forthrightly ("Monsters to be pitied!
Monsters to be despised!"), the entire film itself seems bent on
showcasing monsters to be desired. In order to get his voyeuristic
entertainment, the presumed spectator ("Are you heterosexual...?"
asked the ad campaign, although a lesbian might certainly enjoy the
show) must enter the cemetery and participate in this gothic cere­
mony along with the other creatures of the night. Once there, s/he
might watch from a position of sadistic power (that of the Emperor
of the Night or the Black Ghoul), or from one of masochistic weak­
ness (the tied-up heterosexualized couple). Either way, the film's
raison d'etre seems to be the showcasing of popular female strippers
such as Texas Starr and Bunny Glaser. Yet why frame the strippers
in such a gothic way in the first place?
75
The prevailing social attitudes about monsters and sexuality (and
an oblique reference to male homosexuality?) are first discussed by
Shirley and Bob as they drive to the cemetery. Shirley cannot under­
stand why anyone would want to write horror stories:
BOB:
Shirley, I wrote for years without selling a single word. My
monsters have done well for me. You think I'd give that up
just so I could write about trees, or dogs, or daisies? Daisies!
That's it! I'll write about my creatures who are pushing up
the daisies. [They kiss.] Your Puritan upbringing holds you
back from my monsters but certainly doesn't hurt your art
of kissing!
Pods, pederasts and perverts
SHIRLEY:
BOB:
165
That's life. My kisses are alive.
Who's to say my monsters aren't alive?
Wood's queer monster was specifically transvestism: here he
acknowledges the role US Puritanism has had in countering matters
both sexual as well as monstrous, and he argues that his monsters
are just as much alive and valid to the real world as are heterosex­
ual kisses. In Orgy of the Dead, any and all sexuality - not just queer
sexuality - is understood by the film-makers as some sort of secret
and monstrous thing that lurks in the night, having been forced
there in the first place by a repressive social heritage. Yet, knowing
what we know about Wood himself, one can come to acknowledge
(perhaps only in retrospect) that his definition of monstrous sexual­
ity also includes that of the queer.
Actually, while most of Wood's film work remained within the
bounds of (transvestite) heterosexuality, his paperback soft-core
novels written in the late 1960s truly do run the gamut of queer sex­
uality. ' Interracial sex and social unrest were explored in Watts the Difference
(1966) and Watts - After (1967). Male and female
homosexuality were dealt with in books such as It Takes One to
Know One (1967), Night Time Lez (1968), Young, Black and Gay
(1968), and To Make a Homo (1971). In many of these books,
Wood's alter-ego character, a male transvestite with a fetish for
Angora sweaters, frequently makes an appearance, or is the center
of attention in books like Black Lace Drag (1963, also reissued as
Killer in Drag (1965) and The Twilight Land (1967)), Drag Trade
(1967), Death of a Transvestite
(1967), and Death of a
Transvestite
Hooker (1974). And no matter what the queer flavor of the day hap­
pened to be, almost all of these books describe queer sexuality with
metaphors of darkness, monsters, twilight people, the night, the
undead, the ghostly and the ghoulish. Like the gothic tropes of "The
Unspeakable" or "The Un-namable," "the love that dare not speak
its name" has often been figured within mainstream culture in spec­
tral, half-seen ways. Investigating the queerness of literary ghost sto­
ries in her book The Apparitional
Lesbian, Terry Castle notes how
this particular trope was used to sell lesbian pulp novels of the
1950s and 1960s. With titles such as Who Walk in
Darkness
(1951), Women in the Shadows (1959), The Shades of Evil (1960),
Twilight Girl (1961), Twilight Lovers (1964), The Ghosts (1965),
and Sex in the Shadows (1965), lesbian pulp novels of the era - most
7 1
77
166
Monsters in the closet
without the slightest bit of supernatural context - demonstrate the
prevailing queer-as-monster philosophy.
During the late 1960s monster-sex (both hetero- and homo- )
apparently sold well to customers who learned (or who already had
learned) to filter their sexual desires through metaphors of shameful evil and wrongdoing - while perhaps other consumers simply
appreciated the campy mise-en-scène of such endeavors. Nudie
monster flicks like Orgy of the Dead, House on Bare
Mountain,
Legend of the Witches, and The Monster of Camp Sunshine made the
rounds of late-night screenings. These films might best be be understood as a hybrid form of horror-proto-pornography, the horror
part often becoming the justification (or the socially acceptable
reason) for the on-screen nudity. Legend of the Witches, for example, was sold with two simultaneous blurbs: "Has more exposed
flesh and genitalia per square foot than virtually anything in the sex
film genre," and for a less openly sexualized spectator, "Essential
viewing for anyone committed to or interested in the occult."
Magazines such as Monster Sex Tales and Horror Sex Tales also published hundreds of monster-sex stories, many written by Ed Wood
himself. Even when published in non-horror sex magazines such as
Beavers or Hot Fun Magazine, Ed Wood's sex stories still had titles
that suggested the horror genre: "Out of the Fog," "Whorehouse
Horror," and "Dracula Revisited."
Aside from a prevailing Puritanical philosophy which figured sex
as monstrous, there is another reason for the transmogrification of
queer sexuality into violent signifiers, both at this point in time and
in other decades (for example, the sado-masochistic exploits of
Karloff and Lugosi during the 1930s.) Censorship throughout the
twentieth century has usually been more concerned with sexuality
than with violence. As such, the depiction of violence has often been
made to "stand in" for instances of unrepresentable queer sexuality.
In a slightly different context, this point has been dramatically illustrated in F. Valentine Hooven's history of the American "physique
magazines" of the 1950s and 1960s. Before 1965, full nudity was
forbidden, as was any intimation of sexual activity. Thus, when
putting two models together in compromising positions, "legitimate" (i.e. non-sexual) reasons had to be invoked as cover for the
provocative poses. As Hooven puts it: "Wrestling, wrestling,
wrestling! Dressed, undressed, or halfway in between - why were
they always wrestling? ... Because [if the models] had been embrac78
Pods, pederasts and perverts
167
ing instead of wrestling, everyone involved would have been
arrested for pornography and perversion, but since they were trying
to kill one another, it was okay." ' Sado-masochistic imagery is thus
another way to nominate homosexual desire within a social atmos­
phere that forbids its forthright depiction. The male physique films
of the 1960s (as well as the avant-garde film work of Kenneth
Anger, Jack Smith, et al.) mined these territories with a vengeance,
producing homoerotica filled with fraternity initiations, gladiators
and slaves, motorcycle rebels, and all the accouterments of sado­
masochistic leather sex. Simultaneously exploding the sexual under­
currents of homosocial male bonding rituals while eroticizing
hierarchy and violence, such representations and practices remain
topical issues in 1990s debates over queer sexuality and social vio­
lence. For the proto-porno industries of the 1950s and 1960s, how­
ever, sado-masochistic erotica (and in many cases monster-sex) was
often the only way that sex could be packaged and sold without
legal ramifications.
Ed Wood's life and work represent a unique take on America's
changing understanding of sex and the monster during the Cold
War years and after. His (and his films') status as Hollywood out­
siders allowed a more explicit take on the subject of monster queers
than those films coming out of the more regulated Hollywood
industry, although his films still did shy away from any positive
depiction of male homosexuality. While big-budgeted Hollywood
projects such as Bell, Book, and Candle (1958) or The Haunting
(1963) were using homosexual connotation to color a society of
witches and warlocks in Greenwich Village or ghostly apparitions in
a haunted house, many of Wood's exploitation films tackled the
subject of monster queers much more directly, even if they did so in
confused, confusing ways. While Cold War culture (re)criminalized the homosexual as enemy of the state, and suggested that the
movie monster was somehow irrevocably Other, Ed Wood's mad
scientists and space aliens spouted long justifications of their
"humanity," or at least their interest in saving humanity. And as his
career slid into the realm of soft-core pornography, Wood's writings
continued to explore what he apparently knew best - because he
had lived it - the connections between unorthodox sexuality and
the monstrous "twilight world of the damned." These queer people
might be "despised" and "pitied," but nonetheless they cannot be
vanquished in their entirety. As Criswell intones at the end of Orgy
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80
168
Monsters in the closet
of the Dead: "As it is with all the night people, they are destroyed by
the first rays of the sun. But upon the first appearance of the deep
shadows of the night, and when the moon is full, they will return to
rejoice in their evil lust! And take back with them any mortal who
might happen along . . . Who can say that we do not exist? Can
you?"
Notes
1 Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadel­
phia: W B. Saunders, 1948).
2 Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953).
3 See, among many others, "Medicine: Shocker on Sex," Newsweek 3 0
(1 December, 1947) 5 2 ; "Medicine: How Men Behave," Time 51 (5
January, 1948) 66; "Manners and Morals: How to Stop Gin Rummy,"
Time 5 1 (1 March, 1948) 1 6 ; "Medicine: Kinsey Speaks Out,"
Newsweek 31 (12 April, 1948) 5 1 ; and O. Spurgeon English, MD,
"What Parents Can Learn From the Kinsey Report," Parents 23 (Octo­
ber 1948) 2 6 , 144, 1 4 6 - 1 4 8 .
4 Quoted in "Medicine: Dr. Kinsey Misremembers," Time 51 (14 June,
1948) 82.
5 Quoted in "Manners and Morals: How to Stop Gin Rummy," Time 51
(1 March, 1948) 16.
6 Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1956) 7.
7 "Medicine: Curable Disease?" Time 68 (10 December, 1956) 76.
8 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 9.
9 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 3 0 0 .
10 Edmund Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals
(Paterson, NJ: Pageant
Books, Inc., 1959) viii.
11 "Medicine: Queer People," Newsweek 34 (10 October, 1949) 5 2 .
12 Robert J . Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock,
Homo­
phobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) 8.
13 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 28.
14 "Medicine: A Delicate Problem," Newsweek 43 (14 June, 1994) 100.
15 For an interesting and enlightened overview of the report and the topics
it discussed, see Eustace Chesser, Live and Let Live: The Moral of the
Wolfenden Report (London: Heinemann, 1958).
16 "Britain: Facing the Dark Facts," Newsweek 50 (16 September, 1957)
52.
Pods, pederasts and perverts
169
17 "Medicine: Lavender and Old Blues," Newsweek 54 (20 July, 1959) 82.
18 Esquire (July 1951) 134, (August 1951) 1 3 1 .
19 Advertisement for the Jowett Institute, Esquire (August 1951) 132. Also
with this special offer one could receive "Free! Jowett's Photo Book of
Famous Strong Men!"
20 The history of these magazines has recently been explored in F. Valen­
tine Hooven, III, Beefcake:
The Muscle Magazines of America
1950-1970 (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1995).
21 "A Delicate Problem," Newsweek (14 June, 1954) 9 9 .
22 See Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History, revised edition (New
York: Penguin, 1992) 4 0 6 - 4 2 0 for a first-hand account of these events,
and 420^433 for an interview with Barbara Gittings, the founder of the
New York Daughters of Bilitis.
23 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One, trans. Robert
Hurly (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 1 0 1 .
24 Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual
in America: A Subjective
Approach, second edition (New York: Castle Books, 1960) xxiii. This is
essentially the same argument put forth in Man on a Pendulum: A Case
History of an Invert, "Presented by Dr. Israel J . Gerber, A Religious
Counselor" (New York: The American Press, 1955). The author of this
latter work, now also married, tells of the homosexual lifestyle and how
he was able to overcome it through counseling with a Rabbi.
25 George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
359-360.
26 See among many others Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Inter­
pretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­
versity Press, 1987); and Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing : How
Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983).
27 Noel Carroll, "Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology
of Fantastic Beings," Film Quarterly 34:3 (Spring 1981) 2 3 . Basically
the formula is outlined as follows: onset/discovery of the "thing," the
attempt to warn the general populace, confirmation of the "thing's"
presence and further evil mayhem, and finally a confrontation with and
destruction of the "thing." See also Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of
Disaster," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Octa­
gon Books, 1986) 2 1 0 - 2 1 1 . (I have collapsed some of her observations
from the larger-budgeted color formula plot into the following sum­
mary.)
28 Annette Kuhn, "Border Crossing," Sight and Sound 2:3 (July 1992) 13.
See also Kevin Jackson, "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," Sight and
Sound 2:3 (July 1992) 1 1 - 1 2 .
2 9 Margaret Tarratt, "Monsters from the Id," Films and Filming 17:3
170
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Monsters in the closet
(December 1970) 3 8 - 4 2 and 17:4 (January 1971) 4 0 - 4 2 , reprinted in
Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986) 2 5 8 - 2 7 7 .
John D'Emilio, "The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in
Cold War America," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, eds
Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press,1989) 2 2 7 .
"Object Lesson," Time 56 (25 December, 1950) 10.
See Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Les­
bian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991)
139-187.
"Investigations: Files on Parade," Time 61 (16 February, 1953) 26.
James Connolley, "It's the Day of the Gray Flannel Fag," Sir! 15:1
(March 1958) 2 0 - 2 1 , 4 0 .
Reported in Tom Weaver, "Production Background," Creature from the
Black Lagoon Original Script Edition (Hollywood: Maclmage Filmbooks, 1992) 13.
Weaver 17.
"Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953)
28-9.
Richard Meyer, "Rock Hudson's Body," in inside/out: Lesbian Theories,
Gay Theories , ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991) 2 5 9 - 2 8 8 .
See also Steven Cohan, "Masquerading as the American Male in the
Fifties: Picnic, William Holden, and the Spectacle of Masculinity in
Hollywood Film," in Male Trouble, ed. Constance Penley and Sharon
Willis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 2 0 3 - 2 3 3 .
See Hooven 7 8 - 7 9 : "For a while, even the notoriously skittish Holly­
wood studios allowed their top talent to grace the pages of the little
physique mags ..." This phenomenon lasted until at least the mid1960s, and Hooven documents the fact with a beefcake shot of Robert
Conrad that appeared in the August 1963 issue of Physique Pictorial.
Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (New
York: Routledge, 1993) 7 3 - 7 4 .
Dyer 9 0 .
See Christopher Castiglia, "Rebel Without a Closet," in Engendering
Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, eds Joseph A. Boone
and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990) 2 0 7 - 2 2 1 for a more
detailed exploration of the homosexual currents in Rebel Without a
Cause.
Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, revised
edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)117.
Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972;
New York: Da Capo Press, 1993) 3 1 0 .
Pods, pederasts and perverts
171
45 Dyer 84.
46 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 2 9 .
47 Dr Shailer Upton Lawton, "Sex Secrets," Challenge 5:5 (August 1959)
47-18.
48 Fredric Werthem, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart &
Company, Inc., 1953) 1 8 8 - 1 9 3 .
49 Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, Inc., 1956) 5 2 - 5 7 .
50 "Crush the Monster," Idaho Daily Statesman (3 November, 1955).
51 "Crime: Idaho Underworld," Time 66 (12 December, 1955) 2 5 .
52 Anonymous account published in Katz 110. The scandal was covered in
a book-length report by John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice
and Folly in an American City (New York: Collier, 1968).
53 Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals 2 4 4 .
54 Bergler, One Thousand Homosexuals 2 4 9 .
55 True War 2:2 (January 1958) 3.
56 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of Ameri­
can Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988) 147.
57 For background information on the studio and its productions, see
Mark Thomas McGee, Fast and Furious: The Story of American Inter­
national Pictures (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1984)
and Robert L. Ottoson, American International Pictures: A Filmography
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985).
58 Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? 8.
59 The presuppositions of this psychoanalytic model - that homosexuals
were arrested at some stage of their psychosexual development - is also
allegedly responsible for their choice of children as sexual partners, or
at least their simple and child-like demeanors. This idea can also be
found in monster movie manifestations. For example, in Attack of the
Puppet People (1958), a kindly, old (but foreign and queer) doll-maker
(John Hoyt) is revealed to be an evil scientist, bent on shrinking normal
people down to his emotional, childlike level. This idea is also inherent
in Bride of Frankenstein's Dr Pretorius, who also had a collection of
such homunculi.
60 Producer Herman Cohen: "Our films concerned teenagers who had
doubts about their parents, their teachers or what-have-you. That these
doubts influence a teenager to go bad. I felt this would appeal to a
teenage audience, which it did" (reported in McGee 63).
61 Philip Cascio, "We Still Have Male Sex Slaves," Adventure 132:2 (Feb­
ruary 1957) 4 6 - 4 7 , 89.
62 "Medicine: The Hidden Problem," Time 62 (28 December, 1953) 2 8 .
63 "Medicine: These Tragic Women," Newsweek 53 (15 June, 1959)
62-63.
172
Monsters in the closet
64 MPAA files, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles.
65 Robin Wood, "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic," in Movies and
Methods Vol. 11, ed. Bill Nichols (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1985) 6 5 3 .
66 Rudolph Grey, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D.
Wood, Jr. (Los Angeles: Feral Press, 1992) 62.
67 See Harry and Michael Medved, The Golden Turkey Awards (New
York: Perigee Books, 1980); and Harry and Michael Medved, Son of
Golden Turkey Awards (New York: Villard Books, 1986).
68 Quoted in Gregory William Mank, Hollywood
Cauldron (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1994) 3 2 1 .
69 Reported in David Ragan, Who's Who in Hollywood, Volume 2, M - Z
(New York: Facts on File, 1992) 1213.
70 Quoted in Boze Hadleigh, Hollywood Babble On (Secaucus, NJ: Carol
Publishing Group, 1994) 152.
71 Grey 4 6 .
72 Danny Peary, Cult Movies ( New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1981)
266-270.
73 Discussed in Kenneth Anger, Hollywood
Babylon 11 (New York:
Dutton, 1984) 135.
74 The very first entry in Criswell's book, Criswell Predicts (Anderson, SC:
Drake House, 1968), is entitled "Homosexual Cities": "You will be able
to find them near Boston, Des Moines, Columbus, Philadelphia, Wash­
ington, D.C., San Francisco, St. Louis, New York, Dallas, and Miami...
And all this will be within the law because the perverted will claim they
have been discriminated against." This is hardly that daring a predic­
tion, given the fact that Criswell himself would surely have moved
within the burgeoning queer community of Los Angeles, a city he
thoughtfully spares from his list of places where "perversion will
parade shamelessly."
75 Reprinted in Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1983) 5 3 3 .
76 See Grey 1 7 5 - 1 9 5 for an invaluable (if incomplete) bibliography of
Wood's printed work. As Grey notes, it "is conceivable that Wood
wrote as many as 75 books."
77 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality
and
Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 5 4 .
78 The advertisements appeared in Films and Filming 17:8 (May 1971)
15.
79 Hooven 1 2 9 - 1 3 0 .
80 For a good discussion of The Haunting and how it figures lesbianism,
see Patricia White, "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting,"
inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York:
Routledge, 1991) 1 4 2 - 1 7 2 .
4
Exposing the monster queer to
the sunlight circa the 1969
Stonewall Rebellion
B
y the late 1960s, the signifier "monster" had undergone a radi­
cal shift, splitting into at least two opposing constructs - a tra­
ditional one which continued to posit the monster as a threat to the
moral order of society, and another which saw the monster becom­
ing increasingly domesticated. On the one hand, monsters became
flagrantly sexualized figures in both films and pulp pornography,
while on the other they were turned into cartoons and plush toys for
the delectation of children. As television recycled and re-ran the
classic Hollywood canon of horror films, monster magazines such as
Frankenstein's
Castle, The Monster Times, and Famous Monsters of
Filmland brought classical Hollywood monsters into the hands of
youngsters and movie fans alike, treating them with an adoring and
loving playfulness. Peter Bogdanovich's self-reflexive
Targets
(1968) is indicative of this split signifier in a slightly different way,
suggesting that the real monsters confronting US society were no
longer those played at the movies by Boris Karloff, but those pro­
duced at home by a culture of warfare. Indeed, the rise of the
counter-culture and the increasing militancy of the civil rights and
anti-war movements posed an immediate threat to the status quo.
The classical movie monsters were now more often than not appre­
ciated as camp, or as homely, endearing figures that were marketed
to children as toys, or as beloved animated puppets in a film such as
Mad Monster Party (1968).
1
2
To some extent, monsters became hip and, like the witch, defined
in counter-cultural or feminist terms, so much so that by 1970, a
children's film called Pufnstuf could have one of its ostensible vil­
lains, a witch named Hazel (played by the proto-Eve Sedgwickian
"out" fat lady Mama Cass) sing what amounts to a psychedelic
queer anthem for lesbian witches and monsters everywhere:
174
Monsters in the closet
When I was smaller and people were taller,
I realized that I was different.
I had a power that set me apart.
I learned to take it, to use it, to make it.
It's not so bad to be different,
To do your own thing and do it with heart.
[chorus]
Different is hard, different is lonely,
Different is trouble for you only.
Different is heartache, different is pain,
But I'd rather be different than be the same.
At first I'd wonder what hex I was under?
What did I do to be so different?
Then I discovered some others like me!
Wonder no longer - together we're stronger!
It's not so bad to be different!
Be true to yourself, that's what you must be!'
Pufnstuf, an early postmodern artifact which recycled and bur­
lesqued Hollywood forms and icons for children both at the cinema
and at home on a Saturday morning television show (H. R. Pufnstuf
(1969-1971)), dramatically illustrates the shifting meanings of one
particular monster, the lesbian witch. In the 1930s she was Disney's
Evil Queen and MGM's Wicked Witch of the West; children and
even adults could feel the menace she represented. By 1970, for
some audiences the witch had become an icon of pride, self-worth,
and the promise of social change through coalition-building.
This shift in understanding the classical monsters of Hollywood's
past as now more or less benign figures had already begun by
mid-decade, with the arrival and popularity of television situation
comedies such as The Munsters and The Addams Famdy (both
1964-1966), which in their on-going premises regularly conflated
the figure of the monster with the bourgeois suburban family.' These
shows and many others which featured supernatural or science fic­
tion elements (Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, Lost in Space, Star
Trek, Dark Shadows) worked to significantly universalize the idea of
the monster: as if in response to the paranoid scapegoating of the
1950s, monsters were now understood more and more like "Us"
instead of "Them." These shows implied that the monster queer
was really not so bad, that beneath his/her odd exterior, the mon4
Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight
175
ster was really just like everyone else. Many queer people, such as
the horror fan quoted below, found in these shows the "permission"
or social space to be different:
I think The Munsters and The Addams Family were wonderful exam­
ples of happily functioning families. They always got along and were
very loving towards themselves and the community. Being gay myself,
I feel different as a minority functioning in the world. I think these
families were positive role models for me: here's something different
functioning in the real world and enjoying it and dealing with it, and
it gave me hope that I could be different and live in the general world
too.*
Some of these shows are more "homosexual" than others; that is to
say, some are more easily read as queer, since none of them featured
openly homosexual characters or situations. (Openly homosexual
characters on TV would not become an issue until the early 1970s.)
Still, My Favorite Martian's Uncle Martin and Tim can easily be read
as a gay male couple (hiding the secret of their Otherness from nosy
neighbors), while Lost in Space showcased a quite visible nelly old
queen (Dr Zachary Smith, played by Jonathan Harris) on a weekly
basis. Furthermore, many of these shows, like Bewitched,
featured
homosexual or homosexually-coded actors such as Dick Sargent,
Agnes Moorehead, and Paul Lynde, which in ways both conscious
and unconscious increased the possibility that they could be under­
stood as queerly inflected popular culture artifacts.
7
8
This televisual recycling of the classical Hollywood horror film's
witches, mad monks, Frankenstein monsters, and wraith-like vam­
pires firmly situated them within the hegemonic construction of
normality, the US middle-class-living-room, and worked to univer­
salize the figure of the monster." Yet, while this may have been
metaphorically liberating for some queer viewers who viewed the
assimilation of monsters into society as a positive move, an oppos­
ing position might argue that the figure of the oppositional monster,
the queer sexual outlaw, had "sold out" to petit-bourgeois ideol­
ogy. In that respect, the subversive charge of the monster became
softened or eradicated, and the queer sexual threat that s/he had
previously represented was now contained within the institution of
the suburban US family. Aside from their more playfully monstrous
peccadilloes and appearances, most of these shows' characters, like
the Munsters or the Addamses, practiced (more or less) traditional
10
176
Monsters in the closet
family values: Gomez Addams, for example, is clearly aligned with
dominant ideologies through his profession as a venture capitalist.
Yet in other instances these shows could also be interested in civil
rights (for monsters), as in a Bewitched
episode in which Samantha
and her sorceress friends picket Darin's advertising firm as "Unfair
to Witches" because it is planning to depict witches as ugly old
women, and not the "normaP'-looking individuals they really are.
Given the growing awareness of the media's negative stereotyping
of racial and sexual minorities during this period, it is hard not to
read Samantha's crusade in metaphoric terms, even as other critics
might decry the reduction of civil rights struggles to a pop culture
burlesque.
Occasionally these comedic television approaches to monsters
crossed over into the movies in films like Munster Go Home (1966)
or Carry on Screaming (1966), which also posited the furry and/or
scaly monsters of the 1930s-1950s as campy fun. However, this left
a space within cinematic representation for new horror movie
threats, and a batch of increasingly violent and sexualized, more
realistic human monsters quickly arose to fill the void left open by
this shift in signification. In many ways this new realistic monster
was much closer to the public's image of the homosexual than either
the werewolf or the vampire. Films such as The Boston
Strangler
(1968) demonstrated that "real-life" psychosexual deviants were far
more terrifying and posed a much more "real" threat to society than
did mad scientists or teenage werewolves. Psycho and Peeping Tom
(both 1960) and their many imitators had refashioned the "human"
monster as sexual psychopath, and repeatedly suggested that effem­
inate men or forceful women were more likely than not to be homi­
cidal maniacs. William Castle's Psycho knock-off Homicidal
(1961)
made it clear that its maniac was a transsexual, and repressed psy­
chosexual secrets became the gothic flavor of the era in Hammer
horror films such as Taste of Fear (1960), Maniac (1962), Paranoiac
(1962), Nightmare
(1963), and Hysteria (1964). American Interna­
tional Pictures expanded their output from teenage monster movies
to wide-screen color psychoneurotics in Roger Corman's Edgar
Allan Poe films, almost all of which starred the fey Vincent Price as
some sort of crazed sexual psychopath. The Innocents
(1961)
explored the sexual repression of a frigid governess in ghostly
metaphors, and The Haunting (1963) made its spooks an explicit
function of its characters' lesbianism. When the classical movie
Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight
177
monsters (vampires, werewolves, etc.) were invoked, it was often
done with an increased awareness of the genre's implications; thus
Roman Polanski made one of his vampires overtly homosexual (and
another one Jewish) in his film The Fearless Vampire Killers
(1967).
Although one might argue that the film's satiric project works to
deconstruct the trope of the monster queer rather than reinforce it,
this more overt melding of queer sexuality with the monster was
quickly becoming one of the genre's central tropes at this point in
time.
As the 1960s progressed, the weakening Production Code's loos­
ening restrictions on sex and violence helped the horror film define
itself in new and explicit terms, and added to the overall "thrill" of
the genre. B horror films (produced most regularly by American
International Pictures and Hammer Films in the UK) boomed
throughout the 1960s, and reached an apex of popularity around
1970. For the first time in film history, openly homosexual charac­
ters became commonplace within the genre, sometimes as victims
(Blacula (1971), Theatre of Blood (1973)) but more regularly as the
monsters themselves (the lesbian vampire). The monster's violent
acts were increasingly defined in overtly queer terms, and perhaps
not surprisingly, non-straight sexuality in non-horror films was also
defined as monstrous. Throughout the 1960s, gay and lesbian char­
acters were becoming more visible on American movie screens, and,
as Vito Russo has amply demonstrated, whenever they weren't
swishy jokes (Staircase (1969), The Gay Deceivers (1969), Little Big
Man (1970)), they were frequently represented as murderous vil­
lains (From Russia With Love (1963), Caprice (1967), The Detective
(1968), Diamonds
are Forever (1971), ad infinitum)."
As a Time
cinema column opined in 1968, "unashamedly queer characters are
everywhere ... [but] most of the homosexuals shown so far are
sadists, psychopaths, or buffoons. If the actors are mincing more
than the dialogue these days, that may only be because Hollywood
has run out of conventional bad guys." Even in films such as The
Killing of Sister George (1968) or Boys in the Band (1970) - osten­
sibly comedic realist melodramas about modern day lesbian and gay
relationships - the iconography of the horror film creeps in: thun­
der and lightning, Expressionist shadows, ominous musical cues,
and hysterical moments of formal excess are used to characterize
homosexuals' lives. The Killing of Sister George is exemplary in this
respect: director Robert Aldrich films a lesbian seduction scene as if
12
Monsters in the closet
178
he is still directing the Grand Guignol opus What Ever Happened
to
Baby Jane? (1963).
The public debate over "real-life" homosexuality was also shift­
ing. The popular 1950s construction of homosexuality as a psychi­
atric illness and a threat to national security was slowly giving way
to an increasingly militant gay and lesbian civil rights movement."
These opposing constructs were put into play (however feebly) in a
1967 CBS special news report entitled The Homosexuals.
Although
the show reflects the growing social awareness of gay communities
and the work of the Mattachine Society in fighting for legal reform,
much longer sections of the show are devoted to the 1955 Boise,
Idaho scandal and a "you are there" reality-style arrest of a man
caught soliciting sex in a public rest-room. The show makes much
use of psychiatric professionals (including Charles Socarides, who
would later discover his own son was gay) who insist repeatedly on
the deviancy of homosexuals. In a brightly lit classroom, they teach
future doctors Irving Bieber's even then disputed developmental
model of male homosexuality (overbearing mother, distant father)
as if it were scientific fact, and repeatedly assure their students once
again that there are "no happy homosexuals." A self-hating homo­
sexual mouths the "medical concepts" psychiatric professionals
have taught him, calling himself "sick," "immature," "childlike, and
"not human at all." For an "objective" news report, the show
repeatedly indulges in horror film iconography (shadows, darkened
rooms, unsettling musical cues, garbled and distorted vocal tracks)
in order to make its homophobic points. Several of the men inter­
viewed for the special do so from behind a potted plant, hiding their
faces and effectively calling up images of monsters lurking in the
bushes. The show climaxes with a "debate" between Gore Vidal and
conservative cultural pundit Albert Goldman, who links homosex­
uality to the other social horrors of the 1960s: promiscuity, divorce,
a "fun and games" approach to sex, sado-masochism, the "smut
industry," and "masturbatory" dance styles. Vidal has his say, but
the inflammatory often-heard accusations of Albert Goldman are
what stand out: in McCarthyist terms, Goldman asserts that a
"homosexual mafia" in the arts is busily infiltrating US culture with
decadent forms such as pop art, camp, and homosexual fashion, the
last of which was allegedly trying to turn females into "boywomen." A few years later, glam rock stars and others in the public
eye would admit their bisexuality, spurring a small cultural infusion
14
Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight
179
of bisexual chic, androgyny, and general performative queerness,
perhaps best exemplified by David Bowie's series of musical per­
sonas which included space alien Ziggy Stardust and the gothic Thin
White Duke. Not surprisingly, some of these gender-bending musi­
cians eventually distanced themselves from their sexually ambigu­
ous personas; Alice Cooper, for example, found more mainstream
commercial success once he shifted his persona from transvestite to
monstrous sado-masochist, suggesting once again US culture's rela­
tive comfort with violence compared to sexuality.
"Real men" such as Albert Goldman would also have been upset
by the changes taking place within the pages of Esquire. Essays by
Gore Vidal and other known homosexuals (or "homosexualists," as
Vidal would have it) did appear in the magazine during this period,
but perhaps even more disturbing to "heterosexual" male readers
was a new explicitness in the magazine's photographic essays and
advertising campaigns. A 1970 essay on Yukio Mishima, for exam­
ple, features a photograph of the nearly-nude author posed in
gloves, boots, and briefs astride a Honda motorcycle; another shot
shows him posed nude on the rocks as ocean waves crash around
him. Male models in swimsuits and briefs were becoming more
and more prominent within its pages, and art reviews covered all
sorts of avant-garde happenings, from a sculptor of male nudes to
an artist who painted with blood. (One can also find a reflection of
the culture's newfound interest in the occult: Tarot Cards and
Mystic Arts Books could now be ordered directly from ads within
Esquire's pages.) Also, the unisex styles of hippy and other countercultural movements had infiltrated the journal, as evidenced by an
ad for a "Maxi scarf with swinging fringe ... for him or her."
Indeed, the mod styles of the era, many of which were being
imported from London, posited men as "peacocks" ready to be
garbed in paisley caftans, Midnight Cowboy vests, or conspicuous
amounts of jewelry - what one photographic essay described as the
exciting "gleam of metal on men." In the back pages of the maga­
zine, clothing shops that catered to gay men (such as the Ah Men
shop in West Hollywood) sold erotic briefs and swimsuits, and one
could find ads for Roy Dean's A Time in Eden, a "photo essay on
MAN," which promised to show the buyer a series of photographs
"following man through his first experiences and adventures" here
on earth, presumably including his first erection and ejaculation.
In the homosexual community itself, the movement for civil
15
16
17
18
19
20
Monsters in the closet
180
rights had gained considerable momentum during the 1960s, most
notably with "Zaps" aimed at garnering television coverage
(another of the witches in Pufnstuf sings a song entitled "Zap the
World"), but crystallized, perhaps only in retrospect, around the
Stonewall Riots which occurred in June of 1969. As a result of this
civil disturbance, the revolutionary Gay Liberation Front and its
more assimilationist offshoot the Gay Activists Alliance were
formed. ' These events were covered in the popular newsweeklies
of the era, although in dramatically conflicted ways which suggest
the uncertainty of writers and editors when dealing with the topic.
Before and immediately after the riots, words such as "invert,"
"pervert," "third sex," and "queer," were in common usage, even as
there were frequent pleas for tolerance. "The treatment of homo­
sexuals as cripples and monsters is unjust," opined one author,
noting the cultural construction of the monster queer, even as he
goes on to demonize homosexuals as "biologically inaccurate and
socially unsound." The old ploy of displacing homosexuality onto
foreign shores was still used in a 1968 Newsweek
article about
"Amsterdam's thriving fairyland" where "deviates meet freely to
drink and dance," as if that sort of thing wasn't happening in Amer­
ica. ' More and more gay-positive books and essays were being writ­
ten, yet homophobic journalists more often than not couched their
reviews within their own "moral" standards. For example, in a
review of Martin Hoffman's book The Gay World, which calls for
the elimination of anti-sodomy laws, police harassment, and legal
discrimination against homosexuals, the reviewer concludes by
offering his own solution to the problem, namely, "to turn full circle
in the other direction and treat homosexuals as a quasi-criminal ele­
ment." A few years later the same pattern emerges by another
author in another book review. After reviewing Merle Miller's On
Being Different and Dennis Altman's Homosexual
Oppression and
Liberation,
reviewer A. T. Baker tells his readers that Altman's com­
plex arguments are "utter nonsense" and that "Homosexual love is
regarded as deviant because no children can be born of it," appar­
ently forgetting to demonize concomitantly the millions of US het­
erosexuals who were practicing birth control.
Not long after the Stonewall Rebellion, long multi-part articles
were published in October of 1969 in both Time and Newsweek
dis­
cussing the "Newly Visible, Newly Understood" homosexual.
While covering the facts and fallout of the Stonewall riots, most of
2
22
2
24
25
Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight
181
these essays still made recourse to psychiatric models and even
repeated the homophobic myths of previous decades: "At their
fullest flowering, the Persian, Greek, Roman, and Moslem civiliza­
tions permitted a measure of homosexuality; as they decayed, it
became more prevalent. Sexual deviance of every variety was
common during the Nazis' virulent and corrupt rule of Germany."
Many of these essays give the final (or near final) word to recovered
homosexuals, homophobic psychiatrists such as Socarides, gaybashing cops, " or liberal platitudes still embedded in a medical
model, such as "Americans can now recognize the diversity of
homosexual life and understand that an undesirable handicap does
not necessarily make everyone afflicted with it undesirable.""' Yet
the pressure was now on the psychiatric profession to maintain its
authority over the topic, often in any way it could. For example,
when confronted within one open forum with the prospect of
"happy homosexuals," Dr Socarides makes recourse to the old
homosexual-as-predatory-pederast model: "A little boy might go
next door to the Y and an older man might say to him, 'Look, this
is normal, my son. Just join me in this.'"" The newsweeklies con­
tinued to run stories on Dr M. Sidney Margolese's attempts to cure
homosexuality with testosterone injections and Dr Richard Green's
behavior modification therapy which sought to turn sissy boys into
he-men via negative and positive reinforcement programs, an
experiment based on the tacit assumption that femininity is itself
pathological.' Yet they also ran articles on "Gay Power," "Gay
Pride," "California: Gay Mecca No. 1," "The Militant Homosex­
ual," and eventually more humane stories on lesbian mothers, the
Reverend Troy Perry's newly formed Metropolitan Community
Church, and even a group calling itself The Lavender Panthers,
whose goal was to stop gay-bashing in San Francisco."
As the name "The Lavender Panthers" implies, many of these
newly visible and outspoken gay and lesbian groups were linked
with the counter-cultural ideals of other civil rights and anti-war
struggles. Position papers on gay and lesbians rights and concerns
could now be found in underground newspapers such as The Berke­
ley Tribe and the San Francisco Free Press, even as spokespersons
for black and feminist groups often decried the comparison. And
while some of these more radical gay and lesbian groups were chas­
tised by the older and more reformist homophile organizations such
as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, it was their
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Monsters in the closet
182
activism which directly led to the de-pathologization of homosexu­
ality as a medical illness by the American Psychiatric Association in
1973. Despite the prominence of Dr Socarides and his homophobic
colleagues on television and in print, some psychiatrists, such as
Evelyn Hooker and Thomas S. Szasz, had been speaking about
homosexuality throughout the era in more gay-positive terms. For
example, in a 1971 essay entitled "Gay Liberation and Psychiatry,"
which appeared in Psychiatric Opinion, the author's argument was
very similar to the position papers published in the underground
presses:
Accordingly, it is about time that this entire subject were taken off the
psychoanalyst's couch and out of the psychiatrist's office and the psy­
chologist's laboratory and approached as what it is: A sociological
problem in prejudice, discrimination, and bigotry, directed against a
minority group not different in kind from others of our sociological
minority groups. It is society which is defective and at fault and needs
our attention, not the homosexual.'
5
The term "homophobia", which had been used in the popular press
at least since 1969, began to be discussed by some psychiatrists as
the true pathological condition, although many psychiatrists and
especially psychoanalysts continued to assert theoretical paradigms
for models of illness and cure, and some do so to this day.'" Even the
American Medical Association did not formally declare such repar­
ative therapies inadvisable until 1994.
As I hope this brief overview has shown, the topic of homosexu­
ality reached unprecedented levels of cultural visibility during the
period immediately before and after the Stonewall Rebellion. The
new-found visibility of organized gay and lesbian communities, and
the politics of "coming out loud and proud," caused tremendous
social change, especially in terms of the resultant commercialization
and celebration of gay urban culture throughout the 1970s. By
1972, there had been enough homosexual characters on-screen for
Parker Tyler to publish Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality
in the
Movies, the first book-length study of queerness in cinema." Even a
fairly mainstream British film journal, Films and Filming, became
almost flamboyantly gay during this era. Under the editorship of
Robin Bean, ads for and reviews of the latest films (including many
of the horror films discussed below) nestled alongside nearly nude
and homoerotic photographs of the era's male stars. Yet as Vito
Exposing the monster queer to the sunlight
183
Russo has pointed out, the depictions of homosexual characters in
the movies of this era were particularly odious. Certainly there were
more homosexual characters on the screen than ever before, yet (as
Molly Haskell has argued with regard to images of women on
screen) the dissolution of the Production Code in 1968 ushered in
a new era of exploitation and violence, much of it firmly centered
on tragic homosexuals and monster queers. The 1970 film version
of (The Secret of) Dorian Gray, which updated the Oscar Wilde
story to mod swinging London, exemplifies many of these changes
(it was also the subject of a December 1971 cover story in Films and
Filming). Now, for the first time, cinema could actually show what
it had previously only hinted at regarding Dorian's depravity. Yet
whether or not this represents a "better" representation of homo­
sexuality (or one more in line with the fledgling gay and lesbian
movement's goals) is certainly debatable.
Perhaps because of its status as an international co-production,
the 1970 version of Dorian Gray may have felt more license in
depicting its subject-matter; European cinema was often more will­
ing to depict on-screen sexuality than were films made in the United
States. Yet in many ways the film is more resolutely heterosexual
and sexually conservative than the 1945 MGM version. Although
there are (stereotypical) homosexuals on-screen and we do see
Dorian cruising the docks and men's rooms of Mediterranean sea­
ports, he continues to have quite active heterosexual relations
throughout the film (although it is suggested that he has anal inter­
course and/or sado-masochistic sex with some of these women).
The film makes it attitude towards these exploits perfectly clear
through both visual design and musical cues: more often than not
Dorian's heterosexual exploits are scored with a bouncy late 1960s
soft jazz theme (and take place in "natural" settings, such as sunny
beaches and green parks), while his homosexual ones utilize shad­
ows and more somber, ominous scoring. Certain homosexual
aspects of the 1945 version are rewritten in this adaptation, includ­
ing the blackmailing of college chum and chemist Allen, which
results in Allen disposing of Basil Hallward's body. Rather than
threatening to reveal Allen's homosexual relationship with Dorian
(as is suggested in the 1945 film), the blackmail in this version is
effected through compromising pictures of Allen's wife with
Dorian.
Nonetheless, like many other European horror films of this
38