Between Strange Extremes, a Pride 2024 Special My Life in Horror

Between Strange Extremes, a Pride 2024 Special My Life in Horror

Horror is bound up with queerness. That which brings us joy, that which defines, is simultaneously the source of our collective trauma (or rather, the factor by which our self-fancied enemies justify inflicting trauma upon us). 

If, like me, you happen to be a child of the latter decades of the 20th century, you recall a time when being gay -let alone more obscurely queer- was, in the eyes of the vast majority of Western culture, the worst thing you could be (or even vaguely suspected of being). In the school corridors and sports yards, “gay” was the most severe insult, the slur most likely to result in violence and exile. The suspicion of being gay in your own mind was often a source of intense and profound dread and self-loathing. You were “disordered,” culture at large insisted. You were perverted and damaged and unhealthy and unclean. 

Here in the UK, pervasive conservative sentiment and mindless moral scapegoating resulted in queerness being ghettoised in a way that’s difficult to countenance, now in 2024. Our urban centres overflowed with the outcast, exiled from family circles, the drug-addicted and destitute. It’s no secret that the alienation of queers in UK society led to myriad atrocities throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (from the mass-deaths caused by the AIDs epidemic to active serial killers such as Dennis Nilsen, both of which were readily preventable were it not for the status quo of homophobia). 

Whilst those of us born later in the decade barely knew these atrocities, they echo within our collective psyches still; the history we only just avoided being part of mythologised as queer folklore that resonates within us and defines who we are as powerfully (and far more sincerely) as any nationalism or religious ideology. 

Fear is at the heart of that history, fear of our societies, fear of our families and friends. Fear of ourselves. 

Whilst less common now, it is still a pervasive part of queer existence to dread and doubt what we are, particularly in our emergent phases. When I was a child and teenager, queer narratives were almost non-existent in popular or mainstream media, and certainly not in institutions like education (sex education of the era was notoriously inadequate in its puritanism, even for our straight siblings. Primarily concerned with perfunctory procreation, pleasure and communication were barely mentioned. The notion of even referencing homosexuality would’ve certainly resulted in torch-and-pitchfork-wielding mobs at the school gates). We had no frame of reference for what we were or what we’d eventually become; no narratives to shape our states and guide our trajectories. All most of us ever had were the wholly negative, demonising narratives that pervaded cultural discourse: 

Being gay, being queer, was wrong, innately: A state of immorality so profound, many parents of the era made it plain they’d rather their children were dead (and, indeed, acted in such a manner so as to bring it about). The narratives we were allowed to occupy were defined and prescribed largely by our enemies; by a culture that regarded us as verminous at best. 

That denial of narrative is one of the key ways pervasive and traditionally enshrined queer-phobia attempts to rob us of our essential humanity. It is a species of exile as profound as the physical from the home and hearth, the emotional from the family unit, a way of insisting: 

You have no place here. You are not one of us. 

To many of our enemies even in the present day, that denial of narrative persists. For example, many of those that still deny us our basic humanity cannot bring themselves to believe gay people fall in love. That, as Disney films, cartoons and romcoms of the past insist, is the exclusive reserve of straightness, in all its apparent purity. The notion that a man might fall in love with a man or woman with a woman, is anathema to all they insist and enshrine, and one of the most fundamental narratives they take every pain to deny (in all their futility). 

Worse, the notion that a man might fall in love with a man or woman with a woman with the same profundity, fidelity and intensity that a man might a woman (or vice versa) is something they simply cannot allow for. For that would lend us too much credence as fellow human beings rather than the vermin they would cast us as. 

As a result of this flailing lack of prescription, many of us older-generation queers spent our formative years either in profound and distraught states of self-loathing denial and/or conditions of confusion: Everything we learned of ourselves had to be discovered through blind fumbling, via moments of revelation that were almost religious in nature. Some of us were lucky enough to have guides or mentors along the way; to find queer creators, lovers, friends etc who helped us discover who we are and how to write our own narratives, in absence of those culture refused to provide. If we were lucky, we would find those who’d lived the horrors of only a generation ago who could help guide us out of the muck and mire, provide a history that, once again, heteronormative tradition denies even occurred, and would certainly deny to us. 

Those mentors, those guides, taught us the ambiguity of our conditions as much as anything: 

As well as the ability to take joy in our lusts and loves, to celebrate our desires and connections for the minor miracles they are, they also allowed us to realise the sanctity of our exile. Being outcast from a culture comprised of sickness and hypocrisy is no bad thing, their poetry and art and sex and stories insist; being considered disordered by systems so cancerous and incomprehensible they cannibalise themselves is no profound sin. We have a place, we have a purpose, and it is to be the mirror by which culture sees itself: 

Through us, assumptions that have persisted unquestioned for countless generations suddenly find themselves under assault. Assumptions of sex and gender, of the shapes that love and family take. Certainly assumptions of morality. We are the means by which stasis and stagnation are undone, by which harmful status quos that turn us not only against one another, but ourselves, are exposed and expelled from our collective systems.

Most often, we are demonised as monsters by more conservative circles, the narratives they seek to impose upon us nigh-folkloric in their fancy. We are the witches in the wood; the Changeling that steals into the family unit, cuckoo-like. We are the big, bad wolves, the demons and vampires and every monster myth might contrive. 

Between Strange Extremes, a Pride 2024 Special My Life in Horror

One only has to glance at the hyperbolic nonsense, the bleakly fantastical, scapegoating screeds dominating tabloids of the 1980s and early ’90s to understand the fervent, demented need to dehumanise us; to cast us not only as verminous, but predatory. We are the monsters under the bed, the strangers at school gates; the ones coming to take your children and twist them into new and hideous shapes. Those are the narratives we grew up with as queer children of the 1980s/1990s, and, though we refute them, a degree of internalisation was inevitable.

Peruse the recent explosion of queer speculative fiction, and you’ll find a number of interesting trends: Queer horror, for example, generally tends towards a moral ambiguity the genre does not traditionally evince. As we’ve been culturally cast as the monsters, the villains; the otherwise antagonists, there’s a degree of sympathy for and identification with those elements (arguably to a greater and more intensive degree than amongst our straight counterparts).

It’s not uncommon for queer horror to be written from the perspective of “the monster,” or for “the monster” to be framed in such a light that it is attractive, seductive in terms of its condition. By the same token, those factors and forces tradition enshrines as scions of good and order are often revealed in terms of their hypocrises; as peculiarly and insidiously monstrous on their own terms (systems of authority have always historically been the de facto enemies of queerness in culture, and also the mechanisms by which oppression thereof has -often violently- been achieved). 

Forces of church and family, law and society tend to come in for short shrift in queer horror. The world as those forces would prescribe and maintain it is our Hell, not the halcyon Eden so much traditionally-minded horror insists. Redemption, if such is even a consideration, does not come through faith or family and certainly not through exorcism or undoing of the other. 

More often than not, our characters are splinters in the flank of the world, uncomfortable, ill-fitting and incongruous. They find themselves in opposition to what is imposed or enshrined, as they, like us, are forced into that state of exile; the outside-looking-in. From that vantage, the structures and systems we’ve been born to are revealed as the great and blood-slicked engines they are; not the means of our salvation, but abattoir-mechanisms gummed up with the accrued bone and pulverised matter of generations, anti-human by dint of their operations. 

All of this, collectively, expresses through the art we make, the stories we write: That peculiar coalescence of trauma and exile, of celebration and monstrosity. We have joy and pleasure in abundance in our conditions, but also the knowledge that the world hates us for them, and hates the joy we derive therefrom. We are spitted between strange extremes, in love with our conditions yet demonised and condemned on the basis of them. It’s difficult explaining to those who don’t occupy them how normal it is to operate in those spheres, with those loves, wants and desires. Yet, to tradition, to the world of yesterday -that conservatives of all stripes would have us return to-, we are obscene, monstrous, barely human. 

Between Strange Extremes, a Pride 2024 Special My Life in Horror

If you read the work of queer writers, you will find stories that entirely forego the traditional prescriptions and parameters of genre, not to mention the moral assumptions and binaries that underpin them: The “monsters” are, more often than not, our protagonists; the eyes we experience the stories through. Meanwhile, those who would be the heroes in more conventional genre fiction are tertiary or even cast in villainous roles (arguably one of the purest explorations of this dynamic occurs in Clive Barker’s 1980s novella Cabal, which was adapted into the film Nightbreed).

There is no reduction or apology for monstrosity in much of queer fiction; rather it is presented in less didactic, less judgemental terms. In some cases, it is even celebrated as a beautiful and aspirational state. “The monster,” we understand, is not some external threat, some demon in the shadows, as more conventional, conservative horror so often insists: Rather, the monsters are us and ours. They are part of us, they belong to us, and are often more earnest and sincere in their conditions than those who have absolute delusions of what humanity is or should be. 

By the same token, queer writers are often more keenly aware of the hypocrisies underlying conventional assumptions of order and morality: Having been traditionally forced to the margins of society by our natural states, we see where authoritarianism masquerades as order, where oppression wears a mask of morality. We also understand that the pantomime puritanism of those who would condemn us is exactly that: A mask by which they obscure their own dirty little secrets, which are almost always profound and supremely monstrous, given the cultures of oppression and denial in which they publicly operate (it’s a now time-honoured cliché in queer circles that, should you scratch the surface of a homophobe, you’re highly likely to find something deeply unsavoury beneath). 

We operate in a state of honesty and sincerity with regards to certain factors and aspects of our lives that, to a degree, straight culture is denied: 

Because the narratives of patriarchy are denied us in a way they aren’t our straight siblings, we have to figure out our own conditions and modes of expression/presentation. In many respects, we have no choice but to become self-authored in terms of our identities. A simultaneously amazing and horrific condition, as the incidences of our sexual orientations and gender identities, whilst significant, are far from all-defining. We are so much more, despite what our enemies endlessly insist. As such, we are often left in free-fall, especially in our younger years: 

It’s no secret amongst sociologists that queer individuals tend to develop slower and later in certain areas than their straight counterparts. For example, it’s not uncommon for queer people to have their first romantic relationships much later than straight people. The reasons for this are complex and manifold, but ultimately boil down to us lacking the same structure and narrative direction: 

Certainly when I was a boy, there was little-to-nothing representative of our experience in mainstream media. In order to find resonance with our peculiar conditions, we had to quest hard and dig deep; it was a voyage of discovery, often into some fairly dark and ghettoised spaces. Our other alternative -and one I’ve heard a lot of queer readers and audiences of the era express- was to find resonance in the -ostensibly- heteronormative media that was pervasive, particularly within genre fiction. That is: To experience those stories that didn’t necessarily include queer characters or directly reference queer themes, but echoed our experiences or situations in particular ways. 

Within horror, as an example, there have always been queer writers of one stripe or another. From the likes of Shelley, Wilde and Stevenson right through to John Saul, Clive Barker et al. However, owing to cultural mores and the demands of the industry, it has, up until very recently, been the case that they were never granted license to explore or express that element of themselves directly through their fiction.

The standard saw from agents and publishers goes something like: 

“Horror audiences are mainly straight young men. You can’t expect straight young men to identify with queer protagonists.” 

Leaving aside that this is evident, infantilising nonsense, this has led many queer creators to write fiction ostensibly about straight, cisgender characters but whose situations or circumstances lead them down some very queer-adjacent roads indeed. 

The aforementioned John Saul, for example, has a particular penchant for writing about characters who are “outside” in some peculiar fashion; often physically thrown into cultural conditions where they are the trespasser or alien (a state that most queer readers of the era would know all too well). 

Likewise, Clive Barker began his literary career writing primarily about straight characters in straight relationships but who ultimately find themselves in circumstances where assumptions about the world promised and/or advertised to them break down. Even in his early novels and novellas (The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, Cabal etc), the fact of Barker’s status as a gay man is evident, the influence of his homosexuality overt save for the incidence that his work generally revolves around straight characters.

This was how and where we found identification and association as queer fans of genre media in the 1980s/early 1990s: Not necessarily through the consumption of overtly queer material (such being generally considered obscene by culture at large, and very difficult to get a hold of indeed), but through media that referenced or echoed aspects of our conditions. 

For my part, that factor most often took the form of fiction or media that involved either the transformation of the world at large or the ability to transition from it into another. Perhaps as the result of my early experience with work such as C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the subject of liminal spaces, worlds within worlds, magic doorways, dream-like or fantastical realities beyond our own has always obsessed me. Marry that formative influence to the fact of my developing queer identity, and you have a recipe for the writer who sits here now. 

What such fiction provides its queer audiences -wittingly or otherwise- is not merely a means of escape or distraction from the world that can be such torment to us. Rather, it is a means of confrontation; of processing  in the manner of dreams or nightmares. And, for us, those nightmares are acutely necessary. 

It’s little secret these days that queer individuals are attracted to speculative genres of media.

Whilst we’ve been traditionally forced to operate beneath the surface, in secret, even in fan-spaces, we have always been there, and been there in abundance. What we are seeing now is an emergence from the shadows, the end of a too-long gestation period in which we have absorbed and assimilated everything essential to those genres and remade them in reference to our own lived experience. 

The current efflorescence of queer voices in horror, science fiction and fantasy have served not only to breathe new vitality into those genres, they’ve also expanded their remit and application such that they sincerely save lives: 

When I was a boy, it was necessary to reimagine most of the media I consumed in some way to make it relevant to my developing identity. Later, seeking out niche examples of queer authors and artists became priority. These days, thanks to those early pioneers, it is no longer necessary for young queer people to jump through those hoops: There is a booming industry in YA queer fiction, queer fiction in every genre and category you can think of. And it is so, so important: 

On a purely developmental level, that representation allows us to assimilate ways of being and operation; to learn what kinds of relationships we want and don’t want with others (and ourselves). It’s something I didn’t have as a boy in the 1980s and 1990s, and yes; in retrospect, I can see how profoundly that sense of isolation and exile damaged me in terms of my state of mind and relationships to others. That is not to say there wasn’t worth in the exercise of seeking out those artists and writers and others I could more intimately relate to; that journey is its own phenomena, and perhaps a subject for another discussion. 

But I sincerely celebrate -and envy, to a degree- those generations of queer people who have come after; who’ve always known degrees of approbation and representation in their home-lives, communities and culture. To me and those of my generation, it is still an incredulous, ineffable miracle that queer children can operate freely in their homes and school communities. It is a wonder that queer people can be so free and find such a variety of media that not only includes them but speaks to them directly, demonstrating by virtue of its existence that they are not exiles, not vermin, but worthy of celebration. 

That is not to diminish in any way the challenges that young queer people -and queer people in general- face today. Thanks to some remarkably dark and conservative forces, those barely-born freedoms are under severe threat at present, both politically and on the level of culture. Thanks to the escalating moral hysteria regarding trans people, the door is easing open for even more generalised queer-phobia (which, of course, was always the agenda). 

We collectively must not allow that. Whilst I may be too young to recall the mass-deaths and incalculable suffering caused by the AIDs epidemic, I’m certainly old enough to recall its after-effects, and to know first-hand the damage culturally-enshrined queer-phobia can cause. 

This is why Pride this year is so significant; its history as an organised protest means more today than it arguably has in some time, and its quality as a locus for face-to-face communication between different demographics and generations could not be more essential than right here, right now. 

It is my sincere hope that queer generations after mine enjoy a better world, a more open, free and expressive status quo than the one I grew up in. And that begins with representation; the demonstration to our youngest siblings that they are not alone, they are not aberrant and they are worthy of every happiness our enemies would deny all of us. 

George Daniel Lea 26 06 2024

Strange Playgrounds by George Daniel Lea

A vile waking… There are places we walk; cold and dusk-lit; places where the wind whispers, carrying echoes of forgotten games. …a storm of sadism, more loving than any embrace or caress he’d ever known… There are places where we are naked; where the grass and weeds rasp across bleeding wounds, exposed nerves, their dew glistening red. …we are all sick; some are simply sicker than most… Places where the silence cannot be broken, its insect chatter fraying thought, fracturing sanity. …shadows swarming around their intertwined bodies, whispering, congealing… These are the Strange Playgrounds; places where we meet our murdered or abandoned selves, and join their desperate games. Come and play awhile.

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