Jun 21, 2014

Two Zombie Movies with Gay Characters

There have been 100,000 zombie movies, all with about the same plot: an accident or plague turns almost everyone into plodding, brain-gouging zombies.  A ragtag group of survivors hole up somewhere and try to keep the zombies out, and are dispatched in various gruesome ways.  Finally they all die, or else a heterosexual couple survives and forms an idyllic Adam and Eve new world.

You would think that surviving the Apocalypse would leave little time for hetero-romance, but there always is one.

And no gay people, ever.

Many zombie movies are based on graphic novels with gay characters, but they're always heterosexualized, or their sexual identity is not mentioned at all, which the director explains with the homophobic cliche: "I don't want to tell a gay story.  I want to tell a human story."

I am aware of only two zombie movies with gay characters:

1. Zombies of Mass Destruction (2009), a parody about a gay couple (Doug Fahl, Cooper Hopkins) and an Iranian woman trapped in small town full of zombies, homophobes, and xenophobes.












2. Remains (2011).  One of the five survivors trapped in a Reno, Nevada casino is magician's assistant Jensen (Miko Hughes, left), whose boyfriend is stationed at an army base nearby.  He is not only open, he gets to flirt with the hunky-but-evil Victor (Anthony Marks, top photo).  He dies halfway through, but so does everyone except for the last heterosexual couple.  It's not on DVD, but you can see it on youtube.

3. Stephen King's novel Cell (2006) has a major character, Tom, one of those "lonely confirmed bachelor" stereotypes who assists comic-book writer Clay in his goal of trekking through zombie-invested Maine in search of his son.  He never mentions a boyfriend or same-sex desire, and no one says "gay" until halfway through the book, but at least he's a gay character.

The movie version is scheduled to come out later this year, with John Cusack as Clay Samuel L. Jackson as Tom.  I'm guessing that they're going to substitute "black" for "gay."

See also: The Postapocalyptic Fade-Out Kiss; and The Walking Dead: Gay People Unwelcome at the End of the World.


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