The Homoerotic Horror of Edgar Allan Poe

When I was a kid in the 1970s, Chuck Acri's Creature Feature broadcast a lot of very loose adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories: The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tomb of Ligeia.  They were all terribly cheesy.

I loved them.

And the original short stories, which I first encountered in a Scholastic Book Club edition of Ten Great Mysteries by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Groff Conklin, with a drawing of a naked man (by Irv Doktor) illustrating "Metzengerstein."

It's about a man killed by a ghost horse. The nudity was completely unnecessary, but certainly welcome.

Even without the nudity, the stories were amazingly homoerotic, male narrators visiting male friends to hear their tales of murder and madness, with few or no women around, except for a few husbands who hate their wives.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).  Pym and his boyfriend Augustus stow away about a whaling ship and have adventures.  After Augustus dies, Pym hooks up with Richard Parker.  The two have more adventures.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839).  Roderick Usher and his sister are killed by the evil house.  His sister, not his wife!

 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The narrator and his buddy solve a murder.

 "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842). The narrator is tortured by the pit and the pendulum, but rescued by the strong arm of a French soldier.

(Left: ABC series with Edgar Allan Poe as a paranormal investigator.)

"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843).   The narrator (played on film by Stephen Brockway) "loves the old man," but kills him anyway.

"The Gold-Bug." (1843). The narrator, his buddy, and their servant search for buried treasure.


"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)  Montresor gets revenge on Fortunato by walling him up.  But why is he so upset?

No wonder he was not mentioned in my class in American Renaissance Literature at Augustana, though he lived at the same time as Melville, Hawthorne, and Emerson.

But why was so much of Poe's poetry -- "Annabel Lane," "To Helen," "Lenore," "The Raven" -- about men mourning dead girlfriends?  (Left, Jeremy Renner in The Raven).

Maybe because if the women are dead, the men don't have to worry about any of that icky hetero-romance. 

Poe certainly spent a lot of time courting women through his life, but usually they were sickly or dying, like his 13-year old cousin Virginia Clemm, whom he married in 1836, when he was 27.

Maybe he found some solace in glimmers of same-sex desire.

See also: The Gay American Renaissance.

Going to movies in 1997-98: English Blokes Bare It All, Elijah Wood Dies, Marky Mark Dangles, and Joey from "Friends" Gets Lost

 In 1997, I left California for New York, to enroll in yeat another Ph.D. program.  In the humanities, there was constant pressure to embrace only "art"; the grad students competed with each other to determine who had watched tv less: 

"The only thing I watch is opera on PBS."  "Oh, I watched the news once 10 years ago."  "I glanced at a tv screen once in a doctor's office waiting room, but immediately turned away." "TV?  Never heard the term before."

 In the social sciences, grad students and faculty didn't care: all art was garbage.  Richard III or Wacky Races, Mrs. Dalloway or Blondie and Dagwood, all was mindless trash, rotting your brain so you wouldn't be able to think Deep Thoughts about chi squares and logistic regressions.  So go to all the movies you want, but don't expect social scientists to lower themselves sufficiently to accompany you.   

August: The Full Monty.  Unemployed working-class blokes get the idea of making money by stripping (for women). Two of the blokes fall in love.  Actually, one of the grad students in my department did see this; she commented that she went with someone "who is not that way AT ALL," yet still thought that the gay romance subplot was "cute."  So only gay people can watch a gay romance without retching, but everybody can enjoy a boy-meets-girl story?  Heck, the two guys don't even kiss!

September: The Ice Storm.  Bored suburbanite swap partners while their son (Elijah Wood) dies in an ice storm.  I seem to remember Elijah being gay, but the wikipedia summary doesn't mention it.

October: Seven Years in Tibet.  I read the autobiography about a German soldier during World War II who flees into Tibet and becomes the tutor in all things Western for the young Dalai Lama.  The movie goes to great lengths to heterosexualize everybody, giving Heinrich Harrer (Brad Pitt) a wife and estranged son back in Austria.  His  POW buddy (David Thewlis) eventually gets a wife, too.

October: Boogie Nights: the golden age of disco, drugs, porn, and giant penises, with Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler (his giant penis is prosthetic).
There's a gay or bi character, but heterosexual romance saves the day.

November: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  On the evil side, a tawdry closeted "homosexual" is on trial for the murder of a "male prostitute" (he's acquitted, but dies anyway, because Bury Your Gays).   On the good side is Lady Chablis, a transwoman playing herself.  There's a heterosexual romance in the midst of everything, of course.

December: An American Werewolf in Paris,  Not a sequel to An American Werewolf in London, it actually involves a boy discovering that the Girl of His Dreams is a werewolf.  She belongs to a secret society of werewolves that eats his two friends.  So much for gay subtexts.

January: Star Kid.  It was science fiction, so why not?  Teen idol Joseph Mazzello finds a talking superhero suit that helps him save the world and...meet the Girl of His Dreams.  Ugh!

February: Mrs. Dalloway, based on a novel by Virginia Woolfe that I hadn't read, but I knew that she was gay or bi, and traveled in the gay-friendly Bloomsbury Group of early 20th century England.  During a long day fraught with depression, marital squabbles, and suicide, Mrs. Dalloway reflects on a lesbian affair in her youth, and Septimus feels guilty over the death of his boyfriend during World War I.

March: Wild Things.  Sounds like a 1980s sex comedy, but it's actually about a high school teacher who has sex with an underaged student and is accused of rape (which, legally, it was).  

April: Lost in Space. A film version of the 1960s classic sci-fi series about a family waylaid on the long journey to Alpha Centauri, with several of the old cast members doing cameos and hunky Matt LeBlanc as pilot Don West

April: Tarzan and the Lost City.  Audiences were expecting yet another rehash of the Tarzan origin story, not realizing that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote over 20 Tarzan novels. This one brings Tarzan (and Jane) to the lost city of Opar!

May: The Opposite of Sex.  A 16-year old girl, pregnant by her boyfriend, most in with her gay half-brother, and steals his dead lover's ashes.  Meanwhile his dead lover's sister, also pregnant, disapproves of him being gay because it's disgusting and all gay men die of AIDS and..at that point we walked out of the theater.  It was offensive all the way down, which is actually the tagline. 

June: None

July: Smoke Signals.  Victor (Adam Beach) and Thomas (Evan Adams) are gay subtext buddies on the rez.