Oct 14, 2020

Dark Shadows: Barnabas and Willie


In the spring of 1969, my friends and I began running home from school as fast as we could (my house was the closest) to catch the last ten or fifteen minutes of Dark Shadows (1966-71), a soap opera about the brooding, guilt-wracked vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) and his immensely wealthy, occult-obsessed family.

He enters the story when the slim, stuttering ne’er-do-well Willie Loomis (John Karlen, left), prowling around the Collins estate on the stormy coast of Maine, discovers a secret room in the old mausoleum, and inside it a chained coffin.  At this point, most people would flag down the next bus to Boston, but the none-too-bright Willie decides to open the coffin.  A bejeweled hand shoots up and grabs him by the neck.


The next day Barnabas Collins presents himself as a long-lost “cousin from England” and talks his way into possession of the ancient, decrepit Old House.

Willie inexplicably moves in with him, telling his friends that he has taken a job as Barnabas’ servant; yet he is obviously more than a servant.  The two spend an inordinate amount of time together, and are on an altogether chummy first-name basis, a liberty taken by no other servant on the estate.

The truth, of course, is that Barnabas bit him, and now they are co-conspirators if not secret lovers.  What is a vampire’s bite, after all, but a form of sexual congress?

Gossip about the early years of the series reveals that the producers were so skittish about potential homoerotic readings of the relationship that they gave Willie a heterosexual crush, and mandated that same-sex neck-biting must always occur off-camera.

But the heterosexual crush backfires, as the writers have Willie confiding in Maggie Evans about his problems with Barnabas.
Maggie: Where's Barnabas?
Willie: I don't know where he is.  He left without saying anything to me.
Maggie: You seem very angry with him.
Willie: I don't care about Barnabas.
Maggie: You don't really believe that, do you?

Eventually the strain of living with a vampire is too much for Willie; he has a nervous breakdown, and is confined to Windcliff Sanitarium. Later, Barnabas misses Willie, and asks him to return.  Willie eagerly agrees.  Later that evening, their friend Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) is sitting alone in the drawing room of the Old House, evidently keeping guard, when someone comes to the door.  “Barnabas isn’t here  – he’s with Willie,” she says with a diffident glance upstairs – to the bedrooms. Exactly what is Barnabas doing up there to welcome Willie home?  

When Barnabas announces his plans to cure his vampirism by transferring his spiritual essence into a different body, Willie worries that the new Barnabas will not be attracted to him (or, perhaps, that he will not be attracted to the new Barnabas):
Willie: Suppose he don’t like me?
Barnabas:         He will be exactly toward you as I am.
Willie: You don’t know that!  You might come out of this all different. . .It won’t be the same.

Although Barnabas barely acknowledges his affection, Willie obviously cares deeply for him, with an unstated and perhaps unconscious homoerotic desire.

As Barnabas zapped back and forth between time periods and parallel worlds, he encountered different characters played by the same cast members, and John Karlen managed to infuse all of his characters with a sometimes frivolous, sometimes dark and passionate attraction to the vampire hero.

When Barnabas visits Collinwood in the year 1897, he meets Karlen as Carl Collins, a fop only slightly toned down from Oscar Wilde’s green carnation crowd.  Carl grabs his shoulder,  touches his hand, takes his arm, and whispers softly in his ear “You look so nice!  We’re going to be close friends, aren’t we?  We’re going to be buddies!”  And thereafter, whenever he has a problem (usually involving ghosts or werewolves), he throws himself into Barnabas’s arms, overtly presenting himself as a lover.

Many of the cast members were gay, including Joel Crothers, left (who played Maggie Evans' boyfriend and remained her best friend in real life) and Louis Edmonds (patriarch Roger Collins).

When Don Briscoe (werewolf Chris Jennings) took time off to appear in the gay-themed Boys in the Band (1969), he brought Chris Bernau and Keith Prentice back with him.

Most of the others were gay friendly, including Grayson Hall (who was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a repressed lesbian in Night of the Iguana), Katherine Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans), Roger Davis (who went on to star in Alias Smith and Jones),  and the vampire himself, Jonathan Frid.






Most soap operas, like One Life to Live, were unremittingly heterosexist, requiring us to seek out subtexts, but Dark Shadows had ample male characters who were immune to the charms of eyelash-fluttering governesses and sought out each other: David Collins, heir to the family fortune; the fey Noah Gifford (Craig Slocum), who has an unspecified and “sinister” relationship with the golddigging Lieutenant Forbes (Joel Crothers); Aristede (Michael Stroka), a brooding, androgynous “manservant”; the nerdish mad scientist Cyrus Longworthy (Christopher Pennock); and the darkly sensuous Gerald Stiles (Jim Storm) who was not shy about expressing his devotion to werewolf/man-about-town Quentin Collins (David Selby).


No wonder we ran home from school as fast as we could to watch.



25 comments:

  1. You forgot to mention Laura Parker, who played the evil witch Angelique. She's written some novels set in the Dark Shadows universe, with gay characters in them.

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    1. THAT'S why Angelique looks at Eve the way she does when trying to plot with her on Collection 11 Disk 2, 2nd or 3rd episode to the end. I THOUGHT she seemed to be coming on a bit strong!

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  2. I've read Lara Parker's books and I dont' remember any gay characters in them. Could you point the character out to me, maybe with a page number so I can look it up myself.
    For what it's worth, Desmond was in 1840, Carl was Willie's 1897 look alike, an effeminent practical joker.
    There is a scene in 1795, when Barnabas is in danger of dying due to Angelique strangling him with voodoo before he became a vampire, and Barnabas's young uncle Jeremiah is at his bedside with a hand intimately on his thigh. It was shocking how they got away with that. Their body language togather always made me think the actors were involved romanticly off camera.

    slayer@junct.com

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    1. Uncle Jeremiah was played by Joel Crothers, who was gay in real life. Jonathan Frid never specified a sexual orientation, but I saw him once in the 1990s driving around in a convertible with a hot-looking twink.

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    2. I know this post is 6 years old, but there is a picture floating around online of Frid and Louis Edmonds wearing skimpy swimsuits hanging together at Fire Island. Plus after Frid died, his boyfriend/companion was revealed but they never went into details about the personal relationship they had together

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  3. Joel Crothers played hunky fisherman Joe Haskell in the modern day, and scheaming gold digger Nathan Forbes in 1795. Anthony George played Jeremiah, who had to have a spell put on him to make him romance a woman.

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  4. I remember catching reruns of this on some UHF channel back in the early 80s. David Henesy who played the kid David Collins always struck me as VERY gay (not that the character was written that way, but Henesy was just so swishy it was impossible not to notice).

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  5. Willie Loomis was someting of a boy to to all - was he not ? Its funny really as John Karlen who played him really is straight and struck me as something as a rough trade guy .Remember Carls gal pal in 1897 ? London music hall star Pansy Faye .

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  6. John Karlen always played slim, feminine-coded "boys" whose heterosexual interests were never really believable.

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  7. I've heard that Jonathan Frid was indeed gay but was ordered to stay in the coffin by Dark Shadows producer Dan Curtis for the sake of show and all those fantasizing teenage girls and housewives out there in 1960s TV land. . I suppose we'll never know the truth since he never came "out." He did not discuss his private life in interviews, but was never linked with or photographed with any woman that I can remember.

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  8. I have a friend who claimed she caught all that stuff when we were teenagers watching the show on its original run, but quite frankly, I didn't pick up on some of the things mentioned in this article until I finally saw the show in its entirety almost forty years after it ended its run. Hate to say it, but this article sounds a lot more to me like a lot of the theorizing I would expect to read in a journal of academic criticism, though, surprisingly, there is almost no criticism produced by college professors on this show. (One exception is a book about Dark Shadows which was published a few years ago by Wayne State University Press which does talk a good deal about the homosexual overtones of DS and its cast, including the character of Dr. Julia Hoffman.

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  9. I read an interview with the late Mr. Frid a few years ago. The last lines of the article stayed with me. "Mr. Frid does not discuss his private life. He has never married."

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  10. Interestingly, I'm currently bingeing Dark Shadows on Pluto. Of course I never knew any of this when I watched originally as a teen but learned later about Louis Edmonds & stunning Joel Crothers, who died of AIDs. I always though John Karlen's Willie stole the show. Thanks for the rest of the info.

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  11. Interestingly, at a fan convention, John Karlen was asked about the homeorotic subtext between Willie and Barnabas, and he joked "It was always me and Quentin."

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  12. Didn't Barnabas first bite Willie (off-camera) on the wrist? The neck, even off-camera, would have too "too gay" for 60s tv. A friend met Jonathan Frid years ago, told Frid that Barnabas gave him nightmares as a kid, and when they ended their conversation and began to part ways, Frid said with a sly grin, "Pleasant dreams."

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    1. I don't remember the location of the bite being specified. On-camera, it was always on the neck.

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  13. I have been watching "Dark Shadows" on Amazon. I can understand why both women and men fell in love with Barnabas Collins. Frid is excellent specially when he becomes menacing. I will keep an eye on these gay subtext scenes. I woen of if Anne Rice was a fan of the show? Barnabas seems to be the inspiration for Lestat

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    1. She must have been. "Interview with the Vampire" was published in 1976, five years after the show ended.

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  14. What about Rev. Trask (Jerry Lacy) ? He was one of the hottest and sexiest men on the show ! With jet black hair and deep,dark chestnut eyes...he was devilish and very alluring in his black cape and top hat. He seems to have been forgotten on this blog and is alive and well today at 85. Dark Shadows had several openly gay characters in real life,including Jonathan Frid, Joel Crothers and Louis Edmonds. Jerry Lacy,on the other hand was straight,as was David Selby,who played the enticing blue-green eyed,Quentin Collins on the hit tv horror-drama of the 1960's.

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  15. What about Rev.Trask, (Jerry Lacy) ? He was one of the hottest and sexiest men on the show ! With jet black hair and deep,dark chestnut eyes...he was devilish and very alluring in his black cape and top hat. He seems to have been forgotten on this blog and is alive and well today at 85. Dark Shadows had several openly gay characters in real life,including Jonathan Frid, Joel Crothers and Louis Edmonds. Jerry Lacy,on the other hand was straight,as was David Selby,who played the enticing blue-green eyed,Quentin Collins on the hit tv horror-drama of the 1960's.

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  16. Better late than never to reply to this … Jerry Lacy was incredibly hot on Dark Shadows!!! Bless his heart, still with us, and still a silver fox!!!

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  17. I can't believe my mom & I never picked up on this. We watched it together all the time.

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  18. There was definitely an obvious sadomasochistic gay relationship between Barnabas and Willie. Count Petofi and Aristede were the first, pretty much, openly gay partners on television. John Karlen wasn't really joking, there was a flirtatious, suggestive relationship between John's and David Selby's various characters. Jonathan Frid and the actor who played Jeremiah were both gay and could very well have been real life lovers.

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  19. Very shocking indeed I wouldn't have never thought that

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    1. Why shocking? The entertainment industry has always attracted large numbers of gay men. Gay men were probably on every television show in the 1960s and 1970s but I think some of the writers on Dark Shadows had to be queens because there was just too much gay subtext for it to be coincidental or unintentional - even as a kid I could see it.

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