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.

"Wednesday": Is the New Addams Family TV Series Gay-Friendly?

 

The various renditions of The Addams Family have the reputation of being gay-friendly, but I don't recall a single actual LGBT character, or even any significant gay subtexts: it's heterosexual romance all the way down.  I'm hoping that the new Netflix tv series Wednesday, which places the teenage Wednesday Addams in the Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for vampires, werewolves, and other magical types, will move into uncharted territory with actual gay characters.  I watched the episode with a school dance, to check for same-sex couples dancing, foreground or background.  .

Scene 1:  Wednesday and Thing (her disembodied hand companion) break into the coroner's lab to perform an autopsy on a victim of a monster attack.  About what you would expect: some defensive wounds, almost completely disemboweled.  Whoops, they have to hide as the coroner enters, with the sheriff, to show him that the two toes were removed from the victim's left foot.  By the way, this is Dr. Anwar's last week: he and the Mrs. are going to spend his retirement traveling.   He's doomed.  Nope, I looked it up: he only appears in this one episode.  So the retirement and the "Mrs." reference are irrelevant, except to identify him as heterosexual.

Scene 2: Wednesday's dorm room at the Nevermore Academy.  Her roommate objects to the forensic photos covering the wall.  She notes that the victims all had different body parts surgically removed: a kidney, a gall bladder, a finger. This is not a monster; it's an experienced serial killer!  

Scene 3: Botany class.  Wednesday sits next to Xavier (Percy Hynes White, left), her gay bff or boyfriend.  He encourages her to invite someone to the big dance, the Rav'n (because it's the Nevermore Academy, get it?)   "I'd rather stick needles in my eyes.  I may do that anyway." 

She notices scratch marks on his neck.  He explains that he got them from...um...fencing.

Scene 4: To find out what's going on with Xavier, Wednesday and Thing sneak into his art studio, and find paintings of a sharp-clawed monster.  He must be the murderer! They steal a few -- oh no, he caught them.  The girl has no luck with secret missions!    Fortunately, he assumes that Wednesday came to invite him to the dance, but now she has to go through with it.  Oh, well, she can interrogate him about the murders.  

Scene 5: The Roommate is thrilled that Wednesday is exhibiting heterosexual interest (was there a question?), and starts planning an outfit for her.  While she is shopping, Wednesday runs into her therapist, who asks if she is going to the dance (the heteronormative imperative never stops, does it?)  Then she takes the monster drawings to Galpin, the police detective who does the standard "let the professionals take care of it" routine.  

Scene 6: Roommate and two other girls at a diner.  Lucas Walker (Iman Marson), the mayor's son, drops by to ask her to the dance. 

Meanwhile, Wednesday runs into the Detective's son, Tyler (Hunter Doohan, top photo), whom she has an intense-stare crush on.  He was planning to ask her to the dance, but she's already going with Xavier, which upsets him.  "You keep giving me mixed signals.  I thought we liked each other, but then you pull something like this."  

Scene 7:  In a beekeepers' cabin, Wednesday is showing her evidence to Eugene (Moosa Mustafa), a Spanish-speaking boy who has a crush on her roommate.  Ok, everybody is heterosexual so far.  Eugene mentions his two moms, but a single sentence referring to non-appearing characters is insufficient.  Maybe there will be some same-sex couples at the dance. 

Scene 8: They investigate a mysterious cave and find manacles.  They make plans to skip the dance and stake out the cave tonight.

Scene 9: The DJ at the dance, who has a crush on Wednesday,  knocks on her door: Thing has pushed them together by dropping an invitation in his tip jar. This may be a new character, or it may be Tyler from Scene 6.  There are so many guys with crushes on Wednesday that I can keep track.  Is she like, madeo of video games?  

Thing has also provided an appropriately macabre outfit, so Wednesday quickly changes.  They are just leaving when Eugene (the beekeeping boy) shows up, livid over being dumped for the cave stake out.  Xavier (the monster-drawing boy) is also livid. 

Scene 10: The dance.  Roommate arrives with Lucas, the Mayor's Son.  She accidentally spills punch on his crotch, then kneels to clean it up, so her crush Ajax (Georgie Farmer) sees him and thinks she is giving him a blow job.  

Background characters are all male-female couples.

Still 13 minutes to go, but why continue?  There are no LGBTQ people here.  Not one.  Not even a glimmer of subtext.  

So much for the inclusivity of The Addams Family.

Update:  One of the boys has two mothers, and when Uncle Fester visits, he says that Tyler has "clocked" him, but Wednesday immediately says "Tyler is not intersted in you."  Fester is on the run from the law, so maybe he means "noticed that I'm a fugitive," but Wednesday's comment suggests that romantic interest (he's 18, so ok for an adult to date).  

And that's it.  Miniscule representation.  Heterosexuals all the way down.

Happy Trails to Homophobes: The Roy Rogers Show

When I was a kid in the 1960s,  my church didn't allow us to listen to rock music, go to movies, or read comic books or science fiction (I usually found loopholes in the rules).  Television was permitted, but preachers and Sunday school teachers railed against it anyway. 

Did The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ever ask God's guidance in fighting the Communists?
Did The Beverly Hillbillies ever bow their heads and say grace before eating Granny's vittles?
The Flying Nun tried to brainwash you into becoming an evil Catholic.

The only program they approved of was Roy Rogers, about a singing cowboy named Roy Rogers, played by...um...long-time singing cowboy star Roy Rogers.  He never said grace before meals, either, but in real life he was a fundamentalist Christian who always mentioned God in interviews and included Christian songs in his live performances.

The preachers didn't realize that his show (1951-57) had been off the air for over ten years.  But I must have caught glimpses of the Saturday morning reruns (1961-65 or after-school syndication (1961-1972),  because I remember hating it.  Who cared about the Old West in the Space Age?  We were all about astronauts, not cowboys.  Besides, there was hardly any gay content.

1.  Roy didn't hang out with guys like "real" cowboys.  He had a wife, Dale Evans, who sometimes rode next to him in her petite cowboy skirt, but usually stayed home to run a restaurant.

2. This wasn't even  the Old West. They had electric lights, telephones, and cars. As a kid, I found that idiotic. Why would you ride a horse if cars were available?

3.  No beefcake of any sort.  Roy never unbuttoned a button on-screen.  There were a few semi-nude shots in movie magazines, but nothing memorable. The top photo, with Roy eating a hot dog, may look promising, but according to Darwin Porter's autobiographical novel, the "squinty-eyed homophobe" was not particularly gifted beneath the belt.

4. No dreamy boys or muscular men. I found Roy unattractive,  with a face like a mask and tiny, beady eyes. The only other male star was Pat Brady, the cook at Dale's restaurant,  a gawky, comic-relief character who drove a jeep named Nellybelle.

5. The closing song, "Happy Trails to You," sung by the disembodied heads of Roy and Dale, freaked me out.  I distinctly remember them singing it to "cheer up" some kid dying in the hospital.  Mememto mori, a reminder of the transience of life and the inevitability of death -- not what a four-year old wants to hear about while eating his Coco Puffs on Saturday morning.

The only gay content: some buddy-bonding potential, I guess.  Roy and Pat starred in many movies together during the 1940s, and were close friends in real life.

Spring 1983: Reading Faulkner: Redneck Muscle and Boys in Drag

Nothing brings back my memories of college literature classes more than William Faulkner.  Other authors I can return to with respect, even with pleasure, but Faulkner is mostly incomprehensible, and the parts I understand fill me with disgust.

In the spring of 1983, I took a horrible class in turgid, heterosexist "classics."  First Ulysses (by James Joyce).  Then "The Waste Land," by T.S. Eliot.  Then...shudder, gasp... The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner.

"Marvelous!" the Professor chirped. "Stupendous!  A masterpiece!  The greatest novel ever written!"

I doubt he has ever read it.  I doubt anyone has.  It is literally impossible to understand even a sentence.  Check out the first two sentences:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.  They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence.

Benjy the Idiot (Faulkner's term) is standing on the other side of a fence from a golf course, watching golfers hitting balls toward the hole, which is marked with a flag.  I looked it up -- no way anyone could ever figure it out from the cryptic text, even if they knew about golf, which I didn't. 

As I understand it from extensive research, The Sound and the Fury is about three brothers in the dying, decrepit, depressed Compson family of Mississipi: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason.  I imagine they look like this.

Part 1: Narrated by Benjy, an "idiot" who has no conception of time, and jumps back and forth at random between events that he didn't understand in the first place.  He cries a lot, and he's obsessed with his sister Caddy's muddy underwear.

Gay subtext: The elderly "Negro" servant Dilsey warns her grandson Luster to stay away from the Man with the Red Tie.  Wearing red is probably a gay symbol, like wearing lavender today.  Maybe they're having a gay affair.  And hopefully Luster looks like this.

Part 2: Narrated by Benjy's brother Quentin, a Harvard freshman who's crazy, and whose mind jumps back and forth at random just like Benjy's. He's obviously gay, in love with his roommate, Shreve, who responds by grabbing his knee.  Someone even calls Shreve his "husband."

He claims to have committed incest with his sister Caddy, but he's lying to hide a worse shame -- she had sex with someone else.

Wait -- aren't you supposed to have sex with someone other than your brother?

This part is also completely incomprehensible.  Not even a single sentence makes any sense. I understand Quentin commits suicide.

Part 3: Narrated by Jason, the third brother, the only one who thinks normally and writes normally.  This part is sort of comprehensible, except for references to events from the first part that we don't know about because they were written in gibberish, and the fact that a different Quentin shows up -- this one Caddy's daughter.  Giving two characters the same name is taboo for fiction writers, as it inevitably leads to confusion, and this is already an incomprehensible book.  

Jason's story is about stealing money from Quentin #2 (Caddy's daughter).

Part 4: No narrator. Miss Quentin has taken the money Jason stole from her, plus some of his own, and run off with the Man with a Red Tie (the one Luster is having an affair with in Part 1).  So maybe Miss Quentin is a boy in drag.  Jason does get awfully upset when he sees "her" in a bathrobe.

The homophobic Jason looks for Miss Quentin, to get his money back, but finally gives up.  The end.

It took a lot of creativity and endless Cliff's Notes to get through!

And beefcake photos.  Here's a semi-nude William Faulkner, thinking up new and better ways to torture English majors.

There's a gay dating story about William Faulkner on Tales of West Hollywood.