Boys Beware! (The Tillinghast Question, Part 1)
There’s a reason that a certain strain of queer nerd gets overly attached to horror movies. Schlocky 80s gross-out movies are gay comfort food for me. I prefer to linger in their gooey clutches. It makes me feel normal.
There is a kind of goopy, incoherent, sexually deviant horror movie that I love: a movie where vanilla straight people make a kinky queer romance on accident. After all, queer folks are taught to internalize the idea of their romantic pursuits as monstrous and sexually predatory. Is it shocking that sometimes we over-identify with actual movie monsters?
Don’t believe me? Just watch Boys Beware, the 1961 Inglewood Police Department PSA about the dangers of being exposed to a homosexual. It basically hits the beats of a slasher movie: one by one, tow-headed all-American boys disappear, lured into molestation and death by drooling queers. These wretched individuals are “sick with a disease that was not visible, like smallpox, but no less dangerous or contagious.” The meat of the short is a parade of young boys being raped and murdered by these bloodthirsty gentlemen because, well. “All homosexuals are not passive.” If passive homosexuality is safe, what does that make active homosexuality?
In the world of Boys Beware, it makes you a threat. In the most horror-like vignette of the piece, we are warned of the dangers posed by the public bathroom. A young man splits away from his group of friends in front of an outdoor bathroom by a beach, one the narrator grimly warns us is a hive of homosexual activity. We see a black-suited figure, almost a silhouette, duck out and follow him. The camera cuts to a drunken low angle, lurching by his legs as threatening music swells. The shot switches again and we now see our final boy, blonde and innocent, framed behind a chain-linked fence and in front of the menacing stranger. The boy sees his stalker, panics, and runs up the beach. The narrator affirms that by choosing to flee a suspected queer in the vicinity of a public bathroom, the young man may have saved his own life.
Boys Beware closes with a monologue of stark cop advice for young boys trying to avoid the groping clutches of queer boogeymen: “The choice is yours, and your whole future might depend on making the right one. So no matter where you meet a stranger, be careful if they are too friendly. If they try to win your confidence too quickly, or if they become overly personal. One never knows when the homosexual is about.” He may as well be describing a vampire.
Passive homosexuality is certainly an option, if you have the stomach for it. Queer people are often counseled that we should be emulating straight people instead of creating a unique culture of our own. It works out for some of us. Just look at Pete Buttigieg; he’s doing great. Passive homos make great homeowners, but what happens to the rest of us?
Well, in the slasher movie that plays out in the minds of conservative Christians every time they see us enter a bathroom with their children, we’re Leatherface. It doesn’t matter that someone like me is far more likely to get jumped for using a public bathroom than their kid. When they see tits and stubble on me, they see a monster. It’s even harder if you’re trans, if you’re fat, if you’re into kinky shit. I am deeply aware that to be honest about what I want is to accept condemnation for my deviance, but it’s also the only way to refuse to suffer for it. I am one of many flaming queers in this world who will never fit into the tiny, respectable boxes allowed to us.
After a while, isn’t it natural to stop trying? To even take pride in the impossibility? If you can’t be a person, what’s left for you other than delight in monstrosity?
I don’t presume to speak for every gay person in the world, but I do think there’s a reason that a certain strain of queer nerd gets overly attached to horror movies. Schlocky 80s gross-out movies are gay comfort food for me, and I prefer to linger in their gooey clutches when I’m feeling particularly alienated and disgusting. It makes me feel normal.
Horror is a world where the native language is camp, where queer characters unexpectedly abound, where every kind of sex and violence is available to you. A universe of transgressive possibilities, a thousand custom-made wet nightmares for certified blood and guts freaks. Yes, you might die in the pursuit of pleasure there. But until you die the background hum of chaos will make your traumatized nervous system feel normal, and the sensory burlesque of what you experience will be worth it. Queer people in real life also die in pursuit of pleasure, and more often than not, we are blamed for our corpses when they are discovered. Is a horror movie supposed to be scarier than that? At least in a horror movie, I stand a chance of killing the thing that wants to kill me first.
I also might get to fuck a tentacle demon, which would be cool.
Speaking of finding something resonant, I have spent the last three weeks trying to solve a cinematic puzzle. Some people would call this dissociation, retreating from reality as a coping mechanism for my increasing anxiety due to the legal campaign of terror against people in my home state of Ohio. You might even think this entire interlude was just an obvious attempt to process the feeling of my fellow Ohioans gathering up pitchforks and torches to drive people like me out of their castle for good.
Well, you know what? You can mind your fucking business. We aren’t here to discuss what’s wrong with my brain. We’re here to discuss the 1988 psychosexual horror lasagna FROM BEYOND, and whether or not our protagonist Dr. Crawford Tillinghast is some kind of sex pet. Let’s get into it.
(to be continued next week!)