[Editorial] Fighting and Forgiving Queer Monsters

The horror genre has never been about forgiving monsters—it has always been about destroying them. Movies like The Babadook and A Dark Song were revolutionary not only for their finely crafted technical merits, but for their subversive concluding chapters; rather than kill the monsters, those left alive instead chose to forgive and accept. There’s something profound and curative about living with your monsters. There is also, pessimistic and dour as it might seem, a sense of inevitability to it. Some monsters are ephemeral; little goblins in the dark easily eradicated, while others are titanic beasts. Like the monsters of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness: one look back is catatonic.

Growing up queer, the monsters of daily life—the monsters flanking you simply for being alive—are titanic beasts. They are cultural and widespread, yet so distinctly singular at the same time. They are slurs and looks. They are the minutiae of life as a queer person and the monstrous, elephantine pillars of society that aver, perhaps more than anything, that queer life is a life of sin. Sin is dogmatic and existential, and a queer person’s trauma transcends this life. Critics and bigots contend that your punishment will extend long beyond death.

It’s a frightening and despairing thought, one young queer persons, whether spiritual or not, must grapple with. The closet is metaphorical, yes, but the closet is safe. When hidden deep within, the life of ostensible sin is hidden from God and neighbor both. The horror genre, then, is rendered a genre of hope and victory. The monsters are defeated. The monsters are killed. All the trauma and pain, narratively and conveniently, is effaced.

When you have been closeted for so long– I was in that colloquial closet for twenty-five years– you start to believe that the monsters are never going to go away. They are permanent, little devils on your shoulders from birth until death, whispering that your life is sin, that your life is wrong. The genre inspires you to confront your monsters, to fight them, exchanging blows until they’re gone forever.

The closet, though, constrains you. It restricts you like a winding serpent. Instead, it cultivates the idea of forgiveness. When boys tug at your underwear in sixth grade and call you faggot, you have to forgive. When neighbors disparage marriage equality within earshot as you leave for work, you have to forgive. You have to forgive because to take offense, to hold onto what they’ve said and drown in the mire and muck of pain, is to endorse or acknowledge. It is confirmation that what they said has hurt you because what they have said about you is true.

For years, I was a fighter who never fought.

I forgave and forgave and forgave.

I went to dinners and parties and conferences with people who had hurt me, who had undermined and condemned the very fiber of my being– monsters of my own life– equipped with only the power to forgive. I wanted to badly to fight. I wanted to throw people through windows or tackle them like a Discovery special, two beasts of men wrestling and biting to the death. I couldn’t, though. Even after I came out, those very same people either said nothing or everything. “I’m so happy for you.” Or radio silence. Words (or the lack thereof) hard to reconcile with my rolodex of hurt.

What I had to grapple with, then, was the perennial being of my monsters. I could fight one, but it would always come back, Michael Myers ad nauseum. Fighting didn’t always work and fighting only wore me down more each and every time. The only thing I had left, something I thought of as weakness or evasion, was considerably more powerful. I could, whenever possible, try to forgive, and I could try to mean it.

I have forgiven people who I never thought I would. At the same time, there are people I should forgive who I just haven’t yet. I am living in this state of enduring beef, as I like to call it, where I am both energized and electrified by the mythic rivals I’ve constructed in my own mind. This colloquial “beef” is as much a part of me as anything else, heart and soul. It’s hard and it’s an ongoing process, but the older and more enervated I get, the easier it gets. Day by day, it gets easier to both do and mean– to mean so sincerely.

It is, though, incredibly difficult for me to forgive in this culture. Individual slights and people who weaponized my own insecurities to harm and damage me. People who took advantage of whatever goodwill I had to pervert it into something ugly and painful. People both within and beyond the queer community. Then we have legacy media, where the salacious twist is gay; protagonist or peripheral bystander, gay in some capacity is enough to elicit gasps and antiquated shocks. True crime, a kind of Forensic Fags, frames homosexuality so centrally, no matter how large a role it might have played in the contextual crimes. To juice up an otherwise unremarkable crime, it must highlight the queer angle. Middle America audiences will recoil and rubberneck: that could never be them.  

Forgiveness is tricky, too. It’s difficult to fully understand the forgiveness follow-up. Does forgiveness mean to forget? Does forgiveness erase the sometimes-permanent damage of the inciting action, an action that almost alters the synapses of the brain, changing the way you think and feel and behave? I don’t know.

The closet hurt. The monsters that drove me deep inside might not even know the full extent of the damage they’ve done. The offense begins and ends for them.

For me, it is forever.

Forgiveness, too, is often dyadic. If John steals $20 from Jane, John owes her an apology. If Jane, consequentially, slashes John’s tires, does John still need to apologize, or do they both owe the other an apology? If they do, do the apologies not just cancel out? There’s something prescriptive in the response, though, because the response to the original incident occurs in the context of that incident, while the first simply didn’t. That twisted labyrinth of motivations and context obfuscates the through line of the apology and the requisition of forgiveness and penance.

It can also be hard to forgive because our slights and sins so often occur beyond our own interpersonal circles; it’s unfortunately the legacy and universality to the quotidian pain of living in the queer community. That cognizance is difficult to not only grasp, but to internalize. If I forgive an infraction committed against myself, am I forgiving only that, or am I forgiving an infraction against the community? It’s a tricky balancing act; a kind of dispensation Wipeout whereby I endeavor to forgive what was done to me while maintaining that it is so tremendously far beyond my place to forgive what has been done to others.

All of this, of course, occurs alongside daily, almost ritualistic horror screenings. When the monster is defeated, I cheer. When the monsters endure, I am despondent. That reconciliation between the contention of my favorite genre and the contention of my own values…well, it isn’t all that reconciled. They’re in constant, ever-changing combat, an arena model whereby the appeal of one sometimes scores over the other.

What it all means, I guess, is that the power to fight—to defeat the monster—lives alongside the power to forgive. I can’t say with certainty that one is more worthwhile than the other. I wish I could, but I can’t. There is, though, both the queer community and the horror community, and the overlap therein. Perhaps the true strength is there. Whatever one chooses to do, the strength to do it comes from those people that matter most.

With them by your side, there are no monsters too big.