[Pride 2020] A Bumpy Road Of Queer Gothic Resistance From The Old Dark House To The Rocky Horror Picture Show

I only publicly came out as queer less than a year ago at age thirty-four, but it’s something I’ve known about myself for the better part of twenty-five years. Because I spent the majority of my life as a covert queer, and an avid film lover, I often seesawed between implicit and explicit performances of queerness onscreen.

When I was a little boy, I saw a VHS tape in the basement that belonged to my dad — he worked at a record store in the ‘80s, so our basement was filled with a literal wall of CDs and many VHS tapes, a good majority of which he’d picked up for free — and the cover lit my young brain aflame: a big pair of luscious, disembodied red lips in stark contrast against a black background, The Rocky Horror Picture Show pasted over top of them. I’d sneak glimpses of the case, looking at the back to see Tim Curry in Halloween drag and wondering when the day would come that I’d get the chance to watch it, like longing for some queer Shangri-La.

Rebellious young me was only fourteen-years-old when marijuana became part of my life, so when I’d sneak into the basement late at night to puff away quietly while my parents were fast asleep upstairs, I continued staring down at that VHS. One night I decided to take it back upstairs with me and watch under the cover of darkness. Watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time was a liberating experience. The film showed me that queers were outsiders, but they weren’t merely Other, they were also rebels resisting the oppression of a society bent on promoting, and enforcing, heternormativity. All the same, queer history was new to me then. What I saw in Rocky Horror was one small leg of a much larger, longer historical journey that I, as a kid of just fourteen at the time, did not yet understand.

The Old Dark House represents an earlier leg of that journey, before the liberation of Rocky Horror and its fiercely queer resistance to hegemonic masculinity and a heteronormative, patriarchal society. The Old Dark House, released in 1932, sits between the devastation of both World Wars — the 1927 novel on which it’s based, J.B. Priestley’s Benighted, was about society’s disillusionment after WWI. The hypermasculine theatre of war in WWI brought about a number of social changes all across the world, including new strides in the gay rights movement.

A letter published in 1916 by the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee— an organisation founded in Berlin during 1897 to fight for social recognition of gay, bisexual, and transgender people — gave the world an opportunity to hear the voice of a gay man, identified in his letter only as S., whose soldier boyfriend perished from an injury overseas during the war. S. wrote about how his boyfriend died for the Fatherland (Germany), a nation that prohibited sex between men, and that it was unconscionable they were unable to openly celebrate their love in the same way as heterosexual soldiers though were allowed to die for their country.

This letter helped spark new groups fighting for gay equality, and shifted societal conversations about queerness from being strictly about biology to involving ideas of citizenship. Of course, part of being a good citizen in a patriarchal society is about complying with heteronormative demands of the dominant culture, which, as queers, usually means denying a part of ourselves. That’s where The Old Dark House enters the picture, epitomising a struggle between heterosexual marriage and the queer resistance it faced in a post-WWI social landscape. S. telling his story of queer wartime romance to the world feels significant when we consider the fact that The Old Dark House was directed by James Whale, an openly homosexual man who had himself served in the British Army during WWI.

The story of Priestley’s original novel is already loaded with Queer Gothic undertones only further accentuated by Whale’s directing and even the casting. Masculinity is constantly at play throughout the film, from the strange, aptly named Femm family — brother Horace is depicted as a dainty and effeminate man while his sister Rebecca comes off like a stock version of what people thought of as a butch lesbian in the 20th century’s first half — to the downtrodden monologue by Sir William Porterhouse about his efforts to appear manly via his capitalist business acumen. The most queer coded of all the Femms is the locked away Saul, whose pyromania and murderous intent has fused into the ultimate denial of heternormativity: he wants to burn down the family home, effectively cauterising the Femm family name with his queer flame.

First of all, Saul’s imprisonment upstairs carries with it shades of Jane Eyre, in which Charlotte Brontë depicts Bertha Mason locked in an attic apartment by her husband Edward Rochester. Bertha is symbolic of, among other things, Victorian oppression faced by women. Her setting fire to Rochester’s Thornfield Hall near the end of the novel is an act of feminist resistance despite ultimately ending in tragedy for her. Similarly, Saul symbolises queer resistance to heternormative oppression. His desire to burn down the Femm family home is akin to chopping down the family tree. In the end, Saul dies, his dead body cradled lovingly by Boris Karloff’s mute butler Morgan, suggestive of a deeper relationship between the two men — could Morgan’s muteness be a metaphor of “the love that dare not speak its name” which Oscar Wilde referred to as gay love, using the words of his lover, while on trial for gross indecency?

Following Saul’s death, and the house’s refusal to be burned down, Roger Penderel proposes marriage to Gladys Perkins. Heterosexual marriage has the final say, and the queer coded killer is destroyed. Returning to Whale, in spite of his being openly gay and living with producer David Lewis for over two decades, he remained unable to legally marry his partner. The Old Dark House, intentionally or not, seeps with the agony of homosexuality and the existential pain of living in a society unwilling to recognise the legitimacy or rights of queer love. The struggle only got worse, too. A year after The Old Dark House’s release in 1932, Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power and sacked the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, also known as the Institute of Sex Research — a private institute that advocated for sex education, contraception, treating sexually transmitted infections, and emancipating women, as well as pioneered transgender research, treating transgender clients and hiring transgender employees.

This single event set LGBTQ research back a couple decades, particularly in regards to advocacy for trans people, felt both on and offscreen. In everyday life, queer people had to continue to keep relatively hidden, just like the queer connotations in cinema. It’d be over four decades following Whale’s The Old Dark House before anything cinematic overtly challenged heteronormativity with the arrival of a film adaptation of the 1973 musical The Rocky Horror Show.

The queering of marriage and sexuality are centrepieces in The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s story, which we can see from the very beginning. Brad and Janet attend a wedding and not long afterward find themselves stranded at a Gothic castle where the very concepts of gender, sex, and heteronormative marrage are wildly subverted. It’s no coincidence Brad and Janet hear a sliver of President Richard Nixon’s resignation speech from August 8th, 1974 on the radio while they drive. Nixon had deep issues with queerness, infamously blaming the likes of ‘70s sitcom All in the Family for supposedly glorifying homosexuality in one of the Watergate tapes. Coincidentally, the Stonewall Riots occurred only months into Nixon’s presidency.

The beginning of Brad and Janet’s odyssey to the castle, where their heternormative worldview is shattered, is marked by Nixon’s resignation. But the queer work begins from the moment of the wedding, where Tim Curry is visible playing the priest who married the new couple. Curry appearing as a priest then slipping into drag as Dr. Frank-N-Furter is a subtle rejection of Nixon, the suggestion being that from priests to scientists queer people exist, even if not entirely visible, across all levels of society, not excluding institutions like medicine and organised religion.

While Nixon was worried about the promotion of homosexuality on TV, as if it were an abstract concept rather than an objective reality, queer people were living their lives and fighting for space, infiltrating all of society’s most precious strongholds. Brad and Janet are straight-laced, in every way, and their values are aligned with that of Nixon’s judging by the initial horror they display at the castle. Frank-N-Furter essentially initiates them into queerness by tearing down the walls built up around Brad and Janet’s lives by the dominant heternormative culture.

Masculinity, like in The Old Dark House, is targeted often in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Frank’s creation of Rocky is basically the creation of a masculinity outside patriarchal society’s specific image of what makes a man. Brad’s mocked for being “forceful” which Frank quips makes him “a perfect specimen of manhood” for being “dominant.” Most importantly, the pansexual crossdressing scientist himself embodies queer history through an Uncanny image of resistance. The pink triangle on Frank’s hospital scrubs evokes the Nazis, who took power of Germany in 1933, only a year after Whale’s film. T

he pink triangle was used in Nazi concentration camps as a badge of shame identifying LGBTQ people, lumping them in with rapists and paedophiles — at a certain point, the pink triangle was used specifically for gay men, bisexual men, and transgender women. Around the ‘70s, the pink triangle was reclaimed by queer activists, turning the purported badge of shame into one of pride and resistance. By way of the pink triangle, Frank is now the doctor, and in his castle, queerness is the dominant culture. Frank is a queer mad scientist reshaping a heternormative world, intent on reconfiguring the male body and the heteronormative concept of marriage. And he does it all in a pair of high heels.

Every queer person has their own journey — the community, while being unified, isn’t a monolith when it comes to our individual paths. Many of us, no matter our genre of choice, find comfort in the struggles of cinematic queers, more often than not reflective of our own varied experiences. For me, the horror genre encompasses a wide array of emotions that feel eerily parallel to those we experience in the struggle to show our queerness to the world. When the days are heavy, and lately they’ve been heavy for the community as a whole, I think about how far we’ve come. We still have a long way to go before things are truly equal. But there are a whole lot of miles on the road from The Old Dark House to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and many more queer cinematic figures of resistance to help us navigate our way.