[Pride 2020] Richie Tozier As The Unlikely Queer Horror Icon

I remember when I realized that IT Chapter Two was more than likely going to lean into the queer readings of the text that have been present since the book was released in the eighties.

I was seated for a press screening of the film which I was woefully underprepared for in that I had forgotten to bring tissues (yes, it made me cry). I had gone in expecting Andy Muschietti and Gary Dauberman to tease the Reddie (the relationship name for Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak) of it all, maybe hint at the fact that Richie and Eddie weren’t straight, but leave it at that. After all, big blockbusters tend to go for the Joe Russo of Avengers: Endgame kind of representation: a blink and you’ll miss it moment which is easily edited out and that studios can crow makes them super woke.

Instead, they went for broke.

Richie Tozier came out of the IT Chapter Two hype machine a new queer horror icon, aided by the fact he spent the entire film wearing final boy Jesse’s shirt from Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Chapter Two reveals Richie’s secret is that he’s gay and has been in love with Eddie since they were children. After being bullied for his sexuality (and, though this is never explored, also growing up during the AIDS crisis), he remains closeted as an adult, though his feelings for Eddie return once he remembers his childhood.

And then Eddie dies. While Ben and Beverly run off into the sunset (a happy ending both characters richly deserve), Bill returns to his life as a star writer/Stephen King self insert, and Mike finally gets the happiness he also richly deserved, Richie is left to re-carve his and Eddie’s initials into the town’s kissing bridge and softly smile. No easy ending for him.

Overall, it’s not progressive to have the sole gay character end up alone and sad. And yet, for myself and for queer fans, many found Richie to be an incredibly powerful and important character and moment of representation.

IT Chapter Two is an…interesting film. I both love it and deeply wish I could script doctor it quite a bit. Arguments have been made for and against the film’s decision to make Richie gay and embrace that subplot, with some arguing that it isn’t handled well. Even as a defender of the film, I find that those arguments hold weight, especially when the film opens with a brutal act of homophobia in the murder of an openly gay man, Adrian Mellon, in front of his boyfriend.

Ultimately, it stings that Richie gets a tragic ending while his presumably straight friends all get to live their dreams, made even harder by the fact that Richie never comes out in the film and never has his fears of rejection disproven by his friends acceptance of him. So why does Richie mean so much to so many?

The answer is hard to explain.

To start, we need to make one thing clear: IT has been interpreted with a queer lens since the book’s initial publication. Richie and Eddie’s relationship has been the source of much discussion due to the fact that they are easy to interpret as being romantically involved. As kids, they banter back and forth; one example is when Richie pinches Eddie’s cheek and tells him he’s the “Miss America of cute boys.” As adults, Eddie’s final words before he dies are to Richie; he says “you know I—“ before dying. Richie kisses Eddie’s cheek before leaving him in the sewers and screams a parting “FUCK YOU” at It, and when Beverly asks why he did it, he claims he doesn’t know but “he knew well enough.”

And that’s not even delving into the history of reading Eddie as being a gay man. To fully explore the history of Eddie being read as queer would require an article of its own; to summarize it neatly, this reading is so prevalent that Dennis Christopher, who played Eddie in the 1990 miniseries version of IT, shared with fans that he pushed for Eddie to be gay in that adaptation. Christopher currently regularly interacts with Reddie fans on Twitter, which is perhaps the most delightful thing to come out of all this.

Charlie Howard, circa late 1970s

King’s inspiration for part of IT was the murder of a gay man named Charlie Howard. Howard was drowned by three homophobes in 1984. King was so disturbed by the event that he included the crime in the novel to showcase both the evil of Pennywise and the evil that lurks in the heart of Derry. The murder of Adrian Mellon therefore is not, in theory, just for exploitation, and Muschietti has stated that he included that particular scene because homophobia is still very much a destructive and violent form of persecution present in the 2010s.

I respect the decision behind including the sequence in King’s novel. I find it harder to stomach in the film, though I recognize that it is because Muschietti needed to remind straight audiences how dangerous it is to be gay in a world that hates you so that they could understand why Richie remained closeted. However, when you take it in the context of Richie’s ultimately bittersweet ending in a canon in which he is gay, the justification for including it becomes hard.

As I mentioned above, Richie is the only Loser without a happy ending. Sure, we can hope that after he leaves Derry, he comes out and finds love. But that’s a hope and nothing more. There’s nothing shown onscreen that shows that Richie ultimately finds acceptance outside of himself. He doesn’t get to kiss his love interest. His love interest is dead.

Queer pain is a popular trope in all forms of art. It seems as though we shouldn’t be included in a film unless we’re suffering. Horror is a genre known for the pain and death that characters go through, and that shouldn’t change just because a character is gay. However, when the character’s straight friends get tidy endings while the main gay character is left alone with a voiceover telling him to, “be who you want to be, be proud” is not a good look. It’s a sad look. It’s a dated look.

Richie’s pain is not easily solvable unless Muschietti and Dauberman had opted to save Eddie in the final battle. Given how Mike Flanagan was able to change the fate of a main character in Doctor Sleep, Warner Bros’ other big Stephen King adaptation, I wonder whether saving Eddie was ever on the table for Chapter Two.

For what it’s worth, when I met the incredibly kind Muschietti at a panel a couple months post Chapter Two, he did apologize to me for killing Eddie after I cried as I told him how grateful I was for how he handled Richie.

It’s not entirely Muschietti’s fault. Stephen King did not deliberately lead into the “bury your gays” plot when he killed Eddie because he didn’t know that Eddie was gay or would be interpreted as such. If Muschietti and Dauberman had wanted to make Eddie canonically gay and have him reciprocate Richie’s feelings, they would have had to change King’s ending, a decision that might’ve drawn pushback from hardcore King fans, the studio, and King himself.

Ultimately, we can speculate for another 27 years about what was intended, what got scrapped, and why the creative team made the decisions they did. We only have the film’s canon to work with, and the film’s canon is that Richie is gay.

Richie is gay, and that does matter. The film gets a lot of flak for not making Richie’s sexuality more clear, resulting in articles where writers expressed surprise at finding out after the film was done that Richie was supposed to be gay, but what is there is powerful.

What is there is also, mostly, centered on Richie’s pain. The flashback to a young Richie being tormented by the town bully hurts. The pain on adult Richie’s face as he reflects on his youth hurts, as does his grief when Eddie dies. There’s a lot of emphasis on Richie’s pain and suffering while most of the Losers get catharsis.

And at the same time, there’s a lot of emphasis on Richie being…well, Richie. He’s still the jokester of the group. He’s brave. He cares for his friends deeply. He’s not a walking stereotype or bundle of tropes tied together. He’s simply Richie Tozier, everyone’s favorite Trashmouth. He just happens to be gay.

His sexuality is also tied to his story in a way that cannot be ignored. If you take out his sexuality, nothing about his story makes sense. You can’t cut around his flashbacks or his grief or him carving R+E into the bridge. Richie is gay in a big tentpole blockbuster film in a year populated by blink-and-you’ll-miss-it queer moments in other major franchises. Richie’s sexuality both is not his entire character and yet is crucial to understanding him, much like how it works in real life. Our sexualities don’t define us, and yet they’re crucial to understanding and accepting us as who we are.

Maybe we’re so starved for representation that we cling to it in whatever form it comes from, even if it’s from a homophobic clown movie. Or maybe Richie Tozier matters as a new form of representation — representation where sexuality can be both key and incidental to the character’s existence. We need more Richies in horror and in non-horror projects.

We need Richie Toziers across the board, because we so rarely get queer characters in major projects. Television has been stepping up. Literature has been stepping up. Film, on the other hand, exists about twenty years behind. Richie feels like a breath of fresh air in a way, regardless of the quality of the film.

The bar is low, and IT Chapter Two barely cleared it. The next step is letting a character like Richie get to kiss his love interest and have a happy ending. Maybe when the next IT remake rolls around, we’ll get that.

Until then, Chapter Two remains important in that regard. Richie will remain important.

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