“Stick and bones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me.” - Rihanna

What does queerness look like? Is it a rainbow flag wrapped around your shoulders? Is it glittery clothes? Is it monstrous and hiding in the shadows, tantalizing and terrifying you? Queer identities look different to everyone, but to me, they are clad in leather and summoning you to their world of pleasure and pain. Queerness, to me, are Clive Barker’s Cenobites from his directorial debut, Hellraiser.

In Hellraiser, there are four cenobites: Pinhead (the leader), Female Cenobite, Butterball, and Chatterer. They are extra-dimensional beings, from a world where they seek carnal pleasures; they are sexual beings. They are also humanoid, having the general shape and appearance of a human with drastic bodily modifications, from a head covered in nails to an exposed throat to the removal of lips. They are a perversion of the human form through their world of sex, pain, and pleasure. However, they are also a symbol of a transformative experience that gains you access to another world, another reality.

They are something exciting, sexy, terrifying, and new that opens your mind to new and strange ways of interpreting the world in front of you. Barker even said in the notes of the Hellraiser box set that Pinhead “so perfectly married threat and elegance that caught the affections of the audience.” This description encapsulates the power of Hellraiser’s queerness. It is elegant, it is dangerous, it is stunning. That, to me, is how I view my own queerness and the exciting possibilities of non-normative identities.

Barker himself is a self-identified gay man who used his own lived experiences in the kink community to inform his costume and character design. He said that their design was influenced by punk, Catholicism, and S&M clubs he had previously visited. In the very literal sense, gay culture inspired the aesthetic of the cenobites and embodies what Barker wants to portray with these characters: strength, sexuality, and a little bit of fear of the unknown. Jane Wildgoose, costume designer for Hellraiser, said in the DVD commentary of Hellraiser:

"My notes say that he wanted '1. areas of revealed flesh where some kind of torture has, or is occurring. 2. something associated with butchery involved' and then here we have a very Clive turn of phrase, I've written down, 'repulsive glamour.'”

“Repulsive glamour” seems oxymoronic but also encapsulates what queerness can be. It can be beautiful and shocking, which can also be seen in The Boulet Brothers’ TV show, Dragula, where drag queens perform acts that reject stereotypical visions of hyperfemininity; they are monsters, not queens. Hellraiser and Dragula illustrate the power of being a monster rather than a queen or an idealized version of audience expectations. There, I’d rather be a monster than a queen. I’d rather see myself as a rejection of the norm, something new and strange, but also exciting.

But, beyond the Cenobites, Hellraiser also focuses on deviant sexualities that function outside what is considered “normal.” This is not just about the queer coding of the cenobites, but of the possibility of nonheteronormative sex. While the only sex scenes shown in the film are between a man and a woman, Frank represents sexual deviancy in his appetites and cravings for something more than just the missionary position in a dark room.

In the original cut of the movie, Barker included a sodomy scene between Frank and his lover, Julia. However, that was seen as too perverse. Instead, the film intercuts between Frank and Julia’s sex scene and the mangling of Larry’s hand. This showcases the fear of non-normative sexuality and illustrates how cisgender, heterosexual, partiarchal power deems certain sex acts worse than violence. Queerness is deemed more dangerous, and was attempted to be stifled by those in power in Hollywood (specifically those that control a film’s rating). But, despite their efforts to hide any subtext and make it more “straight,” Hellraiser still shines through as a gay film.

The sex scene between Frank and Julia also puts on display the fear that many find pleasure in pain, which rejects normalized ideas of what sexual satisfaction looks like. Conflating their sex with blood and pain seems to degrade their sexual experience, at least the experience that Barker initially wanted to portray. What he initially intended was to display that there is more than one way to experience and access sexuality, even if it takes an unexpected form. Hellraiser rejects the idea of conforming to traditional notions of sex and sexual identity and explores a whole new world full of strange possibility.

I understand the danger in portraying queerness as monstrosity, as it is damaging to demonize gay characters and show queerness as synonymous with violence. However, in my own personal experience with my sexual identity as a bisexual woman, monsters empower my queerness. They are different, powerful, and often unafraid of that difference. You can read monstrosity both ways, but to me, particularly in the case of Hellraiser, monstrosity means transcendence beyond the expected and the normal. It is exposed flesh, pain, pleasure, and a respect for those who rule the flayed.

Queerness, like horrific monsters, stretches the bounds of the hegemonic idea of “normal” and transforms realities with new ways of being. Being gay is transformative, terrifying, and dazzling, like an aroused Cenobite. So hand me that puzzle box and let me revel in the powerful monstrosity of Clive Barker.