[Pride 2021] Pinhead is My Husband, but Leatherface is My Child

I have joked that Leatherface is my child and Pinhead is my husband on Twitter, in private conversations, and often just in my own head to myself. There can be a strong feeling of ownership in queer spectatorship.

One reason for this is the hard work it can take to carve out a place for queer narratives when watching mainstream media. Because of reasons like the pesky standard of almost always including heterosexual romances, many people have to rewrite large portions of canon narratives to maintain their chosen character’s queerness. On the other side of the coin, the ownership of obviously queer-coded characters can be intense because of the historically villainous nature of the characters allowed to be unquestionably queer.

In his essay, An Introduction to the American Horror Film, Robin Wood introduces the theory that monsters in horror represent that which is repressed in society fighting back against their repression. On a societal level the LGBTQ+ community being regulated to the role of monster is damaging, but on an individual level reclaiming a villain that punishes the symbols of heteronormative society can feel oh so good, and, dare I say, empowering. Using only their original film debuts, I want to talk about my feelings of ownership towards Leatherface and Pinhead.    

When I see Leatherface, the locked away part of me that was a teenager obsessed with Tumblr just wants to squeal “look at my smol, cute bean.” Something about the character makes my heart swell with love and my protective instincts engage. It's the same sort of emotional intensity I have towards my cats and I assume parents have towards their children. In his book The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema, Andrew Scahill analyzes the connections between child monsters in horror and queer spectatorship. Children are in a liminal state of becoming and, despite the strict gender roles many try to place upon them, children are still symbolic of infinite possibilities in gender and sexuality.

While Leatherface is not a literal child, he is a similarly liminal being occupying the thresholds of both man and woman while failing to develop into either. Leatherface’s family, the Sawyers, reflect a masculine arena created by a patriarchal structure. They are so patriarchal that they have eliminated the women traditionally found in families. There is a father, grandfather, and two brothers, but no mother and only the remains of a grandmother. While Leatherface’s size and physical aggression are masculine he is still the closest entity the family has to a feminine presence. His femininity primarily comes from his decision to wear a woman’s face. What I find particularly telling is that he often chooses to wear a face with makeup on it. This use of makeup takes the act of wearing a woman’s face from just using the feminine as a mask to actively participating in femininity. 

Leatherface's liminality makes him childlike and therefore it makes sense to have a parental feeling towards him, however, as a queer spectator, I don’t take ownership of every child, or childlike character, in horror. To declare a character as my child I must feel we share some DNA.

I see myself in Leatherface.

The reason for my identification with him is my own liminality. Our connection is most obvious in the continuous liminality we both find in genderqueerness, however, I am in an additional, hopefully temporary, state of queer liminality as well. I am waiting at the threshold of queer expression torn between the discomfort of change and the discomfort of hiding. I sometimes worry I am unconsciously faking my gender identity because queerness is thought to be something difficult to hide either because it is undeniably visible or because it comes at a great mental cost to suppress.

Yet I am lucky enough to have people in my life that would be willing to change the name and pronouns they use for me the moment I ask them to, but I don’t ask them to. I am equally uncomfortable with having my identity known and unknown, and, like a pageant mom, I live vicariously through Leatherface’s decision to use his mask as a display of identity instead of a suppression of it. Unlike my queerness, my love for Leatherface is something I am unafraid to express to everyone and perhaps I call him my child-- a mini-reflection of me-- as a substitute for what I am still unready to say to many. 

I have wanted to write an article based on my “Pinhead is my husband, and Leatherface is my child” jokes for a long time. Before finally deciding on the appropriate occasion to break this idea out of the closet, I already had some ideas on why I am so drawn to Leatherface—as a self-absorbed sort of person it’s not that difficult for me to recognize when I see myself in a character—but I have always been less sure about what deep psychological place my attraction to Pinhead comes from and why this latter attraction is more romantic than the former. Could the difference in my feelings come only from the space each character occupies?

Leatherface does exist in a familial environment, whereas Pinhead inhabits a sexual one, but implying my feelings towards each just reflects the context of the films they’re in seems to remove too much of my context as the spectator. I don’t want to think my thoughts are such a slave to setting. I always just assumed when I sat down to write this article some complex reason for Pinhead being my husband would either come to me as I wrote or I would delay turning in my article until I could come up with one. However, it has become clear I don’t have a deep reason for having a romantic attraction to Pinhead, and that can be difficult for someone like me who feels more comfortable focusing on analysis and academic writing over writing with a whimsical or light tone. I have always admired other people’s humorous or witty writing but felt like people wouldn’t be very interested in my articles if they were more fun-focused and less theory-based. 

My habit of academizing my writing no matter how close it is to my personal feelings reminds me in some ways of society’s tendency to politicize the existence of queer people. Things like queer characters and queer relationships can’t just exist without somebody-- usually, a lot of somebodies-- deciding it is a political statement or something to be analyzed. I have used Robin Wood’s theory that horror monsters represent what is repressed in society countless times to talk about queerness and horror. Perhaps sometimes it would be nice—and mentally healthy—to just enjoy a character without having to reflect on one’s oppression, secrets, and emotions.

So today, knowing that poor Terry would have to wait forever to get my article if I had to figure out some profound meaning for my attraction to Pinhead, I am going to take this opportunity to end the article by listing why Pinhead is hot (Terry: hey, either works. 😉) 

Top 5 Reasons I would marry Pinhead:

1. Let's start with the most obvious reason why Pinhead is attractive, and no, it’s not because he is a leather daddy, it's because compared to the other leading men of the film it’s hard not to be a catch. Compared to the whiny Larry Cotton and the chronically objectifying Frank Cotton, Pinhead’s firm yet reasonable and fair demeanor really makes him seem like a treat-you-right type. 

2. Bad boys are out, sad boys are in. Pinhead’s air of melancholy makes him feel mysterious. I want to spend a night cuddling on the couch as I listen to his entire life story and overthink how I can heal his emotional pain. 

3. “We have such sights to show you” is probably one of the sexiest horror movie quotes. I love a man who can broaden my horizons. The way in which he calmly, succinctly, and, most importantly, un-condescendingly answers Kirsty’s questions during their first meeting is also appealing. Educate me Pinhead. 

4. I like that Pinhead takes pride in his work. When Kirsty informs the cenobites that Frank escaped them, Pinhead is shocked because he knows he does a damn good job keeping track of the souls he has bound in a masochistic hell. However, he is not so arrogant as to ignore the issue. Instead, he does his due diligence as a good extra-dimensional manager and investigates the claim, and corrects the problem promptly. 

5. Pinhead is sexually appealing. For many people, this fact is made evident by the nature of the cenobites as pleasure givers and their leather and chains aesthetic, but for me, it's all in the fingers. In the opening of the film, the audience is treated to a close-up of Frank’s fingers as he offers a man a stack of cash for the puzzle box. His fingernails are so dirty… like completely stuffed to the brim with dirt. Every boy who sexually harassed me in high school had dirty fingernails just like that. Ew. In contrast, we later get a close-up of Pinhead’s fingers as he closes the box. Not only are his nails clean and trim, but the way his fingers slowly and sensually caress the top of the box is also pleasing.

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