Being gay in 2020, despite the immense progress that has been made, is still exceptionally difficult. At its best, media, culture, and life itself are still replete with reminders that a queer lifestyle, in whatever form that might take, is simply different. Perhaps different is conceptualized neutrally, since different itself is not inherently bad, but a graduate professor I had once told me that even neutrality is itself a political position. Neutral means something, and in the case of genre filmmaking writ large, queer is different.

With regard to queer horror – or horror that centers often-excluded identities in their narratives – I am reminded of the parallels that might be drawn to Jordan Peele’s two (exceptional, incredible, revolutionary) genre exercises: Get Out and Us. Get Out was an inexorably political film. Race and class were astutely observed, dissected, evaluated, and the thin veneer obscuring contemporary progressive attitudes were peeled away, showing just how ugly and horrific they really are beneath all the rhetoric and performance.

Us, while still politically charged, kept its identity cards closer to its chest, and as visible as race was in the film, it felt considerably less present – less urgent – than it had in Get Out. In a presentation at the Upright Citizens Brigade in March of 2019, Jordan Peele said, “The way I look at it, I get to cast black people in my movies. I feel fortunate to be in this position where I can say to Universal, 'I want to make a $20 million horror movie with a black family.' And they say yes." Peele further explained that “it really is one of the best, greatest pieces of this story, is feeling like we are in this time — a renaissance has happened and proved the myths about representation in the industry are false."

Those myths are collapsing, and that is good. But as far as queer representation is concerned, the community still has neither its own Get Out or Us.

Disney Plus, for instance, pawned off Love, Victor, their television spin-off of Love, Simon to Hulu, citing adult content, namely the exploration of sexual identity, that clashed with the platform’s ostensibly family-friendly content. In other words, queer identities are different, and that kind of different does not fit in well with most mainstream content. There is always a label, always an excuse to pass queer narratives off under the guise of strategic programming or remunerative self-censorship – it just isn’t what the audience wants.

Anecdotal evidence aside, any person living with a queer identity can tell you that there are still spaces, some public and some private, where at worst our identities aren’t welcome, and where at best, they are simply different. All of this is to ask, then, that as a space to confront and interrogate longstanding societal fears, what role should queer narratives in the horror genre play? Should they, in a vein similar to Peele’s Get Out, be explicit in their aim to tackle and dismantle prejudice? Or, like Us, should they simply position queer characters at the center, and imbue those characters with narrative and depth, even as their identities amount to little more than narrative incidentals?

Currently, I am not sure which approach is the best.

And unfortunately, I have almost no mainstream titles to even cull examples from because, like so much of queer life, those identities have been pushed to the perimeter, relegated to niche indie productions, streaming, and video-on-demand. I am not sure how long it will take for these narratives to finally enter the mainstream, but when they do, I wonder how they might look.

Sometimes I wish it to be pronounced and loud – an unabashed, mainstream queer horror film. Other times, in my own private moments of marginalization, I want them to…simply be. There are times where the presence of my own identity is too enervating to live that I long for nothing more than to slip into the background, unseen and unheard. I have not been out for too terribly long – less than a year – and am thus aware that I am far from an authoritative source on the matter. As a genre fan since birth, however – my mom was showing me Child’s Play in kindergarten – it is a conversation I want to have.

I am curious, then, to hear what others in the community think. When it comes to queer horror, what should it look like?