[Rainbow Christmas 2019] Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: The Monstrous Queer Camp of Gremlins

Once again, we have made it to another season of festive horror. As we creep closer towards the winter solstice, the darker, longer nights feed on the catharsis of films where Santa slays and Krampus is the season’s horned demon Daddy. But perhaps even more niche than that is the rare phenomena of holiday horror of the queer adjacent variety. In an attempt to help make the ghoultide gayer, I hope to carve some space into the queer horror canon for a beloved festive fixture, Joe Dante’s 1984 creature classic Gremlins. 

Centred deep into the tinsel-doused throes of December, the film is set in the fictional snowy town of Kingston Falls. Clearly, Gremlins’ set-design has no reservations in indulging itself in a Liberace approach to the glitter and lights of the season. It is here that elements of camp thrive, catering to a deeply queer sensibility of gender and excess. Take for example the gender-queering of the creatures themselves, “gremlin” essentially becoming its own variation of a gender-fluid identity.

The film queers child-bearing along with constructs of heteronormative parenthood by allowing the gremlins to reproduce asexually. Their apparent lack of distinct binary roles is a radical confrontation to our expectations (note the gremlin who flashes the audience with merely phantom limbs, the satiric absence of genitalia being the intended shock of gender-disruption). And while given the default pronouns of “he/him,” Gizmo is, in fact, the holy mother Mary figure of origin to all of the monstrous spawn thereafter; a cheeky nod to the baby Jesus’ own creation story. This remains a notable example of the queer immaculate conception in its most unabashed yet family-friendly incarnation.

It is not until the gremlins are fed after midnight, the witching hour, that their transition into a more monstrous “other” allows them to fully come into their own. The creatures begin experimenting with (a highly human-determined idea of) gender expression by disrupting its limits. The artifice and excess of the gender binary become palpable through their exaggerated masquerade. In her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag (who receives a meta-referential nod in the film’s sequel) argues that “the androgyne” is “one of the great images of camp sensibility” with drag, in particular, affirming her idea of “Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” Sontag argues that camp epitomizes the metaphor of “life as theatre,” which is an idea both Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) explore in notably Brechtian ways but also more generally through their interpretation of gender as performance.

As though given access to a massive theatrical prop trunk, their experimentation with human drag exposes the artifice of our own highly binary roles. The gremlins parody gender through playing dress-up, and while the majority of costume pieces are coded as masculine they ultimately end up being gender-queered as the creatures are literally putting into practice “don we now our gay apparel”-ing. In fact, “gay gremlin” resonates as a legitimate gender mood for myself, particularly when navigating phases of my own gay-morphosis (e.g. that awkward newly out baby butch phase I experimented within the late ‘90s, or how now an annual attempt to incorporate pants into my wardrobe always ends in a miniature gender meltdown.)

In an article for Gawker, Rich Juzwiak briefly posits the gremlins as “butch lesbian creatures who don’t need distinct genders.” With the creatures’ gender and sexuality queered from the onset, it could be said that Gremlins inadvertently waxes poetic on the rare visibility of non-binary lesbians. Here, multiple layers of lesbian masculinity get conjured and embraced into praxis through Juzwiak’s theory.

The women of Gremlins have always felt highly unconventional and campy in their own right. To this day, there remains something undeniably subversive about their gender expressions within the queering of the film. Marla Bloodstone, the young “power dyke”-esque businesswoman in the hard femme executive suits. And Microwave Marge, the take-no-shit fat femme chef whose secret ingredient is an entire bottle of hard liquor. And of course, Kate Beringer, played by Phoebe Cates, a childhood crush of many queer women coming-of-age in the ‘80s. All of these characters played formative roles in cementing deeply rooted queer camp sensibilities for me, as a literal baby gay. This may be due to the fact that they all happen to fall under Susan Sontag’s description of persons of camp, with their “strongly exaggerated” and “corny flamboy(ance)” of femininity flagging so very queer in their over-articulation of femme camp. They spill over with the excess of Sapphic caricature.

Take, for example, cat lady Deagle (Polly Holliday) as a heterosexual widow turned (reimagined) queer spinster. As an adult watching the film, I can now read her as someone whose years of potential sexual repression have aided in manifesting her into the bitter, lonely elder queer that terrorizes the town; a closet monster with her many house-trained pussycats. Every aspect of Mrs Deagle, down to her hair - a wig - is revealed to be artifice, and this could extend to her cover of heterosexuality. Following her death, a moment of Deagle drag can be spotted at the town’s bar as one gremlin appears fully adorned in her jewelry and garb.

Mrs Deagle becomes a costume and her own variation of a gender expression to be experimented with. Lesbian culture side note: while researching more details on Polly Holliday’s life, I happened upon a message board thread listing her as a potential ex-paramour to Fannie Flagg (the ex-partner to lesbian activist and Rubyfruit Jungle author Rita Mae Brown).

Yet, in regard to a very personal archive of queer femme roots, I dare not dismiss the value of Gremlins 2: The New Batch’s Greta Gremlin, the only notably high femme creature in a franchise of magically diverse masc-gremlesbians. While there still appears to be a tiny contingent of femme-presenting creatures, Greta has inevitably become a high femme icon and gay root for many queer women and drag queen ghouls alike. Her femmedom has been deeply seeded into both a very particular generation of queer culture and as a lesbian lexicon.

As noted by the founder of the Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies in an interview for Mel Magazine, Greta Gremlin is the only sexual-centred gremlin, allowing for “a certain existential horror” to her identity. I would further this idea by claiming a large portion of the delicious horror of Greta is through her rejection of the films’ hegemonic masculinity, a queering against the grain through high femme drag. She reclaims and queers hyper-sexualized femininity for herself in the same way we are now claiming Gremlins as lesbian horror canon.

And through that, there is a much needed charged agency igniting this very act of reclaiming cultural artifacts for our own this season. It is an act of archiving, of self-preservation as the cold season begins to oppress our spirits. Queer culture will continue to transform itself, come the witching hour. And I hope that the efflorescence of Gremlins’ lesbian camp lights the hearth in all of our holigay horror desperate hearts this season.

May we treat ourselves and bask in the neon horror of Greta gremlin, Queen of Monstrous Femmes, the power-butch gremlesbians of Kingston Falls and of course, Joe Dante’s ode to pine-scented gender disruption.