American psycho gay
Welcome to the dark closet of Halloween horror.
Whether it&#;s necessary subtext by a closeted director, a dire warning to young viewers by a Hollywood Code, or a subtle stab by writers at hetero-cis arrogance, the horror genre has long been a dark closet of queer themes, preying on heterosexual panic and feeding on contemporary perspectives of the “gay menace” to enforce, test or outright flout the boundaries of acceptable love.
This Halloween, dig into ten classic Horror stories, in print and on film, that hide their queer themes in plain sight. Sometimes infuriating, sometimes liberating, all these works rely on a queer-coded villain… some of them are seductive enough that you cease up rooting for them.
1. Rebecca ()
It’s not impossible to browse queer subtext into the titular (dead) character’s scandalous affairs, or Mrs. Danvers’ obsession with her beloved mistress. Daphne du Maurier was a notorious bisexual after all. But in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, what was barely-there subtext in the novel became text on film — or at least as block to it as the Hays Code would all
American Psycho: Bateman&#;s repressed homosexuality
No, The only reason that Patrick does not kill Luis when is has the chance is because Luis shows affection towards him. Patrick views the people around him – and the world in general – as loveless, and he’s sort of right; there seems to be no real love between his friends or their love interests. Patrick wants to &#;fit in&#;, but he doesn’t really want to. He views himself as enhanced than his ‘friends’, and therefore has no issue in killing and, perhaps, ‘cleansing’ the world, but that’s a long shot.
However, he does not kill Luis, Evelyn or Jean because they all, in one way or another, express affection for him. He is conflicted, as although previously he felt that there was no love around him, he has now been confronted with that fact and does not know how to react.
In the &#;Confronted by Faggot&#; chapter, Patrick is frightened. He has, inadvertently, led on a homosexual male in whom he, Patrick, has no sexual interest. He tries to distract himself, and he wants to let everyone in the direct vicinity perceive that he is not ‘
(note: though I include no part of the explicit violent and sexual sections of the noun, some of the quotes from the book do contain language that will be very offensive to some)
A two decade adj novel might seem appropriate now, of haves in glass towers and have nots protesting in the streets, a book which is supposedly either a literal story of an investment banker who is a serial killer, or an investment banker who only imagines that he kills a series of men and women, his murder spree a &#;metaphor&#; for his profession&#;s indifference to larger society and the damage he does to it. Curious about whether this publication would shed light on the turmoil now, I found a third theme &#; the novel is a cryptomorph, its subject neither mass murder, or a metaphor for the financial world, but about being gay and closeted during the first years of the AIDS outbreak. This is not a case of a symbolic undercurrent; almost all the male characters, including Patrick Bateman and Timothy Price are gay closeted men, with that aspect of their lives, off-stage and unspoken directly of, but most certai
It’s been 25 years since Patrick Bateman first lathered himself in exfoliant, recited Huey Lewis lyrics like gospel, and dragged a blood-soaked ax across the Manhattan skyline of s excess. And yet somehow, somewhere along the way, a segment of the population missed the memo that American Psycho was not a masterclass in alpha male swagger—it was a send-up of it. A very gay one, at that.
“I’m always so mystified by it,” director Mary Harron told Letterboxd Journal () in a recent retrospective. “I don’t verb that [co-writer Guinevere Turner] and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all. That was not our intention.”
Yet here we are. Patrick Bateman—serial killer, skincare enthusiast, business card snob—is now a patron saint of TikTok hustle culture. He’s been meme-ified into a symbol of capitalist grindset masculinity, often stripped of the nuance (and blood) that made him horrifying and hilarious. It’s the queerest case of cinematic misinterpretation since folks thought Fight Club was a recruitment video for CrossFit.
And it’s not just Chris