Monsters in the closet: Homosexuality and the horror film, Harry M. Benshoff

This book was written by Harry M. Benshoff in 1997 and is very interesting and helps with my suggestion that homosexuals in film are portrayed as the "Other".

  

“In a 1984 study of anti-homosexual attitudes, the investigators broke the heterosexuals’ fears of gay and lesbian sexuality into three topic areas:

(1)  Homosexuality as a threat to the individual – that someone you know (or you yourself) might be homosexual

(2)  Homosexuality as a threat to others – homosexuals have been frequently linked in the media to child molestation, rape, and violence

(3)  Homosexuality as a threat to the community and other components of culture – homosexuals supposedly represent the destruction of the procreative nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and (to use a buzz phrase) ‘family values’.”

p. 1

He compares homosexuality to “an evil Mr Hyde, or the Wolfman, a gay or lesbian self inside of you might be striving to get out.” He says that this is the dominant ideology for most of the people in the “English-language culture.”  Saying that they believe homosexuality to be a "Monstrous condition”

p. 1

“Monster is to “normality” as homosexual is to heterosexual”

p. 2

“Gay men are contagions – vampires – who, with a single mingling of blood, can infect a pure and innocent victim, transforming him/her into the living dead”

p. 2

“In the case of monster movies and science fiction films, the narrative elements themselves demand the depiction of alien “Otherness,” which is often coded as lesbian, gay, or otherwise queer.”

p. 6