Welcome back for part two of our Pride Month Horror Spotlight! As I mentioned in our last post, I recently asked a group of wonderful LGBTQ+ horror authors the same question: who’s your favorite queer character in horror that really changed your life?

So I’ll let our writers in part two take it from here!

ADDIE TSAI: Jareth in Labyrinth. I was completely entranced with Bowie’s embodiment on stage and how the character encapsulated villain and prince, flamboyant and masculine, powerful and vulnerable. I would later realize that his genderbending aesthetic immensely influenced my own genderfluid style, in ways that persist to today, especially in terms of its theatricality and pageantry.

REI ALYSSA MURRAY: This character will probably appear several times throughout this post from various authors, but I am too spiritually connected to her to say anyone otherwise: Carmilla. Vampires have always been a very important archetype to me, and as someone who has identified with the image of the female vampire for a long time, this mysterious lesbian vampire has always been dear to my heart and has helped me to build an internal image that I am trying to externally express now.

My honorable mentions, speaking of vampires, would be Lestat and Louis. Those two definitely had some gay stuff going on.

JESSICA MCHUGH: Dr. Frank-N-Furter and the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show had a profound effect on me. I’d probably pinpoint that as my introduction to queer culture in a visual sense, not just as a topic of conversation at slumber parties…where I also had some of my scariest and gayest experiences up to that point. 😉

The campy horror glam won me over instantly—every sparkling weirdo, every boisterous song—and I found Frank-N-Furter endlessly intriguing. I already knew and loved Tim Curry from roles like Legend and Annie, but I was utterly fascinating by this man embracing femininity while still being so dominant, so fearless. He was beautiful and powerful, wild and wounded, and entirely unapologetic about who he was.

Personally, that scene of him hooking up with Brad followed by a hookup with Janet had my brain buzzing. Like, you can DO that? Brad AND Janet?! BOTH?! It would be years before I came out as bisexual, but middle school Jess was enthralled and curious and very excited to discuss this interesting development at the next slumber party…right after being dared to leave a hickey on Emma H’s butt cheek.

ANGELA SYLVAINE: My favorite queer character is Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I first saw the movie in my teens on the big screen, and it’s my first memory of seeing a bi character. While Lucy wasn’t explicitly bi, it was pretty obvious to me, and I was smitten. She was so incredibly vibrant and unapologetically herself.

Lucy helped me realize I was bi, but she’s also meaningful to me because of what she endured. From her suitors to Dracula, no one cared what she wanted, only what she could give them. While she seemingly had a repressed hunger that was released at her turning, she never had a choice. I remember being very angry that she was villainized and “saved” from her own impurity by the same men who sought to possess her. Sure, she was about to feed on a baby, but a girl’s gotta eat (#girldinner).

She showed me that women are often judged and used and controlled and owned. That we are robbed of choice. That we aren’t allowed to be vibrant and unapologetically ourselves. And if we dare, we may pay a painful and perhaps deadly price. There was time when I internalized this as a cautionary lesson, but in recent years that caution has burned away to leave only fury at how she, how we, are treated. For me, Lucy has shifted over time from a crush to a monstrous femme icon. I wonder if we should all become monsters.

SARA TANTLINGER: Dr. Alana Bloom from NBC’s Hannibal is one of my favorite queer characters. In the books, Dr. Bloom is a male character with a minor role, so for showrunner Bryan Fuller to gender-swap the original and give her a complex storyline was exciting. Plus, by season 3, we learn Alana is bisexual. Watching this show in my early 20s and seeing not only the most beautifully macabre show I had ever seen, but for there to be queer characters and a bisexual woman was so meaningful.

Seeing any queer female character in horror media who wasn’t being treated as an object for the male gaze was significant. When she begins her relationship with Margot Verger, I remember some of the backlash that came out. Viewers were upset that her sexuality wasn’t hinted at more obviously before, and I thought that was a ridiculous criticism. Someone not revealing their bisexuality right away isn’t a “trick” that they’re hiding. Then again, I was never surprised by her bisexuality. Something about her character made more sense to me when she bonds with Margot over the visceral horrors they both endured. Alana spends so much time trapped between the desires of Hannibal and the breakdown of Will Graham. To see her become stronger in season 3 as she embraces a little darkness, and with Margot by her side, only made her cooler in my view. It is definitely a character arc that really had an impact on me and continually inspires my writing!

BILL COZZA: A queer horror character who has never left my brain is Will Rabjohns, from Clive Barker’s Sacrament. As I started really digging into horror, as a bi man, I paid close attention to how certain groups were represented, and most of what I was picking up portrayed queer people very stereotypically, almost never as the main character. Then I read Sacrament, and the thing that struck me about Will is how unremarkable his sexuality is in the scheme of the book. Will’s a gay man, and a portion of the book is him reflecting on AIDS and its effect on his community. But when it comes to the overall plot, Will is just like any other male protagonist. He acts the same way a straight man does, he makes the same decisions, deals with the same things. He’s introspective, he’s brave, he’s complex. He’s not written as a “gay main character.” He’s just the main character. Coming from Clive Barker, one knows this is intentional and to prove a point. And knowing that Clive had a fight over publishing this book because Will was gay (and this is only the mid-90’s), his refusal to change this aspect to sell better has always been a beacon to me. I’ve always looked for bi representation, but Sacrament was the first book I read that showed me that queer characters in general could carry a story, unapologetically, and not stereotypically, as main characters. So, Will stays with me after all this time.

ALAN KELLY: American Horror Story: Asylum‘s Lana Winters is my Favourite Queer Character

AHS: Asylum follows reporter Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), a woman whose storyline initially resembles a Final Girl narrative arc; she gradually evolves into an infinitely more complex and well-rounded character as the season progresses. As much a literary homage to the brazenly Sapphic characters of a Rita Mae Brown novel as she is a non-traditional horror story heroine — exactly what LGBTQ people need in our dark times – Lana Winters is one of the strongest queer/lesbian characters in horror.

MAY WALKER: To age myself in spectacular fashion, I remember watching Isabella Rossellini in Death Becomes Her at a sleepover party, while eating Green Apple Jolly Ranchers. My brain tends to file important memories away in full sensory detail, and that one is etched in neon green. And I’m far from the only one. To paraphrase an article from Vanity Fair, Isabella Rossellini said she can predict with 90% accuracy if someone is gay by telling her they loved her in Death Becomes Her. She might be onto something.

GARRETT COOK: I think my favorite Queer character in horror cinema is Doctor Septimus Praetorius from The Bride of Frankenstein. Ernest Thesiger’s performance is so shamelessly gay at a time when homosexuality in public life was still a huge taboo. He is big, broad and ridiculous and instantly transports this gothic production into a world of Bizarro camp with a laboratory full of weird little homonculi. Praetorius is a good role model in this way because he reminds us that being authentic genuinely transforms the world around you. He might be a campy archvillain but he has control of the world around him, control of the plot and knowledge of what it is to be an outsider. Praetorius is just really cool.

SAMANTHA CURTIN: Surprising to no one who knows me, my queer horror icon is the great character of Tiffany Valentine who graced the screen in the 1998 Bride of Chucky. Since seeing her in both human and doll form unlocked something in my baby queer self that I’ve been trying to embody ever since. Tiffany was also notably played by a queer horror icon in her own right: Jennifer Tilly. The fact that later on in the series they went meta and she played not only Tiffany, but herself, continued to prove just how iconic she is.

VIOLET MCMASTER: For my response, I offer my unhinged beloved May Dove Canady, the titular character of the 2002 film, and played sublimely by Angela Bettis. May’s attempts at desire throughout the film felt like the fumblings of someone uncomfortable in both body and sexuality. Desire for friendship and connection gets wrapped up with sexual exploration, culminating in a sense of confusion and performance as a means of finding recognition, of feeling seen. But humans are untrustworthy. They so often flee at the first sign of strangeness. If we can’t find friends…we must make them.

May likely had little understanding of the totality of queerness throughout the events of the movies, but she was figuring it out before the string of rejections that awakened her inner Victor Frankenstein. Queerness here has less to do with sexuality and more to do with isolation bred from the pursuit of perfection as a means of fostering connection. Obsession leads to her undoing, yes, but this world wasn’t built for her trauma in the first place. May is receiving a well overdue reevaluation, and I think we can thank the Weird Girl movement in film and literature, as well as more normalized conversations regarding queerness and the myriad expressions it takes. Yes, her methods for making friends are questionable on many levels, but at least her heart is sort of in the right place…as is her eye.

KRISTY PARK KULSKI: It’s Lisa from Girl, Interrupted. Sure, Angelina Jolie holds an honored place in my realization of being a bi-sexual woman and this movie was significant part of that self-discovery process—but I see Lisa as something more significant. She’s permission to be dangerous. While not classified as a horror, to me, Girl, Interrupted is a horror. To be institutionalized for being “problematic,” for needing something the world will not give, for being true to ourselves as women, even more so as queer women—that is where horror lives.

Oh, cruel, raw, yet powerful, Lisa, who says, “some advice. Don’t point your fucking finger at crazy people.”

How can we exist as queer women and not feel fucking crazy sometimes? Who doesn’t get tired of the bullshit? Lisa drags the rage and pain into the open and laughs at it, at us. She calls people out. She knows that makes her dangerous. Be inconvenient, make others uncomfortable, be imperfect and damaged. Be human.

Lisa doesn’t just say the truth, she mocks you with it. She can’t stand you holding back either. What she wants is the truth—no matter how horrible or painful it is. She wants you to tell her the truth about herself too. We already know she’s not healthy, but she doesn’t pretend to be either.

She knows she’s a problem, but she won’t stop—can’t stop—and I both love and hate her for it. Worse, I want her to be okay. But she won’t be and that’s part of the horror.

STEPH PATTERSON: One of my favorite queer characters in horror is Yaya Betancourt from Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper. A queer cosmic body horror. As a bi woman with chronic illness, I absolutely devoured this book. A woman named Yaya discovers she has teeth between her thighs and then it transforms into a large entity with tentacles and a mind of its own. During all this, she falls in love with a woman named Doc.

Reading about a queer character going through unimaginable body horror, falling in love, and then becoming fantastically larger than life was empowering and healing. It made me reflect about my own queerness, and how often as a teen I was taught to shrink that part of myself. I now fully embrace my bisexual identity.

Yaya was so badass and inspiring to me that I wrote a poem called “Devour Me.” It’s an ode to Yaya, her love for Doc, and the entity that becomes Magenta. An ode to when queer love cannot be contained. I first posted it on my Instagram, and then later published it in the anthology The Alien Buddha Loves You Too from Alien Buddha Press.

JOHN LINWOOD GRANT: To find a queer character with a direct influence on my own life, I have to go back to the folk-horror television play Penda’s Fen, which I watched as a teenager when it first came out, in 1974. A strange and very personal encounter for me, because like the play’s protagonist, Stephen, I too was at an old-fashioned all-boys school and lived in a small village; I too wandered a rural setting which could set the imagination ablaze. More than that, in those days we really did fear the techno-atomic threat which is an undercurrent in the play – not so far North of our village stood an early-warning station, a constant reminder of destruction.

Against that backdrop, Stephen wrestles with life and, crucially, with his sexuality; I had a swooning crush on our gorgeous village paper-boy, extremely non-Platonic feelings about male schoolmates, and yet found some of the local girls almost as attractive – just to confuse my adolescent brain. And as I watched the play, I walked alongside Stephen with his musings/fears; I echoed him, or he echoed me. So I still remember Stephen well, a boy who turns from a conflicted prig into – essentially – a free thinker, with hope. Maybe others found hope from Penda, and from recognition that life is a constant, flexible dialogue, informed by history but not constrained by it, not an orthodox monologue to be hammered into us. Queer, ironically, can also turn out to mean unfettered.

BRONTE ROWAN: I’m writing this shortly after arriving back in my hometown after attending a human rights conference. Already I can see my colours fading.

Honestly? It hurts to let the rainbow bleed out of me.

It is in moments like this that I remember my favourite anti-hero, Lestat de Lioncourt. What would he do? He’d raise hell in the name of equality. In The Vampire Lestat, he plans for vampires to come out – Anne Rice was very much aware of what she was doing with her monsters.

There is a certain kind of poetic justice in queering vampires.

Eternal love is a beautiful juxtaposition to how queer love has always been erased. Lovers are historically portrayed as friends, a whole generation of queer people was left to die during the AIDS crisis, and queer people face horrendously high violent crime rates.

The vampire is also a metaphor for found families because through blood, Lestat establishes his own coven of people to create the family he always longed for – people who care for each other.

I know that, as queer people, we still scare others because of our identity and sexuality. I feel sorry for those who believe that the only kind of love is of a sexual nature.

Anne Rice’s characters – Lestat in particular – toy with that. He is unafraid of what others have taught him to fear.

Happy Pride – stay safe, embrace your (found) family, and scare the hell out of the bigots by being your beautiful, queer selves.

That’s part two of our Pride Month Horror Spotlight! Please check out part one and part three while you’re here! 

Happy reading, and happy Pride Month!