Contents:
THE GAY LEGACY OF FRANKENSTE
Yet there’s somethg about this story of unhallowed arts that mak darkly ronant for queer artists beyond any other you’re gay and grow up feelg like a hio misf, fully nsc that some believe your sir to be wicked and want to kill you for them, intifyg wh the Monster is hardly a stretch: A misunrstood beast fds solace the solu of the woods, but seems to endlsly face the wrath of the torch-bearg, small-md habants the world beyond. “Frankenste, ” Boris Karloff, 1931, via Everett CollectnHOMOEROTIC SUBTEXT was hntg “Frankenste” way before “Gods and Monsters, ” though: Boris Karloff’s fond nickname for his favore role was “the ar old monster. ” Even the book, the attacks on the Monster spoken by s creator mimic the rabid noise of a trans/homophobic chos: “More hio than belongs to humany” or “some other speci.
We might also add terms that emerged later history, cludg molly, man ler, and more recently homosexual, faggot, gay, queen, butch queen, cunty, pansy, and queer. The homophobic uneass Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has famoly lled “homosexual panic”—the belief that same-sex sire is a threat both to a man’s sense of self and to soc-polil hn—is entwed wh shame (Between Men 83).
Sedgwick fds an “separabily of homosexual sire” om panic and threat—“sndal, shame, annihilatn”—sce “at least the eighteenth century England and Ameri, ” which vers the time and regn which Shelley wrote Frankenste (Epistemology 185, 205). Homosexual panic csh the physil and psychic activy of all men but pecially those who do not self-avowedly nsir themselv to be queer or members of the queer muni of Shelley’s time, such as molli.