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The Lost Boys is All the Gay™
A lot of Queer people love horror and/or all things Gothic.
I mean LOVE it.
Even if, as a genre, it’s always had a somewhat love/hate relationship with us, painting us as either villain or deserving victim in more shameful stereotypes than I have the energy to go into here.
And even that was often a coding (i.e. implied,) rather than explicitly Queer characters.
…Which has inevitably left us, a lot of the time, with the subtext.
Queer people and the subtext are extremely well-acquainted by this point.
We’ll even take some of those problematic tropes and literally cheer for the villain (depending on which villain, we have standards.)
The thing is, even though we have some celebrated explicit Queerness in horror (Jennifer’s Body, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Book of Monsters,) much of it is still problematic — even my beloved spooky fave Jennifer’s Body places us on the villain-victim axis.
But still, many Queer people will return to horror — again and again.
Going into why that is would probably require a degree in psychology, maybe one in sociology, and possibly some other degrees too, but the long and the short of it is this: we see ourselves in horror.
We can’t help but sympathise with many of these villains and victims — because they’re the roles that many of us have been cast in by society as a whole, largely without our permission.
All of which brings us to The Lost Boys.
The Lost Boys is an amazing vampire film from 1987.
It’s also very, very, Gay.
…But not explicitly.
I’m sure someone, somewhere, would argue that it’s straight. Some people will argue anything is straight.
But it’s not. It’s All the Gay™.
The director, Joel Schumacher, who died in 2020, was Gay, and knew what he was doing, tbh.
