The Lost Boys: A Queer Horror Classic

Cee R.
3 min readAug 11, 2021

The Lost Boys is All the Gay™

Roses dyed in rainbow colours
Photo by Denise Chan on Unsplash

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.

--

--

Cee R.

Writer, poet, (book) blogger @ dorareads.co.uk , Queer, weird, & a tad peculiar. Bookish rebel. Welsh as a tractor on the M4. Buy me a coffee @ ko-fi.com/ceearr