Article: Monsters as Queer Icons

[Gnosticangel]

This Buzzfeed article explores the phenomena of adopting mythical monsters, spirits and cryptids as queer icons.

While this version is relatively modern, TLO readers might discern parallels with the similar role of uncanny figures from older literary or social movements such as Gothic, Symbolist, Decadent and others, movements which also served as refuges for queer, marginalized and alienated people.

How Did A Bunch Of Mythical Monsters Become Queer Icons?

Edit: Is Mark Valentine ever here on this site? One of the great scholars of the Weird, no doubt it would take him only a moment to come up with several accounts of uncanny creatures from literature taken as mascots by various forgotten movements.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

I find the uncanny to be a sort of distancing from such categories rather than a reinforcement. A detachment often used as a device in conflict with the narcissism of the self. If the uncanny is to be a manifestation of the psychological, which I believe to be more than valid, then it is a manifestation of something much deeper than Buzzfeed level identity packaging.

I think that was the most Buzzfeed article I have read. The Babadook became a gay icon because it was accidentally listed as a gay film on Netflix. Pseudo-intellectualism is often as useful as anti-intellectualism and probably more harmful. The only thing I learned here was that somebody found a way to write about himself and get paid for writing about others.

[Gnosticangel]

James wrote, " A detachment often used as a device in conflict with the narcissism of the self."

No argument with this, James, it's all too true! Still, I found the article interesting myself.

[gveranon]

"Years of exegesis have made interpreting supernatural tales into a game that anyone can play, and one finds that gods and demons are quite easily relocated from the dreams in which they were born into some mundane context of sociology, psychology, politics, or whatever. The result is pathetic and, in the worst sense of the word, grotesque. One of the noblest and most tragic figures of the imagination was the vampire--damn his soul, and our own. But to see this marvelous, terrifying creature reduced to a plastic Halloween mask for sexual or political repression has been a tedious outrage. The vampire attained his stature through the emotion of fear of a fantastic evil, yet how utterly he has lost it all at the heavy, hammering hands of explication. Rest in peace, Nosferatu, none will ever take your place."

--Thomas Ligotti, "The Dark Beauty of Unheard-Of Horrors" (in The Thomas Ligotti Reader)