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And now, for no particular reason other than that I can, here’s a list of my favorite Doctors.

#10–Colin Baker
The Doctor can be many things: lonely god, cosmic clown, self-righteous defender of the defenseless. What he should probably never be, however, is an asshole. Colin Baker’s a very good actor, and it seems like in the efforts to distance his portrayal of the Doctor from the previous versions, all the likable bits of the character were jettisoned in favor of making the Doctor a rude, off-putting bully. Not necessarily all the blame for this can be laid at Baker’s feet, though. His Doctor was saddled with a particularly dreadful run of self-important stories that seem dead-set on taking the character and his world “seriously.” It’s the “dark and grim means mature and adult” sensibility run rampant. It was Doctor Who trying to be grown-up and it just fell flat.

# 9–Patrick Troughton
The second Doctor gets somewhat short shrift in this ranking, through no fault of his own. One of the significant problems with the early years of the show is that, more often than not, the stories just ran on for too damn long. A significant number of the adventures of the first three Doctors could be vastly improved if they were shortened by an episode or two. And this is were Troughton’s Doctor gets unfairly penalized: there’s nothing actually wrong with his scamp-ish portrayal, but the only episodes I’ve ever seen where he features in the lead are interminably dreadful. I probably would like him, if I could stand to sit through The War Games or The Mind Robber again.

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Aw, man…I’ve managed to blow through all the books in print by the authors I’m currently reading. I am bookless. I gotta find something to read. I know, I’ll swing by the Local Chain Bookstore on my way home from work and pick something up. Take a look around, find something new. Yeah, that’ll work. How hard can it be to find something worth reading in a store with millions of books on the shelves?

Okay, let’s start here in the mystery section.

Sasha Trueblood is a plucky young FBI agent who has just been handed the case of her career. A serial killer is stalking super-models and leaving their corpses in fashion magazine lobbies. Becoming his bait by walking the runway, will she find him before he finds her?

Okay. That’s…that’s maybe a little too high concept for me. And a setting I don’t really care about. Let’s look for something on the next shelf.

Miranda Delamorte is a plucky young forensic investigator who just landed the case of her career. Called to the scene of a bloody serial killing, she must use her expertise as a botanical analyst to-

Ugh, no, no tech-porn

Helen Punnaname is a plucky young-

Christ, are there any other adjectives for female mystery protagonists? Let’s go in a different direction for the mysteries and check out the trade sized books with the fancy-dancy lettering

Philip Sicizer is a rookie cop assigned to the Chicago World’s Fair when he stumbles upon a charnal house in a local hotel. With the help of his adopted Native American son, he must unravel a mystery connected to an unspeakable secret at the fair.

Oh, well, that’s only been done about a dozen times now. What else is here?

Henry O’Malley is a rookie cop who has just discovered a body in the foundations of Ellis Island. With his adopted Chinese son, he must unravel a trans-Atlantic conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of European and American politics!

Okay, was there some wave of single-male adoptions in the 1900s that never got covered in history class? Okay, forget it, moving on…

An art historian must unravel a religious secret hidden in late Renaissance murals before the Vatican’s secret assassins catch up to him.

No.

An archaeologist must unravel an occult conspiracy hidden in Etruscan pottery before the Vatican’s secret assassins catch up to him.

No.

A grad student must unravel a Royal conspiracy hidden in Elizabethan poetry before the Crown’s secret assassins catch up to her.

Dan Brown has much to answer for.

Okay, it’s clear that I’m not going to find anything in the mystery section. Let’s try fantasy and sci-fi.

In a techno-retro past where steam-powered technology rules the day, a humble inventor must risk his life to expose a conspiracy that reaches to the highest level of society.

Well, at least no one’s plucky.

In Part the Second of the “Deathwing of the Skies” Pentology, Rehyvar the Red Rogue and his unwilling bond-mate Hhaarriiaa must seek the aid of the Ulaiora, beautiful immortal beings who are not at all anything like Elves, before the Black Wizards of Notnilc and Isolep can carry out their murderous plot against the High Tetrarch of Raqari. And, far away, the sinister forces of the Undead Lich Lord of Undeath is marshalling his armies beyond the reaches of the Black Swamps of Un’unt’uh.

Are they seriously still making books like this?

Amy Alicia is a plucky girl working at the cosmetics counter at a run-down department store. While walking home one night she’s attacked, only to be rescued by the mysterious Braun, a sexy and dashing man that Amy finds herself mysteriously drawn to. As she learns more about Braun, she is drawn deeper into his world of night-creatures, as she comes face to face with the greatest secret of the ages: vampires live amongst us!

Gyah! No! Kill it! Kill it with fire!

Marv Purvis is a military man from a long history of military men. Rocketed to the stars to fight an invading horde of aliens, he must bond together with the other men in his unit as they learn about their amazing new weapons, the strange loves of alien women, and the unholy savages bent on the destruction of Earth and their way of life in a way that is not at all intended to be an allegory for contemporary American politics at all.

Ah. Gun porn. Fortunately, I have no anxieties over the size of my penis, and don’t need to read stuff like this.

Well, this is a bust. Let’s look at horror.

The second cousin of acclaimed horror author Dean Koontz brings you a shattering journey into terror that is remarkably similar to Koontz’s books but distinct enough to avoid copy-right issues!

Wow…there’s like two whole shelves of books by relatives of better horror writers! When did this turn into a distinct sub-genre?

A haunted radio-

Pass.

A demon-possessed guitar-

Pass.

Zombies-

God, no! Holy Christ, there’s like six shelves of zombie books!

A pre-historic shark-

NO! No, no, no! Isn’t there one single fucking book in this entire damn store that speaks to me as a reader?

Fucked up shit goes down on an island. Dudes get messed up, hard. The actual Devil may be involved, or crazy dudes just think it’s the Devil.

…

Yeah, okay, you’re worth wagering eight bucks on.

One of the quirks of online fandoms is their…interesting attitude towards the truth. When a fan says something is “true” it doesn’t necessarily mean what a non-fan might think it means. So, as a public service, and with pretty pictures to help make the lesson more interesting, in ascending order from “least true” to “most true” in the eyes of fans, I present:

Why, yes, they are in the right order. These are fans remember…

Young Romance #196 teaches all of us some valuable lessons. The chief lesson is that romance comics are way fucking creepy.

Pity poor Debbie…she’s forced to bear witness to the most melodramatic divorce this side of a Lifetime movie. Although I do believe that this is the first time I’ve ever seen a family separate for the sake of the children’s reputation.

Fortunately, Debbie’s mom has an empty void in her life and an inability to function without thinking of herself as a man’s property, so she’s right back in the dating scene.

“Such a charming man…why, he even compliments my teenage daughter on how attractive she is. And he’s always picking out these fancy clothes for her, wanting to spend time alone with her. What a perfect step-dad!”

Fortunately, before this becomes a “very special” episode of Degrassi, Debbie goes out with her pseudo-hippie boyfriend and discovers what her step-dad gets up to when Mom isn’t around, and the marriage is thankfully K.O.-ed.

Of course, Mom’s not complete without a man, so…

At least she appears to be marrying into money this time, and not into the Marina.

Is the creepiness over?

First rule of Fight Club: do NOT flirt with your step-brother. Wait, that’s not right…

Okay, the kid is probably right, but it can’t get any creepier, right?

“It’s right for us,” in addition to being one of the all-time lamest come on lines, right up there with “Just touch it”, only becomes even more disturbing in the context of being spoken to your step-sister.
Remember kids, implied incest is WRONG!

Anyway, Debbie briefly comes to her senses and takes up with her boyfriend not related to her by marriage.

“How dare you make out with some stranger boy when you’ve got a perfectly good step-brother at home, young lady!”

It’s at this point that Debbie’s step-brother proposes they run off together, but Debbie tells him “no glove, no love.” No, wait, that’s not right. She refuses to go with him unless they get married. I’m not sure in what state their love is legal, but there you go. So she runs back to Bill, only he wants nothing to do with her because her mom yelled at him.
Bill, you’re an idiot.

Luckily the story ends on this hopeful and not at all creep-tastic note.

So, remember back at the beginning, when Debbie asked us to judge her?

Debbie, what you did was sick and wrong!

If the Globe Theater had an internet message board:

“FUCK YOU SHAKESPEARE! WHERE DO YOU GET OFF KILLING OFF ROMEO AND JULIET? Clearly, you have no conception of how drama is supposed to work, since you won’t let your characters be happy!”

“It was a total rip-off of the sub-plot from Midsummer’s Nights Dream anyway. Talk about unoriginal.”

“I’m still waiting for WS to explain the continuity errors in Antony and Cleopatra. There is NO WAY that both AAC and Julius Ceasar can take place simultaneously!”

“Don’t get me started on Ceasar! HEY STUPID WILL! THE PLAY IS CALLED JULIUS CAESAR NOT BRUTUS WHINES FOR THREE ACTS!”

“Ugh, you think the Julius Caesar continuity is bad? Falstaff fucking disappears between the second part of of Henry IV and the start of Henry V! It’s like WS forgot all about him!”

“yo tardo falstaff dies inbetwen storis lololol”

“PLEASE SIGN MY PETETION FOR A FALSTAFF MEMORIAL IN HENRY’S CASTLE THANK YOU!“

“Of course Shakespeare wants his characters to be miserable. He’s the last person I’d go to for something fun. All he writes is gorey garbage like Titus Andronicus and continuity porn like the Henry plays.”

“He so badly wants to be Kit it’s kind of sad.”

“The worst was King Lear. Cordelia’s death was just another cliche ‘Woman in an Icehouse’ moment from Hacks-peare.”

“The man clearly has issues. I mean, Taming of the Shrew? Women are shrews? I feel sorry for his wife. No, I don’t, she must deserve it if she has so little self-esteem to be with him. Othello is one of the most offensive and racist pieces of filth I’ve ever had the misfortune to see. And Merchant of Venice is just as bad. I’m honestly surprised people still give him work, he so clearly has an anti-diversity agenda.”

“Is he really all that bad? I thought Hamlet was sort of okay.”

“Oh, please, the plot of Hamlet makes no fucking sense. There’s a ghost and incest and an army on the border, yet they have time to fart around with stupid little plays that do NOTHING to advance the story? It’s stupid. And he clearly killed Rozencrantz and Guildenstern because of his anti-fun agenda, as has already been noted.”

“According to ‘Reclining in a Ditch’ WS doesn’t even really write the plays anyway.”

“With incompetents like Hackspeare writing plays, it’s no wonder that kids today spend so much time at the bear baiting pits instead of going to the theater.”

“Shyea, whatever, I’m waiting for the folio anyway.”

I have been in a contemplative mood of late, and one of the threads I keep coming back to is images of masculinity that resonated with me as a child.

The Earliest Memories

I’ve talked about this before, buy my earliest notions of what men were was watching and hanging around sailors. Being a Navy brat, this wasn’t difficult to do, as most of my parent’s friends were connected to the Navy, and most of our shopping was done on base. Sailors were just always around and were the primary non-familiar men I saw around me every day. I don’t know that I ever had any generalized impressions of what sailors were supposed to be like, but the imagery has always stuck with me.

How Men Act: Errol Flynn and Cary Grant

I wasn’t an athletic child at all. I was probably nine or ten before I even learned to ride a bike. Most of my free time was spent reading, with occasional toy or cartoon breaks. The only prolonged television time I spent was on weekends, watching old movies on local television stations. Most of the movies they showed were old comedies and monster movies, with Godzilla movies on occasion and Popeye cartoons to pad out time. But more adventure orientated films made the cut from time to time, and I quickly grew to appreciate the swashbuckler films that Flynn starred in. There was a virile recklessness to his screen persona, particularly when playing Robin Hood, that appealed to me. Even today, my fascination with Flynn’s Robin has created a fondess for Robin Hood stories over the more popular European and American folk heroes.

Cary Grant, by comparison, I was first exposed to in comedies, and it was some time before I associated him with dramatic acting. He had a strong appeal to, especially in his mannerisms and attitude. If Flynn was a reckless type, Grant was the mature, level-headed one. He was just enough of a dandy to be debonair.

Between the two of them, I formed a notion that men were meant to be elegant and dashing, eloquent and just a bit biting in their wit.

The Adventurers: Sinbad and Hercules

No matter how bad the movie was, if the name “Sinbad” was in the title, I was almost certain to sit through it. The swashbuckling elements appealed to me, as did the rogueish nature, but the sense of braving the unknown had a strong appeal as well. The Sinbad movies are probably largely to blame with my childhood fascination with mythology and fantasy as well.

I’m not ashamed to admit, that my fondness for Hercules films, and sword-and-sandal films in general, was almost purely aesthetic. Even as a kid, I know that the sheer physical presence of Steve Reeves and other actors in the genre excited me in a way that I couldn’t articulate. Even more than sailors, these athletic, well-muscled men defined what masculinity meant physically. This is almost certainly the direct root of my still current fascination with physique photography from the period.

The Heroes: Tarzan, Zorro and the Lone Ranger

I was a teenager, practically, before I gained any interest in super-hero comics. Up until then, I mostly read Disney comics and horror comics. The only super-hero titles I read with any regularity were Wonder Woman, Batman and occasionally Hulk. There’s a common thread to those three titles if you stop and think about it for a moment. My idea of an exciting hero figure than was more pulpy in tone. There was probably a strong aesthetic element to my fondness for anything Tarzan related as well, there were no shortage of handsome men in skimpy costumes to look at in a Tarzan movie or cartoon, after all. And though I’m a good post-colonialist now and cringe at the racist ideas and terrible “White Man’s Burden” subtext of most Tarzan productions, as a kid the notion of the jungle was so exotic and alien that it may as well have been a fantasy film.

I always tended to think of Zorro and the Lone Ranger back-to-back as a kid. I probably was more enthusiastic about the Lone Ranger. He had a horse, and a toy gun was easier to come by than a toy whip, and I did in fact have a dress-up kit which I wore out, pretending to be the Ranger. That you couldn’t get me out of cowboy boots until I was about six is pretty much his fault as well. With these two, you had the swashbuckling angle, and the Robin Hood aspects as well.
Plus, they dressed really, really well. There goes that dandy-ish aspect to masculinity as well.

I Give In To Pop Culture: Han Solo

Eventually, the world at large intruded into my world, and I somehow got exposed to Star Wars. While other boys desperately wanted to be Luke Skywalker, or Chewbacca, or in at least one worrying case, R2-D2, I always wanted Han toys and to play Han with other kids. In light of earlier men who appealed to me, it’s easy to see why. He’s not quite a swash-buckler, but he is a charismatic rogue, who (eventually) does the right thing. He’s witty and dresses fantastically, and he explores a world that’s amazingly exotic and filled with strange creatures. Han was almost the perfect distillation of all the male images I had fallen for before. He was quite possibly the first person I wanted to grow up to be.
That’s almost an embarrassing confession, as I can’t even stand to watch the Star Wars films anymore. But I liked them when I was eight, which is fair enough, I suppose, and I still won’t let go of any of my surviving toys and artifcats with Han on them.

An e-mail exchange with a friend the other day got me to thinking about sailors, and why they hold a place in my imagination, particularly an erotic place. As a child, growing up in Wyoming and then on Navy bases, it’s perhaps understandable that first cowboys and then sailors would come to dominate my early conceptions of masculinity. Cowboys enthralled me as a toddler. It was probably a combination of being surrounded by the trappings of the Western lifestyle in Wyoming and the fact that my heroes were the Lone Ranger and Zorro. But as I grew older, and more adults not related to me came into world, most of those men were sailors.

The result of this was that, as I was becoming aware of sexual feelings within myself, the men I found myself looking at were, more often than not, sailors. That image of the sailor was not only becoming my conception of “what a man looks like” and “what a man acts like” but was also leading to a discovery that what I liked looking at was men. At this point the entire notion of homosexuality was completely foreign to me. I seriously doubt I’d ever even heard of a “gay man” at this point. As far as I could tell, I was the only boy in the world who really enjoyed looking at men and couldn’t understand what was so special about looking at girls. Well, me and one other boy in the neighborhood, but that’s not a story for here.

My first exposure to the concept of homosexuality was actually in health class. Someone, apparently, had decided that we should have this AIDS business explained to us, because it had been in the news and didn’t seem to be going away any time soon. AIDS, we were told, is a disease you catch by being a gay man. A gay man is a man who has sex with other men, instead of with women. So as long as you’re not gay, you don’t have to worry about AIDS, we were told. As the rest of the class nodded at the sagacity and logic of our teacher, I was deep in thought over something that had never occurred to me: men could have sex with men!

Of course, simply knowing about the existence of gay men didn’t make me any more astute necessarily about what I was. Simply knowing that there were such things as homosexuals didn’t make me able to spot them. Which is where the sailors come in again. At this time, we were living in Italy, in a small city north of Naples. A good chunk, perhaps even a majority, of the population were American military families and expats from other English speaking nations. Two doors down from our house was a small house that two enlisted men rented. We didn’t mix much. They were too old for me to be really concerned with them, and as my dad was an officer, being needlessly social with them wasn’t really done. Both men had apparent girlfriends, two young women also in the service, but they only ever seemed to be over about once a month, when the men would throw parties for a small group of enlisted men and women. Eventually one of the men was transferred to another base and the other moved out of the house.

It had never occurred to me at the time, but it now of course seems patently obvious that the sailors were gay, and furthermore a couple. That the “girlfriends” were more likely than not lesbians who also found themselves in need of a convenient cover. And that the parties had such a limited and select guest list out of a sense of self-preservation rather than exclusion. And I don’t come to those conclusions out of any desire to sentimentalize my childhood or create some sort of proto-gay role models out of whole cloth. I simply never realized until later that the men had to have been gay. Shortly after they moved out, me and…another boy in the neighborhood, in searching through their empty house and discarded boxes and trash (as we did, often…the sheer number of empty, half-constructed and ruined buildings made our neighborhood into a wonderland for boys in early adolescence), discovered a small garbage bag containing pornographic magazines, all consisting of pictures of naked men and men having sex with other men. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, nor to my friend I would guess, other than that it was porn. Porn of any kind, because of its forbidden nature, was immensely cool. If anything we were pleasantly surprised to discover that there was porn featuring naked men. That the only kind of man who would own gay porn is a gay man never occurred to me until I was older.

Some time after my father retired from the Navy, we talked briefly about the time we lived in Italy. He told me that one of his specific job duties was the investigation of servicemen suspected to be gay. It was not, he told me, a job he enjoyed doing. He’d have much rather the Navy spent time and money discharging stupid people than gay people (a particular favorite example of his was the pilot who kept crashing his plane into trees, refusing to believe the radar operators who told him he was flying too low). From time to time I think about those men. I don’t remember their names. I don’t even really have a clear memory of what they looked like. When I think of them, I wonder if my father knew what the real story behind them and their girlfriends and parties was. I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d have been aware enough of the world around me to realize that I wasn’t the only gay person in the word. Would I have been less frightened of myself, and of the world? Would I have been more confidant as a teen? Would the other boy and I have felt less guilt, shame and terror over the things we were doing?

I often think of those men on those days when I get damn sick and tired of my very existence being used by politicians to exploit the prejudices of their voting base. I think of the unlikelihood of those men finding each other in the first place. I think of those men having to hide the truth of their lives. And I think of what it must have been like for them when they learned that one of them was being transferred. And I marvel that the world is just as petty and stupid now as it was then.

One of the interesting things about horror movies is how very gay they frequently are. At first it may seem surprising, but it really makes a kind of sense. At their heart, most horror films are about ordinary people trying to survive the warped reality they’ve been introduced into by something that, in some way, violates the natural order and the way the world is supposed to be. This is not significantly different from the bulk of anti-gay rhetoric you hear from political and religious leaders. There’s a certain kinship, in that sense, to gay people and the monstrous denizens of horror films, and not just in the sense that they’re both preying on nice, normal heterosexual teenagers. In the bulk of horror films, these connections are unintentional or so deeply subtextual and coded as to be easily missed. But every once in a while a film comes along that plays with the themes and connections in interesting ways.

Charlie Brewster is a typical American teenager. He’s a mediocre student, he likes cheesy horror films, he’s got a girlfriend reluctant to go all the way with him, and he’s got a vaguely queer sidekick he can push around. He’s also got a mysterious new neighbor who only seems to come out at night. That neighbor, Jerry Dandridge has attracted some conversation amongst the neighborhood women. He’s handsome, an agent of suburban gentrification (he fixes old houses for a living), dresses in an affected style with long coats and scarves, and has a “live-in carpenter.” Charlie’s mother, for one, is quite curious about the nice gay couple who have moved into the neighborhood. Charlie’s a little more suspicious. He’s heard strange sounds, and seen women go in who later turn up dead. Oh, and there’s the fact that Jerry has fangs. In short, Charlie’s convinced that the nice homosexual next door is, in fact, a vampire. And he can’t get anyone to believe him.

Charlie’s efforts to expose Jerry lead him into increased conflict with Jerry. As Dandrige plays a sadistic game of cat and mouse with Charlie, Charlie only succeeds in alienating his friends. In desperation, Charlie turns to horror movie host Peter Vincent. Vincent is more concerned with the fact that he’s just been fired because vampire movies are old fashioned, kids today want “demented madman running around in ski masks, hacking up young virgins,” to take Charlie seriously. And when he realizes Charlie is serious he hightails it out of there, only to be roped into helping Charlie’s girl-friend Amy and side-kick “Evil” Ed prove that Dandridge is only human. The experiment back-fires, however, as Vincent instead realizes that Dandridge is truly undead, and he flees the scene, leaving Charlie and his still skeptical friends to their fate.

The monster literally emerges from the closet of a teenage boy. No, no subtext here.

The film largely rushes towards it’s climax at this point. Jerry seduces Ed and sends Ed to kill Peter Vincent, while Jerry comes for Amy, who just happens to be the spitting image of his long-dead love. Charlie and Peter are compelled to act together to rescue Amy and stop Dandridge. And at the end, heteronormativity is successfully restored, as Charlie and Amy get back together, all the challenges to the “normal” world are dispatched and Peter Vincent gets his job back and decides to stop showing vampire films. But there are still a few interesting twists to get there. The seduction into vampiredom of Evil Ed is just that. Ed is differentiated from the rest of the cast by his dark and sarcastic demeanor, his interest in horror and the occult, and his proto-punk/goth attire. He’s marked out as an outsider amongst his peers. Jerry’s speech, however, hints at even more of a reason why Ed is an outsider. “I know what it’s like being different. Only they won’t pick on you anymore. Or beat you up. I’ll see to that.” It’s that suggestion of bullying violence that finally triggers the gaydar on Ed. Ed’s a weird kid. A more conventional narrative would have him largely ignored in school. And Jerry doesn’t attack Ed to transform him, rather Ed comes to him and, in fact, hugs him. It’s very much like a “coming out” scene.

The post-transformation scenes with Ed and Peter Vincent are remarkable as well, and only accentuate these queer tones. For one, Peter Vincent is played as a slightly fey but dignified aging queen by Roddy McDowall. You don’t cast McDowall if you want any implications of heterosexuality in a character. It’s simply not the “type” that he plays. And the vampire Ed adopts an even more outrageous and campy persona than he ever had before. If human Ed was a closeted teen, vampire Ed is a flamboyantly out queer. At one point he even adopts a strange, rag-doll drag to trick Vincent.

The heavy gay implications in Peter Vincent are hard to ignore as well. McDowall plays the character as a kind of cross between Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. He’s got the faded dignity of Cushing, but the fey archness of Price as well. You have, in effect, a man known for playing gay-coded characters aping the mannerisms of two other actors who play gay-coded characters. It’s a fascinating ororobous of affected mannerisms and mincing caricatures.

The relationship between Jerry Dandridge and his assistant/servant/lover Billy Cole is noteworthy as well. There are other hints of Dandridge’s homosexuality, particularly a telling exchange with Charlie in which Jerry says he doesn’t have a choice about his nature, but this relationship is the most prominent. The film does explicitly posit their posing as a gay couple as a cover for vampirism, but there are these incidental moments of tenderness and affectation between the two that implies more to their relationship than the standard Master/Renfield relationship in vampire narratives. It’s why the introduction late to the film of Dandrige’s obsession with Amy feels like a false note. She happens to look like an ex-lover, so he takes her from Charlie and transforms her into a vampire. It feels off, despite Dandridge’s previously established habit of feeding off prostitutes (a brief implication is made via off-screen newscasts that Dandridge feeds on men as well, but we only see him feed off women). It’s a peculiar statement of heterosexuality in a film steeped in gay characters and imagery, almost seeming like an attempt to deny the queer implications of the narrative. And, given the realities of film-making then and now, not an implausible explanation for it.

Which is why the casting of Amanda Bearse in the role of Amy is so brilliant. Seen now, years after she has come out, it only furthers the gay text of the film. But even ignoring that, Bearse’s Amy is a very tomboyish character. She keeps her hair short and wears bulky, mannish clothing for most of the film. Her vampiric transformation, in contrast to Ed’s enhanced sense of camp, transforms her into a slinky, long-haired seductress, the stereotypical “sexy female vamp” of so many films. It’s a ludicrously oversexed and overdone vision of heterosexuality, in contrast to the relatively normative homosexual relationship of Jerry and Billy.

However, since this is a commercial film, and since this is a horror film, the monstrous queers must be dispatched. Peter Vincent successfully defeats Ed, in a scene ending with a protracted transformation sequence in which Vincent is overcome with sympathy for the boy he has just killed, and together Peter and Charlie dispatch first Billy and then Jerry, who never, it seemed, had the good sense to simply brick up the two dozen windows in his basement, rather than simply paint them black or put heavy curtains in front of them. No, it simply wouldn’t be a vampire film at all if one of the more stupid and contrived plot devices of the genre wasn’t present. But, not only are the queers killed and heteronormativity restored, but Charlie finally gets to go all the way with his handsomely boyish girlfriend. So heteronormativity is really restored. Though, tellingly, a hint does exist of at least one gay survivor, still in the shadows.

Of course she rides a scooter…

Fright Night is an interesting film for me, not just because of this playing with gay themes that it does so thoroughly. It also represents a kind of response to what were prevalent themes in horror at the time. Supernatural horror, especially of the “classic monsters” kind was, as it largely is now, out of fashion. Vincent’s line about “demented madmen in ski masks” was as true then about the audience’s taste in horror as it is today. The rise of the “gore and torture” films in recent years was mirrored in the early eighties by the masked slasher films. Fright Night was an attempt to return the supernatural elements to the horror genre, in an entertaining way, updated for contemporary sensibilities. As opposed to the peculiarly anti-sex and anti-pleasure themes of the slasher movie, writer/director Tom Holland makes a case for the sensual pleasure of the supernatural, as well as emphasizing the sense of fun and humor that those films had, as opposed to the grim seriousness of the gore genres.

“Welcome to Fright Night. For real.”

In contrast to your typical tired and schlocky vampire, Chris Sarandon as Dandridge manages to make him appealing and sinister. He plays up the camp and queer undertones without ever allowing them to degenerate into a fag joke or an explicit condemnation of Dandridge for homosexuality. While largely dismissed at the time of it’s release, the playing that Holland and his cast do with the conflict between “classic” monster themes and modern sensibilities and the coded gay subtext of the horror genre are still remarkable, and have not really been duplicated, or rarely even attempted to this day.

Creature of the night? Or exquisite manicure?

Oh sure, we’ve all seen by now the various columns and blog posts on the topic of “Hey Nerds! Now that you’ve found a woman desperately lonely enough that she’s willing to overlook your personality defects, lack of socialization and poor hygiene to date you, now you need to passive-aggressively manipulate her into reading comics!” We’ve even seen a few “Hey gals, want to get your guy to read your manga, but don’t want to have to explain to him that those characters are actually both guys, or what they’re doing to each other?” type writings here and there. But what we haven’t seen, and what we really need, is a guide for men who read comics and want their boyfriends to read comics as well. And this is that guide.

Step One: Set The Mood
You can’t just expect to shove a comic in a guy’s face and expect him to want to read it. No, first you have to open up the possibility of reading a comic to him. Making sure that the decorations are right in your place when he comes over for the first time is important. Take down those framed Abercrombie and Finch ads and replace them with some Tom of Finland drawings. You still have pictures of naked men up on your walls, but now he knows you’re interested in art, not just twinkie boys. A couple of well-placed action figures are a good step as well. Make sure that they’re actually figures that could be considered “cool” or “knowingly hip” or “ironic.” This will keep him from being completely scared away. Nobody wants to sleep with a nerd. Star Wars and Transformers are right out. You might be able to get away with G.I. Joe or He-Man, but make sure that they’re posed in a sexually suggestive manner.

Step Two: Build Up To It
Make sure all those Marvel Essential paper-backs are off your side-table in the bedroom. You want to slowly get him used to the idea of dating a comic book reader. Start him off easy by taking him to see comic book movies. You don’t have to tell him that this is because you need to check the film-makers adherence to continuity. Tell him that you just think Hugh Jackman is hot. If he doesn’t decide to dump you for your terrible taste in films, start leaving a couple of the artier and more intellectual “graphic novels” around your place. Dear God, don’t call them comic books. They should have a spine and, for preference, reviews from real magazines and newspapers somewhere on the cover. No, Wizard doesn’t count. The Comics Journal does, but only because of the word “journal.” If he asks about them, simply say “Oh, I’ve had an abiding interest in sequential narratives for quite some time. Didn’t I mention it before?” This will make you seem smart and imply that you have better taste than you actually do. Try to let him “catch” you reading one from time to time.
If he still shows interest in you, it’s time to bring out the big guns.

Step Three: Acclimating Him To Super-Heroes
Okay, those Tom of Finland drawings? Take them down and replace them with framed Alex Ross prints. Alex Ross has a very old-school, American-illustrated-magazine, commercially appealing style that non comics readers respond to. It looks enough like real art that they can overlook the fact that they’re just fetish pictures of people in convention costumes, basically. When he asks what’s up with the constipated photo-realistic Batman, tell him that there’s a lot of sophisticated and engaging dramatic serial storytelling in monthly comics periodicals, and that you enjoy them as well, particularly the better illustrated ones. For God’s sake, don’t call them comic books.
Start leaving a few super-hero comics here and there. The coffee table or the bedroom are good places, as those are the places he’s most likely to have some time alone from you for a brief period. Give him time alone in these rooms with nothing to do but read the comics. Don’t put them in the bathroom, you don’t want them to get wrecked, do you? And if you put them in the bedroom, make sure that they’re not on the same end-table as the condoms and lube.
Now, the kinds of comics you leave are very important, and it depends largely on what kind of guy he is. Here’s a simple chart with suggestions by gay “type”:

Boy Next Door–Superman or Spider-Man
Military–Captain America or Sgt. Rock
Queer Activist–Authority or Young Avengers
Flaming Queen–Wonder Woman or Supergirl
Muscle Queen–Warlord or anything by Bart Sears
Leather Daddy–Batman

Step Four: Encouraging Him To Read More
Okay, so with any luck he hasn’t left you for being a hopeless nerd wasting your life reading comic books. With even more luck, you might have actually managed to get him to read a comic book and come to the conclusion that it isn’t completely stupid juvenile pap for sub-literates. So now you want to find him something that he’ll enjoy on his own so that he’ll stop folding back the covers of your books and trying to open your CGC cases. This is where it pays to pay attention to his personality and pre-existing interests. You can’t just hand him Watchmen and expect him to enjoy it. Likewise, you should probably avoid any of the comics that have been highly praised by comic book readers. Steer him clear of Swamp Thing, for example. He’ll have no idea who Alan Moore is and will only remember the terrible, terrible movies. Likewise, don’t hand him Sandman. You’re gay, not a goth. Don’t hand him Preacher because he’ll think you’re a serial killer. And avoid anything written by Grant Morrison unless you want him to think you’re on seriously good drugs. Frankly, there’s really only one way to help him find what he likes to read and that’s to move on to the next step…

Step Five: Taking Him To The Comic Book Store
This is the make-it or break-it point, really. Either he’ll find something interesting or he’s dumping you because you’re a sad, pathetic freak. So, a couple of things to prepare for, since this will be a trying experience for both of you.
Yes, he will laugh at the store. Either at the sun-faded posters in the window or the Michael Turner covers or the Magic players or something with Power Girl on it, something will make him laugh. He can’t help it, it’s going to be an involuntary reaction. Actually, it’s a good sign. It means he’s finding at least some entertainment value in the outing. The bad sign is when he looks around the shop and sighs.
Of course, since you just walked in with man who isn’t a comic book fan (we know our own…) or obviously related to you, you’ve probably just outed yourself to the entire store. As we all know by now, comic book fans hate anything that is different to themselves, almost as much as they hate change, and so be prepared to be treated like Bill Bennett at an NAACP meeting by the staff and other customers from now on.
He’s probably going to be confused by the displays of new comics. Gently guide him through them. Patiently explain the difference between Fantastic Four, 4 and Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four. Be prepared to explain why Wolverine is on the cover of every comic published by Marvel this week and on the covers of Wizard and Comic Buyers Guide. Try not to roll your eyes when he asks if people actually think Jim Lee is a good artist.
If the notion of monthly comics overwhelms him, you might try showing him the trade paperbacks. Tell him that you get a better bargain here, since you can read the incredibly decompressed stories in which nothing happens in one inexpensive volume. Assure him that, yes, actually, people do enjoy reading five issues of filler on Ultimate Spider-Man in one go. Again, be prepared to patiently explain why the world needed an Essential Human Torch book, or a Marvel Visionaries: Chris Claremeont. If possible however, try to steer him towards the monthly books. You don’t want to date one of those people who are killing the industry, do you?
Under no circumstances should you permit him to even glance at the manga. You have to have some standards, after all, and the last thing in the world you want is to be dating somebody who actually likes that crap.

Step Six: Exposing Him To The Comics Internet
Don’t.

Step Seven: Sharing Comics Together
If all has gone according to plan, you’ve now managed to find him one or two titles he grudgingly admits to liking. Oh sure, he may just be saying it because he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings, but the point is, you’ve now made him one of us!
But how do you share your interests together? Compromise is the word to focus on here. When you spend the money that should have gone to this month’s car payment buying 9.8 CGC graded Jim Lee variant covers on e-Bay, be sure to point out that he didn’t really need to fly out to visit his dying grandfather, so he has no room to complain about your spending.
When his plans and your plans conflict, look for creative ways around the problem. For example, have you ever noticed how often gay events are scheduled for the same weekends as comic book conventions? Tell him that you’ll let him whip you in the street all morning at the Leather Festival if he’ll go buy Silver Age back issues with you at Super-Ultra-Con in the afternoon. You don’t even need to change clothes in that case. Just tell the folks at the con that he’s Grimbor the Chainsman and you’re Cosmic Boy!

Yes, you can successfully build a two-comic-reader household if you follow these simple steps. And why wouldn’t you want to? I mean, who ever heard of a successful relationship in which both partners are accepting of each others interests?