Why LGBTQ+ People Connect With Horror with Henry Corrigan

Welcome back to Let's Be Perfectly Queer Podcast, your go to LGBT Australian podcast for all things queer.

In this episode of Let's Be Perfectly Queer, Archie sits down with bisexual horror author and poet Henry Corrigan to explore the fascinating connection between queer identity, horror fiction, mental health and self-acceptance.

Henry shares how writing queer horror helped him come to terms with his own sexuality, why horror can be a powerful tool for understanding fear and trauma, and how LGBTQ+ readers often experience horror differently from straight audiences.

We also dive into the history of queer representation in horror, the harmful stereotypes that shaped the genre, and how modern queer horror writers are reclaiming those narratives.

Plus, Henry discusses his new novel Party of a Lifetime, a supernatural queer horror story about four friends trying to reclaim the prom experience they never got to have.

In this episode:

•  How horror helped Henry accept his bisexual identity
• LGBTQ+ representation in horror fiction
• Horror and mental health
• Why queer audiences experience horror differently
• Reclaiming queer stories and identity
• Henry's new novel Party of a Lifetime
• The hidden history of queer literature and horror

If you love LGBTQ+ stories, horror books, queer authors, mental health discussions and thought-provoking conversations, this episode is for you.

🎧 Listen now to learn a bit of queer horror history... And until next time, stay perfectly queer!



Henry's Links:

Instagram: @Henrycorrigan08

Good reads: Henry Corrigan

Bloodhound Books: Henry Corrigan

Transcript

 Archie : Welcome to Let's Be Perfectly Queer, a queer podcast creating space to talk about all things queer. My name is Archie, and I'm joined today by Henry Corrigan. 

Henry: Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for having me on here, Archie. I really appreciate it. 

 Archie : Thank you for coming back, and on today's episode, we're diving into queer horror, exploring how fear, identity, and storytelling collide.

 Archie : So again, welcome back, Henry. 

Henry: Thank you so much. It's, um... I've been looking forward to being here for so long. 

 Archie : That's what I love to hear. I'm very excited to talk about this. When you emailed about this conversation, I was like, "This is really interesting. I want to know more." Can you give us a quick elevator pitch for your new book, Party of a Lifetime?

Henry: Ab- absolutely. I literally just got copies of these in a few days ago. I'm waiting for my first official book order of them to come through, so this one is my, the galley that, you know, officially brought the book together. But yes, Party of a Lifetime is about four queer friends who reunite after high school to try to h- recreate the prom that could have been, but they end up getting dragged down to a hellish town where the devils may be legion, but the worst monsters might just be themselves.

 Archie : That's a perfect elevator pitch. It does sound very interesting. In this kind of book and your other writing, how much of yourself or your experiences show up in your writing? 

Henry: I love to pick little pieces of my own experience or people that I know and add little bits into characters that I have, but then also build them out because my first book, A Man in Pieces, was very, very personal for me.

Henry: I based a lot of characters on myself or people that I knew, but it's, that's kind of where you start and then you build out because obviously it's like, I, I don't know, like in Party of a Lifetime, I don't know what it's like to be a mechanic. I don't know what it's like to play soccer. I don't know what it's like to be that athletic.

Henry: So it's, it's, I love to put little pieces of things. So I have some friends that I modeled some of the characters after, but I then, I took them in their own special direction. There's little tidbits that I really appreciate, but they are kind of the seasoning, you know, that I've used, and then you build the meal out from there.

 Archie : For those who may have missed our last episode with you, did you wanna say a little bit about who you are? 

Henry: Yeah, absolutely. So again, I'm Henry Corrigan. I'm a bisexual author and poet. My, uh, first book, A Man in Pieces, won the, uh, silver medal from Literary Titan. My second book, Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light, made the Bram Stoker Award reading list for long fiction and was named one of the best books of the year by Ginger Nuts of Horror.

Henry: My poetry's appeared in a couple of anthologies. I've done some nonfiction, uh, presentations for the Queer Horror Conference. One I recorded for the Anne Radcliffe Conference, and I've written articles both for Ginger Nuts of Horror, as well as the Horror Writers Association's Mental Health Initiative.

 Archie : Amazing. Thanks for that. And you mentioned in your email that horror, it helps you accept your queer identity. Can you tell us more about that? 

Henry: I've always loved horror when I was a kid. You know, it was something that, you know, I read Stephen King way too young, and I, I stole my... It was the, the first, uh, copy of Stephen King's Night Shift was the first book I ever stole from my mother.

Henry: So- ... she eventually stole it back. But yeah, I've loved horror ever since I was a kid, but when I really started writing, getting into the mechanics of writing, I wasn't able to make horror work at the time. I needed to grow up and learn the mechanics. I actually started in erotica. That's where I originally started and wrote short stories, have wrote a novella, and I really learned, I cut my teeth in erotica.

Henry: I learned my, the mechanics of writing in there, and I experimented with different relationships, different sexualities in erotica from there. My first real book, A Man in Pieces, featured a deeply closeted antagonist, and that helped me at least deal with The fears of coming out and helped me understand a bit more about the what is at stake for a lot of people and why a lot of people decide to, or, you know, fear being able to come out because of such ostracizing and such danger that they face.

Henry: But the more that I've pushed into queer horror, into horror itself, the more it's helped me to be able to accept myself. Like my first book, A Man In Pieces, I was in my 30s when that came out. I was almost 40 when I officially came out to my family, my friends, everybody, you know, about being bisexual and the like.

Henry: And writing horror and diving deeper into queer horror specifically has not just helped me to get a better grip on that, but it's also helped me to understand the spectrum of queerness itself. It- it's like, you know, it's not just my experiences, it's so many others that I have, uh, that I'm still learning so much about.

Henry: Like my, my last book, Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light, my publisher, David Jack Fletcher from Slasher Horror Press, he basically schooled me on pet names that gay men give to each other. He's like, "I get so tired of gay couples in books. It's like, oh, they say babe or love." He's like, "Gay men don't do that. No.

Henry: Gay men have their own, like, special names for each other." It's like, okay, that's fine. All right, I can make this work. It's all about broadening my experiences. 

 Archie : You mentioned what I thought was really interesting. So you said with your first book, A Man In Pieces, that you wrote it in your 30s, but you didn't come out till you're closer to 40 or your 40s.

 Archie : Did you sit with that kind of closetedness within yourself while you were writing it? And how was that for you? 

Henry: I don't, I don't think I was conscious of it at the time because the reason that I wrote A Man In Pieces was because of my nightmares. The main character, Mike, is, he's a father to be. He's, he's got bills to pay.

Henry: He's feeling underwater. He's got a, a dead-end job. He's got an abusive boss. It was all of my banal nightmares that were keeping me up, waking me up at 2:00 in the morning in a cold sweat. It was what was making me hate so much about the way that my life was going at the time. So writing Mike was a way for me to exercise a lot of the nightmares and demons that I was living with.

Henry: Writing Tom, my closeted antagonist, when I really hit on, you know, why it is that he is, or part of the reason why he is so antagonistic and so brutal, is when I hit upon the idea of his queerness, you know, of him being so deeply in the closet, I think that was a necessary byproduct, I guess, of, you know, me dealing with my nightmares and then slowly but surely coming to grips with the fact it's like, "Hey, I kind of understand where this guy is coming from, or at least I understand how he got here."

Henry: Because I've had those same fears. I've had that same idea of violence, that same idea of if people, you know... I mean, I grew up on the playground. You know, the, uh, or the playground rules when you were growing up. You know, gay men were all supposed to be dirty kid touchers. You had to stay away from them.

Henry: Bisexual people were nothing but greedy folks who didn't wanna share. No such things as lesbians, those kinds of things. So writing Tom helped me start to get to where I am now. 

 Archie : And that's great that you had that kind of outlet, 'cause everybody's journey's different and everybody has their own ways of coming to their identity and, uh, accepting that as well.

 Archie : So I'm not sure if anybody else can relate, but maybe there's someone out there listening who might be thinking the same thing, or I can resonate with Henry, and that's really cool. And that's what I really like about this podcast, about finding different people and their journeys, which is, it's really great, and learning new things.

 Archie : And do you think that queer people experience horror differently than a straight audience? 

Henry: Yes, absolutely, because horror and camp i- well, campiness is very much a foundation of horror. And, you know, you, you suspend disbelief. You, uh, things are exaggerated. Things are much more, uh, not just simply colorful, but things are m- the, the stakes and everything are much higher in horror and everything.

Henry: It's not just your life. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your soul. It's your mind that could be fracturing. You often end up fighting things that you are deathly afraid of, and most of them are yourself or your friends and family, you know? I read an Instagram post that said that, um, comforting lies are not just a, a simply comforting thing.

Henry: They're like a password. They're like a, the magic key to a acceptance. If you are accepted into the broader culture or in broader, you know, if you are accepted into a kind of tribe, the comforting lies that you tell are the ways that you stay in there. So especially for queer people, queer people understand that You say it's like, yeah, you know, you, you tell gay jokes, you make, tell m- jokes about women, you know, all these things to be able to cover the fact that you are actually a gay man who's terrified of not just simply being found out, but of being ostracized and of being potentially having, you know, your life threatened because of your queerness.

Henry: So yes, queer people experience horror on a visceral level that straight people, I don't... Because not just simply, I don't think straight people would fully understand it because not only do queer people... Queer people are, are in a very odd position when it comes to horror because the queer people are, understand about being afraid for your life, they understand about not being the, uh, about having to keep things secret, about not having to, letting your identity out, but they also then have to deal with the fact that they are portrayed as the villain in horror far too often.

Henry: Like I said, the, the playground thing of the dirty kid toucher, the, the gay man or the dirty kid touch- toucher. Freddy Krueger falls into, you know, that's something you can come to. Very weird aside, but, uh, professional wrestling is a very campy form of entertainment. One of the earliest villains or, or heels in professional wrestling was Gorgeous George.

Henry: He was a guy, he would come to the ring with these very long, flowing, bright pink robes and everything like that. He would spray perfume all over himself. The fans ate it up and they hated him. And it's like that, fast-forward I don't know how many decades, you get, um, Goldust, a, another professional wrestler who was very much camp, very much portrayed as gay, and he was, again, portrayed very much as the villain.

Henry: So yeah, horror and the campiness of it, it puts queer people in a kind of untenable position. They have to not only deal with the fact that they're afraid for their lives and their livelihood, but they also have to then find a way to deal with maybe, you know, even fake laugh at the villain of their stereotypical queerness.

 Archie : Yeah, so definitely you've touched on the next question. So historically, queer characters in horrors, they just weren't portrayed well at all? 

Henry: No, absolutely. The, it runs a very strange and kind of sad gamut because you have characters that go all the way back to centuries ago. I actually have a, um, one of the earliest depictions of queerness and horror and the supposed price that is paid for a, for being queer.

Henry: You have Carmilla, you know, the earliest incarnation of the lesbian vampire. I have not actually read this yet. I literally just took it out from the library a few days ago. But yeah, you have Carmilla, the first instance of a lesbian vampire. You have Psycho, one of my favorite books, in which is, uh, Norman Bates is canonically kind of considered a, a straight man, but he...

Henry: I would call him, in my mind, straight-ish because of his, the mothering instincts, the More feminine portion of his personality that his mother twisted over years to become the cross-dressing serial killer from Psycho, from the Bates Motel. Hannibal Lecter is a, uh, canonically very queer man, or at least he has been in a number of stories and books that he's done or that he's in.

Henry: The idea of queerness and horror, it, it's, it's only been within the last couple of decades that we've really started getting- we've always had people pushing to say it's like, "Hey, it's ... Being queer is not a bad thing." Going to the '80s, the '90s, '70s, you know, "Being queer is not a bad thing. It should never be demonized."

Henry: But it's only been in the last, I would say, 25 years, since like the turn of the millennium, that we've really had a groundswell of people pushing to say, "Hey, this isn't just a niche thing. This isn't just like a hot take or an unpopular opinion. This is the truth." And now more than ever, it's more important to say that none of this should be demonized.

Henry: And if I'm gonna go one step further and say that the, one of the biggest reasons that we are living through such dark, authoritarian, homophobic times is because of the groundswell of support, the growth of the LGBTQ community. It's a direct last-gasp attempt to silence an entire community. And as hard as they are trying and as dark as they are trying, it, it will fail.

 Archie : Yeah. And I've seen so many stats saying that, you know, even though they've got this really loud minority, the majority of people around the world actually support LGBTQ+ rights. 

Henry: Yeah. 

 Archie : So it's, it's quite interesting going back to the villain trope as well. It's, it's like society was saying back then when a lot of horrors were written that, um, having these effeminate features for a man or hyper-masculine for a, a woman are abnormal, and because they're abnormal, that's, they're villains.

 Archie : And so it's kind of, you know, back then just saying, "Stick to the status quo because we don't want you pushing the line." Yeah. And then when you write in a way in a horror that pushes the status quo, then you have queer readers who start to see themselves rather than seeing themselves as the villain or evil and questioning why they resonate with the villain in, in a story.

Henry: Yeah. Yeah. And also the, the funny thing about this is there's always been people who want to rewrite the narrative or change how things are portrayed and, but the more that you dig into history, the more that you come to understand that the queer community hasn't just simply been always been around, but there's been multiple times, multiple instances around the world when it was widely accepted You go back into ancient history, you go back to ancient Egypt, you go back to, uh, the 1800s, you know, there were, there were a number of trans men who, or trans men, trans women who lived their whole lives as the people that they wanted to be, even though society tried to keep them away from each other.

Henry: You go into, um, what is it, the 80s, uh, the idea of roommates, you know, from the 80s and 90s. You know, it's like, "Oh, this is my roommate. Yes." 

 Archie : Yeah, Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street. They were just roommates, right? 

Henry: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yes, yes. Mm-hmm. 

 Archie : In your email, you mentioned this beautiful quote, "Horror is the hand you hold before walking through a dark room."

 Archie : Can you unpack that for us? 

Henry: Whenever I'm at a book signing or I'm doing a book signing, it's always funny to me the way that the audience or the people who come through the signing break down because you have the people who come over to the table, you know, they come talk to me about everything, and then you have the people when the second I say horror, 

Speaker 3: it's just like, "Ugh, no.

Speaker 3: Um, no, no, no, no, 

Henry: no. I'm out. No." And I, I, I've said this before, and I will say this to my dying day, horror is not for everyone, but it's here for everyone in case you need it because science fiction handles the future, where we're headed, where we came from, and where we're going. Fantasy is the idea of the different kinds of lives that we might have.

Henry: It's a way for us to be able to, to work into our fantasies about, you know, if worlds had been different, what might come of it, the different creatures that we might be, the different people that we might be. Horror is the genre that helps you deal with not only your fears of the world itself, but the fears about yourself, the things that you don't want to admit to other people because you're afraid of being ostracized.

Henry: Like I said, you know, that, that password, that key into the tribe itself, you know, the, the comforting lies that we tell to be able to just stay in the, in the tent. Horror is the hand that you hold when you want to move out of that tent, when you finally realize that none of this is healthy, that none of this is helping me, that there is something else out there, even though I'm terrified to go out and find it.

Henry: Horror is that friend who will reach out and hold your hand and say, "Look, yes, things are scary. There are monsters out there. There are demons. There's madness. There's terror. But I can help you get through that safely. I can give you a gap between where you, what you re- I can put a gap between what you're legitimately afraid of and the, uh, danger that you would actually face."

Henry: So that's the kind of friend that horror is. It is not always comforting. It can be bleak as hell. Lord knows I've written a number of bleak stories. But the It's the best way for us to be able to understand ourselves, and it's the best friend that you can have when you want to walk into the darkness and see what you find.

 Archie : And I heard a quote recently or like, uh, information recently saying that true friend will actually tell you how it is. They'll get to the nitty-gritty. They'll make you feel uncomfortable so that you improve and you get better. And if, if anybody's just letting you have your bad habits and go along, they're actually not a true friend if they're just there saying, "Yep, you're, you're all good.

 Archie : Nothing's wrong." So it's quite interesting when you, when you spoke it out like that. It, it did sound like a friend, like a, like a best friend who calls you out on your crap, basically. But how can engaging with horror actually support mental health? 

Henry: Because a lot of the ... A lot of fears are wrapped up in mental health, and a lot of the things you're afraid of are end up shaping you over the course of not just your day, but your life.

Henry: You know, I'm a very obsessive person. I always have been. You know, I ... Like, every time I, I leave the house in the morning before I go to work, I have to test the lock on the door 10 times. Helps me get out the door. I have tried over decades to not be this person that I am, to not be so obsessive, and the only thing I've ever done is just replace one tick or one obsession with another.

Henry: I am the kid who in high school would, uh, murmur to himself. I used to chirp, actually, a couple of times as a way to try to, uh, feel safe or have some control over things that were going on around me. Did not in any way, shape, or form make me popular. But the fears, the obsessions, the worry about how you're going to be perceived, how the kind of person that you actually are versus the story that you tell yourself at the end of the day, horror will help you figure that out.

Henry: And I know a couple of people who've actually use horror novels and h- and horror media as forms of therapy. Uh, you know, like legitimate social workers who use it as forms of therapy for their clients because any particular fear that you have, you can find some version of it in horror media, whether it's a book or a movie or a game, something that addresses it.

Henry: Fear of death, fear of isolation, fear of discovery, that you're not as good of a person as you think you are. That's a very hard pill to swallow. Horror can help you do that, and horror can keep you from twisting yourself into knots over the course of your life. If you let it. 

 Archie : That's so interesting. I, I never really thought about that.

 Archie : I was like, "Yeah, horror's there just to make you scared," but there's a lot more to horror than most people realize. 

Henry: Yes, horror is there, will scare you, horror will gross you out, horror will not make you think, but horror is born from the things that we all fear. So every single thing that we've ever been afraid of as humanity is in horror, and horror holds up a mirror to us.

Henry: So whenever you open up about your fears and things that you're afraid of, you're opening up about yourself. By understanding that and not shying away from that, you can understand yourself, understand people around you, and help improve yourself, things. You can help make things a little bit better if at least not just a little bit easier for people.

 Archie : Yeah, that's awesome. Before we get onto talking a bit more about your book, what do people say to you when they find out you write horror? Are they surprised? Are they shocked? Are they like, "Why?" 

Henry: Like I said, when I'm at book signings, some people are like, "Horror, no, no, no, no, no, no." Mostly what I get is just the idea of, you know, I'm, you know, I'm not into horror, horror is not my thing.

Henry: I, I don't feel like being creeped out or anything like that. So there's no surprise, but it's always very revealing the things that people will say to me because especially for my, my first book, A Man In Pieces, and like it, it's a... What's funny is that far more people will be okay with going for, uh, Somewhere Quiet, Full of Life, my, uh, my gay haunted house novel or my, uh, queer horror novel about, you know, going to hell and everything like that.

Henry: When I explain what A Man In Pieces is about, about the fact that, you know, this overburdened father-to-be has to battle his abusive boss for last spot at a dead-end job. The fight leads one of them to murder. It's all about how the American dream can lead you to murder. So many people look at me and say, "No, because I have enough of that in my life already.

Henry: I don't want any more of it," and they walk away. The horror that you get into or the horror that you gravitate towards and the horror you stay away from- very telling about what people are living through. 

 Archie : Yeah, so it's like when you have that supernatural element, some people are like, "Yeah, it's fake, it's make believe."

 Archie : But when you have that real element that people can actually relate to, they're like, "It's too real. It touches too close to home. I can't read it." 

Henry: Uh, Rod Serling was one of the people who when he was, uh, before he was crafting The Twilight Zone, he realized that he wanted to talk about real world issues.

Henry: He wanted to talk about racism and antisemitism and fascism, all of these things, but none of the television, uh, productions or anything like that wanted to touch them. None of the networks would touch them. He said that, you know, "If I, uh, set this whole story a thousand years from now on an entirely different planet, I could probably sell it.

Henry: Yes, I can do that." Okay, and that was how Twilight Zone was born. He was able to discuss racism and fascism, antisemitism under the cover of science fiction. So the supernatural elements, they can, like I said, the, the hand that you hold when you're walking through the room, that the supernatural elements and the things that you deal with can help you, you know, get to where you need to be.

 Archie : Yeah, that makes sense, and, you know, even though th- it's the same themes, you set them a thousand years from now, people are, "Oh, yeah, I don't have to deal with my crap right now. The- it's, it's not, it's in the future, so it's not, not happening right now." But your book, The Party of a Lifetime, or it's just called Party of a Lifetime?

 Archie : Is that correct? 

Henry: Mm-hmm. Party of a Lifetime, yep. 

 Archie : Let's chat a bit more about that. The idea of reclaiming a prom experience, that is very powerful, and I'm sure that so many queer listeners are in some way or another wanting to reclaim their experience. Why was that so important for you to explore in this book?

Henry: Because I told, uh, friends of mine that the idea of rites of passage is a very funny concept to me because rites of passage are things that matter to previous generation, not so much to us, or the generation that's living through it right now. Like, uh, my niece, you know, went to her communion, her first communion.

Henry: You know, my family, we grew up Catholic and everything, and My niece went to her first communion and went up in the church, you know, her whole class and everything like that, went up to take communion and everything like that, turned around, had the most miserable look on her face the entire time because she hated every single instance of it.

Henry: She hated getting dressed up. She hated having everyone stare at her. She hated the, you know, having to be front and center of everything. It was awful for her. And a lot of the ideas of rites of passage, especially something for young people like prom, having a date at prom, going to prom, not being allowed to go to prom, or not being allowed to bring the people that you want to bring to prom because of homophobia, because of racism, because of whatever it is, there's so much that they are dealing with that it makes these rites of passage feel like they are far more important than they actually are.

Henry: So I wanted to have my characters be dealing with the trauma of what they went through on prom night and wanting to reclaim it and recreate it in their way. It's like, "Look, we, you know, we've been at college for a year. Can we please get back together? I miss you guys. Let's go do the thing that we were supposed to do, the thing we wanted to do, the thing that really actually mattered to us out of this whole thing.

Henry: Let's go to the beach. Let's spend the day. When night fall, get some drinks. Let's just chill and enjoy being ourselves." And that's where the idea of the, the start of the, the tragedy and trauma starts coming through for the story. 

 Archie : And for queer listeners, and, and just talking about reclaiming, it could even be, uh, like a metaphor, even though you didn't write it this way, but a metaphor about reclaiming, uh, slurs.

 Archie : You know, so queer used to be a slur, and we still sometimes get emails and direct messages about why we shouldn't be using queer, but we, we're bringing back that power. So you're taking back that power- Mm-hmm ... that Prom once held over you. So it's almost like that metaphor of, like, words and, and how people used to treat queer people and LGBTQI-A plus people and, and taking that power back almost.

 Archie : I know, I know that's not how it's written, but that as you were saying that, that's kind of like how I could kind of relate to what you were talking about. 

Henry: Absolutely, yes. And it's also how the take it a step further is also the idea of trying to reclaim it and having so many people not allow you to do it, people who just no matter what don't want to be that inclusive, don't want to include you, don't want to accept who you are.

Henry: And it's not about, as it happens in the book, what's the, the, the quote? Um, no one in power has ever, ever given it up voluntarily. People have had to take it back one way or the other, and that's very much what is going on in Party of a Lifetime is the, the people, the friends that they are, the lives that they want, they have to try and take it back themselves.

 Archie : And without any spoilers, what kind of horror are we dealing with? Is it psychological, supernatural, ex- existential dread? Any of those categories? 

Henry: It's, uh, it is very much supernatural with a very heavy element of body horror in there. So I wanted to take four classic, not tropes, but I guess character archetypes of horror and do my own spin on them.

Henry: Like, I have my own spin on a werewolf in there. I have my own spin on the Stepford Wives. I have my own spin on the Blob and, uh, the Skinless Man from Hellraiser. I wanted to, in the elevator pitch, as I said, the idea is that the, the town might be full of devils, but the worst monsters might just be themselves.

Henry: And as- The idea of trying to reclaim the people that you want to be means that there's someone out there who's trying to take who you are away from you. So I wanted to do a physical version of that. Not just simply losing an agency as you- of who you are, but losing your physical control over yourself and what that's actually like and how close to insane that will drive you if you're not made of some very, very tough metal or have some very, very good friends around you.

 Archie : the worst monsters could be yourself. When you do grow up queer, you are your own worst enemy. You're, you're attacking yourself. And so that's quite an interesting take on how you've, uh, how you've put that into the book. But what makes this series or this book distinctively queer rather than just having queer characters?

 Archie : What makes it distinctively queer? 

Henry: The campiness of it, I think. I love the ... I mean, I grew up on things like, uh, Nightmare on Elm Street and the, um ... Freddy was always my favorite when I was growing up just because any guy who can crack a joke or make you laugh as he's doing these horrendous things, that's, that's always been something very special for me.

Henry: You know, I mean, Jason, Michael Myers, even what's his name? The Terrifier, you know, the, the clown. I forget his name. They tend to be very silent characters, these creatures that just kind of plod after you. They're like the existential dread. You know, they're just coming after you, nothing that you can really do to outpace them.

Henry: Freddy was the person who would drive you insane and then laugh at you about it. The campiness of it is something that I thought is definitely what makes it very queer because the, the sass that's in the book, the loving noogieing. You hold someone's head, you kind of, you love them to death, but you're also noogieing them at the same time.

Henry: That's a, to me, that's a queer relationship. It's friends that are not just simply accepting of who you are, but you're accepting of each other, and that's what helps all of you to be able to get through it. 

 Archie : And, uh, Nightmare Before Elm Street, I was think I was like six or seven and my auntie showed it to me.

 Archie : I couldn't sleep for a week. Thank you very much. Um, she got into a lot of trouble with my mom. 

Henry: I'm sure. 

 Archie : I've watched a few of them 'cause she loved them, but I, every time I couldn't sleep, and mom's like, "You didn't watch that movie, did you?" I'm like, "No, what are you talking about? I d- I'm just, I'm not feeling great."

 Archie : We've got a little bit of time left, so I've just got two more questions. So you've been working with Eastern Shore's Writers Association, creating the narrative and the importance of understanding queer literary history. Did you wanna touch a bit on that? 

Henry: Absolutely, yes. The, one of the reasons that I have, uh, Carmilla is I wanted to really dig into queer history itself, and not only dig the, into the history, but the different cultures that are tied into it.

Henry: So I have, uh, Giovanni's Room, which is James Baldwin. He's one of the, I'm gonna say he's one of the deepest thinkers of the Civil Rights Movement. He was one of the deepest end thinkers of the queer movement as well. I wanted to dig into the different ways that queer literature and the way that queerness has been buried, hinted, and at times actually shined in the terms of history itself.

Henry: Like James Baldwin, he ended up having to, like, leave the country because of his politics and things that he was saying. You know, he had to travel the world. He was... There are a lot of things that he was afraid of for, you know, a number of years as a Black queer man. Oscar Wilde, I'm reading the very last book that Oscar Wilde wrote.

Henry: It was published after he died, uh, De Profundis. You know, it was a 50,000-word letter to the lover who betrayed him and got him sent to prison for two years. So I'll be touching on that in the presentation about the... Oscar Wilde's queerness, what it is that he sacrificed for it, what it is that it cost him.

Henry: I'm gonna talk about, uh, James Baldwin and everything. I'm gonna talk about, uh, Emily Dickinson and the deeply queer, uh, poetry that she wrote. Uh, I know the show recently, um, Dickinson, I believe, delved more into her, the love that she had for her sister-in-law. While I was digging into this, I found a kind of like, um, that old diamond in the rough idea.

Henry: You find that one diamond that actually is shining amidst things that have just stayed buried for so many years. There was a queer female poet from, I believe, 17th century China, Wu Zhao, and her poetry is not translated. Not all of her poetry is translated into English, but the portions that are, deeply queer, deeply moving, and absolutely unapologetic for it.

Henry: And I want to tie in history all of that together, weave in the dangers, weave in the intimations, weave in the diamonds that shone through, and lead it up to now, here today, the books that are being published, the books that are being banned, the books that are refused to not be seen, like, uh, Me and Mattie, a, a children's book about mother, uh, working with a non-binary child and, you know, helping them to accept, helping them to grow and become the person that they want to be.

Henry: It's understanding queer history and where we've come from. Everything that it's been cost is something that's I've always wanted to dig into And it's something that I'm hoping to spread as much as I can. 

 Archie : Yeah, that's amazing. I've also heard people say that Little Women could also be queer if you take the time and, and, and you look more at the, the author's point of view and, and her lifestyle and how it might have been a secret way of her saying that she was queer in one of the characters, but not actually coming out and saying it.

 Archie : To finish this episode, if you could survive one horror scenario, just one, what would it be and which one are you absolutely dying in? 

Henry: The, the one that I would survive, I think I'd like to be the final girl from Texas Chainsaw Massacre because I feel like on a very odd level I understand Leatherface, and I think there would be, if not an understanding between us, then at least enough of a surprise between us that I would be able to, like, get away and be the one screaming covered in blood in the back of the truck.

Henry: The one that I would absolutely not survive is from The Descent. I- for those who don't know the movie, is a, a series of women go spelunking, cave diving, you know, for as a way to try to, you know, as a team building exercise basically, and they encounter subterranean horrors down there. I would absolutely...

Henry: I would not ju- not just simply, I would not just simply die because of the subterranean horrors and everything, I would lose my mind in the dark and I would get stuck. I would absolutely be Chester Copperpot, the, the bones that people found decades later of when, you know, "What happened to him?" That's where he is.

 Archie : What's funny about that is I, I'm just remembering a family memory. We went down south. So down south there's like Margaret River and there's caves, and the night before we went to the caves my sister watched Descent. Terrible idea because one of the caves you go all the way down and then the tour guide turns off the light.

Speaker 3: Yep. Mm-hmm. 

 Archie : And it just shows you how dark it is when there is literally no li- you can't even see your hands, you can't see like anything, and it's creepy. It's so bad. But then like, you know, then there's bits where you have to squeeze through things, and then she's like, "I don't wanna be the last one. I don't wanna be the first one."

 Archie : And then we just kept leaving her at the end because she was moving too slow 'cause she was scared. It's just, yeah. So I was like as you were saying that, I was remembering that, that family memory. But thank you so much for your time. 

Henry: Thank you. 

 Archie : This has been a very interesting conversation. I've been looking forward to this for a while, so thank you so much for making the time.

 Archie : Very, very soon, so June 8th, this will be out everywhere for all of our listeners to check out and hopefully get into. It's so interesting to see how queer, horror, mental health, it all connects, 'cause if you put those three together people aren't gonna always think about that. I hope that everybody enjoyed this episode, and if you did, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe.

 Archie : I'll also put links into the show notes where you can check out the book and also check out Henry's other work. But until next time, I hope that we have been- 

Henry: Perfectly queer