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I like to think that gay kids had better things to do than work as summer camp counselors and hang out with Jamie Lee Curtis, like maybe strut around the mall or audition for Puttin' on the Hits. There are a few teen slashers that feature gender-bending killers — most notably Terror Train (1980) and the wonderfully screwed-up Sleepaway Camp (1983) — but they are more plot devices aimed at tricking audiences and concealing the identity of the killer than attempts to bring a gay character to the screen, for slaughter or otherwise. (I also have my own theories about Jason himself being a bit light in his water-logged loafers, but that's another discussion entirely.) The message here would seem to be:

4. Being the murderer will keep you alive a little longer, but ultimately you'll still die, be driven insane or bring the wrath of GLAAD down on your head (not sure which is worse).
Along with gender-bending killers, the horror genre also features a few notable “confused teens” whose seeming sexual ambivalence and possible possession by demons lead to mass carnage. Take Fear No Evil (1981) and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985). Both boast somewhat feminine male leads at odds with their more aggressive high school peers, who have complicated relationships with girls and suffer horrible humiliations in the locker room (I affectionately call this subgenre Jockstrap Horror).

In both cases, these young men are possessed with an evil power that seems to arise in highly sexualized situations. For example, Andrew from Fear No Evil is kissed in the shower by a bully looking to humiliate him (makes no sense!), and counters by nearly sucking his soul out of his head. (He later gets revenge on the bully by giving him breasts, at which point the kid kills himself — better dead than feminized, right, kids?)

Meanwhile, Jesse of Freddy's Revenge is a classic closeted teen. He's obviously in love with his best friend, recoils at the touch of an aggressive girlfriend, and dreams about running into his gym coach at a leather bar and being forced to shower alone in front of him. No, I'm not making this up. I guess the lesson here would be:

5. Try to become possessed, so you can lay the blame on someone else for your own sexual frustration. And stage a dance routine to a Cathy Dennis song — that'll throw them off the scent.
Recently, though, the climate for gays in horror has become much less about self-loathing and destructive sexuality, and more about just hanging with friends. Maybe this is because the slasher renaissance was in part facilitated by gay writer and producer Kevin Williamson, whose Scream, The Faculty and I Know What You Did Last Summer infused a dead genre with some much-needed queer sensibility. The teen slashers of recent years, while regrettable at times because of their dependence on WB actors and wink-wink humor, have been surprisingly charitable to the gays.

The first “Well whaddayaknow, he's gay!” character I remember seeing in a horror movie is Dave (Gordon Michael Woolvett) in Bride of Chucky (1998). Openly gay Dave is a well-adjusted, friendly guy who helps his friends elope, while unbeknownst to them Chucky and his new bride Tiffany plot their own cross-country carnage. Dave's character is interesting in that while he does die, he isn't actually killed by Chucky — he gets hit by a truck.

Openly gay scripter Don Mancini (who created the series, wrote every installment, and directed the most recent, Seed of Chucky) once told me that it was important for Dave to die because “he's the one likeable victim,” and that it was important for the audience to feel the “sting of death,” the sense of loss. So here we have the gay character not being used as a way to horrify the audience or make them uncomfortable (as gay characters have been used for decades), but to pull them emotionally into the story. He's sort of a more mainstreamed, teen-friendly version of Donald from Laura Mars. Pretty progressive, for what most people would dismiss as a “dumb horror movie.”

Or what about the surprisingly good (and incredibly gay-friendly) Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)? Aside from boasting a bounty of young male skin and an appearance by Diane Delano (Miss Glass from Popular), Creepers 2 also features a gay teen character, Izzy, who butts heads with an alpha jock on a school basketball trip. The character is smart, attractive and an ambitious writer for the school paper; he's also much more level-headed than the punchy jocks. Sadly, this doesn't save him from being killed by the Creeper, but it does raise the topic of high school homophobia and how it creates a culture of fear for gay teens.

The abysmal teen voodoo slasher flick Venom (2005) also features a gay central character, and for once, he is about as generic as the rest of the kids. (His gayness made him a bit closer to the lead girls than maybe he would have been were he straight, but that's about it.)

Genre legend Tobe Hooper's Mortuary (2005) features a gay teen character as well, and like Venom, the film presents the guy's sexuality as a nonevent, just a character trait like hair color or height. It's also interesting to note that in both movies, the gay characters are absolutely adorable (Pawel Szajda in Venom, Rocky Marquette in Mortuary). We may be subordinated, but we're cute!

Wes Craven's colossally misguided Cursed probably went further than any other recent horror movie to address teen homophobia and present a complex gay character (too bad it was otherwise essentially unwatchable). Bo (Milo Ventimiglia) is a jock who picks on the lead character, Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) — that is, until Jimmy is bitten by a werewolf and suddenly becomes the “dominant male” in his school, kicking butt at wrestling and getting the hot girl.

Curiously, Bo does an about-face at this show of pumping hormones, and clumsily comes on to Jimmy, inadvertently outing himself. By the end of the film, Bo is much more comfortable with his sexuality (and no longer a self-loathing bully as a result), and he and Jimmy are friends. And you know what? They even let him live.

So I guess the real key is:

6. Disguise yourself as a hot, homophobic high school wrestler who later opens up and becomes the hero's happy, gay sidekick.
Which brings us back to square one — well, except for the fact that we're at least allowed to live this time. The bottom line is, genre movies paint with some of the broadest strokes in the business, and as a result, just about any group (gays, blacks, women, the elderly) is likely to find some kind of beef with their methods. But time has shown that gay character presence in horror has become both more frequent and more positive. Now if we could just find a way of bagging the jock, helping the Final Girl to find a more flattering wardrobe, and dispatching the killer, we'd be on to something.

Brian Juergens is the webmaster of campblood.org.

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