[Pride In Horror Month] - Horror Can Heal

One of these days, assuming my senses of focus and organization ever come back from the COVID-19 war, I'd like to create a huge Queer Horror Database. I know there are some great ones for romance--which is what a lot of people, myself included for a long time, immediately and only thought of when thinking about queer stories.

Normally I might try to turn in a well-researched essay (complete with bibliography!) about the history of LGBTQ+ scary stories, along with a list of some prominent queer writers who write amazingly scary books.

But my brain is currently Swiss cheese thanks to our next-door neighbor being tested positive for COVID-19 and the kids being suddenly home-schoolers for the rest of the year (I am going to name a prominent victim in my next novel after the person who invented Common Core Math). So today, you're getting a stream-of-consciousness piece over how I slowly came to accept myself for who I was instead of continually insisting that I was Straight, Really, and how the horror genre was a key part of that. With a little bit of "exactly how hard is it to kick internalized homophobia?" thrown in.

Fun times, let's go.  ;)

One of the first book characters I remember ever having a crush on was Beverly from Stephen King's IT.  Though of course at the time I didn't call it a crush, because girls in Bible Belt small towns did not have crushes on other girls. Besides, I knew what 'gay' meant. Gay meant Ryan White, meant people going to bathhouses and Making Bad Choices (can you tell National Review was a magazine always lying around in our home?). It meant death, even at the beginning of a book I loved with all my heart as a kid. 

(Though that scene also gave us a gay man's death as a *tragedy* instead of an I Told You So, which I finally came to understand several years later. Guess there was a reason I never skipped that scene when I did a reread, even though it turned me into a crying mess every time.)

Then when I was 15, one of my theater friends brought the RENT soundtrack to rehearsal (thanks, musical theater, iluuuu) and I'll just go ahead and cue up the A Whole New World music, because it WAS. An entire storyline with queer people treated as actual human beings instead of object lessons (when it was even acknowledged that they existed at all)?   HOLY SHIT.

There wasn't a whole lot out there for me besides RENT, though. The internet was computer-in-middle-of-family-room, and by freshman year of high school all of my friends had hit that "I have to find a boyfriend or I'll die" stage. I remember hearing the girls giggling in the showers about sex - whether or not they'd had it yet, how much fun it was, how they hadn't had any in *two whole weeks* and couldn't stand it - and feeling entirely left out.

So I found even more of a refuge in horror. Always carrying around a scary book made me a bit of a outcast, but not the same level of outcast I would've been if I'd been open enough about my own feelings to come out at that age.

(The crushes-I-couldn't-call crushes continued, though. Rachel Weisz in The Mummy; Catherine Zeta-Jones in the remake of The Haunting; and of course Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise.)

Horror was so much to me, including training wheels for being queer:  queer people have always been around, just like scary stories, and both tend to be misunderstood at best by society at large. We each have our enclaves where our genre/ourselves are celebrated, while gatekeepers of one sort and another work on banning 'inappropriate' books or hyperventilating 'think of the children!!!' when they happen to see two men holding hands.

We are the weirdos, mister.

I finally - in my early thirties - was comfortable enough to come out.

And with that, I thought, I was free! No longer held back by the prejudiced views of my town! Nothing but open-mindedness and rainbows from this moment on! I moved on from friendships that had become toxic; I started writing queer romance stories for an indie press.

I also started in on the basics of a cryptozoology-themed horror series, finally dipping my toe into *writing* the genre that I'd loved reading since I was far too young to pick up The Shining.

Then came the day when I was organizing what projects I needed to work on and when. There were deadlines for two of the queer romance anthology submissions, and though I really wanted to get some more research done on my horror series, deadlines were deadlines. I could work on my normal project later.

My *normal* project.

I realized what I'd just thought, and felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.

Because my horror series was modeled after the stuff I'd read as a kid/teenager: majority straight characters, with maybe one queer person (who usually didn't live that long). My queer stories were strictly the romance ones, because that was what queer was *always* focused on, right? Relationships?

I'd always been under the impression that once I came out, once I accepted myself, the biggest hurdle was gone. It kicked my ass to realize how much I still had to learn, how deeply my conservative upbringing had really sunk its hooks in.

So I took a break, and did more research, and engaged in a hell of a lot more introspection.

In the end, I kept writing queer romance, but added in more elements of my favorite genre. Pale Moon has werewolves and fae (both friendly and Very Much Not); Blasphemers in the Garden of Eden has an angel/human romance, but also deals heavily with the horror of the Rapture.

And when an amazing charity project came down the line, with author and cover designer Kealan Patrick Burke offering free covers to anyone who wanted to create a creature-feature and offer the proceeds to animal welfare organizations, I wrote Playing Possum: a classic animals-attack-small-town story, with lesbian leads.

As for my horror series? I revamped it to be less "this is what I read as a teen" and more "this is what I *wish* I could've read as a teen". The series is called Cryptids & Cauldrons, and the first book is coming out this Halloween.

It took a while, but I learned to integrate my first genre love with a major aspect of my identity. And I've never been happier, with my writing or otherwise.

By Stephanie Rabig; she/her
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One of Stephanie's earliest memories is hiding in her closet at 3 a.m. reading Pet Semetary. When her father opened the door, she held up the book and whispered "Nooooo, I am 10 pages from the end". Her father sighed, shut the door, and she was doomed from that moment on.