At one stage he was a local Labour council candidate, and, before his death, he had applied to become a candidate for the Scottish Parliament. The Paedophile Information Exchange was founded in Edinburgh in October 1974 by two gay campaigners, Michael Hanson and Ian Campbell Dunn, both of them leading members of the Scottish Minorities Group, which later became the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group.Īn outspoken, egocentric individual who worked as a town planner in Edinburgh, Campbell Dunn was a trade union official and Labour party activist.
The double entendres in songs such as Chuck Berry’s My Ding-a-Ling and sitcoms such as It Ain’t Half Hot Mum all provoked letters, as did a suggestively placed microphone during Mick Jagger’s appearance on Top Of The Pops. She and her fellow campaigners expended a huge amount of energy on the kind of sauciness that nowadays seems quaint. Some of her concerns look rather silly now. And she failed utterly, in a grand display of public humiliation. She didn’t campaign for change, she campaigned for stasis. She spent 37 years organising letter-writing campaigns in an effort to halt the arrival of what she called ‘the permissive society’, horrified as she was by the displays of sex and violence that suddenly appeared on British television screens from the 1960s onwards.Ī contemporary of hers described her as ‘a little Canute, exhorting the waves of moral turpitude to retreat’. Born in 1910, she never let go of her Edwardian sensibilities, even as the society she knew collapsed around her ears. (Editor’s note: We’ve updated the list for 2022, including Titane, Freaky, and Fear Street Part Three: 1666.The much ridiculed campaigner Mary Whitehouse is one of history’s losers. Here are our essential LGBTQ+ horror movies, in order of release. The monsters are out of the closet, and they’re never going back in.
Now we can choose from a lesbian domestic drama involving a baby werewolf in Good Manners, a transfeminist vampire movie in Bit, or a French slasher set in a gay porn community with Knife + Heart. The indie cinema boom at the turn of turn of the millennium coincided with the emergence of New Queer Cinema, and eccentric coming-of-age darlings like May and Ginger Snaps provided an alternative to the glossy studio slashers of the time. The Moral Majority reign of the Reagan Era slammed up against the AIDS crisis, and the excess and tumult of the ’80s gave rise to ultra-stylish and sexualized gore in movies like The Hunger and Hellraiser. (Not to say it was all positive representation, but the lesbian vampire wave of the 1970s certainly signified that the puritans were losing the culture wars in genre.)
On rare occasion, queer folks were given real protagonists to root for, like Theo in The Haunting, but it wasn’t until the Hays Code was abandoned in the late 1960s that sexuality outside the bounds of heteronormativity became more overt. In the century since America became the world’s leader in horror film production, the genre became a bastion for the outsiders, the marginalized, the people made monsters by self-appointed adjudicators of sin, and who saw themselves in the supposed “villains” at the center of stories like Dracula’s Daughter. Fortunately, they weren’t creative enough to drive the big bad Other away. Here was Whale, a gay man, building horror in his own image and having astounding box office success as some groups were lobbying Hollywood to censor queerness out of existence. Before homosexuality was formally legislated out of existence in Hollywood by the Production Code - commonly referred to as the Hays Code, which established mandates for “moral standards” in motion pictures and banned depictions of “sexual perversity” - the legendary filmmaker James Whale was building the foundation for American genre cinema with films like Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and The Invisible Man. (Photo by © Altered Innocence / Courtesy: Everett Collection) 33 Essential LGBTQ+ Horror MoviesĪs long as there have been horror films, there have been queer horror films.