Pride Month: Our thoughts and feelings are valid

By BROOKE PERRIN

Growing up in a town of less than 2,000 people in rural Montana, I never encountered anyone I knew to be gay. It was never discussed and thus did not exist. Even before I realized I was gay, I was an outcast in school. I had nothing in common with most kids my age. My classmates loved football and snowboarding, while I sat in the corner reading Macbeth. I wanted the lead in the school play, not to be head cheerleader. I spent most of my adolescence shroud in black hoping my creepy exterior would repel my fellow classmates. I wasn’t out of the closet by any stretch, even to myself, but was still routinely called “faggot” and singled out for not conforming to the crowd. As Alice Collins mentioned in her column, the arts tend to be common ground for LGBT kids. We often find they are safe havens for us as we struggle to survive high school and beyond. We are allowed to explore our true selves through embodying others on stage or channeling our emotions through art and music. In addition to falling in love with theatre, in high school I also became enamored with the horror genre. Since then I’ve realized a passion for horror is common amongst much of the queer community. As a young girl I cried with Frankenstein’s creature as he was shunned by society while he so hopelessly tried to belong. I was in awe of Carrie White as she burned the school gym to the ground and wrought vengeance on her cruel classmates. Watching these films was deeply cathartic for me. I discovered Dark Shadows in my early twenties, just as I was coming to terms with my sexuality. I felt a connection to Barnabas Collins, the reluctant vampire who wanted so desperately to be human. These feelings of being ostracized run throughout much of the horror genre and strike a chord with me and the LBGT community at large.

As I delved deeper into the Dark Shadows fandom, I learned many of the actors who appeared on the show were queer. Unfortunately they lived in a more conservative and closeted time, when identifying as gay was still considered radical. It was also dangerous and could mean the end of an actor’s professional career. We will never know for sure how Jonathan Frid, Louis Edmonds, or Joel Crothers would have chosen to identify in today’s more accepting society, but what we do know is they too were misunderstood outcasts in a straight world. Although I’ve moved on from the conservative rural life and found love and acceptance identifying as a lesbian, I have also learned the heteronormative community I grew up in still exists in every sphere, including the internet. A small but vocal portion of the Dark Shadows fandom cling to their conservative ideologies that love may only exist between a man and a woman. If youbreathe a word suggesting the beloved Jonathan Frid may have been romantically involved with men they will be on you like blood on fangs. These fans time and again sing the refrain they “don’t care what adults do in the bedroom as long as they don’t have to hear about it.” Initially this makes many queer fans such as myself reluctant or even fearful to share their views online. Gratefully we have many spaces, including CHS, where queer fans can feel safe from bigotry.

In addition to the backlash fans receive for celebrating the queerness of the talent involved in creating Dark Shadows, queer fans are also criticized by our straight counterparts for daring to see ourselves reflected in “their” characters. Although queer representation is making leaps and bounds today historically, the LGBTQ community have little to no representation in the media we consume. To find ourselves represented we have to read between the lines. Recently I saw a comment accusing queer fans of “appropriating Dark Shadows to push their agenda.” For instance one of my favorite plot lines on Dark Shadows is 1970 Parallel Time. This timeline more or less mirrors the plot of the classic gothic novel Rebecca. The main reason I love this story is that it brings my two favorite characters together. Julia takes on the Mrs. Danvers role while Angelique serves as the mysterious deceased wife Rebecca. Danvers has become a lesbian icon in popular culture due to her homoerotic devotion to the dead mistress of Manderley. What makes the storyline on Dark Shadows even more fun than the novel is here Rebecca rises from the grave and the two women are allowed to plot and scheme against the master of the house’s new bride. The knowing and flirtatious glances Hoffman and Alexis exchange when she ‘“arrives from abroad” betray something deeper than the mere professional relationship between a mistress and her maid.  Will some of the Dark Shadows fandom take issue with my interpretation of their relationship as sexual? Absolutely. Does this make my interpretation any less valid? Not for a second.

Dark Shadows has attracted a large queer fanbase over the five decades since it first aired. I truly believe on an instinctual level the LGBT community recognizes art that has been touched by our kind. Is this what draws us to the early horror films of James Whale or to Dark Shadows? I like to think so. What I love most during pride month is our visibility amongst thefandom. It brings me great joy to be reminded we are many and outnumber the bigots we often encounter on Facebook and elsewhere. I am so grateful for the wonderful people I have met and the queer friends I’ve made through the Dark Shadows community. Let us always remember we are many and our thoughts and feelings are valid. I know the many queers who have contributed to Dark Shadows over the years are looking down on us today, proud of the legacy we have created together. Happy Pride! 

Monster Serial: THE INVISIBLE MAN, 1933

Hello, boils and ghouls! October is upon us and that means one thing: HALLOWEEN! While most holidays get a measly day or two of formal recognition, orthodox Monster Kids prefer to celebrate it in the tradition of our people: By watching tons of horror movies. This month at THE COLLINSPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY, we're going to be discussing some of our favorites every day until Halloween. So, put on your 3-D spex, pop some popcorn and turn out the lights .... because we're going to the movies!

By WALLACE McBRIDE

Dr. Jack Griffin is one of cinema's great maniacs. While Universal's other monsters tended to lean toward tragedy and angst, Griffin is just balls-out crazy. This is a guy who doesn't fall off the edge of sanity as much as leap with delirious abandon.

It's a familiar story, and has a few parallels with director James Whale's earlier masterpiece, FRANKENSTEIN: A man tinkers with powers beyond his ken, goes mad and pays the price. What sets this movie apart from similar tales, even Whale's other work, is its euphoric nihilism. Whale's horror films could be cartoonish companion pieces to the novels of Ayn Rand, which also featured supermen brought low by small-minded peers. Whale's FRANKENSTEIN films all feature last-act turns toward moral relativity, but THE INVISIBLE MAN remains a fairly misanthropic film until its final frame.

As a character, Griffin is almost constructed in reverse. We know nothing of him upon his snowy arrival to a country inn at the start of the film. Even his face is masked in bandages, robbing us of any traditional connections to him. And while the movie would have you believe that invisibility drives him around the bend, we find out he's always been a bit of an asshole. He's dismissive of the town's locals (who are all presented as a bunch of drunken imbeciles, letting you know whose side Whale is really on) and grows increasingly abusive toward them. This builds into an early crescendo in the film as Griffin throws a temper tantrum for the ages. He tosses the landlord down the stairs, vandalizes his room at the inn and begins the first of many naked rampages. It's like GRAND THEFT AUTO with mad science.

And hoo boy, the naked rampages. It's mostly mischief at first, throwing a bicycle at the local idiots, throttling a constable, the occasional THREE STOOGES-like mauling of passersby. When Griffin realizes the real power he holds over the country -- terror -- he begins to lean on the throttle. His first act is to pressure a former associate, Dr. Arthur Kemp, into service. Griffin's plan? To kill a few people here and there, some of them "important," others not so much, all as an object lesson to the world that nobody is safe. To make his point, he derails a train and kills hundreds.

The way the film handles the problem of an invisible terrorist is clever and delightful. This is a smart movie, one that doesn't wait for the audience to pick holes in the plot. THE INVISIBLE MAN does the job for them, as characters discuss the pros and cons of a transparent lifestyle. Griffin has to reserve his bad behavior for certain times of the day, avoiding rain and fog because the climate has a way of identifying his presence. He also has to wait an hour after eating, so that people don't see half-digested bangers and mash darting through the city streets.

And then the rest of the cast gets in on the fun. When someone asks the police why they don't paint the roads with wet tar and then follow Griffin's footprints to his hiding place, they get a very reasonable response: "Because he's not an idiot." Before long, nobody in the film feels safe, and are denied the basic comforts of even plotting against the villain for fear he might be lurking in the room during their meetings.
 

It's easy to forget about the contributions of the film's leading man, because he's hardly present on screen during the run of the film. CLAUDE RAINS is one of my favorite actors, the kind of guy who makes any film better by association. He's terrific fun in this movie, and gives the audience 71 solid minutes of indulgent fantasy. Like DOG DAY AFTERNOON, FALLING DOWN and THE DARK KNIGHT, this is a movie for people who are fed up with the petty slings and arrows of day-to-day life. It's easy to associate with Griffin when he's blows a fuse over nosy neighbors at an inn, but not so much when his rage leads him to commit mass murder.

Rains might even deliver the best performance in Universal's early monster movies, at least among the leads. While Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. had many professional ups and downs, none of them really spent much time making A-list movies. Rains was able to move on to films like CASABLANCA, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, possibly avoiding typecasting because his face was rarely on screen in THE INVISIBLE MAN.  (Ditto for his role in 1943's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, which also saw him working from behind a mask.)

THE INVISIBLE MAN's great strength is also its only weakness. The film's sympathies are clearly with Griffin (even as his conduct grows increasingly terrifying) which leaves no room for heroes. The characters that serve as protagonists are thinly drawn and forgettable. Years before she spent four hours lying to Bill Paxton in TITANIC, Gloria Stuart played leading lady in a number of Whale's movies. Here, she's playing a riff on Mae Clarke's character in FRANKENSTEIN, and is given nothing more to do than fret over her one-time beau. If you walk away from the film not caring about their relationship, it's because you're not given a reason to do so.

But that's OK, though. Much like Shakespeare's fools, the movie's "squares" are here to occasionally break the tension. If they're vapid, that's just part of the movie's meme.

WALLACE McBRIDE is editor of The Collinsport Historical Society.