I had a conversation at dinner last night about fiction with gay murderers/criminals or that use crime as a metaphor for homosexuality, and whether it was homophobic. I'm still thinking about it this morning and felt like getting some thoughts out there.
I'm going to focus mostly on two examples in this thread: "The Picture of Dorian Grey" by Oscar Wilde and "Rope," the Hitchcock movie.
Many creators who have been drawn to this metaphor are queer themselves and are using the queerness-as-crime trope to wrestle imaginatively with the complex realities of their lives.
Like, Hitchcock's fixation with evil gays was probably straightforwardly homophobic, but "Rope" was written by Arthur Laurents, a gay man, and acted by Farley Granger and John Dall, both queer.
So what is the appeal of this trope?
Well....um...gay sex was ACTUALLY, LITERALLY A CRIME. So there's that. Oscar Wilde ended up in jail for it.
And his plays almost all wrestle, in code, with the essential moral dilemmas of being a gay Victorian.
The core struggle of one character in "Lady Windermere's Fan," for example, is how to reconcile two contradictory moral imperatives: "It is wrong to lie to your wife" and "It is wrong to burden your wife with overwhelming shame."
How do you cut out one core piece of your moral code and keep the rest intact? How do you abandon one extreme without going to the other?
Feeling unmoored after rejecting a firm code of behavior is a common experience: my dad, a lapsed Catholic, worried about how to bring his children up morally without a fear of Hell.
If gay sex is a crime and a sin, but you decide to do it anyway, what does that make you? How can Dorian know that it's okay to throw away "You shouldn't do things that feel good but that society disapproves of" but that he has to keep "You shouldn't commit murder?"
If Brandon's teacher tells him, "Moral concepts of good and evil and right and wrong don't hold for the intellectually superior"....well, he said that to get in Brandon's pants. But how can Brandon be sure it doesn't also apply to murder?
Fiction is all about extreme, writ-large versions of small inner conflicts. Why should queerness be different?
Both "Rope" and "Dorian Grey," btw, are also about older queer men who take sexual advantage of queer teens who they should have nurtured and protected. The crime is also a metaphor for the sense of damage and monstrosity and guilt felt by abuse survivors.
Last but NOT least...Hitchcock could show Farley Granger and John Dall strangling someone together. He couldn't show them kissing.
Oscar Wilde could write a character talking openly about murder, but he had to circumolocute endlessly around men being in love with each other.
This has emotional implications: if you tell someone, over and over again, that their love is more unspeakable and shameful than murder, how are they supposed to feel about themselves?
But it also has practical ones. If you want to tell your queer story and get it past the censors, make it about murder, and there you are! Use "crime" as a simple code for "queer sex" that everyone gets, and creative possibilities open up!
Anyway. Another conversation I had yesterday was about how deeply problematic tropes can also express core emotional needs. I'm NOT saying that gay murder plots aren't problematic! But labeling them "homophobic" and leaving it there isn't fair either. /fin
