carry me like a sickness with ghosts
carry me like a sickness with ghosts
Spectre? Hardly know her.
On the Glorious Villainy of Being
Okay! It’s finally Spooky season. We’ve had the Equinox, and you’ve had your first autumnal poem. If you’re here for my top notch conker content, you’re gonna have to wait. The tree I get them from in the graveyard on my walk home has knocked out a few of the spiky shells, but none of those tiny, little dark-varnished spider-vanquishing balls as yet! She’s teasing me. I’ll keep checking. Any excuse to scare the shit out of someone in a graveyard. So, I wanted to do some spookier content for the season, but I don’t know if I want to commit to saying I’ll do exclusively ooky content for the month. But here’s a post about how we’re all basically haunted. So that’s fun.
This is basically an introduction to a season of Spooky content that may actually last until I can no longer keep the wailings of Mariah Carey at bay and eventually succumb to writing about Christmas-related things instead. For now, are you sitting weirdly?
Then, let’s begin!
Queerness as Haunting
To be queer is to be haunted—not by chain-rattling ghouls, but by the myriad spectres of who we might have been, who we perhaps should’ve been. We're shadowed by centuries of erasure, otherness, and the grotesque caricatures painted of us. Ghosts of lost time and stolen futures linger at the edges of our consciousness, whispering tales of what could have been in a world less confined by heteronormative chains. And then there are the monsters—the ones lurking in stories, casting long shadows over our narratives, turning us into villains, outcasts, objects of fear. Let's not forget those skeletons still rattling in our closets. I think we usually call those monsters “conservatives”.
Growing up, we found kinship with these figures—the misunderstood, the outlandish, the forbidden. Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, even Disney's flamboyant Ursula, sultry Scar, moody Jafar, and melodramatic Hades—they were mirrors reflecting parts of ourselves that society told us to hide. These queer-coded villains were "too much"—too extravagant, too predatory, too different to be the hero. They embodied the dangers of nonconformity, the thrill of stepping beyond society's chalk-drawn lines. Cast into these roles time and again, we began to embrace the monstrous, not because we chose it, but because it was the only space at that time for us to exist. And oh, how we made it our own.
We are, in a sense, the chosen ones—handpicked by culture to unsettle the norm, to provoke thought, to inject a little chaos into the mundane. The troublemakers! And honestly, who doesn't adore a great villain? As a queer person with a British accent and more than my fair share of velvet in my wardrobe, I often feel like I've hit the trifecta of villainy. Hollywood loves a Brit in a bad guy role—throw in some sharp wit and impeccable style, and suddenly I'm the epitome of sophisticated menace. With facial hair that rivals Guy Fawkes and a penchant for dramatic flair (yes, I own a cape), I'm just a diabolical laugh away from world domination. But isn't that the delicious irony? We've been cast as villains, so we've decided to be the most unforgettable ones imaginable. If you think you’ve overheard me rehearsing my post-domination speech of celebration, no you haven’t.
In the immortal words of Kenneth Williams, “Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!”
The Power of the Queer Villain
There's a wicked joy in queering the villain. By embracing these roles, we subvert expectations and reclaim the power that's been denied to us. Villains don't just disrupt the story—they shatter the status quo. Heroes may uphold society's rules, but villains question them, twist them, toss them aside with a flourish. And if queerness excels at anything, it's challenging the world to rethink its tired conventions.
Queerness is, by nature, an act of defiance. It dismantles binaries, laughs in the face of rigid definitions, and sashays across the boundaries of identity. Like a well-crafted villain, queerness doesn't just step outside the box—it kicks the box over and sets it on fire for good measure. We've been told we're too much—so we became more. We've been told we're the problem—so we embraced being the catalyst for change.
As Captain Raymond Holt declares in Brooklyn 99, "Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place." The queer villain strides onto the stage and declares, "I am not afraid," making the world squirm delightfully in its seat. They wanted monsters? We'll give them monsters draped in elegance, dripping with charisma, brimming with the kind of allure that heroes could only dream of. It’s all in the cape, I promise you.
The Gothic: Our Ancestral Playground
To be queer is to wander freely among the labyrinthine halls of gothic tradition, swinging a thurible wildly, think Ophelia —a world steeped in shadows, adorned with the macabre, and alive with the uncanny. Here, we find our ancestors not in blood but in spirit. The monsters of gothic literature—Mary Shelley's tragic Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's seductive Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Le Fanu’s Carmilla—are our kindred spirits. Feared and misunderstood, they embody desires that society sought to suppress. They are us, and we are them. Even the fucking bird in the Edgar Allan Poe poem has a touch of the queer coding about it.
The gothic obsession with death and darkness resonates with queerness because we've been pushed into the shadows for so long. Yet, in those shadows, we've crafted our own sanctuary. James Baldwin captured this beautifully: "Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition." The closet isn't just a place of hiding—it's a tomb where parts of ourselves were buried alive. But like any good gothic tale, death is not the end but a transformation. It is merely a beginning.
Vampires, with their eternal hunger and ability to transgress boundaries, have long been metaphors for queer desire. Dracula's bite isn't just a physical act—it's a violation of societal norms, a tantalising infection of otherness. Frankenstein's creature, stitched together from discarded parts, seeks acceptance in a world that recoils in horror—a plight all too familiar.
Embracing the Monstrous
Queerness in the Gothic has often been a whisper, a subtle hint beneath layers of metaphor. Queer coding allowed writers to explore forbidden themes under the watchful eyes of censors. Characters like Dorian Gray, whose beauty is both his gift and his downfall, embody the dangers and allure of hidden desires. Oscar Wilde wove a tale where sin is never named but always felt, echoing the silent struggles of many queer individuals.
But we're done with subtext. We're dragging those themes into the spotlight, adorning them with glitter and letting them shine. Characters like Ursula, inspired by the drag queen Divine, aren't just villains—they're powerhouses of self-expression. They don't just break the mould; they shatter it and craft fabulous new ones from the pieces.
We embrace the monstrous because it offers freedom. If society labels us as dangerous, we'll be dangerously authentic. If they fear us, we'll give them something to be awed by. After all, monsters are more interesting than heroes—they have layers, complexities, and stories that delve into the depths where true understanding lies.
Living with Ghosts
To be queer is to live with ghosts—not in mourning, but in reverence. We carry with us the echoes of those who came before, the ones who lived and loved in times even less forgiving than our own. The AIDS epidemic left a generation haunted by absence, by the songs that were never sung, the stories never told. Sam Sax captures this lingering ache: "Queerness is not a sickness, but I still carry it like one."
But these ghosts are also our strength. They are the whispered wisdom in our ears, the gentle push urging us to be braver, louder, more unapologetically ourselves. Ocean Vuong writes, "They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it." We are the embodiment of that lasting legacy.
The closet was once a crypt, but we've transformed it into a stage. We're not just surviving—we're resurrecting, reinventing, revelling. Like Sylvia Plath's phoenix, "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." We're consuming the narratives that once consumed us, turning them into fuel for our next fiery ascent.
Haunt and Be Haunted
So, as the nights grow longer and the shadows deepen, let's embrace the haunting. Let's celebrate the chaos, the desire, the erratic heartbeat of a life lived fully. We are the ghosts and the ghosted, the villains and the victors. We exist in the in-between spaces, where magic thrives and possibility is endless.
Because queerness isn't just about survival—it's about taking the narratives that were written for, about, and around us and scribbling all over them with glitter pens and defiant laughter. It's about turning the monstrous into the magnificent, the haunted into the hunters.
In the end, perhaps we're all just spirits seeking connection, dancing in the graveyards of expectations, and leaving a trail of stardust in our wake. And if there be conkers, all for the better!
“Under the grass, the dust, the damp, and dew,
Lie things that never quite go away,
Traces of the lives we’ve led,
Shadows long after the sun has set.”
Mark Doty, "Elegy"
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