Joe Vallese > Quotes

“It also isn’t lost on me that these films’ emphases on lesbianism reinforce the fact that queerness in mainstream horror is permissible as long as it’s determined by and filtered through the male gaze.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“It is, understandably, considered gauche to describe bisexuality as transitory, almost as gauche as the word “bisexual” itself. Perhaps it would be better to think of bisexuality as queerly universal—stem cells potent with potential. As long as compulsive heteronormativity exists, queer people will pass through bisexuality at some point, however briefly. Some tear through it on a speedboat, heading for a more monosexual harbor, others circle, content, drinking aperitifs in the sun.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“Prohibition feeds desire”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“How silly it looks to hide in plain sight.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“Sontag writes, 'The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made up of three million feathers.' Camp is also a preteen getting a hot curling iron jabbed into her vagina.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“She chews the scenery so thoroughly that her line deliveries come with splinters.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“It was a private apocalypse, and yet it was unmentionable, and I was expected back at the office. The way the world isn’t ready to hear the terrible weirdness of our catastrophes is part of the trauma.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“Transness is not a masking but rather an unmasking, a stripping of a performance expected of us by way of biological essentialism. For some trans people, this process of unmasking may require physical changes. Some may identify with this notion of the death of a past self. For others these changes are not necessary. They may feel as if they were never masked at all or that no physical representation accurately approximates their truth. Unmasking can be a delicate process as a nonbinary person because of its diversity of expression. Androgyny, for example (and not in any way synonymous with nonbinary), doesn’t look a certain way, though gender is ingrained in society such that liberal readings are applied to everyone, sprinkling gender on everything from haircuts to careers to alcoholic beverages. In this way, presentation, when considered for the purposes of legibility, feels futile. I can wear oversize button-down shirts that drape on a bound chest, slouch my shoulders and trim my hair short to avoid being read as “cishet woman” at the very least. But I am more fluid, more expansive than an identity built off of what I am not.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“...I was a Christian, a model student, a Good Girl. I couldn't be a monster. But something in me was disgusting, and I begged God to take it from me.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“Trans people are reduced to our ability to fit some imagined but collectively reinforced standards of gender. The extent to which we meet these standards, however, does nothing to guarantee our safety, even more so for trans people of color as these standards are carved out of whiteness. Those who “pass” are either treated as the token of desirable (read: palatable) transness or accused of betrayal when they don’t introduce themselves with a declaration of their transness; those who do not “pass” are attacked for the transgression of some imagined gender code of conduct; and those whose transness is not adequately visually flagged are delegitimized, deemed “not trans enough.” Dr. Génessier serves as the police of this imagined gender code of conduct in Eyes Without a Face, the paternalistic enforcer of a single merit of belonging.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

“As long as I am subjected to this unconsented reading of my body, I will desire nothing more than facelessness. I think of Christiane, whose father insists she wears the mask around the house so she gets used to it rather than taking it upon himself to accept and celebrate her face as is. It is violent to ask trans people to mask ourselves so it is easier for others to “understand” us, and this is not understanding at all. An effort to understand trans people looks like giving us space to tell our own stories to outnumber the stories that highlight trans tragedy and monstrosity, so that we may see many versions of ourselves reflected in the world. The power in a reflection is not in the simple fact of seeing a physical replication of ourselves but of knowing that there is more of us beyond that. That we are both here and there, expanding past the signifiers of our bodies.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror