Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater

by Jordan Schildcrout

The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires.  Murder Most Queer  examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy.


Murder Most Queer  works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual and gender nonconformity as dangerous and destructive and to show how theater artists—and for the most part LGBT theater artists—have rewritten and radically altered the significance of the homicidal homosexual. Jordan Schildcrout argues that these figures, far from being simple reiterations of a homophobic archetype, are complex and challenging characters who enact trenchant fantasies of empowerment, replacing the shame and stigma of the abject with the defiance and freedom of the outlaw, giving voice to rage and resistance.  These bold characters also probe the darker anxieties and fears that can affect queer lives and relationships.  Instead of sentencing them to the prison of negative representations, this book analyzes the meanings in their acts of murder, confronting the real fears and desires condensed in those dramatic acts.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer

268 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 2014

Reviews

[vileidol · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful look at forms of reclaimation and navigating the space between acceptance and sanitisation using the image of the carnal, the visceral, and the bloodied. Here's to queer monstrosity!

[Em Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful literary criticism! I love all the different interpretations Schildcrout offers for depictions of homocidal homosexuals (as he calls them) that aren’t necessarily rooted in reinforcing a negative stereotype - from personification of fear of homophobia and the way it delegitimizes queers to an embodiment of queer rage that serves to control the way homophobia demonizes then. It’s kind of nice reading a book that stumps for dark/uncomfortable art that’s not necessarily didactic nor the method in which “good representation” is administered to the public.

[H. Givens · Rating 4 out of 5]

I skipped the chapter about serial killers because the details were way too much for me, so I can't speak to that one, but as a whole the book was really interesting, insightful, and well-researched.