As you have likely already heard through our website or other blog posts, the 2025 theme for JCLS’s summer reading is Embrace the Wild.
This might mean embracing nature and wilderness, but it also means wildly embracing your curiosities, hobbies, and passions. As such, one of the ways that staff have been encouraged to get involved with summer reading is by making booklists about whatever hobbies, knowledge, or topics they are wild about. And while staff were excited about many topics — from mermaids to interior design — multiple staff were excited about the same topic: queer horror.
In light of Pride month wrapping up, I wanted to explore what draws readers, and particularly LGBTQIA+ readers, to the genre of queer horror.
Explicitly queer horror books (and movies, TV shows, and other forms of media) have been popular in recent years, but representation, themes, and subplots have been present in horror for far longer. Some of the first instances of LGBTQIA+ themes in horror are frequently attributed to 19th century gothic horror, with titles like the 1872 vampire novella Camilla or Oscar Wilde’s 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray being common examples. But even before these famous classics, there was the 1764 title The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, often considered the first ever gothic novel, which many scholars have pointed to for early examples of queer aesthetics and subliminal messaging (check out this article from the Gay and Lesbian Review for more on the history of vampires as gay culture).
Since societal norms at the time rarely allowed for more explicitly queer characters, romance, and happy endings; queerness was often portrayed through depictions of monsters and the paranormal.
So, if queerness is equated with monsters, why would LGBTQIA+ readers seek these stories out rather than be offended or outraged? Part of it is because they can identify with being misunderstood, considered evil, or living in fear of discovery. Historically, and in many contemporary cases, queer communities can live in fear of being outed, while others are out but otherized by their peers. Throughout many periods in history, gay and trans folks have been considered evil or satanic and been feared by the public. And while some monsters and villains throughout horror are malicious, many are ostracized just for being different, which many queer folks know all too well (if you’re curious to read more about how horror can mirror experiences of queer folks, check out this Crime Reads article).
In more recent years, queer folks have taken the relative normalization of queerness as an opportunity to move LGBTQIA+ stories out of the shadows and into the limelight of horror. One way this shows up is through reimagined, explicitly queer villains and monsters like that of Cassandra Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy. In this novella, a man-eating mermaid and Frankenstein-like plague doctor travel through broken lands, reckoning with their destruction along the way. Front and center queerness in horror shows up in very different ways as well, including stories that make homophobia or transphobia the villain itself. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt takes this path, creating a tale where the surface level antagonist, zombies, takes a backseat to the much more complex villain that is transphobia and its champions. Whether authors choose to explore queerness through parallels with vilified characters or through overcoming obstacles common in queer communities, these stories allow LGBTQIA+ readers to see themselves and find understanding, survival, and hope.
Queer authors and readers have been finding themselves in horror, from classic monsters to body horror and more, for centuries, regardless of whether they were able to openly discuss these themes or not. And while gay and trans plots and characters are more commonly found at center stage today, there is value in reading queer horror throughout generations, to not lose sight of where we came from. If you’d like to celebrate the end of pride month by reading more queer horror, from classics to modern bestsellers, check out something from this list.