It’s important to check in on your favorite couple every now and then. Invite them out for lunch; ask them how they’re doing; find out which one is growing their own tomatoes now. That sort of thing. But I’m not talking about Katie and Justin down the street. I’m talking about Pennywise the Clown and the Babadook. To the best of my knowledge, these two are together, and no one has checked in on them! Are they happy? Did they get married yet? Did their relationship crumble after they had a threesome with the Lipstick-Face Demon from Insidious? If we’ve allowed this relationship to quietly fail because we’ve never checked in on them, then we’ve failed as a society.
Anyway, there was something I was supposed to be doing today. Something that got me thinking about the Babadook and Pennywise. Ah, right! I was going to rank sci-fi monsters by how queer they are.
This dreadlocked alien is only happy when it’s engaging in violence or terrorizing someone weaker than him. This sounds like toxic hetero masculinity at its finest. On the other hand, he looks like he’s never skipped a gym day in his life, which is very Basic Gay. However, I’m going to rank him in last place because he rarely works in a team; if he were queer, he would have found a chosen family by now.
These deadly extraterrestrial monsters only go where people make the most noise, which is very Club Kid/queer raver/circuit gay. They also love to jump from great heights, splaying out their legs in jaw-dropping ways that make your legs hurt just from watching. This is otherwise known as a death drop! But sadly, the Death Angels have nothing else going for them. They all look the same and thus have no understanding of what being an outsider is like. Verdict: Not queer!
This one is tricky, because not all zombies are canonically horny. In some movies, they’re considered asexual, which places them on the queer spectrum; in others, however, they are absolute dogs. Plus, if a zombie were to have a sex drive, it would theoretically just retain the sex drive from its pre-zombie life. That means that, statistically, 20% of all zombies would be at least bisexual. Still, zombies don’t really have any personality traits other than being hungry all the time (for brains), which isn’t so much queer as it is boring.
Godzilla hasn’t always been queer, but in their most recent outing, The New Empire, they switched between blue and pink scales and energy beams. However, Godzilla has also been purple in the past. Blue, pink, purple … These are the colors of the bisexual flag! Thus, Godzilla is a bisexual icon.
Xenomorphs are largely genderless and misunderstood creatures who have been unfairly defined by their otherness and desire to harvest human flesh. That seems pretty queer to me, except for the part about harvesting humans to further their species. On the other hand, the first Alien movie could be read as the refusal of a human woman (Sigourney Weaver) to adhere to the traditional femininity that the Alien represents. Still, I’m going to rank xenomorphs as “very queer” because Sigourney Weaver seems very interested in Winona Ryder when she’s half xenomorph in Alien: Resurrection.
The Thing will mimic just about any living thing in order to fit into its environment. That’s queer! Every queer tries to pretend to be straight at one point or another. However, the Thing isn’t just a regular queer; it’s a theater queer! That’s the queerest type of queer! Miss Thing can act, mama, and it even does impersonations. You just know that The Thing starred in its high school’s production of Bye Bye Birdie.
Audrey finds herself in harmful relationships because she doesn’t feel worthy of love – a queer Greatest Hit – but Audrey II remains the true queer character of this film. A sexual demon with a man’s voice and a woman’s name? We have a queer winner.
