Horror, Erotica, and Community
We're all in this together, no for real
By far my best work of fiction thus far is a still-unfolding collection of erotic horror stories, which is just my luck, because neither genre is widely respected. I’ve been okay with this in the way we tell ourselves we’re okay with anything we feel powerless to change, but after another one of those mornings during which deep-seated psychological issues are painfully confronted (no need to go into detail here) I am not okay with it. We’re a violent society that dismisses horror and a porn-saturated society that looks on erotica with disdain. Both of these genres are body-centric, and I now know too well that American norms begin with fear of the body — not just the disabled body, but the body itself.
To a point, I understand it: we’ve all (…I hope) been overcome by physical impulses whose promises of pleasure were so far beyond imagining that their satisfaction felt more important than anything. Your body doesn’t care about your ambitions, your reputation, your to-do list, or your legacy. Your body wants nourishment, and once that taken care of, it wants any number of wild and unpredictable things, some of which might even go against your political convictions. (Your body really doesn’t care about your political convictions.)
Horror advertises itself as an annihilation of the body, but that’s deceptive: what better way to celebrate these miraculous forms we’re in than to see it from the inside, all the organs and viscera we maybe don’t want to think about but truly couldn’t live without? There’s no way, unfortunately, to see any of this up close without violence, and so the scenarios in which all that is hidden is suddenly right in front of our faces (possibly all over our faces and the camera lens) necessitates violence, generally. Erotica, by contrast, advertises itself as a celebration of the body, but sometimes that’s deceptive: no realistic sex scene is going to remain eloquent the whole damn time; if it feels truly real, you might cringe alongside more desirable feelings. Your brain’s reward/pleasure centers do not care how smart you are. And if your body’s vocalized responses to those activations cause you to blurt out something theatrical or downright ridiculous, well, again, your body doesn’t care. Horror and erotica both are founded on a sudden loss of control. And we all know how most Americans feel about the very idea of a loss of control.
Guess what kind of body symbolizes loss of control to most people? Now we’re back on theme. Horror is gradually being embraced as a means to comment on various aspects of marginalization and perceived monstrosity, but Disability has not been enfolded into this commentary as of yet. It’s too close. A lot of people associate disability with deformity or defect, and thus, we’re the real monsters, lurking among you, no need to draw attention to that fact. If disability is acquired, rather than congenital like mine, then it’s generally seen as the unfortunate fate of the hapless best friend or sidekick that barely survives at the end of the horror movie. You can’t comment on marginalization-as-symbolic-monstrosity if the dominant culture has already declared you a literal horror. And unlike the rightly-celebrated marginalized groups that are getting long-overdue glances from certain corners of Hollywood, there’s no Disability Culture to invite people into, no window into something we all know that you wouldn’t know. It either sucks a lot more than you think or a lot less than you think. That’s basically the beginning and the end of it.
Octavia Butler’s beyond-brilliant short story Speech Sounds is the only literary exploration I’ve seen of a society in which everyone is disabled. And it’s a short story, because, by her own admission, she couldn’t see any way to expand it into a novel. I read it and was immediately convinced it would have been a paradigm-shifting novel whose further explorations into the already tremendously compelling characters could have, I don’t know, saved me a lot of work, which of course is not to say that Octavia Butler owes me anything. (Few people have done more to alter the literary landscape and generations of marginalized authors’ conceptions of what’s possible than she has.) The story is perfect, every phrase and image perfect. Which is an interesting way to conceptualize a post-apocolyptic society that will never see “perfect” again.
I’ve got a nascent idea rattling around in my head for a horror story in which the disabled villain has a dark superpower that can render other people disabled at will. The transformation is painless, but permanent. Edit: Maybe I need to rethink that painlessness thing, as I do tend not to go as far as I need to go in my first drafts of horror writing. Maybe pain is part of the point. Plot is not my strong suit, so that’s all I’ve got so far. (Add a few drops of erotica into that one and I’ll have the Big Four + Bookstagram chompin’ at the bit.) In the past five or six years, I’ve spent a lot of time raging Hulk-style in my apartment about how the American reading public is no longer encouraged to perceive literature as a means to challenge their comfortable ideas. I think I’ve heard more people shout, “I love BOOKS!” in the past five years than ever before, but I can’t remember the last time I heard somebody say that they love reading. Books have become these comforting objects that we’re expected to keep around, and surely they were always that to some extent, but I’ve finally grown sick of the excuses I’m hearing about why we reject difficult art as a society. I’m not a “suck it up” sort of person, but these are facts: everyone is traumatized, the pandemic has affected all of us, and the more we all learn about history the less anyone is sure what to do about it. What does any of this have to do with art that refuses to challenge?
I grew up with a strong sense of community, running around my parents’ coffeehouse in New Mexico which, across from the University and next store to the lesbian bookstore, was a budding artist’s paradise. I often sat with customers and engaged in intellectual conversations with them about what we liked to read, and I spent hours at that lesbian bookstore, which had a robust children’s section. (I also harbored a secret pride that the owners, who had a reputation for distrusting men, roundly adored my father.) Everybody knew everybody at EJ’s, and they soon would, if they didn’t. Yes, a little like the bar Cheers, except exclusively non-alcoholic: across the street was a church where AA meetings took place, and EJ’s was — in addition to being a listening venue for musicians, a poetry venue every Wednesday night, a badass bakery and later a badass restaurant, and the first coffee house in the state of New Mexico — also a sanctuary for newly-sober people looking to connect with others. Oh, it was also where chess champions practiced: the tabletops were black-and-white chessboard-patterned, and some diligent men I remember with startling clarity made great use of this.
For challenging art, we need community, and it’s been deeply depressing for me to realize how many people grew up without it. A lot of people my age and younger have wild-to-me notions of how terrifying and judgemental people are, because they were formed by closed off suburban towns with senseless priorities. I suppose it’s no wonder that people refuse to crack their hearts into necessary pieces on purpose if they’ll have no one to talk about their feelings with, but to me, that’s a downright sci-fi notion: no one to talk to about any of it? There were challenges in my childhood to be sure, but I am fathomlessly grateful that part of what formed me was that I could go up to a stranger’s table, introduce myself, announce that my parents own this place, and become part of the family breakfast, whether or not I ever saw them again. Though of course, I usually did. Unless you were a non-local passing through town, no one went to EJ’s just once.
I managed to carve out these communities more or less everywhere I’ve lived after Albuquerque, until I got to the West Coast. People on the West Coast harbor fears and inhibitions that sound more irrational to me than almost anything I’ve ever heard: a lot of them seem to believe that we are living in a horror movie, and that Showing Emotion will release its evils. Which, depending on your definition of evil, it well might. It just so happens that my personal definition of the most fearful conceivable reality involves lack of affect, pretense of chill, non-admission of anger, and denial of lust.
For others — well, deep sigh, for people around here — evil is the rejection of chill, an undeniable show of rage, shrieking in delight, and communicating directly about feelings that might be “unacceptable.” By this definition, I’m already the villain. I have no actual desire to render anyone disabled on purpose, but I should have enough material by now to develop that horror story. I’m not planning on it being applicable to my erotic horror collection, but then, what has gone as planned in 2022
