Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick talks about "" relations between men and how often they are eroticized, especially in the Gothic. Frankenstein seems to me an ideal case of what she describes, and the lonely creature especially, haunting "normal" society and hoping for a place within it, might remind us of the positions that gays and lesbians were always forced to assume until they defied society's attempts to force them into a closet.

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Henry James's "The Jolly Corner"

Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" (1908) tells the story of a man who returns from an ineffectual life in Europe to confront the ghost of the man he would have been had he stayed in America. The ghost has an eerie attraction for the hero, Spencer Brydon, and he wanders through the lonely house of his childhood in search of the seductive double.

When he finally confronts him, of course, it is almost more than he can bear: The object of his desire is rough looking, polluted somehow by the city, and disfigured. This subtle use of what Freud would call the "uncanny" is enough to mark Brydon with the knowledge of his own darker, less socially presentable side.

When Alice Staverton, his New York friend, tells him that she accepts this darker truth, he can only bury his face in her bosom in profound thanks and relief. This sense of relief after a hideous disclosure is so close to what gay men and lesbians anticipate before coming out that it might seem that James is speaking to us.

The details of James's biography, which suggests a deeply problematic sexual life centering on homosexual desire, support such a reading, as do the chords it strikes in those of us who have been there.

Conclusion

An important question to ask is this: Why do we read Gothic fictions? As violent and at times abusive as they are, what do we find in them to sustain us? To answer that question, we would have to turn to our own psychological makeups, as critics like Tania Modleski have done, and consider what it is that we process in these encounters with the grotesque.

As gay and lesbian readers, it seems to me, we process the horror at the situation society places us in and the demands to conform that we constantly face. Gothic reading is not just an escape; it reminds us of what the stakes really are. If our own sexuality is transgressive, Gothic allows us the chance to break with the norm in our imaginations, which is so important to do before we decide to defy convention in fact.

Gay and lesbian critics are drawn to Gothic for just this reason: Before they knew why, Gothic appealed to them. Now that they know, they can hardly give it up.

Since homosexuality was severely persecuted during the Romantic period, writers who treated the subject more or less positively were forced to encode it or leave it unpublished and were themselves frequently forced into exile.

Both male and female homosexuality or homosexual elements appear throughout the broad scope of ghost and horror fiction.

The monsters of horror films may frequently be read as mirrors of societal views of homosexuals as predatory, amoral, perverse, possessed of secret supernatural powers, and threatening to "normal life."

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

From its inception in the nineteenth century, the artistic vampire has been linked with homosexuality, a connection that has been explored in a number of films.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

Writer, director, and producer Clive Barker is best known for his horror fiction and movies, but is also a prolific painter and illustrator, as well as a developer of comic books and computer games.

In addition to being the muse and inspiration of other writers, American expatriate Natalie Barney, known as the Amazon, was a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist in her own right.

Extremely wealthy and connected to the aristocracy, British author and connoisseur William Beckford was ostracized by English society for the last sixty years of his life because of his homosexuality.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

Matthew Lewis's scandalous masterpiece, The Monk, is one of the great works in the gay and lesbian literary tradition.

Chuck Palahniuk is known for a series of popular and provocative novels; although he has acknowledged his homosexuality, he resists being labeled as a "gay author."

Throughout his life, Horace Walpole was devoted to other men, and his exploration of dysfunctional families in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother probably stems from his own experience with a destructive father.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.