I moved to Boston in my early twenties, having known I was gay for some years but not yet having dared to enter a bar or club, to be visible. I was lucky, during this time, to meet L—a gentle, rootless boy who would become a close companion. It was L who convinced me to attend my first public event in Boston’s queer community. Itwas an evening called Fascination, a monthly gathering for the kink, fetish, and leather communities. At the time, Fascination was held at a dive bar just south of the Boston Common, a few hundred feet from the place where Edgar Allan Poe was born.
I attended Fascination for the first time on the sort of dour, Bostonian evening that populates so much of Poe’s work—it was late into autumn, the leaves well past their peak and now thoroughly glutted into the drainpipes and sewer grates. I got off the T and hurried across the Common alone; L would be waiting for me outside the bar. I was already a bit drunk and more than a bit cold, but I still stopped, after exiting the Common, to study the statue that stood at the center of a red-bricked square. It was Poe, patina-ed green and striding purposefully, suitcase in hand. A raven clamored out of the suitcase, a few wingbeats ahead of its author. The wind was too brisk for me to linger, but when I started walking again I lengthened my strides, ginning myself up to the task of entering that bar with the conviction I saw in the statue’s features. A small homage from an aspiring horror writer to a master of the craft.
© The cover of More Than Love: Edgar Allan Poe
I would pass Poe’s statue on the way to Fascination once a month for the next few years. Most weeks, I thought nothing of it, being preoccupied with thoughts of L and the other friends I’d made through those years. But one week early in the summer of 2016, I stopped to face the statue. I stopped that evening because I was afraid to keep walking, afraid to enter the bar.
The night before, the queer community had endured a shattering horror: a man had walked into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, and murdered forty-nine people inside. It was—until the following year—the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The killer had violated the holiest of queer spaces: the local club, the drag queens’ stage, the dance floor. In doing so, he’d sent a message to every gay person hurt by the atrocity: You are not safe, and you should be afraid.
As I stood in front of Poe, I considered whether or not I should keep walking, whether or not it would be safer to just stay home tonight. I was furious, but terrified—fixed by a paralysis that was, I imagine, exactly what the killer had hoped I would feel.
***
I first met Poe many years before this night, in the form of Roger Corman’s 1960 film “House of Usher.” Isaw this adaptation when I was eleven, courtesy of my mother’s obsession with silver screen scares. Vincent Price’s performance is what my mother would describe as “good, creepy fun”—as Roderick Usher, Price stalks across the set in garish Victorian garb, simultaneously sinister and effete, brooding and hysterical.
What my mother couldn’t have anticipated was that Usher spoke to my still-closeted but burgeoning queer sensibilities with an alarming intimacy. Corman situates Usher as a foil to the film’s virile protagonist, Philip Winthrop. Mark Damon plays Winthrop as a square-jawed, assertive Bostonian who charges into the Gothic dereliction of the Ushers’ lives to rescue his betrothed—Roderick’s sister, Madeline.In his first meeting with Usher, Winthrop strides to the center of the room, hands clenched to fists; he is heterosexual masculinity embodied, so convinced of the purity and necessity of his love for Madeline, so certain that he must overcome anything that stands between him and his desire. Usher, by contrast, skirts the room’s edges,waving his long, delicate hands when Winthrop speaks too loudly, confining himself to a chair against the wall while Winthrop remains fixed at the center of the frame. Even before I understood Usher’s motives, I identified with hisreactions. This was also how I responded when faced with the (often-misplaced) confidence of the other boys my age. Price’s wincing, hostile reluctance externalized what I felt so acutely and so often in the presence of my peers.
My attachment to Usher only intensified as this interaction went on. Upon being asked by Winthrop whether it was really “so incredible” that he should want to marry Madeline, Usher drily replies: “If you only knew how incredible. And I suppose this—this vision—includes children?” (00:09:30). In my eleven years raised by a Fox News-watching, church-attending family, this was the first time I’d ever heard someone seemingly reject the imperative of heterosexuality, the necessity of marriage and the nuclear family. And not only did he reject it, but he did so with such venom and disdain! I sat up a little straighter, watched more closely. At this point in my young life, I didn’t fully understand why I was filled with a nebulous sense of dread at the idea of a wife and children being a mandatory aspect of my future; all I knew was that Roderick Usher was the only lifeline that had been thrown my way as I floundered, silently, in the tide of heteronormativity.
I wouldn’t know until a few years later that Corman’s adaptation hadn’t captured the totality and complexity of Usher’s queerness. In high school, I finally read “The Fall of the House of Usher”. I was surprised to find that the unnamed narrator of Poe’s story doesn’t share any of Winthrop’s motivations in coming to the estate. He isn’t betrothed to Madeline; in fact, he isn’t even aware of Madeline’s existence until after he enters the house. It is, instead, his own relationship with Roderick—an intense and inscrutable friendship—that draws him into the Ushers’ doomed presence.
Early in his account of Usher, the narrator notes that, in their youth, they had been “boon companions” and “intimate associates” (Poe 196). These descriptions did not, at first, strike me as anything out of the ordinary until I reached the passage where the narrator first describes his memory of Usher. He says:
“…the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve…a finely moulded chin speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity…” (198)
The abundant detail of this description serves, in part, to contrast some of the changes the narrator notes in Usher’s physicality; to create parallels between Usher’s bodily transformation and the ever-deteriorating state of the house.But the attentiveness of the narrator’s recollection also reminded me, uncomfortably, of the way I looked at my close male friends. Though the description veers toward occasional sensuality, it’s not a wholly flattering portrait. It’s a catalogue borne of careful observation and comparison, of reflection on how Usher’s physicality seems to reflect the narrator’s understanding of his personality. It is a surprisingly intimate inventory of detail for one man to make of another man’s body.
The intimacy that the narrator builds with Usher over the course of the story is not physical. It can’t be, because Usher is retreating from embodiment, plagued as he is by a “morbid acuteness of the senses” (198) that forces him away from sound, light, and taste alike. The narrator approaches Usher, instead, through creative media. They spend “many solemn hours” (200) alone together, playing the guitar, painting, and reciting poetry. In the tale’s climactic moments, as Usher descends into irrationality, the narrator comforts his companion by reading to him from the fictional “‘Mad Trist’ of Sir Launcelot Canning”—a text that the narrator jokingly calls a “favorite” of Usher’s because its “unimaginative prolixity” doesn’t align with their shared literary taste (205).
This relationship built on shared artistic pursuits also felt, to my high-school-aged self, distressingly familiar. Wasn’t this how I interacted with my closest male friend? The one whose features I studied with stolen glances, and whose every accidental touch I committed to memory? Any deliberate expression of physical intimacy between us was unimaginable. Instead, we memorized the same Romantic poetry and listened to the same string quartets; we took all of the same classes, watched the same silent films. We fashioned a relationship out of shared references and compatible sensibilities, creating a world entirely separate from the mundane, concrete reality of our peers. For me, for many years, this was substituted for anything approaching the romantic; impossible queer longing sublimated into safe, sexless intellectual intimacy.
That first time I read the ending of “Usher,”it felt like a warning. Roderick is destroyed by the murderous return of his ugliest secret: Madeline breaks free of her living burial and kills her brother, leaving him “a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (207). This phrase haunted me. How long had Usher anticipated his own demise? Was it when he sealed his own sister’s tomb that he knew his familial curse would end him? Maybe when he invited the narrator to the house? Or was it earlier still, before the events of the story even began: did he first foresee his destruction when he realized he would have to keep his darkness hidden, entombed? I identified all too well with the prospect of holding a secret that felt impossible to articulate to anyone other than that closest companion but knowing, simultaneously, that the act of articulation would also be one of self-annihilation. Perhaps not an annihilation as literal and dramatic as Usher’s, but still a destruction of the sexless, anodyne public self I had so carefully crafted;a destruction that would denature the tenderness I shared with my close male friends.
The narrator of Poe’s story avoids this end. By fleeing the one space in which he could create his “closer and still closer intimacy” (200) with Roderick, the narrator is able to observe its demise: a fissure splits the house from its roof to its foundations. The House of Usher isn’t just destroyed, though; it is erased completely, swallowed by a “deep and dank tarn” (207). At fifteen years old, terrified by a secret that I was certain would ruin me, this seemed like the only appropriate conclusion. Every space that could nurture queerness was slated for oblivion. Every deviation from the heteronorm erased.
Years later, as I faced Poe’s statue in fear and in grief, that dank tarn felt closer than ever.
© Ian Muneshwar
***
11/20/22: As I write this, I’m learning that last night a gunman walked into Club Q, a gay club in Colorado Springs, and opened fire. Five people are dead. Many others are hospitalized in critical condition.
***
The night after Pulse, I did go to the club. I could tell that Fascination was a different place even before I entered. There was a line of men at the front door, showing IDs and paying the cover. The normally raucous group was so hushed I could hear traffic moving at the far end of the block.
The event was held in the bar’s basement, a windowless place with concrete floors and an understocked bar. The single restroom, burrowed into the back wall, had two urinals without a divider and a single stall that didn’t lock. Someone had raised a portable screen alongside the bar. Vintage porn played from a projector: a man laid out on a locker room bench, his feet in white tube socks hooked over his coach’s shoulders.
We undressed silently, slipping out of overcoats and unlacing sneakers, leaning back against the walls so we could take our jeans off, unburden ourselves of respectability. We wore harnesses beneath our button-downs, jockstraps and cock rings beneath the rest. We pulled out pumps and leather jackets, neoprene pup masks, lace and fishnets and unlit cigars. There was nowhere to put the clothes we’d shed, so we bunched them into corners and heaped them under stacked chairs. We never worried that anything would be stolen.
That night, I studied the basement with shameful attention: I made a list of possible exits; I inventoried potential hiding places; I imagined different scenarios for survival if a man with a gun appeared in one of the doorways. I loathed myself for this because it felt like submission. I was living by the Pulse shooter’s rules, allowing him to shift the gay bar’s center of focus away from joy, desire, and community, and toward the all-consuming locus of fear. I was Roderick all over again, relentlessly anticipating terror.
Eventually, though, the music came on and cocktails were poured. Eventually, we began to dance and to flirt and a cute boy coaxed my eyes away from the two unprotected exits and toward the eagerness of his smile, the warmth and prick of his beard. Eventually, it was two in the morning and the lights came on.
As the evening ended I ran into Fascination’s organizer on the street. I thanked him for another invigorating gathering and, unable or perhaps unwilling to avoid the obvious, I thanked him for not cancelling Fascination tonight, of all nights.
“How could I?” he said to me. “We need this now more than ever before.”
***
11/21/22: It’s reported that the Club Q shooter was stopped by two of the patrons, one of whom bludgeoned the shooter with their own gun (Phillips).
***
When, as a teenager, I first read “The Masque of the Red Death,” I couldn’t have known how Prince Prospero’s “gay and magnificent revel” (Poe 211) would one day mirror my community’s experiences of queer nightlife. Then, my teachers interpreted the short story as a moralizing tale about hedonism and excess, an indictment of Prospero’s attempt to evade his duties to his dying kingdom.Entrenched as I was in the internalized heterosexism of the closet, I didn’t questionthe notion that there must be some inherent link between immorality and the decadence of Prospero’s masquerade. I never asked whether or not there was anything Prospero could do to aid his ailing citizens.I never considered that the masquerade itself might represent the fulfillment of such an obligation. My judgment of the Prince was also informed by how discomfiting I found the descriptions of the ball: I didn’t need to be out of the closet and in a kink community to imagine what was meant by the masquerade being equipped with “all the appliances of pleasure” (210).
I would encounter “Masque” again later, a few years after Pulse. This second reading was a very different experience from the first. It shocked me how personal this story now felt, and how my identification had shifted away from the omniscient first-person narrator’s judgement of Prospero, and toward the masque’s attendees themselves.
The Prince’s ball is queer in many senses of the word. Queer, certainly, in the sense that it is aesthetically strange, with its tolling clock and color-coordinated chambers that seem to serve no purpose other than to give the guests an atmosphere of otherworldliness. The narrator never explicitly states that Prospero or the attendees are themselves queer. In fact, the narration is so preoccupied with relating the physical space of the masquerade that it is noticeably—and, perhaps, tellingly—absent any descriptions of what happens within these rooms. We know that the ball “was a voluptuous scene” (210) and Prospero’s plans for it were “bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre” (211). “Voluptuous” connotes sensuality, carnality, and pleasure, but what does it mean for that description to be tempered by the notion of barbarism? Would the narrator perceive queer sensuality as barbaric? This absence in the story’s otherwise abundant descriptions creates a space for the queer imagination to intervene.
In revisiting these details of the masquerade, the aspect of its queerness that I most identified with, and that most clearly recalled my evenings at Fascination, actually had little to do with these intimations of gay sex. I was reminded of bell hooks’ articulation of the “essence” of queer selfhood:
“queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent, create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” (hooks, 1:27:41-1:28:00)
The masquerade is just this: an audacious act of invention that aims to build a space in which the remaining members of a set-upon population can survive and, in their survival, find pleasure. Prospero’s aims are queer in the sense that they are at odds with heteronormative sensibility. Is it really “barbaric” for the rooms of his cloistered palace to be filled with dancing, music, and fucking? For the ball to “beat feverishly with the heart of life” (212) even while there is so much death and suffering beyond its walls? To the queer eye, this isn’t barbarism but necessity; it is the preservation of self and the creation of culture in the face of obliteration.
Of course, Prospero and his revelers can’t evade destruction. Many queer readers will see a double image when the stranger enters the ball, “shrouded from head to toe in the habiliments of the grave” (213). First, it is nearly impossible to read of the Red Death and not immediately have AIDS called to mind. Much has been made of the connection between epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s and Poe’s fictional disease defined by “redness and the horror of blood” (Poe 210, Jones 171-3).
But for the modern queer reader, there is a second horror transposed over the first: the figure of an intruder breaking into our most intimate, celebratory space, covered in blood. During the Pulse massacre, the victims lost so much blood that the Orlando Regional Medical Center depleted its supply entirely, and needed to send for morefrom local hospitals. A surgical resident at ORMC wore sneakers stained with the victims’ blood every day he worked until the last living victim was discharged. “I will keep them in my office,” he said of the sneakers. “I want to see them in front of me every time I go to work.”
***
12/16/22: Twenty-five people were injured in the Colorado Springs shooting, nineteen by gunfire. Five are dead: Daniel Davis Aston, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh, Derrick Rump, Raymond Green Vance. Vance was at the club celebrating his girlfriend’s birthday; it was his girlfriend’s father who attacked the shooter and beat the shooter with the shooter’s own gun (Phillips). Two others assisted him: a man who later pulled the gun away, and a transwoman who stomped on the shooter with her heels (“Club Q mass shooting”).
***
Perhaps the most humanizing moment for Prospero—and the moment in which my identification shifts wholly away from the narrator and toward the revelers—comes in the story’s final moments. Upon seeing the “spectral image” (Poe 213) of the Red Death enter, the Prince’s emotions vacillate: he is, at first, consumed by anger that someone would break into his space and dress in a mockery of the people dying outside; then, in fear, he runs from the intruder before being pushed by his courage and outrage to confront the Red Death with a dagger. The narrator assesses Prospero’s impulse to flee as “momentary cowardice,” but I can’t imagine a more sane and relatable reaction. Running from the specter of death is, I know, what I would do in this situation; it was, for so long, the first recourse suggested by the Department of Homeland Security in the event of an active shooter (“Active Shooter”); it was what so many of the patrons of Pulse and Club Q did to try to save their own lives.
In the case of the Colorado Springs shooting, though, not everyone sought shelter. Like Prospero and the revelers, several patrons of Club Q attacked the shooter. Richard Fierro, the combat veteran who tackled the shooter, said that he doesn’t remember how he overcame his fear in that moment. He didn’t even remember what, exactly was happening when he made the decision to attack: “Was he shooting at the time?” Fierro wondered in an interview. “Was he about to shoot?...I don’t know. I just knew I had to take him down” (Phillips). The narrator of “Masque” says that the revelers “threw themselves” at the figure of the Red Death with “the wild courage of despair” (213). It is difficult to imagine the quality ofcourage that could motivate someone to run toward the bullets discharging from a rifle. To imagine the despair that would obliterate every memory of the moments that were nearly Fierro’s last. The type of hopelessness that, as Poe’s narrator suggests, creates this “wild courage” seems like it should belong solely to battlefields and warzones. Now, it also belongs to the gay bar.
I initially read the phrase “the wild courage of despair” as meaning that the revelers found courage in their despair. This is a tempting interpretation; I would like to subscribe to the notion that there’s strength to be found even in our bleakest emotional states. There are, though, other possible valences of meaning here. Early in the story, the narrator criticizes Prospero and his followers, saying that they felt it was “folly to grieve, or to think” (210) while within the walls of the Prince’s abbey. If I am being honest with myself, this numbness to the horrors of the outside world is what I wanted to feel when I attended Fascination the night after Pulse. Yes, I wanted to be with my community; and yes, I wanted to prove to the shooter that our community could survive even this. But I also wanted to drink and dance, to forget, however briefly, that we just endured a wound that might never truly heal. I hoped that I could compartmentalize my grief, only if for a night.
Perhaps, in the short story’s final moments, the revelers start thinking and grieving. The phrase “the wild courage of despair” doesn’t only suggest that they find courage in their despair, but also that they have the courage to finally feel their despair. Maybe it isn’t courage but grief, loss, and hopelessness that finally motivate the revelers to fling themselves at the Red Death in an attempt to protect the only space in which they might survive. I know that it must take a truly wild courage to give yourself to that kind of despair because all these years later, when I go to the gay bar, I’m still trying to stop myself from marking the exits, scanning the crowd, anticipating ruin.
Maybe I shouldn’t stop myself anymore.
***
I went to Fascination last night for the first time in some years. It’s now held at a different club, but I still passed Poe’s statue on my way. I didn’t stop because I was already thinking about Pulse and the Red Death, about five dead family in Colorado Springs.
In the wake of this most recent shooting, Fascination’s organizers changed their policies: entry into the space required a pat down and a bag check. When I stepped into the club and began to undress, I didn’t chastise myself for seeking every exit. When I scanned the crowd, I didn’t dismiss my anxiety as ridiculous or unnecessary. I saw so many others watching the dance floor with nervous eyes, breaking away from their conversations every time the front door opened and a stranger entered. I saw friend groups go out of their way to approach the lone figure standing the corner, to enfold them into conversation, into revelry.
What is the function of despair? For me, right now, it is this: Despair demands constant anxious attention. It does not admit space for unthinking hope. At the same time, though, it will not let you turn face away or slide toward numbness and apathy. Despair is an unresolved state. Working toward its resolution might push us toward hopeless, clear-eyed vigilance, or it might even produce that wild courage. I believe we need our despair more now than we ever have before.
Editor: Joyce Chng
Copy Editors: The Copyediting Department