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They are half-human horrors, strange and scary aliens, the seemingly normal but deadly danger that lurks around the corner: Hollywood monsters or homosexuals? Horror fiction has always portrayed society's greatest fears as monstrous incarnations of "the other," so it is no surprise that there has always been-- from Frankenstein to Interview with the Vampire-- a clear homoerotic subtext in horror films. Harry M. Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (University of Manchester Press [distributed By St. Martin's], paper, 327 pages, $18.95) details how changes in the horror film have mirrored changes in attitudes toward homosexuality in our society.

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I> Benshoff shows how the literary tradition of "the Gothic" was a response to repressed eroticism, and how the "queer" monster was invented. But his main concerns are Hollywood and British horror movies. As he goes through the history of horror films, Benshoff charts how horror films have mirrored changes in popular thought. Sometimes monsters-- who, the author argues are always manifestations of some current dread-- are scary and dangerous, but often they are sympathetic. The I Was a Teenage... films-- including the fabulous How to Make a Monster-- were reflections of the promise and threat that teens in the 1950s presented to society. The homoeroticism that is so clear in these movies-- particularly How to Make a Monster-- is symptomatic of the complicated ways that mainstream society viewed homosexuality.

The arguments in Monsters in the Closet are complex and, at times, contradictory. But this is to be expected. Movies-- like any other art-- are not simple reflections of how people or audiences think, and the dominant culture's ambivalence towards homosexuals gives rise to a huge amount of complicated responses.

Like our viewing of horror films-- we love being frightened and are scared of being too frightened-- homosexuality has always engendered conflicted feelings. By discussing hundreds of classic (and not so classic) horror movies, Benshoff provides new insights not only into horror and science-fiction films, but into how popular culture presents ideas about homosexuality to a broad audience.

At the beginning?

Isabella Stewart Gardner has been described variously as a Brahmin eccentric, a patron of the arts, a footnote to Henry James's career, and the woman who founded a small, but elegant museum in Boston. All this is true, but Gardner has never been given her due in the broader social and cultural history of the US. Douglas Shand-Tucci, in his new biography, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Harper Collins, cloth, 384 pages, $27.95), gives readers a new portrait of Gardner that vibrantly brings her to life.

There have been other biographies of Gardner, but Shand-Tucci's is distinctive because he positions her as the center of a late 19th-century cultural world that was helping hatch a gay male sensibility. Up until now, no other writer on Gardner has discussed her relationships to gay artists and thinkers or showed how those figures influenced-- as a group-- the art and writing that profoundly influenced our culture today.

In his first chapters, Shand-Tucci deals with the "charge" that Gardner was a "fag hag." While dismissing the term as offensive, he shows how her gay friendships not only made her more tolerant of other social outcasts-- such as African-Americans and Jewish people-- but placed her on the cutting edge of cultural change and new artistic movements.

While The Art of Scandal is a fine portrait of a woman and her times, it is also a generous and intelligent history of how gay culture shaped the way we look at art and literature today.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com