They’ve adapted they’ve learned to conceal themselves. After all, they live in a world that hates them. An excerpt from Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir, In the Dream House. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually-the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other-I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machados engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. In the Dream House filters a bad lesbian relationship through a series of tropes, stretching the capacities of memoir in the process. “I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them.
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