GLR May-June 2026

ESSAY On the “Gays Who Kill” Subgenre M ATTHEW F RYE -C ASTILLO

O NE SATURDAY MORNING, walking around a vacant industrial area of Queens, I turned a corner to find two lines of graffiti in a lower-case black script against a pale-yel low wall: “be gay/do crime.” I grinned, took a photo, and kept moving. We’ve come a long way when LGBT people can joke about criminality. For much of the 20th century, to be accused of practicing the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks” was to be met with chemical castration (Alan Turing), professional disgrace (Newton Arvin), elec troshock therapy (John Cameron), or prison (Bayard Rustin). The homophile movement of the 1950s and ’60s insisted on re spectability and normality—we’re just like you, save for that one thing—to combat those narratives. Groups like the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine So ciety had made inroads toward gay equality so that others could have some fun with it. In John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972), Divine proclaims: “Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” In the early 1980s, the colloquialism “to slay” emerged from ballroom culture as a suggestion that the per or liar, and LGBT audiences have responded with recognition and joy. Some well-known examples include the teen romance Heartstopper , the ballroom saga Pose , the hockey romance Heated Rivalry , and the military coming-of-age series Boots . Within the “gays who kill” genre in the last decade, there has been a clear demand for depictions of gay criminality with more complexity and agency than Rope (1948) or Cruising (1980). Many of these recent tales move queer people from the object of destruction to its agent. It’s an unsettling reshuffling of power that can turn tragic, surprising, hilarious, cruel. The per mutations are limitless and entertaining, which may be why the genre has grown. In 2019 Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller launched BadGays , a history podcast covering the dark side of homosexuals from Alexander the Great to J. Edgar Hoover. (It became a bestselling book in 2022.) At the end of season two of the HBO series The White Lotus , Jennifer Coolidge pleads with an Italian boat captain who cannot understand English: Matthew Frye-Castillo, author of One Headlight: A Memoir (asMatt Caprioli), teaches LGBTQ + literature at Lehman College in NYC. former kill everything that was holding her back. In some gay subcultures, murder— grand, operatic, hopelessly camp—became a metaphor for a new world that would hold their shapes of being. In the past decade, authors and producers have shown a greater range of queer-cen tered stories that moved beyond the unidi mensional scripts of victim, sinner, criminal,

“Please—these gays, they’re trying to murder me!” Which launched a thousand internet memes, votive candles, and cut-off tanks depicting Coolidge attempting to escape a trio of mur derous gays. Graffiti, shirts, podcasts, film—they’re all amusing because they jostle loose several gay tropes. They contradict the stereo type of LGBT people as pathetic creatures; they challenge the idea that queer people must follow respectability politics to fend off accusations of sickness and criminality. These cultural ex pressions reflect an expanded political vision of LGBT people. However localized or tenuous civil rights may be, many LGBT people are in better situations than they were two decades ago, and this interest in the “gays who kill” reflects an expanded vi sion (if not actuality) of the emotional amplitude that queer peo ple possess. One subcurrent in the “gays who kill” discourse takes slay ing even further. In 2024’s horror-comedy I Don’t Understand You , Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll star as a gay couple that travels to Italy in the hope of adopting a child; along the way they accidentally kill three people. We’re meant to feel a rea sonable pity for the dead, but we’re ultimately happy for the emerging trope—that a sympathetic gay person can kill without legal repercussions—is a recent development in queer litera ture, which historically has depicted the homosexual man as an ineffectual effeminate who is punished by social ostracism, lethal illness, or suicide. A survey of gay male literary fiction in the last 100 years suggests that a “successful” murder by a queer person rarely happens. For centuries, queer characters were only represented to be punished, to repent, or to illustrate their innate weakness. Understandably, gay authors avoided having their protagonists justify negative stereotypes by committing murder. If a gay per son murders anyone, they are duly punished (James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room ; Gary Indiana’s Resentment ). Gays are more often murdered than murderous. They die through gay-bashing (John Rechy’s City of Night , Dennis Cooper’s Sluts ); intra-com munity violence (Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar ); suicide (Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, James Purdy’s Mal colm ); heart failure (Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice , Christo pher Isherwood’s A Single Man ); the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Colm Tóibín’s The Story of the Night , Michael Cunningham’s new dads and their baby (born of Amanda Seyfried). In literature, a raft of recent books have depicted gay men who, legally speak ing, get away with murder: These Violent Delights, by Micah Nemerever (2020); Hawk Mountain , by Conner Habib (2022); I Might Be in Trouble, by Daniel Aleman (2024); Summerhouse, byYi ğ it Karaahmet (2021; English translation 2025). This

A raft of recent books have depicted gay people who literally get away with murder—a new development in queer literature.

May–June 2026

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