MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The evolution of the zombie narrative in film has had some notable stages from Victor Halperin’s zombie master to George Romero’s slow zombie to Danny Boyle’s fast zombie. Bruce La Bruce’s addition of the gay zombie provides new potential for the development of these narratives. La Bruce’s Otto, or Up With Dead People and LA Zombie address the cultural anxieties of being queer in a capitalist society. In these films, capitalism is linked to heteronormative power, banality and violence. These forces (often likened to a zombified state) have ravaged the world. Yet La Bruce’s queering of the zombie narrative produces a new gay zombie quite at odds with earlier heteronormative iterations. These gay zombies have the potential of being revolutionary. They exist in a liminal space, flickering between the potentialities of pathology and ideology. His fractured, psychological zombies while deserving of their place in the zombie mythos also harken to fragile, violent characters from transgressive Queer narratives like Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle. However, sex is decoupled from violence. And in LA Zombie sex can resurrect those young men destroyed by violence. Essentially, zombieism, which is provocatively described as a “gay plague”, creates a condition in which gay men can undo the damage straight society inflicts on them. Becoming a gay zombie is not entry into a queer utopia, but it holds the promise of one. It is a purgatory, which cleanses these men of the banality and violence of normative worlds. The Queer zombie is an antecedent to the inhabitants of these utopias. This paper will draw on the theoretical work of J. Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz to examine how LaBruce has adapted zombie narratives and queer tropes to complicate and anticipate queer futurities.