David Ruis Fisher
Jason is so gay. These words were spoken once by an ex-boyfriend as we sat watching Friday the 13th Part II. It was more like I was forcing him to watch it, and he was just doing it to appease my nerdy obsession. As a slasher film fanatic and a hardcore Friday the 13th lover, I quickly took offense to this notion. Jason is not gay, I fired back. The ex was using the label, not as a pejorative, but as a way of describing Jason’s own sexual identity. He’s sooo gay, he said, pausing right before the Jeff/Sandra shish kebab death scene. I felt that he was reading too much into these films. I saw them as forms of entertainment that made my adolescent years somewhat bearable, and he was theorizing and analyzing them like Jason was strapped down to Freud’s couch. The ex would not let up: Why do you like watching these films? They are so heteronormative. Where is the queer POV of these films? Jason is so gay! Just like the hundreds of deaths I watched unfold in these Friday the 13th films, I was witness to the eye-gouging death of my very own relationship. In this essay, I aim to address these questions of queerness in the Friday the 13th franchise, zeroing in on the first eight films under the Paramount Pictures banner (1980-1989). I came into my queerness in the age of “Just Say No” rhetoric and the rising of the AIDS epidemic, which halted sexual exploration for a group of men being attacked by our very own machete-wielding madman.
I would think about this conversation with my ex-boyfriend years later as I made my way through the machete-wielding canon while writing my own PhD dissertation. After years of studying Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, and observing the lack of queer representation in mainstream horror films, the lights finally came on. Those questions my ex-boyfriend so fierily exclaimed bubbled up to the surface, and I finally had to dissect a franchise that I cherished so much. These were films that stayed in my conscious since the first time I witnessed the beheading of Mrs. Voorhees at the age of five with my older brother, watching from a couch with amusement at the little monster he was creating by supplying me with sequel after sequel. This was the basis of our brotherly relationship.
I made a list. With a lack of queer characters in the franchise, was I able to queer the Friday canon? As a cisgender, queer, Mexican man, what stock did I have in a franchise that seemed to ignore queer representation? The clues were there: mother issues and the lack of a father figure or presence (not just Jason and Mrs. Voorhees’s relationship, but let’s take a look at Vera and her mother’s own relationship in Friday the 13th Part III), dissecting the heteronormative sex scenes in a franchise that ignored my own group’s sexuality (let’s face it, these sex scenes were some of the first sex scenes young, queer fanatics viewed growing up), the admiration for brave final girl characters (using them as a lens for our own bullying and our own fierceness), and the themes of using Jason Voorhees as a conduit for the AIDS epidemic that nearly annihilated the gay population in the 1980s, including the life of my older gay brother who had introduced me to the series.
I did not grow up with a Mrs. Voorhees. My mother had been a stay-at-home mom for close to twenty-two years until I was born and then decided to go into the workforce. With a father that worked 4 PM-Midnight on the railroad, I was alone a lot. Television and our VCR kept me company with two teenage sisters who were sometimes bothered with a little brother tagging along or messing around in their priceless Prince records. My older brothers had already fled the house once they both turned eighteen. So, I was left with a television, a VCR, and old VHS copies of films that my oldest brother left behind for me. Most of these were horror films. As the VHS boom and the popularity of video stores hit the 1980s, my mother was glad to get me out of her hair for a few hours by taking me on frequent trips to the video store, where I would stock up on horror movies, popcorn, and candy. She would throw me a twenty-dollar bill and tell me to go wild! More often than not, the video store clerks would wander outside, tap on my mother’s window, and ask her if she permitted me to rent the R-rated movies I had at the counter. Puffing heavily on a Kent cigarette, she okayed pretty much anything.
I look at all of the mothers in the Friday the 13th franchise with a sense of fondness: Mrs. Voorhees (Part I), Vera’s mother (Part III), Mrs. Jarvis (Part IV), Ethel (Part V), Mrs. Shepard (Part VII). These were mothers that ultimately cared for the well-being of their child(ren). I strongly believe that if Mrs. Voorhees saw her son drowning, she would have done anything to have saved him. My mother, on the other hand, would have stood by the edge of the water and told me to kick faster with my legs and stop being such a baby. It was not so much that she was cruel when these stressful, anxiety-ridden things would happen, she just wanted me to be able to do things on my own without her help. This also could have been one of the many reasons why my brothers left so quickly after their high school graduations. When there are not a lot of rules in the house, you often want that sense of security. I found that in strangers.
My older brother, Frank, may have started my obsession with the Friday the 13th series, but the video clerks were the horror dramaturgs of my adolescent years. I would walk into my town’s video store, and the clerks would be ready with recommendations:
“If you watched this, then you are definitely going to love this…”
“Oh, you love Friday the 13th, why don’t you mash it up with some Mario Bava?”
Video clerks were my superheroes. Where my brother Frank left off, these movie lovers shot me into the stars by unleashing a tomb of knowledgeable anecdotes and trivia that would send me out of the video store with a bag of movies, provisions, and a copy of Fangoria Magazine.
By the time I was thirteen, I had come to two conclusions: I would never be an all-star athlete, and I would never be a Prince protege. My mother could see this as a problem. I was shying away from sports and retreating into my room into a fantasy world of horror films and horror books. My parents tried to purposely put me on a basketball team at our local community center and tried to sign me up for baseball in the Spring to no advantage. The worry of their youngest son being hailed a ‘sissy’ or ‘queer’ was bringing up past memories of worry they’d had with my brother, Frank.
I do not remember bullying ever being a sacrosanct issue that was being discussed growing up the way it is now. Being bullied was almost a rite of passage. Every gay pejorative was whispered in my ear during class or followed by a punch in the chest in the hallways. The ones who got bullied learned how to plan their day accordingly at school. You would wear thicker clothes. You also brought an extra pair of clothes and kept them in your locker just in case the other boys stole your clothes during gym. You would wear boxers instead of briefs just in case you got de-pantsed in the hallway. You also learned how to run really fast just in case you got chased home after school being taunted with sticks and rocks. I felt like an outsider sympathizing with the likes of fellow outsiders like Ned (Part I), Shelly (Part III), and ultimate final boy: Tommy Jarvis. But it was Jason who got the major brunt of it. It was in these moments of stress, anxiety, and being bullied that I found solace in the Friday the 13th films. If a bully intimidated me on a Friday, promising to kick my ass on a Monday, watching the Friday films over the weekends gave me that sense of confidence to walk into school Monday morning with the impressions that all villains, or bullies, could be defeated. Identifying with both the final girl and the villain, I used these films as a way to amp myself up to face the hockey-masked bullies in my own life. These films were my safe space. If these heroes: Alice, Ginny, Chris, Trish, Pam, Megan, Tina, and Rennie could use their smarts and grit to outwit Jason (and his mother), so could I with the many Jasons in my world.
My parents could see the same things happening to me that happened to Frank when he was my age, and I think that scared them. Not only were they now dealing with two gay sons, but they were dealing with one who was dying from AIDS complications. After being gone for so long, afraid of tainting our family with his ‘lifestyle’ as well as the ire that came from my father for having a sissy for a son, Frank came home to die. It was during this time that Frank and I came together to celebrate the Friday films that bonded us many years before. I asked what got him sick.
“Sex,” he answered truthfully. “I had sex, and now I’m going to die because I didn’t follow the rules.” The rules, as curated by the many slasher flicks of the 1980s, hailed that if you have sex, you die. As for the Friday the 13th franchise booming during the 1980s at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, how could you not see the correlation between the two? Frank did. He watched these movies with a fresh pair of eyes now. It was not so much the radical death scenes that made us squirm anymore. These deaths made Frank more aware of his own mortality that was diminishing day by day from an unseen force annihilating every fiber of his body. After his death, I just did not watch these films the same way ever again.
By queering the Friday the 13th franchise, I am certainly not stating the obvious. People tend to go to the overbearing mother/timid son dynamic of Jason and Mrs. Voorhees. What mother would not seek out revenge for the horrible drowning of her son by ill-equipped camp counselors, and what son would not do the same when that victim is his own mother? Queering the franchise looks at it through my own queer lens and the items that I have picked up in the process of watching these films over and over again through the years. This has been the genius of the series as a whole. The viewer can take it upon themselves to see things that others may not have seen before. It is why we keep coming back for more. You can examine this franchise through intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. You can look at its place in the historical context of an epidemic that eradicated millions, who among those were many queer fans, as well as creative artists who were involved with the films.
I retreat back to the questions that my ex-boyfriend fired at me during this colossal argument over my love of these Friday the 13th films. Where is the queer POV in these films? My own, of course. I was watching these films through a queer lens the whole time. Sure, there are elements that you can read into, but I was not thinking about those things as a kid. It was not until I got older and realized that my own queerness was not represented in those films. So, why do I like watching these films? It brings memories of my brother back and the joy of watching these films together after my parents went to sleep. It brings back memories of the anticipation I had driving to the video store with my mom with the smell of a carry out pizza in the back seat of our car. It reminds me of how much I have grown from a nerdy, wimpy adolescent sissy to a badass, queer scholar of color still battling the Jasons of academia.
