ABSTRACT
Due in part to its Gothic character, King’s multiverse oscillates between homophobia and its rejection, between the monster as homosexual and homophobia as monster. This oscillation enables us to explore the sexuality of his corpus from two different positions. When we read his monsters as homosexual, a correspondence takes shape: “queer” History is monstrous because it refuses to reproduce itself in a “healthy” way. When we interpret King’s considerable output as homophobic, a perverted sense of History appears in parallel, one that can be (at least partially) blamed upon impediments to the “normal” propagation of the species. At the same time, if we analyze these tales with homophobia as the monster, we walk away with a distinctive impression that History is stuck in an entropic loop precisely because of its so-called normal propagation. History with a capital “H”—a dominant, heteronormative construct—rubs up against histories with a lower-case “h”—accounts made “queer” due to their rejection of any singular historical or sexual consciousness. That is to say, if we reclaim the “queerness” at work in King’s vision of American History, we might be able—at last—to imagine a future beyond our limited horizons.
