ABSTRACT
The more I watch Psycho, and read what has been written about it, the less certain I am about what to make of Norman Bates psychosexually.1 Should I read him as homosexual/gay? Or does the film seem to represent him as straight? Maybe he’s bisexual? Some viewers attempt to steer clear of these questions by suggesting Norman is asexual or childlike, and, therefore, he should not be considered in sexual terms. To these people, I would say that anyone who constructs a peephole in order to watch women undressing is not asexual, and that the term “polymorphous perversity” isn’t connected to children for nothing. Most critics and the public appear to be divided between understanding soft-spoken, stuttering Norman as another one of Hitchcock’s “crazy-and I mean crazy-dykes and faggots,” and finding him a frightening and/or pitiable straight guy ruined by his too-close relationship with his mother.2 Even in its straight incarnations, however, Norman’s sexuality is understood as perverse somehow: he is the quintessential mama’s boy gone horribly bad. But this incestuous mama’s boy coding is also the basis for reading Norman as homosexual. Granted the dominant cultural trope of mama’s-boy-as-homosexual is a tired one, but it has maintained its pop Freudian, pop culture power.
