Queering Cthulhu

Since the mid-1990s, queer and trans theorists have built on second-wave feminists’ attempts to analyze and reclaim monsters as metaphors for marginalized people. ¹ For example, in Skin Shows, Jack Halberstam observes, “Gothic fiction is a technology is subjectivity. One which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known.” ² In this sense, racialized and sexualized monsters not only “make strange the categories of beauty, humanity, and identity,” as Halberstam suggests, ³ but also actively produce those categories and the normative white male hero in many narratives. This is particularly true of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu.” Often discussed as a weird tale or as a science fiction story, “The Call of Cthulhu” can also be discussed within what Sara Wasson and Emily Alder have recently termed gothic science fiction. ⁴ Framed using the gothic trope of the recovered manuscript “Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston,” ⁵ “The Call of Cthulhu” is notable for how it produces the white male hero at the narrative’s center by presenting artists, eccentrics, and people of color as monstrous cultists.

This essay reads against the grain of the story, looking at the cultists and those most affected by (sympathetic to) Cthulhu’s emergence in the story. Drawing on a range of material from the history of sexuality, including Michel Foucault’s discussion of silence as a discourse of sexuality, Victorian understandings of aestheticism, eccentricity, and “the artist,” as well as the definitional conflation of queer as both odd and homosexual that begins around 1915, this essay argues for a queer reading of Cthulhu through attention to his minions: Henry Anthony Wilcox (“a precocious youth of known genius, but great eccentricity,” “dismissed…as merely queer”), ⁶ the black, mixed-race, and Eskimo swamp cultists who are repeatedly described as “queer,” ⁷ and the narrator’s insistence on the necessity of a discourse of silence surrounding Cthulhu. The essay concludes by using theories of queer spatiality to read R’lyeh’s “all wrong” ⁸ geometry as a form of repressed queer space emerging only briefly in the story but always threatening to rise again—and thus functioning as the source of the story’s horror.