ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which Lovecraft’s notorious homophobia has been queered by the recently consolidated subgenre of male/male (m/m) romance in which two male protagonists overcome obstacles to ultimately find love and “happily ever after.” Focusing on trans writer Jordan L. Hawk’s multi-volume paranormal-historical m/m romance series, Whyborne & Griffin (2012–19), it approaches Hawk’s stories of romantically paired paranormal investigators operating in Lovecraftian settings as critical meditations on the surprising proximity between horror and erotic pleasure in Lovecraft’s own stories. Hawk’s critical queering of Lovecraft in these works is characterized above all by ambivalence: on the one hand, the horrors of Lovecraft’s materialist vision are allegorized as a metaphor for homophobia; on the other hand, they also function as ciphers for the lovers’ objectively represented and celebrated queer pleasure. This semantic ambiguity, it argues, is rooted in Lovecraft’s own contradictory poetics of abjection, whose valences it inverts, placing the accent on erotic desublimation rather than phobic recoil. Ultimately, the essay locates Hawk’s rewriting of Lovecraft’s obsession with monstrous genealogies within contemporary inclusive discourses of the queer family—discourses which extend in the case of this series to the queerness of m/m popular romance fans.