On Queer Haunting and Befriending Ghosts

There are some days I hate the fact that I’m queer. I know that’s not super politically correct to say, but it’s true. Sometimes I just don’t want it – I don’t want the burden of self-disclosure, the stress of vulnerability, the double-takes after delicate admissions over coffee. During Pride Month, especially, it feels blasphemous: I’m supposed to be proud, liberated, and free, or whatever. But there are times when I’m none of those things.

When you’ve gone through the bullshit and faced the disappointment, the silence, the rejection for “coming out” as something you’ve always already been in the first place, it hurts. It does something to you. Maybe it’s a fundamental wound that only some people feel. I’m sure there are a whole bunch of truly well-adjusted queer angels out there who have no idea what I’m on about! I hope so, anyway. For me, though, even when things are perfectly good – when I’m enjoying a sweaty beer at Tempelhof under a nectarine sunset – I’m still haunted by something. And that haunting is closely intertwined with my experience of queerness. It’s okay, though – I’ve realized now that it’s just about making friends with those ghosts.

So when I heard that our favorite queer icon Kristen Stewart would be producing a show about LGBTQ+ ghost hunters, I recognized it as something honest. We don’t know a lot about the show yet (it’s in its early stages of production, there’s an ongoing casting call), but its mere existence weirdly testifies to my experience: it’s all about the queer bond to that which haunts us. Ghosts are kind of inherently queer already, if you think about it. Both haunted and haunting, they bridge two worlds (inhabiting neither fully), they dwell in limbo trying to process a fatal wound, and they scare people a lot of the time. People run away from ghosts. It’s not their fault, it just is what it is. But what about those people who don’t run away from ghosts? The ones who hunt them down? They’re the very same people who run towards the horror and embrace the strange. They look for it, they lean into it. Ghost hunting isn’t just a niche queer topic for a television show – on some level, it’s what a lot of queer people do all the time anyway. We familiarize ourselves with fear, we build a home there. We even seek it out, strive to dig deeper, linger longer, and get on more intimate terms with our trauma.

There’s something cathartic about running towards ghosts: our favorite bisexual emo-folk singer Phoebe Bridgers has built her entire style around embracing them, for instance. Her 2017 debut album Stranger in the Alps features an image of a young girl painted over as a cartoonish white ghost with empty black eyes; her acclaimed 2020 album Punisher features her donning her signature skeleton suit in an eerie red-lit moonscape. It’s not just her aesthetic either, Bridgers’ lyrics also tilt into the supernatural: “We’re not alone / I’ll find a new place to be from / A haunted house with a picket fence / To float around and ghost my friends / No, I’m not afraid to disappear.” That she rose to fame in the midst of the pandemic seems entirely appropriate. As the gothic horror of mass death collided with everyday niceties in 2020, Bridgers brought together haunted houses and picket fences. She isn’t afraid of the dark. For her unrelenting interrogation of what it means to be haunted, her willingness to probe the depths, Phoebe Bridgers has been called the “savior” of “queer, depressed 20-somethings.”

Thinking through Kristen Stewart’s paranormal ambitions and Phoebe Bridgers’ ethereal persona, I find myself transported back to the midst of the pandemic, curled up under my striped duvet watching Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020). Another spectral media experience amplified by that year’s atmosphere, it was described to me as “a sapphic love story with ghosts” rather than a horror series. The show works through the protagonist’s queer trauma as symbolized by the ghost of her homophobic ex-fiancé. It impressed me: I hadn’t thought that supernatural horror could better approximate that fragile emotional landscape than a more realistic narrative. Even two years later, at a moment when much more optimistic queer romance novels and rom-coms are thriving (which I love, don’t get me wrong), I continue to find myself drawn to this tragic ghost story. That probably says something about me, but I believe it also says something about the salience of the genre for speaking to the queer experience. Supernatural horror is the only genre that doesn’t shy away from fear or sugarcoat discomfort – it’s extreme, but it’s honest. It doesn’t pretend that things are fine. As in Bly Manor, things are scary and broken and normal rules don’t apply. Even when characters make through it to the end, they end up haunted. That’s also what it means to be queer sometimes: we endure and hold trauma. We hold a lot of other things, of course, but that’s always there too – at least for me.

The choice to look ghosts in the eye is a brave one. It’s not easy, it comes with sweaty palms and a racing pulse. This choice to face it – like horror, like ghost hunting, like queerness itself – can even be understood as a celebration of being alive. We can go through scary things, painful things, and come out the other side. It’s not that everything is fine, it’s just that there’s more. I find that so beautiful about the queer community: we tend to our ghosts. I love that every day.