The Queer 80s

Article by Mark Allan Gunnells

My novella “Septic” (which appears in Dark Tide: Against the Clock along with novellas from Shane Nelson and Brandon Ford) takes place in 1988. A year which to me doesn’t seem like that long ago but is actually thirty-five years in the rearview. I was in high school during that era, and it was a different world. No one had cell phones, the internet didn’t exist, computers were something rich people had in their homes and didn’t link them to the rest of the world the way they do now. Music was different, fashion was different.

And things were definitely different for queer people.

This was before Ellen and Will and Grace brought us into people’s homes on a weekly basis. Marriage equality was so far in the future it may as well have been science fiction. Queer people were not allowed in the military; we hadn’t even gotten as far as the atrocious Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. We were still within the first decade of the AIDS crisis when people considered it God’s punishment for queer people.

I don’t view the world today with rose-colored glasses. Queer people have made a lot of progress in my lifetime, and I celebrate that progress, but there is still a lot of hate and bigotry out there. The trans community in particular is dealing with so much nastiness, and the push to ban queer-positive books and drag performances is another attempt to wipe us from existence. There is still work to be done.

But growing up in the 80s, I felt like the entire world hated us. Even liberals would rarely come out in full support of queer people. We were still considered sick and mentally ill by the majority of people, especially in the U.S. And for young queer people, there was almost nowhere to turn. There were no GSA groups in high schools, no internet groups where people could link up to find camaraderie and acceptance. In the small southern town where I came of age, I felt utterly alone.

So when I sat down to write “Septic” and recreate that time period, I wanted to queer it up. If you look at the entertainment that came out in the 80s, you rarely found queer people represented unless as an offensive stereotype meant to make the audience laugh or cringe.

And yet we were there. We existed, even if we felt we had to keep ourselves hidden away. We were in your neighborhoods, your churches, your places of employment, and yes, we were in your schools. The notion of queer teenagers didn’t suddenly manifest in the past decade. Just because you didn’t see us, doesn’t mean we didn’t exist.

That was part of what I wanted to explore in “Septic.” Yes, at its core it is a suspense story about a young man who finds himself trapped in a confined space with a burst appendix, but beyond that I wanted to explore other ways he felt trapped. I wanted to show that even in 1988, there were queer teenagers who were suffering in silence, suffering unnecessarily, but who were decent and upstanding people despite the way society tried to paint them as monsters. That aspect of the story was very important to me.

In the characters of Carl and Zach, I wanted to bring the reader inside the lives and minds of queer young people growing up in the conservative 80s, trying to get by and carve out little pockets of happiness for themselves. To show that we were more than the butt of jokes and visions of horror that the entertainment of that time period made us out to be.

And with those two characters, I also wanted to show two distinctly different perspectives. Zach more represents my own experience, the sensitive effeminate boy that everyone recognizes as an outsider and targets for harassment. However, with Carl I wanted to explore what it was like when a popular kid was queer. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, I found out later that some of the popular kids I went to school with were also queer and closeted. They had their own set of pressures and fears that kept them silent, kept them “passing.” I felt that was an important area to touch on as well.

In the end, I hope “Septic” is suspenseful and entertaining, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also make the reader think. As a queer person, it is important to me that my work fosters representation for the queer community and that I help us reclaim our history. We’re queer and we’re here, yes, but we’re also queer and we were there, even back then.

Get used to it.

You can pre-order Against the Clock by CLICKING HERE.