Clive Barker - Spooky Scouse
Clive Barker is an English playwright, novelist, film director, and visual artist. Barker became well-known in the mid-1980s with a series of short stories, ‘The Books of Blood’, which established him as a leading horror writer! Even though writing horror is pretty badass already, he is actually from Liverpool (REPRESENT) and studied at Liverpool University. You are probably wondering why he is involved in our Queer series though, right?
Barker's sexual orientation became well-known in 1996 when he published ‘Sacrament’, his first novel with a gay protagonist. However, Barker says that it's never been a secret: "I have done readings at gay bookstores throughout the world since my first book was published. And I never considered my homosexuality an issue. Not until 1995, however, I got myself a publicist, which is when the 'gay thing' happened. I appeared in The Advocate, OUT, 10% and Genre all practically at the same time, which kind of made the whole issue noteworthy."
The fact that Barker never made his sexuality a ‘selling’ point or what we’d call now as ‘click bait’, is very typical of how we are now! We are just queer, it doesn’t become everything about us once we come out or even if we never do- we are writers, painters, artists, scientists, actors, kind, funny, caring. We are a lot of things - queer just happens to be one of those too.
Barker actually stresses this a little more in his interviews about the book saying, ‘the issue of the book was not homosexuality, but I was very comfortable with the idea that the hero, like me, was gay and having his sexuality was part of who he was and part of the narrative.’ We have decided to stan Mr Clive Barker.
Clive Barker’s life has been full of creation and exploration, he now even lives in sunny California with his partner David Armstrong who is a photographer and they both live with David’s daughter who is from a previous relationship.
From horror writing and gory visuals, Barker found love and peace and never mentions much about the hardships of being gay before the recent times of when it is slighty more acceptable and legally protected. During the time of Barker’s book, ‘Sacrament’, there were no gay protagonists, especially not cool angsty ones where being gay was not the staple point.
Even now in modern culture, many TV shows make the characters sexuality all that they are, but people, creators and viewers are starting to move away from that. We want gay characters who happen to be gay and/or queer, but who are messy and human and do other things apart from be their label.
While being queer is a part of who we are, it does not make us who we are entirely, and Clive Barker is someone who helped spread that knowledge! So thank you Barker, for the local spooky queer content.
