A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Alex Kingsley
What inspired you to start writing?
Ever since I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I just loved to make up stories and to play pretend. When you’re a writer you can play pretend forever. Even better, you can share the stories about the little guys inside your head with other people, and if you’re lucky, they’ll love those little guys just as much as you do. It’s amazing!
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
I have really bad OCD. Most people misunderstand OCD. It’s commonly portrayed as an obsession with cleanliness, but that’s not how it manifests for me. My OCD is complicated, but to put it simply: I’m scared of everything all the time. I face the horrors every day by walking out
my door because a chemical imbalance in my brain is constantly convincing me that I’m going to die, and forcing me to visualize it in gruesome detail. I have all this fear, and I need to put it somewhere. Writing about it lets me channel it into something useful, to feel like I can put some reins on my fears and steer them. If I can write about the horrors – and maybe even make them funny – then they can’t really be too bad. I can’t banish my demons, so I make friends with them and we collab on stories.
Do you make a conscious effort to include LGBTQ material in your writing and if so, what
do you want to portray?
Admittedly, not really. Pretty much every character I write is queer by default because I wrote them. I infuse them with a sort of je ne gay quoi. I don’t think I’ve ever written a straight character in my life. I’m just not interested in doing so.
What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?
Horror and comedy are inextricably linked because they both rely on subversion of expectations. The reason horror is horrific is because there is something enticing about it. I’m kind of obsessed with the concept of the monstrous. The idea that we have the concept of “humanity,” that we have decided “these are the rules for how to be our species and anything that deviates from that norm is evil” is so bizarre when you really
think about it. Why is humanness the ideal that we strive for? What does it look like when we deviate from those norms?
How have you seen the horror genre change over the years? And how do you think it will continue to evolve?
I think in recent years we’ve seen a lot more horror-comedy, which really excites me because that’s probably the genre I write most. I expect to see a lot more genre-blending in the future. Horror-romance seems to be blossoming.
How do you feel the LGBTQ community has been represented thus far in the genre and what hopes do you have for representation in the genre going forward?
It’s hard for me to say because most of the horror media I’ve consumed has been created by/for queer people, so I think I’m lucky in that the media that portrays LGBTQ people poorly has simply not crossed my radar. If anything, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more queer people in horror as we as a society start to embrace the queerness of horror.
Who are some of your favorite LGBTQ characters in horror?
Cecil Palmer from Welcome to Night Vale. I listened to WTNV at such a pivotal point in my life. It was my first experience with audio fiction, my first introduction to horror-comedy, and my first time grappling with my own sexuality. The fact that a character could be gay and not have the plot be about that character being gay was huge to me. Runners up: Martin Blackwood from The Magnus Archives. Eleanor from The Haunting of Hill House, The Thing from The Thing (I will not elaborate. Those who know, know).
Who are some LGBTQ horror authors you recommend our audience check out?
Eve Harms, Sunny Moraine, Andrew Joseph White, and (while his work is more sci-fi than horror, it has some horror elements) Reese Hogan.
What is one piece of advice you would give horror authors today?
Horror is everywhere. The mundane can be horrific and the horrific can be mundane. Don’t be afraid to use horror as a literary device, not just a genre. Write queer sci-fi horror. Write queer fantasy horror. Write queer romance with a little tiny bit of horror as a treat. It doesn’t have to be
pure horror all the time always. It does have to be queer though. That’s the rule.
And to the LGBTQ writers out there who are just getting started, what advice would you
give them?
Whenever I write horror, or anything remotely violent, and I like doing it, I ask myself, “Am I a sick freak?” And I get really ashamed about it, I think this is the same way we’ve treated queerness for a long time. We should all be okay with being a sick freak. Embrace the depravity.
Sexualize the monstrous. Free the beast within. All that good stuff.
Alex Kingsley (they/them) is a writer, comedian, game designer, and amateur mycologist. They are a co-founder of the new media company Strong Branch Productions, where they write and direct sci-fi comedy podcast The Stench of Adventure and other shows. Their short fiction has appeared in Translunar Travelers Lounge, Radon Journal, The Storage Papers, and more. In 2023 they published their short story collection, The Strange Garden and Other Weird Tales. Their debut novel Empress of Dust will be published by Space Wizard Science Fantasy in Fall 2024. Alex’s sci-fi play The Bearer of Bad News premiered in LA in 2022 produced by the Annenberg Foundation, and their sci-fi play Unplanned Obsolescence premiered in Philadelphia in 2023 as part of the Cannonball Festival. Alex’s SFF-related non-fiction has appeared in Interstellar Flight Magazine and Ancillary Review of Books. Their games can be downloaded pay-what-you-will at alexyquest.itch.io.
