Sex and Sexuality
Never one to be shy about his urges, Barker's enthusiasm for all things warm and fleshy spills out from between the covers of all his work. So have the reviewers who mention Jackie Collins and Barbara Cartland in the same paragraph as Barker actually read any of his work?
Eroticising The World
By G. Dair, Cut, Vol 2, No 10, October 1987
"I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life."
Who Needs A Niche?
By Laura Dempsey Dayton Daily News, [July] 1998
"[Being gay is] simply a fact of my life and it hasn't affected at all whether my books are published, whether my movies are made, whether my paintings are shown. You know, my other half is a black man, so we have a double thing going on there. We have an interracial gay partnership, and boy, that pushes some buttons."
Love, Barker Style
By Randy Myers, [NY???]Times, 30th July 1998
"I had much older girlfriends right through my childhood, my adolescence. When I was 15 I had a 19 year old girlfriend, which was a big deal when you were 15. The issue of the kind of openness of your sexuality at that time... When you are just looking at possibilities and one of the things that happens is your possibilities start to narrow and start to become very specific as you get older.
"I think of sexuality as being this incredibly maleable, protean, changeable, wonderful, flowery thing. I don't think that it is fixed. I don't think that it is about saying I am this and I will always be this. I think that it is about being aroused by the world and finding the world sexy. I mean, do I still look at beautiful women? Absolutely."
LoveLine
Transcript of appearance on TV show, LoveLine, 21 August 1996
"What happened last year was that a lot of people in the press put the question to me, instead of skirting around it. Up until then, nobody had ever seemed to be bothered much either way. It's a fact of my life - and a very happy fact of my life - and it's in the books. I've always had mail from people who have assumed, rightly, that I was gay, just from reading the books. And I've always been reviewed in the gay press.Then, last year, something else happened. For the first time, I took on a professional publicist, a woman called Bumble Ward, who did an extraordinary job. In a very short time a huge level of publicity was generated in magazines that I had never seen before, because there was someone in my life who was aware that I was painter, filmmaker, writer and could begin to link them up. So that, instead of going from one publicity event to another, I had somebody who was bringing film critics to see my paintings or introducing book reviewers to other aspects of my work. And what she was saying was, "Look, these are by the same guy!" Suddenly, connections were being made that had never been made before. And one of those connections was to do with the issue of sexuality. I think people saw these very often homoerotic paintings, put them beside the books and movies, and something happened. People who'd never thought of me in terms of my sexuality suddenly asked the question. And then, you know how it is, you write the articles, you do the interviews, and you become the gay magazine cover boy for your 15 minutes. And I was very happy to do it. It just never felt like a big event. It only seemed like a big event afterwards. And maybe that was my error; maybe I should have been more politicised. Nowadays, I am more aware of the AIDS issue. I've lost a lot of friends recently and Sacrament, the new novel, has a gay hero and deals very much with what it is to be alive and gay in 1996, and in the midst of that plague."
Clive Barker - Lord Of Illusions
By Nigel Lloyd, SFX, No 16, September 1996
"I love writing about the erotic, yes, it's immensely pleasurable. I'm always looking to try and [embarrass myself], but I haven't yet been able to achieve it. No, it's real fun to write about sex. And sex and sexual desire are at the heart of the book in the sense that the narrative would not exist were Galilee and Rachel not to fall in love and be drawn to one another against the…actually, against their better wisdom."
Transcript of interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, 9 November 1988
By Brian Hayes
"And there are scenes of great depravity and darkness, and it's also a sexual world: a lot of fantasy is de-sexualised. It maybe part and parcel of the origins of fantasy, I don't know: there's a lot of romance but remarkably little sex. People tend to do things for the sake of the vows rather than for the sake of the fuck that comes afterwards. I always find that a curious, even perplexing way to go about things. And obviously the horror fiction is very sexual: I write highly eroticised horror fiction. I wanted to make sure that when I transferred to fantasy fiction, that wasn't lost. I thought that was very important. For one thing, the fan mail seems to suggest that the readership enjoys that and I also think that here we are in the latter part of the twentieth century, literature is finally liberated from the yoke of censorship in the same way that movies aren't, and I'd like to exploit that freedom. Not in a particularly calculating way, simply that my imagination has a large sexual component as, I believe, does everybody's. And why not put it into the books? I'm actually glad in a way that there was this little territory that hadn't been marked out because I think if people think about Barker fiction, they think about fiction that is taboo-breaking. I have not only addressed the issue of sexuality in horror but the issue of many kinds of sexuality in horror. I mean, women fall in love with gorillas in my fiction! There are sex scenes between men, there are sex scenes between women, there are orgies, there are people fucking walls - there is just a sense that we are sexual beings and that if horror fiction is about the body - which over and over again it is - then putting a little blank space where cocks and cunts are is a misrepresentation. "
Clive Barker In The Flesh
By Dave Hughes, Skeleton Crew, III/IV, 1988
"I once asked Stephen King why he never had any sex scenes in his books, and he told me he was embarrassed by it. I don't think this is unusual among horror writers. They actually believe it is a metaphor rather than a confrontation. They think it only works in horror stories if it's subtextural. That's nonsense. If it's going to be sex, let's damn well see them go to it. I don't want sex in my work to be relief from the horror. I want it to be part of it."
All The Gory Details
By Kent Black, M, January 1989
"I think I'm a little more pro the body than David [Cronenberg] is. David tends to be quite down on physicality and finally there is an argument that he's being repulsed by the flesh he's writing about, whereas I tend to be having a good time with it. 'Long Live the New Flesh' would be a cry that would come from both our lips."
Clive Barker : Tearing Your Soul Apart
By [ ], Your Worst Fears Confirmed, November 1988
"Flesh is the fundamental problem into which we are born . It's the first paradox we are aware of, long before we know what the word paradox means. The very same nerve endings that present us with pleasure if stroked the right way are the same that give us pain…We're paradox real early…We also learn at a young age that certain pleasures we can induce for ourselves are forbidden, secret, taboo. One of the reasons horror fiction falls shy of being considered serious writing is that there's a general belief these kinds of stories have sexuality as their subtext, and by bringing that subtext into the more prominent position of text, you somehow call the bluff of the machine that made the thing work in the first place. You've pulled the hood off, so to speak, and people feared that in showing the workings, the magic wouldn't work any longer. I don't think that's true at all - it doesn't stop me, certainly. Any genre that requires the willful disregard of certain facts that we all know to make it work is moribund by definition."
Barker's Searching For A Higher Plane
By Bob Strauss, The Fresno Bee, 25 October 1987
"I think sex (the act, if you like) is not at all frightening; but I think the hold that sex, that desire has upon our psyches - not only as individuals, but collectively - gives us pause for thought. I think the complexity of our sexual lives, both in terms of the way we operate our love lives, and our adulteries, and the way we think about our bodies in relation to that - and after all, horror fiction is very often body fiction of various kinds - is…I don't know whether 'scary' should be the word. I think there's an element of perverse celebration in my attitudes there - I would evidence stories like 'The Age of Desire', for instance."
Weaving Words With Clive Barker
By Leigh Blackmore, Terror Australis, No1, Autumn 1988
"Curiously, horror fiction hasn't really dealt with sex. Certainly there are horror novels that use sex as light relief, but a lot of my stories have very strong sexual subtexts and can't be interpreted outside the subtext. You have to embrace the sexual meaning of the stories before you can really understand them. I don't think that had been done as passionately as I did it in the 'Books of Blood'."
Clive Barker: Anarchic Prince Of Horror
By Stephen Jones, Knave magazine, Vol 19, No 5 1987
"I think it was that the fans hadn't read this kind of horror fiction before. All I can say is that I can't analyse it. My imagination is a pretty heated one. I don't ever hold back, I don't ever avert my eyes... The problem is not, 'Dare I show it?' The problem is, 'Do I believe I'm witty enough and elegant enough to make that work?' [Sex] hasn't been a staple of horror fiction. It's a last taboo in some ways. But I think you can talk about sex and scare people too."
OmiGod!! - Meet Clive Barker, The Man Who Can Scare Stephen King
By Chet Flippo, New York Daily News, City Lights section, 3 August 1986
"When we're talking about the life of the body in the sort of death context, the violence context, in the corruption context, I think very often we're also talking about sexual feelings. So often, sex is about obsession. Often horror fiction is about obsession. So often, sex is about coming to terms with feelings that you're almost out of control with. Horror fiction is very often about having control or losing control. Sex is always about the body. Horror fiction is over and over again about the body. The French have the term 'petit mort' for the post-orgasmic blues. The French have a point. There's a kind of sense that, in the moments of love, anything is possible. And in the moments after, nothing is. That's like a slap in the face."
An Interview With Clive Barker
By Richard A Lupoff, Science Fiction Eye, No 4, August 1988
"I'm interested in the places where sex reminds me of death, where sex and love and passions bring one close to thinking about death. It may be my own problem, but sex reminds me of death very regularly. Anything which transforms one's life, as the sex act does, for half an hour or half a day, makes one look at oneself afresh. The post-orgasmic sense of loss, or indeed the sense of escape or expulsion, seems to tie up very strongly with the preoccupations of horror, which are, very often, about the transformation of the body, which are about getting close to death but maybe avoiding it, which are about being out of control of one's self and one's feelings. Sex is about a little madness - how often is horror about madness? Sex is about a little death - how often is horror about death? It's about the body - how often is horror about the body?"
Give Me B-Movies Or Give Me Death !
By Douglas E. Winter, Faces of Fear, 1985
[re.'Weaveworld'] "It's not fantasy, exactly…It's also not sword and sorcery - there are no elves or magicians in forests. There's sex in forests, but no magicians! I decided to bring sex into Wonderland - I thought that would be a nice idea because Wonderland is a kind of sexless place. It always surprises me that when fantasy writers decide to return to a place of true magic…they remove one of the few things that is magical in everybody's lives: sex. It seems like a very bizarre, very paradoxical thing to do. I mean, one of the few times mere mortals get to feel something extraordinary, maybe even something visionary, is while falling in love; o during seduction; or even - if you're lucky - during sex. So I decided to make an erotic Wonderland. I put a lot of eroticism into the books and I get a lot of mail about it."
A Little Bit Of Hamlet
Barker at UCLA 25 February 1987, by Dennis Etchison, Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden
"So many of the monsters we create in our fiction are about appetite and the fears of appetite, sexual appetite, sensual appetite. We are taught then that it needs to be tamed and repressed. And yet it stays with us as a possibility. How sexuality transforms us, how miraculous a hard-on is, how a hard-on is like a little piece of special effects!…So there's appetite and transformation and the continuing fascination of these images. It's the very ambiguity that is both the problem for us and the fun. I wanted to put that in 'Hellraiser' and I want to put it in my books. I want to make sure that people know that this ambiguity is to be celebrated, not to be put down."
Eroticising The World
By G. Dair, Cut, Vol 2, No 10, October 1987
"There are areas of pornography which I find morally, wholly unacceptable, exploitation of children would be a key one. And I have to say that the exposure of children to horrific images of horror entertainment I also find morally unacceptable. Simply because I don't think children have a way of contextualise that imagery and I don't think you should expose children to imagery that they can't contextualise."
Beneath The Blanket Of Banality
By Lionel Gracy-Whitman & Don Melia, Heartbreak Hotel, No 4, July/August 1988
[re. sex] "It's fertile ground for me because it isn't for so many other people. It seems as though horror fiction has not really looked deeply into sexuality. Or if it has, it's been very covert about it. There's an argument, and a pertinent one, that every vampire book is, at root, a sexual book. After all, we are sexual beings - and I feel that we are all pansexual ones at heart. What I've tried to do as a writer, much more than as a filmmaker, is talk about the full range of sexual possibilities. The job of fantasy fiction, horror fiction and science fiction is to say that the only rule is there are no rules: 'Let's just go to the extremes.' As somebody who is highly sexed and interested in sex, that's a subject I'm going to talk about. And I don't feel that I need to apologise for the fact that I think lesbian bondage is absolutely fascinating."
Clive Barker's Lurid Fascination
By Dan Lamanna, Cinescape, No [ ], January 1995
[re. sex being prevalent in horror] "I don't think that's so with most writers. There's no link in Stephen King's work. I really believe Steve to be the prominent author in horror. But the erotic-horror link is almost non-existent in his work. So it's not inevitable. I think it's true about my work. I think it's about the mind, about the body, about areas of focus. Erotica is about the body, about transformation. About losing control of the body, and the problems of flesh."
The Clive Barker Interview
By Mike Lackey, Marvel Age, No 107, December 1991 (note - online at the Lost Souls site - see links)
"Is it not possible that our experience of the flesh - the tingle in our nerve endings, the profound feelings that sexual excitement arouses in us - should not be mostly connected with our spiritual selves? Whatever divinity made us - and I believe we were made for a great and perhaps unknowable purpose - that divinity gave us the potential for physical and sensual bliss, which, when we are moved most deeply, leads us on to profound spiritual feelings. In other words… when I am at my most physical I am reaching for the divine. "
AOL Appearance
Transcript of on-line appearance, 18 August 1997
"It's easy for someone in my position to be gay. My books have always been full of sex . . . gay sex, lesbian sex, heterosexual sex. I'm interested in sex in all of its expressions. I don't feel like an Angelino. But I like the extremes - the beauty, the muscle boys, the New Age and occult. L.A.'s trendiness doesn't interest me, though. I've never been hip or cool."
Clive Barker Raises Hell
By Gregg Kilday, Out Magazine, March 1995
"Sex controls us. Sex controls our bodies…. It controls our will. The sexual need pushes us to do things, to make choices, to behave in certain ways; and there's a part of us that's scared of that, but there's another part that wants to relinquish our power, that's saying, "OK, I'm going to suspend my intellect, I'm going to suspend the rules of the workaday world and I'm going to live in peace and sensuality for a while." One of the interesting things about horror fiction is that it very often expresses this ambivalence. If this form of fiction (and 'horror' is used in its broadest sense here) has one great piece of social significance it is that, in this century when the rules are sort of falling apart, political rules, social rules, religious rules, rules that would have been immutable in our parents' times and are now protean and flowing - perhaps in a way that makes us fearful - horror fiction should be so popular. Horror fiction sort of says, "the world is governed by sensible rules, by powers which are internal to you and external, which you have to accept, to open your eyes to and see."
Addicted To Creativity (Part 1)
By Bill Babouris, Samhain, No 70, November 1998
Click here for Barker's further comments on sex & sexuality
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