The Long Hallway

Description

The Long Hallway (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiog)
by Richard Scott Larson

ISBN: 9780299347246
Softcover, new

Brief Description:
Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found
expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John
Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood
identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter’s inscrutable masked villain,
as well as Michael’s potential victims. In The Long Hallway, Larson
scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror as a metaphor for the
torments of the closet. Larson was only nine years old when he recognized
something of his own experience in how Michael Myers hid his true face from
the world. This spark of recognition ignited his imagination while he
searched for clues to what the future might hold for boys like him, all the
while being made to understand his nascent sexuality as deviant and
punishable. Like in the movies, his superficially safe suburban childhood
was in fact filled with threat: a classmate’s murder, his father’s
alcoholism and death, and his own sexual assault by a much older man. The
figurative mask Larson learned to wear could not contain his yearning to be
seen and desired. In the aftermath of this violence, his boyhood self came
to believe that fear and desire would be forever intertwined. This lyrical
memoir expresses a boy’s search for identity while navigating the darkness
and isolation of a deeply private inner world. With introspection and
tenderness, Larson reflects on how little we understand in the moment about
the experiences that mark us forever.