Imagine being so deluded that a hellish, child-eating, serial killer clown is one of your icons because his make-up is fabulous and his theatricality hints at what you hope is a homosexual orientation. Now imagine being disappointed the horrific harlequin isn’t gay.
It turns out Pennywise the Clown from the It series was, well, it to the gay left after the first movie. Sadly though, LGBTQ bloggers are lamenting their dashed gay Pennywise daydreaming, as the character has been given a “homophobic” plotpoint in the upcoming sequel.
OutMagazine blogger Rose Dommu wrote that article over the weekend and she was dead serious. Breaking the terrible news that Pennywise’s It: Chapter 2 depiction featured him taunting a closeted gay and killing and eating another homosexual, Dommu claimed, “I’m sad to announce that Pennywise is not gay, or even an ally. In fact, Pennywise is surprisingly anti-queer.”
Oh. No. You mean to say a killer clown that loves misery and the death of kids doesn’t celebrate the children’s colorful LGBTQ dreams? Real shocker there.
Dommu said there was an actual time period when the depraved killer clown was considered a “gay icon”:
In the aftermath of 2017’s It, Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown became something of a gay icon. Between memes and makeup tutorials, Pennywise was everywhere — he and other monstrous LGBTQ+ favorite, the Babadook, were seen as #couplegoals.”
But the upcoming sequel destroyed these gay killer clown fantasies. The first instance of Pennywise’s shocking homophobia depicts the villain devouring a young gay kid’s boyfriend after he is pushed off a bridge by homophobes. Dommu even wondered if Pennywise “telepathically inspired the homophobes to attack the couple.”
The other instance of Pennywise’s LGBTQ hatred comes when he taunts closeted adult Richie about his “dirty little secret.” Richie “reminisces about being called a ‘fag’ as a child” and, wouldn’t you know, Pennywise doesn’t show up to remove that trauma, just to exacerbate it. Dommu wrote, “He doesn’t just say it, he sings it — the song even appears on the album’s soundtrack.”
Well what did you expect from a clown versed in murder and psychological torture of children? And even though the horror movie monster is designed to be the antithesis of love and respect, Dommu believes this is an irksome symptom of contemporary politics, concluding her piece with the point that the clown’s “a homophobe. Trump’s America strikes again!” The horror.
