Clive Barker’s Hellraiser was based on his original novel, The Hellbound Heart, and told the story of a woman who starts to kill so that her brother-in-law, who had recently been resurrected, can escape from the torments of hell. In a recent interview, Barker explained that the publishing industry of the 1980s appeared to have inherent homophobia about it.
Barker noted that being a gay man had often led to the disapproval of his creations, not only from his family but also from the publishing industry at large. He said, “Creations in drawing form and writing form were not looked upon kindly by my father or my mother. And then, when I got into publishing books, I found there was a prejudice. I was told, especially with In the Hills the Cities, ‘do not publish this – if you publish this, you’ll destroy everything you have’.”
The publishers had suggested to Barker to make his characters straight before they would consider publishing his works. “‘Just make it straight’, Barker said. “It will be fine. You won’t need to give us the money back. We’ll publish it. Just change the pronouns. Where you see a ‘he’, put a ‘she’”. That’s bollocks. It is deeply demeaning.”
He then admitted that each book takes around two years to write, during which time he was naturally considering the sexuality of the characters. He continued, “You don’t think that I didn’t think, every day that I wrote, about what I was doing there? When a publisher comes along and tells you, ‘you can’t tell that story’, it is deeply painful. It angered me greatly. They were very afraid that coming out or speaking positively about homosexuality would be destructive to my career, which is balls. Absolutely balls.”
Barker then turned his attention to his fellow author J.K. Rowling, who has had her fair share of controversy over the last few years over her opinions on the transgender community. “There’s a lot of pain amongst the transgender people that I know,” Barker stated. “They have a lot of issues in the world as it is, without a famous author opining on the subject. It just seems redundant. It just seems unkind.”
Noting Rowling’s vast financial success, Barker felt that Rowling’s newfound position of fame ought to exclude her from discussing trans rights. He added, “It really just seems redundant for a woman as successful, as validated in the world, as Ms Rowling, to be negative, to be disruptive if you will, to a very beaten up subculture. These are human beings. She has no right to opine, I think, upon the lives of human beings that she does not know.”
“I feel very protective of people who are on the edge of our culture as gay people still are,” Barker continued. “And certainly transgender people are on the edge of our culture. And here you have one of the most successful people in the frigging world – Ms Rowling. Going after a very emotionally vulnerable portion of our culture. It just seems unnecessary and unfair.” {read}