It's not about violent urges: It's about feeling different. Before I knew I was gay, I knew that the world was frightening in a way that I couldn't express. I knew that I wasn't like the people around me, and I knew that they picked up on my otherness. When you're a kid, you want desperately to belong, which means trying to hide those unspeakable feelings — long before you're willing to identify with being queer.

"We're raised in a world that's not designed for us," Darren Stein explained to me. He wrote and directed the cult classic teen comedy Jawbreaker, and he produced Grannell's All About Evil. "The stakes for us are higher in life, in a way, because we're raised around all these aliens. I think that horror is a genre that we can get lost in, because we can relate to the extremes of it, the terror of it. The feeling of not belonging is something that comes easily to us."

Stein told me that when he was a kid, he turned to Fangoria magazine the way his peers stole their dads' Playboy. Being too young to consciously crave and seek out gay porn, he looked for images of grotesquerie. I remembered the way I pored over the horror video cases at Blockbuster. There was a perverse pleasure to it — not sexual, but thrilling because it was so outside of the norm. It was another kind of filth, and shameful in its own way.

When Grannell saw Silence of the Lambs for the first time, he felt the same confusing feelings of desire and embarrassment. "I went back like 10 more times, and I was very closeted about it," he recalled. "It completely connected to my secret viewings of Paris Is Burning. I had these secret movies that I would go to the theater to see and not tell anyone, like the way you would go to a porno house in Times Square in the '80s. I remember just loving Hannibal Lecter and loving Buffalo Bill in a way that maybe should have been disturbing to me."

For me, my adoration of figures like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees read more as fear. I couldn't explain my obsession, but I knew that I was scared. I watched what I could through my fingers, because that was the only way to both take it in and block it out. It's the same way I responded to early gay thoughts, which were just as frightening. And who could blame me, when I grew up with the relentless association of being gay and dying from AIDS? On a larger scale, the mere thought of sex between men — regardless of the consequences — was too much to bear.

"Anal sex ultimately can be construed by a child as a very grotesque act," Stein pointed out. "It's invasive, much like a knife in the flesh."

Years later, when I watched the 1980 thriller Cruising for a college course, I saw that subconscious fear made literal, as shots of the killer stabbing his victims were intercut with graphic footage of men fucking. Suddenly, my youthful fears of getting stabbed by Michael Myers took on a new and uncomfortable resonance.