Forbidden Heroes

BY Jeff Khan

JK: Every time I see a new show of yours it’s a few shades darker than the last one. Why is this?

MK: I’ve previously tried to toe an even line between fear and humour, but recently I’ve been less interested in the humour component. I’m quite happy at the moment, and maybe that’s a better place to think about how dark things have affected me since childhood.

JK: One of those things is your long-standing fascination with gay serial killers. Has it had an influence on your recent work?

MK: For a long time I had no idea why I had this borderline obsession. At first I thought this was related to an interest in violence but, as I grew older, I started recognising the sexual links. Growing up in a small town, I wasn’t sure which was worse to discover, actually: being homicidal or being homosexual… Much of my work has been about the periods in our lives when our identities are formed. Recently I’ve been looking at explicit points of reference from my own adolescence, while trying to keep it identifiable for the broader community (who, I’m sure, have secretly felt the same way).

JK: Did you realise the sway that gay serial killers had on your psyche before or after you realised you were gay?

MK: Definitely before. One of my first memories is of watching a daytime soapie where this woman was burgled and tied up by this dude with stockings over his head and left in a bath of rising water; I never saw how it ended so it’s been a source of curiosity for me. When I was about 14 I started to draw the connections between the stories I was reading: John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Otis O’Toole. I was kinda like, “Yeah, I like to be scared shitless and I like to hear about homos too.”

JK: There are some really interesting filmic and literary reinterpretations of killer homos out there. Leopold and Loeb in Todd Haynes’s Swoon; Aileen Wuornos in Monster; Jim Williams in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. What do you think of these?

MK: I saw Hitchcock’s Rope when I was about 13, really late at night, and remember constructing elaborate relationship-based fantasies about one of the guys in it, totally blocking out the whole ‘messed-up power roles’ thing… I saw Monster a little later; I was quite familiar with Wuornos but, as a kid, felt that it was reinforcing my queer status to be afraid of women … Then when I saw Silence of the Lambs and Jame Gumb, I was like, “Oh my god – this is terrifying, but sexy; I can’t believe how confused I feel.” At around this pubescent point I started thinking about when I was going to snap and begin my murderous rampage. I was living in Devonport, Tasmania, after all…

JK: But the literary gay killer figure can be a powerful cultural symbol, and can do some interesting things in terms of breaking down mainstream culture’s notions of “gayness”. I’m thinking about Gregg Araki’s The Living End, which was a violent film but one that argued for a changed perception of gay men.

MK: Yeah there’s that graffiti around Fitzroy that says “Gays bash back” and I’ve always loved it, particularly because, when I moved here to Melbourne in 2000, I’d just come out and had been modelling myself from Outrage magazine photo shoots. You know: camp, looks-obsessed, bitchy… Seeing that graffiti was really empowering, like I didn’t need to behave or dress that way in order to be a legitimate gay. I needed to come full circle, though: here were my initial role models (serial killers) not fitting into gay culture stereotypes, but I had blocked them out only to replace them with Village People ones! I think it’s similar to rejecting your father as a role model – only to search for his type in a leather bar…

JK: Did I ever mention that my favourite university essay I ever wrote was for a gender studies subject and examined the cultural meanings of the figure of the gay male serial killer??! The essay was called… When Homosexuals Attack.

MK: No. Wow, I’d love you to email that to me. I’ve always thought it’s a bit odd that hetero porn has been anti-violence recently (though not necessarily anti-dominance or control), whereas homo porn has been fine with more extreme stuff, even simulated rape scenes. Do you think this is a product of so many years of negative role models? And what about Cruising? Did you ever see that? So sexy but, again, so negative – which makes me wonder about this nature versus nurture stuff and whether my preference for hairy men bigger than myself is because of my DNA makeup or the hot dangerous butchers that I’ve somehow confused with future boyfriends.