There was a horror novel kept behind glass when I visited the Chicago Leather Archives and Museum. Poppy Z. Brite, or Billy Martin, is the author of Exquisite Corpse, a disgusting, heartrending early splatterpunk novel. 

In Exquisite Corpse, “perfect” victim Tran falls in with first one, then two gay serial killers. They destroy him—but lovingly, or maybe I should say, exquisitely. Told from a rotating point of view, the title refers to the acts but also the style of narration. In fact, one of the less remarked upon kinds of horror in Exquisite Corpse is how Tran’s desires and experiences are interpreted, erased, or forgotten by his killers, and by his ex-boyfriend. The novel makes the reader complicit in Tran’s annihilation.

Brite / Martin was a public figure in the horror writing community primarily from 1992 to the mid 2000s, although his writing career spans from his childhood to the current day. One of Martin’s earliest published works is a recording of him as a child, telling his story, “The Bad Mouse.” At time of writing, he is currently on Patreon with less than 300 paid members.

He has been vocal about being a gay man since he became a public figure, although he was rarely received as one. One can argue that the 1990s didn’t have the best language to present oneself as a gay trans man. For context, the expectation of transitioning into heterosexuality was part of medical requirements to access trans healthcare. Lou Sullivan was (in)famously denied care by Stanford University’s Gender Dysphoria Program because he was vocally and fabulously a gay man. Upon learning that he was HIV positive, Sullivan penned a letter to the director of the program: “So, Judy, even though your program did not believe I could live as a gay man, it looks like I’m going to die like one.” He died in 1991.

Poppy Z. Brite / Billy Martin began publishing fiction in 1992. In a 1998 essay, “Enough Rope,” which has been on his website since at least 2001 (according to the Wayback Machine), he talks about the way his identity has been erased and contested. In it, he mentions writing for a community that he discovered doesn’t seem to exist. I see clear comparisons to other gay trans writers, like Sullivan, who wondered in his diaries if he was the only person to feel this way. These words burn in my throat because I, too, have felt that way.

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I came out as transgender at age 14, while living in Lafayette, Louisiana. The year was 2011. The adults in my life were not affirming. Mostly, they thought it was an embarrassing phase. Which is also to say, they didn’t believe me, and my continued insistence (read here: existence) caused these adults to experience shame, anger, and a desire to punish, and otherwise stop, this source of tension (i.e., me). Subsequently, I spent a lot of stolen, unsupervised time with other queer kids in the south, including in New Orleans, Martin’s hometown and the setting of Exquisite Corpse.

It’s funny to think I might have passed Martin on the street without ever knowing, even as I was discovering an affection—even a need—for horror fiction, as well as a need to find other trans people. Visibility and community came with violence—from little erasures to a man trying to mow us down with his pickup just outside of Biloxi, Mississippi—and I craved fiction that made me feel less alone. Fictional worlds where everything was hopeful didn’t map onto my reality. I was, already, exhausted by cisgender books that mostly served to critique or police my expression. I wanted to read things by people who were like me. I wanted to feel like someone was out there, imagining a world that I could be a part of. 

A world with teeth as well as beauty. I wasn’t looking for happy, fluffy queer places—I knew that the world was dark, and violent. Sometimes your friends, your beloved community, could also be the people who hurt and demean you. I craved fiction that felt what I felt, and that offered a place to feel terrible.

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It would be easy to say that no one had context for a gay transgender man in the 1990s, as most people—including some trans people—have never heard of Lou Sullivan or any trans activists from before the current moment. 1992 was before what is now called the “transgender tipping point” in 2014-2015, although this term has been correctly nuanced and critiqued. I can make the counterpoint that Brite / Martin was being as legible as possible—because he was, consistently, as long as he was a public figure. He used the language of trans academics like Kate Borenstein, and he described himself as, in turns: a gay man, a non-operative transsexual, a gay man who “happens to have been born in a female body this time around,” and as having not yet chosen a gender. He consistently asserted his identity as a gay man in just about every interview I read—because interviewers, too, kept asking the same question about his relationship to men and queerness.

However, it is just true that for most cis people then—and for quite a few cis people now—it was difficult to imagine a gay, transgender man, and harder still to promote his work under such a label. Gay interferes with transgender. Transgender man can sometimes be doubly erased by patriarchal social lenses and feminist social lenses. Patriarchy does not recognize transgender men as men. Feminist social lenses sometimes struggle with understanding that men can experience gendered oppression. For instance, “radical” or “gender critical” feminism’s investment in biological essentialism—a twist on sexism that posits any wrongdoing women do is a result of misdirected patriarchy, that women have no agency and are always victims—harms women, cis as well as trans. And it harms marginalized people who are not women. Other, smarter people than myself have written about radical and “gender critical” feminism’s deep investment in racism and white supremacy. [These links are intended as a starting point.]

It may surprise some cis allies to know that transgender people of any gender experience statistically higher rates of depression than cisgender people, although data about trans people that isn’t related to transition is still scarce. Trans men, like other trans people, also experience high rates of intimate partner violence. Trans masculine-specific infantilization, seen in recent New York Times pieces, the “detransitioner” narrative, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, and many, many other places, is usually not thought to contribute to material violence against trans men. There is little awareness of the connection between these narratives and intimate partner violence, gendered street harassment, and other forms of violent control. Little attention is paid to how these forms of control lead to, for instance, increased HIV risk for trans men. 

There are also some allies who, misguidedly, think that talking about this kind of violence distracts from talking about the material violence faced by trans women, to which I want to respond: there is room for all of us. I mean, wage-gap wise—an iconic measurement of workplace hostility to marginalized people—full time trans women and trans men make less than cisgender people. I’ve bolded the ‘and trans men’ part because I have found that cis, feminist allies are surprised to learn this.

It seems clear to me that at least some of this is well-meaning: affirming transgender men as men means treating them like cisgender men, even if we are not living the lives of cisgender men. There’s some blatant transphobia as well: the old stereotype of trans men as gender traitors, as uniquely invested in patriarchy, as socially benefitting from transition. Some of it, I’m sure, is just a lack of awareness. Some of it might be a mix of the above. 

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Most of the scholarship, even scholarship published after Martin’s 2011 tweet to use he/him pronouns when describing him, misgenders Martin and claims him among women writers. As horror fans who were around in the 1990s know, despite interviewers repeatedly asking him why he wrote about gay men (and his repeated response that he is and was a gay man), he was—and it seems, still is—counted as a woman. He’s included in women’s anthologies, and was subject to misogynist discussion of his body, his actions, his sexual history, and how much he got paid. There’s an old HWA newsletter where two people write in to complain that he and Kathe Koja were included in a list of best-ever horror, which stinks of sexism. (I hope that with the benefit of hindsight, and the obvious staying power of Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse and Skin and Cipher, those letter writers feel silly.)

In “Enough Rope,” Martin talks about experiencing physical violence as well as the violence of erasure. Sara Ahmed, in her essay “Affinity of Hammers,” writes about transfeminist possibilities, calling in other cis feminists to stand with trans women, and mentions this same violence of erasure: “What if you are required to provide evidence of your own existence? When an existence is understood as needing evidence, then a rebuttal is directed not only against evidence but against an existence. An existence can be nullified by the requirement that an existence be evidenced.” The tense feelings she describes are purposefully written to evoke the feelings of being a feminist, which she has written about in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook.

Martin writes eloquently about experiencing these rebuttals, but they still hurt to read. I see these rebuttals, too, in Exquisite Corpse, where Tran is constantly spoken over, his boyfriend erasing and ignoring the harm he did, even planning to write about him after Tran’s death, and his killers denying Tran’s desires unto his material annihilation. I felt them as a teenager without yet reading any of Martin’s words.

It is, to say the least, frustrating that even more than twenty years after Martin’s essay, “Enough Rope,” there seems to be no space for transgender men to write about their experiences of gendered violence without submitting to some level of misgendering. Or at all. In a 1994 interview in Horror, Martin said, “I take shit for all kinds of reasons—because I’m too young; I don’t deserve success if they haven’t gotten it. And since I am twenty-six and female, if I do have success I must have fucked for it. Because I write about homosexuals and freaks and people who take drugs. Because my characters apparently bother some people so much that they would cross the street to avoid them. Because I got more money than someone else. Because some people, believe it or not, genuinely hate my writing!” Critics then decided, publicly and loudly, which of these instances of shit—sexism, homophobia—he was allowed to claim. In “Enough Rope,” he writes about how gay critics have accused him of appropriating experiences of gay-specific violence, as much as horror critics have ignored or been baffled by his assertion of masculinity. In response, he describes the physical violence he experienced in high school in response to being read by others as gay.

Looking back, it seems clear to me that these experiences are related in a uniquely trans way. Not only did he experience misogyny, but that was compounded further by the fact that he was not actually a woman, nor interested in being one. He was seen as a woman out of place by existing in the male-dominated literary scene, as well as not feminist enough by writing about men. There was no awareness of how these various sexist and/or homophobic remarks were compounded by his transness, then or now. And how do we think of his work, and work like his, now? Do we still judge trans writers for writing about, for instance, freaks, sex, and drug use? Does the pushback Billy Martin / Poppy Z. Brite experienced for exploring the affects of participating in queer sexual culture in the 1990s register as a kind of stifling violence? 

What about the physical violence he describes in “Enough Rope?” Or its erasure? I have also been in public situations where I have been pressured to disclose the physical violence I have experienced in order to correct assertions about my identity. I have found, and I wonder if Martin found, that this disclosure is often dismissed as a lie or an exaggeration. 

I think part of this is because of the very pressure to disclose: for audiences invested in the gender-traitor trans masculine narrative, or who view trans men as female interlopers in gay male spaces, it reads as too convenient—oh, now that someone is questioning your identity, you want to talk about experiencing violence? You’re damned if you disclose, and you’re damned if you don’t. In the absence of disclosure, myths and stereotypes abound: cis people will fill in what trans people leave unsaid, built out of their own fears and desires. But you, articulating your own experiences, cannot control the way that your experiences will be pruned, dismissed, or erased. As we see in the disparity between Martin’s articulations in “Enough Rope” and the way both popular and scholarly audiences have discussed him before and after this essay, before and after his countless interviews, trans people’s words are rarely listened to. 

Trans men: where do we count, what experiences are we allowed to talk about? What do we mean—without any thought about how we’re struggling to live. I can understand how we present a frustrating conundrum to transfeminist theorizing, but to be honest, navigating cis women’s feelings about trans men—and trans women—is a tense situation to be in. It was tense when I began writing this essay, and it feels even more tense after November 5th. Let alone January 2025.

But I believe in feminism, I believe in transfeminist coalition, and I believe in all of us learning to care for, even if we don’t always understand, each other.

The only way forward that I can see involves flipping the script. I am exhausted by trying to write about myself perfectly, to walk the tightrope between honest, appeasing, and objective but not too objective. Trans people have and currently are writing about what it is like to be trans, with all the beauty and the ugliness that entails. I want to ask you to listen to us. To believe us.

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If you’re not reading trans horror these days, then you’re not paying attention to the genre: Gretchen Felker-Martin, Allison Rumfitt, Lee Mandelo, Hailey Piper, to name a few. Indie and self-publishing horror spaces have an even wider swath of bloody, dripping, eerie, horror: including incredible comics, essays, and multimedia projects. Ghoulish Books and Tenebrous Press have both released excellent trans body horror anthologies in the past two years. I want to amplify the amazing and expansive article by Bethany Karsten of The Transfemme Review about preserving trans literature. Now, more than ever, preserving trans art—particularly gnarlier, less “respectable” art like horror and erotica—is vital.

But, as Misha Crafts reminds us in their essay, “A Transsexual’s Guide to Horror Cinema,” just as important in what one reads is how one reads. While they use this to discuss trans ways of reading transphobic cinema, I want to turn this idea around to think about reading trans literature. Reading trans work like it is a chore or with innate suspicion means missing what the work is doing, and it means continuing to misunderstand each other. Trans people are required to understand, use, and work around cis experiences, even the work of deeply transphobic writers and scholars. We—cis and trans readers—should extend the same thoughtfulness to trans writers.

Which is to say, I am asking you to be uncomfortable. You as in the reader, cis or trans. I’m not asking you to accept everything a trans person says as gospel—we are a varied group of people, we sometimes disagree, and we sometimes have conflicting needs—but I am asking you to read widely and to be attentive to your own discomfort.

Do you have automatic suspicion of trans womens’ writing? Do you forget about, ignore, or discount the work of trans men? Do you have an emotional reaction to the idea that nonbinary people who are not legible as women also experience gendered violence? And what about nonbinary people who you keep misreading as women, or women-lite? Are you quick to dismiss the work of trans people who are not visually appealing to you, whose gender you don’t understand, whose humor and whose affective approaches are strange to you, who are “rude” or confrontational or who are, otherwise, not socially palatable to you? What are you accidentally, implicitly, believing about trans people? 

How can you break these beliefs down? How can you work to believe us when we talk about our experiences? How can we work to believe each other? How can we work to treat the trans people in our horror communities like we are valuable? 

Because we are. We are valuable as ourselves. We are not political bargaining chips, our work is not “woke” homework, we are not annoyances or embarrassments to this or any other community.

In an interview with Nightmare, Hailey Piper said, “Horror heals because it tells the horror in my heart that I’m seen and understood. I also feel horror is the genre of honesty, and while I wouldn’t call other genres dishonest, I think horror can’t help but be inherently honest.” To be effective, horror must work with our honest fears and our honest desires. Which is to say—horror is an ideal genre for working through bad and difficult feelings. Misha Crafts puts it beautifully: “In the place where fear and desire meet we are able to reckon with things we cannot in any other place. The way that horror refuses easy or obvious morality is not a weakness but a strength.” When horror heals, I don’t think it necessarily feels good. And I think this is a strength of the genre.

When I read “Enough Rope,” I feel less alone, even as I, reading interview after interview after interview referenced in this essay, feel rage. I am, constantly, filled with anger and grief and sorrow. When I read Exquisite Corpse, I am horrified and titillated and comforted and disgusted. All these feelings exist together, and communicate, to me, a particularly trans affective register. Things that feel good also feel bad. It’s complicated. Trans existence is an ongoing negotiation with transphobic society; I am always working, performing, to make myself appear human to others. I resent this performance. Reading, writing horror, and writing about horror, I feel this performance less.

Take us at our word. Take us ugly, take us controversial, take us horrifying. Take us as human; take us as monsters. Take us as we are.