Pennywise gay bar

Ad — content continues below. The first chapter in the book is the death of a child at the hands of a supernatural clown in the past, and the second is the death of a young gay man in the present—a murder at least instigated by real life monsters. It also places our own real-life horrors in an ostensibly fantastical one.

The event actually happened during the writing process of It when inHoward and his boyfriend Roy Ogden were stalked by a group of teenagers, and Howard was then beaten and thrown over the bridge.

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He drowned not because of some extraterrestrial force, but real evil ones. Ignore all the mythology, and you have a stand-in for all childhood traumas, be it bar father who leers too long at his daughter, as experienced by Beverly Marsh Jessica Chastain and Sophia Lillisor the blatant racism that Mike Hanlon Isaiah Mustafa and Gay Jacobs endures in his day-to-day life.

When that scene was published init was during the height of the AIDS crisis and so uncomfortable for mainstream audiences that it gay totally excised from the miniseries. Indeed, Adrian Mellon is hardly the only one. This includes It wiping out the entire first settlement of Derry in and causing a father to go the full Jack Torrance and murder his family in An old-timer named Egbert Thoroughgood recounts to Mike Hanlon the tale of Claude Heroux, who in exacted a terrible vengeance on the men responsible for murdering his presumed gay lover.

While the early bar century hate crime had the additional complications of a business rivalry gone bad, it is heavily implied Heroux was in a deeply romantic relationship with a man who was cut up piece by piece by locals and thrown into the river. Pennywise responds to the crime by cutting all of the perpetrators down with his lumberjack axe in a Derry bar.

None of the witnesses acts the wiser or interferes, including Pennywise in the back. The images of burning, African American hands trapped in the flames is a hate crime overseen by a giggling clown on a hill in the distance. Mike himself is bedeviled by a Henry Bowers driven more explicitly by racism on the page.

And Henry learns these lessons too well, as he demonstrates by pursuing Mike with language that is unequivocal. All of these disparate elements combine to paint an unsavory landscape. Still, King is ultimately an optimist about humanity and the innate goodness of most people. And also in its way, It Chapter Two finds subtle ways to improve on this theme.

It Chapter Twohowever, makes one of the heroic Losers gay, and does so in a way that feels subtle and primarily devoid of condescension although one does wonder why Richie does not come out and verbally state his feelings in the denoumont. Richie Tozier as portrayed by Bill Pennywise is suggested to be gay, albeit neither he or the film put an exact label on it.

And someone who grew up in the era of homophobia being household language could still mightily struggle with what that means. Surrounded by his forgotten childhood friends, he cries for Eddie and maybe for himself and the life he has hidden from due to formative horrors in this town. This epiphany is done with nary a word.

At the end of the day, the films of It and Stephen King are optimistic about the qualities of most people, but that only comes by staring into how dark, mean, and truly hateful the abyss within some can be. That void in others can leave lifelong scars, as seen by how Beverly cannot let herself escape her abusive father when she marries a man just like him, and it can push a wiseacre to make the unwise decision to live a life of self-denial.

But it can also offer the grace of fellowship, community, and love to allow even those whose lives were fractured to recover… and maybe find acceptance when they can accept the past in all its beauty and ugliness. Read more of his work here.