Joe Vallese
Joe Vallese previously edited the anthology What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey for Word Riot Press in 2010. His creative and pop culture writing has been featured in Bomb, VICE, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, North American Review, Narrative Northeast, VIA: Voices In Italian-Americana, among other journals. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a notable in Best American Essays for his personal essay “Blood, Brothers," which dealt with themes of queerness and horror, and his queer horror screenplay, Intended, has been a finalist in several industry competitions. Joe currently teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, and prior to that appointment, he was a core administrator and faculty for Bard College’s Bard Prison Initiative. Joe holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, an MAT in Literature and Writing and a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bard College.
Q: How did the idea for the IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET anthology come about? Why were these themes of queerness and horror important for you to dive into in this way?
Simply put, it's the book I always wanted to read that did not yet exist. There's a lot of wonderful scholarly and critical work that queers the horror genre, and I'm grateful that it exists and persists, but I'm a lover of the personal essay—I write it, I teach it, I read it voraciously—and dreamed of a book where queer and trans writers considered their identity and their experiences through the lens of a particular horror film. It was such a specific want that it only made sense for me to eventually get organized and propose and create it myself. I had once considered writing an entire book of essays about myself and horror, but that wouldn't have accomplished my desire to really engage and sustain a dialogue with the queer community about horror. I'm so in love with the final product and it still feels somewhat surreal that it came together as it did.
In terms of the intersection between queerness and horror more broadly, I think it comes down to subversiveness. Subversiveness is really the beating, bloody heart of horror, and I think that resonates with queer communities because, at the risk of being reductive, subversiveness is also at the heart of queerness. We've had to be a subversive people in order to even be a people, to survive and thrive. Although things are moving in the right direction, progress is scarily slow and the efforts to villainize queer people always creep back up—no group understands this more right now globally than the trans community—and horror has consistently been a genre that holds space for LGBTQIAP+ folks to read themselves into the films, to identify with and be empowered by the monster or the final girl. Our identities and our realities remain extremely complex, even as we grow in visible numbers, and I predict horror will be the genre that most reflects that progress over time because horror is where cinematic risk seems most often rewarded.
These Sapphic Stories Book Club author profiles are compiled by founder Aliya Bree Hall. Aliya is a freelance journalist and author who founded the book club in 2021 to uplift sapphic stories and celebrate LGBTQ+ authors. This excerpt has been lifted from an interview Aliya conducted with our October 2024 author. You can read the full Q&A by joining the book club.
