Holly Allen presented information associated with her upcoming paper, “I May be the Next: Fear of the Queer in ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’,” slated for publication in the 2024 issue of Lovecraft Annual. This presentation took place in late March of 2024 at the inaugural Society for the Study of the American Gothic Symposium in Salem, MA. Allen’s presentation highlighted the fact that American author H. P. Lovecraft’s work has been analyzed in a variety of ways with a variety of foci and yet one topic that receives far less attention is that of the queer. Regardless of this
omission in research, Allen noted that Lovecraft’s work includes tales of body-switching between genders, peculiar sexually-charged descriptive language, and men with extremely close bonds. Much of this presentation focused on the breaking down the concept of the “Thing” with the aid of Kantian philosophy and Guy Hocquenghem’s definition of the sexual other, employing both Kantian logic and early queer theory.