Even if you’ve never seen the 1983 cult classic slasher film Sleepaway Camp, you’re likely familiar with its iconic images of male baseball jocks wearing crop tops and booty shorts. And you might already know its infamous twist ending. It’s almost impossible to talk about the film without spoiling its final moments, and it’s hard to imagine  the film would be remembered by anyone besides genre diehards without it.

Sleepaway Camp’s apparent final girl, Angela and the slasher that has been terrorizing Camp Arawak are one in the same. Angela also has a penis. We learn both truths at the same time. Two of the surviving camp counselors discover a naked Angela on a lakeside beach cradling the severed head of her former love interest, Paul. When caught, she stands naked and bloody, flashes the two an uncanny open mouth grin and utters an inhuman mix of groans and hisses. The final shots are admittedly unsettling, but this has very little to do with Angela’s genitalia. There is simply something inescapably eerie about Angela’s frozen-still body and her slack-jawed facial expression that appears both delighted and shocked at the idea of being caught. Director Robert Hiltzik’s staging and actress Felissa Rose’s physical performance create an instantly iconic horror image, and it’s hard to imagine that Sleepaway Camp, even with its gender reveal twist intact, would’ve been remembered at all without it.

Yet, Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp’s script doesn’t seem to be on the same page as his directing. Instead of reacting to the fact that Angela has transformed into a seemingly demonic creature who is covered in the blood of a decapitated teen boy, the characters are clearly more scared by Angela’s penis. “Oh my god, she’s a boy!” remarks Ronnie Angelo, one of the surviving camp counselors. Girldick is always the most terrifying thing imaginable.

This dissonance regarding queerness abounds in Sleepaway Camp. Despite anxiety about queer gender and sexuality playing a central role in the film’s overarching plot, it’s ultimately the cisgender and heterosexual society that the characters exist in that creates most of the film’s conflict. Sleepaway Camp is terrified of queerness and dangerously links gender dysphoria and internalized homophobia as precursors to violent psychopathy, but it’s also a movie that seems to despise straight people, whether that’s intentional or not.

You can trace this dichotomy back to the movie’s opening moments. Angela and her brother Peter join their father, John, and another man, Lenny, on a boating trip on a nearby lake. While the film doesn’t make it immediately apparent, we eventually learn that John and Lenny are boyfriends. Their briefly depicted interactions are casually kind, and Angela and Peter are clearly comfortable with Lenny’s presence on a family trip. For all its initial ambiguity, Sleepaway Camp opens with a healthy depiction of queer domesticity. But then a group of rough housing straight teens collide their motorboat into Angela’s family. John is killed and so is one of the two children while Lenny watches in horror from the shore. The surviving child is sent to live with John’s sister, Martha, and her son, Ricky, and Lenny disappears from the narrative.

I’m vague about this child’s identity because this is where a lot of the meat of Sleepaway Camp’s twist rests. It turns out the Angela we follow for much of the film isn’t the original Angela, who was killed in the prologue’s boating accident. Peter was the actual surviving child and Martha, a deeply deranged woman with some sort of vague medical degree, saw no point in being the guardian of two boys, purposefully raising Peter under the false identity of Angela ever since.

It’s for this reason that parsing Angela/Peter’s actual gender identity has been a subject of debate for over 40 years now. I’ve seen critics, cis and trans, come down on both sides of the debate. In the strictest of readings, Peter appears to have been a cisgender boy that was subjected to years of psychological manipulation and abuse until he accepted the identity of his deceased sister, a Norman Bates-style scenario but if his mother forcibly created his dissociative identity disorder. This reading is complicated by the fact that in Sleepaway Camp’s sequels, Angela continues to identify as a woman and is even implied to have undergone some form of medical transition. For what it’s worth, Angela’s actress Felissa Rose seems to believe that the character is genuinely trans, but it’s still a knotty thorny mess that’s impossible to really untangle.

Regardless, Sleepaway Camp clearly positions Angela’s (or Peter’s) gender as the catalyst for a violent psychosis that leads to her being a killer, which is potentially pushed over the edge by her burgeoning sexuality. Ricky’s friend Paul, the boy whom she will eventually decapitate, shows interest in her almost immediately after she arrives at Camp Arawak. His initial flirting is what finally gets her to break her shy, silent demeanor and speak for the first time in the film. Angela does genuinely seem to like Paul, and she responds to his initially innocent adolescent flirting with quiet appreciation and excitement. However, during their first kiss, Angela undergoes a strange dreamlike vision of her father and Lenny experiencing a tender moment in bed together, which is shocking enough to cause her to break away from Paul and run away into the night. The only reading of this that really makes sense in the context of the film is that Angela (or Peter, again it’s confusing) suffers from some form of internalized homophobia and was actually less comfortable with her father’s sexuality than initially appeared.

With the film’s twist in mind, Sleepaway Camp seems to want us to view this scene as a boy panicking over the idea of kissing another boy, but this also doesn’t really click with Angela’s characterization in the rest of the film. She seems to genuinely like Paul and is angered and heartbroken when he cheats on her with one of the more sexually open campers. So, is it internalized homophobia? Is Angela just still traumatized over the thought of her father’s death? There’s no real way of knowing. In order for the film to keep its big twist intact, Hiltzik never allows Angela to speak for herself. We are left to interpret through the few tools the text gives us, but the end result is roughly the same. Angela/Peter’s identity and history are inescapably wrapped up in queerness, and this is enough reason for her to turn into a serial killer.

Yet, even as Sleepaway Camp seemingly wants to vilify queer people, the actual events of the film say otherwise. Lenny and John’s relationship is never shown to be anything but loving and kind, which is in stark contrast to how its straight characters act and behave. The other campers, both boys and girls, quickly turn on Angela simply because of her quiet nature. While Ricky, who is unflappably loyal to his little cousin, is sometimes able to protect her from the harassment and abuse, he’s not always able to catch or overpower those that have made it their mission to other a girl they despise simply for being different. And sure, maybe Angela’s retaliations are exactly proportionate to her mistreatment, but you can hardly blame her for wanting some kind of revenge.

Paul’s rejection of Angela feels particularly damning considering his initial playful tenderness was such a welcome respite for her. Their courtship is the closest thing we get to a consensual romantic relationship depicted in the film, but it still goes sour as soon as Paul wants to push things farther physically than Angela is comfortable with. The fact that he almost immediately hooks up with one of Angela’s bullies is salt in the wound.

Multiple members of the camp staff are also shown to be sexual predators, including Angela’s first victim, the head cook Artie. Artie is first introduced leering at the underage girls who have flocked to camp, and he even attempts to rape Angela before she gets her revenge and pours a vat of kitchen grease on him. The camp’s owner, Mike, regularly sleeps with his employees and some of the older campers, including one of the girls who has made it her mission to torment Angela. He also almost immediately suspects Ricky of being the actual killer simply because of his adamant defense of Angela and even attempts to murder him after the body count rises.

Sleepaway Camp depicts heterosexual desire, particularly from men, as being predatory, transactional, cruel, and destructive. You can almost argue the film itself is at times sympathetic towards queer people for having to exist in a cishetero dominated society. Almost every step of Angela’s life has been violently impacted by the reckless desires of straight people. A straight couple’s behavior killed her father and sibling. Her presumably straight aunt’s shallow commodification of children’s genders robbed her of agency and identity. The straight campers bully her simply for being quiet and different. She’s almost raped by a straight member of the staff. Her straight boyfriend dumps her for daring to have boundaries about her body. And still, Sleepaway Camp insists it’s her proximity to queerness that is monstrous in the end. Witnessing her father in a loving relationship with another man haunts her, and the sight of her genitalia is more monstrous to the other characters than her actual acts of violence.

Watching Sleepaway Camp feels like witnessing someone on the verge of a breakthrough, putting together the right observations and criticisms but somehow still coming to the worst conclusion possible. It’s both a campy queer horror romp that’s ripe for reclamation but also inescapably harmful and damaging. Like other works of regressive patriarchal horror such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I hate Sleepaway Camp for what it says, but I’m still fascinated by it in equal measure. And yes, that last shot in all its transphobic glory, is still one of the most memorable conclusions to a slasher film in history.

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Would I Be Wrong To Voice My Harry Potter Discomfort Around JK Rowling’s Transphobia To My Family?

Q

I’m non-binary and lesbian, and pretty leftist; but my niece is into Harry Potter, which, of course, makes me uncomfortable because of the author’s… fascist leanings. Actually, most of my family are HP fans or read Rowling’s works, in spite of the fact me, and two of my cousins, are queer. Whenever they, or my niece, bring up the series, I am forced to bite my tongue and say nothing about how buying merch is funding transphobic hate laws and pushing back gay rights; not to mention the discomfort I get seeing HP merch, or my niece’s new copy of The Philosopher’s Stone. Would I be wrong to voice my discomfort to my family?

A

Summer: Ugh, I’m so glad Harry Potter was never a cultural phenomenon in South Africa the way it was overseas. The fallout sounds awful.

And no, I don’t think you’d be ‘wrong’ to voice your discomfort to the family. I might be inclined to ask you to keep the peace if the content of that fictional universe was disquieting to you. Like being with Game of Thrones fans if you have strong opinions about its depictions of various topics. The fact is, one of the main issues with Harry Potter in 2025 is that supporting the franchise isn’t a statement about fictional worlds. It’s about a very real person’s very tangible efforts against social progress and inclusion. Those efforts are mainly aimed at trans people, but others too. She’s made some choice remarks about thin people and models in advertising.

The principal reason she has sufficient wealth and influence to conduct her campaign against a host of people (including… cisgender boxers?) is Harry Potter. The Harry Potter media franchise funds these efforts and her chosen lifestyle. A lifestyle which, to describe in an old-school fashion, I tolerate but don’t respect or believe in. Much is said about Rowling and how her life relates to the literary concept of Death of the Author. But my take-away is that she is one of the most succinct cases wherein supporting a media empire directly contributes to a definitive voice in the marginalization of queer people with far-reaching consequences.

I leave it to my fellow authors to cast their input and discuss how you can talk to them about this. All I can say is you would not be wrong to voice your distaste. If you believe in ‘keeping the peace’, it’s also not wrong for you to keep quiet and avoid the topic. But I have a feeling you’re already sick of doing that.

Nico: I think you can have a conversation with your family about this, yes. It’s good to have hard conversations with family. However, as we’ve seen again and again, not everyone is willing to give up the things they find pleasurable for ethical reasons, so don’t be surprised if you receive pushback. Do you have friends who feel the same way you do who you can commiserate with, or who you can plan out how you’re going to go about saying this with, first? It would be good to have someone who you know you can go to in order to vent your frustrations should your family be, well, frustrating. As Summer said above, their financial support of this franchise goes directly toward funding the furtherance of hateful ideology, and so it goes well beyond something like even enjoying the work of an author who is a bad person or being a fan of a franchise with content you find odious — it’s a lot more like donating directly to anti-trans lobbying efforts, and that’s worth discussing with the people who you care about.

Riese: I think you should talk to them yes! I feel like they’re likely to resist if Harry Potter is often central to a child’s interest in reading, and Rowling’s politics probably feel too abstract in the face of this universe that their children are so engaged with — but it’s still worth a try! If they won’t budge, try some middle grounds: only buying Harry Potter books second-hand, foregoing merch… but if they must merch, they should get it from an independently owned store with politically aligned owners, or pledge to donate the amount they spent on merch to a trans-focused non profit or mutual aid fund.

I’m not actually sure that it even matters that you or your cousins are queer, you know? You absolutely should speak to them about how it feels to be nonbinary and witness JK Rowling’s hatred towards trans people, I think it will resonate and help you get through to them. But I do think at the end of the day, JK Rowling’s fascist hate-fueled campaign towards trans people should concern all of us, including your family, because we are all human, and trans people are human. Because I think this conversation is likely to become an opening to talking to them about some of the shit trans people are currently dealing with politically here and in the UK, and that’s an opportunity to teach them about something they hopefully will care about not just because it affects you but because it’s the ethically sound position to hold.

My Friend In The Poly/Kink Scene Makes Me Feel Boring

Q

I am in a relatively new relationship (1 year and going strong), and it has been really positive for me. Prior to this relationship, I had been in pretty tumultuous and intense open and poly dynamics for the past five years. While monogamish, this relationship with my girlfriend has been way more stable and predictable and…well, boring! But I like it : ) We’re moving in together, which I’ve never done before, and I’m really excited about our future and present together. She has very Mr. Darcy vibes—because she’s quiet, I initially didn’t see her as romantic or fun, but now I literally want to hang out with her all the time.

My question has to do with one of my friends. When I was in these other poly and dating dynamics, and she in her own, she and I would talk a lot about our relationship issues. She’s big in the poly and kink scene and through our friendship I experienced more of those communities, and it was great! We would always have tons to tell each other about our most recent trysts or longings. Since my gf and I have gotten more serious, I just…haven’t had as much to share! We hang out, we have sex, we eat noodles, and that’s sort of it. And on top of that, I feel protective of my relationship and any judgment from my friend. For example, the sex I have with my gf is amazing, but it’s very different from the more explosive kind I had in past relationships. I chalk that up to the fact that all relationships are different and I think we have a more stable dynamic, but my friend has expressed multiple times that she thinks people should be obsessed with and fiending for their partners. So I think she views my pretty non-dramatic feelings for my partner with suspicion.

Anyways, I’m sad! I feel like my friend thinks I’m boring now that I’m not in the poly scene. Idk why I need her approval so much, but apparently it matters to me. And I also feel like she hasn’t put a lot of effort into meeting me where I’m at. And at my lowest moments I doubt myself and worry maybe she sees something that I don’t. I don’t really know any to talk to her about it but I also don’t know how to proceed.

A

Summer: Boring is not necessarily bad. Boring can be safe, stable, and as you prefer: predictable. The ideal relationship for you is the one that fits your needs and personhood at a given time. It sounds like this one fits you and the uncertainty is external. An externality born out of ideas of what an exciting and proper queer life looks like. There isn’t a right way to date queer, nor is it sustainable to build a life wholly on intensity and energy.

Most people reach a life stage where smooth and predictable is a better option. It’s often linked to permanent employment, having kids, marriage, and so forth. Some people hit that stage earlier than others. Some people never hit that stage and resolve to leave smoking skidmarks en route to the grave. I don’t think your friend is seeing something that you don’t, causing her to have misgivings about your relationship. I think she’s completely failed to see what you do. Which is the happiness and comfort you’ve found. Like, I just don’t see what’s wrong with your relationship. It sounds lovely. It may not be the shape of the relationship I want. It won’t be the one a freshly bisexual party sophomore party animal wants. As long as it’s what you want.

Nico: I would hope that your friend would be your friend even if you didn’t have entertaining gossip to share. You don’t both have to be the chaotic friend always embarking on new relationships and adventures. In fact, some of the sweetest friendship dynamics are made up of people who lead wildly different lives. If your friend thinks you’re boring because you aren’t showing up with new poly / kink scene news to share anymore, and you all can’t find something else that’s entertaining to do together, then I am not sure how good of a friend they are. I really hope you’ll ask yourself more about why you care about impressing a friend who isn’t trying to meet you where you are because I am willing to bet that if the situation were reversed, you’d probably be happy for them if they’re happy, right?

Now, to speak to the “boring” and “stable” aspects of your current relationship. Less stable relationships of any kind, not just kinky ones, can lead to more explosive sex. If you feel safe, stable, and certain, then maybe you aren’t “fiending” for your partner constantly in the same way you might have when you didn’t have this same level of security, because sometimes that fiending can also be a sign that you’re seeking more connection and security through sex. There’s nothing wrong with having explosive sex with multiple partners, engaging in the kink scene, but neither is there with not doing those things.

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