For most of its history, the zombie was a body that society marked as dangerous: feared, quarantined, and treated as a threat to everyone nearby. For many gay men, that description is not fiction. In the 21st century, however, the roles have reversed. From a queer perspective, the zombie is no longer the outcast. The zombie is the mob.
The link between gay men and the zombie began with AIDS. Infection films of the 1980s and 1990s were released while the epidemic was killing gay men and the public was calling for quarantine and testing. Critics have read the films' fear of contagion, and of people visibly marked by it, as a reflection of that panic. Harry Benshoff's Monsters in the Closet (1997) documents how horror monsters have long served as stand-ins for homosexuality.
Some filmmakers made the link explicit. Bruce LaBruce's Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010) present the zombie as a gay man who is alienated and treated as diseased. The BBC series In the Flesh (2013–2014) took the idea further. Its recovered zombies take daily medication, wear makeup to pass as living, and are rejected by their families and their town. Its gay lead, Kieren Walker, faces the same pressures as a closeted man.
That is the irony. The people who once treated gay men as a contagion now fit the zombie's description more closely than anyone. Much of the conservative straight community moves as a single body. It repeats the same slogans and turns on anyone who does not conform. It shows little capacity for independent thought.
Yeon Sang-ho's Colony (2026) makes this dynamic visible. Its infected share a single hive mind, and the crowd acts as one. In my collage, two men stand apart from that crowd. They are individuals set against a mob, and the mob is the danger.
Two icons from my recurring visual vocabulary frame the scene. The Blue Moon, in the upper left, stands for longing and witness. The Jupiter 3 spacecraft, at the right, stands for freedom, escape, and witness. Both icons share the role of witness. They record what happens to the two men, and they show that the men's longing and their way out exist outside the mob.
