Joe Vallese

It Came from the Closet is an anthology Vallese edited rather than wrote, in which queer and trans writers take a horror film each and work out what it did to them: possession as puberty, the final girl, the monster who is coded as gay and then killed for it. The pieces are memoir as much as criticism and several of them argue with the films they love. He teaches writing in New York and has published essays on adoption, family and the same territory. It is one of the few books to treat that audience as the subject rather than as a footnote.