Coming out of the Coffin : Queer Historicity and Occult Sexualities on ABC s Dark Shadows

Abstract

This essay investigates a significant illustration of American network television's mediation of queer occultism during the 1960s and 1970s through sociocultural, industrial, and textual analyses of ABC's Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. During and even after its original run between June 1966 and April 1971, I argue that Dark Shadows' (oc)cult popularity was reinforced by the series' narrative journeys into fantastic pasts that assembled a genealogy of supernatural "otherness." By fashioning what Scott Bravmann has called such "queer fictions of the past," meditations on the non-normative politics and pleasures of historical discourses, Dark Shadows introduced, and even made palatable, queer occultism to mainstream broadcast audiences.