Three Men on a Boat by Jen Corrigan – extract from It Came From the Closet
Posted on June 19, 2025
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jaws, we’re sharing an extract from It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror.
Three Men on a Boat by Jen Corrigan
Jaws
IβVE KNOWN THAT I like women since my Sporty Spice obsession at age six, but the feeling was one Iβd mostly ignored until I watched Jaws. My dad had given me a Target gift card for my twelfth birthday, and while shopping for my own present, I was immediately attracted to the blue, metallic sheen of the double-VHS 25th Anniversary Collectorβs Edition. The cover depicted the classic image: a blond woman swimming naked, an enormous mouth of teeth reaching up from the depths, the name of the film above in blaring red letters. It seemed scary, dangerous, and a bit sexy. I bought it and watched it perched on the edge of my bed. I was entranced, enamored with the elusiveness of the shark, how you couldnβt always see it, but you knew it was there by the camera angles and the pulsing thrum of John Williamsβs iconic score. I laughed at the jokes and tensed up at the scary parts, shrieking when Ben Gardnerβs head rolled out of the broken hull of his boat. I was filled with so many feelings that my young body almost couldnβt handle it. One of those feelings was a sexy feeling, a breathless tingle that squirmed around in my abdomen, a trembling that excited me as I watched Brody, Hooper, and Quint together on the boat.
We donβt talk about Jaws as a queer film, but it is. At least, I like to read it as one. Is there really anything gayer than three men on a boat? The thing about Jaws is that itβs only queer if youβre looking for it. To mainstream audiences, queerness is most easily tolerated when masked with straight performance, or an appearance that could be coded as straight. Queer films like Fried Green Tomatoes are widely enjoyed even by more conservative viewers, in part because they can be read as straight should the audience prefer that safer reading. On the flip side, Jaws is a straight film that can be read as queer, which is the reading that I choose.
People donβt read me as queer either. I have never come out to my family. At least, not to everyone. My brother knows, and when I told my father when I was a teenager, he said, βOkay,β and we never spoke of it again. Coming out to my grandmother, now dead, was always out of the question. She told me this more than a decade ago; I donβt remember what triggered it, but she phrased it casually while I drove her home from grocery shopping, the backseat brimming with food. The whoosh of the air conditioning flapped the plastic bags, fwip fwip fwip. The lettuce wilted in the heat, and the ice cream carton sweat icy droplets.
βBeing gay is fine. A person canβt help that. But being bisexual is gross. Just pick one! You shouldnβt double-dip.β She said this brazenly, definitively. I imagined myself as a broccoli floret, dunked twice into a tub of French onion dip at a party.
βWhy is that gross?β I asked. I pressed the accelerator, and my grandmother grabbed the door instinctively. The car hugged the curves of the highway.
βWould you want to have sex with a man who has had sex with another man?β
I didnβt answer. I couldnβt answer. At that age, I had begun to see queerness everywhere, in myself and in others, in real life, in books, in movies. Even when it wasnβt there, I searched for it, as if finding it would help me decode the puzzle of my own sexuality. And sometimes I found it in places where most people didnβt look for it, like in hyper-masculine monster movies like Jaws.
I never came out to my grandmother, but I didnβt need to. All my partners who stuck around long enough to be invited to Thanksgiving dinner have so far been cis men. Iβm able to hide my queerness, a privilege that is convenient and gives me a safeness that some other queer identities donβt have. Yet, there is a guilt nestled underneath that relief, a sense that I am not really participating. By not coming out and declaring myself, I have the clinging feeling that Iβm not being queer enough.
I used to present more queer. When I was in junior high, I had a shag haircut and wore an oversized pink-and-purple-plaid flannel every other day. A friend at the time, who was never very nice, told me I looked like a lesbian lumberjack. I knew it was supposed to be an insult, but I didnβt know which part was supposed to be the insulting bit. Iβm not sure what I said back, or if I said anything. I wore my flannel a few more times, then shoved it far back in my closet. I let my hair grow out.
Around this same time, I went clothes shopping with my grandmother, an activity I loathed. We walked past a bunch of elaborate formal dresses on display for the prom season. I touched one, seafoam green and voluminous, the bodice bedazzled with beads that glinted like glass shards. The fake jewels itched against my skin.
βGross,β I said. I was self-righteous in that way most thirteen-year-olds are. βWhen I go to prom, Iβm not going to wear a dress. Iβm going to wear a sensible tuxedo.β
βYou want everyone to think youβre a lesbian?β my grandmother sneered. βBecause thatβs what theyβll think.β She said this as if it was the worst possible thing anyone could think of me. Being a lesbian was not a sin, but looking like one was.
The joy of Jaws is that itβs still queer even though the men donβt look queer to an outside eye. But I see it when I observe their interactions. My queer reading stems from two aspects of covert communication: the gaze and innocuous touch, both classic indicators of desire. Historically, queer interactions were dangerous, and, really, still are. The looks and touches between the men signal an intimacy that is easy to overlook, particularly when the touches occur in jest; in the midst of arguing with Mayor Vaughn about the seriousness of the situation, Hooper places his hands on Brodyβs stomach and pats him to punctuate his irritation. Itβs easy to orchestrate these touches so they seem natural, because the characters are often standing in close proximity to one another. Director Steven Spielberg frames the water and the characters in the same way, very close. The technique results in their whole bodies and faces taking up the screen. The distance between them seems negligible and the possibilities endless.
It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallese and a foreword by Kirsty Logan.
The essays in It Came from the Closet bring the particulars of the writersβ own experiences, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, or both, to their unique interpretations of horror films from Jaws to Jenniferβs Body.
Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously.
