Stephen King Reading Journal 🎈 Richie Tozier, Pennywise, and Queer Readings of IT (Part 3)

Welcome back to Scare Me! Today, we’re continuing our It read along. There are spoilers ahead, but we won’t cover anything beyond the novel’s midpoint (page 550-ish). To revisit previous entries in this series, click to read part one and part two!

Picture this: It’s a bright summer day in 1958. School’s out, and kids flock to the parks and the cinema as the sun-baked afternoons creep by. Friends split off into cliques and gangs, roaming the streets. Everyone is looking for ways to experience the season’s fleeting freedom.

But not everyone has a friend group. Ben Hanscom is new in town and still finding his social footing. Beverly Marsh is ostracized by most girls, who are repulsed by her scabbed knees and her cigarettes and her family’s poverty.

That’s finally, mercifully about to change.

In this second section of It, Ben and Beverly find their way into the Losers Club, joining Bill, Stan, Richie, and Eddie for monster matinees and long afternoons in the Barrens, an abandoned gully where the town’s wastewater drains away. The group is still missing its final member: our narrator, Mike Hanlon, won’t complete the Losers Club until more than 600 pages have elapsed. But we’re starting to see the Losers gel into a comfortable alliance together.

Little by little, they’re piecing together the friendship that will catapult them into the next phase of their lives.

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In the present day, the adult Losers find their way back Derry. They’ve agreed to reunite at Jade of the Orient, the town’s Chinese restaurant. As they reconnect, strangely vivid memories begin to resurface. It’s shocking; how could they have forgotten so much? But Mike, who never left Derry and so remembers everything, tells them not to rush. They’ll remember when they need to, as their traumatized brains allow it—and not a moment sooner.

As the Losers Club swap stories and split up to rediscover Derry, their everyday lives are close behind. Beverly’s abusive husband is hot on her heels; terrifying bully Henry Bowers feels Derry’s attraction from the facility where he’s been incarcerated; and Pennywise begins to manifest in terrifying, sanity-shaking ways. (More on that in the next installment of this series.) Bill’s wife, beautiful and tragic Audra, also bravely blows up her career and follows her husband into peril.

Of these many narrative threads, Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier’s story made me stop short. I was startled when Richie mentioned his ex-girlfriend, Sandy. “The year after I moved out to California I met a girl, and we fell pretty hard for each other,” Richie tells the other Losers. “Came really close to getting married twice.”

There would have been nothing unusual about this—except I was convinced that King introduced Richie as a gay man. Suddenly uncertain, I flipped back and scanned Richie’s introduction again.

There is absolutely zero mention of Richie being gay.

Feeling insane, I turned to Google to see if or why I hallucinated this information—and discovered many, many articles and social media conversations about Richie’s sexuality. Unfortunately, most are disgruntled reactions to director Andy Muschietti’s 2019 adaptation, which focuses on the Losers’ adulthood and explicitly confirms a relationship between Richie and Eddie.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, King confirmed that he didn’t intentionally write Richie, or any of the Losers, as queer characters—but he was supportive of the 2019 movie’s liberties.

“It’s one of those things that’s kind of genius,” King said of Muschietti’s decision to begin the movie with the homophobic hate crime against Adrian Mellon and end it with confirmation of Richie and Eddie’s romance. “It comes full circle.”

However: I also found this masterpiece of a Reddit post in which a bisexual reader teases out the subtextual subtleties that stood out to them throughout each section of the book. (It did spoil a character death for me, so read with caution!) The post details many specific moments throughout the novel, but most come later than the section we’re discussing. It’s definitely worth reading, though, so I recommend either rolling the dice or bookmarking it for later, depending on your tolerance for spoilers.

I’ll highlight just one dimension of the OP’s analysis here, because it’s one that I also arrived at. I read all of Richie’s antics—the voices, the one liners, the crude remarks—as an elaborate smokescreen he throws out to hide his true self. Playground politics are complicated, but they’re also very simple: If Richie is the class clown, that’s his primary identifier. He can’t be known as the queer kid, because he’s already got a role.

(Also, this should go without saying, but Richie’s racist jokes are absolutely not okay, even if he did use them as a mechanism for passing as straight. I’d forgotten until skimming just now that he continues to use his minstrel voice well into the 1980s. Beep-beep, Richie! WTF is wrong with you!)

It’s also worth noting that Pennywise appears to Richie as two very different symbols of stereotypical masculinity. Richie first encounters Pennywise after narrowly escaping Henry Bowers and his friends. In a moment of textbook megalophobia, Derry’s giant statue of Paul Bunyan comes to life and attacks Richie. Bunyan is canonically a lumberjack who’s seven feet tall, with a booming voice that shook branches from trees. It’s hard to imagine a manlier man than Paul.

This scene is so weird and honestly did not work for me. I was able to accept it after later learning that Bangor genuinely has a Paul Bunyan statue:

Richie escapes the horrifying colossus unscathed—similar to the way I’m allowing us to escape a 4,000 word tangent into the history of why Bangor has a 3,700 pound, 31-foot-tall steel-framed fiberglass Paul Bunyan statue—but is left feeling rattled.

Richie’s next major encounter with Pennywise occurs in the abandoned house on Neibolt Street. This time, Pennywise shifts into the teenage werewolf the Losers Club recently saw at the movies. The werewolf is always a powerful symbol of transformation, but this version pairs the werewolf’s hairy, muscled body with a high school athlete’s letterman jacket. Pennywise taps into more than just Richie’s fear of the monster; it summons all the terrors that accompany puberty.

As Richie comes of age and reaches sexual maturity, he’s neither a Paul Bunyan nor a muscled football player. He’s a wiseass kid with thick glasses, an equal opportunity flirt, and a collection of stagey voices that prevent anyone from ever getting too close.

Here’s what I believe about literature: Authors only control their novels up to a certain point. After that, it’s up to each reader to bring their perspective and life experiences into the story. Fiction’s magic lies in the kinetic collision of these two forces, and neither side can exist without the other’s energy and attention.

If a story makes you feel or realize something, isn’t that a kind of truth?

Regardless of King’s intention, there was something about Richie that caused recognition to flash within me. That same instinct drove Muschietti’s adaptation, the Reddit poster’s analysis, and every other queer reader who recognized something of themself in Richie.

I understand the uneasiness many of us have with fluidity, ambiguity, or the just plain difficulty of trying to make sense of the world—it’s why I didn’t come out as bisexual to myself until I was well into my late twenties. Similarly, it can be disorienting to think that a novel you feel some ownership over could be an unstable, electric entity that’s read differently by someone else.

But isn’t the world so much more exciting that way?

It Will Be Back in Two Weeks

I’ll return to this series in a couple weeks—if you’re reading along, that will bring us through the end of Part 4. This next stretch of the novel contains what I believe to be the scariest scene of all. Any guesses??

Up Next: An Exclusive Interview With Artist Jared Pike

We have a very exciting interview next week! Artist and designer Jared Pike is best known for his Dream Pools series, which sparked viral liminal space trends, countless memes, and…a cult? I recently hopped on a video call with Jared to learn more about his art practice and what’s been like to watch his Dream Pools take on an internet half-life of their own.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.