Sinister Sissies

Sinister Sissies sits where true crime meets horror, and it looks at both from the side of gay men and gay history. The format moves between two modes. Some episodes take up a case. Others are billed as double features that set screen titles side by side, as in Double Feature: Dahmer - Monster and Hellraiser (2022) and G'Gay - Aussie Homoerotic Thriller Double Feature. Episodes open on a recurring collage of menacing voice clips before the conversation begins. The case discussions lean hard on context. In the episode on The Last Call Killer, the speakers rebuild New York around 1990. They cover the AIDS epidemic, a crime wave of several murders a day, and violence between gay men. That violence was explained partly as self-hatred and partly as risk-taking by men who assumed they would not live long. They point to police indifference toward the gay community, sometimes rooted in outright prejudice. They also name Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy while discussing how people saw gay men and violence. The film talk is no gentler. Screen versions of real people get checked against the record. A documentary series is faulted for turning Oscar Wilde into a simple persecuted hero. The conversation describes a complicated man, fixated on his public image, who was convicted of gross indecency rather than a sodomy offense after a second trial. The Dahmer - Monster discussion weighs whether casting Evan Peters risks glamorizing a killer, and one voice suspects some of that alarm is moral panic. The show also states its own rule here: it does not go after victims' families for secrets. Filmmaking itself gets a hearing too. In the Aussie thriller pairing, one film is judged to need a more objective editor, with scenes running long and a prison fling subplot set up and then dropped. The humor is crude and sexually explicit. One speaker has drafted a paper on the legality of sexual choking. A walk through how Australian law treats consent when actual bodily harm is involved drifts straight into open talk about the speakers' own kinks. That swing between the legal and the lewd is a fair picture of how the show sounds. Sam and Jared are among the voices at the mic, and the sign-off is 'stay sinister'. One episode carries the title Queer for Fear (FINAL EPISODE). The Last Call Killer is a natural way into the case side, and the Dahmer and Hellraiser pairing shows the double-feature format at work.