This essay considers the critical commonplace that classic Gothic narratives such as The Monk and Carmilla are transparent windows onto the state of "homophobia" during their moments of production. It traces how, in the case of The Monk, readers have been prone to read for the novelist's fear that his own "sexuality" will somehow be discovered, whereas the novel more accurately makes an intervention in heteronormative sex as the object of its parody. Carmilla, conversely, often finds its relatively straight-forward narrative of lesbian desire displaced by lesbianism's more metonymic associations with race and empire; to read for the lesbian in Le Fanu's text is often to find her missing.