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rallamajoop · 5 months ago

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So why are there so many gay vampires?

From the time of Carmilla all the way up to the works of Anne Rice (a universe that seems to get only less subtle as the years go on), gay vampires have been a thing basically as long as anyone was writing about vampires. Lesbian vampires have been a genre all their own for decades. Bram Stoker, author of the most famous vampire novel ever written, was gay himself. So why vampires specifically?

I’ve seen people attempt to answer this one before, and there are all sorts of contributing factors I could point to here, from the genres’ beginnings with Lord Byron (infamous bisexual disaster fuckboy), to modern discourse about why queer folks so often find themselves identifying with the monsters and outcasts of fiction. Few other monsters besides vampires can so easily pass for ‘normal’, or are nearly so well known for their snappy dress sense and ‘unnatural cravings’ for human flesh. And that’s without even getting into all those skeezy outdated stereotypes casting queer people as predators, or the idea that even one ‘gay experience’ could somehow ��convert’ you into being one yourself.

But to my mind, there’s just one really important thing that makes vampires so gay, and it’s the same thing that makes them sexy in the first place: plausible deniability.

You see, a vampire’s bite is simultaneously a) ridiculously sexual, and b) not even a little bit sexual at all.

You don’t have to look far for vampire canons where there’s nothing sexy about being bitten by a vampire. Bloody, violent, painful, sure ‒or just clinically miserable, human bodies torn open or hung up to drain like a human blood bag. What’s sexy about getting bitten by a mosquito, or a fecking leech? The diet of the actual vampire bat requires it to process so much water that it apparently spends mealtimes busily pissing out the difference, and the anti-coagulants in its saliva leave the wound bleeding messily long after it’s gone. The basic act of feeding is no more inherently sexual for a vampire than it is for a zombie.

Vampires are even a surprisingly acceptable monster to market to children. There’s a vampire muppet, a cartoon about a vampire duck, and a whole series of books about a vampire rabbit. You can put a vampire on the side of a cereal box without undue outrage. Vampires do not have to be R-rated for sex or violence.

So of course vampires will go after victims of the same sex. Do you stop to inquire whether the cow you’re eating was male or female? It’s all just predator and prey!

Until it’s everything but.

Do not let the ‘vampires aren’t supposed to be sexy!’-purists fool you. The tradition of sexy vampires goes all the way back to the oldest folklore, where the first victim of a newly-risen vampire was often their still-living spouse. Vampires were even occasionally known to get women pregnant (a convenient excuse for any widow who might turn up pregnant slightly too many months after their husband's death). The ‘original’ Nosferatu sounds more like an incubus than the naked mole-rat creature they made that movie about. The demon lover aspect of the vampire has been there all along.

And it’s not hard to imagine why. If someone is biting and sucking on your neck, then either they’re a vampire, or they’re well on the way to second base (other folklore has its vampires feed directly from their victim’s heart, which is scarcely less suggestive). The implications of an exchange of bodily fluids were never subtle, even in Stoker’s day (I'm looking at you, Lucy-with-the-three-husbands), and the vampire as a sexual predator was a popular literary device well before Stoker's time. Beautiful vampire women would seduce men to their demise, and the males of the species might visit the bedroom of some innocent maiden time and again. The Victorian obsession with mesmerism, meanwhile, provided the perfect explanation for how victims might be hypnotised into eager compliance, and perhaps not even remember being fed upon at all. Vampires have been the ultimate guilt-free sexual fantasy since way back in the day, compatible with all your awkward Victorian mores! (Not quite ready to admit they're sexual fantasies? No problem: he's just here to, y'know, suck on your neck a bit. No subtext here!)

The whole act of biting is so suggestive that in the early years of vampire cinema, it wasn’t shown at all, not even between opposite-sex participants. The camera of 1922’s Nosferatu maintains a demure distance during the climactic scene where the heroine is finally bitten and slowly drained of blood, and Universal’s Dracula conveniently fades to black or cuts away whenever it’s about to take place. But even if the biting has to take place off screen, who’s to say a vampire isn’t going to pick victims of both sexes?

The stately tradition of the lesbian vampire has cinematic examples going all the way back to 1936, with Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter. Though the titular vampire has a nominal male love interest – a psychologist who naively advises her to confront her temptations without fear – the result of his advice is a famous sequence where she picks up a young woman under the premise of wanting an artist's model, and convinces her to remove her top. No actual biting or nudity is shown (it was only 1936), but her fate is left in little doubt.

By the era of 70’s sexploitation, all such subtlety had been abandoned. If we’re all good with naked boobs, who’s going to be offended by a little biting?

In fact, when it comes to men rather than women, a vampire bite was, for many years, far too sexy to be shown, or even alluded to. Nosferatu clearly feeds on that film’s Jonathan-expy, but our only evidence is the bitemarks on his neck in the morning, and the final sacrifice to defeat the evil monster must naturally be female. Universal’s Dracula had to ignore explicit studio mandate that only the brides should be allowed to feed on their own Jonathan-equivalent, as to even imply that Dracula himself had fed upon a man was obviously far too homoerotic to contemplate (never mind that it’s Dracula who must be established as the threat in this opening sequence, or that it’s Dracula his victim will spend the rest of the film obsessed with).

But in that unspeakable land of male-on-male homoeroticism, you might be surprised how much homo we can squeeze in even without resorting to fangs-in-necks. The Lost Boys is surely one of the most homoerotic vampire films ever made, but there, the one big blood-drinking scene is rendered in a bloody massacre of slasher-movie violence. And though Anne Rice certainly describes the scene where Lestat drains Louis of blood in lurid detail (and even has them spend their first sunrise together sharing a coffin), Louis is already thoroughly seduced before he ever reaches this point.

You see, the lore of the pop-cultural vampire conveniently comes with a second and equally-compelling target for plausible deniability: the act of making a new vampire.

Obviously, to work, this has to be deliberate. A world where anyone bitten by a vampire becomes one hasn’t much to offer us, and the relationship between maker and fledgling can just as easily be framed as parental, as recruitment into a cult, or purely transactional. But whichever way you twist it, the implications of choosing another to share in your own eternal youth and immortality… like, I don’t have to spell this one out for you, do I? Did I mention how that thing where a vampire’s traditional first victim tended to be their own mortal widow goes all the way back?

But if we’re not ready to be completely obvious with our mainstream audience, some alternative explanation can always be provided for cover. Lestat doesn’t really want Louis, he just wants Louis’ money! (He also really wants Louis.) The Lost Boys just want Michael to join their gang! (Their very, very pretty gang, who swan around in mesh shirts, tank tops and assless chaps.)

The two sides of the vampire-deniability coin aren’t mutually exclusive, either. Carmilla drinks her new paramour’s blood, but also gazes into her eyes while promising her you will be mine. Drinking blood is a key part of making a new vampire in so many vampire stories, after all.

Carmilla isn’t even the only gay vampire story of the Victorian era. I recently posted about two other fascinating examples, both featuring male/male pairings: one being pretty much just a gender-flipped version of Carmilla, and the other a tragic love story filled with significant "vampire = gay lover" metaphors (why oh why must the townsfolk keep us apart, when we’ll only ever be happy once we’re united once more?) This stuff goes surprisingly far back.

In fact, you can find queer subtext in vampire fiction that predates even Byron and Polidori. 1819's The Vampyre was the first published vampire story, yes, but the first known work of vampire-fiction in the English language is a poem published by John Stagg in 1810, also called The Vampyre (look, the genre didn’t exist yet, you didn’t have to be creative with your titles).

In brief, Stagg’s poem recounts a conversation between a wife (Gertrude) and her dying husband (Herman), whose dear friend Sigismund, lately deceased and deeply mourned, has returned as a vampire. Night after night, he crawls into Herman’s room to drain his blood. Herman’s fate is already sealed, but unless Gertrude takes action, it will surely be she that Herman will take as his own first victim when he rises from the grave.

There may be nothing intentional about the queer subtext of this tale. A vampire’s victims often include friends he knew in life, as Stagg himself cites in his introduction. But if Herman’s first victim will be his wife, what are we to read about the fact Sigismund’s first victim is Herman? Especially given how long he’s kept secret from poor Gertrude that his dear ‘friend’ has been climbing into his bedroom each night, lying beside him in bed and sucking and draining "the fountain of my heart!" while Herman moans and tosses (in pain, obviously!), always leaving him "exhausted, spent." Ultimately, Gertrude is saved only when both Herman and Sigismund are staked through the heart, and we close on the image of them slumbering together in the tomb.

It is, however you turn it, pretty gay.

I reiterate: this is the very first known work of vampire fiction written in the English language. The second was the one that was kind-of-written-by, kind-of-stolen-from, and unambiguously based on bisexual-disaster-fuckboy Lord Byron. And the two most influential works of vampire fiction of the next hundred years would be Carmilla, the very lesbian vampire story written by a… presumably straight man? And Dracula, the not-completely-convincingly-hetero story written by #1 Walt Whitman fanboy Bram Stoker. Vampires have always been very equal-opportunity kind of monsters.

There are, of course, plenty of influential heterosexual vampire tales to fill out the roster too. Varney the Vampire, a penny dreadful from the 1840s, was so successful it ran for over 200 chapters. The 1960s had their own wildly successful Varney-equivalent in the soap opera Dark Shadows. Love it or hate it, we really can't ignore Twilight either. My own introduction to the genre was Christopher Pike’s The Last Vampire series, which came out alongside the original Vampire Diaries novels. So there's plenty of material around to keep the straights entertained – and honestly, that’s only as it should be, because the very thing that makes vampires so queer-friendly is that the sex of their victims doesn’t matter. And it’s so easy to make vampires sexy (let alone a full vampire-proposal!) that even the Victorians could do it.

Now, if your reaction to all this theorising is to tell me "but the LGBTQ’s shouldn’t have to hide behind plausible deniability!" I can only counter, "well sure, but why should the straights have all the fun?" Because playing with all the ambiguity of "is this monster really just after my blood or is this going somewhere?" can be all sorts of fun, regardless of the genders involved. And as long as they’re up for exchanging bodily fluids with persons-and-or-victims of either gender equally, why not have some fun with it?

So, okay, maybe the real title of this post should have been "why are there so many pansexual vampires?" But the answer doesn’t change. Vampires have been the bisexual disaster fuckmonsters for as long as anyone’s been writing about vampires, and have been a metaphor allowing people publish barely-coded gay attraction since 1872. And much like the queer community, they’ve only become more complex, more sympathetic, and all the more popular as romantic paramours as the years have gone by.

#gay vampire stuff #Interview with the Vampire #Dracula #What We Do In The Shadows #The Lost Boys #Bram Stoker #Anne Rice #Carmilla #lesbian vampires

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