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Twilight Is So Straight, It’s Gay: An Exploration of Camp and the Unintended Queerness of Twilight

Camp aesthetic is a visual movement that communicates appeal through what would be considered tacky iconography, prescribing value (whether good or bad) through the irony of ugliness or gaudiness.  It is theatrical, over-the-top, and dramatic. Campiness has long been tied inextricably to queer culture. Queer films little known to heteronormative society such as Debs, and, But I’m a Cheerleader, or even ubiquitous cult classics to the tune of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and, Hedwig and the Angry Inch are undeniably campy. Within these works, the performance of heterosexuality is unsettling and seems unnatural due to the theatricality of the relationships (one only has to see But I’m a Cheerleader’s Natasha Lyonne drowning in the mouth of her character’s football playing boyfriend during a make-out session to see what I mean here). This type of camp is intentional and pointed. However, the performance of heteronormativity can easily fall into the realm of camp without intending to.

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga is never intentionally Queer; in fact, there’s not even a whiff of overt gayness to be found in the behemoth four book teen melodrama. Edward Cullen and the rest of his vampire family, as well as the rest of the town of Forks seem to be one hundred percent heterosexual. But since its release in 2008, and especially since the 2020 Twilight “renaissance”, Twilight has accumulated a steadfast and growing queer following, leading to packed midnight showings of the films, memes, fan art, and more. Twilight’s over-performance of heterosexuality whilst simultaneously destabilizing aesthetic gender constructs places the series firmly, if unintentionally, within the campy queer classics canon.

            Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble states,

“heterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody… both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself…” (155).

Heterosexuality that does not have reproduction as a teleological goal is by nature not heterosexual, if society were to agree with the purpose of sexual desire as defined by anti-gay movements. In Twilight, the vampires are considered to be extremely sexually attractive, but in their current form, they cannot reproduce sexually. The relationships between vampires Alice and Jasper, Rosalie and Emmett, and, Carlisle and Esme, are now queer, because they are

“contesting the categories of sex or, at least, not in compliance with the normative presuppositions and purposes of that set of categories” (156).  

However, that’s not to say that sexual anatomy and reproduction defines gender or sexuality. For Butler, the performance of gender in queer relationships has to do with the destabilization of perceived gender constructs as they come into “erotic interplay” (157). A femme lesbian being sexually attracted to only cis-gendered women, but also being aroused by a butch lesbian’s performance of masculinity, is an example of that erotic interplay.  This becomes even more expansive in contemporary queer discourse, as we start to understand the performance of gender beyond the binary of men and women. Edward and Bella embody this destabilization through each of their gender crossing attributes. When Bella first witnesses Edward’s vampiric skin when it interacts with sunlight, she narrates,

“his skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface…his shirt open over his incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare.” (Meyer 260).

Bella later goes on to say, “I would have liked to lie back, as he did, and let the sun warm my face. But I stayed curled up, my chin resting on my knees unwilling to take my eyes off of him” (260).

Edward becomes the object of sexual desire for Bella, subverting the narrative convention of the female being the focus of male desire.  

Masculine presenting people wearing glitter and being desired sexually is an intersection of the erotic interplay of gender performances. Edward is meant to be at his most beautiful when he’s in the sun. Meyer’s reasoning for his beauty is that it makes him, according to Edward himself, a perfect predator. He says,

“Everything about me invites you in – my voice, my face, even my smell” (263).

Meyer’s vampires use the erotic interplay of masculinity embodying elements of feminine presentation as an example of the ideal form of sexual desire, and therefore are able to seduce their prey before killing them. It is reminiscent, in some ways, of the seduction of Janet and Brad by Dr. Frank N. Furter, whose own drag aesthetic is considered to be erotic to all of the characters in The Rocky Horror Picture Show at one point or another.  

Edward and Bella are also transgressive due to the differences in their species. Edward states many times throughout their will-they or won’t-they courtship that their being together is a bad idea. In fact, he likens it to a predator falling in love with its prey; in the same scene where Bella sees his sparkly skin for the first time. He says,

“And so the lion fell in love with the lamb” (273),

noting the innate perverseness of their love. Vampire stories have been linked to queerness for nearly two centuries. Dracula leads the way with the homoerotic subtext between The Count and Jonathan Harker in Bram Stokers 1897 novel, something that is essentially canonized in the BBC adaptation from 2020. In the series, Sister Agatha Van Helsing asks Harker if he had “sexual intercourse with Count Dracula” and he remembers back to a dream he had at the castle where his sexual fantasies of Mina shift into a sexual fantasy of Dracula. The series ends with Van Helsing and Dracula together in their own sexual fantasy, which shows the way transgressive sexuality is eroticized in the vampire plot. Van Helsing hates Dracula for his cruelty, but is still attracted to him. Edward lacks Dracula’s cruelty, but his monstrous status has in actuality turned him into an ideal beauty. Bella is attracted to him in part because of his inhumanity, describing his face as angelic or godlike (Meyer 262). Her attraction to Edward is transgressive in a similar way Agatha Van Helsing’s obsession with Dracula is transgressive.

            In a pivotal scene in both the book and the later 2008 adaptation starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the vampire family plays a game of baseball together. The Cullen family can only play baseball during a thunderstorm, due to their super vampire strength (apparently they can hit a baseball hard enough to be mistaken for a crack of thunder, but yet the ball remains completely intact). Baseball seems to be a fairly all American, wholesome, straightforward activity. However, the way the Cullen family plays is decidedly theatrical. Everything they do is over the top and extra, from their vehicles;

“They circled around Rosalie’s red convertible, unmistakable lust in their eyes” (Meyer 222),

to Edward’s piano playing, to baseball. Everything is designed to make them stand out, and apart from the rest of the town. They are the monstrous other, even if they never actually drink human blood. Their everyday activities are performance.

            The Cullen family is theatrical in all things, but especially in romantic partnerships. The first night Bella and Edward ever spend together, she tells him that she loves him. He responds with,

“‘You are my life now’” (314),

which is an intense confession to make after one kiss and a sleepover. Throughout the rest of the novels, Edward and Bella remain obsessed with each other to the point of suicide. In the second installment, New Moon Edward believes Bella has died, and tries to kill himself. He says to Bella,

“I wasn’t going to live without you,” (Meyer 263).

In the last installment, Breaking Dawn, when Bella almost dies (again), he forms a suicide pact with Jacob where he wishes for Jacob to kill him if Bella doesn’t survive. He tells Jacob,

“the moment Bella’s heart stops beating, I’ll be begging you to kill me” (Meyer 70).

The theatricality of their relationship, along with the transgressive nature of the vampire plot, turns displays of heterosexuality into unintentional camp. This, paired with the erotic interplay of gender performances, shows us that Twilight is so straight, it’s gay.