"Vampires, and the Gays That Love Them" Transcript

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There has arguably never been a human civilization in history that did not exist under the threat of vampires. In a universal context they represent our fears of not only death but unrest in death. Though it's one of those “a rose by any other name” kind of things where monsters we may anthropologically recognize as vampires were not the sexy, murderous or twinkly vampires we know of today. Proto-vampires of the ancient world had any range of characteristics and creation stories, some proto-vampires being blessed or cursed by gods or hearkened to fears of the unburied dead. Especially looking toward peoples in East Asia and the indigenous people of Australia and the Americas, there was almost always some kind of creature or monster which combined elements of undeath, the consumption of the living and the shunning of the sun.

When we observe historic vampires, we observe the fear and what the fear was usually meant to indicate. Usually vampiric fables served the utility of spooking a society into proper burial rites, and to avoid cannibalism. Being unable to walk in sunlight, though, that was probably more of a symbolic gesture. Light, specifically the sun, in almost all pre-Christian and pre-colonial societies represented the highest good or capital-T Truth. Sun gods were usually the highest deity in a given pantheon. The ancients very quickly recognized that, especially in the context of agriculture, the sun is kind of important for almost everything, and so by the power of the sun, ancient gods allowed those great civilizations to flourish, so that what was outside of the realm of what the gods considered holy was associated with darkness. The proto-vampire and by extension the vampire proper was shunned from the sun because they either represented something the public could recognize as evil or because they had by action or accident done something to earn the gods’ rejection.

Some gods also preferred to keep their followers in the dark, however. Take, for instance, the goddess Hecate.^* She was an addition to the Hellenic pantheon from Indo-European migrants, and in spite of the fact that her domain of magic and the moon were already covered by Artemis and Selene, she became a permanent fixture and was even translated into the Roman goddess Trivia. Goddesses of the dark were usually tied to the moon, an indication that even in the night there remained a holy light from an alternative source. Hecate's distinction was that she was more closely associated with the rustic gods than the proper Olympians, closely associated with the god Pan as occasionally a maternal figure. That said, Hecate enjoyed widespread and prominent urban worship, particularly in Athens. Really interesting goddess for both her role in the pantheon but as well as the historic movements of her myths across the Mediterranean. She also had a cult of witches who ate dead babies, allegedly.

It should be no surprise that in Hellenic myth, Hecate's daughter Empusa was a bronze-legged vampire who fed on the blood of men she would seduce. The particular fear hearkens to ancient Greece’s repulsion of a powerful independent woman. This also applies to the Witches of Thessaly… the baby munchers. Of course any woman who seeks power outside the institutional misogyny of ancient Hellas will be accused of heinous acts. Meanwhile, the first female presidential nominee from a major political party was also accused of eating babies. It's been 5,000 years, guys, get something original.

This isn't to say that the Empusai are the sole progenitors of vampires, but the impact that a bunch of pagan homosexuals had on shaping subsequent millennia of Christian European culture is immeasurable. It's remarkable just how much of the Empusai is recognizable in Victorian depictions of vampires. That said, the values were slightly shifted. Whereas the gothic writers of Europe focused on depicting nocturnal predators, the ancients downplayed this next to “please don't have sex with dead things.” The monotheistic colonization of Europe and Africa removed competing gods, and with the God of Abraham, the sole deity, coming to a parallel association with the sun, Europe found itself without any divine protection in the night such as moon gods. Imagery around the Christian God is so quintessentially tied to sunlight that he may as well have been seen as a sun god himself, which is also weird because by Catholic doctrine he is also a triple deity. For which triple deities were predominantly women including Hecate herself and the Morrigan, who were both associated with magic -- magic, which is considered unholy because of its association with the moon.

Anyway, within Christian literature there is a strong connection between God and the light of day. Look to The Faerie Queene, a staple of formative English literature, published in 1590, and indicative of the Norman re-evaluation of English mythological sensibilities, away from the Norse and Germanic roots of the Anglo-Saxons, replacing it with a mythological cycle that is more traditionally French. This text makes frequent allusions to light and darkness. Dark forests and wilderness is where the heroic Red Cross finds denizens that are malevolent and who reject God. And these denizens may challenge his chivalry, or tempt him away from God's grace, or to Catholicism which according to the Anglicans was evil. And while this isn't really about vampires, it does exemplify the Christian affinity for holding that the unholy is that which exists without God's light.

But this does apply to vampires in a more European context, for which our analysis shifts from the proto-vampires that can be identified in most historic cultures to the creatures that come to mind with the word “vampire.” Europe's Christianization brought about a closer association between the nighttime and the monsters of all kinds, for which even the Arcadian origins of the werewolf were used to taint the cycles of the moon. The vampire's distance from the literal object of sunlight, representing the figurative element of God's light, was a method for European communities and leaders to indirectly, though very clearly, articulate what values they wanted to highlight as evil.

Just as the ancient Greeks wanted to instill a culture with fear of a woman seductress by plainly associating her with the demonic urge to eat babies, the European vampire’s predatory nature, and relegation to the shadows which were inaccessible to God, was a free license to associate all things outside of the social norm and connect it with evil. It's like McCarthy-era “How to Spot a Communist” instructional videos. The villagers of Europe would keep an eye on their lords and neighbors, and cautionary fables of the vampire would help them identify deviant behavior which they would then report to their local parish. Snitching! It's in white people's DNA.

The vampire became a method of exploring these provocative desires in a coded fashion. However, true to the Hays Code resemblances, these desires had to be expressed in line with contemporary European values of the day. The monster, the sexual deviant, must be brutalized. It's no surprise that many vampires are found out due to their lurid sexual overtones, especially as they became increasingly connected to a kind of extravagant sexual predator who exists in opulence and lavishness. Vampires came to represent the urban predator, compared to the werewolves and ghosts of the countryside. So naturally vampires are, from an anthropological viewpoint, an excellent symbol of a society's collective fears of who exactly is an “other.” For the Hellenics, it was the single ladies. Within the public circles of the 1700s and onwards, regardless of what was going on in the manners of the wealthy, there was an intense public fear of sexuality, and as would develop throughout the 1800s, an intense push for conformity to heteronormative sexual standards and gender roles, which was when the vampire had its greatest heyday in storytelling and became a staple of Gothic literature and folklore alike – at least until now.

But before we sink our teeth into the soft flesh of that, let's hear a word from this video's sponsor Squarespace.

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Somehow we ended up with What We Do in the Shadows. Well, the series, which is what is under discussion today, was originally a companion spin-off to the New Zealand independent film by Taiko Waititi. It has likely since eclipsed the original context, both in the range of side characters, settings and world-building, but also in terms of how strongly this improv-based comedy series has endured five seasons without any sign of slowing down. But what makes this series so important to vampires like me? Well, sure, it plays off a bunch of vampire aesthetics and traits which point out how incoherent the collective vampire mythos is. Somehow it all finds a way into this comedic parody, and the absurdity of it all just adds to the comedy, making these real people who are bound by certain vampiric rules.

And yes, as the series goes on, it's been confirmed that each one of the main characters is some variant and intensity of queer. Not that it really needed to be confirmed, but it's nice to have these outspoken queer characters, who are queer without being preachy.

However, What We Do vampires marks a titular turning point in how our culture has come to understand vampires, a precipice that has been thousands of years in the making, and this comes down to how the show frames and displays these vampires. The series is a documentary-style comedy featuring frequent cutaways, confessional segments where the vampires address the audience directly in order to offer additional elaboration on either elements of the show or how the history of vampiric folklore manifests in the modern day.

The general premise of the show is a little bit more lax than the movie. The series does have the overarching plotline of Guillermo saying, “Can I haz vampire?” Aside from that, the show is about a collection of roommates who are struggling with the dregs of eternal life in modern America. Each of these roommates can be seen as a typification of the various subgenres of vampires, with a couple of recurring characters filling in the gaps. The comedic sensibilities come from a gross defamiliarization and demystification of the vampire myth itself. What do we do in the shadows? More or less what normal people do, but with a dash of chaotic anachronism.

First, there's Nandor who is indicative of the kind of Vlad Tepes vampire -- which, though he may have been a distant inspiration for Count Dracula, reconnecting Dracula to the warrior mythology wasn't something that would be done until Francis Ford Coppola’s incredibly faithful retelling of the story. Nandor the Relentless is a former warlord of the fictional nation of Al-Quolanudar. Kayvan Novak’s portrayal of an Impaler-inspired vampire becomes a commentary on the kind of person who peaked at seventeen when he scored a winning touchdown and took his team to state. Knowing that he can't relive the glory days, he struggles to find ways to feel meaningful. He knows he wants to do something important, but he doesn't really know what that is or how to apply himself to the modern world.

In order of who the gays are in a frenzy over, there's Nadja. Natasia Demetriou takes on a more generalized take on the vampire queen, perhaps most clearly drawing from the vampirus progenitor Carmilla. “Nadja” is also the title of the 1994 horror film about the daughter of Count Dracula. FYI, the more you know.

This is not that Nadja though, who was born in an impoverished village on the Greek island of Antipaxos. Nadja is driven, ambitious, capable and strongly indicated to be the most rawly powerful vampire in the household, fearing only her sire, the Baron Afanas. Darth Vader doesn't have shit on her. While Nadja initially plays into to the “competent women among male idiots” trope, it's made abundantly clear that she doesn't have her shit together at all either, in the slightest, and is far more dependent on her idiots then she lets on. Demetriou balances Nadja's incredible strength with the exact kind of character flaws that most A-type personalities suffer from: being a complete hot fucking mess.

A third housemate is playing off a lesser known vampiric tale, the psychic vampire. Colin Robinson, as such a vampire, feeds off of the life energy of someone. Rather than waving his hands and using magic to drain their life from someone, Colin Robinson feeds off of their heightened emotions, or just general annoyance. He goes about talking about random information dumps that are tangentially related to the topic at hand, or by doing naturally irritating things. Colin Robinson seems to be a one-note character at first from his introduction, though the show makes quick work of highlighting just the level of absurdity that this character offers to the show. Less an allegory of an actual kind of vampire and moreso a comedic play about a certain kind of person.

…We all know one. If you know more than two Canadians, chances are you know an energy vampire. Who do you think runs the Parliament? Colin Robinson is a sheer contrast to normal vampires like me who pride themselves on how interesting they are. To a psychic vampire, being interesting is detrimental to their ability to feed.

Colin Robinson is gray and beige, preferring cardigans and sweater vests where the others don extravagant gowns, lavish multi-piece suit ensembles and surcoats. However it's Nadja’s husband who is worth discussion for this context.

Laszlo Cravensworth. He is probably the most memeable character of the show, if for no other reason than some very strategic line deliveries. It took everyone a few episodes to really get going, but Matt Berry showed up on set and had his character locked and loaded from the very beginning.

If Nandor is indicative of a vampiric folk tale of a reclusive cruel baron, and Nadja is the Victorian vampiric seductress, Laszlo is a satirical reflection of a vampire of the late 20th century, capturing the raw excessive sensuality of Anne Rice's vampires and those who she later inspired -- but not the sparkly ones! Laszlo has an extreme comfort around sex that would shock the public facade of any British lawmaker of the 1800s or today. Granted, for their day job they'd conveniently forget about the sexual depravity that took part in the West End.

The other vampires have their ambitions and objectives and grand designs. Laszlo by contrast seems entirely content with where he is, perfectly happy to spend his days engaging not only in lurid acts of varying intensities but bearing no discrimination to any of it. He also partakes in any manner of art and culture.

Granted, all the vampires are very open about their sexuality and sexual attractions…

…Laszlo is the sexual deviant the Victorians feared so deeply. Meanwhile, he's the most harmless of the group, the most likely to form human friendships and who seems to have the lowest body count, save for Colin Robinson who does not need to kill his victims to feed off of them (though death might be preferable). In fact, the ensemble of characters, and the fact that it's popular enough to assume that the largest swath of the public gets it, seems to indicate a shift, not towards how we think of vampires as a culture, but a shift in our very culture itself. Vampires, which were once decried as monsters to whom social deviance was compared to a kind of cosmic treason against the light of God, are now accepted as people with whom many of us could see ourselves being friendly.

Regardless, What We Do in the Shadows seems to represent a most recent step in our society’s dissemination of vampires, and not only what they mean to us but to gauge the moral value that is placed on the values that vampires represent. However, with What We Do in the Shadows seeming to typify so many vampire tropes and reflect upon us our shifting evolution on the evaluation of these social elements, did these progenitors actually carry this weight and what were exactly the original progenitors of these roommates? To understand what these vampires represent to our society, we first need to understand what those vampires meant to theirs.

The vampire enjoyed a period of relative anonymity between antiquity and the Industrial Revolution. Being creatures tied to pagan deities, they fell to the wayside in lieu of more generalized revenant zombies. However, there were a large number of reported vampire sightings in the 1700s coming from the area of the Balkan Peninsula. It's difficult to really gauge what vampires meant to pre-baroque Europeans because the bulk of European fears were attached to witchcraft. Maybe Hecate and her single ladies weren't on sabbatical after all.

However, in light of superstition migrating across Europe with a flood of Eastern European immigrants, vampires very suddenly and very quickly took the common folk by the throat. At the time, there was a dualistic fascination with Slavic culture that came in tandem with the fear of those foreign values passing into proper European society, coupled of course with a very Victorian fear of what they described as social decay, whatever that meant. Something about foundational European values being abandoned for radical new ideas, which may have been at the time code for being afraid of immigrants, but England has surely shaken off that by now! Because the Americas are any better. And you know, in light of that perhaps the reason white people are so terrified of immigrant cultures quote-unquote “invading” is because we subconsciously are aware that it's exactly what we white people did when we “immigrated” to America. Maybe.

At any rate, in perhaps in line with this “social decay” was a growing trend of rock star poets who wanted to write about sex but still wanted to keep up airs of being a respectable gentleman. In order to avert censorship and scandal, they wrote this subject of sexual fascination into their villains. It's nothing short of hypocritical that Lord Byron wrote of a vampiric villain who fed on blood and chastity. Coincidental of course that he himself was likened to a vampire, by one of his gay exes no less. While the vampire existed in poetry before then, Lord Byron's… former… personal physician John Polidori published a short work of prose fiction in 1819 called “The Vampyre,” with a Y. Which also, looking into it, there was like twelve poems called “The Vampyre” before then. Polidori was just the first to set it to prose, and the first which specifically painted the vampire as making his hunting ground out to be the social elite by masquerading as one of them himself.

No longer semi-demonic cave dwellers roving the countryside nor the reclusive occupants of seemingly deserted manors and forts, there was only a brief transition between the vampire of Southeastern Europe and the high-rolling ladykiller of Polidori. Polodori’s vampire is Lord Ruthven, whose reputation in English high society warrants caution, though the novel's protagonist John -- I mean, Aubrey -- instigates^{[sic: ingratiates]} himself with him nevertheless. Aubrey is drawn to ruin on an almost supernatural level. And while he never is particularly threatened by Ruthven, he overlooks an apparent darkness.

Ruthven and Aubrey go on a tour of Europe, as was a common coming-of-age ritual for young affluent men of the day, much in the same way that Polidori and Byron found themselves in a cottage on Lake Geneva with Mary and Percy Shelley, a famous late-spring trip which is cited as being the conception for Frankenstein. Granted, the same-sex attraction between Ruthven and Aubrey is… subtext… but not really. Polidori had to be careful not to out himself publicly or he would suffer the same backlash that Byron often received. Granted, this was a day and age where sexual perversion of all kinds, including gross heterosexual promiscuity, was on the same level as buggery. Provided more research, I would like to see if people of the day just took it for granted that a vampire, provided promiscuity, would also imply an extension of sexual appetites to same-sex desire.

As a piece of evidence, look to another and perhaps more significant work of vampiric fiction, Carmilla, by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu. Unlike Polidori, there isn't really any information to suggest that Le Fanu engaged in queerness in his own personal life, though his expression of same-sex desire among women is more stark than among Carmilla’s vam-peers. There may be a few reasons for this inclusion. Perhaps because it was European custom to tolerate close if not intimate friendships between women. Alternatively because, in line with an ‘80s slasher movie reserving the most brutal deaths for those committing premarital sex, Carmilla herself is brutalized in a way that was not reserved for any vampires until Breaking Dawn – Part 2.

While it can be said that the work is sympathetic to queer people and that queerness itself is not the element that is punished, it can alternately be observed that punishment is reserved for the sexual aggressor in order to protect Laura, who represents the naive delicate feminine sensibilities that the Victorians praised so much.

The female vampire is the ultimate predator and a staunch challenger of the patriarchal order. Her allure, her very presence, poses a direct threat as she seeks to penetrate her male victims. Yet Carmilla, she operates quite differently from the female vampires we encounter in the tale of Dracula later on. You see, Carmilla harbors no desire for men.

When the vampire is a lesbian, she transforms into a harbinger of destruction, targeting her fellow women and subtly undermining the foundations of heteronormative masculine dominance.

Carmilla presents the most formidable challenge to the norms of heteronormativity due to her profound desire for women and her steadfast rejection of the patriarchal power structure. For her crime of grand theft lesbian, her hunters (for she is hunted) first drive a stake through Carmilla's heart, then decapitate her and finally cremate her head and body upon a funeral pyre, and then they meticulously collect every last trace of her ashes and scatter them over a nearby river, ensuring that there is no possibility of Carmilla's remains reconstituting and reanimating. This procedure leaves no room for doubt about Carmelo's final demise. Overkill much?

The link between vampires and queerness was related seemingly insofar as vampires represented all manner of sexual deviants, though I can't help, given the volume of queer writers who seem to be drawn to the vampire, thinking that, even if just to read their exes, perhaps there is something more to this. I question whether there was a portion of the vampiric mythos that functioned as a beacon, as if by some kind of code, vampires were symbols that non-conformists could signal to one another. Through their public masquerade as monsters, others within society who themselves were often compared to monsters could be drawn towards like-minded spaces, and through the squall of homophobic and quite frankly sex-phobic social conditioning, the presence of this violent myth presented a gateway for the imprudent to seek out one another. Among the most significant elements of this pattern actually occurred in 1976.

Of course it was in goddamn San Francisco.

Granted, Interview with the Vampire and Anne Rice have been under discussion previously on this channel. Whereas once needed to be vigilant of vampires for their prowess over^{[sic: powers of]} seduction, how would this pivotal component of vampires manifest during the Sexual Revolution? Anne Rice’s vamps are pivotal for representing a shift in vampiric perspectives. This new vampire Louis sat down for an interview once upon a time and changed how we all thought of vampires forever. While vampires had been sexual, Anne Rice was among the first to make them sexy. While Interview with the Vampire was not an initial success, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series of Central Romance Books began in 1978 and endured until 2014. Quinn, being a woman living near the San Francisco Bay Area of the ‘70s and writing about a sensual French immigrant vampire in New Orleans.

…I guess?! Rice's vampires specifically stood out because of her focus on their beauty, specifically Lestat’s. Indeed when we first encounter Lestat through the fevered lens of Louis who's very depressed, his depiction bears an uncanny resemblance to Laura’s portrayal of Carmilla. Lestat is described as fair-skinned, possessing a graceful, almost feline quality in his movements, and he's even likened to an angel, a far cry from the beings distant from God's light. Though granted, the vampire had been renowned^{[sic: known]} to shroud itself in a curtain of perceived piety.

Another departure from vampiric traditionalism is Rice's insistence^{[sic: depiction]} on the ritual to become a vampire. No longer can a vampire just bite you and turn you into one. Quite frankly, it was never quite that clear when a vampire bit to kill and when to spread the curse, it was all very confusing. With Rice, the vampiric candidate must participate in the ritual by consuming the blood of their sire, and while this speaks to a kind of mandate for reciprocal consent, it fits better with the Victorian perspective on the curse. An individual who is forced into vampirism is tragic and empathetic^{[sic: sympathetic]}, though depicting each vampire as an active participant in their own downfall is what you get the tortures and pitchforks for. Some poetic justice.

And make no mistake, Rice makes a point of exemplifying^{[sic: emphasizing]} that vampires without a pulse cannot develop an erection. However, feeding on one another is unmistakably depicted as a sex act. During the titular interview, Louis recounts, “I drank, sucking the blood out of the wounds, experiencing for the first time since infancy the unique pleasure of drawing nourishment, the body wholly attuned to the mind's focus on a single, vital source.” Oh yes, normal fellatio things.

Seeing how the two mysterious, inaccessible, handsome, wealthy bachelors in New Orleans suddenly find themselves raising a forever child, this is unmistakably a queer allegory, and for anyone who had any lingering doubts, we have the recent television series where:

Yes, vampires that fuck.

AMC's rendition of Interview with the Vampire is a modern, unflinchingly macabre and delightfully sexual reimagining of the tale. What was once subtext concerning gay themes now stands boldly in the foreground like a hard-on, painting the picture of a dashing vampire in search of more than just transient companionship. When Lestat de Lioncourt whispers to Louis de Pointe du Lac about desiring an eternal counterpart, it's evident that he's not in the market for just a flatmate.

This immortal sanguinary duo is intriguingly queer, identifying as such, and their interactions are not just charged but are undeniably intense, passionate and occasionally interspersed with the crimson fluid of life. Their existence beyond their vampiric thirst challenges the very fabric of human convention.

Interview gracefully dances through a profound narrative, intertwining the complexities of sexuality, race, identity, dominance and societal suppression. Through this lens it underscores the history of America and the constraints it has placed on these magnificently queer vampires, forcing them into a dance of audacious queerness and a myriad of misdeeds.

In a way, the concept of gay vampires is intellectually appetizing. With eons at their disposal, surely these immortal beings would indulge, experiment and embrace the fluidity of their desires. Lestat in his grandeur perceives vampires as beings transcendent of mere humans. Consequently, they are unfettered by the petty prejudices and insecurities that plague mankind. To them, concepts like racism, sexism and homophobia are trivial, for humanity itself is deemed inconsequential.

As a mortal, Louis's queer identity, albeit concealed, combined with being black in a very racist America, relegates him to society's periphery. Lestat, with his telepathic lamentations, frequently underscores the ignorance and inelegance of racist humans who demean Louis for the color of his skin. To Lestat, the real grotesquery lies within typical men. In the realm of the undead, Louis is unshackled from mankind’s oppressive decrees, no longer ensnared by societal bindings and racist overtones of the era.

In the tale woven in Interview, no narrator stands unquestionably credible. However, Daniel, Louis's biographer and rapt listener, casts a critical eye on Louis’s account. Through Daniel's lens, Louis emerges as a vulnerable victim, ensnared by a manipulative creature endowed with a myriad of captivating powers, many meticulously honed for seduction. Daniel perceives Louie as tragically naive and snared in a dance with Lestat that embodies the essence of predator and prey, a dynamic punctuated by a staggering chasm^{[sic: imbalance]} of power. In a poignant exchange, when Louis confides in Daniel, suggesting that his entanglement with Lestat was both mutual and equitably poised^{[sic: on equal standing]}, Daniel retorts with a biting:

In Daniel's discernment, intertwining notions of dominance, vampirism, mortality and the shadow of death with the threads of queerness and passion is at best a jarring juxtaposition, if not profoundly derogatory.

While Daniel's perspective isn't devoid of validity, it stems from an external viewpoint. He lacks the intimate experiences that molded Louis. Daniel has never grappled with the complexities of being gay, he doesn't carry the weight of being a person of color, and despite Louis's vivid descriptions, the depths of despair and vulnerability felt by a black queer man in the clutches of Jim Crow-era South elude Daniel's grasp. Observing the narrative unfold and immersing oneself in Louis’s journey offers a window into his psyche, illuminating his motivations and choices. Throughout the first season, we saw why he was drawn to Lestat and why he thought he could never leave him. That intimacy might never be replaced, but he takes his chances eventually.

While sex and intimacy are inextricably linked to queer identity, so too are power and rebellion. Queerness represents resilience in a realm that often wishes your existence away. Interview intensifies this struggle, juxtaposing the supernatural with the societal. It brings into sharp focus the world's potential for harm and the sheer will it demands to thrive within it. Perhaps being a gay vampire engaged in nefarious activities isn't optimal, yet it offers Louis a truer reflection of himself, far more than the mortal realm ever could.

In Interview with the Vampire, the book, the movie and now the TV show, we witnessed the inception of a transformative era for vampire literature and the vampire archetype in the 21st century. Lestat, Louie and Armand, the central characters of the ongoing Vampire Chronicles, emerge as queer vampires who Rice and her literary descendants employ to break free of the cycle of functioning as a cautionary tale.

As luck would have it, there is a measurable element of tracking^{[sic: way to measure]} Rice's impact on the public perception and expectation of vampires, and that being how we went from this to this:

...to this:

Dracula.

No, this wasn't an omission because it's been done and analyzed to death, but tracking the progress and development of vampires in the last 200 years as per the extra-canonical depictions of the Count, particularly in the context of whether or not they're serving gothussy – Bat-pussy is just.. bussy – is something we can do here, because for all the plethora of versions of Dracula, several of these variations penned by Bram Stoker himself, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker's Dracula (henceforth referred to as Coppola’s Dracula to avoid confusion) was a unique… furry awakening -- I mean, a unique sensual depiction of this titular Transylvanian recluse. Even in the book, Dracula is never as explicitly seductive as he is with Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder eye-fucking each other on the Victorian streets of England. Bram Stoker himself was arguably gay, and the figure of Dracula was inspired by an emotionally distant employer of his, and while it is widely accepted that there is an abundance of subtext to be read into the exchanges of Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula, the film does not elaborate on them, mostly.

Fun fact -- that was improvised. Gary Oldman was chronically sauced on set, and it was scripted that Dracula had cut Harker. Gary just went and licked it up, and ended up slicing his tongue open in the process. Meanwhile, that's the most unsettling shot in the entire movie, not the most memorable, because other elements of the book that had either been subtext or alluded to are included. Yes, Lucy is a bit of a slut and we love her for that, though I'm grateful that Stoker framed her death as not a punishment for her promiscuity but as a tragic turn of someone malevolently exploiting her for it.

Dracula's more fantastic powers, such as his shapeshifting, are plainly depicted. Stoker's allusions to Vlad the Impaler are confirmed, and Coppola expands on the relationship between Dracula and Mina, inserting a subplot around the long-forlorn romance. The novel itself was a little bit subversive, aside from Jonathula -- ship name! -- and the band of vampire hunters being too gay to function, most notably among them the Texan. I mean, if your name is Quincy, then you can blame your parents for your homosexuality.

However, it stands out from other adventure literature of the time that only one of the group to make any headway is a woman, Mina, for whom the men in the cast chronically fuss over her delicate feminine sensibilities. Coppola also includes stronger religious overtones to boot. Again, the significant element here is how readily Coppola depicts a Dracula who fucks, whereas Dracula has been more prominently depicted as a reclusive humanoid monster. From Nosferatu, mm… Plan 9 from Outer Space, Salem’s Lost, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, this figure has almost exclusively been painted white and shown with clownishly monstrous features. But Coppola creates a monster for whom the audience looks at and completely understands what Mina is so horny about. Perhaps due to Dracula's capacity to shift forms between beautiful and hideous, man and wolf, Coppola is depicting a visceral (visual?) range of duplicity, the vampire's speciality.

And that wouldn't be an inaccurate reading, were it not for the fact that Mina's feelings for him persist even as she sees him at his most monstrous. Coupled with the fact that Coppola’s Dracula depicts him as a tragic figure whose shunning of God's light was spurned^{[sic: spurred]} by a broken heart and then turned to vengeance, that draws him closer to Rice's influence.

However, a lot happened between Coppola’s Dracula and the recent television depiction of Louis Lestat, Armand and Claudia, which beckons the question: What happened with that Stephenie Meyer thing?

Okay, sure, the vampires were sparkly for some reason. Apparently there was a scene from the book Meyer saw in a dream, where Edward was sparkling in the Sun and she built the whole damn story around that. For some reason that just screamed “vampire” to her, I guess. And sure, Stewart and Pattinson rubbed a lot of hopeful actors the wrong way for how quick they were to mock and insult the franchise that gave them careers. However, between them and Taylor Lautner, who's getting work and Oscar nominations these days?

And we could talk about Twilight and why it sucks, but we need to protect our mental health. We can analyze it to death, and because of a Mormon writer evoking imagery of a teenager who has sex once, gets pregnant and almost dies because of it -- but I swear, I’ve done this before. I've talked about this before. Have I?

So if Rice made vampires sexy, Meyer seemed to make them…. romantic? I don't even know what to call them because the degree to which the central romance exhibits abusive traits is unsettling to Killing Stalking proportions. “Romantic” is probably a good word, if for no other reason than describing the way Edward and his undead supermodel friends were intended to be seen. They are certainly romance novel cover boys.

What was the cause for this craze in our culture, though, and how did this affect the vampire mythos? To answer the second question first, it didn't have any effect, at least not in the long-term, though at the time Twilight seized the endocrine systems of teenage girls like nothing else. The fervor for this book series was at a fever pitch of intensity we haven't seen since, and was not dissimilar to that wizard book.

Even before the movies, Twilight generated a veritable Pacific trash island of merchandise revolving around the Team Edward/Team Jacob love triangle. Twilight's weird popularity coincided with an incredibly weird point in history, and it's very consequentially American. See, America is a magical place where roughly every eight years, the culture, economy and national identity shifts in radical ways and nobody knows why. Well, we do. It seems that for some reason the president of the United States and the values of him and his cohorts have a profound effect on shifting the inherent sensibilities of the people of the nation at large.

And this is very clearly exemplified by the transition of power from the Clinton Administration to the Bush Administration. Bill Clinton may have made some empty promises to the queer community. ….Lots. However, there was a building momentum towards rights development, and then George Bush committed voter fraud in Florida and suddenly PTA groups that had once been developing a comfort with gay friends and neighbors under Clinton, those same people decided that perhaps a gay gym teacher or scout leader were a threat to their children.

Bush's America, as the first right-wing Evangelical president, was rooted heavily in purity-based values. One thing that mystifies me about people living in America is how they can't see that even if the president does not explicitly make something part of their political agenda, it somehow ends up coming down into the whole culture for a whole decade -- in this case a very loud discourse around pushing for abstinence-only sexual education in schools. Not only that, but projecting those purity standards to adults as well, reeling back from the echoes of the sexual revolution that were redeveloping in the 1990s. Bush’s America turned it in the opposite direction.

Weirdly, this would have been rife^{[sic: ripe]} for a reinvention of ye olde Victorian vampires, where sex is bad and vampires are bad because they have sex. However, this wouldn't be possible because Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles has since become a global sensation for depicting vampires as tragic, misunderstood and empathetic anti-heroes. In conjunction, the 1994 film adaptation was still a game-changer for the careers of Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst, even if Anne Rice had at the time renounced the darkness and began a brief foyer^{[sic: foray]} back into Catholicism, though that didn't last long.

Vampires, insofar as they were able to be fully developed characters, could not be exclusively villainous anymore, so Twilight hit a peak of popularity when it appealed to the darker edgier fantasies of teenagers, while at the same time having a presentation that the Purity Brigade would give a stamp of approval to. Twilight could maintain the illusion of sexuality without engaging with it in a meaningful way. However, for this reason Meyer divorced herself from the core philosophy of vampires, which only begins at the sparkling thing and the X-Men powers that dominate the latter half of the series. Vampires, as we can identify them, traditionally focus around sexual liberation, for which the author and society may moralize that as good or bad, and because Meyer’s Mormon vampires -- I feel like that needs to be an episode of What We Do in the Shadows, Mormon vampires come knocking on your door -- are divorced from sex, they are divorced from sexual deviancy, which as per creative license isn't a bad thing.

What's puzzling to me is why the public chose to accept this depiction of vampires that was so far removed from identifiable depictions. For unfortunately, these narrative decisions pushed queer people further out of the genre that we very much built as creators and subjects, which was also a strong component of Bush's personal belief system, which he desperately tried to turn into policy. No gays… how boring.

For which institutional discrimination was the principal topic for True Blood. Based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries, True Blood, in the least Tolkienian way possible, turned vampires into one-to-one allegories for the queer community. At its core True Blood was more than just a vampire drama, it was a powerful platform that explored societal prejudices, civil rights and the intricacies of identity in a way that resonated deeply with the queer community, not just because of the hot men.

From the onset, True Blood used phrases like “coming out of the coffin” for vampires revealing their existence to humans, mirrored in the real-world experience of coming out. The vampires’ fight for civil rights, recognition and acceptance in human society is reminiscent of the real-world struggles faced by the queer community. This allegory made the vampires’ cause relatable and provided a unique perspective on societal prejudices and the fight for equality. The cultural nature of the series allowed for an exploration of sexuality that goes beyond traditional binaries. Several characters, including some vampires, demonstrate fluid sexual preferences. This fluidity in True Blood reflects the evolving understanding of sexuality in our real world, where labels become less rigid and more people acknowledge the spectrum of sexual orientations. True Blood walked so Elite could dimensionally transcend. It’s porn! With cinematography!

A running theme in the series is the fear of that which is different or misunderstood, the animosity many humans feel toward vampires in True Blood is not dissimilar to the fear or distrust some individuals harbor toward the queer community to this day. The Fellowship of the Sun, an extremist anti-vampire church in the series, provides a critical examination of how religion can be weaponized against marginalized groups. The church's zealous crusade against vampires draws a parallel to the real-world religious entities that condemn and persecute LGBTQ+ individuals based on dogmatic beliefs. Throughout True Blood vampires rally for the VRA, the Vampire Rights Amendment, which would grant them equal rights as humans. This political backdrop mirrors the very real battle for queer rights, from marriage equality to anti-discrimination laws.

The series juxtaposes the visceral emotions of the vampire characters with these political movements, emphasizing the human (or vampire) faces behind the issues. For many characters, their journey in the series is one of self-acceptance. Just as Jason Stackhouse grapples with his attraction to vampires, perhaps even male ones, or Tara Thornton comes to terms with her own sexuality, many queer individuals wrestle with internalized prejudices before they can fully accept themselves. These, let's say, fictional characters and creatures say a lot about our society, especially those considered the least among us, from the monsters of yore to the dangerous foreigners of the 17 and 1800s to the sexual predators of the 1900s and then the sparkles and civil rights allegories of the 2000s. But what does it say about our society… today?

The mass acceptance of the Staten Island vampires signal more than just a spiritual victory of the rights fights shown in True Blood, but rather an indication that in spite of widespread political and institutional persecution, we seem to be finding acceptance on a societal level that we did not have before, “we” meaning “queer people” but also “we” meaning the sex-positive. Earlier queer leaders in the ‘60s and ‘70s sought to use the sexual revolution to justify the advancement of queer rights. If the stigma is removed from sex itself, then there is little ground for persecuting one for whom they have sex with, consent provided of course.

The Victorians would not see the comedy in What We Do in the Shadows because of the focus on a need for poetic justice of those who knowingly live outside of God's light. We don't want to see these vampires punished, even if they are kind of shitty people sometimes. Instead, we champion their personhood and even their small victories over petty struggles. For who among us has not had the dream of starting a vampire nightclub, or even just had a hard time looking for love without realizing that what you were looking for was there all along? To accept the vampire in their traditional form, as is often presented in What We Do in the Shadows, is to accept the full spectrum of what they were meant to traditionally signify. No longer does the sex-positive vampire require poetic justice, nary a stake to the heart nor a decapitation, and consuming only a consensual amount of garlic. For what threat did Carmilla really afford to anyone, if not the occasional snatching of panties?

To our forebearers in antiquity, the real threat was of sex, and the seduction. Though specifically sex that defied the typical norms of patriarchal power dynamics, the man who is penetrated by another man, the woman who can exchange intimacy without a man, the real evil of vampires was their affinity for challenging the conventional power structures. The murder thing was just icing, but the fear, the real fear, was sex itself. By no longer fearing the vampire, are we shedding a fear of sex, or are we too, as a people, abandoning the patriarchal structures that so much of history constructed itself around? If this is the moral decay the Victorians feared so much, society does not seem worse off for it. If anything, society is worse for enduring the throngs^{[sic: torrents??]} of violence against the vampiric, the deviants, women, queers.

Sexuality has come out of the closet. No longer are we forced to hide in the shadows just because we're not having sex to make the next generation of good God-fearing Christians. Dim lamp light has turned into livid^{[sic: vivid]} LEDs, brightening up the lives of the sex-positive for the whole world to see if they want. And whether they like it -- most do -- or not, fuck them, we're not turning those lights off. We don't have to hide what we do in the shadows anymore.