Vampires are gay
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Still, Bela Lugosi and the British Hammer horror films embraced the camp overtones necessary to slide past censors. I think it is antithetical to the underpinning of a vampire, which is essentially a Byronesque, hedonistic form that is interested in experiencing life, interested in experiencing desire, hunger, intimacy, love, whatever it is, in such a way that it doesn't conform itself, it doesn't limit itself.
They want to see things like What We Do In The Shadows where it’s, for once, fun vampires and also yeah, they’re gay, you know?”
There’s always been something queer about vampires. They also think people need to be more open to different kinds of representation. (This explains a lot about Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, which has all its protagonists questioning what they were taught was true, or what they’re told they have to do, particularly in the roles enforced on them as women.)
“I think anything which adds nuance and complexity to the scale of attraction between people is great,” Schwab says.
If you’re inclined toward psychoanalysis, the conflicting imagery of penetrating teeth and sucking mouths is easy to interpret as sexual innuendo.
In media and societies where queer intimacy cannot be safely portrayed, vampires have offered queer audiences coded representations of taboo sexualities and gender performances.
Sex, violence and perversion
There are many vampire mythologies around the world, but their affinity for queerness really coalesced in the late 1800s with Gothic novels.
One of the earliest vampire novels is the sapphic and vampiric love story of “Carmilla,” written by Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872. Binaries are so useless to me. “It isn’t your railroaded coming out, bullshit homophobia, everyone accepts me in the end, we’re all handy dandy everyone shakes hands, hugs, whatever.” It’s somehow more real, even with all the supernatural shenanigans.
“We walk out into the world, and we’re immediately in danger, by virtue of our bodies,” she says. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla in 1872 portrayed a young woman seduced by an aristocratic vampire.
“She represents sex, but she also represents knowledge, power, autonomy, freedom, all of these things,” Schwab says. It’s important to have more expansive representation and have characters that are not just conventionally attractive cis gay white men. Germany’s Weimar Republic, a sexually progressive period between the world wars, produced a number of influential vampire films including Nosferatu (1922) and Vampyr (1932) – made by a gay director and star, respectively.
American vampire films struggled with Hollywood’s repressive Hays Code, a censorship system enforced from the 1930s-1960s that forbade sex, violence, or any form of “perversion”.
“The people who are saying vampires are wrong, unnatural, ‘It can't come into the house, it can't stand daylight, it can't eat food, it can't have all of these things, it is an unnatural monster’ — that’s not the monster saying it, right? “Because what I'm saying when I'm talking about the queer influence is just a broadening: Can we take it away from the binaries?
They are androgynous creatures of the night. And I think for queer identity, especially — but really, for any identity which is not the cultural default — romance has a bit of horror to it, because there is a bodily danger to romance.”
Schwab says anybody (and “any body”) that “doesn't toe the center line of what society deems safe and acceptable” takes risks when opening up to romance — LGBTQ+ folk, people of color, people without privilege or money, people outside a narrow range of conventional beauty.
Every human in a vampire story is in some way attracted to or repulsed by the vampire. 1987 was a bumper year with Joel Schumaker’s The Lost Boys and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark stylising the alternative vampire covens as dangerous but enticing queer communities.
Anne Rice and pulp
Meanwhile, vampires were a staple in pulp literature.
Because of this, they were ‘lucky enough’ to be able to recognise they weren’t straight amid the era of Section 28, and felt ‘relatively safe’ to express themselves.
Beth can’t remember a time when they weren’t interested in vampires and ‘all things spooky’ – and as a child, they loved books like Vlad The Drac and The Worst Witch, as well as Goosebumps and Point Horror.
‘Halloween was always a big deal in my house, even before it became mass commercialised in the UK,’ Beth, who is in their 30s and hosts Queer Diary, a night where LGBTQ+ adults read their teenage diaries, poetry and fanfic live on stage, tells Metro.