By Calleigh Hoffman
About six or so years ago, I was watching a clip of the 1959 Dracula on YouTube. Christopher Lee, in his fake fangs and velvet cloak, seemed very excited at the chance of biting Van Helsing on the neck. I watched both of them push against each other, wondering why they didn't just kiss already. After all, it's common knowledge that all vampires swing both ways, right? And you might think that that sounds crazy, but trust me. Let the queer history of vampires tell itself.
Before there was Dracula, there was Carmilla, the 19th-century gothic novella. The story features a lesbian vampire, Carmilla, equally in love with the protagonist Laura as she is urged to kill her. The novella is perceived to be about the normal Victorian Woman’s sexuality, and how it is often suppressed until it becomes harmful. Sadly, this is not the empowering sapphic book all our 19th-century women were searching for. It was and still is a testament to how women's sexuality is often turned against us, and how most representation of queerness in classic literature is meant to drive the reader away from the acceptance of sexual identity. After all, Carmilla got a steak in her heart and her head chopped off; while Laura went on a tour around Italy in order to recover from the trauma she sustained at the hands of a scary lesbian.
One of my favorite– and easily recognizable– examples of queer vampirism, is our own Bram Stoker’s Dracula! You might find yourself watching Christopher Lee on screen, or the Netflix miniseries, and ask yourself “Well the source material couldn't be this queer, right?” Wrong. It definitely could. Bram Stoker didn't try too hard to conceal his own homosexuality. He wrote love letters to both Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde and wrote Dracula one month after Oscar Wilde had been arrested for sodomy. It is hard to find any material on Stoker and Wilde’s relationship, as Stoker erased his name from any piece of his own writing he could get his hands on. Bram Stoker, was by every right, a man fearful of his own sexuality. He wrote to Walt Whitman, lamenting about how he wished he had the bravery to be as open as he– while simultaneously replacing every mention of Wilde’s name with words like “discretion” and “degeneracy”. So, what better way is there to get over your internalized homophobia, than pouring your sexuality into a fictional monster who gets defeated by the happy straight couple by the end of the novel? Bram Stoker is the perfect example of a gay observer during Oscar Wilde’s time. He was stuck between sitting safely in the closet, writing his fear into 431 pages of gothic literature; or coming out, standing by braver artists, and consequently risking being persecuted. In a way, his book did just as much damage towards queerness as Carmilla did. But I can't help but give Stoker just a bit of leeway, as I imagine him hunched over his desk, writing sad letters to braver men.
Now I know those were only two examples, but you must forgive me, as I haven't finished Interview With a Vampire yet. So, the question is up for grabs. Has the queer nature of vampirism hurt the gay community, or empowered it? Is the monster something we can reclaim, or will it forever be a symbol of our internalized fear?
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