Michael Taylor
BA (Hons) English Literature
Abstract
This article critically explores the relationship between queerness and vampirism in three novels from the late twentieth century: Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice, The Gilda Stories (1991) by Jewelle Gomez, and Lost Souls (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite. It is argued that each text presents a different depiction of queerness: negative, positive and neutral, respectively. The piece explores wider socio-political themes from when the novels were written, most notably the pre and post AIDS epidemic, as well as geographical setting – different cities within the USA. It is argued that the framing of queerness as analogous to vampirism is complex, with potential pitfalls, as well as progressive and transgressive possibilities. Recommendations for future research are critical investigations of representations of the queer vampire in twenty-first century Gothic fiction, as well as to perhaps explore the late nineteenth century texts that were the genesis that inspired those explored herein
Introduction
The queer vampire has always been an enduring staple in the Gothic fiction genre ever since its initial appearances in the 19th century with the portrayals of Ruvthen, Carmilla and Dracula in prose, which then introduced to their audiences the literary depiction of the vampire as a dark lover that allures and attracts their victims. For the writers within the Gothic fiction genre, the queer vampire acted as a vehicle to symbolise sexualities and genders that were taboo, which transgressed the boundaries between what was normative and what was alternative. What then qualified the queer vampire as a vehicle was that the vampire existence was in parallel to the queer experiences of LGBTQ people: double lives, secret identities, underground culture. From these earlier works emerged the representation of the vampire that has been updated and burgeoned into the queer vampire in Gothic fiction of the late 20th century as a mutable metaphorical figure that reflects the LGBTQ community. The queer vampire of the late 20th century is thus ‘out of the coffin’ rather than ‘in the closet’, as was the case with their counterparts in the Romantic era and the Victorian era. In the Gothic fiction this dissertation focuses on, the narratives of the chosen texts focalise the point of view of the vampire instead of the human perspective. In order of their publication and popularity, the chosen texts are Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice, The Gilda Stories (1991) by Jewelle Gomez, and Lost Souls (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite. This article will investigate the chosen texts through the critical lens of queer theory to chart the line of the queer vampire over the course of the chosen texts. In the context of the late 23
20th century, the chosen texts were written at a time of activism and protests that pushed for LGBTQ rights, as well as when AIDS ravaged the LGBTQ community. The central thesis of this piece is that queer experiences are embodied and expressed by way of the metaphor that identifies the marker of queerness with vampirism.
Interview with the Vampire concentrates on Louis as he recounts his 200 years of immortality to a reporter, including his homoerotic relationships with the vampires Lestat and Armand, the family he formed with Lestat and the child vampire Claudia, along with the shame and self-hatred he feels for himself. The Gilda Stories centres on Gilda, a Black butch lesbian woman that was formed in the 1850s by a female vampire from whom she inherits her name. For 200 years she witnesses the injustice towards marginalised communities that are constitutive of her identity as a queer person of colour. Lost Souls follows Nothing, an adopted teenager that abandons his home to hitchhike to the hometown of his favourite band, but he then happens upon roaming vampires. It is then revealed that he too is one of them, and is accepted among them.
Interview with the Vampire
Written by Anne Rice and published in 1976, Interview with the Vampire was expanded into a novel from a short story of the same title as an outlet for grief, and while Rice ‘did not think of the novel as a gay metaphor as she was writing it, she agreed that the parallels were there’ (Ramsland, 1994, p. 169). The novel opens in 1970s San Francisco depicting an interview between ‘the boy’ and ‘the vampire’ in a room on ‘Divisadero Street’ (Rice, 1976, p. 3), which is partly in the gay village. Their proximity to it in a city that was a hub for LGBTQ people and the resemblance to cruising of their meeting at a bar, then at a rendezvous, lends their interaction a homoerotic subtext. For the vampire Louis, the interview is the medium of coming out as a “monster” and constructing his vampirism as an echo of queerness that reflects the queer experience through the reveal of a non-normative identity. The queer experience Louis embodies is the self-hating homosexual, since his vampirism is a source of guilt, shame and melancholy that mirrors the intricacies of internalised homophobia. This self-image is also impacted by the Catholic beliefs that he grapples with, which is often the position for queer people of faith, so the insistence of his religion on guilt, shame and melancholy thus contributes to his internalised homophobia, although seemingly far from the root of the issue. With Louis, becoming a vampire is an infliction which fulfils a ‘wish for self-destruction’ (Rice, 1976, p. 17), because he is sure his brother’s death was his fault so he deserves to be ostracised to the fringe. While Lestat believes that becoming a vampire is freedom from the mainstream, that Louis’ ‘desire to be thoroughly damned’ (Rice, 1976 p. 17) is externalised through vampirism (an analogy for queerness) thus evinces that he treats his identity as a transgression instead. This perception of vampirism as a transgression is compounded by the idea that Louis’ interview is a “confession” and this ‘confessional structure goes a long way to validate the fallacious assumption of gay guilt and melancholy’ (Keller, 2015, p. 28); the interview is then a confession in the sense of a secular counterpart to penance — which corroborates the power that Catholicism has over his morality — and of a criminal admitting to violating the law, which is fitting in that homosexuality was decriminalised in California in 1976, the location of the interview as set in San Francisco, as well as the time of publication.
The interview begins in the 1790s with Louis in the midst of grief over the loss of his brother to an accident that is blamed on him, whereupon he is bitten by the vampire Lestat, who returns that night to offer the gift of vampirism, which he accepts reluctantly. When asked by the boy about becoming a vampire, Louis muses that describing this change to a human is like describing intercourse to a virgin : ‘I can’t tell you exactly, any more than I could tell you exactly what is the experience of sex if you have never had it’ (Rice, 1976, p. 15). This conceit is relevant under the speculation that Louis had never felt attraction to men until meeting Lestat, so the vampire serves as his sexual awakening. As such, the homoeroticism that is embodied and expressed by Lestat is a threat to Louis’ presumed heterosexuality, hence his panic at Lestat’s advances: ‘he lay down beside me now on the steps, his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover. I recoiled’ (Rice, 1976, p. 18). This scene continues to convey itself in terms of sexual overtones, with Louis’ phrasing that, when Lestat withdrew his fangs from his neck, ‘the movement of his lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion’ (Rice, 1976, p. 19). But this bite is of dubious consent because Lestat tries to force the carnal deed on Louis, and in his resistance he fights back, so Lestat restrains Louis and the latter then surrenders to the strength of the former, ‘he held my entire body in check; and as soon as I stopped my abortive attempt at rebellion, he sank his teeth into my neck’ (Rice, 1976, p. 19). Since blood drinking can represent sexual activity, Lestat’s bite can be construed as a rape and him turning Louis into a vampire as perpetuating the stereotype that ‘paradoxically characterise[s] one partner … as a homosexual and the other as a victim of that homosexual’ (Keller, 2015, p. 27). Contradicting this stereotype is the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that queerness is a choice and a lifestyle, which is hinted at in the novel because humans can opt for vampirism of their own volition. However, this is then challenged by the ambiguity of Louis’ reasoning, and he clarifies to the boy: ‘it was not inevitable. Yet I can’t say I decided. Let me say that when he’d finished speaking, no other decision was possible for me’ (Rice, 1976, p. 13). Further, this rhetoric is reliant on the notion that queerness is transient in nature, as a choice and a mutable lifestyle, which thus corresponds with ‘the presumption that given the opportunity for conversion, all homosexuals would prefer to be straight’ (Keller, 2015 p. 27); and whilst Louis wants to be normative (i.e. human, cisgender and heterosexual), his vampirism and his queerness are permanent, the only decision he has is to accept or deny his core identity.
What is crucial to his choice is his toxic relationship with Lestat, since the latter is out in his vampire identity, whereas Louis is discreet in his, and this distance prevents them from connecting, with Lestat rushing Louis through his initiation while ignoring his concerns, fostering a power imbalance. This is evidenced when Louis reflects that, ‘I did not like Lestat at all … but I was infinitely closer to him’, (Rice, 1976, p. 25) and the boy then poses in response, ‘when the gap was closed between you, he lost his. . . spell?’ (Rice, 1976, p. 25), which Louis agrees to. This comment reveals a lot about vampire relationships because turning is the closest intimacy for a vampire and a human, but sharing this intimacy is then a singular occurrence as the human becomes a vampire in the process, which is similar to ‘losing one’s virginity and feeling the pleasure of ascending to a stage beyond that virginal innocence, but that also means that it is a pleasure that can never be replicated’ (Haukås, 2017, p. 26). This could also serve as commentary on homosexual relationships as imitations of heterosexual relationships through projecting the gender roles of ‘the aggressive-male and passive-female binaries’ (Kalia, 2013, p. 17), with Lestat as the masculine partner and Louis as the feminine partner, which then implies ‘that two people of the same gender cannot foster a healthy and productive relationship’ (Kalia, 2013, p. 23). This pertains to the portrayal of Louis and Lestat’s relationship as ‘a pattern of dominance and submission, domestic abuse (physical, emotional and mental) and abandonment issues’ (Kalia, 2013, p. 17), which is strained to a higher extent when Lestat coerces Louis into remaining by his side by siring the child vampire Claudia for them to raise as their daughter, because Lestat erroneously ‘believes the answer to saving the relationship is by adding to the family, by having a child’ (Haukås, 2017, p. 37).
With the tragic character of Claudia the text explores the homophobic stereotype that spreads the lie that all queer people are inherently sexual predators and groomers. Central to this falsity is the fear-mongering of the masses that homosexual relationships are sterile, so they recruit children because they cannot reproduce. The prejudicial belief is ‘that all homosexuals are created by other homosexuals, meaning all queers are converts, ruined heterosexuals’ (Keller, 2015, p. 27). This rhetoric then contributes to the queerphobic fallacy that the children who are adopted by queer families will be stunted because of ‘a premature erotic awakening, usually though molestation’ (Keller, 2015, p. 19-20). In the case of the text, Claudia has her child body, but possesses an adult’s psyche and then literalises this lost maturation, which leads to her showcasing the sensuality of a woman. If Louis’ ‘immortal kiss’ (Rice, 1976, p. 91) is interpreted as an erotic act, then by biting Claudia he molests her, but if interpreted as an intimate act it is still problematic, since it involves physical proximity and injury even if the sexual dimension is dissociated. This homophobic stereotype reemerges when Louis and Claudia escape from Lestat for Europe, and travel to Paris, where they are invited to the Théâtre des Vampires by the leader Armand. In an instant, Louis is attracted to Armand — provoking Claudia’s possessiveness — and terribly envies the attention he has from female vampires: ‘what appalled me was my own fierce jealousy. I was afraid when I saw them so close to him, afraid when he turned and kissed them’ (Rice, 1976, p. 241). While Armand is chronologically five-hundred, he is seventeen in appearance, whereas Louis is twenty-five in appearance, hence for him to fall in love with a late adolescent/youth adult as a queer man is an issue – although Armand is technically the oldest – which means that the power balance is skewed, and it is Armand who desires a romantic relationship with Louis. The relationship they form is unhealthy as Armand uses manipulation tactics to attract Louis; he seeks to sever his companionship with Claudia by psychically pressuring Louis to turn bereaved mother Madeline as a replacement for Claudia’s own, and makes no move to intervene when the coven captures then punishes them, only freeing Louis from captivity once Claudia and Madeline are immolated in the sun. As revenge, Louis torches the theatre and the vampires, prior to reconciling with Armand and relenting to his feelings for him. Louis deems that giving over to taboo desire ‘“is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other’ (Rice, 1976, p. 314),and that there is love in ‘what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong’ (Rice, 1976, p. 334); which is what he hopes to articulate to the boy in the interview – that vampirism and therefore queerness are taboo
The interview ends with Louis’ reflections from the 1920s, with the breakdown of this relationship, to which the boy responds in awe: ‘you don’t even understand the meaning of your own story, what it means to a human being like me’ (Rice, 1976, pp. 337-338). As Louis cannot comprehend the appeal that his identity has, he is horrified when the boy wants to become a vampire, ergo, to become a queer; so ‘to show [the boy] the meaning of what I’ve said’ (Rice, 1976, p. 338), Louis feeds on the boy to deter him from both options and disappears, the text closing with the boy wishing to locate Lestat. Not until the next decade did Rice’s vampires return in The Vampire Lestat (1985) and The Queen of the Damned (1988), which were set predominantly in the 1980s. Within these novels the content controversially included allusions to the AIDS epidemic, the first outbreak of which was June 5th, 1981. Between the publication of Interview with the Vampire and The Gilda Stories there was (seemingly) only one other novel of note on queer vampires. This was The Hunger (1981) by Whitely Strieber, in which the main character was the bisexual Miriam Blaylock, who covets a lesbian relationship with the (straight) human Dr. Sarah Roberts to replace her lover. Besides this, the Gothic novels of the 1980s which focused on vampires were from the perspectives of non-queer vampires (Hôtel Transylvania) or the perspectives of humans (The Delicate Dependency), hence the queer vampire was mainly represented by Rice before Gomez’s bold exploration of this theme.
The Gilda Stories
Written by Jewelle Gomez and published in 1991, The Gilda Stories is a novel of vignettes which was imagined as ‘a lesbian-feminist interpretation of vampires’ (Johnson, 2016) that reframes and recasts the vampire as a positive and progressive figure from the point of view of a Black butch lesbian woman. When the narrative opens in Louisiana 1850, the titular character (referred to as the Girl for the first chapter) is introduced as a runaway slave that is taken in by a White vampire woman named Gilda at a brothel, Woodard’s, that she manages.At this brothel, the Girl is put to work as a domestic by Gilda while her partner Bird — a Lakota vampire woman — is placed in charge of the Girl’s chores and education. Together they raise the Girl, satisfying for them ‘a need for family that matched her own’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 16) along with ‘a spirit and understanding of the world; that [she] were the voice lacking among [them]’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 43). It is because of these emotional needs that Gilda hopes for the Girl to become a vampire at an age when she can ‘make the decision’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 24) and replace Gilda as Bird’s companion while she succumbs to the true death. When the Girl has grown into adulthood, Gilda introduces her to vampirism and the exchange that the majority of the vampires in the novel practice (including herself and Bird), which is: ‘the manner of taking the blood and leaving something in return—how to partake of life and be certain not to take life’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 49). With her consent, Gilda half-turns the Girl into a vampire then departs to end her life so Bird is left to ‘complete the circle’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 47), and the Girl, now newly turned, then inherits the name of Gilda on the request of her predecessor.
While Rice and Brite approach blood-drinking as a substitute for, and supplement to, sex respectively, Gomez dissociates blood-drinking ‘from sexual pleasure so that lesbian eroticism is foregrounded in its own right and not elided and normalised by vampirism’ (Jones, 1997, p. 162). In the novel, the vampires use their nails for drawing blood from humans and other vampires, which thus eschews the phallicism that is inherent to the penetration of fangs, and the slit they cut in the skin then resembles the vagina, thereby feminising the bleeding as a natural process akin to menstruation. Ergo, the prejudice that portrays queer people as sexual predators (rapists and pedophiles) which is present in the other texts (e.g. Rice, above) is eschewed, since the intimacy of blood-drinking is symbiotic rather than parasitic, and is romantic or platonic for vampires, excluding the ones ‘who kill every time they go out into the night’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 45), instead of performing the exchange. However, Gomez’s intention to renegotiate the problematic power dynamic between humans and vampires is compromised by the non-consent that exists in the exchange of blood. For that reason these interactions remain in favour of the vampire, but in desexualising the intimacy of drinking and sharing blood, Gomez is also deconstructing the association of queerness with infection, which is expressed within the text by the original Gilda: ‘It is through our connection with life, not death, that we live’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 45), hence the drinking and sharing of blood is not comparable to STDs such as AIDs. In lieu of this, the creation of a new vampire is presented overtly as an act of nursing, which is crucial since all scenes of turning are performed by female vampires, who feed the humans with blood from a cut beneath their breast or in a single case through mouth-to-mouth feeding — which is akin to a traditional practice that is performed by mothers to their infants — and then with blood from their breast. The prevalence of this maternal imagery might be interpreted as inverting a medical theory within a midwifery text from an anonymous writer who assumed the pseudonym ‘Aristotle’, which posits: ‘the milk is nothing but the menstruous blood made white in the breast’ (Anon, 1702, p. 98). This is not to say that breast milk is transmuted into menstruous blood, but rather that the purpose of breast milk as a source of nourishment is displaced by blood, and this allusion to menstruation evokes the vaginal imagery that was mentioned earlier. This continues to distance the depiction of their feeding from pretences of perversion, akin to Rice. That blood is genderless thus grants same-gender vampires and single vampires the volition to start their chosen family.
This concept of the chosen family is thus defined as the development of a support network that substitutes for biological family, which is particularly common in and is practically synonymous with the LGBTQ community, whose members often suffer ostracism from their families of origin on the basis of their identities. The theme of the chosen family is woven into the narrative through the efforts of Gilda to reconcile the two sides of her chosen family, the humans with whom she has temporary bonds as a “mortal” and the vampires with whom she has blood ties as an immortal. In the chapters that take place post her transformation, Gilda has to manage her relationships with the humans and vampires she meets over the course of history: her rivalry with the vampires Eleanor and Samuel, her solidarity with human activists, actors, singers and sex workers such as Aurelia, Savannah and Ayeesha, a friend to the vampires Julius, Sorel and Anthony, a lover to the vampires Bird, Effie and Ermis. For the bulk of the narrative, Gilda broods over which of her human companions to embrace into their chosen family, an ethical dilemma that is explained thusly by Sorel’s partner Anthony when she asks him about the subject while sojourning with them:‘to choose someone for your family is a great responsibility. It must be done not simply out of your own need or desire but rather because of a mutual need. We must search ourselves and the other to know if it is really essential. To do otherwise is a grave error’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 69).
Such is one of the fundamental ideas in the text; that the formation of chosen families can build intimate bonds that are as deep as biological ties when done with benevolence, a sentiment which is shared amidst the folk that cultivate their families within the LGBTQ community.
Other ideas that are also explored within the narrative are visibility and passing, since Gilda’s identity as a Black butch lesbian woman is perceptible in the milieus she inhabits and hence is susceptible to the discrimination of the mainstream over the decades; yet her vampirism means ‘she has she has power to overcome these situations, but she knows that other people don’t have that same privilege’ (Burch, 2011). Regardless of the advantages that she thus receives via her vampirism, Gilda is still a Black lesbian woman — a triple marginalised identity — and so her lived experiences are encountered through the intersection of her blackness, her lesbianism and her womanhood. Whilst her race as a Black person is unable to pass as White unlike the ‘creamy-coloured quadroons’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 28), on the other hand her sexuality and her gender as a butch lesbian woman is indeed varied in its visibility in the novel. For instance, the fluidity of Gilda’s gender expression is exhibited as a choice and a necessity, since she very rapidly realises that, ‘even with my advantages I’d be fair game for every male passerby’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 66) and so she presents as a boy for the sake of travelling safely. At the same time, Gilda is ‘comfortable returning to the guise of boyhood that had cloaked her during her travels west, releasing her from the pretences and constrictions of womanhood’ (Gomez, 1991, p. 66), which suggests that she prefers masculine presentation when it then entails the matter of gender expression, as befits a butch lesbian. As fashions advance, the wearing of masculine or androgynous apparel by women becomes a trend and so Gilda is able to accentuate her femininity with the garments of masculinity instead of obscuring her femininity with such apparel. This means that Gilda’s identity as a Black butch lesbian woman is visible in lieu of “passing” as a Black feminine straight woman, but ‘by deliberately not “passing’—by putting herself at risk by drawing attention to markers of race and sexual identity – Gilda cunningly camouflages her real secret: her vampirism’ (Jones, 1997, p. 159). Although she is not “passing” as a Black feminine straight woman, she is “passing” as a human and hiding the identity markers of a vampire because ‘passing as mortal is survival, a survival that resonates with the conflicted significance of “passing” to people of color, lesbians, and gay men’ (Jones, 1997, p. 158). This gauging of visibility is imperative for Gilda and her vampire family because of the risks that staying in the same place can pose for them if their vampirism is discovered, which is familiar for LGBTQ people that migrate to preclude the outing of their queerness. This is then reflected in Gilda’s relocations throughout the decades and the personas she assumes to avoid detection: from a farmer in Rosebud, Missouri (1931) to a hairdresser in South End, Boston (1955) to a stage manager then a nightclub singer in New York City (1971 — 1981) and lastly a romance writer in Hampton Halls, New Hampshire until 2020.
When the narrative moves from modern 2020 to the dystopian future of 2050 (as envisioned in the 90s), the existence of vampires has been publicised, so hunters are hired by the rich to pursue them for their blood, whilst the majority of the population (including both humans and vampires) have migrated Off-world due to the ecocide of the planet. Thus, vampires are treated as a further marginalised group that are persecuted much like queer people and people-of-colour were in the previous centuries, an irony that is acknowledged by Gilda as she recalls the oppression she has suffered and witnessed. During this tumultuous time, Gilda receives a telepathic message that her loved ones are bound for the refuge of Machu Picchu in South America, and so travels to join them, during which she saves a woman named Ermis from a suicide attempt by turning her into a vampire as the last member of the chosen family. Together they travel to their destination. In this chosen family of six there are five members that are queer, so for them to retreat from an intolerant society can be read as referencing the idea of separatism (which was particularly prevalent among the lesbians of the 1970s and 1980s), wherein a marginalised group makes the decision to be independent from the mainstream, whereas the idea of assimilation advocates for the incorporation of a particular minority into the majority. Ultimately, this separatism is expressed as a positive political act onthe basis that, for these vampires, the queerness they embody will endure through separation from oppressive structures of society as a triumph of their autonomy and agency. Unlike the fifteen years that separates The Gilda Stories from the preceding text by Rice, there is only one year in-between this and the next novel Lost Souls (1992), so there is a dearth of milestone events in this intervening year. That notwithstanding, there was the publication of Vampires Anonymous (1991) by Jeffery N. McMahan, a Gothic novel that follows the homosexual vampire Andrew as his partner attends meetings at the titular organisation in order to abstain from blood thirst. Rather than the radical queerness represented by Gomez in The Gilda Stories , in Lost Souls Brite tackles the queer vampire via a nihilistic approach to queerness; the queer vampire is amoral and counter-cultural to the subjective moral standards of the humans they are distinct and disparate from, so to measure them by normative notions is mistaken.
Lost Souls
Written by Poppy Z. Brite and published in 1992, Lost Souls was expanded into a novel from a short story that he was working entitled The Seed of Lost Souls. In a 1994 interview with Nancy Kilpatrick for the magazine HORROR, he explains his motives for writing about vampires: ‘I was interested in and involved with the Gothic/deather subculture at the time – the music, the clothes and makeup, the affinity for graveyards, the bloodletting,and vampires are an essential icon of that culture. Those kids are beautiful, alienated, at once craving wild experience and romanticizing death. Is it any wonder they identify with vampires?’
Within alternative subcultures such as the Goth scene, members that are LGTBQ or are involved in non-normative lifestyles like BDSM and polyamory are accepted, but queerness in particular has ‘a high value (sub)cultural capital in Goth subculture. Indeed, the subject of androgyny seems to be attached to the affirmation/performance of divergent sexualities’ (Santos, 2021, p. 228). Against a backdrop in which the non-normativity of queerness is welcomed, the narrators in the novel who belong to the Goth subculture or alternative scene are queer through the identities they perform and present. And of these narrators, it is arguably the perspective of the vampires, and particularly Nothing’s, that is then focalised as the primary thread, which then frames the novel as a coming-of-age/coming out story that follows the course of his queer identity as a vampire.
In the Prologue of the novel, the newer vampires Zillah, Molochai and Twig visit the dive bar of the older vampire Christian on the last night of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where Zillah has sex with the human Jessy. Then in the morning these newer vampires depart the city while Christian undertakes the duty of nursing Jessy during her pregnancy until her death, and to protect Nothing from the fate of vampirism he abandons him in Maryland to be adopted by humans. To begin, the text is differentiated from the previously discussed two in terms of Brite’s depiction of vampires as he renders them as a separate race from humans that are ‘close enough to mate but still as far away from each other as dusk and dawn’ (Brite, p. 68). Thus, Brite’s vampires are living beings that are born as vampires instead of turned into them and ‘therefore, vampires cannot be regarded as degenerate, as they have no infection or disease to transmit to mortal humanity, no imperative to convert others to simulacra of their own state’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 45). When these vampire babies are born, though, ‘they manage to chew their way out’ (Brite, 1992, p. 277, original italics) of their mothers’ wombs, which as a post-AIDS text is ironic for in the text it is the children of heterosexual intercourse that are the cause of death instead of AIDS, a reversal of the homophobic rhetoric that homosexual intercourse is fatal and infectious. Due to the dangers of intercourse for female vampires, they are averse to penetrative sex and are partial to abstinence, which is referenced in relation to the one female vampire that is named in the novel — Richelle — and it is only through rape that she is inseminated and then dies from an attempt to abort. With regard to these reasons, the male vampires have sex with female humans to sire the vampires ‘of a newer generation’ (Brite, 1992, p. 59) who ‘wished they had fangs but had to make do with teeth they filed sharp, and they could walk in sunlight’ (Brite, 1992, p. 5). Meanwhile the male vampires have homosexual relationships as a bisexual preference and a biological adaptation; the normalisation and necessity of homosexuality is contrary to the compulsory heterosexuality of human culture. It is through this emphasis that the analogy of ‘vampirism as homosexuality or, more precisely, vampirism which routinely embodies homosexual practice’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 150) is represented.
The most explicit manifestation of vampirism as homosexuality is via the similitude of blood to semen that is alluded to throughout the novel, the earliest of which is when Nothing evokes after the act of oral sex: ‘come has almost exactly the same chemical makeup as human blood’ (Brite, 1992, p. 124, italics original), consequently feeding is like fellatio because they both involve ingesting a bodily fluid which is linked with life and implies that blood-drinking is intrinsically sexual. However, this instance is not the only or most graphic moment in the novel that ‘grants materiality to the metaphor, or better yet, incarnates the metaphor that associates blood to life into bodily fluids’ (Santos, 2021. p. 231). A case in point is when Christian feeds on a boy as he pleasures him to orgasm, and once, ‘the boy’s sperm flooded warm over Christian’s fingers. Christian brought his hand up to his lips and sucked at that too’ (Brite, 1992, p. 67). Here is the occasion in which the link ‘between the sanguine and seminal’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 149) is literalised for both bodily fluids appease his appetite. On account of the blood as semen analogy, the scenes that depict blood-drinking are interpretable as seminal, such as when Nothing drinks the blood beverage that Zillah offers, which serves as an indication of his inherent queerness since he does the deed ‘without choking, without spitting or gagging’ (Brite, 1992, p. 142). Owing to the fact that ‘he swallows and does not spit, Nothing is simultaneously both a copybook vampire and a willing (and apparently instinctual) participant in gay, oral sexuality’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 148); that the behaviours of vampirism and queerness feel natural for Nothing thus mirrors the consensus that LGBTQ identities are an inborn trait of LGBTQ people and accordingly does not denote a deviation in their psychology. This positive notion of queerness as innate instead of unnatural is undermined though by the negative stereotypes that are present in Brite’s vampires, which pertain to the relationships that Nothing has with Zillah and Christian – who are adults — because Nothing is fifteen, so he is underage and unable to consent to sex. Regardless of his status as a minor, Nothing has sexual relations with Zillah and Christian; which means the novel plays into the harmful implication that queer people are paedophiles that prey on youths, who are viewed as victims of “the gay agenda”. Moreover, there is the reveal that Zillah is Nothing’s father, therefore they have been engaging in an incestuous relationship, and yet, the novel refrains from condemning their relationship on the basis of incest, but instead via abuse. Meanwhile, the existence of this incestuous relationship is another instance of depicting the damaging stereotype that queer people are perverted towards sexual taboos such as incest, and derives from what Freud conjectured in the early 20th century wherein homosexuality is an inversion of the Oedipus complex, ergo homosexuals have an attraction to either their father or mother respectively (Roudinesco, & Pommier, 2002). Nevertheless, the portrayals of incest and pedophilia are not limited to homosexuality, and include heterosexuality, since Nothing’s mother Jessy also has sex with her father as well as Zillah and Christian at the age of sixteen.
With the newer vampires in the novel, blood-drinking is another pleasure they also pursue in their hedonistic diet of drugs, sweets, sex and alcohol. With the older vampires, blood-drinking is the only need other than sex that they are able to satisfy, so Christian treats the blood he drinks with a respect that Zillah and his family (excluding Nothing) are lacking. While there is a reading that Christian ‘may envy the greater freedom of modern youth, ironically scripted here as a form of biological evolution’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 146), there is the sense that he is in a state of ‘reflection upon the passing of a true nature, of an essential distinction that encodes vampirism’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 146). This might be an allusion to the intergenerational conflict between older and younger queers, in which the former feel jealousy and superiority towards the latter because the latter are able to exist in society as a result of their efforts and because they had to suffer through hardships that the latter did not. Since the newer vampires have their advantages from biological evolution, it is better and easier for them to pass as persons compared to Christian. Moreover, these newer vampires purposefully present themselves as queer, a privilege that Christian could not possess. This metaphor thus mirrors their privilege of “passing” to their biological evolution and encapsulates the idea that the younger members of a minority culture are closer to the dominant culture, which is depicted in the novel through the absence of fangs for the newer vampires, hitherto a most obvious marker of identity.
While the privilege of passing is applicable to homosexuals and bisexuals, the concept is also of importance to trans people, specifically since their capacity to pass as cisgender is contingent on the performance and presentation of gender conformity. This too is the position of the vampires, because in order to pass as human they have to embody and express the behaviour and appearance of a human, so the identity of vampire is thus analogous to a gender identity; insofar as being a gender is a matter of performing it by way of behaviour and appearance is fitting for how, ‘Nothing becomes a vampire as he interacts and travels with Molochai, Twig and Zillah. It is from action, by a performative act, that he performs his gender identity’ (Santos, 2021, p. 236). In the same sense that behaviour and appearance are coded as masculine or feminine, behaviour and appearance can be coded as human or vampiric too, and there are two scenes in the novel that illustrate this notion of the vampire as analogous to gender performance. The first of these is when Nothing is encouraged by Zillah, Molochai and Twig to feed on his friend Laine who had hitchhiked to find him after he ran away from home, and realises that the four of them are vampires, whereupon he performs the behaviour of vampirism by taking the life of a human for the first time. The second of these is when Nothing happens on his idols Steve and Ghost once again — the members of the eponymous band “Lost Souls” — while he and his family are living with Christian in their hometown of Missing Mile. In the midst of their meeting, Ghost (who is psychic) then notices that ‘Most of Nothing’s front teeth had been filed to sharp points’ (Brite, 1992, p. 242) like Zillah, Molochai and Twig, thereupon presenting the appearance of vampirism. By doing these things that differentiate him from humans, Nothing is both performing the behaviour and presenting the appearance of his vampire identity, through which he is becoming his vampire identity.
In the climax, Zillah and Christian are dispatched by Steve and Ghost as revenge for the death of Steve’s ex-girlfriend Ann from a botched abortion of ‘another of Zillah’s beautiful, deadly children’ (Brite, 1992, p. 247). In the wake of this Nothing takes on the role of the head vampire. In the Epilogue (fifty years later), Brite closes the novel on Nothing and the twins as they lead ‘a truly separatist gay life’ (Hughes, 2009, p. 155) that is totally independent of the cisgender heterosexual human community. Akin to Gomez this separatism is presented as positive because, ‘to stabilize and perpetuate both the physiology and the identity of the vampire thus necessitates the removal of the human from all functions other than that of feeding’ (Hughes, 2012, p. 206).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the findings of this article are that these depictions of the figure of the vampire in late 20th century Gothic fiction encapsulate the lived experiences of queer people through the portrayal of vampirism as a metaphor for queerness, with each text managing to present the metaphor of vampires as queer in different and distinct ways that respectively represent their queerness as negative, positive and neutral. First is Interview with the Vampire (1976), which is a representation of negative queerness, wherein Louis is a vampire who lives in shame and self-hatred because he believes his vampirism is evil, thus evoking the implication that queerness is a transgression of religion. Further, the novel echoes the negative stereotypes that sees queer people as abusers with the intent of converting others into homosexuality through manipulation, molestation and grooming. These prejudices are depicted in the forcing of vampirism onto Louis by Lestat and their resulting toxic relationship, their adoption of Claudia that stunts her as a child with an adult mind, and Louis falling for a late adolescent. Second is The Gilda Stories (1991), which is a representation of positive queerness, wherein Gilda is a vampire who exchanges blood and emotions between herself and humans, which thus depicts them as symbiotic as opposed to parasitic by balancing the power dynamic. The novel is also then able to avoid the associations of queerness as inextricably linked to disease, as it is a post-AIDS text that, through narrating the sharing of blood as a nurturing and platonic interaction, separates feeding from sex. The novel then features the concept of the chosen family which Gilda enters and expands, as well as the notions of visibility and passing with the text thus examining the intersections of Gilda’s marginalised identities as a Black butch lesbian woman. Third is Lost Souls (1992), which is a representation of neutral queerness, wherein Nothing and his family are vampires who are born from heterosexual fornication, which then inverts the interconnection of queer desire to death as established by the AIDS epidemic. The text does depict the immoralities of incest and paedophilia in homosexual relations, however this is the case too with heterosexual relations in the narrative. Then there is the idea of the vampire as analogous to a gender identity that is performed and presented in behaviour and appearance, which then, again, correlates to the concepts of visibility and passing because the newer vampires can pass as human, but choose not to, and the older vampires have to do much more to pass as human. The recommendation for future research is to investigate the queer vampire in 21st century Gothic fiction to follow the evolution of the texts from the late 20th century, for example Let the Right One In (2004) by John Ajvide Lindqvist and Fledgling (2005) by Octavia Butler, or to explore the queer vampire in 19th century Gothic fiction to establish the genesis for the texts of the 20th century, for example Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Sheridan La Fanu.
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