It is often somewhat jokingly stated that all vampires are gay. The truth is, all vampires are gay or well gay as in queer. From the very first vampires popularized in Camilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, vampires are and always have been steeped in queerness. Even though the authors weren’t always aiming to put queer folks in a positive light, in true queer fashion we reclaimed the toxic representation and ran with it. This is the history of how all vampires are gay.
One of the very first modern vampire novella, Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, was published in 1872, predating the better known Dracula by about 26 years. Carmilla is about a villainous lesbian vampire who preys on innocent women to ‘turn’ them as well, into vampires? No, into lesbians.
You see Carmilla was intended as a homophobic story, trying to warn the readers about those devious lesbians who have sex with women! (oh the horror!) So why is that today Carmilla is hailed as a pinnacle of early queer culture? Well, because we fucking reclaimed it.
In the same way we’ve reclaimed the word queer to mean something positive and the way elder gays reclaimed words like faggot and dyke (don’t worry baby gays, you can use those terms and you should wear them with pride). We managed to reclaim those words that our oppressors once used to hurt us with and we did the damn same thing with vampires.
So how did we turn villainous sexy evil sexually deviant monsters into our cultural heritage?
Cautionary Tales and the Taboo of Sex
Horror and the gays go a long way back in history. Starting in the 1790’s and the 1800’s gay authors like Matthew Lewis, William Thomas Beckford and Francis Lathom started writing gay horror stories. , they used horror to subliminally express themselves. As sexually liberated let alone gay people were a massive taboo at the time.
Horror stories often were cautionary tales and the vampire was a perfect metaphor. As humans turned monsters they represented the fears and taboos of the time. Fears and taboos like sexual infidelity.
However, leading up to the Victorian era, public perception of sex started to change a little. Sure it was still a taboo but people also knew it was enjoyable.
Queer vampires in the Victorian era.
It’s 1872, Carmilla gets published and introduces Victorian common folks to the lesbian vampire Carmilla. The book is written as a cautionary tale of how ‘sexual deviants’ like those who sleep with people of the same sex, are scary monsters just like vampires.
Next up it’s 1897 and Dracula, arguably the most famous of the vampires gets published. While less on the nose queer, it still has rich queer undertones. When Dracula protects Harker from a bunch of female vampires and tells them ‘Harker is mine’. C’mon, that is kind of fruity.
Queer vampires in the early 20th century.
We continue into the 1930’s when Dracula’s Daughter is released in 1936, a movie about you guessed it Dracula’s daughter. After Van Hellsing destroys dracula, she steals the body and attempts to burn it in the hope to break her vampirism which she sees as a curse. Her manservant Sandor however advises against it and tells her she needs to confront her vampirism.
She then sends Sandor to fetch her a model to paint, the young girl Lili gets chosen as a model and well from there on there are plenty of lesbian undertones including a scene where Dracula’s daughter and Lili kiss.
The return of sexy queer vampires in the 1970’s
Between 1936 and 1968 American law started to prohibit displays of homosexuality in movies, which puts a temporary stop on gay vampires on the big screen. In the 1970’s this ban is lifted because it felt impossible to keep up with, which lead to the third rise of vampire stories. Mix that with the fact that the 1970’s were an age of sexual liberty and you get sexy gay vampires taking their permanent place in pop culture.
Anne Rice wrote her Interview with the Vampire series, which contained many gay characters and amassed 80 million fans over the globe. Followed by movies starring queer vampires like the Hunger in the 80’s and tv shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 90’s. Not to mention the first film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire.
Heading into the 2000’s we see True Blood become popular with queer vampires and humans alike. Basically most of modern history’s vampires have been steeped in queer undertones. This was up till the appearance of Twilight which surprisingly contains only hetero characters.
However, the series dealt with themes that queer people can relate to. The feeling that you need to hide what you are, the feeling of being misunderstood and the feeling of longing for acceptance are all feelings that we can relate to. Which is why despite being a hetero romance story Twilight finds itself having a lot of queer fans.
Conclusion: Vampires have always been queer.
Vampires started out as a cautionary tales against many fears and taboos including against us queers. We then continued to claim the queer vampires for our own entertainment and made it a success, vampires are now beloved by many in the mainstream media. So basically it is true, all vampires are gay.