The Gay & Lesbian Review

ESSAY

Vampires Are Us R ICHARD S. P RIMUTH

V AMPIRES HAVE BEEN a part of popular culture in the West for several centuries. American vampire stories are rooted in the folklore of Eastern Europe, but similar crea- tures have also turned up in Western Europe, India, and China. The contemporary vampire story has roots in traditional folklore, in 17th- and 18th-century pseudo-science, and in historical figures such as the “Blood Countess,” Elizabeth Bathory, and Romanian ruler Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes. Well-known precursors to today’s stories in- clude the 1748 German poem, “Der Vampyre” and an 1819 short story by John Polidori titled “The Vampyre.” In this story, the vampire, Lord Ruthven, was first portrayed as the “aristo- cratic seducer” that is so familiar to Americans. Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician, and many readers saw a resemblance between Byron and the vampire. By the 1840s, vampires were seen in English theatrical pro- ductions, and “Varney the Vampire,” created by James Malcolm Rymer, was a popular newspaper serial. In 1871, a vampire story with subtle lesbian undertones, “Carmilla,” by Sheridan Le Fanu was published. In 1897, the best known vampire book, Bram Stoker’s Dracula , was published. Hugely popular in the U.S., it had been adapted for both stage and screen by the 1920s. The first vampire films were actually made by the French in the 1890s. By the 1920s, the Germans had produced Nosferatu , and in 1931 Hollywood jumped in with Tod Browning’s Dracula . W AS D RACULA G AY ? Sexuality and homosexuality have been a part of vampire stories in popular culture, mostly as a subtle undercurrent, since at least the 19th century. In the Romantic and Victorian Eras, vampires often served as sexual metaphors. In 1895, Oscar Wilde was being sent to prison for “gross indecency” while Bram Stoker was writing his novel. The lesson must have been obvious, but there are several homoerotic scenes in Dracula. In a time of ex- treme repression and fear for gay people, using their vampire characters as a metaphor for their own hidden sexuality was an outlet for self-expression. As times changed, these vampires and vampire stories, movies, and later television evolved as well. Vampires, especially in modern American literature, film, and television, can be used as a “window” on gay culture of the cor- responding era. Bram Stoker was a closeted homosexual and a friend of Oscar Wilde, a not-so-closeted gay man. Stoker idolized Walt Whitman and met him while touring the U.S., and he had a “passionate” relationship with actor Henry Irving. He began writing Dracula one month after Wilde was convicted of

sodomy and sentenced to hard labor. In a nod to Wilde, he used the “idiom of Oscar Wilde’s letters to Lord Alfred Douglas” in Dracula . His friend of over twenty years was going to prison, and he began writing a novel about sexual repression and fear. Talia Schaffer (1994) writes that “ Dracula explores Stoker’s fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man during Oscar Wilde’s trial. ... This peculiar tonality of horror derives from Stoker’s emotions at this unique moment in gay history.” In 1931’s Dracula , the character of Jonathan Harker stands in for the author and his own fears and desires vis-à-vis his re- pressed homosexual feelings. Harker describes his sensations when about to engage with a trio of female vampires: “I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ec- stasy and waited—waited with beating heart.” The use of fe- males in scenes such as this is explained by Christopher Craft (1988). He sees all gay men of this time as wearing a “hetero- sexual mask” and any erotic male contact as being “mediated” by females, the “correct” gender. Stoker does not let this seem- ing heterosexual encounter reach fruition; Count Dracula breaks it up, declaring: “How dare you touch him, any of you? ... This man belongs to me!” In a short story from 1911, For the Blood is the Life , Amer- ican writer F. Marion Crawford demonstrated the same mixture of desire and fear, describing his vampire thus: “She had very red lips and very black eyes, she was built like a greyhound, and had the tongue of the devil.” There is sexual attraction but complete dread at the same time, an apt description of the feel- ings surrounding same-sex eroticism at this time.

Richard S. Primuth is an instructor in American history at the Univer- sity of West Georgia.

Bela Lugosi and David Manners (as Jonathan Harker) in 1931’s Dracula

March–April 2014

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