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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
ESSAY
Vampires Are Us
R
ICHARD
S. P
RIMUTH
Richard S. Primuth is an instructor in American history at the Univer-
sity of West Georgia.
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.
March–April 2014
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Bela Lugosi and David Manners (as Jonathan Harker) in 1931’s
Dracula