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culture. Rice’s books with her frequent portrayals of ho-
mosexual relationships have been stunningly success-
ful. In
Interview with the Vampire
, which was published
in 1976, the male vampires form a family, even “giving
birth” to a young female vampire who becomes their
“daughter.” Not all of the book is so family oriented,
however. Scholar George E. Haggerty (1998) examines
an early scene in the novel, in which the vampire Louis
meets a young gay man in a bar and tells his life story
as “a straightforward parody of a queer seduction.” He
argues that Rice is most interested in male-to-male de-
sire, and her characters symbolize gay predators “roving
in the darkness” with an “insatiable appetite.” At the
same time she is portraying a somewhat glamorous
world that’s not accessible to the majority of people.
There can be no doubt that Anne Rice created a
lush, detailed, and highly erotic world. The vampires live in the
world of mortals yet somehow remain separate. They feel and
want many of the same things as everyone else. They are also
very appealing to gay men, for whom the thought of remaining
young and beautiful forever can be intoxicating. By the end of
Interview with the Vampire
, the boy wants to become a vampire
himself. When the vampire does bite him, it is completely sex-
ualized: “two fangs came down into the boy’s flesh. The boy
stuttered, a low guttural sound coming out of his throat ... his
eyes widening only to become dull and gray as the vampire
drank.” While the vampires in the world created by Rice were
erotic beings and are symbolic of the new gay sexual freedom
that developed in the 1970s, there was a backlash. This is one
way to interpret the vampires created by Stephen King in
Salem’s Lot
(1975). These vampires are truly frightening. They
settle in an all-American town in Maine and immediately start
to attack the town’s children.
C
ONSERVATIVE
B
ACKLASH
The “party” that was the 1970s for many gay people ended with
the onset of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and the conservative era
of Ronald Reagan. To be sure, a huge number of gay and les-
bian authors emerged in this era or continued to publish openly
GLBT books—Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Rita Mae Brown,
et al.—but there was a palpable backlash against gay people in
the popular imagination. In
Cruising
(1980), there was an unde-
niable message that gay sex and promiscuity lead to death. Gays
are portrayed as killers (this is also evident in 1991’s
Silence of
the Lambs
) or as practitioners of kinky sex who deserve to die.
A backlash can also be seen in movies such as
The Birdcage
, in
which gays are merely harmless and humorous objects of deri-
sion. A few years later there were a number of movies such as
Threesome
(1994) and
The Opposite of Sex
(1998), which sug-
gested that sexual orientation could be turned on and off like a
light switch, advancing the “choice” theory.
Against this reactionary backdrop, vampires were often seen
in a similar light. In
Fright Night
(1985), the vampire bites a
young, somewhat naïve boy and turns him into a creature of the
night who stalks others. This is a clear metaphor for homosexual
seduction and the fear of gays promulgated by some conserva-
tives.
The Lost Boys
(1987) serves as a cautionary warning: a
group of boys who only want to play at night are coming for your
sons. The movie at its core is about family (a dominant theme in
the 1980s), whether made up of a mom and her sons or created
by homosocial male bonding. The gay vampires in Anne Rice’s
books of this time live extravagantly: “This world was one of
spacious rooms, decorated walls, generous fragrant light and a
regular parade of high fashion, to which I grew accustomed com-
pletely, never seeing much of the pain and misery of the poor of
the city at all.” Her vampires are mostly gay, but rather than being
concerned for humanity, they revel in opulence. In
The Hunger
(1983). the bisexual vampires live a decadent lifestyle, again
symbolic of the 1980s, but most come to a deservedly nasty end.
The AIDS crisis was reflected in vampire culture as well.
Scholar Nina Auerbach (1995) writes that vampires were
stricken (like many homosexuals), and would no longer be
young and beautiful forever, but become tragically mortal. She
discusses a novel by Brian Aldiss,
Dracula Unbound
(1991), in
which Dracula suffers from syphilis, another sexually transmit-
ted disease. This link between blood, disease, and vampires is
evident in the movie
Blade
(1998), in which the pseudo-vampire
played by actor Wesley Snipes must take preventative serum,
much as people who were HIV-positive were beginning to take
a “cocktail” of pills to ward off AIDS. Scholar David J. Skal
(1990) writes that “when the definitive anthropological history
of the AIDS epidemic is finally written, the irrational, vampire-
related undercurrents of scapegoating, blood superstition, and
plague panic will no doubt be prominent considerations.” The
“sex is bad” theme so pronounced during this time is exempli-
fied by movies such as
Vamp
(1986), in which three college
boys go looking for sex and of course wind up dead.
T
HE
A
GE OF
A
CCEPTANCE
It was in the ’90s, and especially after the scourge of AIDS was
lifted, that GLBT people and representations began to find their
place in American popular culture. Out lesbian Rosie O’Don-
nell hosted a popular daytime talk show, as Ellen DeGeneres has
done for many years. The hit comedy series
Will & Grace
began
its eight-year run in 1998. There were gay characters in movies,
on television, on stage, and in books. Some were even “normal.”
Movies intended for gay audiences ranged from funny, such as
But I’m a Cheerleader
(2000), to creepy, like
Chuck and Buck
(2000). Also popular were romances such as
Beautiful Thing
(1996),
Edge of Seventeen
(1998), and
Get Real
(1998), which
presented gay love as entirely ordinary. There was also a grow-
ing underground gay film scene led by filmmaker Bruce
20
The Gay & Lesbian Review
/
WORLDWIDE
Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in 1994’s
Interview with the Vampire