From Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire” to HBO’s television show True Blood, the vampire has always possessed a sexual underdone. Moreover, it has often been used as a commentary (either negative or positive) on what society perceives as deviate sexuality, specifically female sexual liberation and homosexuality. For instance, film critic Parker Tyler contends early Hollywood used actresses like Theda Bara and the role of the female vampire to personify the wonton seductress, with her sly nudity and alluring manner tempting men away from happy marriages and women into lesbianism.[1] The antithesis of the proper women, who kept her body modestly covered and suppressed her sexuality, the vampire employed her body and sexuality as a means to entice and trap her victims: “She was invariably an accursed and depraved type, however physically alluring, and occasionally she would writhe and clutch.”[2] Likewise, David Foster contends the homosexuality of the vampire became associated with the upper class, where same-sex habits were common in the aristocracy. Like the upper-class homosexual who sought relations with rougher trade in the lower classes, the vampire – frequently a member of the upper class (Dracula, for instance, is a count) – hunts the lower class and inflicts their plight upon them. As Foster argues, the nocturnal hunting of the vampire mimics the nightly cruising of the gay man: “Individuals cursed with the love of other men come out at night to lure unsuspecting victims to their gaudy lairs, where their ravishment initiates them into their perverse form of sexuality.”[3]
Works Referenced
Foster, David William. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. Austin, TX: University of Austin Press, 1991.
Tyler, Parker. A Pictorial History of Sex in Films. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1974.
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[1] Tyler, 7.
[2] Tyler, 19.
[3] Foster, 26.
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