NEW YORK—Add another item to the homosexual agenda: In a thought-provoking piece on Esquire magazine’s website, Stephen Marche suggests gay boys are out to take over society, and if they need to use fangs to do that, they will.
Despite “enough already!” protestations from über-geek and best-selling author Neil Gaiman and others, the vampire craze shows no signs of having run its course and fading back into a coffin for another 20 or so years. (The last great vampire craze was sparked by Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in the 1980s.) The second cinematic installment in Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire saga, Twilight: New Moon, is due out in November. HBO’s series True Blood remains at the top of the network’s hits list, and the CW’s new series The Vampire Diaries shows every indication it will be around for at least a season or two. In addition, here! TV’s seductive gay vamp-werewolf-supernatural property The Lair is stronger than ever in season three.
Literary analysts and critics have attributed all sorts of hidden meanings to the classic, subtly erotic theme of blood-sucking immortality, but the real reason the archetypal sexy fanged ones hold the public’s interest generation after generation is much more straightforward, according to Marche: “Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men.
“The craving for vampire fiction is not a matter of taste but of urges; one does not read or watch it so much as inject it through the eyes, and like any epidemic, it’s symptomatic of something much larger: a quiet but profound sexual revolution and a new acceptance of freakiness in mainstream American life,” he wrote. “Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it?”
According to Marche, much of the vampire fantasy draws on those awkward high-school moments most of us would much rather forget. Regardless where along the gender spectrum one falls, almost everyone can remember “the moment of discovery.” A young man realizes the jocks, not the cheerleaders turn him on. A young woman realizes crushing on the “too gorgeous” boy in English class is a thorough waste of time. Another boy realizes there’s a reason his best friend is such a snappy dresser.
The phenomenon—both of the vampire and sexuality types—is nothing new. Vampire novels have been best sellers since the early 19th Century, in large part because of the sexual subtext. Most modern incarnations throw subtext to the winds and just lay everything out there in all its carnal glory. (Even Twilight, the most chaste of the current crop, tends toward the “hot” end of the scale. One critic went so far as to refer to Meyer’s original book as “the hottest bunch of abstinence” she had read.) The Lair and True Blood dare to go beyond traditional sex and deal openly with homosexuality. The Lair is made for a gay audience, so that’s a given. True Blood is cleverer in its offhand references for a more mainstream audience: In the opening credits, a road sign reads “GOD HATES FANGS,” and a talk-show sequence refers to vampires “coming out of the coffin.”
According to Marche, all of the many facets of sexuality suddenly showing up on television in the form of vampire sagas are one way a still-repressed society gives itself permission to embrace the forbidden. Vampires are fictional creatures, but if we can deal with them in our fantasies, perhaps we also can deal with LGBT people in real life.
“…[V]ampires have appeared to help America process its newfound acceptance of what so many once thought strange or abnormal,” he wrote. “Adam and Steve who live on your corner with their adorable little son and run a bakery? The transgendered man who gave birth to a healthy baby? The teenage girl who wishes that all boys could be vampires? All part of the luscious and terrifying magic of today’s sexual revolution.”
And, he concludes, the undead are serving their purpose. Things are changing; society is changing. Eventually, when the cultural rollercoaster has leveled out again and no one thinks twice about sexuality’s existence along a continuum and not simply in black and white extremes, vampires will return to their lairs until we need them again.
“Vampires will eventually go away,” Marche wrote. “They always do. But only when they’ve sucked our fear and our longing dry.”
