Are. You. KIDDING ME with this shit?!

Modern vampire fiction has queerness baked into its fucking foundations. For 200 years they've been about sex you're not supposed to be having at least as much as they've been allegories for the aristocracy.

The first modern vampire story was "The Vampyre", written 200 years ago by John Polidori, Lord Byron's personal physician. It's a blatant roman-a-clef about Byron, an infamous womanizer and the ultimate bisexual disaster. It's not a flattering portrayal.

The next big modern vampire story, "Carmilla", didn't come until over 50 years after Polidori. It was written by Sheridan LeFanu, a 58-year-old father of two daughters who did a great job of capturing the vibe of a dad who's terrified that his little girl is turning out gay AF.

"Carmilla" couldn't be a more blatant allegory for lesbian puberty, specifically as viewed through the lens of a homophobic parent who thinks their daughter's new friends are infecting her with a "social contagion".

Bram Stoker's "Dracula" shows up a quarter-century after "Carmilla". Stoker was gay AF and totally not OK with it and his sexual anxieties found an outlet in a mysterious charismatic foreigner seducing good British folk with his spooky mind powers.

TOO SUBTLE

Polidori, Lefanu, Stoker, and their many, many imitators make up more or less a century of an unbroken trend of vampires as allegory for illicit sex and especially queer sex.

This trend continued well into the 20th century.

Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire hits the shelves in 1976 and it's yaoi with fangs. A thinly veiled story about two gay guys settling down together and adopting a daughter after they get tired of the club scene.

To some extent, I feel where she's coming from with this take. Using inhuman monsters with superhuman powers as allegories for real-life marginalized groups *is* problematic. But modern vampire fiction is, for better and for worse, a genre BUILT on queerness.

Well this thread got way more attention than I expected

Wow there sure are a lot of people quote-tweeting and replying to the first tweet in this thread who clearly didn't read past it

Thank you all for repeating the stuff I already wrote

your contributions are welcome and necessary