Vampires are always symbolic of the outsider, the Other, the ones who are different. The ones that the good, pure folks of the town clutch their pearls when they see them, as they fear that the monsters will destroy all things decent about society. Vampires are foreign, they are queer, they are not us. And the most terrifying thing about a vampire is that, unlike real life minorities, they have power. The same power that our persecutors used to have (and in some places still do have) over us to inflict hell on our minds and bodies.

Interview with the Vampire is gay.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is negatively Jewish coded with harmful stereotypes (foreign, blood libel myth, hook nose, heavy similarities to a dybbuk, sexually predatory, etc.) and presents gender non-conformity. The Jewish coding is so heavy that the Bela Lugosi film actually has Dracula wearing a six-pointed star.

True Blood attempts to make a very non-subtle comparison between vampirism and queer rights. God Hates Fangs, Coming out of the coffin, etc. (This analogy falls apart if you think about it too long because queers aren’t monsters who need to feed on the blood of straight people to live, but hey, they tried.)

You get the picture.

As someone who straddles the intersection of queer and Jewish identity, this has “me” written all over it. But why would I love and write fiction based on something meant to provoke fear of my existence?

While in cases like Dracula, this otherness was meant to be horrific, I think that otherness is why many of us who are actually “others” love vampires so much. Not because of the horror attempted to be conveyed on the page in older vampire stories, but because we see ourselves there and realize that a story exists where we have power. It’s the same reason why queer communities latched onto over-the-top queer-coded Disney villains like Ursula and Jafar as icons. Yes, the evil beings get defeated in the end… and the representation certainly has problematic points. But maybe we can pretend. Maybe we can imagine a world where we get the power for a change and don’t have to hide who we are. Because in real life, even though some people who aren’t very smart *think* there’s some sort of secret Gay Agenda or Protocols of the Elders of Zion, there isn’t. We

historically have had no power, and still struggle to make our voices heard today.

But Vampires aren’t just powerful minorities: they’re survivors [sort of] of dead societies and eras that are gone. They’re the last “living” memory of the Black Plague, of the fall of the Roman Empire, of the rise of Egyptian pyramids. This speaks to me as a Jew, especially as a Jew with Holocaust survivor grandparents, and as a Jew who went to a Jewish school were I was passed on the history, memories, and stories of my people handed down through countless generations. I can’t think of anything more Jewish-coded than representing an ancient civilization and clinging to that memory. It also speaks to me as a queer person, when I look at ancient indications of queer identity and see modern archeologists and anthropologists pull up the “they were roommates” bs, erasing true history of queer people who have always existed.

It might be weird for me to be so in love with vampires given their problematic history connected to harmful Jewish tropes. The image of Dracula’s brides tearing

apart a child isn’t dissimilar to that one medieval picture made to depict the lie that Jews cut up and kill Christian children to make matzah. Dracula has “oriental” features once ascribed to “oriental” Jews, who were the descendants of exiles from Judea that’s technically in Asia – most prominently, the large nose stereotype commonly found in individuals of Middle Eastern heritage. Aka, Dracula has a “hook nose”. Jews were thought to be a parasitic drain on the soul of European societies, much like a vampire literally drains the blood and soul of their victims, and both were described in nearly the same verbiage by some 19th century writers. There’s even a line in Chapter 17 of Dracula that states: “There was dust that thick in the place that you might have slep’ on it without `urtin’ of yer bones. An’ the place was that neglected that yer might `ave smelled ole Jerusalem in it.” I mean, how much louder does the dog whistle have to get before it’s just a whistle?

But people have moved on a little since the original Dracula. People tend to humanize the Other now.

I think, perhaps I love vampires because they were coded to me. To demonize me, of course, but there wasn’t much mainstream representation back in the old days beyond Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice so like queers with Ursula, it’s not unreasonable to take what you can get at that point in time. I see the dog whistles next to the demonization and I think… but what if the vampire wasn’t evil, just like I’m not evil? What if… they’re just me with the power to stand up to the world and be themselves?

What if I had the power to be myself openly without being hunted or hurt for it? To wear my gay Star of David Ahava shirt without fear of either antisemites or homophobes?

Old vampire stories may exist to warn us Others that we will be hunted and killed if we step out of line, if we reveal ourselves too fully. Their horror exists to titillate and terrify mainstream respectable society by imagining minorities with the power to inflict the horrors they’ve inflicted on us back at them.

Modern vampires exist to allow power fantasies and romances. People want to be vampires, or be with vampires, or both. The Others are now Hot. We’ve gone from horror to forbidden lust to being mostly socially acceptable in our existence (even if there’s been some backsliding in progress in recent years). The horror still exists, but are we really horrified by it? No, we want it. We crave it. Because it gives us power. And you know something, that’s kind of fun to pretend we have in a fantasy book. It’s a quiet wish fulfilment to pretend we don’t have to be nice to bigots or our oppressors and can indulge in a morally grey or even pitch black attitude without judgement. And I think, that’s why I love the horror of power and vampires.

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