So a little while ago, I had a pretty big thirst for Victorian horror and thriller novels, mostly because Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a really good book. And I remember that one of the books I read was Carmilla, because I had finished Dracula and I decided that another vampire novel would be fun to read.
Yeah it was really gay. The novel follows a girl named Laura, who’s incredibly lonely and meets a beautiful girl she shared a dream with back when she was a kid named Carmilla, who turns out to be a vampire. They never explicitly state it, but the amount of subtext, kinda makes it clear that Carmilla’s thirst for blood that she hides from the public and thirst for the pure Laura, is also a allegory for romantic attraction towards the same gender, something that was seen as very taboo and very dirty in Victorian times.
It was actually a pretty fun book though, and it created a surprising amount of vampire tropes that are still around to this day, though, when I checked tvtropes, it turns out the trope of the lesbian vampire is even older than I thought, dating back to the 1816 unfinished poem called Christabel.
Also the reason why gay vampires is a trope seems to stem from the fact that vampires are often ubiquitously described as beautiful, and the entire desire for blood is often compared to a desire for the other sex. Though it’s also important to note another less positive reason is that villains were often queer coded to make them seem corrupt and immoral compared to the heroes, and a common theme in a lot of very gay vampire stories is that the vampire wants to corrupt or make the otherwise pure protagonist into an impure hedonist, basically a lot of older vampire novels portray being gay as a corruption that is spread rather than just a thing people are:
Still though Carmilla is a pretty good book, and it also predates Dracula by 25 years, and was a trendsetter for a lot of vampire media, and started to become more popular in the 1970s, once people stopped being rude and started to realize that lgbtq people are well, people and not satanic degenerates.
OneGaySouthDakotan on
The gay werewolf romance from the 11th century:
HighAsBlucifersBalls on
Sparkly vampires are the worst kind by far.
Revolver_Kurisu on
In my mind I normally see vampires as bisexual, just as snake taught me
KenseiHimura on
I mean, is it necessarily the earliest vampire trope when vampires were creatures from mythology for centuries before?
5 Comments
So a little while ago, I had a pretty big thirst for Victorian horror and thriller novels, mostly because Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a really good book. And I remember that one of the books I read was Carmilla, because I had finished Dracula and I decided that another vampire novel would be fun to read.
Yeah it was really gay. The novel follows a girl named Laura, who’s incredibly lonely and meets a beautiful girl she shared a dream with back when she was a kid named Carmilla, who turns out to be a vampire. They never explicitly state it, but the amount of subtext, kinda makes it clear that Carmilla’s thirst for blood that she hides from the public and thirst for the pure Laura, is also a allegory for romantic attraction towards the same gender, something that was seen as very taboo and very dirty in Victorian times.
It was actually a pretty fun book though, and it created a surprising amount of vampire tropes that are still around to this day, though, when I checked tvtropes, it turns out the trope of the lesbian vampire is even older than I thought, dating back to the 1816 unfinished poem called Christabel.
Also the reason why gay vampires is a trope seems to stem from the fact that vampires are often ubiquitously described as beautiful, and the entire desire for blood is often compared to a desire for the other sex. Though it’s also important to note another less positive reason is that villains were often queer coded to make them seem corrupt and immoral compared to the heroes, and a common theme in a lot of very gay vampire stories is that the vampire wants to corrupt or make the otherwise pure protagonist into an impure hedonist, basically a lot of older vampire novels portray being gay as a corruption that is spread rather than just a thing people are:
Still though Carmilla is a pretty good book, and it also predates Dracula by 25 years, and was a trendsetter for a lot of vampire media, and started to become more popular in the 1970s, once people stopped being rude and started to realize that lgbtq people are well, people and not satanic degenerates.
The gay werewolf romance from the 11th century:
Sparkly vampires are the worst kind by far.
In my mind I normally see vampires as bisexual, just as snake taught me
I mean, is it necessarily the earliest vampire trope when vampires were creatures from mythology for centuries before?