Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. Twilight's fantasy is that the gorgeous gay guy can be your boyfriend, and for the slightly awkward teenage girls who consume the books and movies, that's the clincher. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet. Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her.
In the best-selling Undead series of MaryJanice Davidson, the Queen of the Vampires is a suburbanite named Betsy Taylor. This fall's big vampire show is on the CW, the Gossip Girl network, and its producer also brought the world Dawson's Creek. They're not Goth, they're not scary, they're not even that weird.
(Byron, a few whispered, had even slept with his sister.) Bram Stoker's masterpiece, Dracula, appeared right in the middle of what historians call the Great Binge, a period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when cocaine and heroin use ran rampant, and the poster for the novel's first-ever movie adaptation promised "the strangest passion the world has ever known!" More recently, a small boom in vampire movies ( The Hunger, The Lost Boys) coincided exactly with the rise of AIDS, their vampires intelligent and glamorous and doomed.Īll these earlier iterations of the theme are not at all like vampire fiction today. The frisson of deviance was there right from the start: Nobody really knows what happened between Byron and Polidori, but both of their memoirs were destroyed for the sake of propriety. The seminal short story "The Vampyre," written in 1819 by John Polidori, was based on his fascination with Lord Byron, the icon of Romantic sexual liberation and danger. Vampires have always stalked the cultural landscape at moments of carnal crisis. 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. ( Twilight fans took to Twitter in protest.) A foolish hope. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi novelist and geek grandmaster, found out just how many during the shitstorm of pique that covered him from head to toe this past summer after he suggested in an interview that the vampire craze had run its course and should disappear for another twenty to twenty-five years. Not all young straight women, of course, but many, if not most, of them. There's a much better, simpler, more obvious explanation: Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men.
The current bloodsucking trend, achieving maximum ferocity in November with the release of the sequel to Twilight, isn't about outsiders or immigrants or religion or even AIDS, as critics and bloggers have argued ad nauseam these past few months. Forget everything you've read about vampires so far.