FOR ME, one of Anne Rice’s appeals is that she often wrote from a queer perspective. Her vampire fiction is intellectual, brooding, and deeply thought-provoking while remaining accessible to a broad audience. Her Vampire Chronicles are riddled with homoerotic content and androgynous characters that appear human yet are always otherworldly. Her vampires transcend polarized sexuality, going beyond heteronormativity and homosexuality into a preternaturally subversive state where their pansexual abilities and desires place them in a category all their own. Supra-sexuality?
Their erotic nature is meta-human, and their seductive capability is more of a “super-power” than mere talent. Rice’s vampires’ role as outsiders in human society equates to a Minority Status that their “othered” sexuality supports.
Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, published in 1976, has much of its story in the 19th century. I find the queer elements of the novel profoundly transgressive if one looks from the perspective of the vampires in that era, whose actions mimic the free associations of a contemporary “gay community” within a heterosexist, heteronormative world. The Parisian vampires reside in (and under) the Theatre des Vampires.
While there are subjective associations of negativity with the practice of insulation, the “private community” that the Theatre des Vampires represents is by no means a crippling effect. It’s a sanctuary, a tribute to the personal power a minority group can have by removing immediate, overt, and debilitating discrimination. The Paris vampires choose to be together of their own accord; it’s not a reactionary move to the outside human world’s fear of them.
The vampire is, as Rice says in her 1994 Dateline NBC interview, “a metaphor for the human condition. Vampires represent the outsider.” Due to homo/bi-phobia and misogyny, Queer sexuality is too often seen as “outside” the majority, as vampires are “outside” of humanity. Are Rice’s vampires and the LGBTQ+ community kindred spirits in the fight against oppression? What’s excellent about IWTV is that Rice takes the vampire mythos from the nineteenth century and adds a contemporary, intellectually provocative, even psychoanalytic spin. Her vampires go beyond questions of identity toward a complete psychoanalysis of their existence.
Rarely before Rice did vampires question the nature of their nocturnal reality; they were demons and beasts, nothing more, blindly accepting their role as Satanic victimizers. As did their authors and readers. Only through contemporary discourse, using tools like Queer Theory and Feminist Theory, were creatures like Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla or Bram Stoker’s Lucy able to seek identification with terms like “The New Woman” and their misunderstood representation deconstructed without religious or cultural bias. Rice’s vampires, except Louis, do not feel “internalized vampirphobia.” They are not content to accept any societal or cultural preconceived notions—human notions—about the essence of their nature. [The Above Image Is Issue 1 of Innovation Comic’s 12-Part 1991 Illustrated Adaptation of Rice’s Novel.]
Yes, Louis has “issues” concerning his undead state. Yet, he philosophizes and psychoanalyzes his nature and the consequences of his actions as he quests to understand his undead existence rather than simply labelling himself a demon outright.
Interestingly, Rice’s vampires freely engage with their “othered” nature and are not destroyed for it. While some vampires get “killed” by the novel’s end, it’s not by the hand of any human pursuer. Only vampires destroy other vampires, and it’s due to internal politics—breaking the vampire community’s rules—or for personal revenge. Vampire death is never for religious reasons, never by the hand of a human bigot. Unlike Carmilla, Lucy, and even Dracula, Rice saves her vamps from the wrath of zealots.
Poor Louis. He regrets becoming a vampire, continuously questioning his identity throughout the novel via discourse with humans and vampires; however, he doesn’t honestly want to hate himself. Louis is at war with his love of being the powerful and sensual “other” and his romanticized ideal of purity, of life, something he feels eternally robbed of.
Louis also cannot accept and delight in his preternatural existence because he spends too much time obsessing about his unsatisfying “upbringing,” the fault of his creator, the vampire Lestat. He retreats into what’s left of his humanity: his memories. Why? Because it’s a safe space, free from judgment, comforting, and predictable—his life before Lestat.
These memories and the feelings attached, already formed in Louis’ consciousness, are tangible aspects of his life, easily accessible, and he doesn’t need to self-analyze them. This is nothing more than an attempt to escape the responsibility of creating for himself a definition, an individualized meaning, of his vampiric existence outside of his mentor’s teachings, especially Lestat’s opinions of what vampirism is and how it should be “lived.”
While Louis’ global expedition with Claudia is an attempt to discover others of their kind for companionship outside the suffocating life with Lestat, it’s also an excuse to find more information on vampiric existence through the eyes of others. Perpetually unable to, or unwilling to focus on his own vampiric individuality, Louis cannot comprehend that his nature as a vampire may be sufficiently explained through his acceptance of what is—that he is a vampire—and thus, he is what he inevitably chooses to make of himself. Do you see the parable of internalized homophobia?
It’s never wrong to question or self-analyze, but Louis isn’t doing it for healthy, introspective reasons. He’s looking to others to define him, afraid to do it for himself and give credence and validating power to his words. But when the words and actions of another vampire disappoint him, Louis takes it out on vampirism as a whole. When he attempts to focus on his identity and purpose, he constantly compares himself to other vampires instead of disregarding their actions, which may not suit his particular ethics, to focus on personal growth and his responsibility to discover his authentic self.
Louis’ form of “internalized vampirphobia” is interesting because it’s not being a vampire he actually hates; he despises his impotence in being unable to accept his vampiric nature. Louis accepts he’s no longer human, but admitting he’s cool with being a vampire is still problematic.
Rice shows in IWTV that vampirism isn’t inherently evil, as humans’ vile actions don’t make humanity inherently corrupt. Louis understands this but still clings to fear and the need to have others define him. Rice’s vampires must be “beautiful, powerful, and without regret.” Louis can handle the first two, but the third proposes that he surrender what’s left of his humanity and cease mourning it, and he’s not ready.
Again, I don’t feel he abhors being a vampire, being “othered,” but he does fear the folkloric stereotypes of vampirism. He’s afraid that his culturally and religiously created beliefs about the evil of vampires will be deconstructed as human-centric lies, propaganda, and hypocrisy, and he will then be forced to do what he truly fears: define vampirism for himself. It’s interesting because, at the beginning of his vampiric life, Louis doesn’t know what a real vampire is besides what fiction and folktales have to say—so how can he justify his hatred? Throughout the text, Louis tries to disprove the stereotype of evil in an internal, perhaps subconscious, battle. Still, he consciously falls prey to societal conditioning of believing in that evil.
In IWTV, almost all vampires except Louis love who and what they are. Child vampire Claudia hates the age she was transformed at, but not her vampiric turning. The oldest vampire in the novel, Armand, appears sad, a typical sufferer of the ol’ nineteenth-century malady of “melancholia,” heightened by his vampiric senses. But he still engages with his vampirism openly, without any apparent regret other than an ineptitude to move through the ages effortlessly.
Armand loves being a vampire but is limited by his lack of suitable, fulfilling companionship. In another of Rice’s vampire novels, it’s discovered that he was violently taken from his maker, Marius, so it would be more prudent to say he suffers from PTSD than dissatisfaction with his undead existence.
In the nineteenth century, the cultural mindset of equating vampirism with evil and homosexuality with, at best, uncomfortableness, at worse, abhorrence was held by much of European society; however, the fact that the vampires of The Theatre des Vampires chose to reside in Paris speaks to France’s tolerance for “queer” or “othered” behaviour. For centuries, France has been regarded internationally as a highly cultured environment, especially Paris, and it’s not surprising to see an appreciation for “otherness,” at least if one does it theatrically. A caricature, perhaps, but still safe from persecution if an observer of this “queer behaviour” isn’t taking it too earnestly publicly.
The Theatre Des Vampires aims to do just that: create an outlet for the vampires to be “out” in mortal society without causing panic, resulting in a backlash against them. It also provides a community, a safe space away from human fear and the violence that often follows.
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