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Vampires are gay. They've always been gay. Twilight was literally the first vampire story that wasn't gay. (Unless it was? I don't know, I didn't read it.) Dracula was our pioneering gay male vampire story. Carmilla, which predates it by some twenty years, is our pioneering lesbian one.

The authors themselves are not always gay. Bram Stoker was, of course - gayer than a guy who knows how to change the sheets on his bed - but Sheridan Le Fanu, the popular and terrific 1800s Gothic writer responsible for Carmilla, seems like a cousin-fucker but a straight one. And this is, if we're being honest, lesbians more of the "nightgowns and swooning" variety than the "roommates who enjoy pants" variety. ("Roommates who enjoy pants" is what they called them back then.) So this is lesbians by way of the male gaze, and with quite a lot of Daddy Issues mixed in. "My hot daughter's hot friend keeps flouncing about in nightgowns," is one way you could describe the plot. (view spoiler)["Eventually I had to murder her naked body" is how these things end - they find her floating naked in a coffin full of blood, by the way, that's amazing - and (hide spoiler)] I mean we've all right? Do a shot for every time you see the word "languid".


Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb

The hot daughter and her single father live in an old castle ("schloss" is now a word you know) in the middle of nowhere, because of course they do, and a total stranger driving by leaves her hot teenage daughter with them for a few months because she fainted. That's the plot. They set the nubile stranger up in the bedroom that has a tapestry of Cleopatra holding poisonous asps to her bosom, and can I tell you how much I love imagining that decorating decision. "What if we make this room the Dead Naked Lady Room?" Cool.


Cleopatra And The Asp by Girolamo di Benvenuto, 1500ish

Townspeople are dying, as they do. Carmilla's door is locked from the inside at night. She comes down late in the morning. "My strange and beautiful companion," says daughter Laura,

"would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever." Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.

Do a shot for "languid." And should this be taken seriously? Is it literature? Is it great vampire literature? Are vampires inherently silly?


Sheridan Le Fanu: would you bang, yes or no

Vampire books are mostly gay and always about sex. Dangerous visitors to your bedroom at night! Certainly Le Fanu intended Carmilla to be hot, and if Stoker didn't intend Dracula to be it was only because he was so far back in the closet that he ended up in Narnia. But of course vampires are predators, as well, so there's an element of "these depraved homosexuals," right? "So hot! But so dangerous! But so hot!" I hope that in these enlightened times we're slightly less panicky about the vast spectrum of our sexual desire. But sex is still dangerous, and it seems to me like a serious concern. Books about sex are worthy. And what other books, particularly in the stodgy 1800s, were about sex? If you didn't smuggle it into a vampire book, where else would you find it? Henry James certainly wasn't helping anyone.

What I love about this particular edition of Carmilla by Lanternfish Press is that they've convinced the mighty Carmen Maria Machado, a Gothic lover herself, to write an intro where she says all the quiet parts out loud. Machado first of all insists that the entire thing is true, producing historical documents like a righteous gay Borges, and then further accuses Le Fanu of straightwashing the story. It's not gay enough, she says. The true story would have been about about "a young woman’s sexual awakening; the senseless slaughter of her supposed defiler.� Machado points out that gay passion is often read as murderous (hello, Patricia Highsmith), while making a driveby suggestion that the infamous Countess Bathory (of Blood) was bathing less in virgin blood than in their vaginas.


Countess Bathory, one kind of scissor fighter or another

Machado continues,

The act of interacting with text - that is to say, of reading - is that of inserting ones self into what is static and unchanging sounds that it might pump with fresh blood. Having read this introduction, I hope you will enter into Carmilla thusly, using your fingertips and mouth and mind to locate ...what exists below: the erotic relationship of two high-strung and lonely young women.

This whole thing is, of course, a meta joke about our modern hobby of declaring old books gay. Carmen Maria Machado is fingerbanging Carmilla. But under that, there's something serious going on, right? This is a declaration of our right to interpret old books however we want to. The book is as gay as we say it is, she suggests. The words on the page are, of course, static and unchanging. But when we go down on them, we open them up and find new meanings hidden inside, and those are not only valid but crucial to the survival of the book. If there's nothing hidden in it, it doesn't matter. "Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world," says Carmilla,

to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.

A book can be lurid and great at the same time, and Carmilla certainly is both. I love every preposterous sentence of it. Look at this indelible scene where the vampire appears at Laura's bed, her nightgown drenched in blood.


Illustration from the Lanternfish edition

The image was echoed by Stephen King 100 years later in Carrie, another great novel about the terror of feminine sexuality. It's spectacular, and Carmilla is still a gripping and unnerving book. It has plenty of secrets and peculiar propensities left for our probing fingertips.