Dracula
If I weren’t a gay man living in the age of AIDS, I might have gotten sucked into the century-old vampire mystique exemplified by Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror story, Dracula. The lure is obvious: libidos run wild, unleashing “darker” instincts and lustful evil. In the figure of the Transylvanian count (inspired by a nightmare brought on by “a too generous helping of dressed crab at supper one night”) Stoker forever linked blood, sexual deviance, and death. And a century’s worth of books, plays, and films–everything from Son of Dracula to Mama Dracula–has left Stoker’s vision largely untouched.
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He is, in short, perhaps the greatest literary faggot of the century–that is, if you discount “Patient Zero,” Randy Shilts’s phantasmagoric rendering of an actual person in his 1987 And the Band Played On. The direct descendant of Dracula as Shilts imagines him, Patient Zero has an extraterrestrial name–Gaetan Dugas–and spends his days searching through his “fabric-covered address book” for prey when not ensconced in a San Francisco bathhouse, a place more horrifying in Shilts’s description than Dracula’s castle at midnight on Halloween. Even Stoker couldn’t have topped Shilts’s vision of Dugas flipping on the lights after fucking his victim, displaying his lesions, and cackling, “I’ve got gay cancer. I’m going to die and so are you.”
You can just imagine the neocon sex police going into anaphylactic shock over this production. Three ubervulgar “vampyrettes” act as a kind of chorus, stripping, gyrating, and waxing rhapsodic and explicit over their rapacious vulvas. Dr. John Seward, head of the local lunatic asylum and pillar of heroic rationality in Stoker’s novel, becomes a self-aggrandizing drug addict fond of raping unconscious patients. Mina and Lucy, Stoker’s paragons of chaste Victorian womanhood, become semilesbian nymphomaniacs entranced by anything depraved (Lucy gets so worked up imagining the “feats of copulation among the idiot population” in Seward’s asylum that she humps his leg to orgasm). And Professor Van Helsing, Dutch vampirologist and tireless antisatanist, becomes a bug-eyed dirty old man ripped from a Mel Brooks movie.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Dracula theater still by Geoffrey Fingerhut.
