Vampires As Gay Men

I shit you not. This is an actual article. I’m not even sure this counts as journalism anymore. Maybe the editorial assistant was up against one motherf*cker of a deadline and this was all he or she could find to fill the page.

Forget everything you’ve read about vampires so far. 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. 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…

Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? Sex that’s dangerous and safe at the same time, risky but comfortable, gooey and violent but also traditional and loving. In the bedroom, we want to have one foot in the twenty-first century and another in the nineteenth.

I think this misses a lorry load of points. It’s the kind of discussion that’s had in bars at conventions and maybe best left there, because it has more weight when you’re drunk.

I mean, aside from making sweeping generalisations about gay men and human sexuality, it misses the point that most boys that age probably aren’t iconic and super-preened and/or smell nice, so for teenage girls, vampires, in comparison, are worth a swoon or two.

Oh well, I knew I shouldn’t have written a vampire into City of Ruin…