In a recent interview, author V. E. Schwab declared that vampires are “inherently queer,” claiming that “there are no straight vampires” because such creatures are, by nature, “hedonistic” and “antithetical” to human norms. She bizarrely argued that the vampire’s hunger and intimacy make them icons of “defiance against heteronormativity.” That might sound high-minded and new to readers scrolling by, but it was an old argument back when Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire in 1976.
Rice’s characters, Louis and Lestat, were already mirrors for the themes Schwab describes. They shared homes, lovers, and blood. Gay readers embraced the book immediately, reading its anguish and intimacy as allegory. Rice herself later said her vampires stood for “outsiders and lost souls,” calling Lestat the ultimate bisexual wanderer.
Schwab, the author of the Shades of Magic series and creator of Netflix’s incredibly overwrought queer vampire series First Kill, does mention Rice, but her framing ignores what came long before. The “queer vampire” was not invented in the age of TikTok. J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla in 1872 centered on a seductive female vampire who preyed exclusively on women, a story written decades before Dracula. Earlier still, European folklore tied blood-drinkers to the same fears that shaped plague myths—proximity, contagion, and the exchange of blood as a symbol of corruption. In those stories, death and desire blended without reference to modern identity politics like gay, interracial, high school, vampire lovers.
Schwab tells Polygon, “We queered the vampire because it was already there.” Yet by making queerness the only valid lens, she narrows what the myth can represent. Vampires have symbolized xenophobia, class conflict, addiction, greed, even antisemitic paranoia. In earlier centuries, they also reflected fear of sexually transmitted disease, with contagions passed in a bite rather than in the bedroom. Those ideas stretched across all human behavior, not one group’s experience.
The modern trend of labeling everything “coded” for one cause or identity has now turned rich metaphors into slogans. A character once written with ambiguity is now dissected for which box they tick. Online critics praise a villain as “queer-coded” as if the label itself were a virtue. An idea that once invited readers to think, now invites applause (or mockery) for recycling the same lectures about “representation.”
The vampire means more than sexuality or rebellion. The figure works in literature and film because it channels what every culture fears: the loss of control, the hunger that outlives the body, the urge to break moral limits. Reducing that to a fashionable reflection of “identity” drains the symbol of its power. Vampires are fascinating because anyone; straight, gay, male, female, sinner, saint can see some piece of themselves in the mirror of that myth.
Schwab’s novel will surely find its audience, as this YA romance tripe always does, and of course there is room for every kind of reinterpretation. But the pretense that this lens is new, or the only one that matters, misses a truth older than any modern metaphor. The vampire survives because it can be anything at all. It doesn’t belong to just one group, because its shadow stretches farther than that, across every dark corner human beings still fear to face.
***
---01.jpg)
English (US) · 