Sex and Anne Rice Vampires: The Big Summary
With some of the changes in the AMC adaptation of The Vampire Chronicles, I've seen a lot of word of mouth about the way sexuality and sex works for Anne Rice's vampires, and I wanted to kind of collect what is actually in the books and how it functions (or, really, doesn't.)
Content heads up: I'm going to discuss symbolic sexual assault towards the end, in the specific words used in the books. The rest of these quotes are from various sexual or sensual encounters across the book series with a variety of characters. One is from a scene that is a scene involving a human and sexual assault, but I'm not quoting that specific part of the scene.
It's established as early as Interview with the Vampire that, for vampires, nothing, including sex, comes close to the sensation of killing and drinking blood. Drinking blood is the ultimate form of desire and pleasure, above all else:
Not physical love, you must understand. I donāt speak of that at all, though Armand was beautiful and simple, and no intimacy with him would ever have been repellent. For vampires, physical love culminates and is satisfied in one thing, the kill.
āIt was something hurried,ā I said, trying now to meet her eyes. How perfectly, coldly blue they were. How earnest. āAndĀ ā¦Ā it was seldom savoredĀ ā¦Ā something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.'
Lestat, via Science Magic, has a chance to have sex in his vampiric form in Prince Lestat, and concludes that Louis is completely correct here:
Now I could write an essay of five hundred pages on how this experience unfolded, because I did feel biological erotic desire again, and I fell on the young woman about as mercilessly as any greedy aristocrat of my time ever fell on a milkmaid in his village. But it was precisely as my beloved Louis had said a long time ago, āthe pale shadow of killing,ā that is, the pale shadow of drinking blood, and it was over almost at once, it seemed, and then the passion was gone, back into the depths of memory once more as if it had never been aroused, the pinnacle, the ejaculation forgotten.
In The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat actually compares desire for blood to sexual desire, in the scene with the waitress:
She opened her mouth for my tongue. This was good, even if her mouth was bad tasting. Didnāt matter. But then my mind raced ahead to blood. Drink her blood.
Where was the pounding intensity of drawing near the victim, of the moment right before my teeth pierced the skin and the blood spilled all over my tongue?
No, itās not going to be that easy, or that consuming. Itās going to be between the legs and more like a shiver, but this is some shiver, Iāll say that.
Sexual Function in Vampires
Male vampires, I guess the best way to put it, have the hard marble-like skin texture all over their bodies (quick summary: we get "hard" as a description of the feel, "half erect" as a description of appearance, both in The Vampire Armand), but don't experience pleasure differently in different parts of their bodies once they are vampires.
From Lestat, we get this somewhat infamous quote about his "organ" in The Queen of the Damned:
And the organ, the organ we donāt need, poised as if ready for what it would never again know how to do or want to do, marble, a Priapus at a gate.
From the book Pandora, we get a simulated sex scene between a male and female vampire, that indicates that neither one is feeling much direct sensation from the act:
But it was hard, this organ I sought, the organ forever lost to the god Osiris. I guided it, hard and cold as it was, into my body. ... He was right. The lower organs meant nothing. He fed on me. I fed on him. This was our marriage.
Our bodies were one, connected by this sterile organ which was no more to him now than his arm, but how I loved the arm he threw over me and the lips he pressed to my forehead.
There are a fair number of sexual encounters between vampires and humans in the books (in ways that don't require sexual function). Here are some of the perspectives we get from within the vampire's point of view. As you can see, a lot of the dialogue here is about passion, desire, and intimacy. In several of them, they specifically mention holding back, which means holding back from biting.
These are from the same scene in two different books (they're both talking about Bianca):
"Blood or no blood, I could remember hot passion for her, and I felt it now in a strange overall manner, not localized in the forgotten organ as it had been before." - Armand, The Vampire Armand
"With my eyes, I let her know my love for her, that I would trespass now if she didnāt strictly forbid it, and moving past her, I seated myself on her bed. Never had I taken such a liberty with her, but I knew her thoughts. We dazzled her. She idolized us." - Marius, Blood and Gold
This is Marius talking about Amadeo in Blood and Gold:
As for me, I had never experienced such pure intimacy with a mortal, except with those I meant to kill. It gave me chills to have my arms around this boy, to press my lips to his cheeks and chin, his forehead, his tender closed eyes.
Yes, the blood thirst rose, but I knew so well how to control it. I filled my nostrils with the smell of his youthful flesh.
And this is from Blood Canticle:
My hands wanted all of her, her flesh beneath the stiff cotton, the small full curve of her hips, her breasts, her pale neck, her lips, her privy parts, so wet and ready for my fingers, my lips grazing her throat, not daring to do more than feel the blood beneath the skin as my fingers brought her up to the climax, as she moaned against me, as her limbs went stiff with the finish, as she lay limp against my chest.
The blood thudded in my ears. It raced through my brain. It said I want her.Ā But I lay still.
Sensual Desire Between Vampires
From the above, we know they no longer desire sex because it has been overwhelmed by the desire for blood, we know their sexual function doesn't really exist, and we know that when they feel desire for humans, they experience it differently from sexual desire, in their own words, but use a lot of the same language you'd expect for sexuality.
So what does this mean for how sexuality works between vampires?
I think the simplest way to put it, in the words of the books, is that vampires have sensual desire towards each other. They don't desire sex with each other and couldn't really properly do it if they tried, but they appreciate aesthetic beauty and they desire pleasure and intimacy. And often, though not always, that means blood.
The first big scene that comes to mind of two vampires drinking from each other, that's not one of them being turned into a vampire, is Lestat and Akasha:
I saw it, the shimmering circuit, and more divinely I felt it because nothing else existed but our mouths locked to each otherās throats and the relentless pounding path of the blood. There were no dreams, there were no visions, there was just this, thisāgorgeous and deafening and heatedāand nothing mattered, absolutely nothing, except that this never stop. The world of all things that had weight and filled space and interrupted the flow of light was gone.
In Prince Lestat, we get the closest thing to a vampire/vampire sex scene, which I'll give a small section of. They are both drinking each other's blood, in bed, and these two characters are unambiguously in a romantic relationship:
"He stripped off Benedictās jacket, and then his shirt and his sweater, and brought him down on the dark embroidered covers. He lay beside him, fingers tightening on the pink nipples on Benedictās chest, his lips grazing Benedictās throat, and then he pressed Benedictās head against his own throat and said, āDrinkā under his breath.
At once those razor-sharp teeth broke through and he felt the mighty hungry pull on his heart as the blood flowed out of him towards the heart beating against him. A gusher of images opened. He saw the burning house in London, saw that hideous wraithlike thing, saw what Benedict must have seen but never registered, that thing falling to its knees, the rafters coming down on it, an arm cracked loose and flung away in the fire, black fingers curling. He heard the skull pop.
The images dissolved in the pleasure that he was feeling, the deep dark throbbing pleasure he reveled in as the blood was drawn out of him with greater and greater speed. It was as if a hand had ahold of his heart and was squeezing his heart and the pleasure washed out in waves from his heart, passing through all his limbs."
We also have the, kind of hard-to-quote-concisely, scene where Lestat drinks from Gregory in Blood Communion, which is also in a bed and framed pretty sensually:
āCome here to me, Prince,ā he said. āLet me give you my blood. Let me give you the blood of the fourth blood drinker ever made.ā
I couldnāt resist. It didnāt even occur to me. I saw him rise before me and I lay back on the marble bed and he was stretched out on top of me, a warm gentle weight against me, and my fangs were pressed to his neck. I drank.
In the last two examples above, sharing blood between vampires isn't only for sex; both scenes include one vampire looking at the memories of another, which commonly happens when they share blood. Vampire blood, especially of a vampire older than you, is also healing, it gives you more power, so there are scenes of consensual blood drinking between vampires in the books that are not as sensually coded. Not every scene of a vampire drinking from another vampire is framed in a sensual or sexual way.
Blood Drinking Nonconsensually
Drinking blood from a vampire (or turning someone into a vampire without their consent) is often referred to using language usually used to describe sexual assault. I'll focus on instances between vampires here.
This is from the opening of The Vampire Armand:
I wondered idly and viciously if I could attack him, take him, bring him down under my greater craft and cunning and taste his blood without his consent.
āIām much too far along the road for that,ā he said, āand why would you chance such a thing?ā
What self-possession. The older man in him did indeed command the sturdier younger flesh, the wise mortal with an iron authority over all things eternal and supernaturally powerful. What a blend of energies! Nice to drink his blood, to take him against his will. There is no such fun on Earth like the raping of an equal.
āI donāt know,ā I said, ashamed. Rape is unmanly. āI donāt know why I insult you. You know, I wanted to leave quickly. I mean I wanted to visit the attic, and then be out of here. I wanted to avoid this sort of infatuation. You are a wonder, and you think me a wonder, and itās rich.ā
This is from Prince Lestat. The phrase "droit du seigneur" is the right of kings to have sex with their subjects:
āIām thirsting,ā I said aloud. At once he suggested where we might hunt.
āNo, for your blood,ā I said, pushing him backwards against the slender but firm trunk of a tree.
āYou damnable brat,ā he seethed.
āOh, yes, despise me, please,ā I said as I closed in. I pushed his face to one side, kissing his throat first, and then sinking my fangs very slowly, my tongue ready for those first radiant drops. I think I heard him say the single word, āCaution,ā but once the blood struck the roof of my mouth, I wasnāt hearing clearly or seeing clearly and didnāt care.
I had to force myself to pull back. I held a mouthful of blood as long as I could until it seemed to be absorbed without my swallowing, and I let those last ripples of warmth pass through my fingers and toes.
āAnd you?ā I asked. He was slumped there against the tree, obviously dizzy. I went to take him in my arms.
āGet away from me,ā he growled. And started off walking, fast away from me. āStick your filthy droit du seigneur right through your greedy heart.ā
Like with other blood drinking between vampires, how specific this framing is varies. Sometimes vampires do just drink each other's blood as an act of physical assault to wound or kill the other, but especially between vampires who have an established interpersonal relationship, the assault is often described as or framed as rape.
I occasionally see people make a lot of claims about Anne Rice's opinions about sexuality and her characters that don't line up with anything she said publicly, the content of her works, or, frankly, the fact that she was a prolific writer of what she herself called "pornography." Anne Rice made the vampires relate to sexuality the way they do as an intentional writing choice. She made a lot of her characters queer, including some of them specifically identifying as such. There are explicit sex scenes with both queer and male/female couples in a lot of her works, including some of these books.
I want to highlight this article, archived from Fanpop that includes some sections of emails she wrote to a reader asking questions about sexuality and relationships in the books (though I do not fully agree with the writer of the article.) Here is a small section about specific character relationships from one of her responses, that clarifies a lot of her intent:
"Armand is desperately in love with Lestat but it has nothing to do with sex. Armand feels Marius failed him and Marius feels Armand failed him, and that part has nothing to do with sex. Marius and Pandora, that is a love affair, but again sex has nothing to do with it. So they are all capable of loving people of their own gender and the other gender; gender doesn't matter. It's the essence. Lestat loves David Talbot as a lover, a friend, a mentor, a father, etc. --- It goes on like that. The act of dominating and drinking blood can happen between any two characters regardless of gender. They cannot be pinned down. They see all life as potentially beautiful and all forms of love as rewarding."
To me, the clearest word god you can find online is her response to a Facebook question about Marius and Daniel:
My vampires don't have sex. They can share blood, and this is intimate for them. Daniel and Marius love each other very much.
I mean, that pretty much covers it.
Anne Rice's vampires see drinking blood as the ultimate form of desire and pleasure, and specifically superior to sex.
The vampires lack sexual function and sexual arousal.
Despite this, some vampires do have sexual encounters with humans, related to a desire for intimacy and aesthetic pleasure.
Vampires can be attracted to each other, but drinking blood is the primary form of intimacy between them. Anne Rice did not consider this sex, but she did describe several vampire pairings as "lovers." It is sensual, it is pleasurable, it is passionate.
I put this together because how you interpret and feel about the sexuality in the books is going to be very personal to each reader, but hopefully this summary has managed to stick as closely as I could to what's on the page. What sexuality is to you, what you define as sex, how you interpret these characters, how you interpret their relationships, what parts of the books meant something to you or help you understand something about yourself- that's all up to you.
There are people who find the fact that the vampires don't have sex really important to them, there are people who find the queerness of their attraction really important, and there are people who identify with how Anne Rice talks about human sexuality in general. What is in the books is what is in the books, what matters about it to you belongs to you.
And if you wish what was in the books was a little bit different, that's why we have AO3, and the fine scientific contributions of Dr. Fareed Bhansali.
One final note: as for adaptations, the word "adapt" means to change or to modify. When it comes to changes in adaptations, it's not inherently bad because it's different; it's not inherently better because it's the same. How you feel about changes in an adaptation- good, bad, neutral, indifferent, kinda would have preferred what was in the source material but the change doesn't really bother you- that is also yours. It's going to depend on what matters to you in the source material and how, and this is the kind of series that matters to people in different ways.
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