#queer dracula

[nosferatu-roberteggers]

“In Christopher Craft's reading (“"Kiss Me with those Red Lips": Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula', Representations”, 1984), Dracula troubles the boundaries between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. The novel 'evokes, manipulates, sustains' the 'sexual threat' of male homosexual desire, male penetration of another male, but never shows this directly.

Talia Schaffer (“"A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula”, 1994) reads the novel as Stoker's response to the trials of Oscar Wilde, with Dracula representing 'the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments' attached to Wilde's name in 1895. Dracula encompasses the monstrous Wilde depicted by his prosecutors, as well as Stoker's 'imaginative identification' with him. Barry McCrea (“Heterosexual Horror: Dracula, the Closet, and the Marriage-Plot”, 2012), like Schaffer, reads Dracula as being written from the closet, suggesting that the novel depicts heterosexual marriage as a gothic prison, making “a giddy, gruesome conjecture about what it might mean to be a well-married, lucky wife”.

— Lauren Owen, Sarah Elizabeth; “Dracula's Inky Shadows: The Vampire Gothic of Writing” (2017)

“He told me about you. [...] How you fell into his arms as a swooning lily of a woman.”

[foxglovedforest]

Dracula Daily girlies you would have loved this gay ass Broadway show

[chirpchirpmuahaha]

i want... to write... revisionist dracula fanfic in which lucy and jonathan are both in love with mina, who also is in love with them both. there is initial tension, b/c they have to figure out if they can make it work, if lucy and jonathan feel like they can do that. but eventually, even though lucy could never love a man, and jonathan doesn’t feel he could ever love more than one woman, they sort of strike up this sibling-y connection, very close good friends, and they both love their wife. and love each other, too, just more familial-y. it gets to the point where all three are genuinely happy and can’t believe there was a time where they NEVER would’ve considered such a connection, but nobody’s compromising or forcing themselves into something that doesn’t work for them. it’s real and good and sweet!

and then lucy still becomes a vampire but it’s less “we gotta DESTROY THE VAMPIRE” and more “lucy struggles with her vampire powers herself but she learns to control them and her dual nature and joins the squad in fighting dracula”

also quincey morris and arthur holmwood are boyfriends in this version, i think? but not until after lucy “dies,” because it starts out as a one-night comfort thing arthur NEVER would’ve considered b/c Social Norms, but then he sorta realizes he actually likes quincey a LOT. and lucy only accepted arthur’s proposal b/c of social norms, too!!! so it sorta works out for everybody.