Is dracula gay

Review: Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors Is a Gay Former Time

It’s always refreshing when a present knows both its audience and exactly how to perform to them. Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is calibrated precisely for a mostly gay, Hell’s Kitchen, off-Broadway crowd at New World Stages. In this grab on Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror classic, the comedy is broad, the small cast is often in flamboyant, the jokes are all played with a wink to the audience, and perhaps most importantly, the Count himself is a lofty, blonde, muscular hunk in leather pants and occasionally sans shirt. Need I say more?

In some ways, I am the ideal audience member for this play: a lgbtq+ resident of Hell’s Kitchen who loves camp and happens to be a scholar of Victorian literature. In other ways, I’m perhaps the worst audience member, largely because I know too much about the source material. I found myself occasionally overthinking this bawdy farce, which tends to over-simplify the adaptation itself.

Clearly though, this production is not supposed to be analyzed that intensely. We are just meant to laugh at the endless string of witty jokes and Monty Python-inspired physical

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is subject to a queer reading. Dracula has clear homoerotic tendencies and since these tendencies are both sexual and outside the norm (i.e., evil), they must be destroyed. But the advice of the homoerotic does not end there. Homosexuality is also hinted at in the apply of the gal as intermediary and in the homosocial relationships among the members of the Crew of Glow. By widely standard usage, “homosocial” implies a close non-sexual relationship among men. The Crew of Light is an attempt to illustrate a homosocial affair (i.e., non-sexual) thereby portraying them as good and therefore allowed to survive. However, the novel itself subverts this definition.

Homosexuality in Victorian England was illegal and there is evidence of a “homosexual panic” in the 19^thCentury (Clark 170). In addition, Stoker maintained a long-distance correspondence relationship with Walt Whitman, a somewhat openly queer American poet and was friends with Oscar Wilde, the Irish-born playwright convicted of gross indecency (homosexuality) in 1895 (Clark 169). As an aside Clark, in his Chapter 11 contribution to the book Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Diff

Tag Archives: homosexuality and Dracula

I have previously posted about the Wandering Jew in Gothic fiction, which can be read at: https://thegothicwanderer.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/the-wandering-jew-a-staple-of-the-gothic-wanderer-tradition/

Following is an excerpt from my book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption about Dracula’s Wandering Jew Origins:

Stoker’s ambiguity about Dracula’s origins is part of his novel’s strength but a frustration for the literary critic. It is impossible to know how easily Victorian readers accepted the plausibility of Dracula’s existence. Readers today cannot recreate such an experience because our culture is saturated with images of vampires that make readers knowledgeable about Dracula from childhood; consequently, those who read Dracula today are already willing to suspend their disbelief. Stoker’s personal feelings toward his famous character are equally difficult to determine; he appears to include both loathed and sympathized with Dracula, and therefore, placed Dracula in the role of outcast, a role with which Stoker, as an Irishman living in England, may contain identified. Dracula’s role as racial outsider

The mostly rather splendid adaptationof Bram Stoker’s Draculajust screened by the BBC prompts me to send here this short edited extract from my forthcoming book The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination.

The BBC Dracula excited much comment, some of it affronted and outraged, in its portrayal of the Count as pansexual. I thought it might be useful to explain, then, how and why gay sexuality is a central theme in Dracula.

If you like the sound of this piece, please carry out feel free to advertise it far and wide. My manual, which ranges from Robinson Crusoe to Batman, and which touches on (among other things) zombies, werewolves, superheroes, aliens and UFOs, psychoanalysis, incest and perversion, Evaluate Dredd, Jane Austen, J. G. Ballard, J. M. Coetzee, and the end of the earth, was not deemed terribly appealing (or sciencey enough) by most UK publishers, so forgive me for having to promote it shamelessly from now until publication.

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First and foremost, “the vampire is an erotic creation”, according to the Italian author Ornella Volta: “The vampir