Lavender Lovers and Gay Gentlemen: An Introduction to the Love Lives

of Supernatural Seducers as Explored in the Vintage Adult Novels

Vampire's Kiss and Gay Vampire

"The Prince of Darkness is a gay gentleman," reads the high-minded epigram that opens Gay Vampire (1969), borrowed from no less impeccably pedigreed a source than William Shakespeare's King Lear. Except the borrowing isn't … quite right: The original line simply reads, "The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman" — no personal attributes or persuasion specified.

Whether the discrepancy is a lazy mistake or a sly jape I couldn't say — though having been in my teens when Gay Vampire and Vampire's Kiss were written, a time when I prowled Times Square theaters for exploitation movies, checked out seedy bars and porn shops, and hung out and went clubbing, when New York was a bad, vibrant, dirty, glorious, open city, I can say that the 1970s niche cultures that begat these books are far from unfamiliar. And that was part of the reason I began collecting novels like these — gay, erotic genre fiction written at a time when few

contemporary gay novels found a place on mainstream college syllabi (think James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar) and writers who wanted to pen gay horror, gay mysteries, gay science fiction and gay Westerns had no publishers willing to oblige them other than the porn peddlers who would give fledgling gay genre novelists an outlet as long as they put a sex scene in every chapter.

In the 1970s, close to a century after Bram Stoker's Dracula synthesized generations of unappealing folklore into arguably the most influential genre novel in history, vampires continued to haunt the shadows of popular movies — from Hammer Films' lush, Gothic vampire films, their milieu defined by Christopher Lee's lean, sensually feral count, to the low-budget, socially revolutionary, and counterculture/Civil Rights-movement inflected Blacula (1972), in which William Marshall's Prince Mamuwalde, a newly awakened, 18th-century African royal, is unleashed on the funky, it's-you streets of Los Angeles.

Though the lesbian vampire countess of Dracula's Daughter (1936) made her debut a mere five years after the genre defining Dracula (1931), gay vampires of either sex were rare onscreen in the late

1960s and '70s, and vampires in general were frequently played for limp laughs, from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers/Dance of the Vampires (1967) to the painful 1979 George Hamilton vehicle Love at First Bite (which opens with Dracula reading smutty magazines and kvetching, "Children of the night, shut up!'), their predatory allure reduced to camp posturing.

But not so on the page: They were already out and proud in the pages of adult novels like Gay Vampire (1969), Vampire's Kiss (1970) and even the ostensibly straight-oriented The Adult Version of Dracula (1970), one of a series of classic (read: out of copyright) novels given a porno makeover and sold by the low-rent Calga Publishers "for the literary entertainment of adults only." The Adult Version of Dracula posits the prince of vampires as vigorously bisexual and particularly partial to the charms of Stoker's much-abused Jonathan Harker. And no consideration of this era's gay vampires is worth the time it takes to read if it fails discuss Dark Shadows, a struggling costumed soap opera until it dipped a toe in the supernatural and added a eccentric gentleman named Barnabas Collins, impeccable of manners, conspicuously theatrical of voice and gesture and mysterious of origin.

As a lifelong horror buff, I can say with assurance that gay vampires have always been with us: For proof one need look no farther than the obvious, John Polidori's seminal 1819 The Vampyre, which fuses the figure of the sexually magnetic rakehell (generally acknowledged to have been modeled directly on young Dr. Polidori's employer and very likely lover, the "mad, bad and dangerous to know" Lord George Byron, a man notoriously flexible in matters sexual) with the coarse blood-drinking demon of folklore to produce undead seducer Lord Ruthven, the romantic vampire version 1.0.

Handsome and haunted, stylish, mysterious and hypnotic, Ruthven and his slim, devilish ilk were the bad boys of the 19th-century erotic dreamscape, dark strangers who seemed to know the innermost thoughts of women, sensing their desires and sensuously enjoying their company rather than chafing at the rituals of social intercourse that baffled and frustrated less extraordinary gentlemen … the kind who preferred the uncomplicated camaraderie of dogs, horses and innkeepers who kept their bars well-stocked. Ladies (and no doubt more than a few gentlemen) adored them in turn, even as their dark lovers rarely pressed the obvious advantage, instead focusing their attentions north of the delta of Venus

and only occasionally revealing an accidental glimpse of their true natures.

Still, gay vampires prowled relatively discreetly until Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976) ripped the lid off their doubtless well-appointed coffins and immersed a broad range of readers in the patently erotic relationship between self-hating Louis de Pointe du Lac and the vibrant, unrepentantly sensual libertine Lestat de Lioncourt, even as they become the child-vampire Claudia's two daddies. The whiff of the exotic that trailed demon lovers with curiously red lips and sharp teeth was always mixed with an intoxicating hint of lavender.

Why else, one might be compelled to ask, does Bram Stoker's convention-setting Count Dracula lavish such savage and attenuated attention on Jonathan Harker, the young clerk dispatched to Transylvania to procure from his firm's exotic foreign client signatures on a batch of legal papers, while indifferently discarding his own fiercely beautiful vampire brides? And what compels him to violate Harker's capable fiancée Mina Murray, the one whose picture he found so pretty, in Harker's own bed — the bed to which Harker is confined as a result of Dracula's earlier attentions, in a sequence so

perversely suggestive that it's hard to believe it was published in 1897?

"The moonlight was so bright that through the thick yellow blind the room was light enough to see. On the bed beside the window lay Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor. Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad figure of his wife. By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black. His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw we all recognized the Count, in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension. His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare chest which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. "

I suspect the dovetailing of two desires: First, to remind Jonathan he's been thoroughly unmanned and second, to cut down to size Mina, a "new woman" who dares to act like a man by supporting herself, speaking her mind and tending briskly to her emasculated fiancé. Dracula knows his future lies in

bustling, modern cities like London, places throbbing with bright new blood and future promise. But even after forsaking his native Transylvania for England and passing through up-to-the-minute London en route to the quieter, seaside town of Whitby, he's tethered to past. Presented with two alluring victims, cotton-brained social butterfly Lucy Westenra and the intelligent, adaptable and forthright Mina, he's irresistibly drawn first to Lucy, just the sort of pretty, vacuous, well-bred and well-mannered girl that his own mortal parents might well have selected for him, once upon a long-ago time. Mina needs to be put in her place, and to serve as a vessel for Dracula's displaced desire for her husband. True, back in Transylvania Dracula handed off Jonathan Harker to his three feral brides, sharp-toothed beauties who yearned for his blood ... but he did so only after he himself was done. What precisely he did may go unstated, but it’s not difficult to infer.

Gay Vampire and Vampire's Kiss have been cited as the first adults-only gay horror pulps and while all "first," "most" and other superlative claims are best taken with a grain of salt, publication dates of 1969 and 1970, respectively, certainly put them at the front of an admittedly modest pack … at least as compared with gay Westerns, mysteries, historical adventures and bildungsromans. They include the self-

explanatory Gay Exorcist (1976); the versatile Peter Tuesday Hughes' Victorian-era The Daemon (1977); Satan's Stud (1972), a Hollywood bitchfest with a side of demon worship; the splendidly titled family horror-show Chamber of Homos (1970); Satan's Victor (1972) and Devil's Phallus (1978) … but not, to my surprise, Satanic Suck (undated), which I read nearly to the end before realizing the devil wasn't going to make so much as a cameo appearance.

It appears that the novel — a modest coming-of-age/coming-out story about a New York City teen exploring his sexuality while visiting his West Coast-based father, a rancher who lives a discrete but uncloseted life with his boyfriend — was bound in the wrong wraps. At least, that's my best guess: I own many vintage adult-gay novels whose covers and/or back-cover copy misrepresent the book within (generally erring on the side of alluring luridness) but no other in which the content and cover image — a robed and bearded celebrant surveying a crowd of hooded acolytes from a throne surrounded by enormous, cock-shaped candles — are 100% unconnected to the copy within.

Vampire's Kiss unfolds deep in Dracula's shadow, from its slyly named undead seducer — Alan Drake, no doubt the distant cousin of Count Alucard, who

came to life fully formed in Curt and Robert Siodmak's in Son of Dracula (1943) — to the protagonist's frequent evocation of Stoker's novel and, by extension, the specifics of vampire lore Stoker introduced into mainstream culture. And it opens with a surprisingly apt and succinct preface that nails the protagonist's dilemma and pins it to a board, asking: "Is Damon Sanger, prominent young attorney… a vampire? Or is he merely rationalizing his homosexuality?"

Not that the novel's protagonist, an ambitious, 28-year-old lawyer, is generally interested in monster-movie nonsense: He's a nine-to-fiver who comes home after happy-hour drinks with his boss and co-workers to barbeque and bridge with his beautiful but vacuous wife, Margaret, and their neighbors. By his own assessment, Damon is about as successful as anyone his age has any reason to expect. But he's restless and unhappy and doesn't know why — or so he claims when, following an experience that throws his complacent expectations for a loop, he starts keeping a diary like a true believer in Socrates' observation that the unexamined life isn't worth living: Unable to sleep after yet another thoroughly predictable Friday evening, Damon takes the car and winds up on the nightlife side of town, closing down bars until he winds up in an out-of-the-way joint

suggestively called The Cave. To his considerable surprise, though less dismay than if he were more sober, Damon gradually realizes both that The Cave is a "queer joint" and that he's having a pretty good time watching when he stumbles across the wild goings-on in the men's room. Back at the bar, he encounters pale-skinned, black-clad charmer Alan, who has startling white hair and lips so red "he must have been wearing a touch of lipstick."

Next thing Damon knows, he's dirty dancing with the hypnotically handsome stranger, and the next thing after that he's in Alan's fabulous, super-'70s bachelor pad-in-a-house-trailer, complete with "heavy, floor-length black drapes and deep-pile red carpet" and "a black-leather chaise longue … as well as book shelves and pictures on the wall … but none of the usual tiny sinks and miniature stoves." One bewitched, bothered and bewildered week after that, Damon is simultaneously wondering how to tell his wife that he's having performance problems because he's fallen for another man and whether it's possible that this man is a vampire. All the while, he scribbles in the diary that forces him to engage in some uncomfortable self-reflection, embodied in a sardonic voice within Damon's head that rudely rebuts his self-justifications, evasions and excuses.

Damon may well be having an early midlife crisis, but author Sonny Barker (a pseudonym of one Jerry Murray, according to gay-erotica publisher Earl Kemp as quoted in Drewey Wayne Gunn's The Golden Age of Gay Fiction) makes clear that his real problem is that he knows he's gay and is totally determined to argue otherwise in the courtroom of his own mind … even if his defense is something as ludicrous as that he's being supernaturally suborned by an undead fiend.

Damon's frantic, guilty journal entries constitutes the novel's frequent highlights: "I just finished reading Dracula," he writes earnestly, if somewhat disingenuously, "and it points more and more to my awful suspicion… Item: He made me ask him to put it in my rear [vampires, in traditional lore, being required to request admittance into one's home]. Item: I couldn't see him in the mirror. I should get some wild roses and a gold crucifix. Where can I get some sanctified Holy Water? I need a stake and a mallet. Could I drive a stake through Alan's chest? Item: I've never seen him during the day… Item: He mentioned his forbears were from Central Europe, and that's where Dracula and his werewolves were from."

Check, check and check (the off-topic "Dracula and his werewolves" remark notwithstanding): Vampire for sure. Then Damon is off on another round of he said/he said, arguing with himself about everything from how to tell his wife — "I've been meaning to tell you, Margaret, I've been taken over by a vampire. That's right, like Dracula. Only this one's queer" — to whether he's the victim of some perverted con game or doomed to embrace his place in "the ranks of the homosexual undead… [cursed] to roam the earth and infect men with the dreadful appetite for cum."

Published in 1970, Vampire's Kiss is both a bridge between the less-explicit novels of only a year or two earlier — including Gay Vampire, published in 1969 — and a curious piece of fence-sitting, a cross between Talking Heads' ode to suburban bewilderment "Once in a Lifetime" ("And you may ask yourself /Am I right... am I wrong?/And you may tell yourself /My God — what have I done?") and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which named the moment when you look down and see exactly what's on the end of your fork… or tongue, as the case may be. One night with Alan sets Damon on the path to realizing that his orderly, middle-class life is the lie he's pulled over his own eyes to keep himself from seeing the truth.

That said, becoming happy with the truth takes him a while and requires negotiating a path that includes cruising public toilets, developing a warm and genuine friendship with a black man, getting rolled as a queer and hanging out with dirty hippies, whom Damon discovers really aren't such bad people after all. They're also a recurring element in gay adult novels of the late '60s and early '70s, perhaps because both hippies and overtly gay men were equally marginalized by virtue of having chosen to reject pervasive mainstream social and sexual norms. And also perhaps because, in a genre written by and for gay men, the specter of self-loathing was never far from mind. The cruel stereotypes of homosexual men pervasive in mainstream culture — limp-wristed fashion designers, menacing hustlers, mincing ballet dancers, lisping male models, switch-hitting blackmailers and predatory child molesters (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of pedophiles, then and now, identify straight and fetishize age over gender) — were offset by the counterculture's woozy emphasis on sexual parity, embrace of androgyny (at least superficially) and commitment to alternative communities.

Notwithstanding the generally light tone of Vampire's Kiss, which never met a garlic joke it didn't like, Barker's novel engages stereotypes consistently and

often quite pointedly, no fang or stake pun intended. As Damon's evolution from "straight-laced" husband to enthusiastic cocksucker proceeds, his conversations with his needling inner self take on an ever-more mockingly serious tone: By the time he's amassed a fairly broad cross-section of conquests, from (initially) gay-for-pay hippie Nick to genial African-American hospital orderly Sam, Damon's snippy conscience is taking him to task for being at heart an unrepentant, middle-class prude and a closet racist besides ("you're still equating [Sam's] black skin with something bad, immoral, like homosexuality"), Vampire's Kiss has made abundantly clear that gay-oriented adult novels are neither political tracts nor utopian theses. They were, first and foremost, written for gay men looking for sexually oriented entertainment and willing, perhaps, to take it with a side of social politics.

That Vampire's Kiss is as committed as it is to suggesting that sleeping with black men doesn't make you a civil-rights activist is downright nervy but as unlikely to vanquish racism as such novels were to fall into the hands of heterosexuals and make them spontaneously exclaim, "Wow, I was totally wrong about those queers; they're just like me, only… gayer!" And yet both it and Gay Vampire look to the counterculture, however short its practice may have

fallen of its utopian ideals, as the road to a future where love can indeed save the day. Gay Vampire's young hero, Davy Swanson, is a child of Texas privilege: His father owns a local oil company, and Davy — who's still in high school — owns a snazzy yellow convertible and lives in big, fancy house.

Which is not to say he's particularly happy: Davy is motherless, though doted on by his older sister, Dianne; not close to his father, who, while financially generous, spends more time at work than at home; and is handsome but small for his age — a mere 5'3". That's an infelicitous combination in the class-conscious and hormone-poisoned swamp of high school, where girls treat him like a pet — with the exception of brazen bad-girl Carolyn, whose interest in Davy is terrifyingly predatory — and the boys, unsurprisingly, are quick to label him a sissy.

By far the most sympathetic and unambiguously decent person with whom Davy crosses paths is his California-based Aunt Nora, a nurse cool enough to be nonplussed when her teenage nephew, his vampire lover and the puppy they rescued from drunken bikers at a roadside rest stop, show up looking for someplace to stay. She's also sufficiently responsible to enroll Davy in a home-study program with an eye to keeping him from completely abandoning his

education, and West Coast laid-back enough not to worry as he befriends a mixed gang of queer boys and straight girls (some things never change) who cheerfully call themselves the "Gay Gang."

But that's getting ahead of things. Before Davy's young life even begins to come together, author Davy S. (yes, like Davy Swanson, though the novel is not, as the byline might led one to suspect, written in the first person) proceeds to pile a Perils of Pauline-load of misfortunes onto the boy's slender shoulders. Davy is generally miserable at school; hopelessly, silently in love with the butchest boy in his grade; almost raped by class bullies; and menaced by his sister's fiancé. He blunders across a gang of murderous drug dealers as they're packing up their dope and, while fleeing, gets lost in an abandoned graveyard and comes face to face with a vampire — though that last turns out to be the first good thing that's happened to him in a long time, and introduces Gay Vampire's secret weapon.

"I am Barnabas C. Dracula," says the young man who rises from a golden coffin wrapped with chains, whom Davy stumbles across in a dark corner of the Sacred Heavens Cemetery. His announcement reveals an indisputable fact about the anonymous author of this novel: He was a straight-up fan of Dark

Shadows, which debuted on ABC-TV in June 1966 and ran through April 1971. Its undisputed star was morally conflicted vampire Barnabas Collins, whose surname is not only a fine candidate for the "C" in Barnabas C. Dracula but also name of the street near which Davy lives.

I'm also willing to call Gay Vampire proof positive that that the overwhelming queerness of the series' Barnabas Collins isn't just obvious in retrospect. It was plain as the breaking day to at least one contemporary viewer, given how closely the scene in which Davy frees his Barnabas from coffin-bound confinement resembles the corresponding episode of Dark Shadows, which aired in 1967 and jump-started the show's transformation from a foundering neo-Gothic pastiche to a hugely popular blend of complicated family drama and supernatural sexual complication involving, among others, a seductive witch, an alluring werewolf and Barnabas, who not only has "fangs like a wolf" but a wolf-headed cane — like the one that dominates the portrait of the centuries-old "ancestor" of the series' Barnabas that is shown regularly one he returns to Collinwood once he returns home — to match.

Gay Vampire also has a great deal in common with, of all things, Stephenie Meyers' Twilight novels, the

young-adult blockbusters driven by the appeal of dishy teen vampire Edward Cullen, who sparkles as though dipped in glitter lip-gloss. For all Gay Vampire's considerable rapiness — both threatened and actual — it remains at heart a sweet little fantasy about two misunderstood youngsters who defy the odds to bridge a formidable supernatural divide by the sheer power of true love. And they do so even after Barnabas, like Twilight's Edward, tries to persuade his human lover to pursue a "normal" life, normal being a term that can be taken two ways. Within the Twilight universe it means simply life as someone who will love, age and die within the confines of natural law.

But in Gay Vampire it means that and more: Vampirism is coded as being synonymous with homosexuality, a trope that figures prominently in novelist Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Gothic novella Carmilla (1871-72) — which predated Stoker's Dracula by a quarter of a century — and in films as early as Dracula's Daughter (1939), the non-canonical sequel to Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula (screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on Stoker's novel by way of the hugely popular 1924 stage play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston) — Dracula's Daughter is ostensibly based on Stoker's short story Dracula's Guest but in fact features a

wholly original story that revolves around the Countess Marya Zaleska. The Countess who regards her hereditary vampirism as a curse from which she hopes to break free. Played by the harshly striking Gloria Holden, the melancholy, artistic Countess Zaleska is consistently and unquestionably coded as lesbian, most blatantly in the sequence in which she importunes naive artist's model, Lili, into surrendering to her Sapphic attentions, and in advertising that included the tagline "Save the Women of London from Dracula's Daughter."

While Gay Vampire's sex scenes are hardcore, Davy S. — in keeping with his story's quaintly fairytale-like narrative in which happily-ever-after love is earned by the sequential winning of a series of tests — hedges his language bets, favoring euphemisms like "hot flesh," "hardness," "forbidden passage" and "white eruption" over the more straightforward "cock," "asshole" and "cum," and his sex scenes are far less protracted than those in the later Vampire's Kiss. What a difference the year that separates the two novels made.

If the good surprise of gay pulps is what enjoyable reads they can be, the bad one is discovering how difficult it is to tease out the real identities of writers like "Davy S." and "Sonny Barker." A handful used

their own names, notably Prix de Flore-winner Bruce Benderson, whose adults-only Kyle (undated, circa 1975), a slippery investigation of desire, celebrity and mutable identity, is every bit the equal of his first mainstream literary novel, 1994's User. But most didn't, and for every novelist who later stood up and claimed his alter ego or -egos, hundreds more remain in their closets or have taken their secret identities to the grave: AIDS burned through their generation like napalm.

Dismissive stereotypes of vintage gay erotica — which for the bulk of the 20th century meant most works dealing with same-sex desire — are largely rooted in novels of the 1940s and '50s, hobbled by the evasive language of "questing mouths," "sensitive portions" and "heated longing" and kept in rigid narrative check by the far-from-unfounded fear that publishing books about homosexuals who were no more tormented, socially marginalized or doomed to squalid lives of degradation and aching loneliness than anyone else whose desires failed to line up with the conventions of bourgeois propriety was the fastest way to invite the wrath of contemporary Comstocks.

But the 1960s — an era of overlapping cultural revolutions sparked by dissatisfaction with pervasive sexual inequality, American involvement in Vietnam,

racial prejudice, homophobia and general discontent with the status quo — wrought rapid changes; too jarringly rapid for some, too frustratingly slow for others who had grown up chafing at restraints that seemed intractable. While there's no consensus as to exactly when the golden age of gay erotica began and ended, I favor roughly from 1969 to 1982, when adults-only novels struck a harmonious balance between sexual explicitness and solid narrative. Sexually graphic westerns like Richard Amory's revisionist Song of the Loon (1966), The Song of Aaron (1967) and Listen, the Loon Sings… (1968) take place in a past where the wildest frontier is love between saddle-sore cowboys and Native Americans. Science-fiction stories unfurled place in richly imagined future societies where such burning contemporary issues as segregation and the politics of sexual repression play out in topsy-turvy scenarios like that of Larry Townsend's hugely entertaining 2069 trilogy (1969-1970), where the manly business of deep-space exploration is powered by rum, sodomy and the lash, minus the lash and the rum.

My first objective in republishing Gay Vampire and Vampire's Kiss — like its predecessor collection Man Eater and Night of the Sadist, the first volume in this series of two-in-one editions — is to bring these forgotten novels out of the shadows and into the

hands of 21st-century readers unencumbered by the biases of earlier generations.

But I'd also love to draw out Davy S. and Sonny Barker/Jerry Murray, if they're still alive, as an ever-dwindling number of writers of their generation are. My efforts to find them have been unsuccessful, stymied by a perfect storm of pseudonyms, copyright registrations by long-defunct publishers and, I suspect, the authors' own conviction that having written smutty books is nothing of which to be proud. I would welcome the chance to persuade them that the effort they invested in transcending the utilitarian parameters of adult books was not wasted: The books they produced are both good pulp fiction and texts that bear witness to history, more readable now then they were at a time when gay and straight lives rarely met… at least not in an atmosphere of open and unbiased good will.