Vampires are evolving. The once-demonic, batlike beings bent on fulfilling their selfish and wicked desires for human blood have been on a steady path toward personal discovery and social acceptance. Modern-day vampires are attractive and alluring, and their transformative bites are an extreme form of sexual union. They no longer vanish in puffs of smoke or live in spider-infested dark mansions, nor do they torment and harass the poor townsfolk.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer began to mainstream the concept of vampire revolutionaries: the protagonist’s boyfriend Angel proves that some vampires go so far as to protect humans from malevolent vampires and other evils. To make their humanness complete, new vampires fall in love with ordinary men and women.

Buffy‘s era is already an outdated stage in the humanization of blood-suckers. In our new age of Twilight (top photo), former creatures of the night are comfortable in sunlight, play piano, struggle with desire for girls in biology class and attend prom. It’s as though their characters are based not on ancient folklore but on misfit American teenagers. There must be something more than the allure of the underworld driving the new pop culture craze of vampire-human romances.

According to a recent article in Esquire, vampires are really all about straight women, and their desire to sleep with gay men. As author Stephen Marche points out, vampires have come so far that they aren’t even goth or weird anymore. (They’re just gay.)

The psyche of the suburban vampire is one of conflict: conflict between internal desires and social mores, conflict between public identity and secret identity, conflict between physical and high-minded desires, conflict between a sense of perversion and a desire to fit in, and a profound sense of difference, particularly when love and romance came into play. The very title of the film and movie series “Twilight” emphasizes the conflict between contradictory forces (dark and light). Vampires are a perfect analogy for gay boys on the cusp of self-acceptance.

To extend the comparison, male vampires are usually soft- spoken and thin, melancholy, pale, fashionable and articulate. Their sexual prowess is largely psychological and anything but cock-oriented, they have longish hair, piercing eyes and an obvious oral fixation. They encompass many of the nebulous stereotypes that surround young gay boys, but in these stories, they’re straight and sexually accessible to women.

I tend to relate most convergences between gender and sexual orientation to social views on masculinity, and this is no exception. I think it’s ironic that the butchness and bulging musculature celebrated as sexually appealing in gay culture is absent in waify, metrosexual vampires — yet adolescent straight girls go wild for them. Perhaps the vampires’ supernatural powers and sharp teeth make up for the social power and idealism that masculinity or jockishness would otherwise provide. Besides that, it’s probably the girls who self-reflect as a little out-of-the-mainstream themselves who go most for the misfit vampire boys and read the long novels about them.

A number of recent “freak” stories make direct allusion to homosexuality; the X-Men “mutants” discover their genetic differences at puberty and are subject to social persecution and reparative therapies, as well as a deadly virus infecting mutants that decimates the community’s population, mirroring AIDS. An astute observer could make similar arguments about Heroes or other secret-special- power stories.

The many fantasy universes that deal with vampires, from True Blood to Underworld, tackle similar social issues that reflect current LGBT issues. But I’m with Samantha Henig of Double X, who doubts it has much to do with straight girls’ desire for gay men. Sure, the type of young women who shun traditional mores and love the transgressive elements in Twilight might be exactly the girls who have the most gay friends, and I’ve argued that the dire need to be a fag hag is sometimes problematic or self-interested, but its a leap to say it’s all about sex.

The issue I have with the theory is that no matter how you cut it, socially constructed or no, there is one thing that makes a man gay: a sexual attraction to other men. Effeminate skinny boys who date girls are just effeminate skinny straight boys. Everything beyond the gender you lust after is a stereotype, and if girls are drawn to that stereotype it has more to do with new ways of looking at relationships (which are no doubt facilitated by gay rights) than a sexual appeal of homosexual men. A five-minute observation of any urban neighborhood reveals that the world has plenty of skinny, pale “hipster” straight guys to offer all the stereotypes of homosexuality without reference to actual gay guys.

If getting off to other guys is what makes you gay — and I say it is — then perhaps a bisexual vampire would fulfill Marche’s vision of a gay creature who is accessible to women (skinny, tormented straight boys don’t count as gay for me). Then I’d agree that there is something to his suggestion that homosexuality is sexually alluring to women, and vampires are the pop world’s window to it.

In that case, I’ll eagerly await more news, of explicitly homoerotic scenes in vampire tales. The aforementioned suggestion never happened on screen, but if only it would! I’d be open to anything so blatantly queer-friendly in the mainstream media, and who the hell cares if its all just for straight girls’ pleasure — you sure wouldn’t hear any complaints from me!

© 2009, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com