Interview with a vampire gay scene

Louis’ struggle to accept his own identity isn’t an allegory; his sexuality and being a vampire are both part of it. He explained:

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Rice’s The Vampires Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches books drew queer Gen X readers like me en masse into her hyper-sensualized world. What happens next makes me laugh out loud because it is so very on-the-nose (and inspired the choice for the title of this blog.) Louis begs Lestat… ‘let me stay in the closet’, to which Lestat laughs and replies ‘Don’t you know what you are?’ Pg.26

The phrase ‘staying in the closet’ or ‘closeted’ became synonymous with hiding one’s true queer nature during the gay liberation movements of the 1960’s (Saguy, 2020); a phrase in common parlance when Rice wrote and published this novel and therefore the implication of its use here is unavoidable.

She’s their daughter.

All of that is to say that for years, decades even, this story, which is both a great book and one of the best vampire movies, has been read as queer-coded.

To hammer this point home further, IndieWire published a list of queer and homoerotic horror movies.

Of course, positioning vampirism as an antithesis to Christianity and ‘godliness’ is common practice within the Gothic – we only need to look briefly at Dracula to see this. From the allure of a life with a centuries-old-yet-eternally-youthful male vampire, to Louis’ ultimate choice to remain alone rather than go forward into a homosexual relationship.

Rice’s protagonist in Interview with the vampire is as conflicted about the morality of his queerness as Rice is about queerness in general, stuck endlessly reinforcing stereotypes and debating the morals of queer experience.

In 1976, in the midst of this proactive support for gay rights (and prior to the devastating setbacks to LGBTQ+ rights caused by the ‘gay panic’ of the AIDS crisis), Rice releases Interview with the vampire while living in California, the same year that same-sex sexual activity is no longer illegal in the state.

We should bear in mind that meanwhile, in Louisiana and Texas, where Anne spent most of her time up to this point, being gay was still illegal and would remain so until 2003. We should consider whether this, along with the Christian conservatism that remains prevalent to this day, may have affected the ways in which Rice wrote, and whether what appears on the face to perhaps be forward-thinking, is actually not so much as it seems.

But he put his right arm around me and pulled me close to his chest… As I tried to move, he pressed his right fingers to my lips and said, “Be still. So, at least for the first part of this story’s history, they weren’t intimate in that way.

However, it could be interpreted in a way that made it clear they were romantically in love, and for decades, Louis and Lestat have been icons in LGBTQ+ media.

For Decades, Both The Book And The Movie Adaptation Of Interview With The Vampire Have Been Viewed As Queer-Coded Texts

Back in 2012, Anne Rice did an interview with Gizmodo where she confirmed that Louis and Lestat were a same-sex couple with a child.

She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. I recoiled. Let us take the first section of the novel, in which Louis explains how he is turned into a vampire, as an example of this. He may not be the rockstar this season, but he is the soul.

With Lestat stepping into the spotlight for season three — literally — the stage is set for a queer, blood-soaked rock opera of heartbreak, revenge, and guitar solos that echo through centuries.

I use ‘choice’ in this way because that is what Louis believes himself to have done, despite the alternative being death, either at Lestat’s hand or his own.

Louis immediately finds a new ‘distaste for being so close to [Lestat], handsome and intriguing as he was’ Pg.26. In true Rice fashion, this passionate closeness and the tension it conjures is abruptly interrupted and closed off by the need for the interviewer to change over the tape in his recorder (Pg.23), a device that could be quite satisfying if the tension is then rebuilt to a crescendo.

And while they’re in Paris, Claudia falls in love with the woman who became her companion before they both met their tragic ends.

This show unabashedly and proudly embraces the queer subtext of Interview with the Vampire that’s been loved for so long, and it makes it a huge part of the story.

I’d like to explore whether, by removing the cultural context of the 1980’s/early 1990’s AIDS panic that Rice still wrote with the same homophobic sense of morality within her first novel. [Laughs] Sure!

My aim is to consider further whether the opening pages of Interview with the vampire reflect the same contextual and embedded homophobia in isolation, rather than in context of the full The Vampire Chronicles series.

Production is underway, and AMC marked the moment on June 20th with the kind of teaser only vampires and gays would appreciate: a clapperboard, a tambourine, a vintage mic, and a Gibson Les Paul guitar.