This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Understanding Vampires: “What Is (Problematic) Love?”; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity (feat. Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism)

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

—Satan, Paradise Lost (1667).

 

Picking up from where “They Hunger (opening) and Eat Me Alive, part zero (vampire crash course)” left off…

If I could stay anything about queerness and vampirism, it’s that both started from ignorance, but also positions closer to nature that have become increasingly alien and closed-off: love, for the state, is both pure and problematic; it cannot separate them, because profit requires division to function. To study both, then, is to study knowledge in a state of dialectical-material flux, knowledge being different ideas about the same things; i.e., often from different schools of thought; e.g., Marxist-Leninism vs anarcho Communism. Such schools are classically at odds, effectively in disagreement about how to develop Communism in the present space and time.

As me and my work are an-Com (specifically Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communist), we’ll need a foil as I unpack my own approach to such things. The foil, in this case, is Bad Empanada (a YouTube video essayist) vs myself, Persephone van der Waard (a sex worker, writer, and BDSM doctor established through independent studies); i.e., Bad Empanada graciously reminding me why I’m not a Marxist-Leninist!

Note: “Understanding Vampires” is informed by interactions with people who, although they are correct about a great many things, lack much-needed nuance in others. In the past, this would have been Noam Chomsky (re: Bleacher). Here, though, we’re specifically talking about Bad Empanada, aka Yannis Stanopoulos, a person who—despite being correct in his persecution of actual sex pests and Zionist behaviors from sell-out “leftists” on the Internet—tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding the value of social studies and literary analysis at large; i.e., what Marx himself would call the Superstructure, and which discounting media analysis at large is to regress to a level of Marxist action on par with Marx and Engel’s making of sodomy accusations (through sniveling private correspondence).

To it, Bad Empanada is a Marxist-Leninist, valuing the material element to Marxist analysis, but also state mechanisms; i.e., he doesn’t condone or support anarcho-Communism, treating its practitioners like hopeless hedonists and (as I shall explain) sex pests to lump in with genuine predators. Except, the state is straight, historically the ultimate and constant enemy selling out and wearing down to abuse its own people; i.e., as expressed by Bad Empanada himself towards me and others like me, the state—whether it calls itself Socialist or capitalist—always prioritizes us fags and sex workers when the state of exception narrows (consider this sentence the Gothic, queer and thoroughly anarchistic thesis argument for “Understanding Vampires”). We can’t afford to be strictly material in our investigations of capital, because much of praxis (and its synthesis in our daily lives) comes from the social component of media; i.e., that is produced as much by workers as corporations.

Furthermore, in regards to Bad Empanada discounting the social aspect of things, he’s “doing a Superstructure,” himself; i.e., by making videos of such things on YouTube, but also insisting that all “online leftists” are Contrapoints clones, thus centrists. He does this while, in the same breath, asking for donations and, at the same time, saying really dumb shit like “social studies don’t matter” and “BDSM doctors aren’t real[1].” He’s good on postcolonial theory and its argumentation in academic forms, but incredibly closeted and ignorant about how things work outside his narrow sphere; i.e., to the point that he makes incredibly regressive and ultimately transphobic arguments, himself (see: footnote). Such “problematic” insinuations are oddly suitable, coming from someone who—apart from being a white, cis-het Australian expat/Marxist-Leninist with Maoist tendencies—looks and acts like an Amish person (or medieval friar, next page): a straight person “in the closet” insofar as he remains terminally ignorant of monstrous poetics and their proletarian, ludo-Gothic BDSM function (versus a classic “closet case,” meaning a queer person in denial about themselves as queer); i.e., all while turning a blind eye to his own hypocrisies and knowledge gaps outside of postcolonial studies (e.g., Bad Empanada’s double standard—of vocally hating Americans regardless if they agree with their nation or not[2], while he himself comes from Australia). It’s all he knows, and he acts like gender studies and activism can’t merge with postcolonialism and Marxism in any meaningful sense (something that plenty of straight boys can do; he’s just a bad ally and historian, styling himself “inflammatory” but really enflamed like a hemorrhoid to infectiously attack more vulnerable parties: a used diaper full of shit).

(source: Fandom)

You don’t want to judge a book by its cover but instead should go after its arguments, and I generally avoid attacking Bad Empanada’s appearance because it’s usually not relevant to his arguments; his behavior towards me is—i.e., his good works and talented scholarship weighed against his sheer and total stupidity regarding sex work and an-Com activism. But given his total disdain towards an-Coms (and BDSM practitioners with academic backgrounds), I will gleefully point out that—as someone making Puritanical, fash-style SWERF arguments like he does (next page)—Bad Empanada certainly looks the part! My man has zero rizz!

Furthermore, he’s far less understanding about social topics that someone like Jessie Gender understands and practices on a daily basis—i.e., despite Jessie being wrong about Palestine and Bad Empanada being correct (re: “Jessie Gender Should Delete Her Zionist Propaganda Video Immediately,” 2024), those two things don’t cancel each other out; Jessie is still wrong about Palestine and right about gender issues, and Bad Empanada is still cloistered, never interacting with said persons except when they sell out, to then use that to discount everything that Jessie ever argued for while trumpeting his own work and Marxist-Leninism at large! He’s cherry-picking with a meat ax—rigid about postcolonialism (which is good), but also Puritanically about gender studies and sex work (which is bad); i.e., in ways that self-report on where he actually stands (with the state, thus against queerness). Needs more nuance, mate!

Also, I detect a lot of middle-class resentment on your end; but, if you detest Jessie for selling out to Israel, how is your calling for universal Puritanical censorship of discussions of sexuality any better? Two wrongs don’t make a right (nor does abstinence make you “holy” any more than Mao was celibate[3]). In short, it’s epic cringe, the virgin Marxist-Leninist (above) vs the Chad an-Com:

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Responding to Bad Empanada’s arguments, I had to explain that, yes, I am real—am both a BDSM doctor, trans person and sex worker, but also practicing leftist (though not on YouTube, for the most part)—doing so in my initial response to our (thankfully short) exchange:

Bad Empanada: “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again.”

Me: “As a sex worker, activist and BDSM doctor, I’m not sure how to feel, here. XD”

Bad Empanada: “‘BDSM doctor.’ That’s not a fucking thing. Jesus Christ.”

Me: “I’m an independent researcher, but wrote my postgraduate work on the Gothic, ludology, Marxism and BDSM. I have multiple books out about sex positivity and BDSM. Kind of an odd mix, but BDSM is absolutely a part of the work that I do. And you’re right, I don’t have an office or work at university, but I do come from an academic background that branched off into non-academic work that I’m trying to share with people to help make others more sex-positive and left-leaning in the fight towards liberation for different marginalized groups sexualized under capital.

I should add that I don’t engage with minors (no minors/minors DNI, per the usual sex worker style), and the vast majority of my work is on my 18+ website (which I can’t even link to on YouTube). I think your post is referring to sex pests on YouTube whose young audiences they prey off of while calling themselves leftists, which I agree, is entirely wrong. My work is basically entirely off-site, and while I view it as strictly educational and made for purposes of satire and critique based my academic and non-academic (extracurricular) work, it’s something I predominantly discuss with other sex workers” (source YouTube community post, Bad Empanada: August 15th, 2024).

This is all true; I have an 18+ website dedicated to an-Com theory and practice through Gothic poetics and labor exchanges, including currently three (soon to be four) books written on the subject. So, being told that I “wasn’t real” by a smug SWERF postcolonialist really stuck in my craw! Like, how would you know, dude? There are more things between Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!

Simply put, my guy hit a nerve. His statement pissed me off for two reasons: one, it’s total horseshit on its face; and two, it was made in a thread where he was already calling for the taboo silence of all discussions about sex while talking with a bunch of weirdos who already agreed with him (the blind leading the blind, in this case). It’d be like if someone said, “People who talk about [Palestinians] constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again,” only to have someone say in response, “as a [doctor of Palestinian studies], I’m not sure how to feel, here,” for him to end with, “[‘Palestinian studies doctor’] That’s not a fucking thing. Jesus Christ.”

First of all, go fuck yourself. Second, just because you have a huge fucking blind spot in your area of research doesn’t mean that something is “worthless”; it just means you have a knowledge gap and don’t know how to quantify or reconcile BDSM, sex work or gender studies with the Global South. Your ignorance feels pretty willful, all the more frustrating given that it (and your arrogance) come from someone who should know better but chooses to scapegoat, exploit and otherwise profit off a dehumanizing view of sex workers and BDSM. You know the motto for BDSM is “hurt, not harm,” right?

Third, Bad Empanada’s argument is unironic Stalinist rhetoric; i.e., “lock up the degenerate sex criminals,” meaning anyone who talks about sex (except him, calling for pogroms)—something he’s been dogwhistling and pedaling to his paying audience on his second channel. Put a pin in that for now. We’ll get back to it when we discuss Chelyabinsk-40 in “Leaving the Closet.”

Note: I’m trying to find a balance between fairness and firmness—being rough and soft in my criticism as needed (strict and gentle, in BDSM terms). Part of me feels like the fag tickling the straight monk with the pink feather duster while crying, “Have at you!” before turning heel and saying, “Now go away or I will taunt you a second time!” But regardless of how exactly I burst his smug, much-to-learn bubble, know that Bad Empanada’s methods concerning activism and gender studies remain, such as they are, clumsy at best and pernicious and exclusionary at worst. Just know that—concerning his massive ego, big mouth and colossal hypocrisy/academic blind spots—we’ll be taking our time with him (the polemic concentrating mostly in this opening and in part zero). —Perse

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

To add to that, one thing that I or my work (Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism) most definitely is not is Marxist-Leninism. Gotta yuck that yum, comrade (from Volume One):

Our liberation is meant to be gradual, occurring through a proletarian Gothic imagination that is grown over time, and whose careful cultivation stems from a collective intelligence/awareness that is explicitly developed to function as anarcho-Communist, not Marxist-Leninist (or other socio-political and -economic arrangements that remain prone to the historical abuses of state power as a vertical, thus harmful, configuration).

Though proletarian, Sex Positivity comes out of an abject past fraught with compromise, the “state Socialism” of Marxist-Leninism becoming increasingly nominal (and abusive) under Capitalism; obviously we want to avoid that as much as we can while developing [Gothic] Communism outside of establishment politics (source).

The idea—as per usual during revolution—is teamwork, with me and my numerous friends’ and collaborators’ collective approach (see: the Acknowledgements to my published volumes, located in the very back of a given PDF) choosing to illustrate mutual consent; i.e., as a matter of praxial context targeting the Superstructure (re: hearts and minds).

Furthermore, as someone who is for (and does) sex work but stands against profit, rape/genocide and the state (which is conducive to all of these things), I’ve worked incredibly hard to distinguish myself as such/delegate for my kind while being an ally to other oppressed through similarity amid difference. So I always try to understand and learn from other scholars, expanding my understanding of Marxism, postcolonialism and gender studies; i.e., by helping those less fortunate than myself; e.g., homeless or housing-challenged people, sex workers, and yes, native populations (the sort states treat as universally expendable). Indeed, my partner Bay constitutes all three—is a disabled person throttled by the New Zealand government, a sex worker and Māori. Granted, the former categories might not be as exotic and “sexy” as helping foreigners getting bombs dropped on them, but the end result is the same: domination, rape and genocide.  All victims are valuable, and all can be helped at the same time through social and material practices: to act out and call attention to problems the way we feel is best, pushing towards liberation for all peoples.

By comparison, Bad Empanada—despite being oddly quick to use words like “rape” and “pedophile” in his thumbnails (e.g., “Milei Sends Delegation to Take Selfies with Rapists, Murderers,” 2024)—lacks the ability to treat such subjects with respect, nuance or skill. Lacking anything akin to a discerning and judicial touch (to go hard or soft), he’s like a bad (functionally white, cis-het) dom—utterly unequipped but ringing the alarm bell as hard as he can, asking for cash while telling others who talk about sex to shut up about it. As such, he enjoys his own double standard (talking about sex), acting like he’s the sole savior to administer blame and reap the rewards (monetizing said channel in frankly insensitive and gross ways); i.e., gender studies are worthless, with Bad Empanada speaking not just for queer people, but also cis-het people effected by conservative policies on both sides of the globe.

One, activism isn’t a contest. But also, maybe sexually abused workers (sex or otherwise) don’t want the weird, straight, expat Maoist speaking for them? Homeless people (which queer people often are) exist all over, my dude, be this impoverished nations, cities, or communities; but one thing we don’t do is rape rank. By comparison, you—someone who as far as I can tell, doesn’t know the first thing about sex work or sex-positive BDSM—were pretty dismissive of even acknowledging that I and my work exist; re: stating that BDSM doctors “aren’t real” (which again, is absurd, given this includes academics, but also sex therapists professionally trained in BDSM; but even in unpaid, unofficial, and/or non-state-certified capacities, BDSM practitioners and pornographers generally amass a knowledge base about BDSM that rivals their official therapeutic counterparts).

 

In short, Bad Empanada is basically Peele from Key & Peele‘s 2013 “Pussy on the Chainwax” skit, telling the slutty, just-as-educated-as-he-is an-Com that I’m “trying to start a thing”; i.e., “You’re not real and the work you do has no value,” echoing this sentiment within his usual belittling of sex work and BDSM used by actual rape victims, including myself and my own survival of such things—doing so to find some sense of control and healing in our own lives while synthesizing an-Com praxis at the same time (anywhere in the world, not just America)! BDSM isn’t universally fake, and its prime function isn’t to harm, but hurt in ways that heal by virtue of calculated risk. Tell that to Bad Empanada and he’d insist it’s all bullshit.

          To quote the Dude, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

It sucks to find out that Bad Empanada is a giant Puritanical dick who thinks that because he’s a postcolonialist, this somehow excuses his outmoded, ignorant, hypocritical behaviors elsewhere. All the same, his actions also inspired me to think and respond to his incredibly dumb arguments, making a lengthy video response detailing years’ worth of work that I do (from the video description):

A trans-woman, an-Com BDSM expert/doctor (with PhD levels [years’ worth] of independent, inter community research), here, talking about why I think @BadEmpanadaLive often lacks a serious, nuanced (or even, at times, basic) understanding of sex work and the discussion of such things. I often enjoy his no-prisoners approach to postcolonialism and investigating sex pests in the YouTube sphere, but sometimes his clunky, sardonic sense of humor is dismissive to the point of bad praxis (this isn’t made to defame him or discredit the legitimately valuable work that he does, but to talk about his blind spots/rough edges in good faith) [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “‘I, Sex Doctor’: About Me, Ludo-Gothic BDSM, and the Work that I Do,” 2024].

Keeping all of this in mind, extensive modifications—to my vampire section and its study and execution of “sodomy dialogs” per vampirism—have occurred in direct response to Bad Empanada’s callous, ignorant, and frankly lame dismissal of Gothic poetics and BDSM at large; i.e., regressing to a cynical, joyless position about “sodomy” and BDSM that Marx arguably would have held himself (or Stalin).

P.S., Not all leftists online are on YouTube, Bad Empanada, and even those on YouTube aren’t all slaves to profit. Think about that while you try and peddle your dated and narrow, punitive view of BDSM (and Communism, if I’m honest), trying as you do to rope so many people who “talk about sex like it’s their main interest” into the same category as legitimate sex pests like Ian Kochinski.

P.P.S., Academic rivals are really important, and I wanted to say thank you to Bad Empanada—for sucking enough that you lit a fire under my ass to critique you! It’s really made me examine Marxist-Leninism and dislike it more than I already did; but also, to yield some fun scholarship regarding vampire Capitalism queerphobically damaging the environment per the state as straight, and Marxist-Leninism being an example of that which led to its own queerphobic abusing of nature-as-monstrous feminine (e.g., Chelyabinsk-40)! Thanks for being a piece of shit! Your Benny Morris to my Norm Finkelstein (for relative suckiness, not because you’re a Zionist)! —Perse

As this subchapter concerns knowledge as a matter of praxis, mid-debate between different political groups that both know stuff (re: Bad Empanada and I both know things, but are at odds), what is knowledge, then? From a Marxist perspective, knowledge is historical-material; from a Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist perspective, knowledge is encapsulated in poetic expression whose history is predicated on dialectical-material arguments with and about monsters, including vampires (we’ll needle Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism, throughout).

Think about this in terms of blood, then—where it’s stored, by whom and what it contains. Stronger vampires canonically feed their slaves with lesser/diluted blood. But they themselves cannot fully control what blood contains. As a matter of epistemology through queer narratives, the meta contents of public knowledge and discourse started to not only shift, but avalanche in the 1970s; i.e., through the Superstructure as inundated with new scholarship and terminologies progressing into the neoliberal era. In turn, new media began to appear speaking to things not always conducive to profit or queer burial, being absorbed through those queer persons hungry for things speaking to them as queer but stuck in the closet. The wealth of increasingly sex-positive allegory began, if not to totally outweigh the bad, then at least to meet it in socio-material opposition.

To this, anything that concerns flow of vitality can effectively be called vampiric; e.g., Tolkien’s Ringwraiths leeching the life out of living things, imagined by someone whose ideas and refrains were mostly allergic to the Neo-Gothic of 150 years’ worth of material, up to that point. But this generality involves canon more broadly as a state-compelled position of ignorance seeking liberation inside of itself. The state needs us, not the other way around; we are, like Stevie Nicks, the mistress of our fates, making far-off things possible by dreaming them up in spite of state forces telling us what to think. You can’t force Communism, like Marxist-Leninism does; it must become second-nature on a ground level (which anarcho Communism is all about)! Or, as I write in Volume Zero (combing an-Com practices with Gothic elements:

It’s possible to still enjoy material culture during nerd sex as an extension or reclaiming of said culture (with someone or their partner wearing a t-shirt [or some such article] to tout their nerdy Gothic status as one’s trendy object of desire: the big-titty Goth GF as a stamp of, or stamped with, consumer pride that also contains cryptomimetic echoes of generational trauma inside of itself.

Dark desire, then, becomes something to compile and compound within various bondage and discipline exercises that, for all intents and purposes, constitute as “edging”—not the releasing of passion, but its prolonged storage until such a time as release is permitted by the one holding the reins). Indeed, enjoyment isn’t divorced from capital and monetization, but we can develop and raise cultural awareness and interconnectivity in meaningful ways while still getting to be the fantasies that Capitalism normally alienates us from (the unicorn not as a manmade, sequestered entity but one that is hidden behind paywalls, the resultant manufactured scarcity granting it a rare, mythical appearance and appreciating value—compelled orgasms, aka “sad cum”); i.e., established through the artwork we make and games that we play as a second-nature mode of altered existence: self-definition as a basic human right that is quickly and readily understood at an intuitive level. It becomes a child-like curiosity and teaching that extends into adulthood, carrying Gothic Communism forward through workers [not the state] dictating the Gothic mode; i.e., their cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence (source).

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

Such is vampirism; i.e., a closeted, thoroughly queer position told through artistic, community positions of vulnerability and hunger that, themselves, have repeatedly evolved to survive under state duress. Changing constantly and drastically over the years (re: Lockhart, vis-à-vis Romero’s zombies—inspired by Matteson’s zombie-vampires—as comprising socio-material critiques of Capitalism through the Gothic mode), all have done so according to popular legends stuck in a tug-o’-war existence; i.e., routinely revisited according to new feelings of dissatisfaction with capital and its neoliberal ordering of things/failure to deliver on basic promises (extending to Marxist-Leninism and queer people). Thus new visits to older hauntological sites bring fresh knowledge regarding older post’s positions of ignorance while tumbling towards truth; e.g., Alien: Romulus (2024) following Alien: Isolation (2014) as traveling towards Alien‘s 1979 archaeology as more class-conscious than Aliens‘ was, in 1986 onwards; i.e., from Marxist-Leninism’s latent homophobia towards anarcho Communism as a far more sexual, Gothic and queer mode of praxis.

We’ll articulate this as follows:

• Part zero (included in this post) starts with a basic history primer on vampires from my chosen starting point—the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s with a combination of popular-to-academic works, vis-à-vis Halford, Rice, Foucault and Butler—to briefly examine the history of sodomy and queer love per the feeding mechanism of vampires; i.e., from homosexual men, to (oft-)female commercializations of said men, followed by GNC language having evolved parallel to binarized normative currents that gradually give rise to liberatory forms of camp taking it all back in more recent times: after such ideas were medicalized, made academic, and finally released into public spheres, to then disseminate and spread for or against the state. We’ll also critique latent queerphobia in Marxist-Leninism (re: Bad Empanada) and academic, queer shortcomings/tokenism through an an-Com lens, and consider some of the larger historical-material currents leading up to the 1970s and beyond.
• Once you have your sea legs, part one shall explore sodomy and queerness beyond that glittering historical period; i.e., through a trans woman’s quest for knowledge built on said bedrock, considering the ways in which understanding “sodomy” and “vampirism” formulated for me, and can develop and grow for you, too. Part one shall suitably provide some general poetic concepts to bear in mind; i.e., defining sodomy more closely while regarding the vampire’s seeking of prey and feeding on them through anisotropic “sodomy dialogs” of power flow and criminal application. After that, we examine some anecdotal examples between myself, my work and various experiences with and epiphanies concerning queer persecution I have experienced across my life; i.e., while closing various knowledge gaps regarding vampiric poetics and texts; e.g., Brotherhood of the Wolf, Wicked, postpunk, crazy exes, and of course, Interview with the Vampire and Anne Rice. Tokenized elements will be addressed, as well, and specialized scholarship I coined while coming out of the closet; i.e., while recently expanding on this portion; e.g., Capitalism’s abuse of the environment being queerphobic, including in Soviet Russia.
• All shall segue into our close-reads in part two, those of Alice in Borderland and The Darkest Dungeon tackling and interrogating Capitalism’s vampiric, prison-like predatory qualities through both stories.

There’s also the crash course that precedes “Understanding Vampires,” wherein “Undead Feeding Vectors, part one” talks about our research focus and history surrounding vampires, BDSM, and liberation through an-Com queer camp under persecutory conditions (with sodomy comparable to witch hunts in state eyes). Make sure you familiarize yourself with it so you have an idea of what vampires even are and how we’ll be tackling them going forwards. 

P.S., This piece was written deliberately without citing Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, despite her expertise. I’m doing this for reasons I’ve already written about, so I’ll just repeat them again, here; re (from “‘Monsters, Magic and Myth’: Modularity and Class,” 2024):

Furthermore, I have plenty of academics to refer to so I’m not going to cite Ní Fhlainn on principle! Per my friend Sandy Norton’s words (someone who actually treated me like a person and not an international student to grit their teeth at): “Rather than ‘needing to invoke’ Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers” (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin,” 1994). I’m using the same mechanism to intentionally omit Ní Fhlainn and say my own piece about vampires (while invoking Foucault, of course); i.e., because a) my arguments are rich enough on their own with the sources I already have and artwork and muses already involved, and b) I find speaking for myself far more liberating instead of suffering Sorcha speaking for me through their own gentrified texts. To be blunt, my arguments straight up don’t need Ní Fhlainn for me to talk to my friends/associates about vampires in a class-conscious way that actually helps sex workers. Fuck ’em! (source).

This isn’t for fortune or fame, but to help people and enjoy the praxial heft of the vampire legend serving workers first—and for free, not for $145 like Ní Fhlainn’s overpriced book. Activism and scholarship isn’t something you paywall.

P.P.S., I won’t stress it too much moving forwards, but “monstrous-feminine” is synonymous with “sodomy,” “vampirism” and “problematic love,” and the canonical terror tactics that historically unfold preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine through police/tokenized prison-to-gang violence serving profit, as always! —Perse

Understanding Vampires, part zero: A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards (feat. Bad Empanada, Rob Halford, Anne Rice, Foucault, Judith Butler, and more)

“Time is on my side. In a century when you are dust I shall awake and call Lucy my queen from her grave. I have had many brides, Mr. Harker, but I shall set Lucy above them all!”

—Dracula (starring Frank Langella), Dracula (1979)

(artist: Robert Ingpen)

First up in “Understanding Vampires,” we arrive at our vampire history primer (not to be confused with the crash course, which tries to introduce the wide spectrum of what vampires [and witches] are, and how we’ll study and focus on them). This history considers aspects of queer/problematic (monstrous-feminine) love from the 1970s onwards (and bits and pieces before that point); i.e., “sodomy” being a witch-hunt accusation to hurl by state forces, but also an activity to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM practiced by an-Coms. It’s merely the start of a position I would expect you to build on—a chance to get your wicks, toes (or anything else) wet regarding revolutionary positions of queerness; i.e., studying (and at times) obsessing over wild animal men, as well as their various female and intersex offshoots, but also their monstrous cousins (werewolves) that would be used in various socio-political dialogs rising to prominence in the 1980s (during the AIDs crisis) onwards: Satanic Panic. This is our starting point, one to explore a great many things that are built on it versus older aspects to vampiric poetic history that others have talked about in older times already (re: Matteson).

Note: I will summarize and reference these histories, moving forwards, so you needn’t pore over this portion too thoroughly. They’re provided merely as a good foundation, one we’ll build and expand on, ourselves. Also, my usual argument—of capital raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine per the dialectic of the alien to move money through nature—applies just as well to vampires and sodomy arguments made by state forces. —Perse

Top to bottom (so to speak), the vampire history primer leads off with a few pages of prep; then, examines homosexual men in the 1970s, followed by female/queer appropriation—and ultimately their expansion and acquisition of the same language around the same time—to allow for increasingly GNC voices camping/taking back the same stuff, ourselves, in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond (and informed by the very things leading up to the 1970s, which we’ll also unpack, albeit to a lesser extent). It’s chronological, so you should be able to track it from topic change to topic change; it’s also fairly short (given its scope), so take what we discuss here and run with it, yourselves. Last but not least, a bit of a tangent occurs—about seven pages in the middle—concerning Marxist-Leninism’s ongoing and pervasive queerphobia[4a]; i.e., stuffed between Foucault and Creed while articulating the importance of holding past leaders and thinkers accountable; re: camping Marx’ ghost, thus Socialism and Communism’s spectres at large!

Furthermore, when cracking open these older ideas, try to remember how the availability of information about vampires (and those they poetically represent) is constantly updating and transforming under duress; i.e., as it pertains to the kinds of public knowledge that would color and inform media from the 1970s into the neoliberal period, thus my own work and interpretations parallel to all queer people and their enemies and allies (which part one will get to).

In short, proletarian vampirism is burdened with knowledge gaps, the latter powering its canonical, police-like function; i.e., bourgeois vampirism cannot work unless people are as ignorant about vampires as they are about sex, gender and BDSM history at large (re: Bad Empanada). By comparison, popular media refers to what we consume—not simply to offset what is publicly discouraged in academia, the sciences, and other official channels/discourse/capacities, but what extends the conversation into spheres the state cannot monopolize: the Superstructure.

As per our initial prep, then, I want spend several more pages articulating not just why we’re sticking with the 1970s onwards, but the overbearing elements of sex, gender and ancient history that routinely pop up when such monsters manifest at any historical point in time. Then—starting with Halford—we’ll jump into increasingly aware, sex-positive and language-rich centers for such conversations to unfold, leading into the current state of affairs!

The reason we’re focusing on/starting with the 1970s is saturation of knowledge, this decade being the flash point for when and where things really started to gel and, all at once, take off; i.e., from an academic standpoint married to ethical and medical, but also poetic debates, all of them happening in the public sphere (thus Superstructure). Everything teetered on the cusp of the neoliberal period, and set the stage for the sorts of sexualized, gendered and performative debates that would come to define the 21st century as we know it.

In turn, though, such debates remain haunted by ancient anchors of sexuality, gender, race and class pertaining to how such language is even applied and considered, mid-debate. Simply put, monsters collocate.

For instance (and for better or worse)—and outside of witches, Pagan elements and various historical exceptions (e.g., the ancient female poet, Sappho)—queer history in the West (and its Gothic dialogs for canon or camp) start predominantly with homosexual men being given the stage first; i.e., from the rhetors of Antiquity onto Shakespeare’s stage plays, followed by Walpole and Lewis onto Dracula. Yes, Le Fanu had Stoker beat by over twenty years, but this story (and its female vampire, Carmilla) was still informed by male homosexuals being medicalized by Carl Westphal in 1870 (finally upstaged by Rice, over a century later), and homosexual men generally being accused of sodomy by the prejudiced public because they could be attacked in court as legal subjects; i.e., as property owners[4b], whereas women were historically persecuted as witches, thus the disobedient property of men.

To it, witches historically tend to align with feminism reclaiming their lost histories and generations; vampires and werewolves, with queerness. We can certainly combine these performances and stances, but doing so (as we shall see) is something done well after the 1970s.

Of course, such distinctions might ultimately seem academic, insofar as witch hunts against witches for practicing “witchcraft,” pogroms against gay man for practicing “sodomy” (again, referred to as “sodomites” far more often than women), and trans people for doing both all unto themselves each and collectively yield the same disastrous and divisive effects (rape the monstrous-feminine/nature-as-alien). But they still historically have unfolded along monetary and other material lines that not only tokenize, but come with our aforementioned male historical bias; i.e., according to a straight man’s place in society taking precedent over women and gay men alike (say nothing of slaves, non-Christians; Indigenous people and those of color, disabled and/or GNC, etc).

As such, whereas the female (or at least straight) seductor has something of a “Mrs. Robinson” wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure vibe (a concept we’ll unpack much more in Volume Three, Chapter Two), the male seductor as queer (subversive or not) is pathologized much more harshly in medical and juridical spheres because he a) doesn’t have a vagina, ovaries or a uterus, thus isn’t worth the trouble of converting “back” into a straight man; b) would be considered a person long before AFAB parties were; and c) presented, among the courts, a rising threat to the heteronormative male image more directly by debasing its “sacred” function: something to penetrate others with righteously. All oppressed face oppression, and tokenization happens to every group, but the above qualities inform a pernicious and deeply entrenched historical distrust and expendability of male queers dogpiled by other oppressed parties. We’re men in dresses, serial killers, etc, and AFAB parties (cis or not) historically triangulate against us for the state.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Regarding the selective punishment that goes into canonical sodomy and vampirism at large, there’s a strange, heteronormative, Man-Box double standard/tolerance regarding vampirism and pornography. A biologically essential component exists that likewise links biology to gender and treats sex and gender as one-in-the-same. In turn, AMABs are historically treated with lethal force under the law, and AFABs are fetishized, imprisoned and raped. AFAB vampires are historically brides, lesbians and/or bisexual unicorn-like whores, whereas AMABs become “men in dresses” invading women’s spaces (though can certainly be feminized and whored out; e.g., twinks and femboys).

Both, in truth, involve the monstrous-feminine fetishization, rape and murder of the accused being chased by straight mobs hungry for blood (and tokenized layers following suit inside the same caramel union). But AFABs are seen as “more valuable” in a PIV sense—i.e., heteronormative sex objects to exploit for their so-called “positive” sexual value (something for cis-het men to masturbate to or literally fuck)—whereas AMAB treatment is more punitive, historically used when calling for violence against queer parties (usually male): to rape them prison-style with a foreign object (thus avoid accusations of queerness, oneself; e.g., “it’s not gay if it’s a stake”).

From a canonical standpoint, AFAB are “more valuable,” thus are fought over as such per the canonical laws—canonically reclaimed like mistresses or rescued in some perverse promotion/preservation of the nuclear family unit; AMAB are more expendable, thus put out down like dogs, cleansed like a disease, or otherwise blamed for the fall of civilization (female exceptions to this “apocalypse scapegoat rule” simply treat them like witches, not damsels; i.e., phallic women and Archaic Mother demons; e.g., the Whore of Babylon).

In short, bodies are policed and imprisoned in ways that pit many different groups against each other for the state. When reclaiming them by “flashing” the public (a misnomer given such nudity is generally made at controlled venues or established sites of protest), sex workers and queer people are both trying to survive, making a living and do praxis through artistic exhibitions! They’re not doing it to be excoriated and ostracized by other workers (re: Bad Empanada)! —Perse

(artist: Hiddend8)

While such a dialog is arguably as old as queer people at large—and we could look at the 1870s and rise of terms like “homosexual” into the public sphere—I want to skip ahead a hundred years; i.e., would like to apply the above historically sexualized and gendered elements to when queer activism crystalized vis-à-vis Gothic academia, second wave feminism and the rise of GNC-inclusive gender studies—all leading unto the popularizing of the vampire legend as it presently exists (and for which our close-reads in “Vampires, part two” shall hinge upon): the 1970s.

So while rape and queerness synonymize in the eyes of those who conflate the two, over time—and especially after the 1960s and into the ’70s when words like “transsexual,” “transvestite” and “transgender” had at long last appeared—the male vampire became increasingly stigmatic, Satanic-Panic code for the homosexual man (and by extension anything incorrectly female/feminine); i.e., as a destroyer of societal norms and spreader of disease, but also forbidden, closeted, xenophilic/guilty pleasure tied to rock ‘n roll, fast cars (the death race and its nostalgic musical fanfare; e.g., 1996’s Twisted Metal 2[5]), bad boys, easy girls, disco, musicals and British heavy metal Gothicism, etc.

Per the process of the abjection romancing the middle class through the ghost of the counterfeit, all of the above collapsed into the poetic forerunner for Satanic Panic and the AIDs crisis, in the 1980s; e.g., Dr. Frankenfurter and the Goth rock opera of 1975 (and Phantom of the Paradise, from 1974) as a then-latter-day Americana resurgence of rockabilly “dark” wish fulfillment imported from “elsewhere” and remade at home in lucrative, quasi-rebellious forms (with actual rebellious energies): from Meat Loaf to Pulp Fiction to Overwatch‘s D.va in her nostalgic car mech. The future is cancelled, regardless, and we an-Com queers must rise to the challenge on the same monstrous stages.

(artist: Bobcow)

Keeping such prep in mind, this brings us to the meat of the primer (so to speak)—starting off with homosexual men, wrapped in leather and rocking out alongside Curry’s Frankenfurter[6] (the “transsexual transvestite from Transylvania” using some of those aforementioned medical terms we talked about, married to Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein to give rise to [white] queer rage. Fighting to escape the closet, the 1970s were an angry time to be “here and queer,” only to have the same cruising peoples ignominiously spit-roasted; i.e., as a kind of awful neoliberal spectacle, enacted the state while that terrible disease ravished gay activists’ bodies[7])!

Starting with AMABs, then, those hauntologies outlined above also extend to Rob Halford; i.e., as a closeted gay man working in the burgeoning 1970s NWOBHM scene—specifically of the “leather daddy” type, codified by Tom of Finland (next page) as primarily a white man’s homoeroticism tied to gay club life, mil spec, and music culture (with such “disco dialogs” being a common place to hold court/masquerade at a public level concerning state abuse). While such striving—to reify male queer loneliness expressed paradoxically through “monster mash” party music and “boogie”-men (e.g., “the vampire musical” from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, 2009; or Brian David Gilbert’s Hee Bee Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive, Performed by a Vampire,” 2022)—is entirely valid, Lahti M. writing how the archetype/aesthetic is canonically tied to fascism; re:

the multiplicity of power and for ambivalent interaction of resistance and oppression in Tom’s drawings. Tom’s pictures draw attention to an idea, derived from Michel Foucault, that power and resistance are to be found in one and the same place. Although ways in which these images are used may give rise to subversive meanings they also circulate racist, sexist, and fascist discourses that contradict their potentially radical meanings. Indeed, the problem with the transgressive pleasures is that transgression may help to sustain the limits that are supposed to be crossed and deconstructed by a transgressor (source: Lahti M’s “Dressing Up in Power: Tom of Finland and Gay Male Body Politics,” 1998).

(source: The Art Newspaper’s “Tom of Finland’s Bulging Beefcake Drawings Unveiled in London,” 2020)

I mean, just look at the aesthetic: gay muscle with a mil spec ghost (the KISS-style sex police-rebel schtick) that can just as easily tokenize for the state in decay as not; i.e., queer sexiness as stylish and tied to a die-hard cult of death (that certainly had a self-hating/martyred flavor shortly before and during the AIDS crisis). Such things are anisotropic, of course, but the temptation (and historical precedence; e.g., the LBGA) for tokenization, faux-medievalism, remains!

In Rob’s case, he—as a leather daddy (dom or sub, I am not sure)—was wailing magnificently about alienation (“Beyond the Realms of Death,” 1978) and fearsome vampires and Jack the Ripper (with gay men classically being likened to serial killers) some twenty-odd years before Halford actually came out as gay (“The Ripper” released in 1976; Halford came out in 1998)!

According to Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One (1980), though, sex was generally attached to activities, not identities before the 19th century and didn’t even delineate to a separate concept, sexual orientation, until 1870 (common exceptions being the Amazon, hag and witch, and various other monsters [and the living people associated with them] as relegated to the dark, unspeakable imaginary space of the Gothic mode):

This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. [… by Carl Westphal’s publication of Archiv für Neurologie in 1870, whereas the] sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species (source).

Taboo activities like sodomy became “crimes against nature” tied to a “new species” that, before this point, simply didn’t exist in terms of open medical discourse; after this point, these crimes (or rather, their hyperbolic, witch-hunt-style function when making allegations regardless of evidence) became increasingly visible in the medical field, but also in Gothic canon as open, synchronistic forms of public, discursive record: the homosexual[8] as dangerous to a middle-class audience, initially with Le Fanu’s lesbian-tinged Carmilla in 1872 (next page) onto Bram Stoker’s 1897 anti-Semitic[9] image of the male vampire standing over the maiden’s bed to threaten her boobies (and other parts) with unspeakable penetration! It’s a literally a morality-play argument through monster panic built on top of older forms!

This is classic abjection, of course, canonically projecting such things onto an ethnic minority and a later an openly queer-coded one; e.g., with Father Schedoni from Radcliffe’s Italian preparing to stab what’s-her-name in the boob while she slept, or Lewis’ Ambrosio camping the idea in The Monk with his “beauteous orb” scene, then proceeding onto Carmilla, Dracula and a million other copycats that lost all irony previously afforded to them; i.e., xenophobically threatening the state apparatus of women owned by men, including gay men in the closet (or not).

(artist: David Henry Friston)

To this, capital has defended itself in ways that routinely decay feminism and the monstrous-feminine (queerness and punk, etc) through ambiguously gay (or at least heteroflexible) thinkers that belong to societal positions bringing with them a fair degree of privilege—Foucault, of course, but also Angela Carter focusing on white women (similar to Beauvoir before her, vis-à-vis “woman is other” being a cis- and white supremacist device); i.e., “women” excluding anything else to treat the monstrous-feminine as a symbol of violence that Barbara Creed unironically attached to Freudian psychoanalysis (re: “Medusa’s Head,” 1922).

Like, girl… why? Freud, like Foucault, had some useful ideas, but the man himself was a giant homophobic quack (an Austrian cokehead that synonymized psychosexual development and the nuclear family [thus the home] with straight-up rape and violence).

We’ll return to Creed and her additions to vampiric scholarship in just a moment. Selective reading remains important to scholarly synthesis and an-Com praxis. I’d like to go on a (roughly seven-page—eleven if you include footnotes) tangent unpacking that, vis-à-vis my throwing in a critique of Marxist-Leninism (and Bad Empanada). —Perse

Oddly enough, so was Foucault, preying on his own group, homosexual men, while obviously synonymizing their shared orientation as something to weaponize against his assorted victims; i.e., his thinking placed him on a pedestal he then used to prey on less-advantaged members in the same larger communities (the student body and neighboring areas); re, Foucault’s posthumously published 1993 interview with Edmund White:

I wasn’t always smart; I was actually very stupid in school [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him – and that’s how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys (source).

In short, Foucault decayed (and in more ways than one—bad joke), starting to feed on his own kind while selling them out; i.e., through a problematic legacy that would haunt the queer world for years to come (said world doing their best to camp their holocaust in the shadows: taking the language Foucault tainted back from his ghost and building on it to liberate themselves [all queer peoples, not just homosexual cis men] with).

The expression “don’t throw stones in glass houses” leaps to mind. As an intellectual celebrity and gay maverick dying of AIDS, Foucault (and his ghost) became free to s(t)ate his perverse, sex-coercive addictions in public, thus were archived as a form of discourse on the subject of queer expression; i.e., operating in ways he academically explored only so far as it benefited his predation: as the academic darling enjoying the maverick status so long as he left the state alone (re: Swain). He did so despite his various nuggets of truth and usual productive theories about prison abuse and queer (male-homosexual) alienation. They formed together, thus require careful effort when separating as a matter of praxis moving forwards.

So while Capitalism’s traumatizing of workers leads us to form or otherwise acquire strange appetites—i.e., that historically pushes workers of various kinds and creeds to prey on ourselves for profit (often encouraging pre-existing stereotypes that lead to police violence all over again)—we shouldn’t lean into those appetites in a sex-coercive way nor defend those who did! This is very much a case of practicing what you preach as, itself, being a work-in-progress, hence needing workers (which scholars are) to actually admit when they’re wrong.

Leading by example, I’ve spent the past three (soon to be four) books critiquing the monstrous-feminine as Amazonian in ways that must be liberated from such narrow utilizations of sex and force for the state; i.e., the revenge of women—narrowly defined as white and straight, in the mid-1970s into the present, by second wave feminists seeing queerness as yet-another threat to foist onto the dark xenomorphic entity called “sodomy”: as something to punch, not humanize.

In short, right around the time Carter, Rice and Moers were cutting their teeth, feminists started to raise their own moral panics, decaying into lobotomized versions of “state vampirism”; i.e., little vampires serving the Man per dualities of monstrous language and the terrorist/counterterrorist dichotomy the proletariat cannot cease, merely subvert; e.g., me camping people like Janice Raymond (more on them in a moment), but also academia’s less obviously problematic darlings from the 1970s onwards (as well as Marx and older bigoted nerds).

As such, Gothic Communists must camp our own rape through uphill dialogs with ghosts (of Freud, Marx, Foucault, etc), treating nothing as sacred but basic human rights for all oppressed groups (and those of animals and the environment); i.e., by anisotropically taking what is socio-materially useful from older forms, then building on that by camping their canonical iterations; i.e., to “make them gay” as an-Coms do as a matter of survival: to explain (to our critics) how turning a blind eye to vampires and older problematic theory about them is to turn a blind eye to much of the world and how it works beyond material analysis alone.

For example, Bad Empanada—a Marxist-Leninist with Maoist leanings—is pretty much stone blind to the social-sexual aspect of Communist development and monstrous-feminine dialogs; i.e., to the fact that GNC people exist in the Global South and that they use social media to express themselves as queer and/or sex workers, thus monstrous in ways comparable to their northern cousins.

In turn, he’s blind towards sense and sensibility as combined; i.e., with themselves and Gothic poetics, but also work with sex. Sex workers are historically raped by the state and discounted by other activists and schools thereof, including Marxist-Leninism (which historically focuses on factory workers, not sex work). He really needs to check his privilege/ego[10] and re-examine the queerphobic, “do gay stuff later/never” history of his own movement (which we’ll unpack in this tangent), but also locate a little more nuance when it comes to social studies, BDSM and his sex-negative stances on them; i.e., his inability to talk about these things with any degree of subtly or consideration for the victims.

I’m not blind to the realities of discussing genocide and sexualized police-style settler-colonial violence in a frank and straightforward manner—i.e., to raise funds for a valid and incredibly time-sensitive cause—but slapping “rape” in big cartoon letters on all of your thumbnails, and then acting like the smartest person in the room because you have the material side of things down pat, feels not just monumentally insensitive and crass, but also superior and full-of-yourself:

As someone who writes about rape therapy and treatment but also prevention all the time, herself, I get the paradox of needing to discuss taboo subjects in ways that get people’s attention (and no one, I think, has ever accused me of acting subtle about it); but Bad Empanada’s approach, again, feels incredibly tone deaf and white-savior to the actual victims being harmed—not middle-class people like me, but rape victims all around the world, North or South!

He might turn right back around and respond, “Does it matter? They’re being bombed and it needs to stop!” And I would agree, the bombing does need to stop (and Israel completely dismantled, America [and all nation-states] defanged, etc). But all the same, Bad Empanada’s words “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again” is right there on the screen (above)—once more showing his double standards at play and prioritizing of quick-and-dirty money through blunt-force methods that champion a single group of people through his usual, take-no-prisoners style.

This unto itself feels thoroughly less offensive on its own, but it utterly withers on the vine once we take his callousness towards sex work and dismissal of queer rights (through open dialogs about sex, including rape/sex abuse) into consideration; re: “make it taboo again” unless he’s doing it for what he thinks is important; i.e., “my cause is valid” (even though he’s not Palestinian, female and/or queer) and “I can do this for one group, but you can’t speak for yourself or others.” In my opinion, such selection and superiority does far more harm than good. It’s a huge red flag (and one that Communist states historically have contributed towards; the state commits rape by design, especially against gay people).

Furthermore, from one perennially sarcastic, middle-class, over-educated person to another, babe, you can play at Edward Said[11] without stooping to such abrasiveness, calumny and canard, or in-fighting alienating yourself from other activists and victims; i.e., optics actually kind of matter when discussing rape/sexual assault, and we middle-class fags (also hailing from the Imperial Core, like you do) aren’t your enemy in this situation—the state is.

Banging on a drum and shouting “rape!” then—i.e., loudly and over and over while being quick to discredit others for largely cosmetic reasons you yourself share[12] while implying you aren’t of their ilk/aren’t queer thus overly concerned with “pure social issues” (as you yourself openly state). Yet in doing so, you write off, tone-police and otherwise dismiss others who demonstrably know more far more than you do in specific fields. It’s possible to do good work and bad in any expertise; your one-track mind just makes you seem vain and Icarian, but also like you really don’t understand what it’s like to be queer/raped, yourself.

I could be wrong in that respect—and if I am I thoroughly apologize, one queer person and rape victim to another—but you really don’t sound like one; you sound like a straight man on a high horse playing white savior through queerphobic Marxist obscurantism (with BDSM code for Communists, but also gay people and Nazis; i.e., the Russian state being infamously unfriendly to queer people from Tchaikovsky to Mikhail Kuzmin to Vladimir Nabokov, father and son). Moving to Argentina doesn’t change that, nor does citing Said, Mao or anyone else in the academic world (the latter using his librarian’s acquisition of older theories to apply them in ways I don’t think Marx would have signed off on). Alienation of your peers is likewise something you want to avoid, lest you keep putting your foot in your mouth. Indeed, you could learn from Said, himself (see: last footnote), but also Mao, Stalin, and many others of the Marxist-Leninist school; i.e., from their mistakes, including to tailor a less drab, more colorful, queer-friendly approach.

(artist: Yevgeny Fiks; source: “Outcasts: The Last Queer Soviet Generation,” 2024)

To that, try to understand that it is both possible to be right and wrong at the same time (as you often are); e.g., Beethoven was right, but not always (see: Napoleon; re: John Clubbe)—he was also a massive prick who alienated just about everyone around him. And Stalin, despite outlawing homosexuality in the Union, had a pedophile best friend who raped little girls for fun (Behind the Bastard’s “Part One: Beria: Stalin’s Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer,” 2024). In either case, denouncing or otherwise poo-pooing such critiques by focusing on what your political/academic rivals’ actual or perceived flaws are (attached to their queer character, as you so often do) is, itself, thoroughly bad praxis.

In other words, the less time we spend fighting each other to split hairs (with you being the proverbial bee in my bonnet), the more we can focus on more important things like development for all peoples—united, not divided and attacking ourselves. Simply put, while we fags like a good fight—humbling lone-wolf cis-het dickheads such as yourself while tearing you a new asshole (“Get ’em, girl!” says Ginger, watching from the sidelines)—it’s both incredibly tiresome and annoying to have to explain to someone in the Internet Age (who should know better) that we are not criminal or aligned with state forces. But such is activism, and I won’t call this wasted ink (one, you need to be checked, and two, this is a battle of pens, and I’m a far better writer than you).

Gay or not, an-Coms aren’t vampires, Bad Empanada. So kindly pull Mao’s dick out of your mouth, and quit treating queer creators and an-Com scholars like we’re some kind of inflatable, monolithic boxing clown you can punch until you get tired. Many approaches are valid, with rushing to the quickest (and angriest) only opening yourself up to a more patient and iron-clad/fortified approach. Your smugness or childish forum-style antics aren’t an invisibility cloak and your hubris, laziness and bigotry are showing.

All in all, someone like Bad Empanada doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to admit when he’s wrong and learn from it (to speak our language), but rather to dig himself into a hole, bunker down and stick to his guns. Broken clocks, ‘n all, but such things only serve to alienate him from the very people he professes to help. It becomes a curious repeating of Christopher Hitchens’ “Why Women Aren’t Funny” (2007), albeit relaid by a postcolonial know-it-all excluding queer voices to act like he’s the man with the one-and-only plan; re: speaking for others. It’s white moderacy with more steps; i.e., cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Intersectional solidarity matters, Bad Empanada, and no matter how right your cause is with the Palestinians (and commendable your aid to them is), your intensely unlikeable behavior towards queer people doesn’t help matters—not in the long run if you go around acting like you’re the only one who’s right and the rest of us can’t help them too; i.e., you, treating us, as mere “centrists in disguise.” Well, I’m Queen Shit of Fuck Mountain (no centrist), and you ain’t all that, dude; quit acting like a baby and grow up!

And in case anyone wants to argue in bad faith for my “wavering and unconditional support” of Foucault (or anyone else in this section), we’re purposefully inspecting the past to “kill its darlings” that we might progress towards a better, yet-to-exist possible world; re (from Volume One):

Foucault wasn’t just accommodated, you see; he was enabled and desired intellectual fame similar to what Sartre had achieved before him. It’s gross, queer-normative, TERF levels of nasty and needs to be abolished. Good play and sex-positive BDSM are all entirely possible (and something we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapters Two and Three). However, creepy Gay Uncle Fester ain’t it.

Rather, in a reconstructed, post-scarcity world, there is no systemic war and rape. To this, Gothic Communism is also not a regression back into the freed market like Gorbachev did to the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, but instead a collective push towards universal degrowth (that means no “as good as it gets” moderates, too). Instead, this is to be an entirely different mode of undertaking development under Capitalism towards anarcho-Communism away from Capitalist Realism, but the basic ideas are still the same—re: Socialism’s “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] work” to Communism’s “to each according to [their] need.” Anarcho- Communism simply means class solidarity and collective action performed directly by informed, intelligent workers of various sorts, aided by bourgeois and petit bourgeois (middle) class allies—not by establishment politicians, academics and state-corporate agents, whose politics/praxis are bourgeois in nature; they serve the state, not workers.

For us and Gothic Communism, worker safety is sacred and supersedes any icon who came before and iconoclasts absolutely shouldn’t hesitate to tear down/camp their harmful reputations [read on, in that volume, to see a list of old famous people we need to critique] (source).

To that, it’s not “Red Scare” to hold old rebels and revolutionaries accountable, because they were often exclusionary and incredibly harmful, themselves; i.e., the queer side of Marxism having an anarchist bent into the 1970s and beyond[13] that would have challenged said leaders; re: Stalin, but also Lenin and Marx’ homophobia[14] continuing into the Russian Federation under Putin, but also China (some places, like Vietnam or Thailand, afford protections for queer people, but these are hardly the norm; i.e., because they go against profit/the state model and, more often than not, date back centuries and exist alongside colonial exploitation: they’re state concessions or cultural relics, not a byproduct of Marxist-Leninism).

To it, my critique of Marxist-Leninism through Bad Empanada—essentially calling for queer nuance from him during postcolonial struggles—isn’t automatically “centrist,” nor is it me “siding with America” (or whatever stupid argument someone like Bad Empanada wants to snivel about). If anything, we should avoid such nostalgia purely to prevent Capitalist Realism; i.e., said Realism ironically occurring when trying to revive Communist states by not critiquing Marxist-Leninism enough. It’s not hard! Certainly there’s no love lost between those I critique, including Foucault, but also those they critiqued and built upon in their own work leading to mine; i.e., me wishing they were gayer than they actually were (with “gayness” speaking to an-Com liberation from state mechanisms and their own exceptions and tyrannies); re: Marx and those who carried out his work, the Bolsheviks, in queer-exclusionary ways.

Please bear in mind, we’ll look at Lenin’s refreshingly queer-friendly exceptions—but also his tragic failure to keep Stalin and Soviet regression (thus fascism) in check—when we examine Dr. Uncola’s tweets about early Soviet queer progressivism, in “Leaving the Closet”:

An important disclaimer, however, is that the national attitude towards gay and trans people wasn’t unanimously supportive. While many were sympathetic or ambivalent, there was a faction of the Bolsheviks who wanted it outlawed again. Among them was this guy. You might know him [shows photo of Stalin] (source tweet, Dr. Uncola: July 1st, 2023).

In short, there was no place for gay people in their view of the world when push came to shove (again, we’ll unpack this more when we look at Stalin). From Stalin onwards (and Mao, too, and all of their imitators), Marxist-Leninism decays under threat of force to sacrifice queer rights, thus spiral towards nominal Communist fragmentation and neoliberal Capitalism and Marxist Capitalist Realism; i.e., said states (and their cops) abusing the environment and nature at great expense of worker and animal life and contributing towards climate change as all states do. All States Are Bad! ASAB! Again, put a pin in that; we’ll come back to it, as well, in “Leaving the Closet.”

Including Bad Empanada’s unironically Stalinist rhetoric (“make it illegal again”), we need to meaningfully challenge all of these inherited confusions and misconceptions, lest we fall into the same dogmatic pitfalls (and academic, cis-het hubris) that people like Bad Empanada are currently doing in their own mixed work; i.e., using veiled sodomy argumentation (re: BDSM bans) to actively close their minds, punching down to help one group at the cost of another by demonizing the latter having its own equally valid concerns. Again, my criticism speaks not to Bad Empanada’s rightful treatment of Jessie Gender as Zionist, but to his weird dogwhistle calling “all discussions” of sex (except his) to be made taboo.

Well, “just a joke” or not, such behavior only seeks to divide and anger allies, making them feel unafraid because you don’t think they’re human, or otherwise worth considering. Calling yourself a Marxist-Leninist and postcolonialist doesn’t grant you blanket immunity to say what you like, Bad Empanada, because neither you nor Marx and the state are beyond reproach; and frankly dehumanizing your critics out-of-turn just because you disagree with them, or because you see all of us as “the same” kind of tracks with older cults of personality in love with Lenin’s approach to things: as spectral, nostalgic, something to chase. Whatever the reason, it’s a bit mechanical and controlling—manifesting in ways that really turn me off to the rest of your work (you’re not the only postcolonialist in existence, dude, and I can hear the same arguments without being belittled by a hypocrite with a chip on his shoulder).

In keeping with all this talk about ghosts, much of the abuse we queers suffer from the state is spectral; i.e., insofar as it’s made illegal and whispered about precisely because it’s taboo, thus not always documented (especially in the Soviet Period, but likewise after it). To be queer is to be raped by the state, which often enough, leaves behind a great gulf where something both is and isn’t; re, Hogle’s restless labyrinth: “standing on the ashes of something not quite present,” a vanishing point and a lonely grave!

(source: Julia Kenny’s “Stalin’s Cult of Personality: Its Origin and Progression,” 2015)

As such, knowledge and execution are built on themselves often being at odds for liberation as being a historically “for me, not for thee” proposition fielded by supremacists vs critics and activists of different things; i.e., from Freudian psychoanalysis being a ’70s, ’80s and ’90s academic go-to, becoming far more Marxist but also GNC-inclusive after the Fall of the Soviet Union; e.g., vis-à-vis my work and combination of Gothic theory with dialectical-material analysis, camping Freud and Marx, but also Creed! To do so requires being aware of such things to begin with, and having a willingness to change course while picking and choosing what works best towards universal liberation (re: Sandy Norton on Foucault’s speculative richness, in “The Imperialism of Theory,” 1994). Historically the state doesn’t—and given the kinds of willful (or hostile) ignorance levied by uptight Marxist-Leninists like Bad Empanada (who loves to administer ad hominens while going overboard; i.e., furiously attacking others for their position as much as their arguments, slinging mean-spirited shit until he’s alienated himself from allies in the process)—it will only continue to do so into the future! Revolution tops from below.

Ending our tangent on selective reading and Marxist-Leninism (and having paddled Bad Empanada and Marx’ naughty bottoms long enough), let’s return to Creed; i.e., as part of the same broad conversation, taking whatever to say whatever to achieve liberation; i.e., Gothic theory and poetics; e.g., vampires and Freud, but also the monstrous-feminine as she saw it during the ubiquitous misnomer, “the end of history.” Per Derrida, the spectres of Marx lived on, but these generally weren’t of the man or his state-happy followers. At least, not all of them were; voices would start to rise for a change in direction, if not overall plan.

Regarding vampirism, Creed wrote the Monstrous-Feminine in 1993; i.e., based on academics from the 1970s, but also Freud haunting third wave feminism. While standing on Freud’s shoulders and only expanding on The Monstrous-Feminine three decades down the road (re: Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, 2022), I can’t help but feel like she cited the old man for clout, back in ’93 (most academics did, to be fair). Certainly she could have focused more on other groups, but she also was a third wave feminist, not a GNC person. It only makes sense, then, that I would do so for her while tracing Creed’s footsteps towards a better outcome she herself could see even less well than I:

(exhibit 41g1a2: Artist, left: Cherry Mouse Street; source, top: Vampire Freaks. “Any free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” While Angela Carter’s popular adage is a ringing sentiment on paper, in truth it smacks of cis voices speaking about cis women first and foremost; i.e., their imprisoned and “kept” status policing GNC elements by conflating them with state abuses [re: the Alien Queen and tokophobia, punched by Ripley, mid-Amazonomachia[15]]. While it was the ’70s and I can’t blame Carter for any active ill will, it didn’t take especially long [in the grand scheme of things] for female bigots to turn her message into dead dogma, a tokenized war-like platitude excluding trans women like myself from the revolutionary equation. Their carceral violence, anger and stigmatized “chaos-dragon” status were legitimate, not ours.

As if the monstrous-feminine pareidolia weren’t inscribed all over our essence-swallowing mouths, soft bodies and girl-cocks [the forbidden, potent objects of desire for many cis-het men]! Yet, the double standard is plain: cis-supremacist women see themselves as wrongly-accused, incarcerated and executed Medusas, whereas we trans folk are “false-women”; i.e., killer crossdressers putting on sodomy vaudeville in bad faith to try and score some “oppression points” in the bargain [stolen valor but for victims]. It’s completely ludicrous, but the vengeful honor killings/rape ranking remain quite real.

As for Creed, as much as I obviously liked her idea, “monstrous-feminine,” I still felt like I needed to expand on and push said idea away from the whole “castrating mother” thing—i.e., out of Freud’s big, dumb shadow and the nuclear family model but also away from biologically centered feminism [quaintly focused on—ah, yes, “film” as the hip new thing all the kids are consuming]

In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualized only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body (source). 

and towards an updated realm of cross-media discourse that could actually voice my concerns in the Internet Age: as a ludologist trans woman threatened as much by angry “biological” TERFs colonizing Medusa as cis-het men and -queers were. Any and all of them could, did, and will refuse to be victims by unironically razing Cain [that was a pun] while burning us at the stake; i.e., fascist chaos triangulating through tokenized violence.)

Compared to male vampires like Dracula or Rob Halford, which emerged in more visible ways for much of human history (as property-owning men versus female property acting out), the female vampire—and her orgasmic, wantonly xenophilic energies marrying raw lust with the owning of property over men by women—was generally something that couldn’t be conceived in the popular Western imagination until its Gothic side had expanded to account for such socio-material factors; i.e., not just enough to grant women the ability to even speak in public discourse (with women banned from acting as late as the Renaissance), but also to flaunt their possessions and their desires. Consider Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire—a homoerotic story written by a longtime LGBTQ ally from an admittedly conventional source: a closeted bisexual woman writing about homosexual men to eroticize them in monstrous, conventional ways; i.e., the Female Gaze, but one that consciously humanized them in monstrous language that others less principled (or queer[16]) than Rice would abjure, past, present and future (see: footnote).

And if you’re too lazy to read footnotes, the state—but also Marx and his ilk in the years that followed his and Engels’ work—have historically been asleep at the wheel following the death of these men; i.e., they are not culturally conscious/woke to nearly the degree required, because it reduces largely to laborers and factory work instead of the kinds of embarrassing positions and non-factory labor (re: women’s work) pushed off onto queer people by cis-het people (often women) punching down: the things that society treats like its toilet, out of sight and out of mind except to make a cruel, dehumanizing joke regarding or to pull out of the gutter and “make respectable” (to assimilate).

That’s what the abjection process is, and the state—being fundamentally straight—uses abjection to historically and categorically exclude its enemies. Chief among those excluded are queer folk, often alienated by tokenized cis-het women in the Gothic industry[17] since Radcliffe and certainly since Rice’s contemporaries; i.e., in the fictional, but also medical/academic world; e.g., Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979): “I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.” Such “questions” are quackery “just asked” by the state and its proponents; e.g., the Jewish question; i.e., calling for genocide as simply something to put on the table, then take settler-colonial steps through fiction/non-fiction, medical documents and scholarship, as well as private correspondence (re: Marx and Engels) treating us as criminal aberrations, but also space aliens and manmade freaks of creature. It’s Frankenstein taken to its logical conclusion—one only the state has the power to enact to the degree that such pogroms historically require to play out. The history is depressingly bad-faith, but also out in the open for all to—celebrated for its own cartoonishly ominous (and dead-serious) presentation:

My point with Rice, here, is she didn’t abject/exclude queer people despite presenting them as vampires. Certainly a desire for her subjects was present in our closeted, bereaved[18] bisexual, but alienation, empathy and eroticism are not mutually exclusive (nuns and priests having been lusting after Christ for centuries). Until Rice, and indeed after these tricky conversations began through women like her in the same time period, women weren’t allowed to be lesbians or practice anal (with/for the husband or male clients) because they weren’t people who could rebel in the eyes of the state; i.e., they were only property and thus “couldn’t think for themselves.”

And in thinking for herself, Rice arguably contributed to a larger trend in ways that was ultimately sex-positive, even if many others chiming in most certainly were not. Funny how such vampirism (as a poetic device) only is accepted by the state when you ostensibly capitalize on tokenistic forms that adhere to the profit motive and punch down against someone; i.e., Rice, as I understand it, was in the closet for much of her life. But her material wasn’t—meaning in the poetic sense that people out of the closet could take and run with it:

(exhibit 41g1b: Artist: Devilhs. Per Creed, female vampirism links the female orgasm to psychoanalytical sites of darkness and trauma; i.e., the home as a den-like tomb for the woman haunted by ancient female power as orgasmic—female rage, but also hysteria [the wandering womb] as an endless, Sapphic eroticism and biology divorced from compelled sexual reproduction as much to spite/mess with patriarchal men as it is to merely have fun [the two activities are ultimately modular].

Unto itself, the “predicament” of female vampirism comments on female biology as different in relation to male biology regarding sex as a medical phenomenon:

Sex could kill you. Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries constrict, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets, respiration becomes rapid and shallow, the brain fires bursts of electrical impulses from nowhere to nowhere, and secretions spit out of every gland, and the muscles tense and spasm like you’re lifting three times your body weight. It’s violent. It’s ugly. And it’s messy. And if God hadn’t made it unbelievably fun, the human race would have died out eons ago. Men are lucky they can only have one orgasm. You know that women can have an hour-long orgasm? [Dr. Cameron from House, 2004; source]. 

While gender performance is something that be played around with, biology intersects in ways that are unique per individual. Male/female is not actually a binary at all, but complicated by intersex people existing who might, for all intents and purposes, appear male/female and/or masc and femme. During sex, their bodies might function in ways that go against common understandings [or misconceptions] about what’s “supposed” to happen.  

In turn, monstrous poetics from the 1970s have expanded during the Internet Age based on their most famous forms; i.e., to grant more and more violent, terrifying and morphological demonstrations subverting these harmful heteronormative expectations, while also commenting on the stigmas and biases that continually persist during vampirism and its notably liminal expression: psychosexual feminist, genderqueer and/or postcolonialist iterations. It’s literally “the sex is angry.” Formally a crime against God and “good nature,” gay nature [the Medusa] is churned out in alien replicas in corporate-friendly shooting galleries; i.e., a panopticon targeting leper/sodomy clichés framed as AIDS: a disease the straights simultaneously “can’t get” and act the most allergic towards. They’re alienated from things we experience at their and the state’s hands on a daily basis.

For example, despite not being wholly female, Giger’s xenomorph [above] has as much a monstrous-feminine [and vampiric] function as Vampirella [originally penned in 1969, last page] does, but also a biomechanical BDSM element its more human-looking counterparts also contribute to: a voice for monstrous-feminine rage. Such fury would parallel homosexual men’s anger in the 1970s, but also those even more marginalized who wouldn’t appear en masse until the Internet could present them as such; i.e., on graphs—with trans people, for instance, making up less than .004% of the total US population[19].  

Such a voice—apart from embodying classically female sexual desires out of the Western Gothic mode like Rice’s cute vampire boys—also presents monstrous-feminine rage and hysteria as physically imposing through different physical, psychosexual manifestations; i.e., through outwardly urbane or conveniently attractive forms like the “built” but “babelicious” Amazon, but also tethered to dark, less outwardly humanist-facing doubles turning those conventions, at times, literally inside-out. We queers often prefer the latter when looking to freeze Cartesian weird canonical nerds in their tracks; i.e., it speaks to our frustration but also our monomorphic tendencies, power and potential to take things in a new, terrifying [to the state] direction.)

As such, female-to-feminine forms of vampirism are as old as the Gorgon that Creed highlights in The Monstrous-Feminine, and themselves take on a thousand faces; re: to match the thousand implied by Joseph Campbell’s monomythic hero being sent by the state to rape nature-as-alien for the umpteenth time. It is both vital and cursed, anathema and outspoken. Banned things generally are, and were in America, the Soviet Union and elsewhere between out-and-out Capitalism and Marxist-Leninism embodying the state model.

Tying things to Rice and her less comely counterparts elsewhere in female-to-GNC-adjacent stories, it bears repeating how such a staging point in the 1970s really took time to arrive; i.e., the predatory and undead stigma of the “problematic lover” has applied predominantly to AMABs for much of canonical history (re: Brent Pickett of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes on the Ancient Greeks, “Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status” source). In turn, the language of gender and sex had to update in ways that took just as long and yielded various exceptions, double standards and refrains that only doubled down the moment the public discourse (through monsters and sexual/gendered terms alike) caught up. The more rights people had, the more the state (and its proponents) would treat it as problematic.

To that, I’d like to conclude the history primer going over the morphological variety to such vampires (and similar monsters; e.g., Gorgons, werewolves, ghosts; exhibit 41g2), while likewise looking briefly at the availability of GNC terms that married to the medical, scholarly and Neo-Gothic renaissance in from the 1970s well into the present.

Note: This portion is more than a little messy insofar as it’s not made with much of a thesis in mind, other than stressing the dizzyingly chaotic convergence of different poetic forces, social movements and dialectical-material forms over a relatively short period of time; i.e., Capitalism (and the state as straight) struggling to defend itself, and the millions-upon-millions of people involved in that from laissez-faire to Bretton Woods to neoliberal Capitalism—all of these working parallel to scholarship and poetics from the 1870s and Westphal towards Dracula, the gay monster men and women from the 1930s, Matteson’s vampire-zombies in 1954, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968, Rice’s ’70s vampire revival followed by Giger’s and many others into the neoliberal period, then Creed and The Monstrous-Feminine in 1993 (and Derrida and Butler’s own works from that year), into the 2000s and rise of internet culture, landing eventually on my book project (and similar subversive works).

Sure, it might all be what Bad Empanada calls “pure wankery.” But he’s an insensitive, vituperative (and totally lame) philistine with an obnoxious superiority complex, the personality of drying paint mixed with nails on a chalkboard and a faulty toaster, and two left feet regarding BDSM—about as fun as a tooth ache, allergic to sex work/Gothic poetics, blind to allegory and quick to dismiss those aspects of critical thinking I enjoy the most: holistic analysis and play! —Perse

For one—and keeping with our ancient canonical anchor argument—monsters represent gendered ideas that canonically try to stress things in false binaries: male/female and man/woman. Such has always been the case, but in the 20th century began to double aggressively and smash into one another for different reasons. Across history such things have often been out of step, only to explode towards into a GNC presence from the 1970s onwards—one, I should add, the state has since tried to drown out with chaff; i.e., canonical, monomythic words and weapons recuperating all manner of things to keep to profit as preying vampirically on nature (and monstrous-feminine) elements, first and foremost. Such beings speak to a lack of agency and monstrous identity formation, which have something of a love/hate, “strange bedfellows” relationship between cis women and gay men in earlier creative periods (e.g., German Expressionism, left), but also the GNC queer voices they’d help give rise to in our aforementioned later decades.

This might seem kind of obvious in hindsight; i.e., when inspecting the 1970s now. But at the time, it came out of the Free Love movement, postmodernism, the Civil Rights movement, and so many important and exciting horror works, but also a surge of equally exciting (and mysterious) new GNC language, emerging in 1965[20] (four years before Night of the Living Dead and smack-dab in the middle of the Vietnam War). Said language sort of redescribed Westphal’s “new species” (re: Foucault); i.e., in ways that turned so many things on their head, but preserved themselves like amber inside the same monsters. Such beings were no longer, if ever, pure symbols of fear and dogma, but started to speak to a rising form of discourse that, more than ever, was alive and well in ways the state couldn’t fully control.

Except, leading up to that paradigm shift’s ejaculation in the 1970s, there was a male-heavy slant that feminism (and other social movements) were already starting to challenge the status quo with. They did so if only because Western women and slaves remained property until the 19th and 20th centuries, thus did not enjoy the same statuses and privileges through canonical law and patrilineal descent. In short, men—even gay men—could create in the 1930s much as they had been allowed to for hundreds and thousands of years.

This meant that AFAB parties couldn’t challenge or partition their own stations to nearly the same degree in cinema (the primary media form for much of the 20th century, especially concerning monsters) as men could theirs (queer or not), but all the same were generally snuck like odd cargo into vampire stories (conventional or otherwise); i.e., by male weird-nerd authors wanting monster women in their stories, but also female weird nerds who were helped by men into having creative voices way ahead of the curb about such topics; e.g., Mary Shelley being pushed by Percy Shelley to write a little story called Frankenstein in 1818, which had a monstrous-feminine component that would live on in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis[21] (crammed diegetically into her robot suit by a Jewish-coded mad scientist and overhung by a pentagram, last image), James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (next page) and many other stories treating women (and those “acting like women”) as alien, but also as monstrous-feminine commodities that men of science wanted to control and voyeuristically exhibit, borrowed from older genres; re, Roger Ebert’s observation: “to see Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is to look into eyes that will never leave you” (source).

Such a Male Gaze has often sought to classically martyr women (and bury gay people); i.e., not strictly to kill them, but keep them in pain/peril and film them as such (the Gothic heroine transplanted onto celluloid). By the 1930s, though, you had gay directors (or directors with gay sensibilities) working alongside women to camp the same patriarchal industry. By shoot something a bit different than female torture, it was more queer and—like Frankenstein’s infamous Creature—less easy to control/more (and more) morphologically diverse. Suddenly the biology began to meld and bounce around, swapping out clear polarized divides for things more in the uncomfortable (for the state) middle.

More to the point, labor-wise, you were left with AFAB actresses having common ground with other oppressed (queer men) who weren’t—unlike the cis-het director shouting “Lights! Camera! Action!” to his overworked team (with gay men classically being hair dressers, costume designers, cameramen and even, in Whale’s case, the director)—doing this for profit’s sake; it became a multicultural stage to camp such vampirism, the sodomy on display something of a “monster magnet” whose main attraction drew later directors, thespians, writers, what-have-you, to consider what they were looking at/working with in a GNC sense.

(source: American Cinematographer’s “The Bride of Frankenstein: A Gothic Masterpiece,” 1998)

So while women since ancient times could be readily portrayed as witches, Amazons and hags—all whose disobedience into the Middle Ages and beyond threatened their “natural” owners (with Hammer of Witches, 1478, stressing a rising desire to quell female dissidents, often portraying them as the eaters of babies)—they were still disobedient chattel who could always be converted through state force by men toeing the line (again, gay or not); i.e., the Amazonomachia and its modern forms; e.g., from Shelley’s Frankenstein breaking away from that to express an alien humanity tied to nature-as-monstrous-feminine and Promethean, only to be revived centuries later by Scott’s neoliberal critique that—surprise, surprise—was succeeded by Aliens and other neoliberal refrains designed to reel nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus queer and hostile towards the state) back under state dominion.

To it, this mutating band of space vampires—fueled with a new terrorist stockpile of ideas about violence, terror and morphological language not exactly conducive to total Cartesian submission—had to become “canonically gay” again; i.e., in ways that dogmatically challenged not just the monsters, themselves but the iconoclastic sum of popularized language, scholarship and discourse at large: the state’s answer to a rising Gothic counterculture party to the same Superstructure that was no longer fully (or ever) in the elite’s court.

In short, Hollywood had to install the concept of cops and victims into something that was then threatening to expose them and their ordering of the universe as hitherto “under their control” (the 1970s being a hinge point, insofar as neoliberalism had yet to fully emerge and indeed, would not until 1979). Such us-versus-them (commonly “man vs nature”) orderings aren’t new, insofar as the state has forever concerned and relied on heteronormative ideas of men, women and patriarchy to further itself; i.e., in dominion over nature. But such things were rapidly becoming more and more problematic; i.e., as something to market and sell as such. The settler colony began to populate with monsters, the territory (and Capitalist Realism) decaying in ways that would call for their destruction.

Again, this delay constitutes something of a long-awaited party. Non-enslaved men, compared to women, have been legally human under the law since the dawn of recorded time, thus able to perform criminal acts that women and male slaves never openly could. These hypothetical crimes pertained to the many roles men had to perform in accordance with growing ideas of what manhood even meant under Capitalism, subjecting them to knee-jerk punishments by people frightened of another Foucauldian prophesy—the death of man. Foucault writes in The Order of Things (1966):

The epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance: no philosophy, not political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, no imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labour); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success) among the objects of science (source, pages 344-45).

Such “deaths” were consequently encountered by their abject others: the scary things that aren’t them (according to fear and dogma)!

Of course, these monsters weren’t immune to tokenization. Like BDSM in general, such play sits between genuine submission and gingerly subversion that, unto itself, is routinely arbitrated by state forces vs workers they are trying to control who don’t always play but sometimes along (rather they play against the state with the same basic devices, selling out where desperate and/or convenient). All of this yielded a lot of morphological (thus sex and gender) variation in the 1970s. Grappling with the decay of free love spiraling towards neoliberalism and Satanic Panic, this included Rice’s (often male, but not always) vampires of 1976, of course, but also a great many others besides that—like Giger’s xenomorph—have non-standard, BDSM-themed, trans, non-binary and intersex forms; re: the likes of which gave rise out of stage plays, operas and yesterday’s rock ‘n roll onto new enraged queer and female voices that Creed herself took to speak about women refusing to be victims, in 1993, and which I have since attached to queer entities refusing to be cops or the victims of cops.

What Creed talked about concerned and composed a lot of monsters besides bog-standard vampires, but also those varieties of vampire-like entities; i.e., hinted at by the xenomorph of the same decade as Rice, but also ones that came from far earlier in time (and followed up with new increasingly queer revivals):

(exhibit 41g2: Artist, top-far-left: Jill the Succubus; top-left: Devilhs; top-right and far-right [top to bottom]: Blushing Yokai; bottom-far-left: unknown; bottom-left: Kukumomo; bottom-right: Vethrax. Within oppositional praxis, the undead aren’t simply instruments of gendered revenge for past wrongs—e.g., female: Sadako, as a matriarchal threat of an abused sub switching to a “strict” mommy dom; male: Pyramid Head as a masculine, patriarchal threat of “rape” [despite how Bernard Perron writes, “One of the most legendary and iconic monsters in scary games is a monster called Pyramid Head” in The World of Scary Games (2018), the thirst for sexy Pyramid Head is real and overrides his heteronormative function; i.e., as a simple, alien killer with a knife]. They’re darkness visible, and speak to things that otherwise might be pushed to the margins [the taboo sorts that Bad Empanada is calling for].

When camped, such entities convey the creative successes of proletarian praxis being the best revenge of all: a thriving delight at furthering sex positivity through xenophilic gender trouble and parody performed not just in monstrous language, but poetics. Said poiesis and its cryptomimetic attack embodies the queer self through struggle under the status quo. Trauma and pleasure climb out of the well as hidden truths [whose furious, female personification Jean-Léon Gérôme literally calls Truth[22]] but also power and resistance become things to chaotically express through multiple, dialectical-material incarnations/interpretations; these have morphological considerations, blending the undead with demons as anthropomorphic, uncanny entities concerned with shapeshifting as a genderqueer means of invading the home as colonized; i.e., to present normality as unhomely in the face of friendly monsters and ghosts being abjected by the home’s usual defenders: moderates and out-and-out fascists. Except, they cannot monopolize these various forms any more than the state can, raising thoughts and concerns that speak to oppressed pedagogies contributing to the same conversation out of forbidden refrains that keep coming back; i.e., returning to the home as laying itself to waste, but also seeking liberation from tyranny.

Such curios include the doll as an ontological expression of traumatic language that—under friendlier circumstances—simply makes for a cute toy to spend time with in various [a]sexual ways: from kawaii to kowai as a matter of size difference, knife play and doll-ish uncanny masks [the vampire’s pale complexion on an ageless face] reduced to knife-genitals for heads; re: echoes of the xenomorph and Freud’s abject view of the monstrous-feminine, itself later championed by Creed built on such 20th-century in-betweens like Scott’s Alien leading to Jacob’s Ladder and Silent Hill in the early-to-mid-’90s [exhibit 43a/b].)

Vampires are monsters that constitute arguments, which are themselves, not always obvious from a dialectical-material standpoint. This reality plays out through how they are used through context, with attempts to express and reinstall such voices through a state lens occurring through abjection. As usual, but in response to various state activities, 20th century vampires took on a lot of different forms, and those forms mirrored the things they wanted workers to fear and attack: Red Scare, worker uprisings, various other moral panics, and so on. So began the neoconservative corrections, thus overcorrections through Heinlein and similar weird canonical nerds trying very hard to “right the ship.” He was tired of all those motherfucking gay snakes on his motherfucking straight plane!

As a developing enterprise in the 20th century onwards, there emerged demands for a heteronormative, colonial binary within Capitalism that could meet the genderqueer xenophilia rising out of the shadows of public life since Shakespeare led to Walpole, to Lewis, all the way to Giger and Creed; i.e., a “correct” man versus vampires of many different kinds, but especially the monstrous-feminine as the chief alien threat. Post-WW2, vampires started to come more and more “from outer space”; i.e., alien species that didn’t come in peace, but as bugs and other stigmatized animals, planets and fungi; e.g., mushroom men, but also the “super carrot” vampire from 1951’s The Thing from Another World (the guy with the 1911 and bomber jacket protecting the damsel-in-distress from almost certain penetration).

Of course, such things were obviously ongoing at all points of the state’s existence (and across continents, between genres; e.g., Italy’s giallo); e.g., between the 1930s, into the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1970s and 1980s as different waves of terror (re: Meerloo); i.e., concerning vampires attacking the nuclear family model, upheld by brave men protecting damsels from many-a-latter-day-vampire aping Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) onto Mars Needs Cheerleaders (1968) and later still, Cameron’s Aliens cocooning many a colony wench for impregnation and painful, insectoid Commie birth: a position of forbidden or problematic love, us-versus-them orientation, and a threatening of exchanging various juices (or knowledge, whatever) to turn the modest maiden wild, hungry and whorish—a sodomy argument, in other words!

Keeping with William Blum[23], the elite would tie these growing problems of rape and sodomy to Communism—post WW2, but especially in the neoliberal era. To quote the promotional campaign for Cameron’s sequel: “This time, it’s war!” Due to previous concessions by the state regarding worker calls for equal rights, the former would simply recruit the latter to wage future wars for them (this included women like Ripley[24] and people of color like Frost and Vasquez). The copaganda began to pour out of the American Superstructure, leading to a proliferation of so many rape and sodomy arguments. From one xenomorph, suddenly all of America was “Vietnam” filled with the buggers (that was pun); i.e., a previous colony “gone to pot” taken back home and playing out differently this time around in American theatres (and on television screens, thanks to Metroid, and later Doom and their many clones acclimating future children to Pax Americana ad infinitum): nature-as-alien in ways that build and stack different cops-and-victims, us-versus-them bigotries on top of Cartesian thought—all to enforce Western supremacy in and out of astronoetic tales. Free market or not, such an order must be preserved through Capitalist Realism to maintain Capitalism and the state.

*Including Cameron’s Avatar literally being a videogame-style, American Liberal/tech bro treatment of the FPS, tokenizing Indigenous rebellion in a controlled opposition form with tokenized and imposturous appropriative vaudeville: African Americans playing Indigenous people, or Jennette Goldstein playing a Mexican woman; i.e., the “close enough” quality to acting.

Apart from the female entities we’ve looked at (as often being directed by gay men), the actual stigmas of queer identity (and the double standards therein) also took time to evolve into their current modernized versions: queer people as enemies of the state, which the state coercively ignores, dimorphizes and exploits in hauntological, doll-like threats of porcelain sodomy and dark ecclesiastical implements of eternal torture. As with Cameron, such abjection dogmatically scares the squeamish faithful through fetishized violence that informs future exchanges, mid-creature-feature; i.e., eternal threats of punishment and damnation by police agents pointing the finger at the middle class obsessed with such ghosts of the counterfeit: “lead or silver.” Hell and vampirism take many forms, but the basic argument is always the same. It would simply explode (like a chestburster)in the 1980s onwards.

To this, DARVO obscurantism marries bullshit to half-veiled threats of fear and lies, guilt and pleasure, predation and persecution being something to put somewhere other than the middle class, themselves; re: they abject it, then turn into gargoyles themselves—faithfully guarding the church as it currently stands (while built on top of older versions), protecting home during the dialectic of shelter from monstrous-feminine forces. Such canon would reliably manifest in phallic, barbarian forms of fear and dogma, but also token police violence. As state power looms over women, people of color and queer persons, etc, they betray their class, culture and/or race interests in bad faith; i.e., because it is convenient, and because such egregores become a form of currency that is, unto itself, worshipped (the equality of convenience historically met with more and more desperation by increasingly marginalized token parties looking to be feared, but also loved by everyone else).

Pyramid Head, for instance, must canonically remain the unironic slayer of women, not someone for them to lust after or embody in genderqueer ways (making said women performances of alternate identities or—God forbid—deciding they aren’t women anymore). Meanwhile, the vagina dentata—from a canonical standpoint—can be beheaded, defanged and fucked; the penis is merely something for men to cross swords with (something to keep in mind when we continue examining transphobia and Satanic Panic, from here on out: “any hole’s a goal, but fangs fence”). In turn, such neoliberalism was banking on invocations thereof, falling back on ancient and ingrained applications of sex and force, versus relatively brand-new terms like “transgender” that had yet to embed themselves in Western hearts and minds.

In fact, an extensive, queer-inclusive vocabulary for many of the words featured in this book didn’t widely develop until after the 1980s (e.g., Foucault, but also exhibit 3b: Michael Werner’s popularizing of the term, “heteronormativity,” in 1991[25])! The ’70s and ’80s were the transition from second-to-third wave feminism, Gothic thought and queer theory in academia, but took many more decades after that to disseminate among a larger trans counterculture across the Internet, who saw them less as torturous or dangerous/terrorist (re: Raymond’s Transsexual Empire) and more as radically empathetic, imagining a world without exclusive torture for the marginalized. In short, we revolutionary queers (especially younger queers) empathized with the monstrous human plight, its own torment and alienation speaking to ourselves in the closet (and framed as sodomites with a new coat of point).

It bears repeating that, while the Internet wasn’t widely available until the early 2000s, such language—already introduced in 1965, regarding an ongoing poetic trend that had been stewing for centuries (since 1764, as far as the Neo-Gothic period goes)—staged further assaults through important works after the 1970s; e.g., like Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1993 giving rise to pro-(anarcho)-Communist ideas of genderqueer studies bleeding into future outcries and poetics; re (from Persephone van der Waard’s “About the Logo”):

When crafting my own symbol, I wanted to progress further beyond the Vaporware aesthetic (which emerged in roughly in 2011) than Laborwave had, which, in 2016, combined Vaporwave’s signature corporate mood/neoliberalism-in-decay with Marxist-Leninist icons divorced from their historical-material past. I wanted to not simply reflect on corporate/neoliberal fallibility and decay within dead/dystopian postpunk-tinged nostalgia, nor wax nostalgia on the undead pastiche of Marxist-Leninism, but inject a Gothic-queer presence to evoke an anarcho-Communist potential towards ending Capitalist Realism in the eternal drive towards developing Communism (source).

In decades minutes would happen, and then in minutes years would happen—slowly and then all at once, reaching boiling points. Mine was one, but many had preceded it in as many years.

As a matter of state mechanisms, such stopgaps also owe to queerness being constantly under attack in popular discourse; i.e., about sexuality and gender as a rising form of oppositional praxis: not fully understood within a modern context because it was constantly being challenged by the official histories whenever and wherever anyone bothered to look. This is especially salient in the Gothic tale as colonized by heteronormative forces since before the 1800s; i.e., previously and recursively associated with unhealthy forms of rebellion like the French Terror (re: Crawford) and various buried, whispered-about slave revolts of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also ancient female and queer (monstrous-feminine) agency as demonized, vampiric; e.g., the doomed, legendary Amazons of Ancient Greece and various classically female monsters like the mermaid, harpy or siren threatening classic Greek heroes, but also their canonical, androgynous modern-day hauntologies: Mother Brain, the Alien Queen, etc, as suitably correct-incorrect.

The whole point of abjection is to popularize and normalize open violence in society (foreign and domestic) and popular media against target groups, and that’s exactly what happened to queer people in the 1980s. They came out of the closet in force and the state invented a shadow army to attach to them and blame for/capitalize on imperial decline through militarized violence. Any nation-state could recognize and attack them, thus shame, rape, mutilate and kill them; society became sick in ways never before seen. Nowhere was safe for either side, Cartesian thought radicalized in service to profit under the neoliberal hegemon; i.e., through tokenized police violence against queerness during us-versus them copaganda. Already reprobate, we became grist for the mill—a new destiny to manifest by enterprising (and paranoid, avenging) young boys and girls of all colors and creeds (white Indians), lest they catch and transmit what we were carrying: Black-Death vermin to trap, cage and exterminate, but also sexual and yeast/fungal/viral (code-like, secretive) infections to cure told in retro-future revivals neither here nor there (a Foucauldian moral panic policing sex by treating us as an alien health crisis; i.e., as Communism, but especially gay Communism, as AIDS incarnate).

Out of nowhere, the future was abruptly and utterly canceled, and it was suddenly all us fags’ fault, what with our gay anarchist’s “Commie,” alien, abject biology and gender suddenly being everywhere; i.e., waiting insidiously and perilously to hatch and make the Earth queer and gay from outer space—all despite older proponents of Communism historically wanting little if anything to do with us; re: the state is straight and our survival is both antithetical to its own and something it needs to prey upon and extirpate to carry on—like a vampire, in other words. To quote Marx (who loved monstrous language; re: Castricano), specifically from Kapital, “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor.” Our vampirism must camp canonical iterations, the state most of all, including all its heteronormative, cryptomimetic bid for power’s rape and death fantasies: our death and rape at their hands. This can be theft of power to cause harm, but also labor and wages, even bodies and blood itself (e.g., John Dooley and Emily Gallagher’s “Blood Money: Selling Plasma to Avoid High-Interest Loans,” 2024); and all existent in a half-real sense between history as alive and dead, material and social, imaginary and substantial, etc.

For all those asking for equal treatment, the buck stops for us—the prolific Big Evil, Grendel’s-mother-style cave to face, reject destroy for its intrinsically outsiders non-state signature, paradoxically “desired” for being undesirable and hideous in ways our killing gives state warriors (standard or token) their usual rush. Along with the other inhabitants of Omelas’ bowers and dungeons, we became the last sewer drain for them to swirl around and plunge down into, slumming our screaming innards. It’s a sugar high, false power as neoliberalism always trades in; but the deaths and rape are real enough, part of the same monomythic-to-Promethean power trip/fantasy.

Per Creed, I think Cameron’s murderous womb (and Archaic Mother, lurking just offscreen, inside the alien brothel/graveyard/factory/den) sums things up rather well (they haven’t changed much since then). The power in such places exists for us to submit or rebel using what we got: our bodies, know-how, labor and so on liberated from state control!

(artist: The Maestro Noob)

But perhaps you could think of others, too? Again, this whirl of scribblings and images—by me, for the primer’s conclusion—haven’t been to try and compile a total history of all that has occurred up to, among and after the 1970s; i.e., that might go holistically and completely towards our argument (which is impossible). Instead, it’s merely to give you an idea of a) the kinds of multilateral, chaotic forces at work, and b) the dualities and competing forces either trying to: unite workers against the state regardless of gender or sex through different Gothically poetic appeals, or pit them against each other through the same weaponized devices; i.e., less wholly unspooled and praxially inert (from a proletarian standpoint) and more something to crack like a whip against labor. Reclaim that kink, make it sex-positive, thus emotionally/Gothically intelligent, and class, culture and race conscious.

Before we move onto my coming out of the closet and making new theory based on such histories, I quickly want to consider what guided my doing so: subversion as met with tokenized counters by abusive agents, sharing the same spaces and devices with me.

Something to repeatedly keep in mind, then, is how the state will attack such language when given freely to the masses as a critical-thinking device (thus conducive to queer identities). Recent terms like “transgender” were founded on Magnus Hirschfield’s early-20th century work, which the Nazis attempted to erase; to think, had the Reich not invaded the Institute of Sexology in 1933, these terms may have emerged in popular discourse far sooner than 1965, thereby establishing themselves as a means of challenging queer repression under Capitalism well before the 1980s (re: Ellen Moers’ “Female Gothic” from her book, Literary Woman and Anne Rice’s Interview, both from 1976, and Foucault before, during and afterwards; etc).

Except, they didn’t (making Creed and, by extension, my life far more difficult) because queer politics are inherently iconoclastic, running countercurrent to the material interests of the elite and their heteronormative scheme preying on nature-as-alien since day one. This includes moderate/fascist forms of feminism; re: Raymond’s transphobic polemic, The Transsexual Empire. It and similar attempts exist as part of a systemic, concentric gatekeeping of ever-evolving language; i.e., from “transvestite,” to “transsexual” to “transgender” and similar labels barreling towards other contested codewords like “trap” or “twink,” “femboy,” etc (all terms whose reverse abjection we’ll explore more of in Volume Three, Chapters Three and Four): as easy prey for state forces, including token cops, but also something for iconoclasts to romanticize during liminal expression—somewhere in between reclamation and enslavement.

Queers love their preferential monster code. Believe it or not, though, but all these words were once slurs and/or medical terms. Per Derrida, Butler and Creed (and directors like Gregg Araki, or writers like Dennis Cooper in the ’90s), they became spectres of Marx injecting new gender trouble back into the monstrous-feminine equation. As part of the Gothic mode’s continuation under state control, all have become something to take back and hold onto despite such dogma’s tokenized, policing doubles; i.e., generally by embodying that which capital fears through complicated ontological statements: a solidarized labor force reclaiming abject language and its strawmen of rape (re: Pyramid Head and the xenomorph, but also vampires in general taking essence until their victims die, and emerge as undead slaves) to humanize themselves with!

In Araki and Cooper’s case (echoes of Foucault), this sometimes means “raping” ourselves during calculated risk through those we want to be, use or discard, in effect also reconciling feelings of control and release between ourselves and those we play with as psychosexually crossed at the wires. Disorder is a neoliberal symptom made to loop in on itself. Subversion, then, isn’t just to fuck with canon, but humanize ourselves precisely because and for our damage and alienation inside such straight-coded, medicalized hauntologies and modified canonical laws (you are useful, Foucault). That’s what queer survival is—surviving the state medicalizing us as the psychosexual alien disease; i.e., one they can fetishize and fuck, forbid and foment hate and violence towards.

Again, we camp canon because we must, including sodomy and the monstrous-feminine through vampire language that our abusers (even tokenized ones) will try and police by pegging us as diseased sex pets (rats)! Who ever said that survival had to be boring? Quite the contrary! Martyrdom is portrayed as “passionate” for a reason. To that, we gay an-Coms are already the treated like the bloodsucking scum of the universe; might as well live it up!

Furthermore, we want to change how workers collect or organize through their identities as monstrous, vampiric. As said during the opening, doing so is generally a group effort (not a solo one, Empanada), one conducted between artist and muse—friends singing to the same keynote of transformation into who we want to become, using such language as it belongs to and is operated by us: the gay Communist vampires (“the Reds”) we want to be, redesigning such ideas to be as sleek, abrasive, adorable or offensive shapely and delicious as we desire! To it, the language of war and sex suitably combine in all the usual medieval poetic ways, but also disease as it normally pertains to us. That’s how gender trouble/parody works (the heavy lifting accomplished by our second-nature interactions, playfully communicating humanity regarding normally abject things); i.e., to lock eyes with what you like/desire and think naughtily and hungrily to yourself, “I want that—to catch whatever they got” (with doctors historically framing hysteria as a female condition that needs medically assisted orgasms, and a male condition that needs execution).

In turn, this graduates to taking what is forbidden/alien in ways that, sex-positive or not, will be treated like a vampire’s disease, an infection to quarantine and purge less it infarct (not just a wart to remove, but a cancer). Such medievalized dualities and barbarism never left/only changed shape and focus slightly under neoliberal capital. And faced with it, we gay an-Coms campily respond (from relative safety): “Oh, yeah, daddy! Push us into the mattress while you pound us silly! Storm our fortress! Harder! Faster! Deeper!”

As such, “exit-only” becomes a myth, the vampiric castle-in-the-flesh remaining open (figuratively and literally) to different insertions per military campaign—not to rape, but gain agency, understanding and control through rape play, thus begin to heal. Give and take, we can drive ourselves to greater pleasure and pain under the vampiric mode of exchange (denial and desire, fluid exchange); i.e., in a non-harmful, indulgent and highly educational sense (and sometimes, as with Cuwu, it can drive the taster a bit insane; but all the while, opens their eyes to the lovely carnival—and its sweet, infectious, addictive lessons/scholarship—that eagerly await). Don’t abstain; we can go all night, so bottoms up (ace people, decide for yourselves if you want to partake)! Oral, anal and/or vaginal, but also intercrural, the tender tissue (and holes) beckon for you to try them! So rub your noses (and other sensory organs) in it!

(artist: Cuwu)

Lady or not, it’s rude to keep a cutie waiting. And also, such stimulants are empathizing. However, the more you interact with abject, repulsive things as human, the more you’ll learn; the more you learn, the luckier you’ll get pertaining to them because you’ll be less inclined to reject and discount their theories in praxis (sex is a radicalizing factor unto revolution, a way for freedom fighters to bond wherever they find themselves)! In turn, the owners of these parts become human, and praxis (as something to synthesize) becomes second-nature on the ground level: between workers doing what workers have done since time out of mind, but now as openly cummy comrades. Regardless of the exact outcome per exchange, the world’s our oyster to pry open and participate in; we socially and sexually network among a shared pedagogy finding similarity amid difference! Everything snowballs amongst larger conversation, movement, rebellion—our Aegis to bare against the state’s own mirrors (of false rebellion).

To that, having survived such things to experience the traumatic rewiring of different pleasurable and prey-like mechanisms, such do we camp our own state-threatened rapes and deaths. Whatever pull we boast (or booties we blast), rebellion doesn’t so much as “have a clock” (an appointed hour) or a small, visible win condition (a simple track and finishing line) but a primed set of socio-materials condition whose application unfolds under the usual factors geared towards praxial success but not guaranteed as such. No such guarantees exist, save that doing nothing and make politics (thus survival) criminal/allergic only consigns us to a slow and sorry fate. We camp canon because we must, doing so with people of different ages—youth not wasted on the young because the young and old can interact in fresh synthesis! As exhibitionists and voyeurs, what we do in life echoes in eternity as something less to farm (for profit) and more to set free! It’s not taught in school, but there are places to learn that will admit you if you’re willing and young-at-heart; i.e., not so jaded that you can’t rock ‘n roll (with the role of master and apprentice, teacher and student switching between two [or more] parties, per play session)!

In other words, watch and learn, but also, listen and understand: healing is system shock—where walking the tightrope yields untold feelings of many different kinds, and whose subsequent gushing we must interrogate, but also play and negotiate with. When doing so, there is always risk. In treading such choppy waters and in playing such dangerous games, then, always respect each other’s humanity through clear permission and informed consent (remember your safewords)! Otherwise, we’re just cops victimizing each other for the state. Provided you avoid such betrayals, though, go to town! If a pussy’s hungry for more—wants you to tear it up—oblige them! They’ll let you know if you’re being too rough (and if they can’t, then it’s time to stop)! Find the beat and pound that drum; fuck to metal; learn and become the best lover you can be, making each and every time the best adventure it can possibly be right now (afterlife is a conservative bargain; re: the cake is a lie): a precious and princely parting gift you’ll treasure until the end!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Furthermore, by putting these things increasingly in quotes using ludo-Gothic BDSM, the word “rape” becomes not just utterable, but paradoxically medicinal and medieval (the best medicine being laughter but also sex, usually combining the two during calculated risk). “Poison” was the cure, strengthening us to speak out again police forces (which bad-faith allies, actors and players are) abusing the same devices in dated pernicious forms; i.e., for the state during its own settler and sodomy arguments. It will seek us out, only to find its instructions wonderfully confused; i.e., subverted for counterterrorist (rear)ends during as(s)ymetrical warfare by taking vampirism back in a GNC, thus Gothic an-com, green-eggs-and-harm kind of way! They’re a bit melty (and stinky) but boy are they exquisite (I’m riffing off the Poetry Module, in case you’re wondering)! Thus good BDSM becomes good praxis—not a closeted shameful deed, but a new way of life towards a better tomorrow! Spread it around, pay it forward; plant the seeds for something better that grows inside and outside of ourselves.

We’re called unicorns for a reason. Unlike straight people, we fags (and especially we non-cis fags) are intimately familiar with the ontological, closeted feelings and needing to show and hide them under oppressive conditions attached to state structures (religious or otherwise). Once inoculated or otherwise adjusted to state decay, disorder and hauntology-of-war lies, GNC workers become equally resistant but not immune to tokenization from coercion through dogma, torture, incarceration and indoctrination (especially the older we get but also vulnerable from a young age).

(artist: Ballard Zero)

In turn, such beings of the night can—per liminal expression—cryptonymically show to conceal and vice versa per all the usual gay codes, euphemisms and constantly updating courtship strategies; i.e., as revolution and survival from the state (as straight) demands we do. The more marginalized the victims, the more radical the solution regarding their liberation (which is why Marxist-Leninism won’t work—in short, it’s not radical enough). We get together (and down together) to inspire, share and lend each other inspiration, ideas, attention, drugs, fashion tips, money and, yes, sex—whatever we need to see revolution through (to “put ourselves together” and, as Kim Petras nicely explains, “give you my heart to break,” 2018). We insulate and protect, comfort and console, defend and supply.

For us, rebellion isn’t separate from daily life, but one-in-the-same old of dead things we establish to trust as something to build; i.e., bring back to life to weigh on the brains of the living: the ghost of gay Marx bombing the Brumaire! Thus, nothing is owned (privatized) and everything is shared to better help workers and nature endure and ultimately surpass the state as straight! We can fuck with them, including their holy ideas of the past; i.e., punk, rock and gay culture, etc, as alive and well, but like Milton’s Satan, undead in artistic opposition to state dualities (no matter what Marilyn Manson insists, in “Rock Is Dead,” 1998); e.g., by reminding Marxist-Leninists that Marx wasn’t above playing with monsters, thus having a gay potential those who long survived him could later use to camp his own work—to shock everyone awake with unholy pandemonic solidarity (while crooning like Morrison, moaning like Benatar, purring like Petras, and wailing like Halford, etc)! “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!” as Milton said; as I said (from Volume Zero), belong to the devil’s party and know it! You have only to lose you chains—from holding you down, but not for being used regarding other things! Out of the slaver’s control, we see ourselves free as liberated slaves; i.e., loving the aesthetic of domination, of power and death (the red-in-the-black flushing’s first-glance vaso vagal threatening blood and penetration through syringe-like injection). Fits like a glove!

To this, patience is a virtue, but the intense, resolute, and pent-up need remains; i.e., that fierce and unyielding hunger—to be free and able to eat, fuck, exist and relate to each other as simultaneously human and abject. Rebellion is required to avoid liquidation, but we make it a delight by “liquidating” all over them! Juicy fruit, we demand to be tasted, humanizing the harvest while serpentine-like and wiggling temptingly! Eat this apple, then revel in doing so: “We’re totally ‘eating from the Tree of Knowledge’ right now!” The “almost holy” is our church, and we want to prey for our sins!

(exhibit 41g3: Model and artist: Persephone van der Waard and Quinnvincible. Note the Mona-Lisa smile, the self-assured confidence about what he has mind. Quinn is a trans boy who, for this particular exhibit, desired to appear more masculine; i.e., as a xenophilic, gynodiverse, monstrous-feminine expression of how they regularly want to present and perform as masc. Before we started, they specifically told me they wanted their face and shoulders more masculine than they currently are; conversely they stated how they also feel content with the female aspects of their body—their pussy, curves and breasts. Such evolutions are idiosyncratic and vary per person, with some people wanting top and/or bottom surgeries and some people choosing to opt out of those procedures.

As a matter of sexually descriptive, andro/gynodiverse genderqueer expression, every vampire is unique, as is every negotiation between artist and model, etc. My subsequent attempts to masculinize Quinn apply to the “phallic,” campy medievalism of fangs and drinking blood, but also masc clothing loosely informed by older Gothic poetics; i.e., an imaginary past as continuously reinvented, “threatening” gender trouble through sodomy as a reclaimed action tied to the performer as subversive, themselves. Although Quinn’s actions are canonically “heretical,” their self-interpretation and sense of style is immediately friendly and harmless.

Angry transgression is entirely a strategy within oppressed pedagogies, but Quinn’s affable, seductive cuteness shows how threats of violent, open revenge aren’t the only path of resistance available to iconoclasts. Sometimes the best revenge is successfully making one’s enemies self-report against you, pulling their hair out at gender as something to [a]sexually parody and joyously play with in public, nudist displays; i.e., not welcome to my sad little world [sad cum], but my weird, happy [sometimes angry/sad, but not always] world—embodying the former realities of compelled personification as a living, sexually transmitted “disease” [queer people are AIDS] to then subvert its dogmatic, holocaust-by-bullet, settler-colonial elements amid new regeneration and praxial catharsis! Medusa’s rapture mixes pleasure and pain in ways signatory to queer experience always being liminal. In turn, no liberation exists without facing that music in a holistic sense.)

(source: Lucy Diavolo’s “The United States Government’s Anti-Gay Lavender Scare, Explained,” 2019)

Like the word “transgender,” “vampire”/”sodomy” evolved into itself through opposing forces that yielded pejorative, heteronormative labels/crises and genderqueer identities/struggles attached to the same language. For instance, the above image was shot in 1965, exactly when words like “homosexual” were nearly a century old, and “transgender” and “transsexual” were just being coined in a Western, medicalized sense. The recency of those new words cannot be said of vampires. Even by 1954, Matteson’s story was old hat, but new in focus; i.e., apply the vampire to what Romero would treat as “zombie apocalypse” some fifteen years later! Past present or (retro-)future, any vampire you see is caught in the same tug-of-war between state and worker concerns about sexual, gendered and performative agency—their swooping in through violent, terrifying and morphological sodomy dialogs about sex and force; i.e., as poetic levers laid with new knowledge build on old knowledge to further closet workers or, in some shape or form, help set them free during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

As something that has crystalized over centuries, though, the vampire’s feeding behaviors unfold during moments of active “torture” according to canonical fears of societal change brought on by queer persons merely trying to exist (thus demonstrate and protest, ipso facto, by actively resisting our segregation and eradication); i.e., by threatening the state, generally through reclaiming xenophobic symbols of the vampire, making them more party-like, sex-positive and fun (the disco vamp as tied to “the devil’s music” and cultural appropriation/demonization of people of color as chained to Americanized sites of sin for white consumers: “the creatures of the night, what sweet music they make!”; e.g., Paganini’s devilish fiddle; Cab Calloway’s 1933 Betty Boop rotoscope jaunt, “St. James Infirmary Blues,” or his tokenized Harlem Romance/sale’s pitch, “Hi-Di-Ho,” 1934; Squeezit the Moocher from Forbidden Zone, 1979; “Slam Shuffle” from Final Fantasy VI, 1994; or King Dice from Cuphead, 2017).

Taken as a whole, these combined, campy feelings of alienation speak to our martyred predation by the state; i.e., in ways we can enjoy and reclaim, reversing abjection through such vampire-style, campy vice characterization. As Asprey notes (and I build on), revolutions take terror back through counterterror challenging state monopolies through camp (those who opt out of doing so and discourage others from camp are generally sell-outs—a concept we’ll unpack more in part one of “Understanding Vampires,” next). Such revivals (and their dispersals) can, often enough, catch fire and spread just as quickly through the state (and its defenders): recoiling in disgust and scrambling to monopolize on the craze.

Concerning the vampire’s sudden neoliberal resurgence as queer and unwelcome, this heteronormative xenophobia manifests as a matter of degree. Indeed, the operation—of the human body and its behaviors during canonical vampire stories burying the gay—originally operate as a mixed metaphor tied to conservative social attitudes obsessed with racial, but also hereditarily “pure” bloodlines and PIV sex. Anal sex—and peoples associated with that and other forms of sodomy—are nigh unimaginable during moral panics (especially male sodomy as chased after, while female sodomy is more openly fetishized by these same chasers of incorrect men).

Instead, the “classic” Western vampire becomes a common fixture of unholy appetite and middle-class addiction, restored through the consumption of forbidden[26] sex, “virgin” vitality and, far from resenting its absence, utterly waste away without it (with “blood” being closer to its medieval, “humors” rubric than the literal stuff in human bodies). In other words, canonical treatments of the vampire vary further according to their biological sex and gender identity as recent, resisted developments of inclusive vampirism during the past half-century or so—i.e., embodying desire as forbidden to the point of fatal excess, including murderous, skulking impulses tied to raw, unbridled sexuality (a very Victorian fear): as having expanded to include trans, intersex and non-binary people camping all of that as “strung out” (or using it to cryptonymically blend in—beards and lavender weddings). Bitches in heat—and ones they’ll never tame—we rise from the heap to scream; stretched to the limit, overcome with defiant ecstasy and rapture, our bouncing bodies (and jiggly parts) give our disdainers butterflies: letting them know they’ll never own us! Wet at the thought, we melt into puddles and quiver! “Stare and tremble!” we sigh, and blast off yet again.

(artist: Nya Blu)

All the same, queerness is continuously moderated through an insistence on cis-gendered, pornographic anchor language and heteronormative concerns during popular vampire stories. Whereas xenophilic vampires reliably become incubi and succubae that challenge the heteronormative order by feeding on maidens, their queerness is generally repressed before corporeal punishment is even administered: state sanctioned banishment, but also “staking” for the crime of theft, a priori.

Wives, in particular, are seen as valuable property by the jilted husband, and the vampires who defile them do so through an extramarital exchange of essence that damns both to die by the sanctimonious owners of women (and, by extension, anything of nature, thus monstrous-feminine). In this sense, women are the ancient carriers for a disease that started more recently inside a queer male body. Exposed to it, their primordial, bleeding hysteria bleeds everywhere, rushing to the operatic surface/stage; i.e., to go a bit batty against patriarchal forces policing nature-as-monstrous-feminine, the act of doing so being a flexible gradient of persecution, dividing and conquering the usual groups amongst themselves, gentrifying and decaying through sodomy dialogs historically having gatekept themselves and omitting anyone else.

Such a tokenized, toe-the-lined trend started with feminism and white cis-het women, only to become increasingly racist, queerphobic, Orientalist, and ultimately assimilative across all parties through DARVO and obscurantism; e.g.,  having the Carmilla triangulate against other vampires—to take the cross, bearing her fangs, drool blood and say unto the trans woman, person of color and/or Indigenous element, etc, “The power of Christ compels you!” Either they betray their cause, or were bad faith from the start. Let it be said, no group is historically immune from this. Allies of all sorts become enemies, such malcontents undermining a shared struggle and entire poetic language, in the process. The ahegao/anguish loses its irony and inverts into fresh betrayal:

This genocidal heritage and fakery has a cryptonymic silencing affect in either spatial, temporal and cultural direction. The further back you go, the more exclusive, myopic, and wordless activism in the Gothic mode becomes. But during the expanding of sexual and gender discourse in later centuries, those being silenced go from less queer to more queer in a criminal, “problematic” sense policing alien love—from vampires as heteronormative to queernormative, from “buggery” to “lesbian” to “transgender” to “twink” as an updated dictionary of pejorative claims used by tokenized, recuperated elements. This includes sex workers punching down against themselves (“dandies” and “ladies of the night”); i.e., inside the same, half-real discipline-and-punish prisons; i.e., between fiction and non-fiction, Capitalist Realism during Satanic Panic into Red Scare punching down at GNC peoples as “vampires” through internalized bigotry!

Let it be said, the visual differences are virtually meaningless (male or female, trans man or trans woman), insofar as class, culture and race betrayal manifests to accomplish the same basic goal through these axes of oppression. There’s no rationalization for tokenization that can justify such betrayals; they’re simply wrong by virtue of settler colonialism (and all its symptoms and variations, including Marxist-Leninist queerphobia) being wrong! Capitalism is wrong. The state and cops are wrong regardless of where they come from (re: America or the U.S.S.R.), and regardless who’s policing the monstrous-feminine for practicing “sodomy.” The state always decays and always polices, smites, and imprisons its foes; capital does that for profit’s sake against nature-as-monstrous-feminine.

Trying this pointedly to sodomy and to classic vampires, the individual, updated treatment of male and female vampires exudes various monstrous-feminine double standards all by themselves (say nothing of intersex examples, which we’ll explore more in the Demon Module): the rakish tempter and sultry temptress as “lady-killer” and “man-eater” tied to the deep, dark thirst and shameless theft of blood, undermining the sanctity of marriage (and a dutiful wife) for a quick, messy one-night stand with a lothario or lady of the night.

With gender reduced to a simple us-vers-thus binary, the act of sex becomes canonically bad-faith—dangerous and perfidious, but also tied to a larger structure: the world as the vampire, exhibit 41h—specifically Capitalism as dissociated and displaced to a mythologized anytime, place and people (re: Federici); i.e., the Gothic masque and its dangerous game of love-making as emblematic to social-sexual interactions more broadly that present in demonized language; e.g., the heteronormative love triangle of the virgin/whore caught between the benign male hero and the rapacious demon lover as patently vampiric.

In other words, blood is canonically abject, but makes queerness unspoken in vampire stories by focusing more on the classic window-dressing of imperiled maidens and husbands; e.g., replicas of Jonathan Harker and his wife, Mina, by the pesky old Count as the go-to torturer/mask-wearing serial killer of women bodies and cis-het male pride. Under these circumstances, it becomes impossible to express xenophilic queerness through vampire stories without some xenophobic carryovers from the history of sexuality and gender as queer-repressed nostalgia.

This ongoing repression constitutes a “vanishing point” of queerness; the closer one tries to get, the more illusions imagined in defense of Capitalism’s struggle; i.e., to maintain heteronormativity by staving off a queer world whose stability and harmony with nature beyond Capitalism is “unimaginable,” leaving only the boxed-in reality that Capitalism is a vampire—one whose predatory and hypnotic illusions workers must canonically accept. So often, they’ll do so, punching down against anyone who ruffles their feathers by asking, “Why, Black Dynamite, why?” (the question the “hero” in that movie thinks he hears, but is actually a statement of defiance made by a Vietnamese child, saying to his not-to-bright destroyer, “Can’t kill me”).

People who live through pogroms are haunted by them, reaching up from abject Hell to chill their victims solid and, to some degree, paralyze themselves whilst staring on in hunger at yet-untouched forms still fresh and innocent: “Don’t be afraid.” Vampirism and sodomy classically involve medieval courtship and meeting new people as a matter of monsters and camp (with that delicious shock of adrenaline, doing what you shouldn’t and it tasting good all the more for it). To it, when Zeuhl showed me the ways of the vampire (through Foucault, who they said they “rode and died with”), they took my innocence; but I was born again, gifted with a heavy knowledge I’d never try to give back to them. Trading in queer love, they teased and woke something up inside me, taking me to faraway places that felt like home in ways home never quite was; having tasted of the forbidden fruit, I emerged a newborn queer—suitably strange and ready to go with the flow, wreaking a lovely gayness upon the world Zeuhl would probably blush at now in complete-and-utter chagrin! Reap the whirlwind, I guess.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Vampirism speaks to altered states of mind, unfolding with eerie grandeur and anticipation, but also remarkable fear and confusion, excitement and anticipation—land back, but also identities back in ways that have to wake up in new undead forms challenging older zombies (re: Foucault, Marxist-Leninism, etc). As such, these hauntologies yield different flavors, which we’ll consider next, in part one; i.e., where we talk about my coming out of the closest as building on this messy 1970s foundation onwards! After that, we’ll do our close-reads! Hunger City, humbly we power bottoms offer up our girthy tumescence! Drain us so that we may transcend to new orders of existence!

Onto “Understanding Vampires, part one: Leaving the Closet“!

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Footnotes

[1] Originally from a community post Bad Empanada made, saying “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again,” followed by him responding to me, saying “BDSM doctors aren’t real” when I called myself one (which, I am); i.e., I—a BDSM doctor and trans woman—am not real (thus neither are sex therapists and paid/unpaid researchers, apparently).

It goes to show that people who are often right about a lot of things, just as often, are really fucking wrong when they are wrong. “Doctors,” for instance, didn’t originate from universities in the 20th-century style; for our purposes, they started off as clerics and scholars in monasteries during the Middle Ages—e.g., Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have a university degree and worked with media and materials, hand-in-hand (and was charged with sodomy* by a local town); i.e., his contributions aren’t something you can merely dismiss for him doing so (including the sodomy charge).

*As Catherine Fletcher writes, in “Leonardo da Vinci’s Private Relationships” (2021):

On 9 April 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in an anonymous report to the Florentine authorities.

Leonardo, then just short of his 24th birthday, was one of four men said to have had sex with the 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli. The denouncer claimed that Saltarelli “had been a party to many wretched affairs and consents to please those persons who exact certain evil pleasures from him” (source).

For the record, there would have pedophilic qualities to da Vinci’s life by modern standards, for which Catherine Fletcher goes on to add:

A sexual relationship between a 43-year-old man and his 15-year-old employee would be considered reprehensible today, all the more so if, as in the case of Leonardo and Salaì, the younger person had joined the elder’s household at the age of 10.

This pederastic model was, however, typical of same-sex relationships in Renaissance Florence, with the younger man often aged between 12 and 18. The 17-year-old Saltarelli also fits the pattern. Lomazzo suggested that through such relationships “out of a tender age come, at a manly age, worthier and closer friends.”

Renaissance attitudes tended to echo those of the ancient world and, as recent research by historian Rachel Hope Cleves on British author Norman Douglas has shown, tolerance of pederasty persisted in Europe into the 20th century. Age-gaps were not exclusive to same-sex relationships: girls might also be married very young (ibid.).

As such, people generally face the world and contribute to it in good and bad ways; i.e., talent and morality aren’t the same thing. It’s a mixture, those good things existing paradoxically with those bad.

To it, my whole argument with Sex Positivity is for workers to take what is useful from the past (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients) and leave the rest, reclaiming pre-Capitalist jewels to move towards a post-capitalist, hence post-scarcity world. Should we throw out everything da Vinci pioneered and discovered because he practiced sodomy? What about Foucault’s extended works on homosexual punishment and, by extension, carceral abuse in Discipline and Punish (1975)?

By that same logic, should we do the same for Stalin because he sent millions of people to the gulags or enabled Beria to prey on schoolyard girls in their tweens? What about Mao and his War of the Sparrows during the Great Leap Forwards causing millions to die, or his Cultural Revolution weaponizing children to kill his political enemies so he—an aging and paranoid dictator at this stage in his life—could stay in power? These were not people we should emulate exactly as they were, comrade. Marxist-Leninism is, in my opinion, antiquated precisely because the state historically decays, causing tremendous harm towards its citizens and others; e.g., the Russian Federation, the United States, and China. Whatever labor value any of them offered, they are now capitalist bodies competing industriously under Capitalism to out-capital each other. Such is the way of states; they will never let themselves progress—i.e., it has to happen democratically among the hearts and minds of workers united under a common humanizing banner that avoids Omelas-style exceptions.

As an aside, my friend Ginger points out, even if BDSM doctors “weren’t real,” as Bad Empanada argues, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s still spectacularly wrong about sex work and activism at large; i.e., by abstaining from them and claiming total ignorance on such things (which he does all the time), he’s basically falling out of the dreaded I’m Really Wrong Tree and hitting all the branches on the way down!

To it, people in the Global South experience oppression through sex work, and gender studies espoused by someone like Jessie Gender (or any other activist/content creator) are still true and applicable to said people’s lived reality even if the individuals involved sell out or otherwise do/say stupid shit in other areas. The same concept applies to myself and Bad Empanada; to err is human, and last I checked, neither one of us is a space alien.

[2] Re: Aaron Bushnell (from “Ode to a Martyr,” 2024)

Note: This piece was inspired by someone I respect, but whose apathy and myopia I wish to respond to: Bad Empanada and his video, “Americans Demand I Praise US Soldier Who Self-Immolated to Protest Gaza Genocide” (2024). I respond to it in his second channel’s community section: “I thought your refusal to say anything about Aaron Bushnell’s martyrdom at all, only to comment on American jingoism and all-importance is, I feel, incredibly myopic and apathetic; e.g., ‘I don’t care’ (which you’ve said as much); i.e., to overlook something vital merely to state the obvious, thereby avoiding solidarity with Americans who otherwise might agree with you during a shared struggle against larger forces at play. It’s not ‘praise’ to call Bushnell a martyr, it’s a fact. He was an anarcho-Communist, and this act wasn’t a spontaneous [one made] by a weekend warrior. He lived it, dude.”

Martyrdom is seldom agreed upon and often misunderstood. For proof, consider two YouTube channels that I follow, Bad Empanada and GPD. Bad Empanada cynically and prematurely described Bushnell’s death as “a waste of time,” condemning the Americans entering his channel for wanting him to discuss it by virtue of those persons “being unable to see things beyond their own noses.” Showing his own privilege (and nose), Bad Empanada went on to say that far better ways of devoting one’s time to class war exist than killing oneself, and that, likewise, there are far better ways to kill oneself for a cause than Bushnell’s; conversely, GPD commented quite differently, concluding, “The statement that [Bushnell] made, the way that he made it, the symbolism of the act, the uncomfortable truth of the act that makes reporting on it so awkward for Western mass media, makes this arguably one of the most important instances of protest in US history” (“I Watched the Uncensored Aaron Bushnell Video,” 2024).

I understand both points of view. Indeed, it is possible that both are essentially correct at the same time (this post will address several paradoxes, because liberation requires us doing so in order to liberate ourselves from the elite’s powerful illusions). Though somewhat cold and callous in his frank assessment, Bad Empanada’s candor is merited; many Americans are arrogant insofar as they value the lives and voices of those from home versus those from abroad making the same arguments on a daily basis. He wanted to say it and said so without shame, but his cynical, judgement-clouding anger did two things: a) clump all Americans together and b) miss a larger point that GDF did not. GDF is also right, then, insofar as Bushnell’s death is both highly unusual and persuasive: to be done by a member of the colonizing group—and not only that, a member within said group paid to actively participate in genocide as a structure—is intimidating to the elite precisely because the executioners are revealed to be human and have human feelings, which is just as important as humanizing the victims in the obvious colonized group (source).

but also the Kent State shootings. Are their lives worth less than Palestinians or any other victims of Pax Americana purely because they’re from America, you smug, Ozzy, virtue-signaling fuck? Many great activists started off as warmongers, only to blow the whistle afterwards; e.g., Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Howard Zinn, or Bob fucking Ross. Are people beyond redemption the moment they serve? Learn some nuance, dude!

[3] Jung Chang writes of Mao policies’ and hypocrisies,

His regime nailed everyone down to a place of residence, making it impossible for most people to move. Tens of millions of married couples posted to different parts of China couldn’t live together. Given 12 days a year to visit each other, they were condemned to almost year-round sexual abstinence. While his people endured such constraints, Mao indulged his every sexual caprice. The Communist Party and army procured young girls for him. These girls staffed his villas and served as dancing companions at leaders’ exclusive parties when such dancing was banned for ordinary Chinese (source: “Was Mao a Maoist?”).

Even if this were some kind of hit piece (Chang writes for the Washington Post), Mao doesn’t sound especially like someone I’d want to emulate, nor would I want to endorse the state model, per Marxist-Leninism. Undoubtedly his rule helped raise China out of grand poverty (after the Warlord Era)—but it’s still incredibly brutal and worse, ultimately pointless if China conducts similar atrocities and rivalries, regardless of scale or intent; i.e., the Sino-Soviet split and the Great Leap Forward. States are the enemy and historically kill a great many people to call doing so the Greater Good. Everything is expendable to the state, and I see no reason to apologize for their grim harvests, hence keep them and those around. We must humanize and intersectionally solidarize ourselves against them and their queerphobic history (more on this in “Understanding Vampires,” part zero).

[4a] Regardless of which form of queer biology, sexual orientation, and gender identity/performance one excludes, to exclude a subset is to exclude all of them regardless of the popular/clinical language available, known or otherwise used/favored; i.e., homophobia is a kind of queerphobia, and itself constitutes an attack on the entire queer and sex work* communities (at home and abroad, often in token forms).

*The two generally go hand-in hand.

For example, Marx and Engels lacked the language to express their bigotry against homosexual men (and perhaps lesbians, but who’s to say given the bias), going so far as to make up their own words (“Uranians”). Except, exclusion is exclusion, and regardless of how a queerphobe expresses or applies it, such behavior is never good for queerness at large; i.e., to segregate, silence and/or sell out about such things always leads/contributes to collective punishment and genocide; re: a faggot is just a faggot, and “When they abandoned us [back then], they abandoned all of us” (re: Vaspider).

To it, we queers, anarchists and sex workers have no nation or land tied to us (the state is the enemy); so our intersectional solidarity is our best defense. In turn, liberation is all-or-nothing and zero sum (insofar as we want to discourage such bigotry against all queer and sex worker groups because in the end, we are all the same to the Straights, capitalist and Marxist-Leninist alike). It behooves us to be aware of such histories because the negative consequences to said histories affect us disproportionately compared to straight people, who—for all intents and purposes—can afford/enjoy some degree of blindness (even if it ultimately harms them, too); e.g., Bad Empanada being socially blind/entirely unconcerned with literary analysis; i.e., because he is a cis-het straight man in love with the state, he thinks the state (the Marxist version of it) would never go and make him illegal for being straight. And this is essentially true. The state is fundamentally straight, thus will never affect him the same way it affects us, but refusing to adopt literary studies for that reason makes him a poor scholar/historian and even worse ally!

[4b] As Catherine Fletcher writes of da Vinci’s sodomy charge; re, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Private Relationships”: “Renaissance society did not have the concept of firm sexual orientation that exists today and many men were in practice bisexual. (We know less about the women, because prosecutions, the main source of records, generally targeted men.)” (source).

[5] 331Erock’s “Twisted Metal 2 – Holland (guitar cover)” (2023).

[6] Though Rocka Rolla actually debuted first, in 1974 (the title track aired on BBC), with Rocky Horror releasing a year later.

[7] Dr. Dana Rosenfeld writes in “The AIDS Epidemic’s Lasting Impact on Gay Men” (2018):

As I and colleagues established, the epidemic hit male baby boomers much harder than it did older and younger men, causing high numbers of premature deaths, especially among those aged 25-44 (and, in this age group, among those aged 35-44), with gay men suffering “the most AIDS deaths by  far at the epidemic’s height.” In the USA, by 1995, one gay man in nine had been diagnosed with AIDS, one in fifteen had died, and 10% of the 1,600,000 men aged 25-44 who identified as gay had died  – a literal decimation of this cohort of gay men born 1951-1970 (source).

For various reasons, but including a stigma surrounding men as sodomites that did not effect women to nearly the same extent, men historically paid a heavier price in the public’s eyes than women; but conversely, said women were the ones to care for and ultimately bury their male comrades.

As a 2019 editorial for The Foreword explains, this reality led to a changing of the queer acronym from GLBT to LGBTQ+:

The “L” in LGBTQ stands for lesbians. The “L” comes first in the acronym for a reason. In the starting stage of the gay rights movement, gay men were largely the ones running the show. There was a focus on men’s issues and lesbians (as well as trans people of both genders) were largely unrecognized, hence the common GLBT acronym.

The LGBT community despite being inherently inclusive, has always had pockets of sexism. From the fact that there has always been a lack of spaces catered to lesbians when compared to gay men. Gay bars are common spots in big cities, however lesbians are consistently not included in these spaces. There is a large amount of harassment that occurs in these bars. And this is not made up for with lesbian spaces. There are very few “lesbian bars.”

Lesbians are also historically underrepresented in media (though trans people probably have it even worse) when compared to gay men. Although the representation of gay men is often horribly stereotypical, lesbians, especially in the decades before this one, have hardly been represented at all. Where comical gay men, as poor as the representation may be, were fairly common in the 90s and the 2000s, lesbians aside from the occasional gal pals and Ellen, were few and far between and were never main characters.

The push to change the order came with the surge of feminist ideas that sprouted in the ’80s and ’90s. The AIDS crisis also factored into the “gay/lesbian solidarity” that led to lesbians being more recognized in the community. While a huge portion of gay men were suffering from AIDS, the lesbian community was largely unaffected. Lesbians were the ones helping gay men with medical care (source: “The ‘L’ In LGBT, And Why Order Matters”).

Intersectional solidarity matters, especially since the state historically will try to overlap panics—e.g., Lavender/Satanic Panic and Red Scare—to get people to in-fight, thus ignore the bourgeoisie. It’s possible to recognize the sacrifice for different groups, then, representing them without throwing anyone else under the bus or blindly taking the state’s poisoned “gifts.”

To it, I—a trans woman born in the AIDs crisis (1986) but living in it shadow—contracted Hep C in 2013. Unlike the HIV virus, Hep C is largely spread through blood-on-blood contact (typically from sharing needles). I don’t how I contracted it, but I did. While having a long incubation period/slow mortality rate (+20 years), medical treatment was not widely available at the time. Luckily I had insurance through the state (welfare), and while insurance companies could ignore personal requests for the medication, the U of M helped me find a loophole: supply a letter of financial hardship through the school; get denied, thus qualify by forcing these companies’ hands. They’d have to use my insurance!

This took several years, though, because no medication was presently available that had a high enough success rate (or zero side effects). Until then, I simply had to wait.

Eventually, in 2015 while finishing my BA, I received over $100k’s worth of then-experimental drugs by the medical company my school worked with. They mailed a box once a month to the efficiency I stayed at (I was a transfer, so I didn’t have to live on-campus at the overpriced dorms, like freshmen students legally had to). I took the drug religiously (as prescribed); once I’d exhausted treatment, I took a trip to the university hepatology clinic, where a subsequent blood test told me I was “cured” (the antibodies still and forever being in my system). Cool beans.

It was relatively straightforward, but still stressful because so much could’ve gone wrong (scheduling the medication was difficult, and given the efficiency shared one mailbox, theft of the pills wasn’t out of the question). There’s also those several years where I was simply told “to wait for a cure.” It wasn’t something I talked about with others at the time, and I did my best to handle it on my own as best I could. It felt weird having an illness that, if left untreated, could kill me (the disease had, point-in-fact, killed my friend Sandy Norton’s husband—a transgender professor—years prior).

All this being said, I was closeted at the time and only just starting to date; I can’t imagine what it would be like to contract HIV and develop AIDS in a time when Satanic Panic was at its peak and treatment for the disease was impossible. Many older queers—I recall, from the Pride episode of Sense8—remember Pride in the ’80s as a funeral; and I feel somewhat alienated from the deaths of the period only to live in fear after the 2014 election of Donald Trump, chased by a 2017 renaissance of token feminism and queer backpedaling. As much solidarity occurred in the same window into the present, but it’s still disheartening because—despite being a postcolonialist like Bad Empanada is—he (and other Marxist-Leninists like him) look down at me; i.e., see me (and those like me) as just the middle-class fag chasing dreams. I’d say, “pot, meet kettle,” but he’s not gay!

[8] I can understand Foucault lamenting this shift; i.e., as something that threatened his existence as a 20th-century homosexual man. Foucault ultimately died from AIDS in 1984, a disease that was blamed primarily on gay men while also being used to target and kill the gay community as political activists (with lesbian women usually being the ones to care for their dying male allies during the struggle; re: “Why Order Matters“).

Still, knowing what I know about his own pedophilic tendencies (and those of his idol, Jean-Paul Sartre), I feel rather queasy reading passages like those about an 1867 farm hand from the village of Lapcourt in defense of irrefutably pedophilic activities:

who […] living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called “curdled milk.” So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration (ibid.).

It’s incredibly dishonest for Foucault to even use the phrase “theoretical elaboration,” here. For one, it involves actual peoples—including but not limited to the man being “#Me-Too’d” for “playing” with the little girl. His grumbling has its own nostalgic theme, with Foucault seeing the ending of the pre-17th century’s frankness as a “twilight [that] soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home.”

To this, critiquing the home as a site of sexual abuse is valid (many Gothic stories do just that). However, Foucault isn’t isolating or critiquing sexual abuse; he’s lamenting the evolution of older sexual practices in the medieval past, before sexual orientation and gender identity were even established! As such, his fairytale regression in 1980—towards good, old-fashioned sodomy as unencumbered by modern rules—completely ignores the legitimate, moral arguments to be made in defense of those who are most prone to be sexually abused in the modern world; and in doing so, Foucault speaks to a time when these abusive practices could be done as he, himself, did them during his own lifetime; re: his predatory sex tourism, desire to abolish age of consent laws in France, and an addiction to self-destruction and (coercive) sadomasochist sex; i.e., humiliating sodomy being associated with the homosexual man as criminal from the perspective of the self-hating queer (and cis-het reactionaries).

Sexuality and gender are defined by the societies in which they form, and calling for a “tolerance” of abusive behaviors now just because “no one cared” back then is rape apologia, pure and simple; it’s not “speaking truth to power” but rather using one’s own power and privilege to get what one wants, and Foucault wanted to sexually “liberate” minors (an old cliché in the academic world; re: Beauvoir and Sartre waxing nostalgic about the Renaissance). Furthermore, he’s completely ignoring the power imbalances that he, not the bourgeoisie, would have had over these persons as a prominent, male French intellectual; i.e., the material conditions by which to manipulate them and the incredibly bad precedent this sets, mid-exploitation.

It’s entirely possible to critique institutional sexism, progress society towards post-scarcity using pre-capitalist language, and defend children/queer people at the same time, but Foucault doesn’t even try (to be fair, the language of inclusive queer theory was woefully underdeveloped when he wrote A History of Sexuality). He instead makes a regressive, predatory ultimatum, arguing for a return to an amoral time in order to benefit himself. That, taking the “theoretical” arguments and applying them to Foucault’s actions in the material world, we get to the truth of the man as a socio-material outcome: Foucault’s arguments about power could be used to critique material conditions when used by someone else, but ultimately were used by Foucault to cultivate power, prestige and material around himself; i.e., as a privileged, entitled thinker (Chomsky, despite having ties to sexual predator Jeffery Epstein [re: “Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names”], once called Foucault the most amoral person he ever met [source: “On Human Nature,” 1971]. Pot, meet kettle).

As practicing Gothic Communists, we should take what was useful from Foucault (re: acknowledge homosexual existence and persecution under a Western juridical system medicalizing them as alien) and apply to this inclusively to all GNC peoples—all while acknowledging and leaving Foucault’s dated, medieval predation of underaged boys behind. Rape is rape, and there’s no place for it in a post-scarcity world except as something to camp (re: to put “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM).

[9] Re: Lynn Stuart Parramore writes in “Like QAnon’s Capitol Rioters, the Nashville Bomber’s Lizard People Theory Is Deadly Serious” (2021):

The notion of shape-shifting, blood-sucking reptilian humanoids invading Earth to control the human race sounds like a cheesy sci-fi plot. But it’s actually a very old trope with disturbing links to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hostilities dating to the 19th century. […] Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the 1897 tale of a Romanian vampire who plans to take over London using his renowned shape-shifting abilities, also carries traces of this trope. The count possesses a number of reptilian qualities — from his association with the knightly Order of the Dragon, from which his name derives, to his cold-blooded nature and talent for shimmying down walls lizard-fashion. Dracula’s protruding teeth, pointed ears and blood-sucking habits mark him as a species apart, a motif of “othering” read by some critics as code for Jewishness. From this perspective, Stoker’s book is part of the British response to the increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The vampire is a stealthy invader, passing as a proper citizen but secretly plotting domination and destruction (source).

As usual, such things were made “to defend” (white, straight, middle-class) women and children; i.e., from any bias or bigotry that, itself, could be recombined to antagonize nature and put it to work through sodomy arguments and witch hunts.

[10] I can’t speak to his age, but Bad Empanada looks (and acts) like he’s in his late twenties or early thirties; i.e., a sophomore, or “wise fool.” I was about the same age before I went “back to school”; i.e., both literally but also while coming out of the closet in ways that opened my eyes to queer struggles and the therapeutic qualities to BDSM—until I eventually coined “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as new scholarship in my PhD. But being 38 myself, I have probably ten years (or so) on Bad Empanada, thus have had more time to reflect on/alter my positions; i.e., by meeting people who would influence me to change, thus come out of the closet and build on queer scholarship being, like all scholarship, a cumulative enterprise (more on this in part one of “Understanding Vampires”). He’s arrogant, but half-baked—needing more time to learn and grow away from his harmful cloistering.

[11] Said made his own mistakes when critiquing famous media and personalities; e.g., Jane Austen vis-à-vis Culture and Imperialism (1993). As I write in the essay “Gothic Communism, a sample essay: “Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire,” from Volume One:

Said riffed on Austen, “farting in Britain’s general direction” to say something larger about that country’s colonial guilt through their hypercanonical literature mom. That was new for the time (and useful to Gothic Communism for us). My essay does something similar in opposition to Gothic canon as something that is very much alive and well, and far less “quiet” than Austen’s Mansfield Park. Said is forced into, as John Sutherland puts it, “the awkward speculation, ‘Sir Thomas’s property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour (not abolished until the 1830s)'” and the “dead silence [that] pretty well describes Mansfield Park’s dealing with Antigua” (ibid.); the Gothic is far louder because it’s working with a kind of language whose “silence” is anything but quiet.

Even with Said debating Austen’s “ghost” minus Gothic poetics, there’s considerable merit to arguing with spectres and the unspoken (re: Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” which I expanded to “writing with monsters”). Indeed, doing so is a time-honored activity that largely makes up what the Gothic is. And while Said’s dialogs are certainly not without weight, they’re also nearly two centuries further along than Austen’s. To that, it’s certainly true there’s a complete lack of urgency in Austen’s novel surrounding any kind of modern importance that Said assigns to postcolonial concerns. These would have been absent in Austen’s time, with her focusing entirely on the struggles of a rising class of property that was quickly becoming a class of people in a slave-owning society through a particular novelistic convention: white women inside the novel of manners. It shouldn’t really be surprising that she kept mum on certain topics; e.g., her pointedly roundabout and indirect conversation between Eleanor Dashwood and Colonel Brandon showcasing how neither can bring themselves to utter the word “duel” in polite company. But if her stories are any clue, she was profoundly apt at navigating the expanding-if-sequestered place of white women in an incredibly material world, and not without a considerable degree of irony (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”) and dialectical-material analysis behind a veil that all women in her time were expected to wear by tone-policing white men; furthermore, as we have already explored in Volume Zero, Austen certainly wasn’t above critiquing the open, if deliberately moderate, bigotries of Ann Radcliffe’s own Gothic Orientalism (the further east you go, the darker it gets) when writing Northanger Abbey (written in 1803, published in 1817 after Austen’s death).

We shall press these Gothic voicings to our advantage in this essay. My point about Said is that I think he—ever in a hurry to outline the very-real and ever-pressing presence of American Imperialism in the Middle East—thoroughly underestimates/discounts the ubiquity (and degree) of the powerful forces that Austen was writing under as a white woman. It would be a mistake to lump Austen in with so many of her imitators and contemporaries, in part because her Mansfield protagonist, Sutherland rightly points out, “belongs to the Clapham Sect of evangelical Christianity, which hated plays and light morality only less slightly than it loathed slavery” (ibid.). Said’s overall conclusions certainly aren’t wrong about Imperialism, but his assertions about Austen are largely words put in her mouth by his pen (kinky), which he then argues with to make his point. The problem is, he assumes her silence to be indicative of a particular kind of guilt, when Austen’s shame at writing at all became a matter of legend after her death: “How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?” (source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition,” 2020).

(artist: Touminnn)

That’s the problem with ghosts in regards to trauma writing and illustrations: they yield a fictitious, imaginary component to unspeakable systemic abuse supplied by the critic seeking to give said abuse voice, and Said’s invention (as with many invocations of Austen) is not entirely of the woman herself but her reputation and the spirit (and shackles) of the British Empire stretching into Pax Americana following the so-called “end of history” in 1991 (Culture and Imperialism and Spectres of Marx were both written in 1993). As with all Gothic histories, though, there’s a considerable amount of truth to had through a familiarity with what is being said, unsaid, or supplied through various cryptonymies that indicate a presence of trauma (source).

In short, when in Rome, you don’t want to assume you know everything about its inhabitants or that they, regardless if they don’t do activism like you do (which is to say, write novels versus banging on a trashcan and shouting “rape!” at the top of your lungs). There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my dude, different activists working at different speeds to accomplish the same goal of universal liberation.

[12] Specifically your being middle-class and of the Global North. By comparison, Edward Said was a US citizen; he also taught at Columbia, wore a three-piece suit and wrote from relative luxury about his fellow oppressed elsewhere, refusing to wear a bulletproof vest despite writing both about “the problem of representation and the necessity of a political critique that is also a cultural critique” (source: Ella Shohat’s “In Memory of Edward Said – The Bulletproof Intellectual,” 2014) earning him many unwarranted detractors and critics; re: Culture and Imperialism.

Simply to it, as Said enjoyed his pleasures of exile, so do you; i.e., despite your dual citizenship, you make a considerable amount of money (enough to be considered middle class, anyways). Should we just dismiss everything you say because of that, like many of Said’s critics did with him? I don’t think so, nor is your calling on the rejection of others valid for much the same reasons.

However, I also don’t think we should hang on your every word because you primarily reject the social-sexual aspect of revolution (unlike Edward Said, oddly enough, but also Marx, who loved to write with the language of ghosts, vampires and other undead monsters; re: Castricano), and use your myopic, rather carcinogenic and Puritanical approach towards activism to say whatever vitriol you want about others; e.g., attacking and discounting large numbers of creators for being “Contrapoints clones” isn’t good criticism on its face (and I don’t even like Natalie Wynn; re: “Inside the Hall of Mirrors“); i.e., it starts to sound more and more like a dogwhistle and blanket, filibuster approach to discourse, weighing your recent comments with past behaviors, your origins and your political leanings, et al. It’s really not a good look, my dude.

To it, Said’s combination of class and critique (and his distance/privilege) gave him added perspective, and enhanced his arguments through a willingness to play with cultural devices; your distance/willful omissions/refusal to play with such things yourself—alongside your complete, unfiltered lack of restraint—is hostile, alienating and at times, thoroughly childish, grating and apathetic. Call me sensitive and masturbatory if you wish; I’m still reeling by just how standoffish, dated and SWERF-y you feel, thus overly sheltered and hypersensitive, yourself. Unable to play with others, you feel exclusionary and one-note—come off as a lopsided, anemic, pale-and-pernicious imitation. Something human is desperately missing from your work, lending the entire corpus a stale, robotic, isolated, and at times classist/class-reductive signature. I respect your tooth-and-nail fight for the Palestinians greatly (and other exploited workers), but you needn’t do that and fall back on second wave feminist tropes and Marxist-Leninist tendencies!

[13] As I write in “Making Marx Gay”:

The idea isn’t exactly new—Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism established the basic idea in 1977 and the Revolutionary Communist Party’s admittedly incomplete 2001 “On the Position on Homosexuality in the New Draft Programme” discussed the idea towards homosexuals and women, first and foremost, while not having the most comprehensive understanding of trans people. My approach takes things much further through a holistic Gothic methodology meant towards ending Capitalist Realism (which hadn’t crystalized in 1977, let alone the 1800s). Sex Positivity camps canon by “making it gay” using monsters to consciously humanize, thus liberate, workers with; i.e., cooler, sexier and more fun, etc, and in ways that—unlike Foucault or Marx—actively and effectively diminish the state’s capacity to inflict harm in service to the profit motive through Gothic poetics.

(source: Pluto Press)

Anyone who shoves asides the rights of one group for another—as Bad Empanada does for GNC people in defense of the Palestinians—needs to be weighed by the queerphobic history of Marxist-Leninism they’re imitating in the present moment.

[14] Despite Sherry Wolf calling “Marxist homophobia” a myth, such things were founded on a considerable amount of truth. Not only was Marx and Engel’s silence about homosexuals telling as a historical byproduct of the times in which they lived, but it constitutes a double standard that well outlived them into future forms of apology concerning both thinkers:

Heteronormativity certainly has closeted men endlessly overcompensating for their perceived “lack” of straightness, to which we can only speculate about Marx being closeted or not. What matters is what he said or didn’t say regarding the liberation of GNC people from state control. His problem, as we shall see, lay less in how he focused primarily on class and material conditions instead of class and culture combined through socio-material conditions, but that the language hadn’t “caught up.” As Sherry Wolf points out in “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia” (2009): “It is insufficient, however, to argue that Marx and Engels were merely prisoners of the era in which they lived, though they were undoubtedly influenced by the dominant Victorian morals of the early Industrial Revolution” (source). Indeed, they fought progressively for the Cause regarding those scandals and crises-of-the-day that society published most openly and clearly. Among these, homosexuality had yet to emerge, and indeed would not until Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial (1895) twelve years after Marx had already kicked the bucket (1883).

Wolf raises concerns about American slavery and anti-Irish racism, to which Marx and Engels fought for the oppressed; what injustices they saw and had the language for, they fought for the side of workers on social issues:

All this refuses definitively the argument that Marxism is interested only in questions of class. Marx and Engels’ body of writings and life’s pursuit have influenced generations of revolutionaries who have fought for a better world, including a sexually liberated one. Yet there is no reason to defend every utterance and act as if they were infallible gods instead of living men, warts and all (source: “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia,” 2009).

I’m inclined to agree with Wolf, but won’t apologize for the societal ignorance that informed Marx and Engel’s private homophobia. Clearly there is room for improvement, which neither man lived to see, and this is best expressed through Gothic poetics; i.e., the open, popular language of monsters and aliens as fetishized by the state, but also workers for or against the state and the bourgeoisie (source: “Making Marx Gay”).

In other words, there was a blind spot in their work that neither man lived to correct. And frankly, there’s no guarantee that they would have. Certainly, plenty afterwards did not, including Lenin, Stalin and many other Soviets, Chinese and Americans alike. So no, Wolf, these men aren’t infallible gods, meaning we should criticize them; i.e., to camp their ghosts, not suck their dicks and ignore the lived reality of their movement’s effects on so many queer people (which extends to cis-het groups through lateral abuses)! Equality and liberation needs to be universal or it leads to the same kinds of problems that academics still apologize for in the present day—the state and Marxist-Leninism!

To perhaps belabor the point, fighting for one group does not guarantee you will fight for another (see: tokenism in the present); i.e., Marx and Engels, the men, fought for many groups, but turned a blind eye to others that carried into Marxist-Leninism over its entire lifespan. As such, the consequences of Marx’s buried dialogs with Engels (and exclusion of queerness at large) can be felt in nearly two centuries of arrested development, the state resisting changes away from heteronormativity on either side of the Iron Curtain!

[15] From “Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps” (2024).

[16] Whereas Sherry Wolf apologizes for Marx a little bit too charitably in “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia,” I find it’s much easier to play defense for Anne Rice in my own writing. Unlike Marx, Rice was arguably practicing as gay in her work and her life (and her son certainly is); i.e., standing and being recognized during times of moral panic (which, while the first English trial directly against a man described as “homosexual” would happen with Oscar Wilde in 1895, trials for sodomy* actually preceded Marx’ birth in 1818 by decades, and living in England from 1849 onwards would have seen gay men as alien much like any other bigot of the time); e.g., Marlow Stern’s “Anne Rice Opens Up: ‘I Feel Like I’m Gay'” (2017):

I’ve never associated AIDS with vampires, myself. I’ve always been very much a champion of gay rights, and art produced by gay people—whether it was the early Frankenstein movies that had such a gay sensibility to them, or any art created by gay people. I’m highly sensitive to it. I have a gay sensibility. I get teased a lot by my gay friends because we have a rapport on things we find exciting or interesting. It’s very hard for me to remember that I have a gender, and that they’re treating me in a negative way because of that gender (Marlow Stern’s “Anne Rice Opens Up: ‘I Feel Like I’m Gay'” (source).

And certainly the vampiric poetic trends she played with and modified (while turning a buck) were made in ways she inherited and changed for others to abuse in turn, while she continually refused to.

*Re (from Colin Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon,” 2021):

Victims of the law were ritually humiliated and then murdered in an extravagant and merciless display of state power. Around the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a long-running pogrom aimed specifically against gay men that exploded during the decades of The Monk‘s original release. As Louis Compton records in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England: ‘By 1806 the number of executions had risen to an average of two a year and remained there for three decades, though executions for every other capital offense decreased dramatically.’ In the 1790s, when Lewis was writing The Monk, judicial anti-homosexual persecution was at its height in England. Gangs of undercover police officers from anti-homosexual task forces infiltrated queer spaces, sending scores of gay men to the gallows or pillory and creating a palpable sense of paranoia throughout England’s underground LGBT communities (source).

By comparison, Marx and Engels created ideas that other abused, which they a) eponymized and b) excluded queer people from. Marx wasn’t ignorant of queer people and their persecution (see: above). He and Engels simply chose (to the degree that anyone can, under accident of birth) to alienate them—an exclusionary quality that reflects in the queerphobic people and structures that survived and were built uncritically from both men’s body of work. Want to help cis women? Engels has you covered! Gay people and GNC? Crickets; re (from “Making Marx Gay”):

For [Marx] and Engels, queerness was “sodomy” and the third sex (a problematic term) was “Uranians,” but that view was informed by the present availability of information at the time. Even so, Engels—despite calling sodomy “abominable” in “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1883) and lacking the ability to distinguish harmful forms from non-harmful forms—tries in the same essay to imagine a world beyond his own that speaks to our goals:

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion of their practice of each individual—and that will be the end of it (source).

In response, Sherry Wolf writes in “The Myth of Marxist Homophobia,”

While here Engels is explicit about how heterosexual relations would undoubtedly be transformed by a socialist revolution, his broader point is that by removing the material obstacles to sexual freedom the ideological barriers can fall. This raises far-reaching possibilities for a genuine sexual revolution on all fronts (source).

Again, I am inclined to agree, but want to critique Engels a bit more than Wolf does. The people he’s discussing aren’t those born into a world where Capitalism simply “doesn’t exist” when the person is born. To posit that is to kick the can down the road and shrug one’s shoulders. Instead, the current generation must try to imagine a better future while developing Communism in the bargain. To that, hearts, minds and bodies can change while people are alive, and the trick, I would argue, is through Gothic poetics; I was in the closet once and have needed to work hard while alive to become a better, more authentic person. It’s certainly far too late to rescue Marx and Engels the historical figures from the embarrassing grave they admittedly dug for themselves, but we can transform their spectres as living entities inside society and ourselves. Take what is useful and leave the rest. Marx will understand. And if he doesn’t, to Hell with him! (source).

In short, we don’t want to apologize for the past and our cross our fingers. Capitalist or Marxist-Leninist, the state simply isn’t gay by function, putting us at the bottom while it fucks us in ways we don’t agree to or want.

As such, if the state isn’t gay enough, make something gayer that it! Your survival—and that of all queer people across space and time—depends on it (closeting in silence and silence is genocide):

Sex Positivity camps canon by “making it gay” using monsters to consciously humanize, thus liberate, workers with; i.e., cooler, sexier and more fun, etc, and in ways that—unlike Foucault or Marx—actively and effectively diminish the state’s capacity to inflict harm in service to the profit motive through Gothic poetics.

In other words, the state commodifies oppression through monsters, which we must challenge by making our own. Our “making it gay” includes Marx and his ghostly reputation as something to debate with (and improve on) in spectral forms that hold these once-living men accountable now for their bigotries back then (from my author’s foreword in the thesis volume):

Marx wasn’t gay enough for my tastes, thus could never camp canon to the amount required. In camping him, I’m obviously doing this through the Gothic mode, specifically its making of monsters—their lairs, battles, identities and struggles—through a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients that represents ourselves during shared dialectical-material struggles that take what Marx touched on before going further than he ever could

However private they may have kept them, it doubtless affected their ability to speak out loud concerning the rights of gender-non-conforming persons and their divergent sexualities. So we, by camping their ghosts, must not be silent like theirs were/are; we must use any means at our disposal to “cry out,” including novels and movies, but also videogames and their franchised material (ibid.).

Make everything gay where it is not; however irreversibly affixed to history at large, and/or ghostly and sacred, don’t be afraid to change it! Make Marx and Communism gayer than Marxist-Leninism dared! From the Base to the Superstructure, camp all aspects of it to account for all peoples then, now and in the future. This isn’t a trolley problem—i.e., where one side has to die—but a gradual and total freeing of all those involved from such raw deals, once and for all!

[17] And likewise other heteronormative elements of fantasy and science fiction, regardless of who authored them; i.e., the monomyth as rooted in socio-material aspects that the state, per the Base and Superstructure, has a vested interest in not subverting the status quo; e.g., Jack Fall’s “Knightfall” (timestamp: 14:12; 2023) pointing out how YouTuber Shadiversity (a white LARPer with fascist beliefs—surprise, surprise) can’t stand the new 2023 Mario movie because the male hero… doesn’t follow the same-old Hero’s Journey that millions of other male status-quo heroes have followed before and after Joseph Campbell pointed these things out in 1949 (or Jung before that).

[18] Re, Stern: Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire to cope with losing her daughter. In short, vampirism can be used as a poetic device to mount a variety of arguments and achieve a variety of effects, sex-positive or sex-coercive!

[19] According to the UCLA as of 2022 (source: “How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?”), 1.6 million people ages 13+ identify as trans in the US. Divide that by the US population in 2022 (~333 million), and .004% is the percentage we make up. That’s how marginalized we are, yet for which American conservative (and complicit moderacy through establishment politics) has devoted so much hate and anti-trans legislation towards (over 450 failed bills in 2024, 127 in effect from earlier years, and 45 new ones passed this year alone; source: Translegislation).

And while being trans (thus sparkly and covered in rainbows and glitter), I don’t want to encapsulate that hip virtue signal to for centrists to flag wave at the expense of those less well off (and populous) actively being bombed into the ground, denied asylum, starved to death, or otherwise preyed upon by the American state abroad; e.g., the Palestinians, but also other targeted groups abroad. We can call for the liberation of all parties involved, simultaneously!

[20] From David Suresh’s Transgenders Problems and Administrative Response (2016):

Origin of the Transgender Word

Psychiatrist John F. Oliven of Columbia University coined the term transgender in his 1965 reference work Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, writing that the term which had previously been used, Transsexualism, “is misleading; actually, transgenderism is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism” (Oliven, John, F., 1965: 514). The term “transgender” was then popularized with varying definitions by various TG, transsexual and transvestite people, including Virginia Prince (Thomas, E. Bevan, 2014: 42), who used it in the December 1969 issue of Transvestia, a national magazine for cross dressers she 11 founded (Elikins, Richard, King, Dave, 2006: 13-14). By the mid-1970s both “transgender” and “trans people” were in use as umbrella terms, and “transgenderist” was used to describe people who wanted to live cross-gender without sex reassignment surgery (SRS) (Stryker, S., 2004). By 1976, ‘transgenderist’ was abbreviated as ‘transgender’ in educational materials (The Radio Times, 1979).

By 1984, the concept of a “transgender community” had developed, in which transgender was used as an umbrella term (Peo, 1984); in 1985, Richard Elkins established The Trans-Gender Archive at the University of Ulster (Elikins, Richard, King, Dave, 2006). By 1992, the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy defined transgender as an expansive umbrella term including “transsexuals,” “transgenderists,” “cross dressers” and anyone transitioning (ICTLEP, 1992) […]

Transsexual and its relationship to Transgender

The term transsexual was introduced to English in 1949 by David Oliver Cauldwell, and popularized by Harry Benjamin in 1966, around the same time “transgender” was coined and began to be popularized (Thomas E. Bevan, 2014). Since the 1990s, “transsexual” has generally been used to describe the subset of “transgender” people (Alegria, A.C., 2011: 175-182) who desire to transition permanently to the gender with which they identify and who seek medical assistance (for example, SRS) with this. However, the concerns of the two groups are sometimes different; for example, transsexual men and women who can pay for medical treatments (or who have institutional coverage for their treatment) are likely to be concerned with medical privacy and establishing a durable legal status as their gender later in life.

Distinctions between the terms “transgender” and “transsexual” are commonly based on distinctions between “gender” (psychological, social) and sex (physical) (Prince, Varginia Charles, 1969). Hence, transsexuality may be said to deal more with material aspects of one’s sex, while TG considerations deal more with one’s internal gender disposition or predisposition, as well as the related social expectations that may accompany a given gender role (Nova, A. Swanstrom 2006). Many TG people prefer the designation “transgender” and reject “transsexual” (Polly, R and J. Nicole, 2011). For example, Christine Jorgensen publicly rejected transsexual in 1979, and instead identified herself in newsprint as “transgender, saying, gender doesn’t have to do with bed partners; it has to do with identity” (Parker Jerry, 1978). This refers to the concern that transsexual implies something to do with sexuality, when it is actually about gender identity (source).

Keep these definitions in mind. The state generally excludes by medicalizing queerness—a quality that manifests not just in TERFs and biological essentialism, but NERFs and transmedicalists like Contrapoints and Buck Angel (whose tokenism we’ll explore in Volume Three); i.e., us-versus-them gatekeeping through medical privileges generally afforded by more affluent queers like those two (and many others, besides)!

[21] A director that, while for all intents and purposes, wasn’t himself above making some fairly queer-friendly material that, in the same breath, Hitler apparently loved. Henry Giardina writes in “Hitler’s Favorite Movie Was Super Gay, Actually” (wonderful title):

Lang had made one of Hitler’s favorite films of all time in 1924’s Siegfried, a technically-advanced adaptation of the 13th-century epic poem Die Nibelungenlied, which told the story of a brave (blonde, Aryan) hero who slays a dragon but is later killed by treachery.

Lang’s adaptation came in two parts: the first, Siegfried, focused on the Aryan hero of myth […] it was Siegfried that Hitler loved most: he picked up on the nascent nationalism that would come to define the film industry under Third Reich rule, made up of those tall tales about blood quantum and blonde purity that would make it easier for an entire nation to view Jews—as well as other “deviants” and “undesirables” such as queer people, people of color, and folks with disabilities—as objects for extermination.

There’s one little contradiction here: Siegfried happens to be extraordinarily gay. Like, very gay. As in: hours of watching a hot guy walk around without a shirt on gay. As in every character standing in pure worship of this random hot dude for no apparent reason gay [and all in a time when steroids didn’t exist, the best men could hope aping Eugene Sandow].

There’s also a canon lesbian character in Siegfried: the Amazon warrior Brunhilde. She refuses to give herself to any man who can’t best her in battle, and before she meets Siegfried, no such man exists. But when Siegfried disguises himself as his betrothed’s brother, King Gunther, to win Brunhilde’s hand for the cowardly king, she’s forced to marry him. When she learns the truth, of course, she’s pissed: and she sets in motion a plan to have Gunther kill Siegfried, despite Gunther’s obvious attraction to the young demigod (source).

To my readers (and queer people at large), all of this should really come as no surprise. It’s not exactly a well-kept secret how a) the state uses godly body language and militant theatrics conjured up anew (re: Marx), which b) queer forces classically camp on the same stages (as Sex Positivity constantly argues). Shelley would take this same basic “bodybuilder” idea and make Prometheus gay (the male scientist giving birth to an infernal son) and vengeful, but also in highly subversive, vampiric ways; i.e., whose trauma and sodomy rhetoric would handily survive up to the 1970s and well beyond!

[22] As Ariela Gittlen writes in “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art”:

Academic French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme’s take on the allegorical figure of Truth (specifically, the philosopher Democritus’s aphorism: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well”) differs from contemporary interpretations in a number of ways. A beautiful nude woman emerges from a well, an open-mouthed shout of anger on her face and a whip in her hand, rather than the usual mirror. Although she is nude (a blunt reference to “the naked truth”), she looks ready to charge straight for the viewer in a full-throated battle cry (source).

(artist: Jean-Léon Gérôme)

We’ll return to this concept in Volume Three, part one when we compare Sadako to Gérôme’s Truth (exhibit 96). For now, just know that monsters do not have set allegiances or authors, and that something seemingly as queerphobic as the xenomorph or Pyramid head can, in the right iconoclast’s subversive hands, speak easily enough to queer liberation through an-Com theatrics by destabilizing the moral order of the state (re: Aguirre); i.e., through spaces of terror but also the castle-like bodies associated with them (re: me) having queer monstrous-feminine rage and joy alike!

[23] Re: “For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was ‘the wrong war against the wrong enemies.’ Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda” (source: Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

[24] Later on, token queer people would identify with Ripley and others. But revolutionary fags were just as likely to identify with the xenomorph as try to reclaim Ripley from her corporate, settler-colonial origins (she’s a bit second wave).

[25] Built, as Meg-Jon Barker explains in “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” (2016) on two forebears: a) the 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex,” by Gayle Rubin and their arguments about sex hierarchies; and b) the 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” by Adrienne Rich and their arguments for the title topic. Such ideas started off more pulverized, working on popularized concepts that strove to get closer and closer to the heart of things; i.e., I would take Barker’s explanation and built on it, hence Rubin, Rich, Foucault, Creed, and many others, thus expand the multimedia ludo-Gothic BDSM web of inclusion to as many oppressed (and diverse) queers as I could. Hopefully it snowballs!

[26] In regards to forbidden fruit, the conservative argument/perspective extends to the closeted “chaser”—i.e., a person who outwardly rejects the pursuit of “sodomy” (in the medieval sense) but secretly pursues it in private in relation to various out-group types: the twink, femboy or ladyboy, or trans women more broadly as monstrous-feminine entities. Speaking as a trans woman who once identified as a femboy, our treatment by these chasers reduces us to a kind of “dangerous drug” or “bait” in a punitive hierarchy of abuse: the “prison sex” phenomenon. Inside it, our abusers brand us with in public with coded language, then pursue us in private. Conversely, while chasers are often white, cis-het men, they can include AFAB sex workers that police trans women as a smaller subset of AMAB sex worker “bait” within “women” as a larger minority category. These AFAB women “chase” us down and punish us as “bait” that steals their customers, in the process blaming us for being treated this way by cis-male chasers and by AFAB “chasers” as well. I have a small section in Volume Three, Chapter Four dedicated to this concept based on my own experiences.