This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first 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). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). 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 “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 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.

An Uphill Battle, part three: Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires; feat Cuwu)

“I’ve known sheep that could outwit you, I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs, but you, you think you’re an intellectual, don’t you, ape!”

“Apes don’t read philosophy!”

“Yes they do, Otto; they just don’t understand it!”

—Wanda and Otto, A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Picking up where “Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires” left off…

Whereas Marx once said, “Private property makes people stupid,” my thesis argued, “Capitalism sexualizes (and alienates) everything.” In Marxists words, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us” To that, sex and nature (animals, food, people) are things that you have in service to the profit motive in a Cartesian system; e.g., to have sex, to have a meal, sex-as-a-meal, etc, under settler-colonialism; i.e., under a belief system that instructs us-versus-them rhetoric, thus taking all of the above by force from a perceived alien by a perceived human and advertised constantly during military optimism to serve the profit motive.

As such, the nation-state under Capitalism monopolizes violence and terror by privatizing it, generally through Gothic poetics that make people stupid, alienating them from each other during canonical expression; during asymmetrical class and culture warfare, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism abolishes nation-states, including private property and the violent, chattelizing stupidity it causes (whose gradients of stupidity we’ll go over in this subchapter—including vampires, as we’ve slowly been hinting at). This abolishment includes dismantling marriage as a religious-secular institution, but also creatively expressing love in de-privatizing Gothic language. Communism is entirely extramarital/de-nuclear, but also inclusively exceptional. Forget “There can only be one”; under Communism, we’re all queens, best boys and best girls, enbies, etc. Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism applies this idea to the language of monsters as it reflects in the natural-material world across space and time—through monster pastiche as an extension of systemic conflicts produced between workers for or against the state. In short, it’s like an uphill, guerilla battle for our brains, but also our bodies, hearts and pumping lifeblood touched by trauma in ways that, as we have explored, animalize us as prey for predatory state forces: the vampire is a seducer who hypnotizes their prey and feeds on them, but also assumes the forms of various animals, concealing the confusing reality that canonical vampires are divorced from nature, and indeed responsible for its enslavement and destruction (Otto, pictured above, is a misogynist pig who thinks too highly of himself, both a complete dumbass and curiously someone who hates animals: “You know what Nietzsche said about animals, Ken? That they were God’s second blunder!”).

The first two subchapters touched on animalistic poetics and castles, so I don’t want to focus on them too much, here. Instead, I want to use this subchapter to consider the kinds of stupidities that regularly emerge between workers “turned” by the state; i.e., which it has rendered unironically vampiric in some shape or form. What we’ve discussed so far will come up, though, so keep all of it in mind. Likewise, consider all of this as part of our dossier of practical theory that, itself, will prove invaluable when synthesizing praxis by confronting trauma ourselves. That confrontation starts among the people we live with, but also work and fight with, and here is where the confrontation of trauma as something to process through our interpersonal relationships will start to emerge and develop; i.e., leading out of the manifesto and into the instruction half of the volume.

Gothic Communism seeks not a return to tradition and older ways of life as they once were, neither those false or empty revolutions, nor older rebellions that came and went; it uses what we’re born with—our bodies and emotions, but also gut animal feelings, genders, dreams and sexualities, as well as our stories, imaginations and language as begot from these things as they presently exist—to inclusively transform the world beyond “Rome” (Capitalism) in various slave rebellions and boundary-setting exercises that demonstrate emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness as things to cultivate through proletarian praxis: to make our own castles, monsters, muses and media that speak to, from and of our lived experiences. This includes our trauma as attached to and informed by the material world extending from these things, effectively coming out of our brains, our bodies as being closer to nature in praxis that those without trauma; i.e., the Wisdom of the Ancients as a cultural understanding of the imaginary past as useful to our political cause, corrupting the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and the Superstructure—into Communist forms that address our suffering and systemic abuse. Oppositional praxis reclaims one tree and recultivates the other to camp canon, making it gay through creativity as fundamental towards making people more (or less) emotionally and Gothically intelligent.

The Gothic castle and its monsters, then, work as a kind of school of sorts, one literally called the Schools of Terror and Horror in the Neo-Gothic period; it is something that workers can make or represent through themselves learning from past auteurs like Walpole and Lewis, but also Radcliffe and her offshoots. Every monster has an upbringing and haunt riddled with emotional turmoil, an unruly place to call home even when they are unwelcome there or otherwise posed as a challenge to the current inhabits (making up their own lies about ownership). It’s all an attempt to blend in, but also relying on people sitting across from you, who—for one reason or another—cannot read the room:

(artist: La Faux Creux)

To this, the Gothic (vis-à-vis Tolkien) is not generally used by straight white people as an actively critical device, especially when said persons are already pretty accustomed to the socio-material benefits of the Imperial Core. As Jadis shows us, those persons (usually cis-het men or women, though Jadis was a token genderfluid person) have famously found ample cause to attack or commodify the Gothic mode as originally made by homosexual men or gender-non-conforming women resisting older institutional decrees appearing inside their lands; i.e., with historical moderates either whitewashing the Gothic, capitalizing on it, or entirely excluding it in or in whole for something “better” (re: Coleridge, Radcliffe and Jameson). But even with the aforementioned iconoclasts that these sticks-in-the mind aimed to discount, there was certainly critical power among the room for improvement, and things to rescue from Radcliffe as an imperfect moderate herself (we’ve explored Radcliffe’s numerous imperfections plenty in Volume Zero, but will consider their revolutionary potential [such as it is] in Volume Two).

To be blunt, the state raises its own castles and molds its own monsters that pointedly make workers stupidly vampiric; while Communism wakes workers up, Gothic Communism does so with castles and monsters that actually challenge Capitalism even more than past versions did (and not all historically even did, remember). The basic process requires propaganda, but can be divided into canonical or iconoclastic forms during Gothic exchanges between warring groups. Either rely on poiesis to work; i.e., “to bring into being that which did not exist before”—to make art, specifically monsters or things regarded as monsters or where monsters live echoed through cryptomimesis. During Socialism, said monsters and castles will still exist (along with the technology and workers needed to express them); they just won’t be exploited by the bourgeoisie for profit because the bourgeoisie will cease to exist and private property will be abolished, then replaced by horizontal arrangements of power and reclaimed stigmas (and stigma animals)/torturous language that enable and maximize labor—not as a force for war, the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda’s manufactured consent, settler colonialism, etc—but as an enriching means of interrogating older expressions for all inhabitants of the Earth in peaceful, co-existing ways: to de-escalate and remove[1] war as something to produce and endorse in the material world, arts and STEM fields through sex and monstrous bodies/genders, castles, and so on.

This is a gradual procedure, meaning it requires patience, awareness and constant application to work; i.e., between groups of people, and generally by people who have to warm up to the idea of even taking part in iconoclastic deeds: not just sex work, but standing up for themselves during it as a source of pride, boosted confidence and courage. To that, Jadis was gutless and judgmental, but also harrowingly abusive. To have a sex-positive example, we’ll have to look to my friend Dulcinea/Dulci (whose alias refers to the barmaid from Don Quixote, 1605). As they demonstrate, finding one’s nerve not only took not just practice, but going outside their comfort zone to achieve the comfort levels needed to stand up for themselves and have fun among the things they love.

Alas, Dulci’s story does not have a happy ending. And their tragedy demonstrates that revolution is a constant, uphill battle threatened by abusive parties against those they will try to keep stupid through coercive measures; e.g., physical violence, but also mental attacks, like a vampire: DARVO, love-bombing and isolation, etc. Minus any identifying features, I’ve preserved Dulci’s material in this subchapter in order to learn from their mistakes and lived experiences. —Perse

(exhibit 11a: Artist: Cecilio Pla, of the “princess” Dulcinea from Don Quixote. My friend Dulci tried to come out of their shell doing cosplay and sex work. Over time, they grew more comfortable with going to conventions while dressing up [and meeting cool people like Steven Blum, the voice of Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop, 1998] and using sex toys, but also doing sex work and being the femme fatale princess in cathartic, ironic, oft-slutty ways that reclaim their thicc body as a badass source of pride; e.g., Orchid from Killer Instinct [1995] and Princess Zelda. Sadly, Dulci’s exhibit has been removed, as they met someone who grew jealous of Dulci’s sex work and used that to isolate Dulci from their friends. In the end, my friendship with Dulci dissolved, and I have—per their wishes—removed all images of them from the book.)

As part of their development towards doing sex work as a job, Dulci came to visit and we negotiated our operative/actionable boundaries as I was also helping them start sex work on OnlyFans. This included sex—to fuck the way we both agreed to, no coercion. I won’t lie. It wasn’t the best sex on the planet—they didn’t like to cuddle or sleep in the same bed—but it was still nice to get my nut and still be able to help Dulci set up their own revenue stream. They wanted to do their own thing and that’s cool; so is the fact that certain offers are put on the table and taken off again as both sides hash things out over space and time (including the dissolving of our friendship). What’s important is that it’s conditional and mutually agreed upon—no ultimatums, in other words. Dulci agreed to let me have sex with them provided I

• knew they were going to be fantasizing about someone else
• called them a slut or a “ho”
• pulled out and came on their body not inside them (even though I’ve had a vasectomy and they have an IUD)

This had to do with Dulci releasing stress and rebelling against their overbearing/overprotective mother. Said mother’s views on love are privatized, in the sense of Capitalism making workers stupid by conceiving ownership as an exploitative “usage-equals-ownership” model. When attached to its historical-material conditions stuck on repeat, heteronormativity creates uneven feelings/pulverized divisions of idiosyncratic stupidity and caution. These canonical attitudes towards private property apply to men and women under a punitive hierarchy that divides sexualized labor (and workers from nature) dimorphically inside a heteronormative, settler-colonial scheme; i.e., what Tolkien upheld, and which extends into more openly Gothic stories.

Because of this division, we’ll need at least two examples if we want to holistically interrogate the problem of idiosyncratic stupidity among domestic workers. However, I’ll use three (other than Jadis, whose stupidity we’ve covered enough for now but will reexamine far more in Volume Two); I’m going with that number because I am trans, thus don’t fit neatly into the binary but have met people who certainly do:

• my ex-roomie, Beavis (not his real name)—a heteronormative, cis-het dude/Catholic masters student with conflicting social-sexual desires
• myself and my own “Gothic” situation of stupidity and caution: falling in love with a model I drew before Jadis kicked me out and fucked afterwards: Cuwu
• Dulci’s mom—a half-stupid, overly cautious woman worried about her “wayward” daughter

We’ll also need a monster type, for which I’ve chosen the vampire.

Let’s start with Beavis. His idiosyncratic stupidity manifested in the universal male fear under Capitalism: dying a virgin. Beavis loved animals but had zero idea how to talk to girls. He was also incredibly privileged, jealous and scheming when it came to women, but also searching for that “perfect” wife: the small, submissive woman who looked like his high school crush and would have his kids. While pretty damn telling and creepy all on its own, he was straight-up canceling second or third dates with girls who were DTF because they didn’t want to have “his” kids. Like, if it matters to you so much, just put it on your dating profile, dude; people aren’t telepathic!

Beavis never learned. He not only insisted he “was a nice guy” (code for “creep,” these days); he was also a secret gun nut who squirreled away fucking assault rifles and lied to Jadis and I about it! This put me in a weird spot because—while I thoroughly detest guns (my three brothers once pointed our paternal grandfather’s rifles at me without checking to see if they were loaded and then pulled the trigger like a damn firing line)—Jadis was working on their master’s thesis and I didn’t want to worry them; but then things eventually came out and, well, that was a mess! Pro-tip, kids: Don’t keep secrets if you can help it (to be fair, Jadis was abusive towards me, but we’ll explore that even more during the synthesis roadmap when we discuss most directly synthesis/oppositional-grouping stratagems like girl talk and healing from trauma)!

(artist: Mike Judge)

In the end, Beavis never scored (unless he finally found his maiden on his mom’s Catholic dating app). I tried for weeks to be a good wing girl for him—eventually deciding to protect women from him when I realized he needed to learn for everyone’s good. I got increasingly weird signals from him and tried to teach him to be better. Rather than listen, though, he just whined and moaned, blaming women but also lusting after the ones he “wanted”: the most prey-like. He wouldn’t sleep with the hot, slutty girl who was DFT or any of the girls on his dating app; he just fawned after someone at work who not only had a boyfriend, but—you guessed it—looked like his high school crush. She was a very nice person; i.e., was actually willing to try and hook the lad up with a friend if only he stopped making things weird. Sadly, Beavis didn’t listen to me or her at all; it was like he had it all figured out, but was paradoxically tormented by his Catholic grief (akin to Matthew Lewis’ Ambrosio). Frankly he had no clue. I told him, “College is the time when you’re not under your mother’s thumb. Just experiment!” He never, ever did, blaming women by default for his failures (the classic Catholic’s Original Sin victim-blaming/male victimhood complex—a wicked combo).

While Beavis’ ordinary-looking appearance belied an internal, vampiric predator—and his stupidity was altogether impressive for a single person (never underestimate the power of stupid people in groups)—his own psychological divisions were less acutely severe than more immediately pluralized persons, in large part because his privilege spared him the kind of trauma such fracturing demands. Yet, he was still divided in ways utterly commonplace under Capitalism (and well-at-home in Gothic novels; e.g., Matthew Lewis’ 18th-century take on the incel: Father Ambrosio): from sex and nature; i.e., girls were alien to him and he fetishized them for their natural biological functions for him to dominate. Indeed, Beavis’ biggest problem was that he wanted manufactured consent, not genuine, informed consent. The sex-positive idea is to want someone to want you, like that Cheap Trick song—to need your body and your personality, your sense of humor and your touch, your pussy or your dick, etc. At the same time, appreciating value goes both ways when relating to others in whatever ways we can actually get. To whatever extent you both agree on, it’s not about fitting in perfectly or agreeing on every little thing being offered; it’s about being however intimate you’re both decidedly comfortable with: FWBs, fuck buddies, one-night-stands, marriage, “just experimenting,” etc. All the same, any “vibe check” should be done, if not on your toes, then at least on your feet; watch out for false friends, because people suck! The same goes for false symbols, fake rainbows, assimilated homosexual men (which vampires represent), etc:

(exhibit 11b1a: Top-left: Our classic friends of Dorothy making an appeal to a very heteronormative, colonizer/false wizard; higher-bottom-left: proletarian wizard, Mike Jittlov; middle: liminal, appropriated witch, Mila Kunis from Sam Raimi’s 2013 Oz the Great and Powerful; bottom-right: Artnip; bottom-left: Talia. Rainbow Capitalism loves to slap rainbows on pretty much everything. All the same, the rainbow during oppositional praxis remains a liminal symbol of queer liberation amid heteronormative appropriation—can be re-slapped on art that feels sex-positive to the person altering it; i.e., a countercultural marking to an already iconoclastic artwork or artist. During oppositional praxis as remediated through pastiche, there arise many bourgeois/proletarian witches, queens, queer folk, monsters, dream girls, etc—all of which we’ll unpack and examine throughout the book, but especially in Volume Three, Chapters Four and Five.)

While proletarian caution applies to queer circles as things to infiltrate by state enforcers playing the vampire (and asking for an invitation inside), it also applies to heteronormatively Gothic stories as things to camp. For example, in McG’s surprisingly good, 2017 horror-comedy, The Babysitter, Bee the blonde bombshell evokes a shape-shifting devil on par with Matthew Lewis’ gender-swapping Matilda: every cloistered boy’s wet dream/worst nightmare. In this case, the hero is an awkward white nerd called Cee, whose innocent virgin blood Bee requires for her Faustian witchcraft. Making this movie, McG is just as self-aware and playful two centuries later as Lewis was, evoking complex wish fulfillment: a desire to victim-blame warring with wanting to use someone according to canonically assigned (and iconoclastically rebellious) gender roles. This playful dissonance is typical of the Gothic story and has been since Horace Walpole first wrote The Castle of Otranto.

Not only did Walpole originally pass Otranto off as a “historical” artifact “disinterred” and presented as “genuine”; his goal was to illustrate the novel—a story of everyday experience—as married[2] to the Ancient Romance, a tale of high imagination, adventure and reinvention of the medieval period. Doing so requires working within the imaginary past as something to reassemble in the present, generally with incongruent, imperfect replicas; i.e., on par with Beltane or tarot as something to appreciate/appropriate depending on who’s doing the reinvention; e.g., Marilyn Roxie’s The Public Tarot as an appreciative example of digital hauntologies in videoludic form (the game is no longer online, but a screencap of it is, below):

Rainbows and queerness are generally Gothic, but also consistently liminal and grappling with various renditions of themselves: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987) vs Rainbow’s cautionary “Tarot Woman” (1976) illustrating the quaint paradox of manly rainbows versus gay ones. Not only can phenomenological conflict through an unheimlich not be avoided; I would argue it’s the whole point of Gothic stories: to face agitated, warring confusion (often in relation to repressed sexual desires and gender dysphoria) and deal with it (and the doubles that cause it) as part of the advertised experience commenting on the Western home as imperiled from within. This includes people infected by Capitalism, becoming stupid, vampiric abusers who have survived trauma only to become arbiters of capital through ghosts of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection through lived experiences passed from person to person but informed by popular stories.

Similar to Walpole and Lewis, then, McG’s Gothic is not just the wholesale stuff of fiction; it’s a turbulent, fun commentary on real, everyday events told in displaced, dissociative, half-real language not quite divorced from the present space and time: fairytale love and over-the-top, outmoded betrayal when the vampire (the classic master of the Gothic castle) comes home to roost in an American suburb where a) no castles exist, and b) the houses are full of fresh, tempting virgin blood!

This paradoxical authenticity is something I can vouch for in my own life. Despite Cee obviously being a cis-het teenage boy navigating the monomyth inside his own house as hellish, I had a very similar experience myself while still inside the closet. In a galaxy not so far, far away… a past friend and sex worker called Cuwu (who the book has mentioned repeatedly by now) used me for their own stupid, selfish needs after Jadis kicked me to the curb. Like a vampire hypnotizing their prey, Cuwu’s courtship happened in ways I didn’t completely agree to. All the same, they made my wildest dreams come true (we once fucked on the floor and recorded it while discussing my thesis work on Hollow Knight (2017) and watching this 2021 Silk Song fan video by Less [above] afterwards)! Before Jadis had thrown me out for calling them abusive, I had met Cuwu online a month prior while drawing sex workers (which Jadis knew about). Like Jadis, Cuwu also talked a good game and knew a ton about DBT (versus Jadis’ extensive knowledge about BDSM and tendency to selectively follow its tenets for their own benefit). Cuwu’s premise was to offer me a safe, loving environment after my breakup with Jadis. It worked like a charm, lowering my defenses and making me stupid. Pussy on the brain will do that (or dick; just ask Alcibiades), classically leading to live burial (which, as Eve Sedgwick explains, is symbolic of repressed, harmful libido communicating a symbolic form of generational trauma tied to house and home as invaded by predatory doubles; but for us is more a lived experience akin to unrooting in one’s homestead as foreign and populated by wild fictions indicative of such transplantation).

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard) 

Note: We’ve included some photos of Cuwu up until now—i.e., for the second edition of this volume—but when discussing them briefly here and in the postscript, I’ll only include a photo (or two) per section; they’ll get plenty of exposure in Volume Two, trust me! —Perse, 4/7/2025

At first, Cuwu was incredible. However, after I flew home from their nomadic household, my time with them long-distance started to feel unstable and insincere, but also draining. They had borderline personality disorder and manifested in more overt pluralities—less like Beavis and closer to my mother when she was manic. I had to fight very hard not to blame Cuwu even when I felt their abusing potentially coming home to roost. In part, I was entirely afraid of losing them and the vampiric essence they offered me, while having already been dispossessed by Jadis (who actually left me for their own ex after the three of us were living in a polycule, trying to triangulate that person against me by calling me the homewrecker[3]) and shortly thereafter losing my uncle to a spontaneous heart attack; I also knew Cuwu was sick and trying to improve. In other words, I was Cuwu’s “good boy” because I thought they’d actually try by detaching from their abusive past, thus not preying on me; i.e., the vampire that doesn’t drink blood.

(artist: Edwin Landseer)

At first, they seemed sincere. I hadn’t come out yet, but Cuwu encouraged it/were my mommy dom and little fuck puppy. So for a short-but-blissful time, I was living in my own variation of Bottom’s Dream from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and not for the first time, even, but I’ll get to that in Volume Three when I discuss my first love, Constance):

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’ because it hath no bottom (source).

Before I came out, my name was Nicholas, so Nick Bottom is a character I always relate to; it’s also kind of a funny BDSM pun (thank you for pointing that out, Ginger). Personally, I think Shakespeare’s bondage of the rude mechanical, Nick, by Titania was a little too pointed and ceremonial to be a complete accident, but maybe I’m just an ass. You have to be a little stupid/risqué to let someone in and play games with them where—like the vampire—you can actually get hurt.

Note: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “Bottom’s Dream” from it are tremendously important to my work. i.e., both are things I’ll return to repeatedly in Volume Two; e.g., “I’ll See You in Hell” or “Call of the Wild” in the Demon Module. —Perse, 4/7/2025

Let’s return to The Babysitter. The story is, like many other novels of the Neo-Gothic tradition, at least superficially concerned with growing up/becoming an adult. In that vein, Cee has to learn to protect himself from the more experienced girl he loves preying on him. The imperfect moral shared between Cee and myself is, “We all have to learn to form boundaries and protect ourselves, even from those we love; even if they talk a good game, they can still fuck you over or up.” In McG’s movie, Cee’s taught this by more than one person—Bee, but also her himbo servant, the high school quarterback:

“You want a head start?”

“You’re the quarterback, man!”

“Life’s not fair, dude!”

Whether male, female or intersex, the Gothic hero’s trial is overcoming adversity through love-making (courtship) as an inherently complicated and risky endeavor. In Cee’s case, he’s being attacked by someone else (the quarterback) being manipulated by someone else (Bee) being misled by something else (an old book of sacrificial blood magic). Deceivers take many forms and concentrically deceive themselves and others (the classic flaw of the Gothic villain). Facing this cold, sad fact—that many people most definitely suck, including assimilated, fearful workers—is merely part of this stupid, absurd game called life. But life can still be good! We just have to play it for ourselves, taking chances at enrichment while doing our best to be good friends, but also teachers and workers interacting back and forth to end the problem at its root: capital.

How you chose to go about this is entirely up to you and yours. As mentioned in Volume Zero, Cuwu’s borderline personality disorder would give them panic attacks/make them dissociate. To counteract these comorbidities, I used to read Cuwu The Hobbit before bed; the book, combined with my voice, helped calm them. It wasn’t a perfect solution, though. How Cuwu desired to become strong! They especially loved Smaug the dragon, who was “strong, strong, strong!” and started to adopt that principle in their own “healing” behaviors; i.e., having been abused in the past, but also having been a self-confessed abuser towards their own ex of six years. In other words, I wasn’t Cuwu’s first victim, but they also weren’t entirely an abuser when all was said and done; they were like Bee, who “used to be weak” and desired strength—abusive and controlling towards Cee even if it came from a place of real trauma (victims, like people turned into vampires, often become traumatizers themselves):

Neither Bee nor Cuwu were all bad (“just because she’s a psycho doesn’t mean women are evil,” Cee’s movie crush tells him), but there was still legitimate betrayal towards those they called friends. Cee and Bee had a sweet friendship but she still exploited him in non-consensual ways; i.e., draining his blood like a vampire for her black magic as ostensibly giving her everlasting life, but still a stupid decision and that alienated her from her best friend. Likewise, Cuwu fucked me over despite making all my wildest fantasies come true and, in the end, calling me “one of the best friends they ever had” (which strikes me as incredibly sad, given how short our friendship ultimately was); they were very vain and loved attention (and unlike the vampire were constantly gazing at their own reflection), but could be incredibly sweet when they were stable and medicated (or had their fill of “blood[4]“)! They professed to love nature[5] and had been upfront about their abusive habits, too—had insisted they’d turned over a new leaf. And my dumb ass, rebounding hard after Jadis and firmly under Cuwu’s intensely erotic spell, was only too happy to believe them (to be fair, they talked a good game, the tricksy little Commie).

Note: We’ll revisit Cuwu’s vampirism repeatedly in the future; e.g., “Red Scare” and “My Experiences” from the Poetry Module, and “Leaving the Closet” from the Undead Module. A fiercely forward and hypnotic exhibitionist, Cuwu loved to dress in red to draw their audience in, but also were “a little ho with a mouth like a clown demon [Pennywise leaps to mind] and a body like a fairy reaching over from fairyland to take [a bite out] of me” [re: “My Experiences”]. Furthermore, the Demon Module PDF would dedicate to them, saying about Cuwu, “I‘ve often thought of you as a demon (and compared you to Pennywise the Clown for your wide, hungry mouth, below), so it only makes sense to dedicate your contributions in the Demon Module, itself.” Long story short, they were always hungry and gave as good as they got! And frankly I loved their vampirism enough to subvert it; i.e., in my own instructing of ludo-Gothic BDSM marked by Cuwu’s “vampy fae” aesthetic, but also their gung-ho Marxist-Leninism, stabs at DBT and fluctuating borderline personality disorder! —Perse, 4/7/2025

In the end, I paid a heavy price for my continued desire for Gothic-style adventures, but it was still a learning experience normally only seen in novels, movies or videogames (thus denied to everyday persons in advertisements about where to even find love). Through my own happy accident, I learned the same Gothic moral that Cee did: sex is dangerous, but it’s also entirely worth it if you can find someone to trust (which Cee eventually does). I now have friends I can trust and confront trauma with: several partners (Crow and Bay) and loads of people working with me on this book. However, developing that also took a lot of time, perseverance and work from both sides; it’s also, as this chapter has hopefully illustrated, an uphill battle, one that requires fighting societal coding with reclaimed animal-monster language and learning (through said language) paradoxical ways to open up to each other and reconnect with the nature world. Don’t be afraid to do that or you’ll grow divorced from nature, from sex, from love as not being paywalled in their most delicious forms—in short, you’ll miss out on what makes life worth living!

At the same time, be careful! Like Cee and Bee, Cuwu and I were intimate with each other in a variety of ways; I loved them fully and deeply. But I stood up to them knowing on some level I’d never see them again (as I did with all of my exes). And as much as it hurt, I regret nothing insofar as it all panned out. However short, I laid with someone special; i.e., a little fae-like cum-magnet made entirely of that weird, special stuff that only dreams are made of: darkness visible. All my exes were like that; I guess it’s my type. Pick your poison, kids; vis-à-vis, Paracelsus, it’s all a question of application and balance: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison,” condensed to “the dose makes the poison.” To that, toxicity in relationships is normally a question of function, flavor and degree, including the poetics involved and what they encourage; i.e., Gothic irony and enjoyment as more of a liminal scenario challenging state-sponsored stupidity.

Now that we’ve examined Beavis’ idiosyncratic stupidity and my own, let’s move onto Dulci’s mother. Her idiosyncratic stupidity manifests in uneven female fears: getting raped and killed by creepy men; i.e., the legitimate concern about male “conquests” acquired through dishonesty and theft; e.g., drugging/date rape as projected on people Dulci’s mom thinks are creepy. In fact, she was worried I’d roofie her child! Like, context matters, lady! I’d known Dulci for ten years at that point. I wasn’t gotta use drugs or lies—just tell them I wanted to have sex and if they said no, I’d respect their boundaries and wouldn’t push it. That’s how trust, boundaries and negotiation work, and most cis-het guys act more like vampires trying to seduce (and brute-force) their way past these (see: Beavis). As such they resort to “date rape” tricks during conservatively canonized, ritual-like spaces; e.g., high school and prom. That’s a risk that’s prone to fail and rightly so, because the only time it won’t fall apart is if the romantic interest is battered. It’s unhealthy and stupid, but also taught through popular stories with popular devices centered around the ghost of the counterfeit and the process of abjection (moral panic): magic and high adventure, but also sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll as vampiric reagents (the Gothic castle being cemented in videogames, thus neoliberal culture, with Metroidvania; i.e., as we discussed extensively in Volume Zero regarding Metroid and Castlevania but also their various palimpsests and imitators; e.g., Alien and Jojo, Dracula and others).

Ignoring the fact that Gothic stories are largely nostalgic, operatic and suitably wacky affairs (of the time-traveling sort), prom is at best heteronormative; i.e., compelled sex dressed up in ritualistic make-believe; at worst, it’s the same thing but rapey (centrism in action) but still required to help the hero (the young man, by default) succeed in life: to get what he wants. It’s class betrayal and dormant stupidity-in-the-making.

Take, for example, the Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance from Back to the Future (1985). This “rhythmic ceremonial ritual” hails from a hauntological 1950s nostalgia made by neoliberal filmmakers, then pointedly sold back to Reagan’s 1980s and its children of the future as the end-all, be-all of true love. Newsflash: Robert Zemeckis’ wacky courtship ritual (and its myriad clones) don’t actually teach you how to talk to other people; it just alienates workers inside a compelled, colonial binary where the “good” strong prevail against the “bad” strong in literal duels over a helpless woman who tells her own future son this is how things are: “A man should be strong, to protect the woman he loves.” Never mind that George McFly was a Peeping Tom[6] according to his own son, and who Loraine Bates only fell in love with Florence-Nightingale-style[7] because he… got hit by her dad’s car?

Dulci’s mom is similar to Loraine in that she’s “half-stupid.” “Bad timeline” Loraine lectured Marty about vice, only to change her tune when Marty rewrites the past; Dulci’s mother taught her daughter about contraceptives, but also sees rape everywhere and defers to heteronormative male authority. Bitch, please; negotiating frankly doesn’t “kill the romance” (an idea made from ignorance that fascism and neoliberalism absolutely cherish in their gradient of canonical, heteronormative love stories). Building trust is sexy. So is boundary formation and minimizing risk while taking chances. Healthy relationships require some degree of informed risk, including sex: risk-taking while also taking randomness into account. They don’t have to be entirely sexual all of the time (or even part of the time, for all you ace folks out there). However, if they are sexual in some shape or form, then it behooves both sides to be open and honest, but also game.

This honesty and good-faith “gameness” can take different forms. To that, I’m a mid-sized trans woman (~170 pounds) and could help relieve stress by fucking Dulci’s sweet little pussy when they were feeling it; but Dulci actually prefers (or so I thought when I wrote this) big, strong “teddy bear” men who don’t ask for sex at all. As long as everyone’s on board ahead of time, then no harm, no foul (which sadly isn’t the case for Dulci’s currently abusive partner preying on their stupidity for his gain; in the end, I told Dulci that predators don’t change—that he’d keep abusing them if they stayed with him. Sadly Dulci stayed, a common phenomenon among battered partners). More importantly, such negotiations can extend to experimentation and labor as things to rescue from their sex-coercive arrangements (and pornographically appropriated equivalents) in Gothic poetics.

To that, let’s cap off the chapter with vampires; i.e., by exploring how both labor and social-sexual expression can be rescued without involving prom, but instead delving into forbidden experimentation with Gothic poetics, including bodies from places that are normally exoticized and farmed for their vampiric qualities as things to behold: full, fleshy and vivid, the color red serving as the Catholicized color for excessiveness and enrichment (symbolizing the literal blood of Jesus Christ), but also raw hunger and blushing engorgement; i.e., as red as lipstick, as the apples of the Tree of (forbidden) Knowledge.

(artist: Nya Blu)

Experimentation is vital to social-sexual health and understanding but also healing. For instance, I’ve mentioned how Cuwu once wanted me to fuck them while they were asleep, telling me in advance they were taking sleeping pills for a consent-non-consent ritual (how’s that for “rhythmically ceremonial,” Doc). The iconoclastic idea, here, was appreciative peril—a sex-positive instance of controlled dissociation/calculated risk to help Cuwu deal with their own trauma by facing it in a controlled environment where they have all the power as the sub. Normally rape is impossible when both parties mutually consent. However, it’s still a trust-building exercise as consent-non-consent requires the dom to not actually harm the sub during paralysis, bondage, etc. There’s a performative irony there, not unlike Eddie Money’s costumed “Dracula” being bit on the neck by the “sleeping” beauty during “I Think I’m in Love” (1982). As I fucked Cuwu, I felt foolish, guilty and excited all at once—like I was learning something I shouldn’t and partaking in the kind of game most don’t get to play—and that my teacher was just as foolish as I. In truth, looks can be deceiving. Cuwu was borderline, but they’d chosen their partner well; I did exactly as I was told, and learned a wonderful lesson in the process (one taught through the vampiric exchanging of fluids).

The same basic playfulness applies to the Gothic camping of “necrophilia” and “live burial” as paradoxes to double and perform: enjoyed during ironic BDSM ceremonies and vampire metaphors that explore psychosexual trauma through rituals of, at times, regressive healing practices (meaning “to regress to a childlike or immobile state”). For these to be sex-positive, they mustn’t condone the historical-material abuses their reclaimed rituals are based on, and which unironic/canonical necrophilia is associated with (which denotes a harmful lack of agency and inability to consent regardless if one is literally or figuratively dead). For the persons being packaged and sold as Gothic commodities (normally women[8]), there is often a degree of desperation and theatricality to their work; i.e., something to temporarily feel as you devour it like a luscious crop. Per Jameson, middle-class consumers wolf down these melons during their own class nightmares of relative privilege inside the Imperial Core. But in the Gothic sense of the fatal harvest, the neoliberal siphoning of resources from the colony back to the motherland generally disguises ongoing genocides inside exotic, culturally appropriative yarns. While each storybook reverie is filled with danger and excitement as forbidden-yet-delicious, these can be interrogated regarding the skull-like pit that always waits at the center of the fruit. Vis-à-vis Barbara Creed, it becomes not something to merely discard (as Jameson would do) but an aegis for workers to utilize however they decide: to reverse the process of abjection through the same ghost of the counterfeit.

(exhibit 11b1b: Artist, left: Nya Blu. We all have skulls inside us. According to the Gothic tradition inside the Imperial Core, inheritance anxiety historically-materially communicates internalized trauma as suggested within workers but expressed according to their surface-level appearance in the material world; i.e., who, regardless of their origins, will be judged and consumed based how they appear relative to a cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to constantly look at, vis-à-vis Segewick’s “Imagery of the Surface” [1980]. Nya, for example, is covered in tattoos that speak to Cartesian trauma and the Gothic as something to wear on her skin, reassembled there after having been created many times before. She’s a walking fortress, utterly stacked but rife with surface tension. She performs the paradox that Charlotte Brontë’s Anne Causeway could not, the latter woman entirely doomed inside the attic for no one to see [except in dream-like reveries]. The paradox is a doubled form of emancipation that occurs through confrontation; i.e., a savvy and brave wielding of the very things used to coop her up in the white man’s home, but also his colonizer’s heart and mind and those of an imperial readership then and now seeing her “of nature” and nature as psychosexual food [something to remember during the roadmap, part three, which examines Cartesian fetishization of nature-as-food and how to subvert it with our bodies during ludo-Gothic BDSM].)

The paradox of theatrical “necrophilia” is not even corpses or bodies, but vampirism within capital (thus at large) as driven by animal hunger and need, but also invitations to enter and submit as tied to and expressed through one’s mouth and appetites as undead sexual metaphors; i.e., alien symbols tied to trauma, power and decay in various forms, but also powerlessness. For example, in Metalocalypse (2006) a male band member is having a one-way conversation with a girl in a literal coma. Afraid of the girl and wanting to separate, pre-coma, now the guy doesn’t actually want to break up with her because she’s useful to him as “the ultimate girlfriend.”

This skit is arguably funny because it’s patently absurd; it’s also a poor-taste rape joke shining a light on the vampiric nature of rape culture among white men towards women. Per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, the show passes off an “abject reality or hidden barbarity” that, vis-à-vis David Punter, “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (source: “The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 1980). This obviously goes well beyond Metalocalypse, and yields a vampiric function in neoliberal fantasies like Back to the Future: a hypnotic lullaby that sublimates abuse. Not only has this abuse gone nowhere; its Gothic commodities, whether subtle or overt, have grown even more tempting (for the middle class) as time goes on—i.e., as Capitalism drains us of our blood (and brains) and sells them back to us in cartoonishly delicious, addictively sugary forms. Stories like The Babysitter generally camp these cartoons, but the expression is still liminal; i.e., like Nya Blu and her succulent embodiment of the Gothic, or Cuwu lying in bed, smiling like a vampire as I fucked them in their sleep (the smile indicating the drugs, like Juliet’s “sleep of death,” weren’t strong enough). As I did, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Cuwu wasn’t quite as asleep as they let on, but also were well-and-truly stoned; i.e., their own “love-in-idleness[9]” something of a partial, zombie-like ruse—a, educational game that was half-real, somewhere in-between all manner of things, satiating the raw, animal hunger felt by both sides:

(artist: Christopher Sean)

This kind of compound, appropriative-versus-appreciative peril illustrates the difference between negotiated boundaries and compelled boundaries/manufactured consent—i.e., choosing to be a “doll” (with the vampire having porcelain-line skin and painted-looking lips) in a sex-positive rape fantasy (Cuwu’s schtick) versus being compelled into a doll-like role in literal and figurative forms of coerced rape by those in power (as stated in Volume Zero, appreciative rape fantasies can be intense, potentially affecting the dom far more intensely than the sub; Cuwu’s games arguably did with me because I was awake and Cuwu wasn’t[10], though for the knowledge I gained and the fun I had, I don’t regret partaking part). Faustian “agreements” more broadly have a habit of “getting worse all the time”—e.g., Darth Vader’s warning to Lando Calrissian: “I am altering the conditions of our agreement; pray I do not alter them further!”

This being said, “deals” made through force or lies are not deals at all; they’re slavery and exploitation, even when dressed up (re: Sauron’s rings of power). That’s what neoliberalism is beneath “the magic.” Cis-het men historically-materially treat women like de facto stress toys without their consent, transforming them into their pets, their property and/or their compelled sex dolls (so-called “Brides of Dracula”). For privileged, sexist men, intimacy is automatically sexual and rapacious to varying degrees; for battered/compelled women, this invokes body dysphoria: plastic, assimilated bodies made to please men; i.e., Stepford Wives (with eating disorders being an extra variable—incredibly dangerous, but also shameful and secretive). This “Barbie Doll effect” amounts to colonization/manufactured appearance—plastic surgery and purity/moderacy and sexy outfits (exhibit 8a; re: “Predators and Prey“). It also leads to compelled brides of vampires through the Christofascist return to tradition; e.g., the Mormons’ coercive polygamy intrinsically linked to settler colonialism.

In other words, the ghost of the counterfeit is detrimental to workers within capital when left unchallenged; or worse, when entertained, the vampire-like draining and announcement become a spectacle to purchase and consume like second-hand blood.

For example, in my mid-20s I once had someone approach me asking me to illustrate them a fantasy about a man who turned women into sex dolls against their will—a bit like Jeffrey Dahmer lobotomizing his victims with hydrochloric acid, except in the client’s story the syringe merely incapacitated the girls long enough for him to submerge them in a magic bath. Said bath literally turned the girls’ bodies to rubber but kept their minds active—displaced/dissociative violence in action, wherein the idea behind the bodily destruction isn’t reclaiming someone’s lost agency but rather exploiting a particular group to vampirically enrich a privileged party. Eventually I learned to say no to weird clients like these, but back then I was younger, dumber, and poorer. I drew the story because I felt like I needed the money. However, I also thought, “This feels like a horror story outside of the text—like the person I’m working for is a devil-in-disguise.” Eventually my shame eclipsed my fiscal needs and I learned to form boundaries and say no to predatory clients preying on a) my financial desperation (thus stupid hunger) and b) the exploitation of historically abused groups (women, in their case).

Creepy art commissions aside, labor can also be transmuted into iconoclastic, sex-positive forms. In the case of Cuwu but also Dulci, I helped them rescue their labor from sex-coercive arrangements—by experimenting with them as our sex, art and friendships intersected in different ways per case. Like Cuwu, Dulci and I did sex work and made monster art together that aimed at making us less hungry but also less emotionally and Gothically stupid regarding our labor and bodies. Open sexuality antonymizes sex and harm but acknowledges past forms of trauma (and bad-faith versions of the same theatre) that synonymize these things. They provided and I provided and like vampires feeding out in the open—giving essence back and forth—we communicated freely without guilt, secrecy or shame; we learned. And even if our relationships didn’t ultimately work out, the lesson—like a corpse in a coffin—”survives” to be gazed upon by future generations. Such feeding arrangements (and their Gothic aesthetics) are so much simpler and more educational (from a sex-positive standpoint) than how they would be under heteronormative arrangements, robbing one side of their power under violently compelled, mendacious circumstances. None of us wanted to get married and have kids—i.e., serve the state’s will in nostalgically propagandized ways like Back to the Future.

That movie’s hauntological song-and-dance (all so Marty can get his dick wet by compelling his own parents to get back together) is every bit as emotionally manipulative as it is nostalgically curious (e.g., 1986-era Marty needing a car to have sex, similar to how his mother “parked” with neighborhood boys to escape her 1950s repressive household; i.e., American car culture being an escape from imposed socio-material conditions) but also borrowed: the 1946 palimpsest, It’s a Wonderful Life, nakedly fear-mongering independent women, presenting George Bailey’s wife as being entirely reliant on broke, hopeless dreamers and—funnily enough—Peeping Toms.

Marty’s plan is terrible for several reasons. Not only should it have not worked; it presents George McFly as this self-made man when in truth, the entire coercively manufactured production made it possible for him to “get Lorraine back” (despite never earning her to begin with), then take all the credit after privatizing[11] it in “his” novel. Back to the Future is easy to like; dialectically-materially it’s a giant, dangerous lie. That’s not “just” Reagan’s 1980s in a nutshell; it’s something that’s continuously being sold to the next-in-line as “wholesome, good, and safe” for workers, making them stupid.

To borrow from Anita Sarkisian, though, I can enjoy “Earth Angel” rerecorded with the orchestral accompaniment (1985) and refuse to endorse Ronald Reagan, Robert Zemeckis, et al in the same breath. Just as Milton loved angels and demons, and Horace Walpole made his own castles out of whole cloth, each gave future peoples the intricate potential to challenge the status quo through Gothic (crypto)mimesis and pastiche: the institution of marriage as a fearsome place that we—using the spectres of Marx—can take and transform into something better while keeping the devilish aesthetic[12] as a naughty keepsake; i.e., from Pygmalion’s shadow to Galatea challenging said shadow while pimped out in black-and-red fetish gear and having all manner of submissive cuties under her powerfully parodic spells. Except unlike the status quo—re: Tolkien’s unironic rape of anything deemed dark and terrible in misguided and ultimately dishonest attempts to conquer death—Galatea’s darkness visible camps canon, “making it gay” as a false “jailor” threatening “rape,” “torture” and various other things in quotes set to funky music; e.g., “Down, Down to Goblin Town” (1977). It might seem like toothless bullshit—nothing except empty fetishes and clichés to consume—but I got news for you: that’s how language works! Meaning is arbitrary decided through the function of aesthetics as something to inhabit within the endless chaotic copying. So we may well use the aesthetics for medicinal, psychosexual leverage; i.e., when navigating the socio-political landscape under Capitalism, looking for kindred spirits among its assorted wreckage (the steady trauma, disintegration and alienization) while also employing Sarkeesian’s adage among the Gothic assemblage: anything begot from those older bricks—first taken from the ruinous, undead whole (extending to videogames and their paratexts, of course) and charged in a power not entirely our own: “no man is an island” and all that. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, indeed.

Sex positivity between sex workers and friends liberates them from capital and, more to the point, is no less democratic or humane than a cis-het marriage. Quite the opposite—it’s far more democratic and humane from a systemic standpoint. Marriage has historically offered false “protection” to cis-het women during manufactured conflict, scarcity and consent; it only segregates them from other women and lets their husbands legally abuse/rape them—the Marital Exemption Act only being abolished in all fifty states in America in the early 1990s. Like Roe v. Wade, though, the repealing of the Marital Exemption Act is something that Christofascists/SCOTUS will try to overturn, blaming symptoms of Capitalism and its decay on minorities while simultaneously reining women in and cracking down “on crime” through an expanded state of exception’s ghosts of the counterfeit. Neoliberal capitalists will allow this to occur through the oscillating pendulum of Capitalism and American politics working very much as intended: as a Puritanical institution, America was founded on genocide, rape, war and worker exploitation, as well as compelled marriages defended during moral panics.

As vampires demonstrate, there’s frankly countless ways to personify then subvert trauma and the status quo; i.e., while seeking catharsis as one moves away from closeted self-hatred and towards self-acceptance, self-fashioning and self-love. These are topics we’ll cover much more in depth in Volume Two and Three, but I’ve included some additional examples—four exhibits over the next eight pages—that pointedly use the Gothic mode in relation to vampirism.

If you want, call it a taste of things to come:

(exhibit 11b2: Artist, top: Maloroid; middle-left: unknown; bottom-left: D. H. Friston’s illustration for Carmilla [1872]—a cautionary tale about female forbidden love; bottom-right: Nat the Lich.

Something to keep in mind about criminal hauntology [and which we’ll return to in Volumes Two and Three, exhibits 47a1/2 and 86a2] is that it relishes in the commodified suffering of the buried, the gays as automatic criminals, fugitives, unironic monsters through various fictional twists: nine times out of ten, we’re the closest monster in the WASP-penned murder mystery or we’re the victim as someone to punish by the damsel, detective or subjugated Amazon [the xenomorph is both: the cumulative forces-of-darkness black knight, cosmic rapist, pre-fascist corruption dressed up in ’70s fetish gear, exhibit 60d; re: “Follow the White-to-Black-Rabbit“]. The canonical vampire narrative, then, isn’t just a night stalker/queer boogeyman that only comes out at night [like Edgar Winter]. It also emulates various animal attacks and—like medieval lycanthropy—is a crude analog for mammalian diseases and medieval psychology [the humors] that brings a none-too-subtle metaphor for sleep/death, staking the queer while they’re helpless; but also the sleeping woman as often naked and/or defenseless, like a babe in its cradle [similar to her sitting on the toilet or standing in the shower but even more vulnerable]: the compelled voyeurism of Gothic conventions demanding that we stare at her unironic rape as something to relish, to worship, to covet.

To “sleep,” in this case, is overlapped with “playing dead” when faced with a sexual predator but also the reality that wives, teenagers and young girls would have been sitting ducks for their patriarchal overlords; i.e., to be violated and to have no conscious idea, but faced with the haunting suspicions through the “nightmare” of being visited by a succubus/incubus paralysis demon [exhibit 51b1; re: “Demons and Dealing with Them“] that has its way with the chaste maiden/celibate man-of-faith as an unwilling/unironic sacrifice [camped to hell and back by Tim Curry’s Dr. Frankenfurter sleeping with Brad and Janet; i.e., less “making it gay” and more about exposing the repressed queer dialog amid monstrous proliferation as something to poke fun at and make your own in the process]. It becomes a spectating match by the audience as complicit in the whole ordeal, demanding a rape victim to worship, mock and fetishize as part of the night’s usual entertainment.

Of course, consent-non-consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM allows for the ritual of induced sleep sex to have playfully sex-positive BDSM, fetish and kink flavors; i.e., sleep sex being a regular event in cis-het bedrooms, but nevertheless one that is canonically used to scapegoat queer persons relegated to the shadows of a rising sexual discourse [while cis-het men continue to hunt their prey from the same darkness]. To reclaim the night and its creatures from the cis-het curse of a patriarchal, “Dark Father” sex pest, the subversion of the symbolic tableau always occurs through rape play/voyeuristic peril of some kind or another—of catharsis and trauma as occupying the same playground. This liminal expression can dress up in the aesthetics of death [exhibit 9b2; re: “Prey as Liberators“], be openly vampiric swooning [exhibit 87; re: Volume Three], include animalized bondage and commands of tinctures of sleep and submission [exhibit 51d3; re: “Dark Xenophilia“]; or promote/execute doll-like sleep sex in various animate-inanimate forms [exhibits 38a and 38b1, ” b2, ” b3, ” b4; re: “Meeting Jadis“]. It can also be evoked as a kind of guilty pleasure in heteronormative circles [exhibit 86a1, exhibit 86a3; re: Volume Three] meant to scare and infantilize women; such fear and dogma can be reclaimed by Gothic counterculture—i.e., by sex-positive couples whose invited voyeurism/exhibitionist nudism [exhibit 101c2; re: Volume Three] helps move society away from harmful and coerced wish fulfillment: “It’s ok to look or indulge if all parties want it.”)

(exhibit 11b3: Artist left/middle: Aroma Sensei; right: Horny X. “To sleep perchance to dream.” The fantasy of subjugation can be sex-positive but must subvert the imagery of the monstrous-feminine as targeted for “slaying” by traditionally male implements: the woman-in-black or the Amazon as threatened by the “knife-like” penis, but then actually wanting it [breeding kink being a common one, fantasizing about making monster babies and having monster sex to improve the orgasm, exhibit 87a; re: Volume Three]. Badly. Such notions of a sex-hungry woman are, as usual, forbidden in heteronormative spheres, but remain an open secret sold to people through the procurement of forbidden fruit as pornography that hardworking American adults [usually men] may consume. It becomes pay-walled, a sale of indulgences classically overloaded with a variety of harmful stigmas [exhibit 32a; re: “Concerning Knife Dicks”]. As always, these stigmas must, like individual trauma, be reclaimed and subverted in the same dream-like zone: between the fiction and the rules, on the surface of the image in intense thresholds neither here nor there.)

(exhibit 11b4: Artist, bottom-left: Kay; bottom-middle: Kristine Walton; bottom-right: Jesús Campos.

The queer man as a de facto sodomite is often driven to seek trauma in such a liminality and being synonymized with deserved self-loathing and psychosexual violence—e.g., failing to understand that Rob Halford is crooning about “The Ripper” or “The Isle of Domination” [exhibit 38c1b; re: “One Foot out the Door” but also “Facing Death: What I Learned“] in an ironic, cathartic sense—but also stared at by straight people looking for a medieval shock on a cryptomimetic vein [e.g., Trent Reznor’s “Closer” (1989), exhibit 43b (re: “Seeing Dead People“); or Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018), exhibit 40a1b (re: “Mandy, Homophobia and the Problem of Futile Revenge“)]. The same goes for the woman as the presumed whore/virgin. Ironically reclaiming these markers of shame occurs in the same place they are unironically applied, thus subject to constant scrutiny and moral panic the way that white straight men are not. Under the Neo-Gothic standard, though, the fearful imagination of a WASP-y moral panicker has produced centuries of stories about the devilish white person acting “non-white” but also not Protestant; i.e., like an outsider from the barbaric past [wherein Blasphemous is a thoroughly curious Metroidvania: Catholic fear and dogma, especially torture and miracles, dressed up as Gothic nostalgia]. Misdirection is a powerful tool, understood by common abusers and benefactors profiting off the conservative adage, “Perception is reality.” Broken trust makes anything seem possible, but also plays on the mind in ways that render one the dupe/accomplice; i.e., to be under someone’s power regardless if you’re asleep, on drugs or in a seemingly healthy relationship.

This applies to real life, of course. For example, I thought Zeuhl loved me [we’ll discuss Jadis at length, later] but I didn’t realize I was being used for most of our relationship. It didn’t matter because I perceived our love as genuine based on what I was told. For a while it felt manageable. All of a sudden, it wasn’t [I winced when they fingered my asshole too hard, secretly second-guessed them when they didn’t want me to meet their other boyfriend, who I’ll call Paris; and asked me for money after the breakup, or other favors while stringing me along in various ways]; after that, I felt like I had been lied to, used, and manipulated like a silly unicorn. Zeuhl taught me that self-denial is a powerful thing. And yet, while the beard is often used by queer people to blend in or navigate choppy waters, the same idea is used by bigots who blend in with token spouses and partners [rendering them dupes, victims or accomplices in the process]; i.e., a theme of penance for past crimes, but also ongoing deceptions for the false penitent seeking sanctuary by directing blame at others/casting suspicion away from themselves and their habitual misdeeds. Like a game of Clue or a cheap “Whodunnit?” no one is being honest, even if this deception is societal; i.e., coded through heteronormative propaganda, fear and dogma [contrition, or the forced confession, being its own issue within police states; and drug abuse, torture and isolation used to keep victims in check, suggestible, even complicit]. In other words, “It just wasn’t talked about,” an open secret; the victim becomes not just the fly on the wall, but the wall itself part of a desolate, perfidious cathedral where people care more about keeping up with appearances and delighting at the coded barbaric’s schadenfreude. Eventually it all falls apart, but also becomes forgotten and rediscovered as ruinous, esoteric.

To this, real life and fiction collide and fuse in a dialectical-material sense. The murder mystery/black confessional is a foundational trope of the Neo-Gothic’s historical-material record: the secret letter or diary entry as a fictional throwback then and now [e.g., Ann Radcliffe’s having Monsieur St. Aubert write a letter to his daughter, as well as the entire Confessional of the Black Penitents—aka The Italian]. Its poiesis amounts to familial open secrets [of the Gothic sort, the bloodline] married to the myth that society is corrupt, not genocidal; i.e., the scapegoating of the fascist or the false authority figure as anomalous: the husband, preacher, father, teacher, etc. This kind of murder mystery has the centrist effect of directing blame away from the elite, from the distribution of power/material conditions at a societal, criminogenic level. It presents persons as reprobate, deceitful, fallen, not the state [the demonizing of the Catholic faith being a displaced critique of a former structure “on its way out”; i.e., during the crystallization of a Protestant ethic amid and after the Neo-Gothic revival, contributing to the rise of the current state of affairs: modern war, the nation-state, Capitalism as a neoliberal hegemony built on older hegemonies. These, in turn, produce newer kinds of complicit, bourgeois vampires versus older ones, but still rule over and prey on us; i.e., as queer people are buried indiscriminately without power or prestige to protect them].)

(exhibit 11b5: Artist, left: Luis Dominguez; right: Clyde Caldwell. At least as a starting point, the entire xenophobic/pre-fascist exercise of vampirism is basically anti-Catholic dogma ridiculing transubstantiation [exhibit 41i; re: “The World Is a Vampire“]. However, the female vampire ritual is further complex and bifurcated under Capitalism as a Protestant affair [we’ll also examine anti-Semitism and queerphobia/-philia in Volume Two and Three]. It either often desires a cathartic ritual to the paralysis, thus a reassurance that the dark dominator isn’t abusive like a past real-life example might have been; or it desires a reversal to the trauma, exacting “revenge” and “torture” on the perceived patriarchal dominator [in BDSM, this is calling “switching”]—i.e., by swatting them like a pesky bug. Coincidences aside, a female mosquito has been buzzing around my head as I write this exhibit, dutifully reminding me that male mosquitoes do not drink blood, and that the drinking of blood by these insects is an abject, chimeric metaphor for Archaic-Mother sexual reproduction, as well as sex and power in general; or, as I write in “War Vaginas” [2021]:

Mythical weapons can symbolize female rebellion and power. Take Medusa’s snakes: Functionally her snakes aren’t female-exclusive, or man-made; they’re purely cosmetic. Medusa kills her victims with a petrifying gaze. Gothic tales treat this freezing effect as a shock response: The female “snake” is viewed as a symbol of antagonistic power, threatening traditional masculinity through castration fears (robbing the phallus of its mythical power) expressed in patriarchal myths like the gorgon. The snake can also be overtly phallic. Benisato, a female villain from Ninja Scroll (1993), attacks with venomous snakes, including one hidden inside her vagina (a man could arguably cram a “snake” up his bum, but homosexuality is often seen as “female”: othered, ridiculous, impotent).

The second symbol of female rebellion are natural, entomological weapons. These can be vaginal, tied to sexual reproduction. Insect brood mothers are a natural example of the Archaic Mother, using their powerful wombs to birth hostile armies. There’s also phallic-looking weapons with female functions. The ovipositor of parasitoid wasps injects an egg into an unlucky host (the life cycle which inspired the xenomorph in Alien). However, all female Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, ants) have an ovipositor, the stinger of which is a modified version thereof. Stingers inject [paralyzing] venom, but also eggs[!]. It can stab and kill, but no male can have it. Like the womb, it is forbidden to men (“womb-like,” vaginal spaces have a forbidding alien atmosphere, which we’ll explore in a moment).

Insects tremendously impacted popular monsters like the xenomorph and later, Samus. Amazons are monsters, and Samus is only half-human. The other half is avian, but my point still stands: Humanoid insects (or animals more generally) are the site of alien depiction, but also behaviors humans typically abject. Unnatural strength is a thing to be feared, especially when viewed through a sexist lens. Though Samus is not insectoid, she still has levels of strength that mirror female insects. Hymenoptera are female dominant. Males are small, weak; they only exists to mate, and cannot work nor soldier—not unlike the submissive male roles in imaginary Amazon societies [source].

 [artist, left: Luciano Garbati; right: Benvenuto Cellini]

To this, the female [actual or in appearance/performance] vampire is something of a chimera, but also dragon, Godzilla or dominator whose powerful fangs/stinger is feared by powerful men/token executioners [cops] through collective insecurity but also collective, hand-me-down [master/apprentice] guilt: the proverbial sins of the parent against a vengeful monstrous-feminine. As usual, this code is executed in canonical, heteronormative videogames; i.e., to neglect, deny or scorn anything that isn’t “the Man.” Knights don’t just slay dragons; they make trophies of them.)

I went with vampires in this subchapter for a reason; they’re a very closeted kind of monster—always staying indoors, away from sunlight, but also hiding in plain sight by passing themselves off as “straight” (fooling no one; the point isn’t total concealment, but feigned subjugation within postures of controlled opposition). Sexuality under Capitalism is generally closeted, and the ancient canonical codes that Foucault warned about in A History of Sexuality weren’t generally applied to powerful-looking men: Count Dracula as presumed straight but actually being the poster boy for Sodomy 101 (the musical, theatrical play and Gothic castle [danger disco] serving as the relegated domains of the classic tortured queer seeking catharsis). True to form, praxial catharsis must happen according to a raising of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness in order to break through Capitalist Realism’s myopic inability to imagine a different future; i.e., by reimagining the Gothic past, expressing state trauma during the present in relation to our past, present and future selves (we’ll unpack this more during Volume Two when we trot out Frederic Jameson’s corpse and beat it with a stick). This requires challenging the current chiefs of a colonized dialog raising cathedrals ringed with weird canonical nerds: Pygmalions as arbiters of the ghost of the counterfeit, hence the process of abjection.

Contrary to Pygmalions and canonical weird-nerd culture, monsters aren’t just commodities; they’re symbolic embodiments of speculative thinking tied to larger issues. You don’t simply buy and consume them (commodifying struggle) but use them as a means, if not to put yourself directly in the shoes of those being oppressed, then to think about things differently than you might normally. It’s an opportunity to empathize with the oppressed and contribute to their pedagogy in ways that, to be frank, make you less stupid, nasty and cruel.

I’d like to conclude this chapter, then, by using vampires to consider the Pygmalion standard as a) something to challenge in relation to oppositional praxis, and b) whose curious double standards have evolved into themselves over centuries; i.e., between men and women who, should they choose to challenge the status quo in a genderqueer fashion, might find themselves being compared to vampires (or similar monsters) during moral panics valorizing the likes of those who don’t rock the boat. We’ll work in pairs, looking at Radcliffe and Lewis, Steven King and Elvira, Farley Granger and Roddy McDowell, doing our best to consider what commonalities and discrepancies these disputes might entail. However, before we dive in, I have a few points for you to keep in mind…

(artist: protski)

First, the author’s foreword from Volume Zero introduced the Pygmalion as something to oppose through a Galatean double; i.e., not a subservient statue with (as Jameson puts it) “blind eyeballs,” but a cagey challenge to Patriarchal Capitalism and its heteronormative devices. Ignoring our usual Pygmalion’s commodifying of monsters, Galatea was just as gay as Dracula, and her Gothic mode of monstrous, Satanic poetics includes examining our own traumas and memories—be they real, imagined, or reimagined—as Gothic pastiche. This includes vampires as quick, scrappy shorthand for things that people tend to relate and respond to; i.e., the monsters, but also where to find them and how they function during liminal expression across various mediums (movies, television shows, books, masques, musicals, short stories, roleplay and videogames; etc) that likewise interact back and forth during oppositional praxis: canon vs iconoclasm.

Second, we need to remember that challenging the status quo occurs within sectors of capital that incentivize people not to speak out, but paradoxically give them the means to do just that (albeit in fabulously vampy ways). A generous portion of the Gothic mode, then, lives inside Western entertainment, whose industries host dialectical-material debates often held by famous personalities—talk show hosts, once-upon-a-time, but before them, novelists. The practice effectively started between Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, famously fencing back and forth while establishing Schools of the Gothic mode; in turn, their combatting fictions led by example, offering up warring critiques, art, political statements, porn, apologia, and polemics on a variety of taboo subjects (often centered around sex and violence). Through the ghost of the counterfeit, these became a stream of commodities that moved money through the natural-material world and formed a well-trod path for abjection to move forwards or in reverse.

Third, the vampire is something that survives by hiding in plain sight, while also being allergic to close inspection (most notably broad daylight) and whose revolutionary cryptonymy (as we shall see in a moment) strives for various amounts of stealth and showiness. This means that any attempts to challenge state monopolies yield moral panics that showcase the kinds of double standards present between men and women since Lewis and Radcliffe, into the Closeted Era of Gothic queer expression and towards bolder (more GNC-inclusive) times; i.e., in a Gothic dialog that has, until fairly recently inside mainstream circles, been commercialized as cis (and honestly still mostly is). As Radcliffe showed us, the accommodated author is generally complicit and celebrated for being straight, thus focusing on straight plights surviving foreign threats; as Lewis showed us, these “threats” took on the form of genderqueer demons, which later became the vampire as the 19th century saw homosexuality shove itself into public discourse (1870 seeing the arrival of the homosexual man as “a new species,” according to Foucault). Even out in the open, the male queer historically survives inside the theatre closet as something to take with them, never allowing the public confirmation of which team they play for but certainly teasing the Straights’ fear-addled brains. So while homosexual men were pegged as vampires, their status as men historically granted a fair bit of leeway to stretch their wings and vamp it up: onstage (with women historically being denied this privilege which simultaneously seeing their own homosexuality as fetishized by cis-het men in pornographic markets).

In short, the expression of vampires (and indeed, any monstrous symbol you could assign to genderqueer forces) historically has played out very differently depending on your orientation, but also your birth sex as naturally assigned; i.e., for centuries, men and women were treated violently when suspected of queerness (witches were burned alive, and gay men were labeled as criminals, but also as a plague, etc), but men like Lewis could still write The Monk and own it, provided they didn’t say the quiet part out loud (or without a disclaimer on par with Shakespeare’s Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended…”).

These three points are all things to keep in mind when considering the stupidities of workers around us who learn from famous persons working through the Gothic mode; i.e., working to enrich themselves, to be sure, but also express their thoughts and feelings on taboo subjects tied to the profit motive. The more you make, the more credence lent to you, but this varies further depending on if you’re male/female and if you queer/straight, etc.

Fourth, “Pygmalion,” as I use the term, is generally applied in reference to men—e.g., Steven King or James Cameron—but it could just as easily be applied to token groups; i.e., sell-out women, queer people or other minorities in the entertainment business banking on Man-Box bigotry to turn a quick buck against members of their own (or other) oppressed groups (and leading to various disastrous effects: unironic forms of the narrative of the crypt, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern playing out in real life). Radcliffe certainly did that, but she was straight. Nowadays, a Rainbow-capitalist market allows for an expanded degree of authors (and content creators: weird nerds not tied to big studios or publishing houses) who are complicit and/or closeted beyond just Lewis and Radcliffe fencing back and forth, but also working alongside one another in the same market; e.g., Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, sitting opposite Steven King through the decades in which they both worked:

(exhibit 12: Steven King is a white cis-het dude cashing in, but also a Pygmalion pushing his moderately heteronormative idea of Gothic commodities; i.e., fear as a structure that he manipulates and manufactures as a product, first and foremost [similar to Radcliffe]. According to legend, King Pygmalion creates and falls in love with Galatea. For our purposes, Pygmalion is the shadow of the Cycle of Kings[13], a patriarchal influence that banishes queerness to the shadows and dimorphizes workers to be cis-het men and women. This Shadow of Pygmalion is the lasting influence of such a myth on the public imagination, whose Gothic poetics must be challenged by active, constructively angry Galateas who buck the status quo in genderqueer ways that have been with the Gothic since the days of Matthew Lewis [also a Galatea—see my previous point about Pygmalions not needing to be male]. Cassandra Peterson is one such Galatea. A lesbian-in-secret for decades and now out of the closet, Elvira has been advocating for queer expression onscreen just as long.)

Under Patriarchal Capitalism, the creation of monsters is heteronormative, thus binarized and sexually dimorphic, but also divided between male and female creators in cis language alienating non-binary forms of Gothic poetics. Called “the Pygmalion effect” in my thesis[14], we’ll explore this facet of Capitalist Realism throughout the remainder the book: Heteronormative men (and token enforcers) are Pygmalion “kings” who create monsters in their male-dominated industries; subservient girls/queer people are monsters/monstrous, sexy props/de facto brides or chattel that sell abject merchandise by embodying blind pastiche. This applies many different registers—from Alfred Stieglitz to Frank Frazetta; to George Lucas to Ronald Reagan to Steven King to Jordan Peterson; to Elvis to Michael Jackson; to Dracula to God. All are kings, all are imperfectly and asymmetrically imitated by wannabe-monarchs—the female queens/princesses coercively wedded to powerful men and their Cartesian visions/misogynistic nightmares like the brides of Dracula or Frankenstein, etc. These marital sublimations of dynastic power exchange, hereditary rites and patrilineal descent manifest as cultish, but inclusive. As Deborah Layton puts it, “No one joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped—and almost everybody does—you can’t figure a safe way back out” (source: PBS’ Jonestown: the Life and Death of Peoples Temple, 2006).

By this same token, Pygmalion’s opposite, Galatea, offers up classically female/genderqueer “monarchs” and non-abusive groups/communities with which to belong during oppositional praxis; e.g., Elvira (exhibit 12, a proletarian queen) and Ripley (a liminal, sometimes-proletarian “space trucker” queen/sometimes-bourgeois “TERF queen,” exhibit 8b) or your run-of-the-mill sex workers rebelling and conforming to varying degrees: existing on the “rungs” of power as queens, but also figurative/literal princesses, lieutenants, captains, soldiers, etc. Either praxial type is distinguished by their good-faith or bad-faith façade; i.e., what is the queen-in-question angry about and what are they fighting for behind the persona—be they a witch, werewolf, zombie, vampire or some hybrid thereof, with all these canonical monsters personifying venereal disease but also bourgeois metaphors for homosexual[15] men as the problematic practitioners of monstrous-feminine sex, of sodomy (which we’ll examine more in Volume Two when we look at the history of vampires as a specific monster type): Roddy McDowall from Fright Night (1985) performing a queer/queenly horror show host similar to Elvira’s outspoken iconoclastic role as the “mistress of the dark.”

Similar to Walpole or Lewis, both horror hosts were queer but courtesy of Hollywood being staunchly heteronormative, coming out had its risks. Of course, a common way to hide was with a “beard”—marrying a member of the “opposite sex” (the phrase ignoring intersex people, of course) to keep the nosy blue-blooded neighbors from gossiping too much about your “female accomplishments” and string of male bachelors running about the place; i.e., hiding in plain sight.

Some people never bothered. For example, Terry of Gay Influence writes on Farley Granger (a co-star to McDowell in several productions, below):

unlike most other actors who were gay or bisexual, Granger refused to marry to keep his fans and studios off the scent of his male relationships. When studio bosses berated him for being seen having dinner with composer Aaron Copland, a known homosexual, he shot back, “(Copland is) one of the most important composers in America, a gentleman I met at this studio when you hired him to write the score for The North Star,” which was Granger’s debut film (1943). “I’m not going to be told…who I can or cannot see in my private life.” Granger turned on his heels and walked out of Sam Goldwyn’s office (source).

Of course, this was a giant risk that could have gone either way. Generally it would have been one taken by men who, depending on their level of status and the political climate, would have had better or worse odds announcing themselves as “problematic lovers” (re: “Understanding Vampires“). It’s vital, then, to be unafraid to reexamine the past with fresh eyes and language that historical figures wouldn’t actually have used, but may have understood better than you might think. Oppression is oppression, and that certainly hasn’t changed much in the recent centuries. At the very least, we need recognize the cone of silence that then-and-now continues to linger over those who fear state punishment as not only refusing to die, but expanding horrifyingly in all directions.

Revolutionary cryptonymy offers a paradoxical means of challenging these monopolies (and subsequent brain drains). However, until the Internet Age—i.e., since Lewis wrote The Monk over two centuries ago—resisting the decay of fascism and moral panic was something few men of privilege actually tried to an extent that would threaten their established livelihoods; e.g., like Oscar Wilde. But revolution won’t work if we martyr ourselves en masse, and smaller efforts can add up over time (especially collectively during intersectional solidarity in the Internet Age).

While learning from past struggles bleeding into fresh ones, it’s vital to consider how—after more precise language cemented queerness as a cultural identity in the shadow of the state—such persons merely became a separate species, but also a social disease that was commonly recognized as male (rebellious women were generally cast as witches, Amazons or whores, but their method of disease-spreading was seen as whore-like; i.e., attached to prostitution and unruly merchandise [again, women] versus sodomy being a crime committed by persons under the law—men). As often was the case, such things were seldom discussed out in the open at all, but that certainly didn’t preclude political action being taken by those with privilege, generally those who waited until they were older and more secure; e.g., Vincent Price as someone who “didn’t broadcast his sexuality [or use the words that would have spelled it out, but still stood] up and was counted when it mattered—attacking Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade in the 1970s, joining PFLAG as an honorary board member, and shooting one of the first celebrity PSAs to allay public fears about AIDS” (source: Dan Avery’s “Vincent Price’s Daughter Confirms He Was Bisexual,” 2015).

It’s important to recognize these instances when they actually happened, but also to understand the class-based stigmas and cultural forces guiding these persons to behave how they did: our aforementioned trifectas and cultural stigmas tied to state monopolies during oppositional praxis as an uphill battle ringed with dreadful, often unseen struggles. This obviously extends to homonormativity and queer assimilation by embodying the very stereotypes that straight people expected once the queer community couldn’t be ignored, but it also preceded it through the actors whose behaviors shaped future generations. McDowall, for example, played many queer-coded characters, but not actual gay persons. But something of the closet continued to trap them even after gay people supposedly were “out.” Time and time again, queerness has become both highly legendary and as invisible as Dracula’s reflection. The sad joke is, Dracula wasn’t invisible; he felt that way as a queer-coded behavior reflected back at him that he was expected to carry forward by victimizing himself and others around him—i.e., the LGBA targeting trans people by making them invisible, preying on them exactly how the state wants.

Such behaviors have clearly overstayed their welcome on- and offstage, demanding to be recoded through future cryptonymies that serve a revolutionary purpose (which we have already discussed in this chapter and which Volume Three, Chapter Five is entirely devoted to); but these older codes still remind us how desperate minorities become when they are treated as inhuman, diseased and invisible their entire lives. To feel welcome inside the one place they could ostensibly be themselves (Gothic theatre), token agents triangulate against the state’s enemies if it only means they can stall their own demise in the process. Some are less predatory and more meek (not a stab at their personalities but their character during class and culture war). As for McDowall, Andrej Koymasky of The Living Room writes:

Although McDowall never officially came out, the fact that he was gay was one of Hollywood’s best-known secrets. Like many of his contemporaries from Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” McDowall never publicly discussed his sexuality, but his relationships with other men were poorly-kept secrets and friends and lovers have confirmed in the years since his death that he was gay (source).

Yet, all of these examples were men, of course. A gay woman in Hollywood would face her own struggles to face when trying to “raise Galatea.”

Returning to Cassandra Peterson, then, Jazz Tangcay writes how Peterson is being “sexually fluid” in real life, but has largely been in the closet about it for decades for “business reasons” (echoes of McDowell, Price or Granger):

As Elvira, Peterson served as the Mistress of the Dark for four decades, starring in dozens of B-movies and portraying her alter ago on many TV shows. But behind the makeup, Peterson was guarding something very close to her heart—her sexuality. “I was scared that by coming out earlier, I could do some serious damage to my career,” she admits.

Peterson revealed all in her 2021 memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira, detailing her 20-year relationship with a woman while labeling herself as sexually fluid. The hesitation in talking about her personal life came from having seen many good friends come out—only to have their careers end up in tatters. When asked, she won’t name names, but she saw what happened. “They were men” is all she offers, and she couldn’t imagine what it would be like for a woman to do the same. […] After Peterson turned 70 last year, she decided she was ready to be herself in public: “If I don’t do it now, when the hell am I going to do it? Who cares if people hate my character as Elvira and it goes down the tubes?” (source: “Elvira, aka Cassandra Peterson, Opens Up on the Freedom of Coming Out,” 2022).

These same reasons haunt popular media at large, regarding women; e.g., the Gothic/postpunk “disco-in-disguise” of female musical personalities like Siouxsie Sioux from Siouxsie and the Banshees or the ambiguous sexuality of Joan Jett from The Runaways. Similar to Price, Peterson, Lewis, or Hirohiko Araki, etc, their queerness could be found at the castles they built for themselves; i.e., not to conquer death, but to live among and embrace it, dancing with the skeletons while making the Gothic their own through something akin to ludo-Gothic BDSM as I would describe it (and doing as Walpole did but further).

(artist: Quruiqing)

This short foray into vampires—and challenging the cultural stupidity engendered by Pygmalions and other weird canonical nerds—has merely been the beginning of a very monstrous (as gay-as-fuck) journey. Before we outline that odyssey in the next chapter, please remember that pastiche is merely the presence of remediated praxis, which Capitalism reduces to cheap, mass-produced counterfeits—called “blind” parody by Jameson and showcased in literal and figurative examples of the Gothic mode on various registers: workers acting like monsters; monsters representing workers, the bourgeoisie or their social-sexual power exchanges and linguo-material reminders of those things. As sublimated trauma, monsters are easier to confront, attack or befriend in complicated ways (doubles). Sticking with a dialectical-material approach, these monsters, lairs/parallel space and phobias can be canonical or iconoclastic within oppositional praxis, and there’s room for liminal, in-between gradients, too; re: as half-real, the ludo-Gothic BDSM-in-question happening on and offstage at once.

For the remainder of the manifesto, we’ll list these remaining things in order (then devote all of Volume Two to unpacking and exploring the history of monsters during oppositional praxis; e.g., Vampires being given their own chapter alongside ghosts: “They Hunger“). After that, the instruction half of the volume will consider their synthesis (of praxis) when confronting systemic trauma in our own daily lives; i.e., as healthy social-sexual habits that help bring the revolution of Gothic Communism home through ludo-Gothic BDSM. A vampire penetrates through sleeping and wakening moments crossing over into something profoundly more liminal, the animal hunger something to slake and camp in equal measure (sending “fluid” [and power, knowledge] anisotropically in both directions, mid-feeding time; re: Cuwu harmed me in taking too much, but I camped it to hopefully help others heal from rape even if they fully could not! Nothing lasts forever but some things stain and spread across their surroundings; i.e., through ghostly individuals who—long after they’ve left their mark—contain to gloriously haunt us: their dark desire to be remembered after they’re gone, neither here nor there but somewhere in between! To it, “Capital is dead labor feeding on living labor,” said Marx; we can feed back to camp his ghost, but also Cuwu’s!

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Onto “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Oppositional Praxis“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] This process is generally referred to as “hammering swords into ploughshares”—not the end of the world in Biblical terms (where the term originally comes from), but an end of history as envisioned and historically-materially perpetuated under Capitalism as enacted materially and culturally through the Base and Superstructure.

[2] “…in Otranto, it was [Walpole’s] aim to combine the ‘imposing tone of chivalry’ and ‘marvellous turn of incident’ of the ancient romance with the ‘accurate exhibition of human character’ to be found in the modern novel” (source: Dale Townshend’s “Horace Walpole’s Enchanted Castles” from Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840, 2019).

[3] I.e., the classic role of the vampire, with Jadis insisting I was the monster feeding on their sanity and blood, not the other way around. Ironically their accusations happened before I met Cuwu, who a) Jadis never knew about, and b) who pointedly told me they didn’t want to be a homewrecker towards Jadis and I.

[4] Vampirism isn’t rooted strictly in literal blood, but sanguine as a medieval form of physiological expression (essence) connected later to British morality plights about improper relations; i.e., extramarital sex as something that, if it didn’t kill you upfront, drained you of your sanity and lifeforce over time (effectively serving as a quadruple xenophobic metaphor for infidelity and venereal disease, but also domestic abuse and serial murder).

[5] They gave me their copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which helped me tremendously when researching for this book.

[6] I would call this phenomenon “half-invited.” Yes, the exhibitionist girl had her window and curtains open/was showing off to anyone who would look while she (un)dressed. Even so, George was still in a tree with a pair of binoculars looking secretly at her. Despite involving a willing exhibitionist and voyeur, the circumstances weren’t actively agreed upon, thus exemplifying Mulvey’s Male Gaze in a canonical narrative.

[7] According to know-it-all, “Operation Paperclip” sublimation, Doc Brown. Re: “Paperclip” was the post-WW2 transplanting of German Nazi scientists into America’s institutions—with Wernher von Braun, the “father of modern space travel,” being a literal member of the Nazi party while Doc Brown’s de-Americanized family name is… von Bron (with Doc being a similar age to Wernher regardless of which fictional age you select). Like, Einstein was a Socialist and opposed to the Manhattan Project; why couldn’t they have made the loveable Doc a Jewish scientist, Spielberg?

[8] We’ll examine the vampire’s historical usage vis-à-vis homosexual men briefly here (exhibit 11b4) but much more fully in Volume Two.

[9] The drug given by Puck to Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (source: Marissa Nicosia’s “Love-in-idleness, Part Two: Intoxicating Botanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 2022).

[10] “Somno” (short for “somnambulism,” which means “to sleepwalk”) is sex wherein one party is asleep and the other is fucking them. It’s not uncommon for feelings of discomfort to be felt by the conscious partner—usually guilt—which often requires not just spoken agreements beforehand, but collars worn to visually signify the sleeper’s agreement that help mollify the awake partner that it’s ok to proceed.

In Cuwu’s case, they drained me while they were asleep; i.e., as a reversal of the common feeding scheme: feeding on a sleeping victim, which vampires perform as a kind of sex demon. The inverse—feeding on someone while sleeping/playing dead (sleep is the cousin of death)—can also be true!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; font generated by Rezuaq’s “FromSoftware Image Macro Creator,” 2022; re: “Dark Shadows“)

[11] Fun fact: The actor who played George, Crispin Glover, was replaced because he disliked the monetary reward the McFlys get in the end; i.e., that the movie is arguing that they need to acquire it to be happy—not because they are interesting people but because they were assimilated. According to Adam Donald’s “How Back to the Future 2 Tricked You into Thinking Crispin Glover Returned” (2022):

Bob Gale, co-writer and co-producer of the Back to the Future trilogy, has long claimed that it was a salary dispute which led to Glover not reprising his role in Part II. Gale has claimed that because Glover was not a huge fan of the sequel’s script, he demanded he be paid $1 million to appear in the movie (source).

In essence, the producers fired Glover, lied about what he said and used his likeness without his permission (a taste of things to come in the AI days ahead of us).

[12] Including musical homages imitated and bandied to and fro; e.g., Michiru Yamane’s emulation of Western styles in Castlevania as a Japanese neoliberal counterfeit of the Gothic castle as originally forged in Britain.

[13] A term I coined, which my thesis volume describes as, “the centrist monomyth, or cycling out of good and bad kings and all the kings’ white cis-het Christian men or those acting like these men, thus warrior-minded good cops and bad cops in hauntological copaganda apologizing for state genocide—i.e., TERFs and other token groups.” Likewise, the “Shadow of Pygmalion” (another term I created for my arguments) is the harmful, lasting influence of the Cycle of Kings felt between fiction and reality concerning weird canonical nerds producing, consuming or otherwise endorsing material that upholds Capitalist Realism.

[14] “…inert, heteronormative dogma stuck on loop—our ‘Pygmalion effect’ as part of the broader Shadow of Pygmalion, which zombifies worker brains to not simply accept these moon-sized tortures through Capitalist Realism, but embody them as menticided soldiers and victims […] The two exist simultaneously within various offshoots of the colonial binary under the Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., as a harmful mythic structure enforced by the gender trouble that weird canonical nerds experience; i.e., their rape culture‘s heteronormativity-in-crisis being pitted against the campy gender parody of weird iconoclastic nerds” (source: “Thesis Body”).

[15] Dale Townshend once told me in grad school that homosexuality—in the early 1800s—went from the “love that dare not speak its name!” to “the love that wouldn’t shut up!” by the time Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897. “Love” is of course a tremendous misnomer, assigned to queerness as a kind of canonically monstrous “false love” tied to rape, disease and the disillusion of marriage and decency. Likewise, while good sexual health and education are important, they are also not the state’s aim. Rather, the state uses outmoded, Gothicized fears of venereal disease to stigmatize select groups as “spreaders” that need to be contained, controlled, even killed.