This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
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Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Understanding Vampires, part one: Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love (feat. Anne Rice, Chelyabinsk-40, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Castlevania, and more)
“Don’t be afraid. I’m going to give you the choice I never had.”
—Lestat, Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Picking up from where “Understanding Vampires (opening and part zero: the vampire history primer)” left off…
The opening to “Understanding Vampires” considered the basic, historical-material predicament—i.e., of academic-to-popular debate surrounding queerness and vampirism as starting from ignorance, achieving a gradual, uphill understanding of nature through opposing schools of thought (compiling and competing knowledge as it exists through application in vampiric terms, specifically Marxist-Leninism and anarcho Communism). Following that, part one gave a relatively short history primer of vampires (much has been written about them); i.e., orbiting around the 1970s, whose before, during and after of that tumultuous, bustling and productive period helped compose the burgeoning nucleus for my coming out of the closet. Doing so built new inclusive theory on top of said history’s previous treatment and understanding of vampires and queerness; i.e., its medical, academic and popularized legends, surrounding queerness as canonically vampiric on all registers.
Now we shall consider said journey as told by I, trans woman: climbing out of the underworld to change things above ground, breaking new ground according to an iconoclastic understanding of the world as queer and vampiric; e.g., vampire Capitalism and its negative effects on the environment being queerphobic (and the Marxist-Leninist history of queerphobia coinciding with its environmental abuse); i.e., while standing on said foundation previously mentioned, the vampire fangs (and other phallic devices) pumping in and out. The more solid the ground became, the more I had to impart, the artificial wilderness of my enclosure falling away…
Note: One, this subdivision for “Understanding Vampires” is quite long—69 pages, in fact (nice)! While the style is fairly personal, flowing and conversational, everything’s signposted; but I’ve decided not to split it into different posts. There will be signposts, though; the titles are kind of self-explanatory so I won’t summarize them—just give the titles:
- Feeding: Finding Our Voice While Surviving in the Closet
- Ludo-Gothic BDSM: Criminality and Power Flow when Feeding (feat. “Omelas,” Roadside Picnic, Solzhenitsyn, Mao and Stalin, Chelyabinsk-40, and more)
- Halfway point: Performing and Learning from Older Vampires (feat. Interview with the Vampire, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Rob Halford and Chappell Roan) in My Older Work; My Exiting the Closet
- No More Food: the State Eating Itself, and Notes on Tokenism
Two, a holistic, historical side note about the Closet, before we proceed:
Vampires are, like gay people, sex monsters with a flair for the medieval/castles; canon closets that to contain our sex-pest virulency (our status being disease-spreading whores, but also men in dresses, confused breeders, etc). The closet is a lonely place to be, then—a hell without windows, walls or doors, a rat trap to hold, not entertain us (versus cis-het speedrunners playing games for treats). Whereas cis-het women are enslaved through their biology first and foremost, sexism chaining them to the household and the marriage bed (e.g., the Gothic heroine in the castle, the damsel in a tower); people of color for their skin pigment and geographical origins, racism taking them diasporically to faraway lands through literal enslavement or Orientalism linking immigrants criminally to said lands; and non-Christians persecuted for their heretical lack of status-quo faith, burned alive or fed to the lions; queer people in Western culture have always been a disease with no earthly grounds, largely denied the language to discuss itself and criminalized on medical casus beli as an affront to nature.
(artists: Allegra Viper and August Harper)
To it, we’re less zombies and more vampires; i.e., something to chase down, pull the lid off of and stake, or expose to the burning glare of broad daylight and burn to a crisp under public scrutiny. Also, unlike these other groups, the chief weapon against us is performative shame because we are a crime against nature precisely because we refuse to breed and behave like the state—a heteronormative, Cartesian, settler-colonial body—wants us to: in a binary sense.
From my PhD and manifesto, capital doesn’t just alienate everything about workers, but sexualizes them in order to profit against nature as monstrous-feminine. Per our modular thesis, it does so in ways that, punishing us queers, cultivates odd appetites; and we, seeking to challenge profit’s regular divisions and subsequent rape, must reclaim gender and sexuality as a matter of identity and performance, not biological essentialism [re: “A Note About Canonical Essentialism“]. We take pre-existing popular legends and ideas, already historically repeating and stacking on themselves, and lean them in a progressively inclusive and intersectionally solidarized direction; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny and play. “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth!” Sometimes that “lever” is our penis.
Setting aside intersections (e.g., black trans women) and synonymous treatment (e.g., black rape epidemics versus sodomy charges), these other oppressed groups—while still thoroughly alienated and abused—are more visible, and fight in the light of day about what the state controls concerning their bodies, culture and history surrounding themselves. Conversely, the closet is a place that is more invisible, and hidden by code standing in its place; re: the cryptonymy process, which other groups use, but which all but defines queerness as embedded into the Western hegemon (taken from/evolving convergent to other ancient cultures, where GNC people have existed since the dawn of time). Queerness is closeted, which in turn becomes something to escape while holding onto itself (all while being accused of things that are difficult to prove. Keeping with Red Scare, vampires are seen as infiltrators and impostors, but also deviants and devils; i.e., weak and strong in ways that invite police violence against us).
Except, exiting the closet is not something that every queer gets to do. For those that manage it, it is a journey of self-discovery and chance to contribute to the world around them while becoming dangerously exposed inside a larger prison we must transform within itself—the world and nature per us relating to them. This section shall talk about that in relation to vampires, and how such things informed my transformation and scholarship through the people I met and media I consumed (whether popular or not). In my usual holistic style, there’s no gods, kings or masters under Communism as I imagine it, nor states, but are coming from a variety of communities and institutions; i.e., borrowed from the historical Gothic mode to produce the work that I do. Keep that in mind as we proceed!
Your Commie Mommy,
—Persephone van der Waard
P.S., Even though we’ve already had a primer and crash course about vampires, I wanted to reiterate what makes them unique as a modular subclass of undead, and all the sheer thematic variety they offer that zombies do not—at least not quite as much!
Zombies primarily constitute a lack of humanity and agency among hybrid, traumatized beings that, per the state, are resurrected, acknowledged and then exterminated by police and vigilante force (stochastic terrorism against labor action); vampirism—as we’ve established—is a bit more worldly and cosmopolitan, but also alive with personality despite being undead.
Hence, the “disease” of vampirism can mean/abstract so many things. These things generally tie to wealth, sanguine, anti-Semitism and anti-Paganism, sodomy and animal sex, but also predator/prey hunting mechanisms, ravishing rape play and infernal dalliances[1] for or against state bodies; e.g., (and looking past the superstitions and history of sodomy and witch hunts we examined in the crash course/primer) there’s perhaps most obviously the erotic relationship to unnaturally long life and blood, but also the pumping thrust of the needling teeth; i.e., their usage simulating predatory sex or escalating deliberations towards criminal love and alien connections to vitality and nature-as-abject (animal lust/magnetism and fatal attraction). But also, many other collocations exist and overlap (indented for emphasis):
bridging gaps in liminal positions (walking the edge), phases/passages of vulnerability vs invulnerability, inverse mordents (a musical technique of tickling the keys up and down, not unlike teasing a nipple or clitoris), general oral fixation, rabies, adrenaline, drug use/substance abuse and fever dreams, general addiction, poison/venom, intoxication and inebriation (delirium), hypnosis and eye contact, toxic love, codependency, masters and slaves, owners and pets, medieval physiology (the humors) and literal blood flow, menstruation, placental blood and tokophobia, PMS, hysteria and postpartum psychosis, hereditary madness and blood diseases, lunacy and lycanthropy, extermination orders and insect politics/vermin rhetoric, flat affects and mood disorders, orgasms and general arousal (blushing and tumescence), febrility, gentility, literal bite kink and fetishes (controlling one’s prey with your teeth holding them in place, but also the powerful tactile sensations said teeth produce), tongues (the strongest muscle in the body) and bad breath, needles and syringes, medical malpractice, weird body hair (on the palms, for some reason), picky eaters, bourgeois abstraction, rough sex, torn hymens, virginity and innocence, wicked promiscuousness, hedonism, polyamory and orgies, mouths (oral, anal or vaginal), lust, bloodlust, wanderlust, prostitution, gentleman callers, assassins, murderers and serial killers, smooth criminals (and bloodstains, on the carpet), period sex, STDs, sexual transients and vagabonds, traveling histrionics and wandering wombs, home invasions, paralysis and comas, conversation therapy, live burials, corpse theft and transportation, plague fears, necrophilia and graveyard sex, gluttony (and other Deadly Sins), temptation and indulgence, libido and prurience, modesty and abstinence, grave soil and quintessence, castles, cobwebs, Catholics, courtly love, duels, swords (status weapons, unlike arrows, halberds, or clubs, of a patrician sort), amnesia/oblivion, a spiking heart rate and the heart muscle/circulatory system working (or freezing in its place), blooding or curdling blood/tempers, cat-and-mouse predation, rats (scavengers), spiders and bats (blood drinkers), wolves (pack hunters and lone pariahs), hauntological tone poems, xenophobic caricature, etc…
Vampirism also hyphenates general eroticism, BDSM, teeth and mouths, knives-phalluses, ancient-to-medieval warrior cultures and killer instinct, levitation from holding one by the throat (minimal resistance), domestic trauma, and different superstitions; re: concerning blood purity, quantum and libel, race science and eugenics, the occult, ritual sacrifices, voodoo and creole religions/celebrations (e.g., Mardi Gras marrying Catholicism to Americanized Cajun language, seafood and other cultural elements [sex and plastic prayer beads handed out like candy by parade girls]: “laissez les bon temps rouler!” to conjure up not-so-dead ghosts of whores in the French Quarter), Faustian bargains, necromancy and black-and-blood magic/witchcraft, Red Scare, and fascist overlords commanding armies of the walking dead drained of their life force but not their desire to feed, among other things. With vampires, the sky truly is the limit (not even: they can fly[2], too)!
Regardless of what exactly you want to stipulate, the vampire boils down to feeding and trauma like all undead (and parallels enacting knowledge/power exchange and transformation like demons and animal monsters also do). All these signature qualities likewise loosely and poetically encompass seduction, survival, suspension (sexual tension) and slumming versus raw cannibalism, concerning the maladaptive prey response (the freeze mechanism) from past abuse along vampiric hypnosis; i.e., succeeding in reversing the usual direction/polarity such things flow in/on (surface tension) during normalized exchanges: the giving and taking of power in venereal, animalistic forms (e.g., the male randy-dandy threatening women, but also demonizing and romancing female “huntress” revenge; i.e., such morality plights blaming the victim as innocent, pure-as-the-driven-snow maiden but also comorbid/congenital mistress acting as eater of men and/or women).
Feeding: Finding Our Voice While Surviving in the Closet
Now that you have an idea about the closet, a few (okay, nine) pages of prep before we get to studying power flow/criminality and exchange while inside it; i.e., there is always something caging queer people that drives them to feed whether they are “out or not.” Let’s unpack that concerning my history as such—surviving and finding our voice while inside the state!
First, there’s a kernel of truth to vampire legends—the historical scapegoating of venereal disease (and the Black Death) aside, their urgent feeding and decay speak to capital’s effect on us through our relationships; re: Marx’s argument of dead labor feeding vampirically on living labor, which—as you’ll know by now, makes us undead by virtue of our sexualities and genders diverging from state desires. The closet is very much an undead feeling situation where the state tries to profit on us being different—one that haunts you long after you leave it (and vampires always return to the grave-as-crime-scene; i.e., where queerness simply exists in loneliness, seeking company to make such torment less unbearable). Francis Ford Coppola insisted in 1992 that “Love never dies.” But it does die, decaying and changing into various different things inside the closet, mid-disintegration, longing for change and escape but holding onto the past:
The Gothic is writ in such Ozymandian sands, vampires in particular speaking to social-sexual disease and cure alike; i.e., society as sick with the canonical idea that we fags are carriers of social-psychosexual disease that, as an-Coms, will corrupt and degenerate the world as you know it (re: Capitalist Realism). I mean, guilty as charged! Just not in the way the Straights are born and bred to think about, thus respond to us (with police, persecutory and carceral violence, of course).
Furthermore, as my exes taught me, something is always lost and gained with any exchange. Zeuhl, for instance, didn’t quite give me a choice, like Lestat with to Louis, but I always could have backed out when both of us were in Manchester (turning down two years’ worth of sex, and a lifetime’s supply of extracurricular genderqueer education)! I didn’t—and more to the point, we didn’t—because we were attracted to each other in a queer sense. Like the undead, we fed on each other—hungry for more, giving parts of ourselves away and enjoying as we did so how exciting it felt; i.e., our being born different and finally finding a similar lost soul we could bring into our individual graveyards for some good, wholesome fun (“Step into my parlor…” said the spider to the fly).
“I’ve never done this before…” Zeuhl insisted, stepping into my tiny flat. Wearing a pretty black dress, they twirled to flare out their skirt before, just as fast, sitting on the bed, laying back, and spreading their thick thighs to offer me their tight, fuzzy, princex pussy. It was the tightest I have ever fucked, gushing in wetness as soon as I pinned them to the bed—”spread it, mount it, pin it,” as the lepidopterists would put it (a bit of an entomologist joke. My deck is full of such cards, given to me by different exes)!
College sex be like that—a time for those who go to escape the perils of the street or control of the household, and indulge in what is forbidden:
One look at you, I’m powerless
I feel my body saying yes
Where’s my self-control? Ah
And when you touch me, I’m a fool
This game I know I’m gonna lose
Makes me want you more (re: Kim Petras’ “Heart to Break“).
Having a taste, Zeuhl and I turned into “nocturnal” feeders who would actively seek out future prey after our current love had run its course (thanks to them, not me)! I had to reconcile that, wondering if it was my fault (they initially said it wasn’t my fault at all, but later changed their mind and said it was all my fault, not theirs); i.e., making me freeze and shatter like glass—not from virgin anticipation, but if someone else after Zeuhl would, like them, take my heart when pulled out of my chest for them to hold, and shove a nail through it (eat your heart out, Solzhenitsyn):
Even if it means that I’ll never put myself back together
Gonna give you my heart to break
Even if I’ll end up in shatters, baby, it doesn’t matter
Gonna give you my heart to break
I tried to fight, but I can’t help it
Don’t care if this is my worst mistake
‘Cause no one else could do it better
And that’s why I give you my heart to break (ibid.).
In part, the ageless quality to vampires speaks to the die-hard quality of sodomy as a poetic device, of sex as a political weapon; i.e., of its simultaneously burnt-out and novel qualities, its geriatric and youthful affect. Oxymorons and other such vampire clichés were truly done and dusted by the time Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet—done quite literally to death but immortalized through the arrogance of youth, the undead restoration of former novelties repeatedly coming on and wearing off as vampiric charms always do. But paradoxes concerning good/evil and burning desire a) speak to capital (for the Bard, mercantile Capitalism) feeding on the living and the living seeking their own need for hormonal release from the state’s casual alienation, and b) our collective desire to feel young again, thus return to a past moment of vulnerability—and yes, stupidity and risk-taking behaviors—to relive them as calculated risk in undead, vampiric forms. Once undead, always undead; re: Matteson’s concept that rebellion is vampiric, punishing mad science.
That’s the beauty (and the pain) of the Gothic love song—a holistic thread to tug on all manner of things capital has used purely for profit, but which we an-Coms use ourselves (e.g., me, when writing about my own journey through life). In part, it’s nature—our bodies doing what they were made (through the miracle of evolution) to do—but also as a manmade thing; i.e., capital and our responses to it.
“Sex is dangerous!” Sandy Norton told me once (recognizing the little slut and poet, in me), but there’s nothing else like it in the world; it is both tacky and common—a cheap and plastic flower sold on the street corner to unwitting tourists—and a tower of precious crystal that, like Tennessee William’s glass menagerie, might shatter to pieces should anyone involved dare! We feel trapped between, in the closet but somehow having nowhere to hide and stripped bare! Ironies emerge as dualities (class and culture, race and status, wealth and destitution, straight and queerness, etc) not only start to collide, but come to a head; we feel pretty and trapped, hot and cold, burning with desire and co(n)signed to a lonely fate: living in luxury but collared and owned—your angel and your devil, divided into such paradoxes not simply through the human condition, but capital caging and vampirically pimping us out!
The core of the monstrous-feminine, then, is the feminine side yielding a curious, at-times-mind-boggling paradox: shelter as a house for property that—all the same—can tokenize and liberate in equal measure, along the same axes of oppression; e.g., tokenization per black homophobia (Khalid Attaf’s “Selling Pink Lighters in the Hood,” 2024) vs queer appropriation (Tirrrb’s “The Yassification of Masculinity,” 2023). For or against the state, such actions unfold depending on the circumstances and, in a meta sense, across different texts and space-time. A monster lurks just beneath the surface, but also across it and on its thresholds, yet isn’t automatically “evil.” It simply is what it is. Power, in turn, is something to discover and act out in such liminalities by putting “evil” in quotes.
As old as I am, I’ve felt that, and been with people who both chomp at the bit and submit to it despite being younger than me (with Cuwu being 23 and a stoner college dropout when we met and I 35 and doing my postgrad, there being a 12-year age gap between us, but our meeting still yielding a shared and captivating bond; i.e., both of us recovering from past abuse and each being interested in Marxism and queer liberation, but also having fun and learning from each other as interested, thus to some degree hypnotized by/captured with, the other’s presence)—the dialectical-material context of it being as much resisting bourgeois forces and, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, putting on the collar to play with the drug-like feelings (of appetite and thirst, synonymous with desire) in a liberatory sense: we rolled the dice and aren’t sorry for it/did so without regret or care[3])!
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Agency, then, become the choice of adding a theatrical element to things incredibly common; i.e., towards kept female, and by extension, feminine existence, but also anything monstrous-feminine to the white, cis-het, male, European Christian status quo (a social nadir that feminizes the biggest, fiercest black men and the most diminutive and unassuming twink, nurturing feelings of gentle, teddy-bear submission in one and murderous intent in the other [similar to murderous girls, per the kowai/kawaii effect and demonizing mental illness and violent psychosexual mechanisms] provided whatever results can be used by capital to exploit us; and which we take back in liberatory doubles); i.e., love is a battlefield to prosecute class, culture and race war for workers vs the state (while avoiding Benatar’s racist pimp clichés in the 1983 “Love Is a Battlefield” music video, below).
(exhibit 41g1a1b1: Pat Benatar was discovered in a New York club “singing for her supper” [Awards Show Network’s “Dick Clark Interviews Pat Benatar – American Bandstand 1980”]. She had operatic training but a rock ‘n roll sensibility that she used in MTV’s early years to top the charts. She did so while standing in for abuse that she never lived herself—she and her husband say as much, having a wonderful-if-poor-to-middle-class-childhood[4]—but sung about for others in songs like “Treat Me Right,” “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” “Hell Is for Children” and “Love is a Battlefield,” etc. No stand-in is perfect, and the music video in question sports an ethnically and gender-diverse group of ostensibly all-AFAB sex workers spearheaded by Benatar as the second wave white savior standing up to the racially-coded gangster. While such realities do unfold under criminogenic conditions, such media is, itself, criminogenic in that it only presents Italian men as ruthless pimps, white women as saviors, and sex workers as down-on-their luck whores. There’s lies and truth, interwoven and requiring an-Coms to take the good and leave the bad, post-dialectical-material scrutiny accounting for the dualities, exceptions, contradictions and double standards, etc; i.e., from the homeless or housing-challenged, cis-het or otherwise[5], white or otherwise—all clubbing per street life and “paying rent” by working the corners [servicing middle-class Johns prowling the streets due to virgin/whore syndrome, but also chasing faggot mistresses; re: Tangerine].
Per Jameson’s elaborate strategies of misdirection, the performer’s paradox—of something being “just for show,” making it “look good” for the cameras, etc—applies to activism, in turn, being composed of such lies; i.e., as half-real, the half-true coinciding with the completely false and completely true [the liar’s paradox]. In it, abuse sits adjacent to fabrications meant to achieve and prevent future forms, but also give voice to such things we are both tough on and soft about in different ways; i.e., often inverted, with those smaller persons having a tougher core and those who look tough on the outside being soft on the inside; e.g., the cum dumpster and the sperm donor but also the cumslut to give cum, etc! Whatever the arrangement, control is something to surrender that we might subvert the duality of rainbows’ usual capitalist covenant thereof; i.e., enslaving the Earth through its appearances; e.g., through the solstices as dogmatized per feast and famine, summer and winter’s respective long and short days, but also those who look and act different punished and fetishized to uphold the status quo, then and now.
Trashy and sacred, pillowy and profane, true rebellion and falsehood/acting are not mutually exclusive, but liminal; and Pat—all 95-pounds of her and that earth-shattering voice of hers, her firecracker’s streetwise sensibilities—really “sung for her supper” but also for the rights of others less advantaged to have their chance to eat and sing for their food and careers, too! Thanks to her class character’s proletarian function, Pat’s a feminist icon for a reason, and not stuck in the past like so many others from the same period. A blast from the past, she was ahead of her time and overcame oppression to help others do the same [making me—a trans woman—feel gay-as-hell; i.e., for a cis-het woman as I listened to her music on CD, closeted in high school]! Stay classy, Pat!)
Not only is there no shame in playing with such dolls (ourselves and our bodies) to figure out what we and others want in a vampire sense, but danger and confusion exist for anyone who stoically denies such play on principle (“to deny our own impulses is to deny that which makes us human!”)! Instead, make it a shared, community lifestyle that pushes us not towards Promethean fire (as capital does), but towards truth and knowledge unto a school that includes queerness and monsters to become part of the struggle; i.e., in ways the state never fully will, us rising from its destruction like a phoenix from the ashes. That’s why I tailored Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism as I did. It fit my privilege and persecution makeup—my starting point, class-wise and race-wise, in terms of accident of birth, but also my innate, very queer desire to play in the colorful din and emerge with fresh synthesis: a dog with a bone, a slutty puppy wagging her tail (full to bursting with joy and… other things)!
Per the usual dualities, the state and rebels each offer people apples to eat, relaid as various splendid, artistic and pornographic/art-is-or-isn’t-pornographic lies, mid-debate (magic mirrors, anisotropic witch rhetoric, grimoire cookbooks to consult when tempting maidens, etc). Except, the elite brandish bread-and-circus opiates like Snow White‘s poisoned apple to blind the masses with, whereas proletarian receptions cryptonymically “lie” to hide and uncover different things; i.e., elaborate strategies of misdirection that, through their allegory as something to play with and consume by deranging the senses (re: acid Communism), shows those who vampirically feed (on the red pill, the forbidden fruit) two things: the cold hard truth about capital exploiting us (e.g., Neo, in The Matrix), but also the increasingly body-warm vampire’s comfort in knowing they can make a difference against Capitalist Realism by feeding anisotropically to empower us.
By comparison, capital makes us prey and feel cold, seeking body heat through “sanguine” and sodomy of all kinds, which it then criminalizes and reduces to a quick fleeting drug high (re: false power). Speaking out about this is the whore’s “that happens” side of things, showcasing wonderful and terrible realities for which there both no substitute for (e.g., wet pussy and body heat) and all the more reason to substitute (real abuse for “rape” in quotes). However small, the differences these possible worlds promote happen through their own creative output subverting state vampirism as a death omen to shock rebellion into action; i.e., by snapping workers out of their myopia, thus weaponizing labor against white moderacy and tokenism (the centrist’s hands tied by the state’s desire for profit; Marxist-Leninism historically homophobic, thus led around by capital like a bull by the nose; and the feminist punching down against “men in dresses,” etc), and other forms of police violence through state monopolies and trifectas!
As usual, all share the same spaces, minds, coverage/reach and bellies; e.g., Matthew Lewis’ “sleepy potion” from The Monk camping rape in a very literal, cabin-in-the-woods sense, versus something like vampires making the same basic sodomy arguments: sleep, sex, sleep sex; surprise butt sex! A wild, sex-doctor cumslut with hairy legs—tucking while wearing an itty-bitty thong (and having a tight little hole between her legs, below)—appears! “Holy Saint Francis!” Time for your medicine, Straights! Fuck around, find out! Kill ’em with kindness (and fanning eyelashes)! Pew! Pew (witches are sexual ninjas—guerrillas of the night and masters of the Austenian sarcastic italics, hiding in plain sight)!
(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Hearing those words, you might be visited by the less-than-quaint image of a 38-year-old witch—conjured up from horny jail to kick down the door with one stiletto heel, before shouting “Trick or treat, motherfuckers!” (with a husky allure/jazz growl like Tom Waits) and spraying everything with Halloween candy fired from a tommy gun (treats, prophylactics and party favors). In academic terms, though, the language of ghosts, the ancient past, and rebellion are reclaimed from dead forms of capital—of “Halloween” stealing your wages, labor, violence, terror, and morphological expression, etc—and making it consciously rebellious again. In turn, GNC academia and gender trouble through popular discourse intertwine in a fun, liminal (thus more effective) sense; re: canonical Gothic treats us fags as perpetually “evil” and stripped non-consensually down to our birthday suits on the streets and in the prison cages (stripping is not consent, nor is theft of any of the usual things the elite take from queer people/sex workers); i.e., in ways we deprivatize and use to blend in/stand out cryptonymically with, during dialectics of shelter and the alien.
Liminal expression, then, is a powerful (at times bubblegum, nostalgic) means of performing those exchanges that vampires specialize in: through charm, but also painful, moist, and fluid-to-heat-seeking behaviors/prandial activities! Instead of weakening and corrupting us like a drug user who cannot stop, we’ve suddenly built ourselves up from hard-fought lessons about consumption; i.e., all the wiser and stronger for it, having a voice at last! Anger is a weapon useful to liberation (per the 1970s), but so is sex positivity and joy (per the ’90s and beyond): shit, honey—catch flies with both! And if they pull our teeth (recuperation and controlled opposition)? Grow new ones! Stand out! Take risks; get hurt and learn from the harm caused by state forces! They’ll harm us anyways!
What I mean is, while I have drawn and dreamt since childhood, I couldn’t be exactly who I am now without having taken these chances and, yes, having been hurt and harmed for them. I survived, and despite my own strange, at-times-deranged[6] undead appetites, have learned to tailor myself and my bloodlust to feed on others in a sex-positive fashion; i.e., with me not only not harming them or vice versa, but all of us working towards a better future than capital will ever allow (the road to recovery is both one of deconstruction, regarding pernicious carceral systems, and reconstructing them into something better)! Never trust a skinny cook, kids (re: Bad Empanada)! Unlike their superficially charming bourgeois counterparts (or Marxist-Leninism abstainers), proletarian vampires (and their naughty sermons) hold up under scrutiny! We generally aren’t sex pests because sex pests are most commonly cops that serve capital and the state.
This magical sluttiness is endemic to anarcho Communism, which through the Gothic can reclaim the monstrous-feminine (especially GNC people) from negative labels (and simplistic, bloodless views of revolution) regarding vampirism as largely centered around us. Such labels—and their perceived feeding mechanisms under capital[7]—have a history tied to queer love as undead, which I want to keep going over now through vampires; i.e., short-but-sweet, but more than we have already in the crash course and vampire historical primer. We’ll keep focusing on sodomy’s history—especially how it hypnotized the middle class into abject, class-dormant paralysis—doing so through my scholarship (which also looks at SWERF-y Marxist-Leninists; re: Bad Empanada); i.e., coming from someone whose exit from the closet took over twenty years!
We’ll get to my exiting in a bit, though For now, having exhausted my prep discussing why we fags feed in general—hammering eager-and-hungry pegs into willing-and-thirsty holes—let’s consider why we feed in secret/under state surveillance; i.e., feeding’s criminal application and subversive potential!
Ludo-Gothic BDSM: Criminality and Power Flow when Feeding (feat. “Omelas,” Roadside Picnic, Solzhenitsyn, Mao and Stalin, Chelyabinsk-40, and more)
As we’ve already established, vampires feed, but so do all undead; i.e., generally as a matter of strange habits gained through trauma and criminality under capital. Keeping this basic fact in mind, the word “undead” is ontologically imprecise, and vampires, ghosts and composites all constitute different forms of modular undead: they can hybridize but also exist by themselves. To keep things as simple as we can when talking about the state’s criminalizing of sodomy and undead, let’s focus on their common feature; i.e., as liminal beings—how they feed and what they eat, and how this relates to subversive, ludo-Gothic BDSM expressions of sexuality and gender through my Gothic scholarship—then apply this all to vampires, in particular, as criminalized by state forces (and how they can fight that)!
(artist: In Shoo)
Even though vampires, ghosts and composites appear somewhat differently than zombies do, all of them return to the living world to feed in some shape or form; i.e., doing so to survive by seeking warmth (for different reasons, depending on who’s making the argument; e.g., food, affection, shelter or some combination of these things). “Feeding” needn’t be literal; instead, it primarily constitutes liminal, undead interactions between the living and the (un)dead inside a linguo-material threshold that often concerns sex; re: those touched by trauma “cruising” as they seek out feelings of control that, true enough, stem from feelings of being out of control that must be simulated in calculated-risk environments. Once bitten, twice shy!
This practice is generally called “sodomy” vis-à-vis vampires; i.e., as a pejorative label tied to psychosexual activities queer people do just to survive (sex work), but also everyday actions that deviate from the norm, insofar as sexuality and gender are concerned. “Sodomy” (and similar terms) are devices of abjection, whose labels of guilt-by-association and collective punishment attach to things we do and identities we have being described inaccurately and in outmoded language in order to alienate, persecute and commodify us in the eyes of the middle class.
(artists: Chryssi and Ayla)
Anal sex, for example, is “sodomy” under the umbrella term, but so is oral sex, French kissing and BDSM, at large—wrongfully conflated with cannibalism, bestiality and pedophilia as rightfully harmful acts; i.e., in short, anything that deviates from PIV sex and heteronormative behaviors/personas, which said personas and proponents will twist in order to enjoy themselves (during guilty pleasures) while they act holier-than-thou, labeling and defaming queer people—but especially GNC fags in particular—as disease-like threats to capital (and DARVO’d through comparisons to diseases capital causes). Per Le Guinn’s “Omelas,” the greater the happiness in the city thereof, the smaller the scapegoat group and the more blame put on them! It’s basically the world’s worst BDSM session (the hauntology of canceled futures haunting dead futurism [re: Jameson’s “Progress vs Utopia“] in this sense, below):
They all know that it [the child] has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery (source: “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” 1973).
It’s a trolley problem inside a pipedream, portending not just to free-market Capitalism, but state Capitalism, too (which is what Marxist-Leninism fundamentally began when attacked by the West); i.e., hardening the hearts of those doing the killing to enact what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973, the same year as “Omelas” and a year after the Strugatsky brothers wrote Roadside Picnic, a story about how rapid industrialism and nuclear abuse is bad. Hmm…):
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
My argument to escaping both (and bad, DIY “heart surgery”) is to do ludo-Gothic BDSM in anarchistic forms; i.e., breaking Capitalist Realism and all its canonical illusions—Gothic ones included!
(source: Sam Woolfe’s “Should We Walk Away From Omelas?” 2022)
Capitalism needs a distraction, people in love with their dead futures and not thinking about the state as vampiric. Thus, “sodomy” can be whatever they want/need to punish queer people with during witch hunts, if only by proxy or adjacent to the usual things being implied; i.e., in a gaslit state of ignorance surrounding basic activities; e.g., things like eating food, drinking water, releasing bodily waste[8] and/or making love unto itself or as an-Com praxis—in short, us just existing and trying to survive, then being accused for it, and having that be romanced by straight weirdos and token sell-outs part of the same prison and its problematic “prison sex” mentality.
In other words, “sodomy” is a bad reputation built on weaponized lies of terror through enforced ignorance—generational trauma and dogma applied without basis of fact, merely positions with a punitive, otherwise unspoken hierarchy of preferential abuse. Whereas zombies are generally known for cannibalism (and to a lesser extent, rape), ghosts for possession, and composites for revenge (though each are capable of all of these things as a matter of argument), those called or otherwise treated as “vampires” are, in effect, being accused of “sodomy”; i.e., an incredibly broad persecution label inside a larger network thereof. The canonical idea is to swap out parts; then, to continue destabilizing minority groups from a straight middle class downwards—i.e., on a ladder of preferential mistreatment preying on nature (the monstrous-feminine) as historically updated to weaponize different persecution parties against queerness as ignorant to itself and informed by constantly updating legends, theories, and graveyard ahegao (re: the death stare/theatre):
So while Jewish people, Pagan women, or people of color, etc, are often pegged for committing sodomy through loose association with the deed—i.e., in a neo-medieval sense; e.g., the rodent-like qualities of Count Orlock from Nosferatu, left—queer people are synonymous with sodomy by virtue of an identity that has been tailor-made specifically for us over the last several centuries and flourished under neoliberal Capitalism’s own positions of enforced ignorance after much medical and literary academic publication between 1870 and the 1970s: through Satanic Panic pitting the aforementioned groups against us inside neoliberal concentration camps and closets (no such thing as a perfect victim, my dudes). We’re fenced in and attacked, but also pimped out and preyed upon; i.e., while being accused of sodomizing the world, said accusations made—like the vampire’s reflection—with invisible ink (all of which realize under reactive abuse and criminogenic conditions).
This weapon of terror includes the label, itself, but also vampirism being synonymous to our liminal struggles, which we paradoxically must reclaim from canonized forms commercializing our abuse, effectively recuperating and monopolizing them to commit police violence against us (or, per people like Frederic Jameson or Bad Empanada, using their own Marxist scholarship to devalue ours and the Gothic mode’s GNC potential/socio-material energies); i.e., concerning Asprey’s paradox of terror through sodomy dialogs for or against the state applied dualistically by opposing forces using the same language: “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source).
Because such a monopoly is impossible, this means we can reverse its typical, canonical usage’s incentivizing and endorsing of criminal accusations and hate crimes; i.e., towards us as more or less ignorant to better worlds where vampirism is now endemic across all of them (similar to COVID or rabies), but doggedly pushing for them all the same: from closeted positions filled with iron-maiden-esque spikes draining us of our wits!
Given this is a concept I’ve already written about repeatedly in this series, I’ll supply several quote chains now for the sake of reference and convenience (my own post-closet scholarship for you to stand on). The first batch summarizes the process vis-à-vis rape play through ludo-Gothic BDSM; the second highlights criminality as a shared process of reclamation, also through ludo-Gothic BDSM: the flow of power and knowledge, and how we can play with either in monstrous language (not just vampirism) to interrogate our trauma, thus rearrange them as they societally present and are understood. Keeping with our Marxist-Leninist critiques—and critiques of the state, period—I’ll discuss homophobia in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, and the negative effects the state-as-straight has on nature (re: Chelyabinsk-40); i.e., as something to marginalize and attack if not for raw profit, then to rapidly industrialize and militarize while also criminalizing queerness!
As I do all of these things, try to think about the criminalized terrorist/counterterrorist function of sodomy and how it can likewise reverse the usual flow and function of power on such registers.
From Volume Two, part one’s “Preface: Inside the Hall of Mirrors” (2024), I rearticulate ludo-Gothic BDSM as a pedagogy of the oppressed:
[artist: ikerellatab]
I’ve said before and will say again, “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”—must do so through performance and play as a potent, paradoxical means of camp [from Volume Zero]
Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not [source].
per my conceptualization of ludo-Gothic BDSM [also from Volume Zero]
My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms [source].
to the pedagogy of oppressed that ludo-Gothic BDSM entails [from Volume One]
At its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails— i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces. Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers [source].
onto Volume Two’s observations:
As such, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of interrogating trauma by which to heal one’s home as sick with Capitalism. For me and my voyeurism, for instance, I love to observe the sexual gratification of others; i.e., mutually consensual voyeurism agreed between me and the people letting me watch them. I love being put in that headspace, that altered state of mind: someone else’s shoes; i.e., one where that person feels good. It feels good to occupy a role attached to a real person feeling good in ways that I want to feel, too. I think that speaks to what my book is really about. Healing through social-sexual exchanges like these, but also slipping into different roles to face difficult traumas [source].
Such pedagogies concerns criminality as something to anisotropically subvert, thus power as it is normally arranged, articulated and arbitrated in vampiric language/polarities; i.e., that of sodomy and blood flow as hate language taken back in resistance to capital and profit as a structure. Whatever the form—from a hauntologized 1800s gay man, to Medusa per Stranger Things‘ Demogorgon, to Alraune knockoffs in latter-day comic book series commodifying sapphic love as vampiric (e.g., Poison Ivy from Batman) to Gothic and queer-Marxist scholarship—queer authors/performers can camp such things to survive the gentrification and decay of police violence in official or stochastic (vigilante) capacities, preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine.
To that, most an-Coms are environmentalists, whereas the Soviet state did plenty of fucked-up shit to the environment; e.g., the Holodomor famine, but also late-Soviet-era cotton monoculture, fertilizer mismanagement and evaporation of the Aral sea (source: New Scientist’s “Soviet Cotton Threatens a Region’s Sea – and Its Children,” 1898), Chelyabinsk-40 and the USSR’s production and storage of nuclear waste (source: Alan Bellows’ “In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You,” 2008) and of course, the initial infamous suppression of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (which, while oversold by HBO many years later under neoliberal Red Scare [re: my Chernobyl review], was still a terrible event and black eye for non-militarized nuclear power in the Western bloc)!
Combined, it’s not exactly a surprise the country is romanticized post hoc as a nuclear wasteland; i.e., there’s some truth to it; e.g., Roadside Picnic (1972), but also Stalker (the 1979 movie or 2007 videogame franchise) or Metro 2033 (the 2003 Russian novel or 2010 videogame franchise). In a vampiric sense, Socialism can decay and when it does it decays into Capitalism; suitably enough, Russia’s decay is marked by literal radiation, its vampires having an isotopic signature to them (their presence marked by space aliens and giant mutant animals as much drawn to the radiation as created by it). Irradiation and irrigation irritate the poorly fertilized land, enflaming and drying it out while the state sucks up as much (through its mouth, but also its syringe) as it can!
In between quote chains, let’s quickly (seven pages) apply the idea of queer criminal application during ludo-Gothic BDSM under state abuse; i.e., by exposing sometimes forgotten or overlooked areas thereof on the “leftist” side of things, we’ll uncover and expose embarrassing things normally boxed up and packaged as “good” for those the state normally abuses. The trick in subverting abuse is speaking to it by pulling the severed head out of the box. Forget Gwyneth Paltrow (who’s a real piece of work, all on her own); I’m gonna kill those darlings, comrades! Time to die, Stalin, Mao and Russia’s “Communist” ghost!
(source: Howard Senft’s “Se7en Movie Prop ‘What’s In The Box’ Scene,” 2021)
Remember what I said about Bad Empanada’s unironic Stalinist rhetoric—for making the talking about sex illegal (except to criminalize and police it, like he does)? Well, thus are the wages of sin, boyos! As I’ve established, homophobia was a deep-rooted and pernicious, Omelas-grade problem with Marx and Engels, and no one after them who was functionally straight, thus pro-state, actually challenged the homophobic bedrock to their ideas (except Lenin and his ilk, who Stalin killed and purged to make Communist a straight enterprise, thus not actually Communism). It was always, “Do Communism (and queerness) later!” In the interim, the race to rapidly industrialize led to giant concessions with state power abusing itself (and workers/nature) to compete with America, becoming—in effect—capitalist in function; i.e., raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine to vampirically draw strength from the land as dead labor does on living labor. This goes for China and Russia!
For China, the Great Leap Forward resulted in a colossal famine, starving the People so Mao could militarily consolidate his own power against his rivals. He cared largely about himself and that took priority over good praxis; i.e., he betrayed any sense of the cause that didn’t enrich him and his dream for winning the war at whatever the cost. He hardened his heart, separated others off into places where they could be killed, and pushed the button. In turn, queerness withered and the land suffered in ways that were comparable to the United States; i.e., queer sexuality was invisible to Mao like a vampire in a narcissist’s vanity glass, thus left to rot and be abused by pro-state forces hurting them and straight workers alike!
Queerness was still seen as “degenerate,” though; i.e., treated as less-and-less welcome during the Republic of China increasingly emulating the Western powers (the “beating them at their own game” approach). Especially during the Cultural Revolution (where people followed the leader acting straight and sleeping with many women as a point of reference in his own personality cult), the stage was set for queer criminalization. After Mao’s decay and death, homosexuality in China was made de facto illegal in 1979:
Deng Xiaoping’s proposal in 1979 to advance Chinese socialist spiritual civilization was operationalized through a wide variety of procedures, including the use of the criminal justice system through the new crime of “hooliganism.” It was understood that the object infringed upon by hooliganism was the social order itself, through acts that violated the moral principles of Chinese society. Legislated in 1979, hooliganism was an obvious tool for the regulation of sexuality. Those engaged in hooliganism had to be severely punished. Seven men of the 31 men in our study were arrested and six were sentenced to re-education through labour [conversion therapy] (source: Heather Worth et al’s ” Hooliganism, Homosexuality and the Opening-up of China,” 2019)
In short, it was medicalized and legally persecuted like the West had done, the start of the neoliberal period marking in a queerphobic (thus capitalist) turning point ushered in by Mao’s behaviors defeating any potential China had to develop Communism at the state level (already illustrated by the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, after Stalin’s death). This wasn’t a failure of the state, but the state doing what the state always doubles: double, divide and decay before dueling itself.
By comparison, Stalin put a chokehold on homosexuality and simply made it illegal in 1933 (the same year the Nazis burned down Hirschfeld’s Sexology Institute)—a law that would stay in effect until the Fall of the Soviet Union, only to be courted again by rising fascist sentiment scapegoating queer people for “degeneracy” during the Russian Federation’s own boom-and-bust approach, post-neoliberal shock therapy. But even before neoliberalism took effect, decay always leads to the same mistreatment of queer people on either side of the Iron Curtain.
For example, Dr. Uncola explains, “The USSR under Lenin was the world leader in gay rights and gender corrective surgery for more than a decade. Before Stalin rolled back certain laws in the ’30s, queer liberation was understood as ‘part of the revolution'” (source tweet: July 1, 2023). He initially cites the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR penal codes of 1922 and 1926 legalizing homosexuality. Then he goes onto add, “Nikolai Semashko, the first People’s Commissar of Public Health for the USSR [was] responsible for the introduction of world’s first universal healthcare system, referred to as the Semashko model. He was also one of the earliest supporters for Soviet queer emancipation” (ibid.).
Other examples include Dr. Grigorii Batkis, “director of the Institute for Social Hygiene in Moscow. In his 1925 report, ‘The Sexual Revolution in Russia’ stated queer relationships weren’t only normal, but should be legally respected, noting Russia differed from the rest of Europe” (ibid.); and “People’s Commissar for Welfare (and close friend of Lenin, below) Alexandra Kollontai was also a vocal advocate for queer liberation, arguing that true socialism could never be achieved without a radical change in attitudes towards sexuality” (ibid.); also mentioned are gender corrective surgeries and same-sex marriage in opposition to European and American fascism.
So, it sounds like Lenin was more inclusive than Marx and Engels, right? Sure, points for Lenin for not closeting queers and kettling/staking them like vampires (a low bar but one he fairly met). The problem is, Lenin needed muscle for his revolution and Stalin—a Georgian gangster and Lenin’s righthand man—filled that role. But once Lenin died, in 1924, Stalin began to muscle in/prey on Lenin’s former operation (and even before his death, let’s be honest). He exiled Trotsky in 1929 and enacted the first of the purges in 1938 (only to kill Trotsky while the other man was in exile, in 1940). Between those, he also made homosexuality illegal in 1933 (the same year the Nazis burned Hirschfeld’s Sexology Institute to ashes):
An important disclaimer, however, is that the national attitude towards gay and trans people wasn’t unanimously supportive. While many were sympathetic or ambivalent, there was a faction of the Bolsheviks who wanted it outlawed again. Among them was this guy. You might know him. Stalin personally demanded the introduction of an anti-gay law in response to a report from NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda, who had conducted a raid on the residence of hundreds of homosexuals in Moscow and Leningrad in 1933, labelling them “pederasts.” Sound familiar?
On 7 March 1934, Article 121 was added to the USSR criminal code, outlawing homosexuality all over again. Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko added fuel to the fire by linking gay and trans people to “the remnants of enemies”—products of fascism and bourgeois decadence (ibid.).
All those really-cool things Uncola mentioned earlier? Gone, just like that—all because Stalin had a hard-on for absolute power not unlike the Czars and Caesars before him! It’s “might makes right,” which had all the usual rollback/walk back/setback effect on queer people Imperialism always doe: criminalize, closet, demonize and destroy through state obscurantism, DAVRO and vampiric predation.
To it, not even twenty years after the Romanovs were dead (and good riddance to them), the Russian state had already begun to decline and, to some extent, ape their fascist foils by feeding on queer people while calling them vampires. There were differences, but ultimately these were more of degree than anything else. Homosexuality (and queerness at large) would be illegal in Russia until 1993, two years after the Fall. In 2013, though, “the Russian duma in Moscow passed a new law banning the ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships’ to minors” (source: the Council for Global Equality’s “The Facts on LGBT Rights in Russia,” 2022); this would be followed by Putin’s anti-LGBT propaganda law in 2022, making queerness not just a crime again, but effectively sedition in Russia and its prospective territories. Fun!
This is what I meant earlier when I said we need to meaningfully challenge inherited confusions and misconceptions; i.e., as closeted, scared/sacred things that historically decay towards capital, thus fascism. We can’t just do what Bad Empanada does and throw around Stalin and Mao memes, mixed into valid postcolonialist work and pernicious SWERF and queerphobic arguments. Two wrongs does not make a right, and tying this historically to millions of dead people (again, queer or straight) through state policies enacted on such exclusionary rhetoric is wrong regardless of intent or how they attach/relate (directly or in a lateral sense); socio-material outcome is what matters, the state having the power to enact these things to a Promethean degree. Supporting the same by making pro-state arguments like Bad Empanada does is bad history aided by blind spots for his favorite team on the global stage. ASAB, dude!
To that, liars often mix lies with truth (re: Macbeth); the usual Bad Empanada approach would be to argue something akin to, “It’s okay! The Holodomor was an accident, not an intentional genocide [Bad Empanada’s “The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You,” 2022], so America sucks. Pay no attention to Soviet or Chinese abuses like the Holodomor, including how queerphobic they were and how much they destroyed the environment!” The lie is rooted in the distraction, through facts that—while technically true—are dishonest in how they are framed. Like, Russia and America both suck, dude; Communism needs to start and end on the ground level; the state only decays to abuse its people and the land in queerphobic, anti-nature ways, treating all of them as expendable puppets (and taking all the credit; re: Mao, Stalin). We are not divorced from these things; if the environment collapses, so will states, and state Socialism led by Western enemies holding its nose ring is essentially state Capitalism in history and practice.
Looking more at Russia’s decay and collapse, then, the state’s vampiric policing role became increasingly radioactive in a literal sense, their own decay towards Capitalism being one of Promethean science abusing the same technology the Americans did, but arguably far worse from a legislative and executory standpoint. Yes, America enacted Capitalist Realism through its own genocides and open-to-covert power abuse—e.g., the CIA and weaponized fascist rebellions; i.e., to paralyze and feed on their populations—but those drunk/star struck on the Soviet-era power of the atom and regression towards Stalin are still forgetting the incredible (and often hideously incompetent) cloaked abuses of power that leader’s vampiric, bloodthirsty cult of personality armed American propagandists with (the ultimate scapegoat)! Myopic nostalgic assists in state vampirism, free market or not!
(artist: Alex Andreev)
As such, by the early 1970s, abuses in the Soviet nuclear program were starting to be felt in Russian media in ways the state couldn’t censor—first with Roadside Picnic, then Stalker in 1979; i.e., the latter being an ongoing event that showcases the cancer growing in the Russian state mechanism: its tumor-like power plants (which eventually went malign with Chernobyl, in 1986) having metastasized to more than just infrastructure. In 1979, the start of the neoliberal era, the Russians invaded Afghanistan—in effect, embarking on their own Vietnam after America had pulled out of Saigon, in 1975.
All of this means Ukraine is a follow-up to the kinds of fascist, vampiric decay seen earlier during Russia’s rapid industrialization and subsequent militarization, then said military’s total war period before the Union’s inevitable divide and collapse. Sound familiar? Such endeavors historically only ever cause the state to grow stronger for a shorter period, before sickening and regressing into functionally bourgeois allies of American interests: bloodsuckers of a capitalist sort. By the time the Fall happened, the Russian elite and their American counterparts were ready for it. And all the while, they had been fencing together on the global stage—not as rivals, but friends combating boredom and weaponizing the spectres of Caesar and Marx alike to move money through nature while policing nature as queer to apologize for the state as straight (or to pinkwash it, in America’s case)!
While horseshoe arguments exist regarding Stalin and Hitler as “identical,” the fact remains they both outlawed queerness and were united on that front; to camp such ghosts of the men themselves requires doing more than just slapping a rainbow on them and calling it a day! While American Red Scare is likewise dubious, there is a kernel of truth to their own fabrications, too. Nothing is sacred but basic human rights and those of animals and the environment.
From Soviet Russia to Renaissance Florence (and its own imperfect sexual models), acclimation grooms through regressively conservative nostalgia; in turn, regressing nostalgically towards any imaginary past is incredibly dangerous. Using ludo-Gothic BDSM, we need to historically critique all such vampirism in an-Com ways that include queerness, challenge state heteronormativity and safeguard nature (animals, children and all vulnerable parties) from weaponized vigilante violence and unironic rape fantasies (stochastic terrorism) in/outside a calculated risk environment—all while breaking Capitalist Realism on all registers. In a vampiric sense, Stalin sucked power to the top. For the same reason, Putin sucks, America sucks; states and cops suck and criminalizing queerness sucks, divvying up the land for Imperialism sucks (whether as the Soviets did it, with extant, numbered administrative territories [re: Chelyabinsk-40] or America’s repurposing of native peoples; e.g., Milwaukee)! Anyone who would destroy nature and queerness like that flies a giant, Dracula-style red flag. Our revenge is sucking back in ways that defang the state and release their policeman’s chokehold on nature-as-monstrous-feminine[9]. End of story!
The takeaway from these observations, here, is such abuses invariably gulag someone and kill them, raping nature and queerness through police violence in defense of the few privileged powerful at the top. And if the outcome is functionally the same, then what, pray tell, was the point? To try and distinguish them and shift blame onto one aspect thereof or the other is sheer folly. All states decay and police queer people to further capital, thus “vampirize” as such, and we need to focus on the value of nature and human life by challenging and subverting their monopolies on vampire image; i.e., including queer forms thereof during ludo-Gothic BDSM, lest different forms of Capitalist Realism rise up and conceal the state’s harming of us. Arguments like “not one step back” are already made by those not on the front lines, themselves; e.g., Stalingrad—one of the bloodiest if not the bloodiest battle in the history of warfare—was fought not for the city’s strategic value, but because it was named after Stalin! How is that siege any different than American Vietnam necrometrics (re: kill counts) and pointless land battles if none of it furthered the cause because the state eventually decayed/sold out?
Keeping with that, and for reasons we have previously discussed vis-à-vis Capitalism, vampires/disease and Cartesian thought vs nature-as-monstrous-feminine, abuse of the environment is historically queerphobic in ways Marxist-Leninism was not above doing. Per Mao and Stalin, they rapidly industrialized to militarily compete with the United States; this “worked,” but led to great famines and ecological disasters if not equivalent to neoliberal Capitalism currently then certainly the lesser of two evils (emphasis on evil, there). Except, such deflective[10] gambits didn’t lead them to “defeat” the United States; i.e., the Soviet’s sold out long before the Fall, and China is only nominally Communist as they presently exist. More to the point, in lieu of climate change, I think we can safely say the strategy is amounts to mutually-assured destruction. Forget, ACAB! ASAB! All States Are Bad!
So, forgive me if I find someone like Bad Empanada making “America bad” arguments while, in the same breath, not doing his homework and acting like a Soviet-era cop rooting out corruption amongst us “degenerate, centrist” queers (terrorists for him to counterterrorize per the state). Apparently we’re all clones of the same evil model (re: Contrapoints)! State apologia is state apologia, and making it always leads to the same abuses. We need to take away the state, thus capital’s, ability to do it at all; i.e., not say and do things that basically amount to rape ranking: “Well, they only raped you a little bit, but those rapists basically do it more to [my virtue signal group] so just send me money!” Decay is decay and if someone says they “aren’t a neoliberal capitalist” and before falling into various “tankie” tropes against a particular group of people, then congratulations, they’re a neoliberal! This piece isn’t for him, but the people he’s trying to convert!
To conclude this short tangent, all Capitalist Realism must be challenged with ludo-Gothic BDSM, not just one or the other. It only takes one betrayal for you to become a cop, which is what the state will always push you to do; it’s always “maybe tomorrow” for those you betray. Soviet apologetics are Capitalism Realism, thus Promethean, queerphobic cops of nature-as-alien, queerness as criminal; Bad Empanada is a tankie cop making Stalinist arguments apologizing for past, present and future pogroms while, in the same breath, hiding behind the shield of anti-American rhetoric and postcolonial argument. He sucks and we don’t need him to do Communism right. The beauty of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is anyone can do it, including but especially sex workers and Medusa-esque queer people rocking state defenders to their core! With the deck stacked against us, we stacked mommies succ back!
(artist: Klaud)
Moving into our second quote chain, as I write of performance and play in Volume Zero—concerning monstrous things being “an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode,” and how “a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other” (source)—I go onto express power flow in Volume One through said things
I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda (source)
and of playing with poetics and power during ludo-Gothic BDSM, in Volume Two, part one’s “What Inspires Us to Meet and All of It Carrying On and On” (2024)
Think of meeting people and becoming friends like solving puzzles, then. To that, games are an effective way not just to play but to learn between the games we play together as distributed across all registers. This can be intended play or emergent play. The difference with some humans versus, say, all bees (Ze Frank’s “True Facts: Bees That Can Do Math!” 2024) is that humans can do both intended and emergent, but also emergent to challenge profit, and all while still having fun! Unlike bees, we’re potentially better at multitasking because our brains are so much bigger. The problem is, most people not only don’t use most of their brains (the old 15% argument) but devote games, play and mastery towards monopolizing emergent play in defense of profit (which bees have no concept for—”For me, sir, the question is totally without meaning!”).
This includes our species-unique abilities to communicate and learn: to lie/conceal, act, and rape, but also consent; i.e., camp canon as something only humans can do/create: putting “rape” in quotes by illustrating mutual consent, while also compartmentalizing trauma as a linguo-material device with complex (symbolic) social functions (the flow of power towards or away from the state) that frequent Gothic (monstrous) forms. These, in turn, achieve multiple functions at the same time—pleasure through play as an oft-imaginary means of social-sexual enrichment, learning and rebellion through gender identity and psychosexual struggle: at cross purposes with the state and the elite; i.e., both of us existing as separate, oppositional classes of existence within capital by design. Drama, comedy and satire are all unique to humans as part of a bigger world; so are games in this larger paradigm we want to liberate ourselves from with, meaning through sex work making iconoclastic art (through nudism, dress-up and sex, etc).
(artist: Nuclear Wasabi)
All games teach something. Our undead, demonic, and/or anthromorph BDSM costumes—our potentially satirical, ironic exchange rituals— happen uniquely during games as subversive coding behaviors (forbidden knowledge) and unequal distributions of power that educate people about trauma through social-sexual engagement; i.e., as a sex-positive, iconoclastic teaching device. In short, we can lie, act, tell jokes, and camp/canonize on a gradient of social-sexual expression that is more or less unique to humans, but which doesn’t unilaterally affect us and nothing else. Humans involve the rest of nature in their silliness, making us the slavers or stewards of our jungle friends.
Not only is the state a superorganism guided by abstract forces (the Shadow of Pygmalion); but certain workers become very good at convincing themselves and others the state is the only way forward; they adopt ruthless, cunning and brutal methods to keep others in line: concentric veneers, premeditation and lying in wait (ambush) to gentrify labor and its art/games. Except their infiltrators don’t have monopolies on violence, terror and monsters any more than the elite and its trifectas do. Their enforcement of terror vs counterterror can be reversed through the natural duality of human language as anisotropic.
By comparison, Gothic Communism is a superorganism that arranges power horizontally. It does so by recognizing the class character of warring relationships between games and players in ways that can be used—per ludo-Gothic BDSM and liminal expression—to learn through emergent play during multi(p)layer, linguo-material, social-sexual interactions across space and time; i.e., as games to play to process historical-material (complex) problems in the abstract, either solo and together, through ergodic (non-trivial) means: through negotiated, half-real ludic contracts where games master/code (re: Giddings and Kennedy) players but for which players can likewise work within this paradigm (me: ludo-Gothic BDSM) to achieve mutual consent, post-scarcity and liberation (source).
All three combine per ludo-Gothic BDSM to subvert, thus camp “sodomy” as a matter of canon (thus queer criminalization) in vampiric language. The resistance is active and engaged, but playful and linguo-material.
In short, we’re reclaiming vampirism from the state the same way a woman would reclaim the word “bitch”; a black person, the n word; and we fags, the word “faggot” but also Communism and its dead nostalgias (veering away from ambiguous Stalin or Mao memes [re: Bad Empanada] and instead camping their ghosts like we would Marx or anyone else from older times)—through power as something to play with, reversing its flow concerning the usual paradoxes’ poetic execution. Standing on the shoulders of giant abusers (who we check, challenge and camp; e.g., Stalin), but also surrounded by the invisible vampire queers from bygone days, we sloganize the past—not to ape older bigots weighing on us (re: Marx) or new sellouts acting in bad faith (re: Bad Empanada), but to change what is problematic about how we fags are viewed; i.e., by camping these vampires and, in effect, the state as straight (thus a giant closet). “Art is love made public!”
(artist: Kim Petras)
Whatever the castle, wherever the location or stage, supernatural as explained or not (re: Otranto and Strawberry Hill, but revived in many-a-haunted-house-movie, including full-town dioramas like Beetlejuice and museum exhibits of castle-like homesteads, in High Spirits—both 1988), it’s all another bastion to take back and own, making Omelas-style exceptions for no one. All suffering is valid, and all must be free from profit (thus corporate influence; e.g., Barbie, 2023); if one group is caged and closeted, we all are because either will be victims or cops (which is what the state does)! Decentralize and consolidate through intersectional solidarity! You can’t win by alienating yourself even if many of your arguments are correct (re: Bad Empanada being a surly cunt—pick your battles, my dude). Diversity is strength; so is fragility—expressing vulnerability in order to a) heal enough to build ourselves up to the point that we can even fight back, and b) establish trust to begin with; re: by admitting when we’re wrong and learning from that!
In short, vampires are—like so many monsters in Gothic fiction—built on ignorance according to their status as vice-character freaks of nature (to police, prosecute and prey on/with) that can be reclaimed from police agents through the usual sodomy devices as theatrical in nature; i.e., something to perform keeping the above concepts of power flow and assigned criminality in mind (and our earlier prep before that). And while exiting the closet to sleep in a coffin might seem like the Twilight Zone/outside Plato’s Cave, its actually quite vivacious; i.e., not hard to be steadily productive and sex-positive inside, once you’re shown the ropes! Everybody fucks; cops rape for the state.
To that, we go “all the way” for all peoples (victims, not cops), never quitting on the outliers just because it’s convenient. Make the bourgeoisie (thus the state) a thing of the past in totality! No billionaires! No lynch mobs, witch hunts, pogroms, prisons and/or ghettos! No cops! No kings or masters! No gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss! No Dana, only Zuul (next page)!
In asymmetrical military terms, we needn’t defeat them on open ground, but merely make them lose the will to fight; e.g., Eric Roberts and F. Murray Abraham in By the Sword (1991), one man fighting the other with a dulled blade to show his courage and shame his bully rival: “Like you, the boy thought winning was everything! Like you, the boy worshipped killing!”; i.e., to, like a Borges-style street fight, bring those high on their own supply down to Earth in Romantic courtship language (e.g. Rob Roy’s final fight one for the ages, but also staged fairly lengthily[11] between the marquis’ de facto assassin and the dashing and valiant Rob), but also like an opera duel elevated to levels they can never imitate—to duel with our hearts on our sleeves to send yours into your throats (e.g., “The Dream Opera” from FFVI, 1994)!
The GNC idea, mid-duel, is to move but be wholly unmoved by the sight of cum and/or blood—i.e., female/feminine violence and women’s work; e.g., taking poundings and loads alike, a fixture of the household for men to use as they please—and thus completely humiliate a mighty giant by humanizing ourselves: showing them and theirs (cops) humiliating us through these things! To show them this Aegis is to hamstring our enemy’s legs and poke holes in their aggressor’s bloodstream until they run out of gas: anything we do is violent, but violence through campily humanizing ourselves (and our rapes) can spread in ways no weapon can stop. Our terrifying toy soldiers turn theirs to tin, our paper tigers declawing their own squeamish origami (cats and paper both being hydrophobic, in the literal sense). The pen, under these circumstances, is mightier than the sword!
Through Capitalist Realism, “an enemy has only images, behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.” You can’t force Communism, merely develop it—including through medievalized (and Neo-Gothic) stage language dropping cartoonish pianos on our fabricated enemies’ “almighty” heads; e.g., vampires and their hunters being black knights and white (e.g., Vampire Hunter D, Castlevania, and Jojo), but also class and culture warriors fighting for survival vis-à-vis state monopolies we speak to our usual closeting through during some concentric iteration thereof (re, Derrida: there is no outside of the text)! There are no set definitions, thus functions. They can be as ironically gay as we need to camp vampires with, on any battlefield, on and offstage!
In turn, this recultivating of the Superstructure (to reclaim the Base) will take time; there will be sacrifice and blood, and all before Communism can exist for others who will also suffer well beforehand and never live to see themselves free; but in the end, we shall prevail: living to fight another day, or to live as we died—fighting for what we believed in! “Our freedom” means all of us. In more optimistic terms, we’re stronger united than divided, and just how necessity is the mother of invention, capital utterly throttles innovation.
With our weird nerdy powers combined, Medusa checks capital through inventive means (the oppressed usually have nothing else). Do that often enough—and if workers all around the world act all at once in ways the state can’t contain or otherwise police—then the system will have no choice but to change! But people have to wake up now and reclaim these neoliberal illusions that stories like Ghostbusters (1984) gentrified, per Capitalist Realism: the vampiric, eye-catching reds of a future Communist existence levitating in jouissance above the figurative bed unlike past versions we’ve always known; i.e., through history real and imagined, Red Scare or from Marx’ own vampire mouth! Mouth-to-mouth, such drivel can become sedition, can become rebellion through the same aesthetics and transfers anisotropically towards workers (while acknowledging their canonical criminal assignment by state forces; i.e., cops; e.g., Ghostbusters and Zuul, below). As with Bad Empanada masking himself with Castro’s or Rasputin’s beard but making Stalin’s arguments, beware anyone lacking nuance; their singular, dogmatic interpretations of Marx are rigid in ways that—per cultural studies—decay unto queerphobic, Cartesian forms.
(artist: Emma Méligne)
All this being said, using camp to reclaim such “hair of the dog” is not a perfect science/artform, and married to the usual comorbidities of the state alienating and punishing such peoples by stranding them in closeted positions of ignorance only increases the odds that we’ll get hurt when dispossessed of or otherwise denied safe spaces; i.e., to play out our confused prey and pleasure/pain mechanisms without sanctuary; e.g., by Marxist-Leninists like Bad Empanada, themselves profoundly ignorant of and hostile towards BDSM praxis, scholarship and synthesis being forever a work-in-progress (those who hate the hardest are generally the most blind, impoverished and thirsty—privileged because they will never face genuine accusation of queerness/sodomy themselves).
Furthermore, people touched by rape, death, and drug abuse, etc (as gay people usually are), often yield psychosexual compulsions that bring out addictive feeding qualities they a) don’t fully understand, and b) identify first and foremost through Gothic fiction; e.g., borderline people often being drawn towards those who can actually harm them through the vampire’s seeking mechanism, which leads to profound feelings of closeness to the edge: a lever that abusive sadists and masochists absolutely can exploit (re: Cuwu vs Guildenstern, below)!
(models and artist: Cuwu and Guildenstern; Persephone van der Waard)
All the same, there remains a hybridity and holistic concern to the application and enduring of such labels as “sodomy”; i.e., being redeveloped by people exiting the closet (re: me, but also Foucault, Ann Rice, and many others). Because our historical focus is xenophilic sex when humanizing exploited workers through reclaimed an-Com monstrous language, consider how good sex and “danger” combine in undead stories, but also announce a privileged ghost of the counterfeit that many outside the status quo (non-white, GNC and/or non-Christian, etc) cannot cleanly relate to or safely experience. In short, there’s always a vague, often messy element of danger involved; when tackling the process during oppressed pedagogies repossessing canonical vampirism, said vampirism is itself, strange and alien to the oppressed: it’s a trigger and a threat.
In iconoclastic examples like me and my work (and, by extension, all sex-positive an-Coms), “feeding” and “sodomy” can of course mean different things:
- forbidden, queer love, but also unsanctioned, extramarital sex
- revenge against or by a parasitic host group (rebellion versus witch hunts/moral panic dressed up as “rebellion” or even, in Bad Empanada’s case, “scholarship” and Marxist-Leninist praxis)
This lubricative[12] function applies to all undead, even if their histories diverge or speak poetically to particular oppressed peoples.
In dialectical-material terms, then, canonical vampirism and sodomy speak to the nation-state controlling and compelling ignorance of workers, which iconoclastic forms often challenge while being historically in the dark, themselves; i.e., first enacted on the state side by ignorant police forces (class traitors among the populace), then challenged through liberatory agents often hamstrung by a frustrating unavailability of official, state-authored information while in the closet. Even if said information is technically already published—i.e., in medical journals or scholarship of some kind or another (re: Westphal or Foucault)—it becomes not merely discouraged, but anathema, thus prone to being left out of curricular lessons and texts.
Instead, it must be picked up wherever queer people (and their allies) can find and absorb such things: in monster stories like Anne Rice’s Interview (and King’s Carrie, footnote) merely being the starting point to a much larger conversation that needs to expand out of the church/bedroom (re: Foucault). We can’t just trot out the superfreak, have her scream, then closet her as Pygmalions do; Galatea needs to take charge and spill bloody tea, as do all workers preyed on by Capitalism and the state (the wild womb eating the colonial maw)!
To that, I want to spend the rest of part one discussing my escape from ignorance; i.e., when alienated from vampirism as rebellious, which I slowly have had to reclaim for most of my adult life: considering how through a series of anecdotes (and adjacent queer scholarship) whereupon I finally escape the dreaded closet—about fifteen pages’ worth—before concluding the section speaking about state cannibalism, tokenism, and then moving into our 21st-century close-reads!
Halfway point: Performing and Learning from Older Vampires (feat. Interview with the Vampire, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Rob Halford and Chappell Roan) in My Older Work; My Exiting the Closet
As a manner of queer expression, vampires present as “sodomy monsters” of disguise that must demask to feed, but also which can be cornered and attacked in their homes for accusations of “sodomy”; i.e., police agents kettling the witch-like entity to force it to show its true colors (an act that historically happens to Communists, not fascists, despite the shared aesthetic): to bare our fangs under reactive abuse/false pretenses. Per systems of reactive abuse, our bloody canine incisors’ animalistic flight-or-flight becomes an excuse for the state to harangue us, chase us down and kill us; i.e., like animals, but also while fetishizing and impersonating us in bestial forms bad for us, not them. They’re slumming!
For example, Tom Cruise—despite giving a lovely performance as Rice’s Lestat—is still a cis-het male actor (and Scientology cult member) unironically playing a cis woman’s closeted idea of a gay man to serve the profit motive (one she borrowed from older authors, including her older 1976 book when she adapted it to the screen, writing the screenplay in 1992 for the 1994 film): queer angst, but also teen angst (arrested development) trapped in ageless bodies sold repeatedly to today’s middle-class youth (and adults); i.e., pubescent workers thirsty for sodomy/the monstrous-feminine in acceptably gentrified, commercialized forms of that hungry sex animal!
Through such assimilation’s perpetual guilt and pastiche, states are constantly left apologizing for themselves, merging the heady epiphany of a garbage-disposal hauntology with the simultaneously broad and narrow language “of the night”; i.e., useful enough for them to exploit us to a maximum degree, creatures of the night committing sodomy inside spaces of the night when the plague has “already happened,” thus permitting us to exist among the panopticon; re: canceled futures; e.g., prison-like, noir cityscapes where such beings (sex workers and fags) only come out at night “to feed” (to “live among the creatures of the night,” as Laura Branigan says, in “Self Control,” 1984): it’s false hope, a neoliberal drug to take tied to older nostalgias and their spaces and monsters. While queer existence teeters, capital preys on it (re: dead labor on undead labor)! It’s an act mean to pacify us, capital’s jaws on our gay throats.
As such, “night” synonymizes with “hunger” and “crime” per things the state normally denies except under the undercover cop’s brothel; i.e., such criminogenic conditions and their murky positions of ignorance: cities/churches/castles of sin, vice, drugs, corruption, sex, murder and so on. State proponents associate us with those things in an abject light; i.e., whereas Cruise makes it look good (and homonormative), we rebellious fags are always guilty inside a night of danger and ignorance that never ends, one whose state of exception we must make do and get by inside wearing these semi-invisible marks of shame blaming us for state predation instead of Cruise. All render into myth married to the past, present and retro-future of medical documents, literary criticism and Gothic fiction.
The key to liberation isn’t abstinence, but playing with the past as such (our focus being Gothic fiction). Wherever and whenever the setting’s time and place, canon conveys positions of privilege abusing monster language like “sodomy” to enjoy what they police others/steal from them with, Udolpho-style; i.e., often with strange combinations of expose-the-hypocrite, Hawthorne-esque critique and action that pointedly steers away from obvious vampire clichés. Even without a patent oral fixation (mouths and fangs), the feeding and seeker function (of sanguine) stubbornly remains. Sodomy is something you can imply to achieve the same effect, generally through parallel forms of historical-Gothic language that skirt the same punitive umbrella lumping odd groups through the same hangman’s noose in defense of former orders. They’re simping for the crown and the state!
For example, The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) merges vampiric anti-monarchy posturing with lycanthropy to apologize for the King of France (thus Capitalism). It’s absurd—Don Hertzfeld’s “Queen of France” bit from “Rejected” (2001) sans irony. Note Vincent Cassel’s none-too-subtle black-and-red Dracula outfit, coding him and his cannibalistic family members for the inbred lycanthropes[13] the film eventually reveals them, thus the state’s corrupt elements, to be. This is classic abjection—a debridement ceremony carried out by the king’s men against his unruly fash-coded wolfmen. The story likewise combines Tonto-and-the-Lone-Ranger (the white Indian) tokenism with martial arts, sexy maidens and whores, and plenty of stabby-stabby devices: to feed on diseased criminals and execute them with impunity. It’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) if only Clyde showed up, the cops being the angel death sent by God to purge Sodom and Gomorrah—in “France” (now with 30% more ninjas)!
The movie, while shamelessly exploitative, campily riffs on The Matrix from two years previous, nevertheless eating at national institutions of power through all the usual draws known to Gothic pastiche: sex and violence, but also taboos and Orientalism. Wolf plays with problematic things—including police violence, secret identities, legendary monsters, Balzacian chronotopes (complete with extended Paris-style brothel scenes/espionage), pre-fascist cults, assassins and dog soldiers—to cater to a swashbuckling mode of monstrous consumption that, sure enough, smuggles allegory into the usual trashy, wild-frontier refrains: the night is dark and full of terrors, but also oddly-sexy warriors and cultural appropriation leaning into various Gothic theatre tropes? The devil is in the details!
In short, it’s a frame narrative, putting history into “history” as partially dreamt up again, in the historical Gothic style:
Christophe Gans’ Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le pacte des loups) is a fantasy adventure set in a history within a history. The framing narrative that bookends its actions (and occasionally interrupts them with elegiac commentary) sees a greying gentleman (Jacques Perrin) choosing to finish penning his memoirs in his castle quarters rather than to seek escape from the mob outside baying for his blood.
“This world had to change,” says Thomas d’Apcher in voiceover, wistfully recognizing that there is no place for an old noble like himself in the approaching Republic and resigned to his fate. Yet in his final hours, his mind is filled less with present danger than with events from his youth, some three decades earlier, which similarly gave rise to public hysteria and potential subversion of the then prevailing order.
Those events are drawn from real history: between 1764 [the year Walpole wrote Otranto] and 1767, the mysterious Beast of Gévaudan – said to be wolf-like in appearance, but much larger and with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm for homicide – was terrorizing the rural province in south-central France, killing over 100 locals. The failure of several royally sanctioned hunting parties to kill this monstrous cause célèbre made the Beast not just a threat to Gévaudan’s exposed peasant population, but to the supposed divine authority on which the King’s power rested. This was a true-life horror story with resonances in both mythology and politics.
In treating this history, Gans engages in his own myth-making. For the principal inset narrative begins with a scene of the unseen Beast viciously attacking and killing a terrified woman, and then of two royal emissaries arriving on horseback in rainy Gévaudan. These two fictive characters – the King’s gardener and naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) and his loyal “brother” Mani (Mark Dacascos[14]) – have been fashioned to look like cowboys from a western, and indeed Mani is, somewhat improbably, an actual Iroquois.
Yet as this pair crosses paths with a group of soldiers (dressed as women) ruthlessly clubbing the old peasant Jean Chasterl (Philippe Nahon) and his wild-eyed daughter (Virginie Darmon), Mani single-handedly takes them all on in a fight that is less oater standoff than martial arts beatdown. So it is clear from the outset that, in this historical setting, genre is very much up for grabs (source: Anton Bitel’s “The Swashbuckling Thrills of Brotherhood of the Wolf,” 2023).
Such disparate eclecticism is hardly out of place in a Gothic tale—the historical Gothic genre profoundly flexible; i.e., as a matter of fact and invention dancing on the same floor while holding a gloved, enticing finger to its pillowy lips (with Monica Bellucci, left, not actually French, but an Italian starlet playing a demonically-yet-conventionally-attractive [and bloodthirsty] “French,” lady-in-black seductress in multiple films, including The Matrix Reloaded, from 2003).
Despite its problematic content, I absolutely loved Brotherhood growing up and exiting the closet as an adult, Marxist/genderqueer/an-Com scholar, if only because it’s so playful with things that—like many of its forebears—cast blame against current systems by abjecting them to dated ideas of the past. It’s problematic, to be sure, but showcases the very creative (and hypnotic) spirit we can easily reclaim in such darkly sexy zones of action and doom (my own juvenilia borrowed from the film’s multiple, bombastic and frankly rad fight scenes). Per Sarkeesian, enjoyment is not endorsement by virtue of the manner in which something is engaged with; i.e., your mileage for stories like Wolf (and parallel scholarship) varies by how you can play with it after you turn eighteen! The same goes for vampires and their tell-tale haunts married to other forms of undead feeding that serve the same canonical purpose: unironic state predation, persecution and prostitution tossed about like a hot potato (anyone but the state, of course). We grow less ignorant/escape the closet by playing with these stories ourselves into adulthood and Gothic maturity—for rebellion! “Double the pain,” Ronnie James Dio!
The big closet (Capitalism) is exited by breaking Capitalist Realism. As such, the rest of this section shall articulate this pain of rebirth per my decades-long adventures outside the womb; i.e., into such vampiric zones, eventually writing these books and this subchapter on state vampirism!
We’ll get to me specifically in several pages. I want to preface myself and my exiting of the closest by reiterating something important: to read the room, watch what people eat, but also how and why they play with their food (and spice it/swap this out for that). For the state, vampiric media stages a Satanic-Panic panopticon for “lepers,” framing us as wretched, sodomic murderers, Communists and nutjobs to divide-and-conquer ourselves during feeding time; for us fags, the castle or the canceled-future city (or theme park, dead mall, land that time forgot, etc, as commentaries on Capitalism/power in decline, as the Gothic always concerns—from nursery rhymes to children’s stories, YA fiction and adult media) yields a postpunk, disco-in-disguise[15]/danger disco of sorts—one to prowl and hunt inside, ironically (through camp) staging jailbreaks, thus reclaiming a room of one’s own as both body and place having that tell-tale “look.” As vampires generally do, sodomy is something to play with—merging canon with camp, condor with code, class with gutter antics, horror with hedonism, fiction with non-fiction, action with arthouse, black with red, perfume with prurience, and pleasure with pain:
In short, you’ll know it when you see it—porn, but also different qualities of vampirism and masked, costumed prostitution/queerness speaking to buried realities ignored by ancient canonical laws (re: Foucault). We queers speak through all manner of preferential code in and out of the closet, whereupon trans, non-binary and intersex people have always existed, and prostitution—the world’s oldest profession—isn’t simply the domain of women being policed by men; it’s also romanced by middle-class AFAB people unto AMAB ones per sodomy rhetoric.
Anne Rice, for example, made a career out of it, pimping out these boyish, hot-blooded ghosts of the counterfeit to great effect (though nowhere near as perniciously as Rowling [through serial killers] or Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series [canonically trash for thirsty housewives not getting enough from their boring/absentee partners], probably due to Rice actually being queer[16]). So did Dennis Cooper and other late-20th-century gay men speaking to a shared sense of pain and exploitation, having their own convulsionnaires’ Christ-like, “second boyhoods” (returning to the cross to learn through pain); i.e., liberation remains a liminal proposition that doesn’t preclude abuse through the performance by those punching down against their favorite snack in and out of the closet; re: Zeuhl, a non-binary AFAB person with a twink torture fetish, furthering the process of abjection by acting against me (queer-leaning but still in the closet at the time) in ways that were ultimately predatory—to use and discard me, following them forsaking most of their revolutionary principles for a steady paycheck. Reversing abjection that ain’t!
Under Western influence, to be queer is to have started inside the closet (of closets, of closets). Since Matthew Lewis, the reality of queer people—especially AMAB ones, but not limited to them (re: Le Fanu’s Carmilla, 1872[17])—has been abject in ways we have to reverse from positions of greater ignorance to less, but still inside capital as a “big closet”; i.e., by bearing it all as a combination of exploitation and humanization through such seeking and feeding principles (dungeon play and toys) upending dangerous forms of decay and the equality of convenience: through persecution of the persecuted by the persecuted in regressively hypocritical vampire language (scholarship and fiction)!
The root cause for such betrayals (and subsequent salvation that happens alongside them) is pernicious and deep, taking years of non-standard experimentation that, itself, requires de facto (extracurricular) reeducation; i.e., living these ideas in order to best understand and camp them; e.g., living and unpacking “sodomy” as I have done for most of my life, from positions of ignorance leading paradoxically to knowledge dressed up as trash, as darkness visible; re: “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” We’re not just trying to learn from policed materials, but under duress from those around us as a living experience—hence my anecdotes about vampirism and what it means to me ultimately being a cumulative foray into fresh scholarship while exiting a closeted police state of ignorance that, unto itself, was less closeted than past versions (and more, insofar as capital decayed as much developed into its present state).
Like breadcrumbs in a fable (and a maze getting deeper to the dreadful center of Capitalism), my books were founded on picking up pieces that, themselves, came from older practices build on older knowledge escaping into the public sphere from libraries, schools, and so on. By virtue of my own queer identity formed during a survivor’s multiple struggles against tokenized predation, I’ve since gone on my own adventures of self-discovery with fellow fags, only to have some prey on me without irony as something to fluctuate with through bits and pieces of “the good stuff”: as a cute “vampire” with terrifying appetites, andro/gynodiverse biology and fluid sexual orientations, genders and performances (all next page), as well as eyes that glow in the dark to better see our “prey” with (we wish)!
Zeuhl didn’t poison me to such things, but taught me what I was (re: gay-as-fuck) and what I wanted to seek out (re: fresh synthesis); i.e., among those who not only wouldn’t harm me, but who I could enjoy and protect from predators like Zeuhl! Eventually I left the closet, writing about ludo-Gothic BDSM and studying it through art and media, but also my own social-sexual relations according to a shared pedagogy of the oppressed. When I was 36 (and sadly after Cuwu), I came out (encouraged by them to do so); I feel like it was only the beginning to a much longer journey away from ignorance and towards knowledge concerning vampirism and its reclamation (not for fame, riches or respect, but self-respect despite others devaluing and disrespecting my labor and expertise; re: Bad Empanada).
Such mythology and gossip generally has an anisotropic flavor to it. For us fags, it’s Tuesday on the cross; for the Straights, it’s the gay apocalypse. To look on such behaviors and theatrics, then, is to look on spectres of Marx speaking to the usual things relegated to the imaginary underworld and preyed on while inside those locations by cis-het/tokenized people; i.e., the middle class feeding on the ghost of the counterfeit to further the abjection process. But no matter how much they feed, we’re always there reflecting their predation as something to turn back, Aegis-style, at our attackers! Stare and tremble at Satan doing “sodomy” in the dead of night (again, canonical code for “rape” as a nightly activity at nightly hours by home invaders abusing the trust of gentile [white] female homeowners)!
(exhibit 41g1a1b2: Artist: Pulp Punk. It’s common for cis-het women and older [second wave] feminists/cis fags to monopolize social-sexual oppression, while turning AMAB parties into lunch; i.e., commodifying gender trouble as something we must reclaim through ourselves doubling such predation without harming each other [re: Zeuhl, Jadis, and Cuwu, etc].
Unto the first concept, Catherine Mackinnon writes in “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State” [1989], “Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object.”
However, in “A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work” from Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s [2017], Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk argues, “While most of the chapters do not provide much information about male or transgender/transvestite sex work (and in most historical [legal] contexts prostitution has been defined as “female”), some countries such as China and the Ottoman Empire had a rich tradition of prostitution by men or boys.” In other words, and under a Western lens, much of sex work is historically AFAB since ancient times, but includes AMABs from as far back treated in a traditionally feminine sense under the current colonial model’s various nostalgias [re: Marxist-Leninism] also being SWERF-y and queerphobic [whose exploitation under Capitalism we will examine in Volume Three, part one, Chapter Three when we cover discrimination against femboys, “traps” and twinks in the section, “Patriarchal Hatred Against Transgender Persons, Intersexuality and Drag”].
Second, regardless of sex, gender or performance through occupation, all workers [sex or otherwise] are heteronormatively slighted; i.e., to varying degrees of standard-to-token normativity. Androgyny becomes a prolific and speculative dialog on predation and enslavement as something to camp. This takes time to camp purely by virtue of acquiring the language from one closet to the next; i.e., a knowledge gap eased by “shopping sprees”; e.g., I have had and used fantasy poetics since I was a little girl to speak to mine and other’s queerness in vampire stories, but didn’t have the academic language until I met Zeuhl [who explained its emergence and utility from Judith Butler, onwards, and Foucault, backwards]. After Zeuhl used and abused me, I rebounded into future abusive relationships with equally GNC elements, whereupon I continued my research pursuant to equal rights for queer people under capital [followed by a holistic defense for all oppressed peoples using anarchistic genderqueer models, itself aided from my meeting of Bay Ryan—an an-Com GNC Indigenous Person who not only didn’t abuse me, but supported my work in defense of all workers].
I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was being abused repeatedly by predatory AFAB GNC partners with Marxist elements to them; e.g., Cuwu being a self-professed Marxist-Leninist [although they didn’t always act it] and Zeuhl saying they were an-Com but then closeting themselves and their revolutionary heart[18] off for good i.e., exploiting me as a submissive AMAB person, who did her best to learn from her own survival at their hands, thus cultivate the best lessons about ludo-Gothic BDSM I could. In between my graduate work and postgrad, you can even see the discourse start to emerge as I prepare to leave the closet. As I write in “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” [2021]:
There’s no shame in communicating about these things and having one’s partner decide that they like to submit. Conversely some partners like goofy dudes built like Randy Savage; [e.g., Eric Bugenhagen]. More power to them. However, if they can choose, they can also refuse. And this is normal and ok, my dudes. It allows for stability and happy partners on both sides—security, and isn’t that what everyone ultimately wants? That is why I voluntarily submit—to Metroidvania, to mommy doms, and to my partner [Jadis] (a mommy dom). I do it through informed choices, knowing what I enjoy—what we enjoy. That’s literally why I’m writing this: to say what works and what doesn’t; to educate society and prevent persecution of minorities who just want to live in peace.
Persecution
I don’t advocate for objective morality. I still insist that a happy world is one where people are not enslaved, but free to choose what makes them happy without harming other people. Cat boys are happy being themselves. So are fem boys, basking [in] the consensual “subby” power experienced by women and queer people for millennia. There’s not only power in this, there’s beauty as well:
Easy on the eyes, aren’t they? This beauty isn’t a joke: the “stupid” sort advertised by Flanders’ skin-tight snowsuit. Rather, it’s beauty that someone actually wants and values unironically. And if sexist men think someone is weird for expressing themselves, they’re the one with the problem, not the fem boy. These same men wouldn’t bat an eyelash at “traditional values,” including the sexual, semi-nude depiction of women in media that female players don’t actually want.
Unfortunately these attitudes also bleed into the public sphere. Here, cis women/trans persons are forced to see vulgar displays of power—not the expression of physical beauty alone, but the male-mandated conscription of AFAB into gratuitous exhibits (or manly displays for AMAB). Gratuity isn’t the problem. Compulsion is. Today these behaviors are informed by nostalgia, of a return to a “better” time, where “men were men and the women were sexier”:
I have nothing against tan Brazilian booties. The booty extends life; the booty expands consciousness. I just believe they shouldn’t be enslaved and monopolized by men who flood the public sphere with nothing else. So many cis women are “empowered” by men, placed into dubious positions of sexual power (for a male equivalent, see the Hawkeye Initiative). For the sex-positive feminist there’s nothing wrong with AFAB who actually consent to these positions, nor is the content they produce [automatically] harmful. Well, maybe “WAP” is slightly crass, but even that yields some killer mashups and clever parodies. Let the discourse flow!
I digress. Non-traditional alternatives should also be made available to the public. This includes the aforementioned cat and fem boys, but also the male variant of a Gothic heroine. “The greatest anxiety for the woman reader was the Gothic heroine’s lack of agency,” writes Avril Horner. Postmodernity makes the role performative, letting cis women/trans persons consent to submission. They can voluntarily yield to greater forces. And from cradle to grave, I can be the Gothic heroine too—Samus, or even subbier forms when I’m with [one of my exes]
[…] In reality the assignment of an “outlier” status isn’t always agreed upon; society at large is prone to witch hunts, but also lusting for the witch they seek to destroy. I’ve always felt attracted to witches, especially Joan of Arc and the Wicked Witch of the West. I attribute this to two childhood texts: The Legend of Billie Jean, and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (this being said, Margaret Hamilton is a total boss).
When I was in middle school, I saw The Legend of Billie Jean on TV. A local girl, Billie Jean, is almost raped by a sleazy store clerk. She escapes, but is pursued through the whole movie by the police, who believe the man, not Billie. On the run, Billie watches Saint Joan, a 1957 movie about Joan of Arc, and cuts her long hair. The whole adventure is slightly dorky but the message remains vital; also, the theme song is absolutely great and remains a personal favorite of mine to this day.
Wicked was published in 1995 when my parents divorced. My grandmother and mother read it for their book club; I heard them raving about the book and read it for myself. Elphie is a powerful, rebellious woman. Unlike Glinda, she doesn’t submit to tyranny; she’s a civil rights activist, standing up for minority communities oppressed by the powerful, not-so-wonderful Wizard. By and large, the entire story is dark, X-rated, and violent. Though mostly G-rated and lacking Maguire’s sardonic wit, the musical is still fun; I saw it with my father for my 21st birthday.
My interest in Billie and Elphie is partly sexual. However, I feel an open interest in the persecuted through their performances in media [source].
As far as free lunches go, capitalists don’t give things back unless it’s out of spite [“Pickle-fucker gave us free eats!“], to fatten us up, or exert control over us through power fantasies that weaponize rebellion in cop-like ways vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism [re: the Power Rangers]. And this isn’t always the Monopoly Guy being cartoonishly evil; it’s often committed by other marginalized peoples [and/or activists; re: Bad Empanada] abusing us in bad faith and/or ignorance.
To this, the above piece was written while I was with Jadis, a genderfluid tank of a dominatrix [with masochistic tendencies] who raped me through constant emotional-sexual abuse for years [re: “Transforming Our Zombie Selves,” 2024]. Zeuhl, on the other hand, was the kind of person to break up with you, then ask you for money [me] and if they could crash and your place with their current husband [another ex of theirs[19]]! The common ground between them is exploitation, with these GNC persons acting persecuted, but turning right back around to persecute their fellow oppressed; i.e. hyphenating predator and prey but also owner and pet in sex-coercive ways while, oddly enough, loving vampire stories! In short, whatever contract was at play between them and myself, both abused it in-play during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Through characters like Billie Jean and Elphaba, I sought escape by identifying with social-sexual outlaws who informed my ideas, and couldn’t be monopolized by state forces [who basically treat vampires as dogmatic “fast food[20]“]!)
(source: Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York, 2020)
Anecdotes of my leaving the closet aside, such superstitions are coded into recursive, fragmented, queerphobic language with homophobic dogma unto normative depictions; i.e., by persons acting out such ideas, whether they live them or not; e.g., Tom Cruise from earlier versus Rob Halford (exhibit 41g1a1b), but also Zeuhl (see: previous footnote) and Bad Empanada: people turned into undead killer dolls while seeking revenge and prey during various forms of sodomy argumentation and witch hunts (for the state or against it, ipso facto). Such poetic statements canonically yield pedophilic components, but also pluralized elements speaking to cops and victims frozen in time; i.e., ageless and pristine, but thirsty for revenge married to pleasure and pain of various kinds (weird sex metaphors); re: Bad Empanada is a Stalinist relic!
Now that we’ve left the closet, I want to concern such feeding through the state eating itself, followed by some notes on tokenization.
No More Food: the State Eating Itself, and Notes on Tokenism
Denied queer scapegoats, the state will turn to other forms of monstrous-feminine, and ultimately on itself as famine sets in (e.g., Attack on Titan). To that, the usual clichés persist. Though not always, vampires are often male, monstrous-feminine dandies operating predatorily inside a traumatic, colonial location (re: Lestat from Interview with the Vampire, feeding in pre-revolutionary America); i.e., one where consumption is generally considered an act of theft during welcome-unwelcome trespasses that freeze the victim in place: the paralyzing theft of privatized essence—blood, brains, life force, etc—from a rightful, bourgeois source (the lothario/gigolo-coded Lestat, gleefully supping on the aging beldame before wringing her neck, and Louis clumsily trying his best not to kill his meal, thus prove Lestat wrong: that gay men needn’t strictly be sexual predators who harm those they feed on). Anything that challenges said ownership is unwelcome by the pearl-clutcher, be the robbery a solo enterprise or an uncomfortable gathering with revolutionary potential (eating the rich); i.e., the prosecution framing sodomy as a venereal disease that conflates the cruiser’s seeking mechanism and punching up/topping from below with bad-faith predation[21] (eating women and children).
As a discourse, though, the potency of class conflict during monster-themed oppositional praxis has only intensified during the Internet Age. Inside this age, new generations of queer people emerge, then reclaim “sodomy” through vampirism; i.e., as a theatrical device they take back from older tokenized queers (and straight Marxist-Leninists acting like second wave feminists at best, Stalinists at worse; re: Bad Empanada) who insist “they ‘won’ the battle” or “have all the answers.” Newer an-Com queers must resist tokenism, then, refusing to sell out according to such desperation and convenience (wherein abjecting the entire Superstructure and literary analysis very much is a matter of convenience; re: Bad Empanada); i.e., those persons hijack rebellious language (such as vampirism) to abuse it for fascist, false-rebellious purposes: stochastic predatory violence and betrayals, both delegitimizing activist credibility and goodwill to empower state mechanisms per the brand of selling out (re: Drolta from Castlevania: Nocturne, which again, I explore in “Back to the Necropolis“).
To that, canonical vampirism and its unironic, police-like means of “sodomy” language have crystalized over several centuries—i.e., by tying neo-medieval expression to individual sexual predators, pests and addicts who invade and prey parasitically upon a single location; or is framed as doing so according to abject pogrom stereotypes within a profoundly biased heteronormative imagination; re: the “outing” of Jews (and people confused as “Jewish,” such as Eastern Europeans) during blood libel and other anti-Semitic tropes describing them as blood-drinking vampires, baby-killing witches, and/or flesh-eating goblins (all, again, from Hey Alma’s “Anti-Semitic History of…” series; 2021, 2020, and 2023):
(artist: Chris Bourassa)
In turn, the same chimeric libel would extend to trans women[22] as 21st-century reprobates; i.e., vampires (and their kissing-cousin relatives, lycans) needing to be publicly embarrassed, hounded, and ultimately put down/to the torch in order to serve profit. As such, their execution falls under the same grim harvest, its liminal hauntology of war happening by assimilative forces conducting rapacious, obscurantist and hypocritical acts of penetrative force, mid-DARVO: the silver bullet or stake through the heart being more of the same witch hunt cannibalizing queerness; i.e., one whose Foucauldian (discipline-and-punish) enforcement arbitrates chaotically as the state decays and sinks its “fangs” (stakes) into wherever and whomever the state needs them to go.
Charged with practicing not just illicit sex, but cannibalism, rape, infiltration/impersonation, and general abuse of (white or token) husbands, but also their women and children, we latter-day (often polyamorous) GNC have fallen under the baleful eye of a bloodthirsty public famished and alienized by neoliberal dogma; i.e., those who automatically see us as “terrorists” per the usual shiftiness of the label flowing power upwards—both instantly and irrevocably guilty without trial, thesis or cause, and who just as often turn on themselves through increasingly radicalized forms. The hunters become the hunted, shifting blame surrounding such notions of “problematic love” as something to push onto and punish in-group members when the usual culprits (we fags “on the table,” an apple showed in our mouths) are eventually exhausted.
In short, there is always a problem of manufactured scarcity to solve through force, only allowing the hearts of the middle class to bleed when the Imperial Boomerang nails them to the wall: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”
(artist: Chris Bourassa)
Under such complicated and roiling abuse, trans people, enbies and intersex persons have become the next generation of the “love that dare not speak its name!” weaponized all over again; i.e., the harmful xenophilia of unreproductive sex, but also illegitimate “sodomy” conflated with the killing of the institution of marriage and its logical byproduct: legitimate children and the nuclear family structure, but also the entire world around them pushed towards cataclysm (state shift)! Here, vampiric homonormativity yields different “vampire cops”; e.g., the LGBA defending the heteronormative institution of marriage; i.e., by conducting pick-me-style witch hunts against non-cis persons who, unlike the LGBA, are “evil queers” (according to them). Likewise, Marxist cops from older disciplines such as Marxist-Leninism, police an-Com personas for much the same death-lottery reasons and ignorance (with Bad Empanada being a painfully straight man who is historically far less likely to be an-Com insofar as Marx and Engels, followed by Stalin aping the Czars, were all homophobes by choice; re: Bad Empanada calling for the censorship of social-sexual discussions [especially psychosexual discussions] and praxis, itself a regressive form of queerphobia haunting Marxism then and now). The state, in effect, treats vampires as “homewreckers” who can thankfully be tokenized into doing the bourgeoisie’s bidding (essentially saying to the world, “kill the vampire, save the man”); it then eats them first when decay sets in.
Generally referred to as “sodomy” but also “pederasty” and “buggery” in older times, these broader xenophobic, “Gothic” labels (meaning “pertaining to the Middle Ages”; re: Baldrick) have historically applied to various harmful-and-forbidden sexual practices being associated with go-to out-groups the state can (and does) criminalize to their own benefit; i.e., cops and victims, the former attacking the latter through acts essentially established through rumor and state dialogs; e.g., anal and oral sex with humans and any sexual act with children and animals, either being associated with Jewish people in medieval Europe and Pagan (or simply unwell/disobedient) women by Hammer of Witches burning scapegoats up like bread-and-circus fuel. It’s, pardon the expression, a smokescreen.
(source: Britannica)
Older pogroms and moral panics inspire new ones, of course. The above examples would be followed by Enlightenment-era homosexuals being ignominiously granted a similar criminal identity afforded its own legendary makeup being made from old, dead parts (re: Foucault). Leading to the 20th and 21st centuries, any faction can vindicate/assimilate to attack another faction; i.e., as historical-material trends whose wax-and-wane popularity serves profit, as usual; e.g., anti-Semitism falling out of style, or racist lynch mobs, the metronome-esque waffling towards either and others reliably decaying towards Omelas-grade, magnifying-glass shrinkings of the state of exception onto trans people/an-Coms (who, in turn, can tokenize, pinkwashing genocide as labor goes on chasing and eating its own tail for profit and the state).
To it, the male vampire has continuously served a historically recent metaphorical role/regressive paradigm shift; i.e., for sodomy as an “ancient” practice hauntologically associated with Paganism, Judaism or other ancient[23] religions. Meanwhile, female vampires are witches and sellout blood-drinkers bathing in virgin’s blood; but also, GNC people and BDSM practitioners/experts “aren’t real” (re: Bad Empanada). All coalesce into the made-up “bad religion” of unspeakable sexualities (and genders, performances, etc) under post-fascist upheavals decaying into fascism again and again; i.e., codified, then preyed upon by the current capitalist model’s Protestant ethic, said ethic canonizing the church of vampirism pursuant to profit during abject moral panic. Per the liminal hauntology of war, Nazis appear and Communists are attacked (re: Bad Empanada vs an-Coms vis-à-vis queer tokenism leading to Marxist tokenism—him).
Simply put, scared people spend money while obsessing over things they can abject, thus control and dominate as monstrous-feminine regardless of the veracity of the claims being leveled; e.g., the middle class’ superstitious and dogmatic associating of queerness with anal sex/pedophilia (the “Neverland effect”) in particular abjecting homosexual men as lovers of shit and child abuse—with anal sex happening among AMAB persons for its prostate stimulation but also not being a common way for them to even have sex because anal is more work, but also more painful and stigmatized; re: Bobby Box’s “Gay Bottoms Hate Anal Sex,” 2020). This, itself, extends to an-Coms and BDSM rhetoric as something to reclaim while other (usually straight) activists finger-wag them and act like they themselves aren’t somehow haunted by the ghost of Caesar (re: Bad Empanada aping Stalin’s 1933 regression of Lenin’s good work, making homosexuality illegal again).
Concerning the BDSM implementation of vampiric eroticism, calculated risk commonly involves (and invokes) paralysis under powerful seduction and painful social-psychosexual activities. These fetishes and clichés commonly play out for coercive and/or cathartic reasons; i.e., consent-non-consent, but also just rough sex, period; re: Trent Reznor’s “fuck me like animal” (exhibit 43b); e.g., the vampire’s stalking and subsequent biting of the neck being a double metaphor for both non-exsanguinatory rough play[24] but also an oscillating proximity with dangerous/rebellious[25] lovers reputed to do all manner of scandalous, thus problematic, alien things.
All the same, ludo-Gothic BDSM (through the vampire) constitutes the dualistic, dialectical-material opportunity to have illegitimate sex as “sodomy” that, when camped, reverses various bodily fluids’ directional flow (and application) in poetic forms; i.e., criminalized, but also sensationalized in the eyes of the wider public, the latter operating in predatory religious-to-capitalistic institutions normally monopolizing heteronormative sex (and tokenized normativities) exclusively through marriage as a dogmatic mode of consumption: PIV sex and legitimatized children extending to tokenized enforcers initially sanctioned and later euthanized/closeted by the state punctuating this with that.
Since Shakespeare, at least, the Gothic has provided stages for queer people to exist and express themselves; i.e., has allowed to exist provided we toe the line and lean into the same-old, incredibly tired and pernicious tropes. Except Gothic Communism’s camping of sodomy for systemically cathartic purposes remains not only unsanctioned on these stages, but anisotropic per unironically and perpetually dirty, torturous and sinful double standards therein; i.e., those adhering to the profit motive consider us an-Com fags (and our cryptonymic “flashing” rituals, below) gross and “impolite” of sex workers (which we often are, for various reasons): acting and sex work generally go hand-in-hand, and combine medieval, barbarian-grade classes of extreme hyperbolic violence since Titus Andronicus bleeding into latter-day spiritual successors (e.g., the polite, queer-coded hypocrisies of Hannibal Lector). We’re simply showing those policing us their role in things, and where it historically gets them: an early and ignominious grave!
While trying to advertise our own place in the world (and fight for equal rights), those most accused of “sodomy” (re: queers and prostitutes) are likewise frequently accused of going where we’re not welcome and doing things to vulnerable parties that generally are committed by in-group members and the state (cis-het men, first and foremost). As histories’ oldest scapegoats pawned off through state fabrications (re: the ghost of the counterfeit), the state keeps us on speed dial—to conjure up, then shame and police; i.e., the slut to summon and spurn who is, themselves, prone to using four-letter words and brute “outsider” methods the summoner can finger-wag as needed; e.g., to fuck for its own sake, thereby acknowledging and addressing our lived trauma as a matter of “best revenge.” Apart from its endless entertainment value, we also do this to survive, hence abjure, state-compelled reproduction and dogma, hence head-hunting and cannibalism using sex as a weapon against us; i.e., as happening dogmatically for the state while indulging in said state’s canonical guilty pleasures: us, and our castled bodies, as abject (whose persecution only reaffirms their belief and bias in things that are holy[26] to them)!
(artist: Akira Raikou)
In response, our critics reliably attack us (and our black mirrors) for being inconvenient; they see us as vermin who not only “breed like rats,” but spread disease of any kind unto self-righteous peoples like them afraid of anything and everything beyond what they know as good and proper! We (and our Aegises) become the devil they know—something to pimp, police and persecute, pigs to stick it to per all the usual double standards/entendres. Our various holes become Pandora’s Box, which monomythically is the very drug that those alienated from nature seek out for the state; i.e., it’s what the state sells to them, and which we must subvert during camp using what we got to make them uncomfortable: critiquing power where power is found, pulling no punches in the process of reversing abjection (taking holier-than-thou people down a few pegs).
As often as not, we do so by playfully reminding our critics that we exist (on either side of the political isle; e.g., Bad Empanada leaning into weirdly fascist SWERF arguments when discrediting my scholarship to aggrandize his own good works[27]). This occurs both through our humanity ipso facto, as well as our fun, indulgent ability to subvert canonical vampire legends in the process; i.e., letting people know that such things don’t have a set definition, but multiple meanings that double and interact in liminalized debates; e.g., Bay’s blood-red lipstick and blushing pussy (which gets like that when they’re happy and excited/playing with lovers and friends); re: “when the Man comes around, don’t follow him; show him your Aegis!” There’s power in sex and gender, bodies and labor, undeath and vampirism—something the elite tries to control and weaponize for its infinite value, and which we can take and turn back against those who seek to cage and abuse us—to say to them, “No, never! This is my body, not yours, white man!” Suddenly the cryptonymy becomes revolutionary and the nudity is largely the same! Context matters; make it your rebel yell!
(artist: Bay)
Reclaimed by us during liminal expression (the same spaces and surfaces), such devices speak to what is controlled and can liberate itself when subverting vampire legends for liberatory purposes: freeing the tush, the rack and the box as vampiric in ways that translate to male and intersex biology just as well.
In turn, cosmetic qualities normally demonized for their alien character under capital—the color red, for example—translate sex-positively to healthy appetites and sites of consumption (re: the lips or female genitals, above) tied to modern GNC attempts to enact sodomy of a male, female, or intersex kind; i.e., through reclaimed Gothic poetics during an-Com arguments: the male sodomite and the female Sapphic (the Carmilla, in vampire lesbian[28] narratives) “homewrecker” scarlet woman, canon treating either as a social-sexual disease to punch down against despite being of the world’s oldest profession; re: prostitution. The state can corrupt vampires, correct vs incorrect love, etc, but cannot monopolize them:
(exhibit 41g1a1b: Left: Rob Halford of Judas Priest; right: Chappell Roan and Magical Katrina. Sex symbols under Capitalism inherit prior divisions and binaries that are codified and resold back into a hungry market. The queer man is often framed as guilty and self-hating, flagellating himself in methods tied both to medieval penance, worship and religious experience [e.g., “Donner and Blitzen,” 2019]; implements of death and torture under heteronormative power structures [the “leather daddy/gay biker” BDSM schtick]; but also punk and “cruising” bar culture as occupied by outcasts on either side of the political spectrum decaying into undead: Nazis and Communists.
Conversely, the female queer is [from the late 1800s, onwards] called “lesbian” in ways that appeal to the heteronormative gaze: the “lipstick” look. In truth, practicing lipstick lesbians prefer the term “femme” [versus butch], and can use their hypnotic power over cis-het men to generate the effect of a “captive” audience through asexual means; i.e., the men spellbound and ready to fork over their hard-earned cash, but also ready to take in and digest the witchy Sapphic’s subversive allegory using the color red, thus reject the stigmas that reliably lead to the unironic, absurd persecution of her kind: “She turned me into a newt!”
In other words, Roan camps canon and rejects sexist implications that “men and women can’t work together because red lipstick equals sexual arousal”—with Jordan Peterson insisting one, that’s what it means and only what it means[29]; two, that it is “for men” or concerned with them at all; and three, that if it was, it’d be “unfair.” The Muppet from Hell, Peterson’s basically “Evil Kermit” chomping on Vincent Price’s neck without irony.)
Concerning tokenism, the popularized idea of vampires were built on older bigotries that assimilated into concessional forms of equality that, unto themselves, have historically sold out since then (re: second wave feminists and homosexual gay men, but also Marxist-Leninists abstaining from Gothic analysis). Before we proceed onto the close-reads, then, I want to give a brand-new and extended (six-page) note about the duality of vampires, and how such things don’t have set definitions when challenging tokenized forms:
In the spirit of a) returning to this section after several years and having written multiple books since then, b) wanting to be holistic as possible, and c) in light of recent and ongoing abuse carried out against me by other marginalized sex workers (and Marxist-Leninist weird nerds; re: Bad Empanada)—i.e., those treating me, a trans woman who does sex work and scholarship—like I don’t belong or am somehow an enemy or threat to them and the Cause through the work that I do (re: Jadis, Jade, and various AFAB sex workers during my own brush with transmisogynistic sex work)—I wish to reinforce my arguments regarding tokenism, while simultaneously acknowledging my inability to historically document and cover every aspect of vampirism and sodomy I would like (so many fags, so little time)!
Sodomy and terror tactics by police forces are historically “messy” insofar as canonical vampirism and its praxial articulation, mid-poiesis, involves many different groups playing the Roman fool (“crossing the Rubicon” with “Caesar”). The following tangent concerns the language’s evolution and availability over multiple centuries, previously discussed; concerning its application as a living conversation, we won’t have time to completely unpack all of the praxial nuances and amorphous offshoots of tokenism and class betrayal, content vs activism, self-persecution and assorted, cryptomimetic discipline-and-punish-style sell-out antics that frequently go along with vampiric discourse and its overarching histories; i.e., (indented for clarity):
from the false-rebellious antics of the American Revolution and its employing of earlier settler-colonial forms that historically decay into radicalized forms thereof (re: fascism and “Rome,” but also Marxist-Leninism). Per our aforementioned chapter, “An Uphill Battle with the Sun in Your Eyes” (from Volume One), the optics of rebellion continually manifest via the state recuperating monstrous language through the bourgeois trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital/the state; i.e., the self-persecuted and self-policing nature of monsters evolving under Cartesian thought into neoliberal forms, which apart from the standard-issue moderate and reactionary politics of white cis-het men and women, pits different factions and sectarian axes of oppression against each other for the elite—for the “rare and exclusive” chance to put on the costume and be a tokenized king or queen for a day while punching down at their own kind and their allies!
I’ll try my best to hint at them, here, but you might feel such proceedings to be rather anemic concerning vampires, in that respect.
(artist: Katie Silvia)
Perhaps in the future, I shall address those inadequacies in further additional essays about vampires in particular (versus Amazons or zombies, both of which I’ve written tons about). All I can do for now is recommend “Back to the Necropolis” (re: Drolta and black Nazi vampires), “The Monomyth, part zero: Mandy, Homophobia, and the Problem of Futile Revenge,” my vampire crash course preceding this section, and the close-reads on The Darkest Dungeon and Alice in Borderland after it, which articulate elements of tokenization, appropriation and betrayal we need to wary of, moving forwards; e.g., Olrox and Drolta seem radically different from their source versions, as Drew Mackie writes in “Localization Drift and Hidden History in Castlevania: Nocturne“:
It’s fitting how Olrox and Drolta, as they exist in Castlevania: Nocturne, ended up so far afield from Count Orlock in Nosferatu and Elizabeth Bathory’s accomplice. In the Netflix series, these two characters couldn’t have less to do with the entities that inspired them, and it sort of makes sense that it’s near impossible to deduce where they came from just based on their names. They’re basically new names for new characters; the source material is basically a footnote that has little bearing on how they function now. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing. That’s just how language drifts and changes and the concepts it describes evolve as well, to the point that you don’t realize that two seemingly unrelated things ever had something in common (source).
They’re also characters that walk the tightrope between parody and dogma, description and prescription; e.g., “vampires should have fangs, look classy and act like Nazis”; i.e., with Drolta being a black Nazi and Olrox being the show’s token black gay man pushing against Red-Scare Capitalist Realism while siding with the Belmonts, who—let’s not forget—are cops!
That’s problematic all on its own, and we can enjoy the idea of racial inclusion (and hauntological vampire dress sense, above and next page) and still think critically about what’s being fed to us that, unto itself, recycles through representation as meriting criticism under Capitalism as much as anything else; i.e., through teams of professional artists (re: Silvia directing a design team, including Tender Miasma on Tumblr), passed down to affluent content creators that—however stylish, authentic and bold they appear—don’t speak for the disparate and dire lived reality of entire populations. Such things are dangerous for any oppressed group to adopt and accept without thought; i.e., just as Glen Coulthard writes in Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014) about Indigenous Peoples
More specifically, I argue that the expression of Indigenous anticolonial nationalism that emerged during this period forced colonial power to modify itself from a structure that was once primarily reinforced by policies, techniques, and ideologies explicitly oriented around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation double, to one that is now reproduced through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and accommodation. Regardless of this modification, however, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation (source).
the same idea applies to any group taking their chance at recognition in relation to territories they police through such flexible assimilatory maneuvers expressed in monstrous language; i.e., as a matter of convenience and desperation that, sadly enough, always seems to become, “I deserve this. Haven’t I suffered enough?” Indulge to some extent as a matter of enjoyment, but never compromise your proletarian, racial and an-Com GNC values in service to profit and the status quo! Stalin and Mao were cops, therefore just as bad as presidents (and Lenin got shot, meaning rebellion must be a group effort: to not die out or corrupt through singular men at the top falling victim to capital and Imperialism’s usual Faustian bargains[30])!
While liberation and exploitation exist in the same thresholds and on the same surfaces, the moment you start demonstrably playing the Judas/cop without irony or concern for others, that’s exactly what you become! In turn, the speculative richness of such glamorous beings and their sodomy dialogs becomes wholly one-note, traitorous; in the wrong hands, a sultry and captivating burlesque like Winding Snake Production’s Cuphead-homage, cartoon casino of sin, vice, and playtime—”Marmalade Is Missing” (2023)—quickly can become minstrel-show vaudeville using the same language thereof. So play nice and play smart—not for fame and riches! If that’s all it takes to win you over, the systems we’re challenging need only offer you a job and/or police uniform; i.e., to tokenize in whatever ways controlling opposition demands!
(artist: Tsunami Punoni)
Of course, such poetic arguments and aesthetics lack singular set meanings. Nor is there anything wrong (or historically out of place) with camping BDSM by wearing cop uniforms, fetish gear and/or fascist mil spec. But the beat of that same theatrical drum desperately needs to be done intelligently/ironically and without predation; i.e., while articulating class, cultural and race awareness. Otherwise, it’s just betrayal and tokenization, repeating the settler argument (re: Fanon) in all the usual middle-class, assimilative, gentrify-and-decay ways in all the usual prison-like venues; i.e., the prisons, casinos, ghettos, madhouses, reservations, pogroms, etc, and a Vegas starlet or prize fighter[31] stripping for the (white cis-het) men who run the buffet, all-you-can-eat-style show (as long as you pay out, of course)!
In not just a place, but a culture where anything is for sale, provided you uphold profit, said starlets and gladiators become cops, jesters, and grim reapers one-in-all as part of the same harvest’s cities of sin; i.e., unironic vice characters preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine in all the usual ways, the business of gambling that becomes a side-show attraction or arm candy to put coins into “slots.” Where do you think said attitude comes from—that women (or those treated like women) are sex machines you put money into until sex comes out? Videogames and other popular media forms (which generally are designed to serve profit; re: “Borrowed Robes,” 2020).
Regardless of your biology, orientation, gender, ethnicity and/or performative bent, you can’t just put on a Nazi uniform and call it “good praxis.” Despite the inherent duality in such things, performative context always matters (with any vampiric hybrids, not just afronormative forms), because drag feminism and Afrocentric groups (and any other minority I could list, to be clear) historically divides and preys on one another through state coercion, but also GNC groups trying to intersectionally consolidate while subsisting under capital’s usual coded criminalities, power and bigotries: through ostentatious, utterly fabulous displays of wealth and status that can speak to different sides of the political spectrum using the same linguo-material devices (to be sure, Tsunami from earlier kills it and none of this is a direct attack on them—just, that any image is praxially and ontologically ambiguous and must be scrutinized per a dialectical-material lens that goes beyond its face value on a larger stage).
To reiterate, there’s countless forms of tokenism that emerge, intersect, and diverge across space and time—i.e., through the vampire legend as an assimilation fantasy policing itself and those around it using state-issue DARVO, obscurantism and factionalization (divide and conquer) across different class, racial and cultural lines/axes of oppression and praxial models (re: Marxist-Leninism)—far too many to adequately cover them in a book, let alone all in a section under a hundred pages long!
Pastiche is remediated praxis; per the cryptonymy process, violence and disguise serve state or worker aims, both fighting over the same devices’ medieval, queer-coded costumes, masks, appearances, and identities linked to sodomy as a policed label and application: a witch to burn, vampire to stake, and/or gay to bury by those also not fully of the in-group but also not fully of the out-group (re: Bad Empanada)! Few people are fully “outside” (a dubious position afforded more to voiceless zombies ignored inside the state of exception; e.g., Kurds, black Africans or Palestinians, etc). We mustn’t ignore those who are, but “drink deep of the plasma pool” (as Seth Brundle puts it) to transform and understand their perspective in popular stories and mediums (such as heavy metal, cartoons and monsters, but also things that combine them—like Nimona does, below); re: the pedagogy of the oppressed affording similarity amid difference: humanizing the wretched normally exterminated by police forces!
As we proceed through the rest the chapter, then, just bear in mind that “sodomy” is “monstrous-feminine” vis-à-vis nature as preyed upon by the state abusing vampiric/medieval language and its continuation in canonical forms and functions; i.e., as threats of punishment inside a panopticon-style state of exception, which they can enact by turning different groups against each other to serve profit, thus the predation of nature under Capitalist Realism; e.g., cis women punching down against cis gay men through sodomy dialogs, cis gay men and straight women punching down against GNC peoples and sex workers, Marxist-Leninists calling for an-Com activists to be closeted, Stalin-style, and sex workers being coerced—under divisive, prison-like environments—to once more pass the Omelas-style buck onto different groups in-fighting while “passing” to avoid the state’s baleful gaze: GNC people turning cannibalistically on themselves through meaningless/groundless distinctions (for the purposes of attacking ourselves) like “trans woman” or “trans man,” “enby” or so on.
Betrayal is betrayal, regardless of why traitors do it or who they choose to punch down against! Cops are cops and victims are victims during us versus them, insofar as the direction of power (and violence) are concerned during sodomy and seeker dialogs. From the Crusades to Manifest Destiny to Vietnam, the “Russian Vietnam,” Operation Iraqi Freedom, Gaza and the Ukraine, then, the state functions on hate, insofar as Pax Americana‘s Red Scare (and other moral panics) require hate (thus insanity and apathy) to move money through nature, thus achieve profit; i.e., generally this bourgeois feeding operation occurs through monomythic acts of revenge and/or superiority against evil forces, the good side treating nature-as-alien by raping it as white-to-black knights, cops, wizards, what-have-you.
Beyond geopolitics, this happens through the usual neoliberal, settler-colonial arguments and neo-Gothic refrains; e.g., Jojo, Castlevania, and Darkstalkers (with Morrigan from the third franchise being a popular choice, below) all canonically pimping the monstrous-feminine through monomythic forms that commodify such violence with various forms of allegory regarding state persecution; i.e., good-and-bad police teams breaching the usual territories on and offstage, in and out of fiction, at home and abroad, in centrist implementations of police violence against abject, monstrous-feminine victims (re: Bad Empanada seeing all peoples who “discuss sex [and sex work] like it’s their main interest” as needing to be concentrated and silenced because he can’t tell the difference between Ian Kochinski, Contrapoints, Jessie Gender and Persephone van der Waard. Like Stalin and Putin, he’s conceding defeat to the state by saying “I’ll police gay people and sex workers!” Much of this is through his credentials, casting doubt and aspersions on some of the most marginalized and exploited people on Earth).
(artist: Neo Art Core)
There’s always an iconoclastic double and ways to strip/decloak vampirically and play with the powers at work under the same paradigm, of course; liberation and exploitation exist in the same shadow zone. Outside of conscious informed liberation, though, profit’s usual (and false) empowerment schemes incessantly enroll and employ workers to lash out against strange, sodomic elements; i.e., reifying and exploiting forces of darkness that—designed to promote insecurities that weird canonical nerds can optimistically conjure up—the usual benefactors (white middle-class cis-het men) defeat in trademark fashion. In turn, they optimize these victorious actions in neoliberal simulations of war and rape that continually frame sodomy as something to romance and crush: to unironically enact and relive unhealthy and predatory forms of trauma, vis-à-vis canonical implements of calculated risk. It’s bad BDSM, replete with all the usual stereotypes, neo-con police prescriptions, Faustian bargains, Stalinist regressions, and genocidal, Promethean historical-material outcomes.
On the receiving end of such public outcry and their half-real forums, someone must always be incorrect, alien, undead; i.e., beyond normal experience, and “asking for it” by practicing “sodomy” under Capitalism and inside the state of exception. The state is the ultimate cop, thus the ultimate bigot, the ultimate wasteful glutton—a giant syringe jammed into nature and sucking her dry! Waste not, want not!
Except, the moment a vampire chases down incorrectness and degeneracy in its own circles, confiscating and/or discriminating against them like fascists do, they’ve decayed their cause (and disco/revolutionary cryptonymic elements) to join the enemy by policing themselves; i.e., for the state, burying the gay for profit, putting on the white mask for genocide (segregation, and censorship), embodying the Man Box for rape per the phallic woman/subjugated Amazon, or the Leninist segregating and alienating the anarchist, the punk decaying into proud-and-prejudiced iterations of itself, etc. It’s what the state wants! The more such selling out occurs, the more it (and its violent, dishonest class, cultural and race characters) need to be acknowledged, studied and expressed! Always root for the oppressed! If they don’t, give ’em a jolt/love tap but don’t enable them (e.g., blood and alcoholism, Animal House [1978]: “Thanks, I needed that!“)! —Perse
Having provided you with a crash course and history primer, but also follow-up covering both what vampires basically are and their 1970s theoretical revival-as-foundation for my coming out of the closet—i.e., as a 21st-century BDSM scholar of undead things—you hopefully have a good grasp of sodomy and playfulness amid vampire poetic’s dialectical-material conflicts (re: Marxist-Leninism vs Gothic Communism). You should likewise have some idea of what it’s like to put these things together while inside the closet as a result (re: a position of state-compelled ignorance). Now for a bit of fun! We’re now going to proceed into close-reads of various hauntologies! Yay!
As stated earlier, these hauntologies yield different flavors; re: of Alice in Borderland and The Darkest Dungeon. Before moving onto global vampirism with Alice in Borderland (left), I’d like to focus on some of these “older,” neo-medievalized flavors thereof, highlighting the spectres of queerness and Marxism where possible. As such, we’ll inspect The Darkest Dungeon, first; i.e., as a recent example of how popular vampire media “draws” the line at the usual suspect of patriarchal fears: the Archaic Mother deepthroating the hero’s lance with her bottomless throat. A walking Quetzalcoatl black fortress, a castle-inside-a-castle to storm, she swallows… your soul (and impregnates you: the giver of life and death)!
Hidden inside a curious blend of middle-class eroticism, her portrayal of “problematic” love is less about overt queer expression at all and more about whispering dated ideas of “spiritual feeding and transference” through cliché BDSM practices (not identities; canonically the Countless cannot be queer by virtue of calling herself a lesbian[32] or some other identity, in-game; she has no voice—can only show it laterally through the canonized ritual of drunk blood/other tissues). We’ll unpack these ideas separately as we go.
Onto “‘The World Is a Vampire’; or, Bloodsports and Prisons from Old World to New World“!
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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] E.g., not all princesses want be rescued, running with the wolf as a kind of “best revenge” that walks different tightropes—raised by wolves, but also fucked by them (the above movie, 1992’s Dracula, highlighting the similarities between lycanthropy and vampirism by Vlad fucking Lucy as a wolfman unto a slutty redhead. Such dualities speak to unchained desire and a lack self-control under capital as something to simultaneously fight and give into (and all the usual fetishes and done-to-death clichés—”my heart says no, but my body says yes” being a rehash of “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”); but also to queer love (and battered housewives) classically conflated, our love something that goes back to cis-het male abusers that a tokenized public will feminize and present as “slightly off” in order to justify whatever police/witch-hunt violence occurs; i.e., Pavlovian hostage behaviors from victims, and the persecution of queer-people-as-usual simply trying to find connection despite our being treated liminally as alien disease spreaders, but also—true enough—such heteronormative abuses extending queernormatively to queer relationships. Abuse (usually in reactive forms) happens in our lives, too!
[2] While mosquitos carry and spread malaria, one of the world’s oldest and deadliest diseases*, vampires aren’t classically associated with those flying animals (re: Watterson, below—we’ll get to exceptions when we examine the Countess); they’re compared to bats. The world’s only true flying mammals, bats have an unusual metabolic system that allows them to carry viruses without dying: “Bats—the only flying mammal—display several additional features that are unique among mammals, such as a long lifespan relative to body size, a low rate of tumorigenesis and an exceptional ability to host viruses without presenting clinical disease” (source: Aaron Irving et al’s “Lessons from the Host Defences of Bats, a Unique Viral Reservoir,” 2021). That is, they incubate, transmute and carry the disease, making them excellent vectors.
*Richard Carter and Namini Mendis write, “Malaria is among the oldest of diseases. In one form or another, it has infected and affected our ancestors since long before the origin of the human line. During our recent evolution, its influence has probably been greater than that of any other infectious agent” (source: “Evolutionary and Historical Aspects of the Burden of Malaria,” 2003).
(artist: Bill Watterson)
Bats are also excellent pollinators/fertilizers and eat billions of insects* (which also spread disease) a night. Despite bats’ importance in the world eco system, humans—especially capitalists, being terribly self-centered—overlook these qualities to scapegoat and punish bats in relation to themselves and people (we fags). Regarding bats, a case can be made for them metabolizing COVID, but humans spread it with their airplanes; as for gay people spreading AIDS, that disease is much more recent than malaria: “To date, the earliest known case of HIV-1 infection in human blood is from a sample taken in 1959 from a man who’d died in Kinshasa in what was then the Belgian Congo” (source: Peter Daszak’ “Where Did HIV Come From?” 2018). And while the virus formed in chimpanzees and spread to African poachers in the 1950s (thanks to Capitalism ruining that continent), it likewise spread elsewhere until it affected people in the Global North, who promptly blamed homosexual men for the virus (thanks to anal sex and blood, even though the disease also effects straight people—indeed more so than 21st queer people because said people take precautions with anal sex; source: Terrence Higgins Trust’s “Heterosexual HIV Diagnoses Overtake Those in Gay Men for First Time in a Decade,” 2022).
*Bats are the second largest order of mammals, and make up 20% of all mammals on Earth (~1,400 species). Furthermore, “still the most significant part of bat species will feed mainly on insects. For example, an ordinary brown bat can eat up to 100 percent of its body weight every night; that would be about half an ounce. It can consume about 1,200 insects per hour approximately (source: Wildlife Education & Directory of Wildlife Experts, 2020). Multiply 1,000 (to subtract a rough guess for which species don’t eat bugs) by 1,000,000 (as a low estimate population total across all species) and then multiply that by 1,000 again (for one hour of feeding) and you get 1,000,000,000,000 bugs—per hour! Even ballpark figures, that’s still a lot of bugs, thus a lot of disease prevention (especially in the Global South)! More to the point, if an environment changes too much due to state shift (which is mounting due to Capitalism), different species will die and the ecosystem will spiral out of control and eventually collapse. To maintain Capitalist Realism, capital will blame stigma animals and associate human groups instead of itself (re: Raj Patel and Jason Moore, who we’ll bring up in this footnote).
As such, pandemics spread to humans, who then spread them among themselves because of Capitalism, which relegates them to the Global South (and queer groups). Much is said about the disease affecting the Global North (and said North’s abjection of the disease onto queer people, there), but Africa to this day remains the most affected: “The WHO African Region remains most severely affected, with one in every 30 adults (3.4%) living with HIV and accounting for more than two-thirds of the people living with HIV worldwide [currently nearly 40 million]” (source: WHO). 630,000 have died this year from the disease alone, with estimates of 35.7–51.1 million since 1959 (ibid.). By comparison, the total number of deaths for COVID is over 7 million—though, as Worldometer writes, “As of April 13, 2024, the Coronavirus Tracker is no longer being updated due to the unfeasibility of providing statistically valid global totals, as the majority of countries have now stopped reporting” (source). Great.
It really bears repeating, then, that the places that spread misinformation do so for profit, generally at the cost of human and animal life. Capitalists, being the owners of countries, will open those boarders to disease and then blame said disease on a scapegoat (usually immigrants, queer people and other minorities) because it helps them stay in control.
For example, the United States, by 2023, had more COVID deaths than any other country on Earth: “As of May 2, 2023, the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had spread to almost every country in the world, and more than 6.86 million people had died after contracting the respiratory virus. Over 1.16 million of these deaths occurred in the United States” (source: Statista). In fact, the United States is a place known for such behaviors not just in the present, but the past, as well; e.g., the Spanish Flu and a refusal to obey quarantine measures:
In places where mask orders were successfully implemented, noncompliance and outright defiance quickly became a problem. Many businesses, unwilling to turn away shoppers, wouldn’t bar unmasked customers from their stores. In San Francisco, however, initial noncompliance turned to large-scale defiance when the city enacted a second mask ordinance in January 1919 as the epidemic spiked anew. Many decried what they viewed as an unconstitutional infringement of their civil liberties (source: J. Alexander Navarro’s ” Mask Resistance During a Pandemic Isn’t New,” 2020).
Of course, blame always occurs when diseases spread, which they always do. Just not capital blaming themselves! In medieval Europe, for instance, Christians blamed Jews for poisoning wells and witches for hexing Christians, often comparing them to wild animals, but especially mammals like dogs, known for spreading rabies*. As sexually transmitted diseases become more and more understood, though, Jewish-blamed diseases became more and more associated with “vampires” as queer-coded; i.e., the bigots/capitalists code-switched, but the ethnic origins remained!
*”Rabies is one of the oldest known diseases in history with cases dating back to 4,000 years ago. For most of human history, a bite from a rabid animal was uniformly fatal. […] While rabies is well controlled in the United States, globally nearly 60,000 people die each year due to rabies. Most of these deaths are in children” (source: Cape Cod Regional Government).
In short, who the elite blame depends entirely on how the disease spreads married to superstitions; i.e., according to how they are currently used and understood. The animals always suffer* but so do any people(s) treated like animals under current social-sexual phobias; e.g., the people who refused to wear masks for Spanish Flu compared having to do so as “being muzzled like a hydrophobic dog” (re: Navarro). “Hydrophobia,” of course, is another word for rabies—lycanthropy being a precursor for vampirism and often used interchangeably with it throughout history (e.g., AIDs)!
*Even when being humane, rabid animals must be put down. I woke up back in early 2019 with a bat crawling on my drapes. I caught it in a bucket and released it—only to learn later that bat bites can be microscopic, and the only way to tell if the creature was infected is to have it tested. With that being impossible and rabies being more or less 100% fatal (the only way to check for rabies in humans is through their brain tissue and by then it’s too late to save them; i.e., once symptoms show, you’re dead on your feet), this meant I had to get shots. Luckily I still had insurance through state welfare. Otherwise, it would have been cheaper for me to fly to Vietnam, get the shots for free (rabies being much more common in non-American countries, meaning the vaccine is more available in Socialist countries), and fly back home! Honestly the horror stories I’d heard made it sound like torture, and I dislike needles, but the procedure wasn’t that bad! But even if it was, I wouldn’t advocate for the revenge killing of bats (or queer people)!
Regarding Spanish Flu and COVID, absurd numbers of people died from lack of medicine, of course (Penicillin wasn’t mass-produced for many years after its invention, in 1928, and the COVID vaccine had to be fast-tracked before it could be tested on humans), but also for disobeying quarantines: “From 1918 to 1919, the Spanish flu infected an estimated 500 million people globally. This amounted to about 33% of the world’s population at the time. In addition, the Spanish flu killed about 50 million people. About 675,000 of the deaths were in the U.S.” (source: Cleveland Clinic’s “Spanish Flu,” 2021).
Such numbers are similar to AIDS and other pandemics, if not somewhat lower than even older cases because of medicinal developments; e.g., the Black Death, which “was so extreme that it’s surprising even to scientists who are familiar with the general details. The epidemic killed 30 to 50 percent of the entire population of Europe. Between 75 and 200 million people died in a few years’ time, starting in 1348 when the plague reached London” (source: Pat Lee Shipman’s “The Bright Side of the Black Death,” 2014). Concerning that plague, the disease—Raj Patel and Jason Moore argue—forced feudalism to adapt into Capitalism in order to survive, but that Capitalism is inherently unstable, thus equipped to survive the pandemics it routinely generates in order to profit on a global scale; re:
Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semicompulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t image a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism. […] Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene [than the Anthropocene] (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things).
As such, the 1400s marked the rise of different scapegoats to account for Western diseases caused by feudalism, and later Capitalism. Hammer of Witches was written in 1478, for example, along with various anti-Semitic stories like The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta (1598 and 1590).
After several centuries, when Capitalism, settler-colonialism and systemic racism had more fully established on the world stage, Walpole’s giant armor in Otranto (1764), at the end of the French and Indian War, foreshadowed the Capitalocene that Mary Shelley critiqued when she combined the Jewish legend, the Golem of Prague, with the Promethean myth, in 1818 (the year Marx was born); i.e., to critique Cartesian thought. Per Foucault, the rise of the Victorian bourgeoisie saw new queer-coded scapegoats invading the English idea of home by the 1800s; i.e., vampires being the sexual disease standing in for so many kinds of illnesses likened to STDs that were not STDs (re: rabies). At this same time, gay men were being persecuted in 1700s England at a mounting rate (re: Broadmoor)—a trend that would only climb as the state/capital medicalized them more and more in defense of itself; re: from the 1870s onwards, homosexual men were in the medical books for less-than-savory reasons, followed by Irish-penned anti-Semitism/queerphobia: Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897) onto 20th century examples burying the gay as usual; e.g., Castlevania: SotN (1997) tokenizing Alucard in Oedipal ways: “In the name of my mother, I will defeat you again!” to “You have been doomed ever since you lost the ability to love!” Oh, the betrayal and irony!
It should be noted that the medical profession is not the same as Capitalism, and that as time went on, new medicalized documents and academic works began to acknowledge queerness in a more favorable and less strictly biological light (definitely not Freud, Jung or their ilk); re: Hirschfeld in the 1930s, and later others in the 1960s. By that point, new information and social conflicts began to rise up and challenge the state to such a degree that its defenders (fascism and cops) couldn’t repress everything (re: having burned down Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology, in 1933).
Humanizing such mythologies associated with these aforementioned groups, revolutionary (an-Com) queerness reclaimed the language of rebellion through old, medicalized stereotypes precisely so they could avoid being classified as public health hazards; i.e., preventing the reduction of a particular group to a cultural export, especially if that item is a slave-trade icon or otherwise indicative of a stigmatic treatment of said group; e.g., Dutch people with tulips to a lesser extent, and African Americans with water melons to a greater extent, the latter extreme extending to queer people and bats or Pagan women and snakes (those elements not being racialized, but sexualized and tied to gender versus a physical location). Such reclamations include witches and their familiars (e.g., black cats), but also queer people and sex work; re: Cuwu wearing my vampire cloak:
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
However, this also goes for the animals being stigmatized alongside them as monstrous-feminine; e.g., bats; i.e., cutesifying former stigma animals to humanize them and their human counterparts using Gothic media but also academic theory combined, as usual, with access* to accurate and humane scientific journals (those most afraid of such beings usually being bigots, themselves—Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls [1996] poking fun of the idea by making Ventura comically afraid of bats/rabies [the first movie having him (not-so-)comically afraid of gay people] in the middle of a story that, in the same breath, is criticizing British Imperialism and its affect on the Global South). Fear aside, animals like bats are simply damaged by humans destroying their natural habitats (again, due to Capitalism). Animals are often chimerized in ways that must also be reclaimed; e.g., Giger’s xenomorph—a vampiric BDSM monster based on parasitoid wasps, but also lampreys, Nazis, and other parasites (and perceived parasites, queer people)—is both undead, demonic and animalistic; i.e., in ways queer people have reclaimed following its inception to humanize Communism-as-queer in the neoliberal era (re: Aliens, Metroid, and Doom).
*My ex, Jadis, loved stigma animals like snakes, spiders and wasps, but also alligators and bats. Living on-campus at the University of Florida, there was a bat conservatory less than a mile from where we lived. It was basically a house on stilts with no floor. Every night, the bats—at twilight—would begin to drop from their roost and fly out go feed on bugs (mosquitoes and other insects being plentiful in North Florida). There were probably ten thousand bats in that single hutch, and people would come from all around to watch them descend from them home to predate on insects (and chirp musically as they did so)!
As far as reclamation goes, doing so is always in the shadow of state-sanctioned disorder (societal and environmental collapse), ignorance and pandemics, queer people eclipsing Jews as formerly being the classic bringers of disease in that respect (with Jews instead being “upgraded” to the evil, goblin-like shadow bankers of the world; i.e., according to Jewish Conspiracy myths that survive in fascist discourse on and off the Internet).
All this this being said, blood libels persisted from the medieval period (the Middle Ages), the 16th to 19th centuries, and was reenacted by the Nazis (source: Holocaust Encyclopedia). Furthermore, tokenized Jews (re: Zionists) have even weaponized this language, monopolizing it for themselves (thus the state) to apologize for American genocide, while all but ignoring its primary function against anti-Zionist Jews and queer people (or race science in other minorities; e.g., people of color and blood quantum).
While rumors were spread in older times to consolidate state power as it existed back then, anyone who does so now serves profit; i.e., generally the middle class’ white conservative side, happy to throw other middle-class people under the bus (and everyone else) if it means turning a buck. Those who give their medicine away for free (re: the Polio vaccine or Penicillin) are just as likely not queerphobic, because queerphobia is a grift tied to medicalizing us as disease spreaders. It’s unscientific, illogical and cruel, but highly capitalistic! Capital synonymizes queer people/animals and diseases to stay on top. For them, nature itself is literally queer and alien, needing to be raped by the Straights from Columbus to Stalin to Putin to Andrew Tate. It’s not medieval, but “scientific.”
[3] Awkwardness regarding sexuality commonly manifests under capital; i.e., working up an appetite, but also abstinence from playing with such things being the canonical “best way to learn.” We’re taught to care so much from positions of ignorance, then to be appalled when someone shows indifference or is unaffected by something that makes us sweat, weak-at-the-knees, what-have-you (to be weak, thus under the control of someone more skilled than us); e.g., me, the Lady of Shallot, fucking Cuwu in the below photo (next page), only for me to mortified by the metal bedframe being very squeaky! “I don’t care!” was their response, simply enjoying my cock inside them, their little cunt wet with animal desire. It wasn’t to shame me, but console and encourage me to indulge in their “vampy fae” pussy until my pleasure was satisfied; i.e., to focus on the good, not the bad, and live and enjoy life to the fullest! They fed on that (and not always in healthy ways; re: Volume One). We all have our secret side that we (whether on purpose or not) hide from others—have something off-limits that others can’t reach or affect; i.e., is unattainable and, mysterious and aloof, can even be more attractive for it. It all depends!
In a vampiric matter of exchange, revolutionaries are built on the backs of workers, but also through the social exchanges and sex they have, exchanging information as vampires classically do. This takes work, thus fuel, hence feeding and food. Debate and knowledge literally are the exchange and release of bodily fluids (often cum, synonymized with blood and essence in medieval thought): to give and receive through nutritious social-psychosexual exchanges conducive to sex positivity on a cultural level. Cuwu loved getting creampied and “back-shotted,” me glazing their perfectly perky dancer’s buns with precious essence; and I loved spending time with them as such because doing so helped me learn/be a better revolutionary. We fed off and fed on each other to enrich/educate rebellion as psychosexual, informing ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it (re: based on dialectical behavioral therapy as practiced by Cuwu). Blood stores energy and triggers it (re: the vaso vagal response). So does cum. They also drive us wild in ways that can—in controlled forms synthesized/digested into good praxis—restore a healthy bond to nature that challenges state abuse alienating us from these things to begin with. In sickness and health, we become each other’s drugs and diseases to share; i.e., a burden had is a burden shared, only problematic when it becomes predatory (as Cuwu did with me; I didn’t mind being their drug as long as they didn’t abuse me).
[4] “That’s where the inspiration [for “Hell Is for Children”] came from,” Benatar’s husband, Neil Geraldo explains, “an article written about child abuse. And then everybody thought that it was real. They thought that Patricia was abused as a child, which wasn’t the case. She had a great upbringing. You couldn’t get more Happy-Days-like than her” (source: Unmask Us). But the important thing is that despite her privilege, Benatar still sided with the kids, the whores, the battered housewives! She made a career out of it, but always pushed for equal treatment. Similar to Austen, vis-à-vis slavery in Mansfield Park (re: Culture and Imperialism), such dialogs need the oppressed speaking for themselves; but this generally stems from older conversations that have white women taking to the stage and speaking for other oppressed groups, encouraging them to find their own voices in time!
[5] E.g., Tangerine being a 2015 story about a fresh-outta-jail trans-woman sex worker
looking for her pimp—to beat him up for sleeping on the side with “fish” (slang for AFAB) while she (the heroine) was in jail! In short, scarcity makes people splurge and glut, but also hurt and harm other comrades/denizens of the street, jail and/or brothel, etc.
[6] Canonically speaking. I love mommy doms and consent-non-consent to perform ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a sex positive, an-Com force that can likewise “turn” others rebellious undead, too! All the same, sex is addictive, but only when enabling harmful feeding behaviors pursuant to profit; i.e., cis-het guys and porn addictions; e.g., to cartoon ideas of women they chase instead of actual, in-the-flesh mistresses (re: the incel problem)! Under heteronormative thought, appetites—but especially sexual appetites—are shamed as “gay” unless you’re having PIV sex; i.e., you’re thirsty or hungry and shamed for not upfolding the nuclear family model when eating in the bedroom. It’s essentially a form of austerity politics, Capitalist Realism (queerphobic nostalgic), and slut-shaming all rolled into one; i.e., a compound disorder!
By comparison, rebellious sexuality and gender identity/performance can become more honest about such things (e.g., Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” 1978), while not exploiting anyone; i.e., raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural awareness through punk parody that rediscovers its critical bite:
I been to the edge
And there I stood and looked down
You know I lost a lot of friends there baby
I got no time to mess around (source: Genius).
The apple is “rotten,” but delicious and truthful in ways that—like David Lee Roth—can be indulged, enjoyed, and subverted for its bitter top notes (re: Sarkeesian). “Eat ’em and smile!” to quote the man, himself! So, no dominating or abusing women, like Sid Vicious did—murdering his girlfriend, Nancy Sprungen, with a knife; and no selling out, like Johnny Ramone! Instead, such acquired tastes are a balancing act, pushing workers sex positively towards rebellion (anything else is false rebellion; e.g., Stalin making homosexuality illegal—an elite closet game for the Politburo to abuse [re: Beria] while fighting Nazis for territory).
[7] Meaning the state-as-straight controlling such profound things, all to turn something as awesome as vampires into something as banal-yet-evil as profit (essentially vampirism without the personality or charisma; re: Marx’ “dead labor” equaling dead, lifeless vampirism as pro-state dogma).
[8] Segregation commonly being a battle for the bathrooms, telling the oppressed where we can shit (or fuck, in the cruising sense, shitting where we eat*)—to control every aspect of our lives.
*Not simply “because it’s exciting” or some such slumming excuse, but because we are both kettled and seeking catharsis through calculated risk; i.e., as something abused parties will do even when they are normally prevented or otherwise discouraged from doing so: to seek out rebellion like a vice!
[9] Power flow, with vampires being blood; with composites, it’s electricity. Anisotropically the idea of current direction/polarity is the same; the poetic material is different. The plasma (a physics and physician pun) is practical, not platitudinous, purging harmful elements for salubrious ones; i.e., through the language of energy as food-like (caloric) and/or torturous (famines/electro-shock).
[10] To this, such diversion tactics are deflections mentioned to dogwhistle and divide criticism; e.g., I used to fight with my mother (who specializes in environmental criticism of the USSR, starting school at the U of M in 1994), unable to accept their rightful criticism of the Soviet state because Bad Empanada said America is the Greater of Two Evils. But the lesser evil is still evil! Despite being an an-Com thoroughly against states, genocide and pollution, I would fight with my mother harder than I should have purely because of Empanada’s anti-American stance married to his frankly excellent postcolonial work. But the moment he made his Stalinist arguments about queerness and sex work, I saw his arguments for what they were in totality—Capitalist Realism through a Marxist-Leninist’s regressive lens—and began to critique him holistically as such; e.g., holding him accountable for his sex-negative views, insofar as to make one exception is to doom all towards decay under state models. Thus, I had to admit I was wrong, learn from it, and build on my mother’s historical knowledge (while still being critical of the United States and cops the world over). By comparison, Bad Empanada is refusing to: “Screw Your ‘Nuance‘” (2024) being his latest refusal to listen to critics.
[11] More realistic or historically accurate duels would generally be much shorter—less tailored for dramatic swell and more straightforward and to-the-point (so to speak); e.g., Dequitem’s “Blood Flowers” (2024).
[12] Fun fact: blood was used in ancient cultures as a sexual lubricant. If animal blood wasn’t available, period blood will do the trick (re: me and Jadis). Also, period sex, unto itself, is a canonical phobia that, in genderqueer hands, serves as a prophylactic and aphrodisiac, but also anesthetic: AFAB are often hornier when they’re hormonal, but also suffering cramps that an orgasm can easily help with (while also being unable to get preggers). Vaginal (“murder dick”), oral (“getting your red wings”), or simulated (“self-staking”), these double as useful exposure therapies to admittedly acquired-taste things that straight guys curiously dread, leading to compelled anal and weird, cottage-industry sophisms: “If the river runs red, take the dirt path, instead!” How ’bout, go fuck yourselves?
To be fair and holistic, there is some truth to it; i.e., insofar as consuming blood carries risk of disease, but so does all sex and eating food (re: vampirism and lycanthropy married to blood libel and AIDS phobias)! Straight men tend to treat the people they fuck (female or not) as disease bags they “safely” stab with their dicks sans condoms—ignoring the fact that they can still catch diseases this way (not to mention cause pregnancies, which were historically fatal to women)! No one is dumber about sexual health than cis-het men—with queer people needing to understand diseases and biology/gender to identify differently, and cis-het women having periods that will be controlled and demonized, often by other women: to come of age is a mark of shame, one to be met with hazing.
For example (and tacking on my Gothic’s obligatory Carrie footnote), the period and pig’s blood scenes from Carrie (1976) both tackle religious ignorance and bullying by weaponizing hysteria/the wandering womb against different bullies by the female witch: her evil religious mother and secular teenage peers/apathetic instructors at school. Denied a proper sex education (as religious institutions do), girls often think they’re dying or possessed, but also are shamed as sluts, witches, vampires and whores by hypocrite forces both young and old; i.e., those to seek revenge against by paralyzing them with the Gorgon’s stare when Carrie has had enough, a school-shooter banshee that—in the end—destroys the perfidious community from within (the difference being cis-het men generally shoot up schools for fame, whereas women [while not above TERF-style witch hunts and other bigotries] rarely if ever stoop to such glory-seeking violence, themselves)!
[13] During the final fight between Cassel and the hero, Cassel appears uncloaked, wearing the guise of a wolf (the evil white Indian) and the hero having on war paint (the good white Indian); i.e., vampirism and lycanthropy stem from the same dialogs concerned with predation, degeneracy and criminal sex. To it, Cassel’s aristocratic debauchery is exposed, he and the hero eager to fight to the death (over a girl, of course). There’s an incestuous flavor to the scandal, too, but also raw, highwayman violence enacted by those profiting off the werewolf legend; i.e., a crown-funded terrorist action targeting French village girls to instill countryside panic—one eventually exposed by facing and demasking the vampiric royals projecting their ravenous appetites off onto their fash cousins and victims of said cousins: a sex pest to exterminate, demonizing BDSM and queer people in the process (all while fencing it off, vis-à-vis Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” 1842).
Also, the movie treats “the Beast” as the immortality of the French Revolution: “You’re too late, Fronsac; the Beast is already immortal!” Cassel then dies, and thirty years after the scene we just saw, the opening mourns the death of a French nobleman! So… that’s good, right? Then, why does the movie treat the rebels like killer rapey cannibals? Abjecting rebellion to apologize for the French monarchy, its director (Christophe Gans) is suitably trying to have his cake and eat it, too (all the way to guillotine, Marie Antoinette)! It’s a bit confused on the message, but then again, Cassel is the best part of the film (such a badass)!
To that, Gans is effectively playing with old Gothic conventions that let us root for the villain (the demon lover) but—in classic Radcliffean fashion—settle for the Gothic hero at the end (re: Wolff, suitably enough). It’s canonical, but has subversive elements; i.e., as Neo-Gothic novels classically did, Gans imitating them to a fault, which—at the same time—gives us an-Coms something to work with (throwing a dog a bone)!
[14] Dacascos isn’t actually Native American; he’s Hawaiian/Filipino and Irish/Japanese. In fact, it’s quite common for non-white martial artists to be chosen “for their looks”; i.e., a vaudeville, “blackface,” close-enough quality that translates, oddly enough, into food shows:
Melissa: “You have a very multicultural, very multiracial background. How has that influenced you and your work?”
Mark: “Well, I guess the advantage is that it’s enabled me to play a lot of different characters. The disadvantage, I suppose, is that sometimes I’m not enough of anything to play what they’re looking for [emphasis, me]” (source: Melissa Slaughter’s “Mark Dacascos Can’t Cook, But He Can Kick A** in the Reboot of Iron Chef,” 2022).
I mention this because after his action roles, Dacascos would go onto reboot Iron Chef on Netflix—a show that treats multiculturalism as a neoliberal cash grab.
This being said, it’s entirely possible to be multicultural, do martial arts and critique consumption; e.g., Foreign Man in a Foreign Land does all three (“How Food Racism Ruined the World,” 2024); i.e., an foreigner (from the Caribbean) speaking to crops of various kinds, made into settler colonies and banana republics that, unto neoliberal Capitalism, translate into little microcosms that spread state predation (and subsequent DARVO) across people and place. The more foreign people are from the Imperial Core, the more estranged and critical their Gothic voice tends to be (e.g., Jean Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966). Unlike queerness, they’re alien in ways they can’t always hide; i.e., there’s no closet for being a slave (short of some “passing” shadism arguments).
[15] My ex, Zeuhl, was a postpunk nut who—apart from being a total nerd in that respect—romanticized such spaces (and their hauntologies) as a matter of predation amongst queers. As I previously said, at school Zeuhl and I fed on each other, becoming what we ate as a matter of fluid exchange, but also power and knowledge. Zeuhl drank of my nectar and I gave it willingly while taking of their essence; but they taught me a hard truth, as well: attraction and abuse often coincide. Furthermore, the latter is often done by those who have more experience in pain and abuse, thus have the ability to not simply wound, but take advantage of those they hurt (again, a bit like Lestat and Louis from Rice’s famous tale). And that’s precisely what Zeuhl did! All the same, I learned a lot from them and their life-in-the-big-city bullshit; i.e., including that I’m attracted to damage—not because I like it/am a glutton-for-punishment or am into people with trust issues, but because I like having someone I can relate to for also being gay (and queer people, finding a mate, will often settle)! Much of this section remains positively haunted by Zeuhl’s strange adoration for Foucault, but also twink-in-peril, exploitation-style torture porn (re: Cooper) and caged queer existence (re: Jarman)!
[16] Partly, Rice wrote her landmark Interview (1976) to heal from the death of her young child; re, Marlow Stern’s “Anne Rice Opens Up: ‘I Feel Like I’m Gay'” (2017):
Forty years ago, Anne Rice’s debut novel, Interview with the Vampire, brought vampirism out of the shadows and into the light. Her initial foray into the world of blood-imbibing immortals was partially inspired by the tragic death of her daughter Michelle, who died at age of 5 of leukemia. The character of Claudia, a 5-year-old vampire with an insatiable thirst for life-giving blood, was a tribute to her lost little girl (source).
In the same interview, though, Rice explains,
I was writing about vampires before the AIDS crisis. People told me Interview with the Vampire was a gay allegory, and I was very honored by that. [Rice’s son, Christopher, is openly gay.] I think I have a gay sensibility and I feel like I’m gay, because I’ve always transcended gender, and I’ve always seen love as transcending gender. In my books, I’ve always created bonds of love that have transcended gender. But I’ve never associated AIDS with vampires, myself. I’ve always been very much a champion of gay rights, and art produced by gay people—whether it was the early Frankenstein movies that had such a gay sensibility to them, or any art created by gay people. I’m highly sensitive to it. I have a gay sensibility. I get teased a lot by my gay friends because we have a rapport on things we find exciting or interesting. It’s very hard for me to remember that I have a gender, and that they’re treating me in a negative way because of that gender (ibid.).
And, honestly, she’s sounds pretty gay/non-binary to me! Yes, her work sexualizes cute boys, but specifically to humanize them and acknowledge their monstrous status (and subsequent strange appetites) in society. It’s hardly predatory!
Bear in mind, when Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, much of the language that exists today didn’t back then (re: Moers and Foucault, Creed and Carter); i.e., just “vampires” as code for things she made queer in a sex-positive light while arguably inside the closet, herself. Eventually she came out (similar to Cassandra Peterson), but even before she did, she was always fighting the good fight (a bit like Vincent Price or, hell, Pat Benatar).
To that, monsters can be used for good or ill; Rice—unlike Frank Herbert—was actually and actively loving and accepting of her gay son, and she never sold out or weaponized queerness to triangulate abused women against marginalized communities like Rowling did. While you can find queer themes in Rowling’s work, much of that comes from the proverbial “death of the author,” whereas Rice’s sex-positive legacy very much keeps her alive in people’s hearts (Rowling, by comparison, is dead to many former fans; she sucks).
[17] Re: Riding on Carl Westphal’s coattails and beating Stoker’s own anti-Semitic novel to the punch by over twenty years, and focusing on female vampires.
[18] Re: Solzhenitsyn, with Zeuhl treating things like a trolley problem, and them picking their husband. I always kind of gathered that’s what they were doing, but it never hit me until this moment: that’s a very monogamous and, furthermore, a very cis-het approach to love; i.e., the moment they sold out, they killed and buried that revolutionary gay inside of themselves, in turn killing a piece of their own heart! And not just theirs, but mine in regards to them! In realizing this, Zeuhl has become completely alien to me, a stranger I didn’t know—or rather, an imposter I’d seen before but had always turned a blind eye to: all because I was in love with an idea of them that wasn’t true. The entire time, I had been lying to myself, trying to hold onto something of a keepsake. All ammunition for them to deceive me with!
Of course, the fact that Zeuhl took advantage of me and didn’t even have the guts to admit it speaks volumes to their dearth of character. It always bothered me, but seeing the cold hard logic of them justifying it—as Captain Miller did when saving Private Ryan (re: convince yourself that what you’re doing will “pay off” down the road)—shows me they were more in the closet by the end, more short-sighted than I could have ever possibly imagined!
Small wonder we couldn’t be together! And frankly the thought kind of sickens me—like the person I thought was Che Guevara really being just a closet neoliberal (and not an out-and-out one, like Jadis); i.e., in disguise, merely biding their time to sell out! I feel like I fucked Obama with a facemask:
Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm. Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black. As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships (source: Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, 2020).
The irony is, Zeuhl actually did good work, but gave it all up for that boy they fell in love with at 19! It’s like everything after that was bullshit, them simply bidding their time! And to make matters worse (if such a thing were possible), this is basically what Foucault did, too, and I’m not even the first person to acknowledge it; e.g., Walker Caplan writes,
We can add Barack Obama to our list of academic posers. In a section of his new memoir, A Promised Land, the former president describes reading books in college to impress girls he liked […] However, Obama is following in the footsteps of great men—in fact, of the very thinkers he faux-read. As @thomas_decker pointed out on Twitter, James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault features Foucault telling this anecdote from his early education:
…In order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, [I] began to do his homework for him—and that’s how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.
Crushes are so powerful that Foucault became Foucault for a crush. And the tactic makes sense; reading is hot, which we as writers for a book website love to remember (source: “Even President Obama Once Used Books to Pick up Girls,” 2020).
Worse, Zeuhl even quoted that passage to me in school! They thought it was funny! “I have so many… mixed feelings!” indeed! Why do all of my memories of us suddenly feel like evidence, now?
It hurts me enough to feel fresh anger after so much time, and in ways I never quite dared before without reflection. So it’s oddly a relief to be angry with my abuser in ways that outs them for the canonical vampire they were. Fuck you, Zeuhl—one, for breaking my heart and using me like you did (and lying about it); two, for making me feel like Fred from Scooby-fucking-Doo; and three, for making me realize this, thus ruin even my happy memories of you!
I’ll be honest; it’s one thing to kill one’s darlings that you didn’t know in person (re: Halford as a poser). But someone I loved as much as I loved Zeuhl, who’s ultimate betrayal has layers of emptiness/vampiric invisibility I’m only realizing years later? My relationship with them feels so goddamn fake; they feel so goddamn fake! But now that I can kill that stupid idea of them, once and for all, it’s odd—it feels like closure, and I can move on. Indeed, I’ve already been doing that for years (even so, I still feel a rueful twinge/pang of agony, but only a small one)! But tragically they will always have a piece of my heart stuck in them, and I will always have a piece of them stuck in me. To reflect is, in some sense, to pour salt on old wounds, inflaming “shrapnel” injuries that never fully heal. As I pull away from them, like a dead precious animal lying abandoned on the side of the ride, its ghost follows me, and the cold hard stare of that Spaghetti-Western-loving revolutionary I fell in love with glares at me; i.e., out of a rebellious past that is both dead and alive inside me:
Why does that ghost of them have to resemble Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson (“Never shake your gory locks at me!”)? A part of me, even now, will always love that idea of what they could have been. And despite how it hurts, and no matter how much I cry going forwards, I will never let that go; I will learn from it and use it to build the very things Zeuhl gave up on; I will build a temple to the honor of that side of them that was good; re: “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Zeuhl was a coward; no coward soul is mine (for a fictional example, consider Broken Sword and Snow from Hero, 2003; both rebels, Sword betrayed all of their values and friends to hand power over to the bloodthirsty [and self-pitying] Chinese Emperor, and Snow—rightfully enraged—killed his stupid ass for it)!
Under capital, we’re left scavenging on the wreckage of the past, be it our own or that of others; e.g., I used to cite Frodo, bemoaning the Eye of Sauron watching him: “I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing—no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.” I thought Zeuhl, holding me and watching me with their pretty princex eyes, was my Samwise Gamgee; instead, they went to Mordor alone, and took the hobbits to Isengard. They took the Ring and abandoned me for a place at the Dark Lord’s throne. Why? Because it was easy and convenient. Even if they cried (and they did cry somewhat), they still killed that piece of themselves. But perhaps I’ll rest easier knowing they’ll be pained and haunted by me too. Useful things are couched within useless things and vice versa, “But she will remember forever that I caught her! That I held her prisoner!” versus “She will remember your heart when men are fairy tales and books written by rabbits.” And maybe, just maybe, that will motivate them to change back into the androgyne that I loved, all those years ago…
So let this be a lesson, kids—when you’re in your graduate supervisor’s office, crying your eyes out because you think your then-partner is using you (re: “I feel used!”), said voice isn’t wrong! Then again, I still have mixed feelings because if I listened to my conscience back then, I would have never met Jadis and Cuwu as formative exes, onto awesome friends like Bay or Harmony—and this book series wouldn’t exist! So, personally—despite knowing how phony Zeuhl ultimately is—I still wouldn’t change a thing (the sex was good, and Zeuhl and I had some fun times/taught each other things despite them being a colossal mooch). Despite what they did, I’d still love people as openly as I do now because having a heart that can feel is infinitely more valuable than one made of stone.
Caveats aside, I’d rather have a Communist world, not a neoliberal one (which is all Vaporwave really is, Zeuhl: the romance of a canceled future, a road to nowhere). To that, my hard-fought knowledge came from mistakes I made so you, dear readers, don’t have to. But if it does lead to mistakes on your end, don’t let it stop you from looking for love again the future! Don’t be afraid to love and fail! Failure is useful, just like Foucault (and his truths and lies and half-lies) was useful. You can’t learn unless you relate to others, and you can’t relate to others without loving them, thus open up the possibility of getting hurt. So learn from rejection and open your heart, then find yourself someone who won’t use sex and the veneer of intellectual posturing to get what they want at expense of yourself! Find someone real and kind and good! And then, make the world a better place than Zeuhl ever could (the funny thing being Bay kind of looks like Foucault when he wears turtlenecks, but is in truth, a very sweet person; i.e., he’s been abused and learned from it, whereas Zeuhl—a bit of a skittish wuss, afraid of intimacy and connection—mostly led a charmed and self-centered life)!
Build a fire and see who joins you by it. Raise a flag and see who salutes! And always look after yourselves and be well! “First, do no harm”; “hurt, not harm!” But also, self-care is community care (and we an-Coms are service tops). So “die” by Snu-Snu, eating Cheddar Goblin until your swan song is “macaroni stirring sound.” Always in moderation, but swing for the fences!
[19] Really the tip of the iceberg, insofar as Zeuhl’s abuse goes (again, see: previous footnote). But, like most abusers, good is mixed in with bad. For a good summary of their nonsense, consider “The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do” (2024) from Volume Two, part one. Otherwise, mentions of them appear all throughout Volumes One and Zero.
[20] I once worked at a Subway in college the first time around, from 2006 to 2007. The job was so terrible I would rebel in different ways—one, by making myself illegal, not-to-standard sub sandwiches (with quadruple the meat [usually teriyaki chicken], strips of bacon and a shitload of chipotle/ranch sauce with a generous helping of black olives, then toasted with double provolone cheese on top); but also two, by going home and writing monster stories on my iMac G3.
To this, the act of creating monsters (fueled by stolen food to get back at my corporate employers) powered my revenge and felt good; i.e., I worked minimum wage in a gentrified college town (which in Michigan, 2006, would have been $6.95/hour), thus was always underpaid, underfed, and trying to go to college myself (while subletting at an abusive friend’s apartment). More to the point, I could create monsters myself; i.e., as “comfort food” that treated said content as a way of enriching the world by not serving the profit motive (a lifelong process taking many more years, me not really exiting the closet more aggressively until I started to date queer people in 2015).
For example, a KFC I worked at, years later (in 2012, shortly before I went back to college*), would throw food away every night—trays and trays of chicken—all so corporations could make money through the middle class instead of feeding the poor. By extension, sex abuse and food sales go part-in-parcel, like any product and its salespeople; i.e., the same motive canonically apologizes for predation among corporations selling food as, often enough, both literal and tied to a brand associate: a person who, failing upwards, enjoys the perks of such efficient profit to abuse those under them; e.g., Subway’s Jared Fogle preying vampirically on others thanks to his freak and meteoric rise up the corporate ladder (Dreading’s “From Five Dollar Foot Long to Felon” (2022).
*A tradition that would carry over into my grad school MMU days; i.e., donner kabab at the local chippy—basically fried stoner food sold to college students popping in after all night at the library (or sex in bed and your lover wanting a snack). It was hot expensive garbage, to be sure, but the bottles of mayo sitting on the counter they served your food with? Manna from Heaven!
[21] Often, the closeted, imprisoned character to such proximity and alienation leads queer people to one, become damaged, then two, be drawn towards each other like moths to moths and/or flames (unable to tell the difference).
[22] Usually more than trans men or those confused as trans; e.g., Imane Khelif’s recent dogpiling on the word of those normally profiting off moral panic, like J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk and others (Rebecca Watson’s “The Transphobes are Coming for All of Us” (2024).
[23] This includes a perceived “ancient”; e.g., the Catholicized medieval as vice-driven and prone to sinful excess from the Protestant perspective, the flush of the stated bloodlust less the drinking of actual blood and more the medieval idea of sanguine during sexual arousal; i.e., as an ancient wisdom now forbidden in a Puritanical age (Bay’s pussy “blushes” deliciously when they’re horny, for example), but also abjected onto the surface of problematic lovers who ostensibly practice/embody sodomy/”bad sex” (out of wedlock). Certainly the draining of essence and deprivation of sex conveys a guilty alienized claim for now-taboo appeals that aren’t harmful; e.g., wanton fucking with reckless abandon through the Gothicized theatrics thereof. Such language fits like a glove because Capitalism is more “medieval” than you might think—its bastardized icons, but also its hidden atrocities sold back to us in cartoonish, comfortably prandial forms; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection.
[24] Whose ostentatious “claiming rituals,” like hickeys, show off trophies and general ownership; i.e., intimating on the surface of the skin, thereby showcasing prurient suggestions of naughty sex and general bedroom activities outside the bedroom; re: Foucault).
[25] For a nice Sapphic example, consider Chappell Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” (exhibit 41g1a1b, 2023):
She was a Playboy, Brigitte Bardot
She showed me things I didn’t know
She did it right there, out on the deck
Put her canine teeth in the side of my neck (source).
[26] For many workers, “holy” simply refers to popular media, but also popular thinkers in and out of academia; i.e., sacred cows they’ll defend to a fault, and attack any “almost holy” iconoclast who dares barbeque them and theirs when fighting for equal rights; e.g., me roasting Marx.
[27] Specifically his quote, “People who talk about sex constantly and like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again” (Persephone van der Waard’s “‘I, Sex Doctor’: About Me, Ludo-Gothic BDSM, and the Work that I Do (response to @BadEmpanadaLive,” (2024). This constitutes unironic, Stalinist/fascist witch hunter rhetoric—the very sort enabled by Marx and Engels against “sodomites” (which is why we must camp Marx’ ghost; re: “Making Marx Gay“), but also by functional Puritans against anything different than them; re: closeted Marxist-Leninist agents allergic to literary critique and BDSM. Communism—especially Marxist-Leninism (non-anarchistic forms)—is not immune to such thinking and, per the profit motive, can easily regress and decay towards harmful forms (also, to Bad Empanada: investigating legitimate sex pests [and getting paid for it] does not give you the right to call for sex worker pogroms that, let’s be honest, are primarily and historically used to target gay people; re: Stalin).
[28] Re: Le Fanu; i.e., itself hauntological, insofar as the many queer labels that were (and still are) used to medicalize and alienate GNC people were already tied to popular stories starting to cheaply monetize (the so-called “penny dreadfuls”). Overtime, Foucault notes how concerning criminal sexuality per the homosexual man. His emphasis on sexuality has a certain “pick me/woe-is-me” quality to it, one that ignores the plights of cis women, but also GNC qualities when looking at these earlier times in a purely sexual, thus biological light. Such histories were addressed through his own work as making new scholarship that we’ve have to critique and synthesize into new, more inclusive forms in the Internet Age (which Volume Three shall focus on).
[29] Re: Vice’s “Jordan Peterson Is Canada’s Most Infamous Intellectual” (2018).
[30] Do you really want to live forever if you have to rape and kill someone (e.g., Griffith from Berserk)? Furthermore, do you want to be remembered forever as someone who sold out and betrayed your own kind (re: Griffith)? Fuck that! Help people without being a token sellout or “great man of history”! Their fate is always the same—to be camped and subverted by us!
[31] Mike Tyson (the real-life equivalent for Street Fighter‘s Boxer/Balrog/M. Bison, next page) became world champ when he was nineteen. Yes, he was exploited by Don King—a predatory black man promoting boxing’s royal division—but all of this happened inside a white structure of power under the settler-colonial model; i.e., the centering of old/big money around the usual benefactors at a systemic level, “white” speaking to the supremacist nature of the binary while, in the same breath, recruiting racially non-white bodies to do their dirty work pursuant to those ends (e.g., African American cops, but also black politicians of either establishment party or binary sex, what-have-you). To that, King managed Tyson after Cus D’amato but D’amato pulled him off the streets specifically to make money off him, then left him as a ward of the system taught to police and fight for said system. It was not a nurturing environment for Tyson, but one designed to exploit him as a black gladiator/racehorse to whip and corral (who, it must be said, still harmed and abused others around him, as a result; re: F.D. Signifier’s “The Complex History of Mike Tyson,” 2022). Any privilege offered unto token cops, performers and/or representatives in general will be used by the state to hammer home concessions and stereotypes these persons will be expected to levy against members of their own kind.
[32] Furthermore, the cis-supremacist lesbian will colonize the struggle during marginalized in-fighting; i.e., where they delegitimize the trans woman as a “man-in-disguise,” basically calling them a male rapist or sodomite: a homosexual man in the dated, transphobic language of second wave feminists, TERFS, et al. To the TERF, the trans woman is an incorrect form of monstrous-feminine (while fetishizing female revenge in ways that horseshoe fascism, BDSM and Communism).
