From the "Hilariously Late to the Party" department comes vampires-gay-men-1109">this article in Esquire magazine, "Vampires As Gay Men" by Stephen Marche.  First of all, I desperately wanted to firebomb this article for the following sentence:

Not all young straight women, of course, but many, if not most, of them.

Not all, but many, if not most.  That is just TERRIBLE writing.  Awful.  It poisoned me against Marche's case, and I read on with a steely gaze indeed.

Then I started chuckling.  I skimmed forward, then returned to my place and laughed harder.  Here is the problem with this article, in a nutshell: NEEDS MOAR ANNE RICE.  Stephen Marche has apparently just stumbled across this amazing thing, the parallel in modern media between vampires and gay men, and wants us all to know about it.  Hey!  Did you know?  I am so clever for figuring this out!

Of course, anyone who has read - nay, heard of - Anne Rice's novels knows this already.  What may have been subtextual before the publication of "Interview With A Vampire" was no longer afterward.  Rice made this connection explicit, and the vampire legend would never be the same.

Any article on "the meaning of vampires" which fails to mention Anne Rice should get an automatic failing grade, if only for poor research.  I was also stymied when Marche referred to two 80s vampire movies as "a small boom."  

I also didn't care for the author's concluding paragraph, which seems to be skirting on the edge of a sneer.  People, check me on this: would someone who accepts homosexuality as normal and acceptable behavior would ever use "Adam and Steve"? So far as I know, it is used only by gay bashers.

(If, when you read the phrase "Adam and Steve," you hear David Rakoff saying "Of course it's not Adam and Steve.  It's Adam and Steven," from This American Life, then I can tell that I like you very much.)

Finally, to cap off this hilariously misguided article, Marche concludes that "Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening."

Which is pretty effing funny, considering that the thing about vampires is that they KILL YOU.  I mean, that is the salient feature of vampires, the one thing you really can't miss about them: they drink human blood.  Some of them may abstain, of course.  (I'm thinking of Angel, here, because unlike Marche I have seen vampire things other than  "Twilight.")  But the whole point about vampires is that they are dangerous.

There are even more wrong-headed things packed into his statement, "And so vampires have appeared to help America process its newfound acceptance of what so many once thought strange or abnormal."  First of all, he's assuming that vampires are helping us "process acceptance."  Does he not understand that some women could be drawn to things that are scary and bad for them?  That are, in fact, "strange or abnormal"?  

This more than anything is what makes me think that Marche's understanding of the vampire genre is limited to having watched "Twilight" and skimmed some Wikipedia articles.  Thankfully I can report that Mormon vampires are the exception, being an unusually watered-down form of the myth, diluted to such an extent that eleven year old girls find it acceptable.