Homosexuality, while alluring, is dangerous and ends in death. Furthermore, those who are homosexual can and often do convince their "victims" (previously thought to be heterosexual) to partake in their dangerous activity. These are the overarching ideas presented in queer readings of certain creatures and stories. Although there are outliers, the vast majority of stories that invoke ideas of same-sex queerness as a disease do so through the use of vampires. Interestingly though, there's a marked difference between vampires that are read as lesbians and those who are read as gay men.

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The connection between vampirism and lesbianism dates back as far as the 1800s with Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla. The novella details the relationship between 18 year old Laura and the titular vampire Carmilla, who displays both a romantic yearning for and urge to "feed" on the protagonist [1]. Carmilla provided the groundworks for many movies throughout the next century, with the first being 1936's Dracula's Daughter. Claimed to be based on one of Bram Stoker's stories, the film shows similarities to Carmilla by delving into the complicated psyche of Dracula's daughter Marya as she fails to stifle her urge to attack women and turn them into vampires/infecting them. She even tries to go to a psychiatrist for suggestions on how to stop her urges, which can be read as a reference to 1900s queer conversion therapy. The trope gained popularity throughout the rest of the 20th century, but quickly turned to eroticism [2]. Instead of focusing on psychology, movies such as Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Female Vampire/The Bare Breasted Countess (1973), and The Hunger (1983) used the trope as an excuse to show lesbian relationships and sexual encounters for a mostly male audience.

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The connection between gay men and vampires didn't exist until about a century after Carmilla was originally written and served a much different purpose. It also wasn't nearly as popular. Instead of acting as an erotic metaphor for homosexual relations in general, queer male vampires instead often included the subtext of the 1980s/'90s HIV/AIDS epidemic. As vampires historically may have originated as a response to different types of disease [3] and an association between blood and HIV arose in the '80s [4], the connection was inevitable. It was also perhaps inevitable due to the meteoric rise in fear of gay men and their bodies as a result of HIV. The disease was originally referred to as Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), and many Americans were scared of being "infected" by those who were HIV+. Most media that explored this concept wasn't mainstream in the same way that the others covered in this project were, however. Outside of certain smaller creators (many who were queer themselves) [3], the majority of queer male vampires in horror media before the 2000s is speculation.  Nevertheless, even a speculated connection is notable, as subtle and non-stated connections between historical notions of queerness and horror concepts are the roots of this entire project.