Breathers and Suckers: Sources of Queerness in True Blood

Home , Daniel Minahan, Matt Fielding, Queer Duck, Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood, True Blood (season 1)

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Aleš Rumpel

Breathers and Suckers: Sources of Queerness in True Blood

Bachelor‘s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.

2011

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the thesis supervisor Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A., and Mgr. Kateřina Kolářová, PhD., for support and inspiration, and also to my friend Zuzana Bednářová and my husband Josef Rabara for introducing me to the world of True Blood.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Queer Reading ant the Heteronormative Text ...... 4

Contextualising True Blood ...... 8

Strangers to prime-time ...... 8

Erecting and penetrating: vampire as a metaphor for queer sexuality ...... 17

―We are not monsters. We are Americans‖ ...... 28

Deviant lifestyle ...... 30

God hates fangs ...... 32

Artery is the grave ...... 35

Conclusion ...... 41

Bibliography ...... 44

Summary ...... 51

Anotace ...... 52

Introduction

―I am Sookie Stackhouse and I‘m just a waitress,‖ the main character of

True Blood keeps telling creatures that are hundreds and thousands years older than herself and – know better. Sookie lives in a small Louisiana town and is a bit of a local freak, as she has telepathic skills and cannot always contain herself when she hears the local people‘s thoughts. As an outsider often feeling to be the only one of her kind, she greatly anticipates meeting vampires, who had recently announced their existence to the human race in an act called ―The

Great Revelation,‖ assuring human race that with the invention of synthetic blood substitute ―Tru Blood,‖ humans and vampires can coexist. When Sookie meets Bill Compton, the first vampire in Bon Temp, she realizes that she cannot hear vampires‘ thoughts and can finally relax. With Bill, Sookie starts her very first relationship, looses virginity and sets on a journey of many discoveries, including discoveries of her own body.

Dangerous situations that her acquaintance with vampires bring about eventually and increasingly trigger Sookie‘s spontaneous self-defence powers no less supernatural that her telepathy. In the third season of the series, Sookie finds out the reason why so many vampires (and other creatures) were puzzled by her and drawn to her. She is a fairy, a race long considered wiped out of existence by vampires centuries ago, as these find fairy blood intoxicating and irresistible.

Association with vampires introduces Sookie to a world of many supernatural beings, most of which, unlike vampires, do not wish to be known to the mainstream society. The diegetic world of True Blood is populated by shape-shifters, werewolves, werepanthers, maenads and witches, with their individual hidden subcultures and codes. Sookie transgresses the rules of her culture, enters a new one and experiences human prejudice and hate for participating in it.

True Blood is a self-reflexive postmodern text, which crosses several genres. It also creates a strong fictional universe, based on The Sookie

Stackhouse Novels by Charlaine Harris. HBO devised a complex marketing strategy for its prime-time product and the campaign includes viral videos and alternative reality games, encouraging fandom and strong identification with the characters and plots. Individual characters have their own blogs and twitter accounts, fictional political parties, churches and lobby groups have their websites. Fans are encouraged to invest into the alternative reality of True

Blood, a reality that mirrors contemporary American debate on human rights and identity politics.

This thesis investigates a gay man‘s investment into the story of a straight woman. After all, it is a story of a fairy, which is a slang term for an effeminate gay man. The fairy learns to understand herself, discovers sexuality, infiltrates orthodox religious communities and leather-biker bars, faces prejudice and violence for who she chooses to love, and importantly, extremely attractive men find the fairy irresistible and intoxicating. True Blood features a great number of characters that are not straight, a number that is higher than 2

the average of contemporary American prime-time television, and some of its language alludes to gay and lesbian issues and experiences. However, True

Blood is queer beyond explicit representations and narratives. Areas of inquiry into the queerness of True Blood will include contextual as well as textual discussion, informed by reader activated reception theory referred to as queer reading.

Queer Reading ant the Heteronormative Text

The author has been dead since the mid nineteen-sixties when post- structuralism hit the ground. Further developments in critical theory witnessed a certain departure from the text as the sole site of meaning towards considerations of how actual spectators/readers interact with film/texts. Janet

Steiger, one of the most influential scholars in film receptions studies, author of

Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema and

Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception says that all audiences are

„perverse― as they make uncontrollable meanings of their own. Queer theorists have proposed various approached to queer reading, a reader activated theory of how heterogeneous audiences take up varied positions towards texts.

Queer theory is a relatively new branch of critical theory, heavily influenced by Michel Foucault‘s writings. In contrast to gay and lesbian studies, queer theory moves the study of sexuality ―from explaining the modern homosexual to questions of the operation of the hetero/homosexual binary, from an exclusive preoccupation with homosexuality to a focus on heterosexuality as a social and political organizing principle, and from a politics of minority interest to a politics of knowledge and difference‖ (Seidman, 9).

Queer reading is a practice of re-reading and re-labelling texts with explicit heterosexual narrative, which destabilises heterosexual readings, often utilising narrative silence concerning characters‘ sexuality, and/or homosocial environments and relationships. Queer reading is sometimes understood as a strategy historically employed by non-straight audiences in times of next-to-

none LBGT visibility and explicit LGBT articulations in the arts and media, and also as a strategy of reading historical texts (Benshoff, Dyer). Queer reading strategies are used to explain cult followings of certain stars or films, fandom and slash fictions. Some theorists discuss queer reading positions as opposed to gay and lesbian ones, suggesting lack of interest in ―legitimis(ing) homosexuality as a sexual minority by positioning it within the binary construction of homosexuality versus heterosexuality‖ (Dhaenens, Van Bauwel,

Biltereyst), while others use it along with ―gay‖ and ―lesbian‖ to trace a wider range of audience positions.

Alexander Doty, author of Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting

Mass Culture and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon, is among scholars that also use the categories of gay and lesbian. Doty is critical of strategies of queer reading that use the rhetoric of subtext or connotations or of ―queering‖ texts as these are ―deniable or ‗insubstantial‘ as long as we keep thinking within conventional heterocentrist paradigms, which always already have decided that expressions of queerness are sub-textual, sub-cultural, alternative readings, or pathetic and delusional attempts to see something that isn‘t there‖ (Making, xii). Doty also campaigns for not using the term ―queering‖ as ―it implies taking a thing that is straight and doing something to it‖ (Flaming, 2). Instead, Doty claims a position that is equal to that attributed to straight reading.

All takes on queer reading share a common preoccupation with the concept of heteronormativity, a term coined by Michael Warner in 1991.

Heteronormativity ―refers to pervasive and invisible norms of heterosexuality

(…) embedded as a normative principle in social institutions and theory‖ 5

(―Heteronormativity‖) and ―the importance of the concept is that it centres on the operation of the norm. Heteronormativity emphasises the extent to which everyone, straight or queer, will be judged, measured, probed and evaluated from the perspective of the heterosexual norm. It means that everyone and everything is judged from the perspective of straight‖ (Chambers, 26).

For Doty, both production and reception-consumption have multiple

―sources of queerness‖ and queer reading needs to consider producers, texts and audiences (xiii). Bringing the author back into discussion does not mean re- locating the site of meaning to the particular person of the author but rather a discussion of the construction of the author. Richard Dyer proposes that ―all authorship and all sexual identities are performances, done with greater or less facility, always problematic in relation to any self separable from the realisation of self in the discursive modes available. The study of (gay/lesbian) authorship is a study of those models and the particular ways in which they have been performed in given texts‖ (33).

True Blood, like any other TV series or film has a number of authors. The highly collaborative process of making TV series involves multiple writers and directors of individual episodes. Authorship that is emphasised by marketing and publicity campaigns of the show is that of Charlaine Harris, who wrote the commercially successful The Southern Vampire Mysteries also known as The

Sookie Stackhouse Novels, on which the series is based, and of the creator, writer and producer Alan Ball. Ball is an out gay men (listed as one of 100 most impressive gay men and women by Out magazine in 2008, ―Out 100 2008‖), the Academy Award winner for the screenplay of American Beauty and the 6

creator, writer, and producer of HBO‘s drama series Six Feet Under. American

Beauty has a strong narrative of internalised homophobia and deeply repressed homosexuality and Six Feet Under included central gay characters. Alan Ball is constructed as the main auteur of the series and the performances of the auteur include Q&A sessions with Ball on YouTube and messages to fans on hbo.com. Knowledge of Ball‘s previous works and personal life is one of the sources of queerness of True Blood.

In analysis queerness of True Blood, I will draw on extra-textual sources such as the aforementioned authorship of Alan Ball, and the relatively short history of non-straight representations on American prime-time television. Con- textual sources for queering of True Blood will be the discoursive proximity of vampirism and queer sexuality, and the textual sources will revolve around

(anti-) gay language and rhetoric.

Contextualising True Blood

Strangers to prime-time

True Blood was named the top drama series at the 22nd annual GLAAD

Media Awards. GLAAD – Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is a media monitoring organization that works to prevent the defamation of LGBT people in the media. Among other activities, GLAAD publishes the annual

Where We Are On TV report on gay and lesbian visibility and representation on

TV. The report‘s predicate for 2010-2011 is that LGBT representations ―will account for 3.9% of all scripted series regular characters in the broadcast television schedule, up from 3% in 2009, 2.6% in 2008, and 1.1% in 2007. The number of regular LGBT characters on cable has also increased following a two year decline, up to 35 from a count of 25 last year‖ (―Where We Are On TV

2010-2011,‖ 3).

These figures are relatively high if contrasted to the fact that openly gay and lesbian TV characters were almost non-existent in America prior to 1990.

The twenty years of gay and lesbian visibility on American fiction television parallels two decades of gay and lesbian presence in media discourse.

Discussion of the history of gay and lesbian themed fiction television needs to consider also the nature of broadcasting, which includes a variety of forms and genres of daytime programming, reality shows and news, gay-themed plotlines and references in programming lacking explicit gay characters and, given the political nature of LGBT issues in America, also discourses around it.

LGBT presence on American TV of the 1990‘s and 2000‘s was linked to issues of marriage rights (through media events such as Marches on

Washington in 1993, 2000 and 2009, The Defence of Marriage Act in 1996, or

California Proposition 8 massive campaign in 2008), Don‘t Ask Don‘t Tell policy, violence against LGBT people (highly publicized murders of Brandon Teena in

1993, Matthew Shepard in 1998, among others), the U.S. Supreme Court‘s overturning Texas‘s sodomy law, and the ―Culture Wars‖ in general. Advocates of LGBT rights such as GLAAD also launched a number of campaigns critiquing and praising media and film for their representations of non-straight characters, making LGBT visibility a political issue.

The 1990‘s was not only a period of shifting media representation of gays and lesbians on the small screen, but also of emergence of the New Queer

Cinema and subsequent boom of gay and lesbians films. Critical and commercial success of independent queer filmmaking inspired a number of companies to produce and market to a gay and lesbian audience through a growing network of LGBT film festivals, DVD companies and on-line distribution channels. Although queer film does not reach the audiences network and cable television have, emergence of gay and lesbian filmmaking nevertheless contributed to the general growth of gay and lesbian visibility and LGBT media events in the 1990‘s and on.

In Gay TV and Straight America Ron Becker argues that the development of gay-themed network television of the decade coincided with a period of heightened ―straight panic.‖ Becker explains that

straight panic refers to the growing anxiety of a heterosexual culture and

straight individuals confronting this shifting social landscape where

categories of sexual identity were repeatedly scrutinized and traditional

moral hierarchies regulating sexuality were challenged. In this process,

the distinctions separating what it meant to be gay or lesbian from what

it meant to be straight were simultaneously sharpened and blurred,

producing an uneasy confusion. (4)

His discussion of ―straight panic‖ is illustrated by citations of a 1990 cover story in Newsweek (the second-largest news weekly magazine in the

U.S.A.) entitled „The Future of Gay America‖ and the 1993 cover story ―The

Gay Moment‖ in the left-wing magazine The Nation, which suggest the prevalence and visibility of LGBT-related issues in American mainstream media and society of the day. Becker also quotes the 2004 presidential election exit polls, in which ―voters identified moral values as the issue they were most concerned about. (...) Atop of their list were gays, lesbians, and the big-city politicians, activist judges, and liberal Hollywood elites working to destroy

America‘s moral center‖ (1). It is this very atmosphere of the Red-Blue state divide that True Blood captures, employing political rhetoric of the culture wars and referencing particular LGBT media events as well as genres of gay-themed television products.

Despite ―gay moments‖ and the sudden increase of LGBT ―televisibility,‖ complex representations of gay and lesbian experience, and consequently gay and lesbian viewer positions and pleasures available to non-straight audiences,

still remain limited in the heteronormative and heterocentrist media. True Blood explicitly addresses issues of social minorities, identity politics and mainstream panic, including media discourse.

The first network series that influenced the discourse around representation of gays in prime-time was ABC‘s thirtysomething. The 1989 episode ―Strangers‖ was the first prime-time moment of two gay men in bed after a sexual encounter. ―Strangers‖ created an image that gays on TV are a financial suicide: ―ABC lost $1.5 million in ad revenue when five of the series‘ ten regular sponsors pulled their ads‖ (138). The reason for sponsor withdrawals in the period were boycotts of advertisers‘ products and services by special interest groups such as the American Family Association, rejecting

―prohomosexual agenda‖ (146). The boycotts gained efficiency in the economically difficult recession of 1991 – 1992 (141). Counter-reaction by gay rights advocates took form in the boycott of advertisers who pulled ads from gay-themed episodes of popular series, which GLAAD launched in 1992 (144).

The first gay kiss was featured in the miniseries Tales of the City, produced by UK‘s Channel 4 and broadcasted by PBS (non-profit public broadcasting television service) in 1994. The show‘s portrayal of homosexuality, nudity and drug use resulted in controversy, with Georgia Senate passing a resolution advising Georgia affiliates not to broadcast the show. PBS decided not to co-produce the sequel, despite the critical acclaim and high ratings of the first instalment (Cagle).

Future portrayals of gays strictly avoided the characters‘ sex life and intimacy. A famous example of different treatment of straight and gay 11

characters in terms of intimacy is Melrose Place, which featured an openly gay recurring character Matt Fielding from its beginnings in 1992. ―On a show known for depicting its heterosexual characters having sex life left and right,

Melrose Place‘s treatment of Matt made the double standard particularly glaring‖ (147). The greater financial independence cable TV enjoys enabled more complex and risqué representations of LGBT lives (which is also true of

True Blood, created by HBO), whereas networks continuously face pressure from special interest groups.

The paradigm of ―economic suicide‖ shifted when Roseanne, which included gay and lesbian characters, ―became the top-rated prime-time show in

$60.000 + households‖ (150) and advertisers came to understand the possibility of reaching niche audiences. Roseanne and concurrently running

Seinfeld meant a paradigmatic change in the sitcom genre, which had previously been dominated by family-oriented narratives. The following seasons saw an increase of gay plotlines and gay characters in sitcoms, many of which were written by openly gay writers (163) and gay inclusive programming was backed by gay-friendly corporations, who believed that ―bringing controversial issues from current headlines could give a show the politically-correct and in- the-know quality helpful in attracting a hard-to-reach audience‖ (158).

The first show to include a non-heterosexual main character was Ellen.

The main character came out in a 1997 ―The Puppy Episode,‖ in the series‘ fourth season; one year after the lead actress Ellen DeGeneres had done so.

The actress‘s coming out built up a lot of media anticipation as to when the sitcom‘s protagonist would come out as well. Consequently, ABC was forced to 12

place a parental advisory at the beginning of each episode, ratings dropped and the show was discontinued (169). The second network series to have a gay central character was Will & Grace, which was broadcast by NBC from 1998 to

2006 in a total of eighty episodes, becoming one of top ten highest ranking prime-time shows. Unlike Ellen, however, Will & Grace was ―de-

(homo)sexualized‖ (172), both narratively by excluding Will‘s sexuality and intimacy and political issues, and by marketing strategies (172). Although by the end of the millennium the number of LGBT characters grew dramatically, short-lived Ellen and Will were the only main ones; all the other network gays and lesbians were only included to support the main heteronormative narratives.

Frequent criticism of LGBT television characters is that despite their growing numbers, they remain poorly representative of the diverse LGBT community: affluent, urban and white. Furthermore, ―strong heterocentric bias was overdetermined by an industry that used gay material to target an audience envisioned as straight; by textual conventions that privileged lead

(i.e., heterosexual) characters; by straight viewers who seemingly demanded heterosexual entry points into gay-themed narratives; and by a political culture that continually and explicitly reaffirmed heterosexuality‘s centrality at a time when multiculturalism and gay rights threatened to dislodge it‖ (182).

This predominantly heteronormative phase of representation changed in the new millennium in cable television. The first series that did not rearticulate heterosexual privilege but instead shifted gayness into the position of the dominant discourse was Showtime‘s Queer as Folk in 2000, based on the 13

eponymous British miniseries, produced by Channel 4 a year earlier. A lesbian counterpart, The L Word, also presented by Showtime, arrived in 2004.

Interestingly, The L Word has ―a certain New Queer Pedigree‖ (Davis, Needham

68) as the series was co-created by Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche, creators of the groundbreaking lesbian classic Go Fish. A list of homonormative series might also include the cartoons Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All The World (Logo, the LGBT channel launched in 2001), and Queer Duck

(Showtime), Exes and Ohs and Noah‘s Arc (Logo), Dante‘s Cove, The Lair or the miniseries The DL Chronicles by here!, the gay-oriented channel launched in

2002 (Jedličková, 73).

Shows that do not operate within normative assumptions, be it hetero- or homonormative, are still exception to the rule of representations that are at best essentialist, at worst binary (good vs bad homosexuals). A groundbreaking show in terms of a varied and non-normative portrayal of characters of various identities is HBO‘s Six Feet Under (2001 – 2005), the first series by True Blood‘s creator Alan Ball. Six Feet Under, Michele Aeron observes, ―complicates rather than concretises cultural norms‖ (66) as ―camp, (sexual) recklessness, perversity, and even death, are effectively detached from ‗gay‘ in the show‘s reckoning with stereotype‖ (68). One of the show‘s central characters is David, who lives in a monogamous relationship with an African American policeman.

―Though David will provide the main focus for some of the gay-themed plots

(e.g. on homophobia; gay adoption; bisexuality), such issues are not attached to him alone. Instead, the broader concerns of prejudice, of social conformity,

of family, circulate freely in the narrative and are attached to a wider community of characters‖ (66).

Samuel A. Chambers goes on to claim that, through the character of a young student Russell, who appears in 22 episodes of the series, Six Feet Under

―explores fundamental epistemological questions (questions concerning the production and limits of knowledge) and crucial political problems (problems of power, identity and representation‖ (175). Russell is perceived as gay by most characters on the show and confronted in order to be outed. ―Russell‘s refusal to come out or to effectively perform heterosexuality leads to a rejection of the terms of heteronormativity, he refuses the only thing he possible can be, gay or straight‖ (186).

Like Six Feet Under, Alan Ball‘s new series distributes narratives of prejudice, fear of the other, stigmatization, discrimination, disease and death not only to LGBT characters, but evenly, regardless of sexual orientation. In the diegetic world of True Blood, few people are ―normal‖. Sookie Stackhouse, the series‘ central protagonist, is a telepath who discovers that America is populated not only by vampires, who have made their existence public, but also by shape shifters, werewolves, were-panthers, maenads and witches and that she is a supernatural being herself. The recognition True Blood received from

GLAAD was for ten gay and lesbian characters on Season Three, the most gay- lesbian populated season of the series so far. This and the GLAAD statistics quoted at the beginning of the chapter suggest that even a show recognised for being inclusive offers only a limited number of characters that are not straight.

Narratively central is only one of them, Lafayette Reynolds, a campy

African American prostitute and drug dealer. In the diegesis of True Blood, boundaries between respectable professions and lifestyles are blurred as a vast array of characters are unmasked as hypocritical, hateful, criminal, and corrupt.

Lafayette‘s portrayal cannot be seen as a negative or stereotyping representation. He is a complex character and, along with his criminal activities and sexual conduct, his loving and responsible nature is depicted. Also, in the third season, when Lafayette starts an intimate relationship with a Mexican nurse Jesus Velasquez, Lafayette is normalized in a plot line revealing that his prostitution and drug dealing is a means of sustaining his homophobic mother in an expensive mental clinic.

Other non-straight characters on the show are also complex, although some of them could be perceived as negative or as pertaining to a continuum of gay stereotypes: the decadent aristocratic King of Mississippi Russell Eddington and his partner of 700 years, domestic aesthete Talbot, the hypocritical right wing politician and Lafayette‘s client David Finch or the glam-free, obese Eddie

Gautier, who wished to be turned into vampire as he hoped this would improve his chances in the ageist, body culture obsessed world of gay dating.

The flexibility of vampire sexual preferences (―I haven't enjoyed sex with men since the Eisenhower administration,‖ glosses over the currently lesbian

Vampire Queen of Louisiana in ―Frenzy‖) as well as the fact that anybody is sexually attracted to the vampire whose blood one has drunk regardless of their gender or sexual identity further complicates normative, essentialist

understanding of sexual orientation presented by vast majority of prime-time

TV, both hetero- and homocentrist.

This dominance of the non-normative opens space for non-straight viewing positions and pleasures. Moreover, True Blood‘s plotline of the vampire rights movement and ―human panic‖ (to paraphrase Becker‘s ―straight panic‖) manifested by the rhetoric of ―culture wars,‖ draws on anti-gay language.

Another inroad into queer reading is the very theme of vampires as the vampire metaphor has traditionally had very strong queer associations.

Erecting and penetrating: vampire as a metaphor for queer sexuality

Vampires have fangs, which get erect and penetrate the vampire‘s victim/ partner in the act of vampirism. The ease which we now read the analogy between vampires‘ feeding on humans and sexual act is a result of the development of two centuries of English language fiction on vampires. The metaphor has been made explicit in a number of texts (both literary and filmic) and the sexualized image of vampires has become common.

This chapter looks at the historic parallels between vampirism and homosexual desire both on the level of reception and production. The True

Blood series provide a commentary on the narrative and aesthetic transformation of an evil supernatural being into a member of social minority, a transformation which took place along the emergence of and changes in homosexual identity in the Western society, and which can be debated in relation to two foundational texts of the vampire genre – Bram Stoker‘s Dracula and Anne Rice‘s Interview with the Vampire.

In his influential book on homosexuality and horror film, Henry M.

Benshoff identifies four major intersections of the two: certain works include identifiably gay and/or lesbian characters, some works are authored by a gay man or a lesbian, analogies are constructed through the process of queer reading and, according to Benshoff probably the most important way in which homosexuality enters the genre is through subtextual or connotative avenues

(13 - 15).

The character of vampire has been read and used to represent other than socially prescribed sexuality, but its metaphorical potential also covers a vast array of other meanings such as ethnicity, Judaism and immigration, weight of the past or negative influence of European culture on contemporary

America, colonialism, AIDS or (globalised) capitalism (Dyer, 75). Judith

Halberstam argues that Stoker‘s Dracula, a novel that singularly influenced the popularity of vampires, constructs the vampire as otherness itself:

Othering in Gothic fiction scavenges from many discursive fields and

makes monsters out of bits and pieces of science and literature: Gothic

monsters are over-determined, and open therefore to numerous

interpretations, precisely because they transform the fragments of

otherness into one body. That body is not female, not Jewish, not

homosexual, but it bears the constructions of femininity, race, and

sexuality (Halberstam, 337).

In the history of constructing otherness through the vampire body, shifting societal awareness and understanding of the other, whether it is

ethnicity or sexual identity, play a major role. Importantly, the transformations of vampires from Dracula to the present day have been accompanied by further discursive scavenging: in Celluloid Vampires, Stacey Abbot writes the story of

20th century anxieties embodied by the filmic vampire, paying close attention to not only major cultural and social paradigms but also to changes in the possibilities of film technology and production. Abbot opens her argument by stating the fact that the first vampire on film (Le manoir du diable by George

Méliès from 1896) preceded the publication of Stoker‘s Dracula by one year (1) and goes on to argue that the vampire comes to embody the time in which it emerges. Britain in the late 19th century was going through massive social and technological changes among which was the redefinition of time and space carried on by scientific and technological discoveries in the field of electronic communication. Dracula does not only embody otherness to white male heterosexual Englishness, but also to the revolutionizing technology of the day:

―the vampire becomes the technology, able to transcend the boundaries of its body by transforming into other creatures and communication across distances‖

(7).

Major shift in vampire fiction comes at a time following turbulent social changes: in the 1970s. Post-industrial economics, emergence of independent filmmaking, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movements, are among the discourses creating the new vampire. Anne Rice‘s Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976, revolutionizing vampire fiction: for the first time, a vampire is the narrator of the story (which Richard Dyer links to the self- determination demands of the gay liberation movement, 83) and the former 19

antagonist of the story becomes the central character. 1970s vampires are urban Americans, following the paradigmatic shift of the horror genre from the supernatural to the human: ―In the 1970s, a decade of intense change in

American history—marked by Vietnam, Watergate, the Kent State massacre, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and both John and

Robert Kennedy—normality could no longer be restored: normality itself was deemed monstrous‖ (Abbot, p 80).

Hollywood studios were forced to restructure their production and distribution models and independent companies, which were leased to make films, were more open to experimenting with generic conventions. Vampires of the period got integrated into American society and a number of their representations in film are making the metaphorical potential of vampirism explicit. William Crain‘s Blacula (1972), an early entry into the Black film, places the vampire in the context of civil rights and racial violence (83). In Bob Clark‘s

Deathdream (1974), vampire is a ―metaphor for the returning soldier, traumatized and changed by the events he has experienced, and unable to live up to family and social expectations. No longer the innocent teenage boy who left home to defend his country, he literally returns as a monster, dispassionate and detached from the living, revealed to be a killer capable of horrific atrocities‖ (83).

Success of the vampire film reinvented by independent filmmakers resulted in the comeback of the genre into the Hollywood studios in the 1980‘s.

The mainstream horror films of the era, as Abbot points out, make use of new sophisticated make-up technologies to recreate the decade‘s obsession with the 20

physical body represented by bodybuilding, dieting, body modification techniques such as tattooing and piercing and the fear of the bodily disintegration caused by the thinning ozone layer and AIDS (126). The end of the millennium for the vampire in certain ways mirrors the end of the nineteenth century, with themes of freedom of mobility, and revolutionary technology, this time predominantly genetic engineering (198).

Richard Dyer looks into historical extraliterary reasons for associations of homosexuality and vampirism. The classic vampires are aristocrats and ―much of the public face for homosexuality and/or decadent sexuality was at the hands of aristocrats‖ (74), in Dracula, Mina Murray is associated with the ―New

Woman‖ and ―from New Woman to lesbianism is but a step in the ideology of the day‖(75) and, in interwar German homosexual writings, themes of love with a dead young man, loss of the beloved friend in the First World War and sentiments of the youth movement intertwine (ibid).

Dyer also finds vampire-homosexual parallels in privacy and discovery narratives:

In most vampire tales, the fact that a character is a vampire is only

gradually discovered – it is a secret that has to be found out. The

analogy with homosexuality as a secret erotic practice works in two

contradictory ways. On the one hand, the point about sexual orientation

is that it doesn‘t ‗show‘, you can‘t tell who is and who isn‘t just by

looking; but on the other hand, there is also a widespread discourse that

there are tell-tale signs that someone ‗is.‘ The vampire myth reproduces

this double view in its very structures of suspense (78). 21

These narratives are related to ideas of double life and, historically more specific, decadence whereby people who do not engage in public life and stay indoors have pale complexions. For a closeted gay reader, Dyer argues, these narratives present a specific pleasure of having superior knowledge over the protagonist (79). Another pleasure of queering vampirism is reading the bite as a sexual act: ―Even when the writing does not seem to emphasize the sexual, the act itself is so like a sexual act that it seems almost perverse not to see it as one,‖ comments Dyer (75) and links the act to analogous oral sex acts such as fellatio, cunnilingus and rimming, which, just like vamping, involve contact with body fluids (76).

True Blood and other vampire fiction of the new century (Buffy the

Vampire Slayer, Twilight) center on issues of socially problematic romantic relationship between humans and vampires. Vampires are complex characters and vampirism became a condition that poses a challenge to vampire-human intimate relationships and is a subject of societal prejudice. The cross-genre

True Blood is a self-reflexive text that acknowledges the vampire‘s position of

Otherness. It employs most of the narratives associated with vampirism: race and ethnicity, capital, non-American culture, disease and sexuality.

It is sexuality that is most commonly discussed in critical discourses on vampire fiction and many writers built parallels between the emergence of the literary figure of vampire and the construction of homosexual (and consequently heterosexual) identity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues out that many writers of the first wave of gothic novels in the eighteen century might be understood to have been homosexual by today‘s understanding of the word and 22

that ―the Gothic was the first novelistic form in England to have close, relatively visible links to male homosexuality‖ (in Benshoff 17). The links include not only the figure of the author but also narrative features, which can be read as allegories for same sex desire or queer relationships. Both of these factors for queer reading can be applied to canonical texts of the genre: Frankenstein and

Vampyre (Benshoff 18).

Furthermore, one of the first openly gay stories ever published was, according to Richard Dyer, the vampire story Manor, written in Leipzig in 1885 by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, one of the first defenders of same-sex desire in Europe

(70). Ulrichs contributed to the end of century discourse establishing homosexuality as an essential identity as opposed to a practice or act of sodomy. This discourse eventually constructed homosexuality as something beyond the individual‘s will and control, which, for Dyer, is another intersection between ideas of vampirism and homosexuality (80). It is around the same time that, according to Christopher Craft, reading of vampirism as an analogy for sexuality is explicitly identified by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in the vampire classic Carmilla (1872). The paradigm is established by characterizations like

―the vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence resembling the passion of love‖ and descriptions of vampiric pleasure as heightened ―by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship‖ (in Craft, 107).

Twenty five years after Carmilla and twelve years after Manor, Bram

Stoker published Dracula, which has become, without doubt, the paradigmatic vampire novel. Stoker himself has been discussed as a closeted homosexual man and it is important to consider the fact that he began writing Dracula one 23

month after his friend Oscar Wild was convicted of the crime of sodomy

(Schaffer 381). Regardless of bibliographical and authorial discussions

(interestingly, one of the most important film versions of Dracula was made in

1922 by the gay filmmaker F.W. Murnau), multiple feminist and queer readings of the text established the paradigmatic vampire analogy as that of (queer) sexuality.

Halberstam analyses Dracula as Otherness itself, and analogously claims that ―the vampire represents the production of sexuality itself. The vampire, after all, creates more vampires in engaging in a sexual relation with his victims, and he reproduces vampires who share his specific sexual predilections‖ (344). The sexuality vampires produce simultaneously reverses and confirms male and female roles: ―male but not female vampires reproduce;

Lucy and the three female vampires in Transylvania feed from children but do not create vampire children (…). Dracula, of course, also produces male sexuality in this novel as a composite of virility, good blood and the desire to reproduce one‘s own kind‖ (345).

Craft locates the gender ambivalence of vampires in their mouth; paying attention to Stoker‘s sexualized descriptions of the body part.

Luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness, but

delivering instead a piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and

confuses (…) the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the

receptive (…). With its soft flesh barred by hard bone, its red crossed by

white, this mouth compels opposites and contrasts into a frightening

unity, and it asks some disturbing questions. Are we male or are we

female? Do we have penetrators or orifices? And if both, what does that

mean? (...) Furthermore, this mouth, bespeaking the subversion of the

stable and lucid distinctions of gender, is the mouth of all vampires, male

and female (109).

In an exemplary case of queer reading, Craft also locates the text‘s queer energy in a series of narrative displacements. A men‘s desire to be penetrated by another man and Dracula‘s desire for men is never represented explicitly: its fulfillment is achieved in surrogation when Jonathan Harker is penetrated by Dracula‘s orally masculinised daughters (110), or when Dracula feeds on Lucy Westenra, who had received blood transfusion from the novel‘s men (111).

Homoerotic desire is far less hidden in another paradigmatic vampire text, Interview with the Vampire. Written seven decades after Stoker‘s classic,

Interview reflects the turbulent social changes of the 20th century. Ann Rice‘s novel is, for the first time in history, narrated not by the vampire slayer/s or by the vampire‘s victim/s but by a vampire. The embodiment of evil receives a voice and the previously taboo gender and sexual ambivalence becomes one of the text‘s overt themes.

George Haggerty points out the gay context Ann Rice creates for her characters from the outset of the story, situating the interview in a gay district of San Francisco and constructing the interviewer-interviewee situation as a gay seduction scene (5). Haggerty claims that Rice ―makes Lestat our culture‘s

prototypical gay predator, roving in the darkness with an insatiable appetite that is usually satisfied by the blood of a troubled but beautiful male‖ (ibid).

Homoeroticism is present throughout the Vampire Chronicles in the relationships between the central characters Lestat, Louis and Armand and in many sexualized scenes of male vamping. Often discussed is the model of queer family Lestat and Louis form when turning a little girl into a vampire.

Haggerty is critical of Rice from the point of politics of representation as he claims that ―it is the measure of the homophobia of the work that Lestat and

Louis can never really make love‖ (13). However, Rice‘s best-selling novels did strengthen and made more explicit the historically present link between vampirism and homosexuality. Also, despite the fact that the former antagonist becomes the protagonist, vampires still are monsters and their monstrosity addresses cultural fears and uncertainties of same sex desire and love. ―The concepts ‗monster‘ and ‗homosexual‘ share many of the same fears about sex and death,‖ summarizes Benshoff (3).

True Blood‘‘s vampires often are gay or sexually flexible and non- monogamous; they are also often non-American, non-white, pre-democratic and pre-Christian, epitomizing an array of othernesses to the Deep South small- town human population, which is reacting, rejecting or embracing both vampires and humans who have sexual relations with them. The series central character, though, is a white straight woman who has exclusive romantic relationship with a white American (vampire) male. Given the centrality of non- normative discourses and relative prominence of explicit gay and lesbian

characters, queer audience pleasures can be derived from queer reading of the central characters regardless of their sexual identity.

“We are not monsters. We are Americans”

The very first two minutes of the first episode of True Blood set out the main narrative concerns of the series. While driving, a bored college student decides to manually stimulate her boyfriend. Suddenly, he asks her to stop the car as he notices an announcement that a shabby-looking back road liquor store offers ―Tru Blood.‖ A close-up of a TV set inside the store shows a spokesperson for the American Vampire League in a debate program. It is night-time and the only people in the establishment are the shopkeeper and a costumer. Their outfits and accessories position them as a Goth/Satanist and a trucker/hunter respectively. The students inquire about the synthetic blood substitute and say they had no idea that there were vampires in Louisiana. The shopkeeper, satanic cross, rams head and a pentagram dangling on chains down his chest, is surprised that they didn‘t know New Orleans was a vampire

Mecca. In an Eastern European accent he suggests that he is a vampire ready to taste their blood.

The students are terrified and after the shopkeeper has a good laugh at their expense, the young man ask about ―v-juice‖ or vampire blood, illegally sold as an intoxicating (and addictive) substance. His girlfriend is alarmed as she knows somebody who knows somebody who was harmed using ―V‖. The other customer says the joke the shopkeeper made by pretending to be a vampire was not funny and asks the couple to leave. The student looks down on the bearded man in a Woodland camouflage outfit, calls him Bill Bob and tells him ―fuck you.‖ The man shows his fangs, chases the students off and 28

makes sure the shopkeeper understands not to insult vampires by pretending to be one of them.

The themes this short sequence opens are constitutive for queer reading of the whole series. The emphasis on sex, sexuality and exploitative display of athletic bodies of attractive men works on the level of visual pleasure, but also suggest that sexuality will be central to the show. The shopkeeper‘s vampire act is the first of many indications that the show recognizes its generic context: the attempted Easter European accent points back to the character of Dracula and locating New Orleans as a vampire Mecca alludes to Anne Rice‘s Interview with the Vampire, two texts that are paradigmatic for queer reading of the vampire metaphor. Simple hints may reveal vampiric literary canon, but it is impossible to recognize a vampire just by reading superficial signs, the scene indicates.

The humans are terrified not only by the vampire‘s fangs, but by realization that any ―redneck‖ void of stereotypical signs of vampirism can be a vampire.

The diegetic world of True Blood is populated by supernatural beings whose nature is not coded by easily recognizable signs, and also by characters whose true intentions are unclear, strengthening the notion of an epistemological crisis, a notion that no one is what they might seem or say to be.

―We‘re citizens, we pay taxes, we deserve basic civil rights, just like everyone else,‖ argues Nan Flanagan, the American Vampire League‘s spokesperson in the television program, adding that ―every member of our community is now drinking synthetic blood. That's why we have decided to make our existence known, we just want to be part of the mainstream society‖

(―Strange Love‖). The rhetoric of the struggle for civil rights, including language 29

of both empowerment and defamation, draws on current debates on homosexuality. Although none of the situations of the opening is directly identifiable as gay or lesbian, these narratives are principal sources of queerness in True Blood.

Deviant lifestyle

Nan Flanagan is a recurring character and the only face of the American

Vampire League (AVL) in the series. AVL is the main supporter of the Vampire

Rights Amendment that aims to give vampires equal rights to those of humans.

Nan Flanagan often debates with opponents of the Constitutional Amendment,

Reverend Newlin and his son, and Congressman David Finch. In a fictional debate show ―Sunday Morning with McCafferty,‖ Nan and Congressman Finch use rhetoric of gay rights movement and that of its opponents.

Congressman Finch (who is a closeted homosexual and a ―V‖ addict, using services of Lafayette Reynolds in the first season) speaks of ―deviant lifestyle,‖ warns against ―full government endorsement of deviant vampiric behavior‖ and is suspicious of ―vampire agenda.‖ Flanagan rejects some of the same rhetoric: ―As far the idea that we need to save the country from trending towards vampirism, I don‘t even know what that is supposed to mean.‖ The issue that is emphasized is marriage: ―I think the issue of equal rights transcends the notion of Red and Blue. Marriage between a human and a vampire is now legal in six states including Missouri.‖ Nan Flanagan makes an explicit link between vampire and gay rights:

FLANAGAN. We are all aware of your opposition to granting equal rights to all Americans. FINCH. Not all. Just vampires. FLANAGAN. And homosexuals.

The discourse of citizenship and equality, marriage rights in particular, are a clear reference to real life struggle for gay and lesbian rights that has been present in American media since the 1990‘s and was very visible on American television with Proposition 8 in 2008, when the first series of True Blood was broadcast.

A milestone event in fight for vampire rights and vampire visibility was a

D.C. rally, reminiscent of the LGBT Marches on Washington, covered by a series of videos, which are not part of the broadcasted series, but build the fictional universe. During the rally, a vampire makes a statement: ―we are not what you see on the silver screen. We are not monsters. We are not evil. We are

Americans‖ (―Vampire speaks at a D.C. rally‖). The language of citizenship also points out to the issue of media representation, which has been of great concern also to LGBT activism. Marriage is not the only right vampires demand; the ―Vampire Rights Amendment Cartoon‖ also mentions adoptions. Proposition

8, the ballot proposition and constitutional amendment passed in the November

2008 California state elections, providing that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California, is also referenced in the True

Blood universe. ―Proposition 188‖ is an anti-vampire video, in which State

Senator Adams supports Proposition 188, which aims to introduce mandatory registration of all vampires‘ blood. The register would, the senator argues, help the war on drugs.

God hates fangs

Opposition to vampires does not come from politicians only but, just like in case of LGBT rights, also from religious organizations. Leading voices in anti- vampire politics in America are the Reverend Theodore Newlin and, after he dies in suspicious circumstances, his son Steve Newlin. The Newlins founded

The Fellowship of the Sun, a religious organization that preaches a message of

―coming from the darkness into the light,‖ emphasizing the ―foul ways‖ of vampires. For the Newlins, intermarriage between vampires and humans is an abomination, which might be a ―fatal blow to the traditional family, perhaps even to the human race‖ (―Steve and Sarah Newlin's Reflections of Light #1‖), and they preach that the ―vampire lifestyle‖ is perverse. Their conviction that

―tolerance of evil is no virtue and extremism in confronting eternal darkness is no vice‖ (#2) is a justification of them founding the Light of Day Institute, a paramilitary training unit founded for killing vampires. The Fellowship of the

Sun also sponsored the ―Anti-Vampire Rights Amendment ad‖ featuring people who find vampires ―unnatural‖ and fear that ―children will see this lifestyle and maybe want to imitate it.‖ It is important to note that most of the $43.3 milion for the real life 2008 Proposition 8 campaign were raised by Mormons and affiliated churches.

Defamatory language that religious groupings use towards vampires is a direct allusion to the Westboro Baptist Church and their infamous slogan ―God

Hates Fags.‖ The title sequence of True Blood depicts a church sign saying

―God Hates Fangs.‖ The slogan expresses the Westboro Baptist Church‘s belief that ―decadent, depraved, degenerate and debauched America, having bought 32

the lie that It's OK to be gay, has thereby changed the truth of God into a lie, and now worships and serves the creature more than the Creator‖

(godhatesfags.com). The ―God Hates Fags‖ dogma asserts that homosexuality and the public‘s susceptibility to the ―homosexual agenda‖ is the ultimate threat to society. The godhatesfags.com website advertises sister website with self- explanatory names such as AmericaIsDoomed.com and

GodHatesTheMedia.com. The dogma is indicative of the ―straight panic‖ discussed by Becker.

The extreme religious anti-vampire rhetoric emphasizes ―deviant lifestyle‖ and so do vampire opponents on the political scene. It is clear that sexual behavior of vampires, especially if involving humans, is the ultimate reason for rejecting and fearing them. The insistence that relationships can be recognized exclusively for people meeting strict criteria, explained as ―natural,‖ further deepens the discursive links between homophobia and hatred of vampires. Vampires are clearly the Other of contemporary society and as any other minority, defamatory language is used to speak about them. Derogatory terms for vampires include ―fangers‖ or ―bloodsuckers,‖ closely reminiscent of the homophobic expression ―cocksuckers.‖ Moreover, as one of the basic reasons for hatred of vampires is their lifestyle and unnatural sexual behavior with humans, it is not surprising that defamatory language is used also towards people who support the lifestyle and participate in the deviant behavior. In the

True Blood universe, these people are called ―fangbangers.‖

True Blood and its alternative reality also paraphrase positive, self- determining language. The American Vampire League promotes the use of the 33

word ―sentient‖ to include both humans and vampires

(americanvampireleague.com). Politicians supporting the vampire rights cause use politically correct language of ―Vampire Americans‖ and coin the expression

―life-challenged‖ (―Senator Bradford supports vampire rights‖ and ―Senator

Bradford at D.C. rally‖). Fangbangers, those who do not re-appropriate the derogatory term, prefer to call themselves ―fangophiles‖ (―In Focus on

Fangophiles‖). Supporters of vampire rights, or at least those who do not wish to be seen as bigots, say they are not ―vampophobic‖ (―Bill‖).

All the positive and negative lexis has its analogy in language used to speak about gays. Vampires themselves use gay and lesbian inspired language.

The Great Revelation is referred to as ―coming out of the coffin,‖ clearly pointing out to the phrase ―coming out of the closet.‖ Other examples from the vampire vocabulary include the word ―breather,‖ a contemptuous expression for a human, a near homophone to ―breeder,‖ a demeaning word for heterosexuals

(particularly heterosexual women) used by gay men. Breather and breeder share a strategy for demeaning what is considered of highest value to the mainstream society: traditional form of life (humans, unlike vampires, breath) and traditional form of procreation (a same-sex couple cannot procreate). A common example of lesbian slang is alluded to in the naming of Jessica, one of the central characters who had only recently been turned into a vampire – a baby vamp (www.babyvamp-jessica.com). ―Baby‖ does not refer to biological age but the short time of being a vampire, or an outed lesbian (―baby dyke‖).

Artery is the grave

The fact that the second human activity (after driving) we see on True

Blood is masturbation indicates the centrality of sex and sexuality in the series.

During the scene when the main protagonist Sookie Stackhouse is introduced, the viewers learn of her ability to hear other people‘s thoughts. Among the first people we witness her hearing is a customer of Merlotte‘s Bar and Grill whose thoughts are addressed to her man. She thinks of how she had sexually pleased him in a way that ―was disgusting,‖ although she ―kinda enjoyed it‖ (―Strange

Love‖). We do not learn of the specifics of the sexual act other than the woman, a nameless representative of the local population, distinguishes between types of sexual behavior, considering some outside of the norm or deviant. Sex does not cease to be a central concern for other characters of the first episode. When Sookie saves Bill, the very first vampire she finally gets to meet after the Great Revelation, and is alone with him for the first time, Bill tries to sexually objectify her and tells that one of his favorite arteries is in the groin.

Links between vampires and sex and sex and vamping is firmly established on a number of occasions. Soon after their first meting, Sookie has an erotic dream with Bill in which she misinterprets his intentions. Bill starts undressing, but when Sookie tells him she didn‘t think they would be having sex so soon, his fangs get erect and he says: ―who said anything about sex?‖ When their relationship develops and Sookie and Bill do have sex, the act includes Bill biting Sookie and sucking her blood. On-line videos that promoted True Blood

and also created its fictional universe are explicit in creating the link. In ―In

Focus on Fangophiles,‖ a woman describes the great sex she has with her vampire boyfriend and speaks about the pleasures of mutual drinking of blood between humans and vampires. In ―Vampire Dentist,‖ a commercial advertising a dentist who ―glams‖ his patients into not feeling any pain and who charges blood instead of money, a satisfied patient talks about how what used to be painful is now a pleasure, while we hear her moans during the act.

The fictional universe of True Blood is going through a ―Vampire moment‖: television series include vampire characters (―The L.E.S.‖), magazines report that ―Angelina adopts a vamp baby,‖ but just like with early representations of gays, the media image of vampires constructs them as promiscuous sex-machines. This image, recycled by formats ranging from pornography magazines (Hustler) to reportage TV (―In Focus‖) and advertising

(―Vampire Dentist‖) saturates the culture of the diegetic world with stereotypes.

One of the consequences of this stereotyping is that women tend to sexually objectify vampires based on what they are. In the short film ―Bill,‖ a saleswoman comes to Bill Compton‘s house and it soon becomes obvious that she expects a sexual adventure. When ―glamed‖ by Bill to confess her true intentions, she says: ―I‘m hoping that you‘ll ravish me right here on this velvet couch, and take me gently, but not too gently, the way a pirate would.‖ In the second episode of the second season (―Keep This Party Going‖), a shop assistant offers herself to Bill when she finds out he is a vampire. She understands his rejection only when she takes Bill for gay (after Eric appears in

the store and Bill compliments him on his new hairstyle), again practicing a cultural reading based on stereotypes.

Sookie‘s brother Jason Stackhouse is the local hunk and he is brought into the narration having one of his many casual sexual encounters. During the act, Jason discovers that his sexual partner Maudette had been bitten by a vampire. He is simultaneously repelled and turned on. ―I read in Hustler everybody should have sex with a vampire at least once before they die,‖ Jason recalls and becomes interested in details. Soon after, he tells Sookie and their grandmother that many people are having sex with vampires these days and that there are human prostitutes who allow vampires to feed on them for cash.

Jason Stackhouse is deeply affected by the perceived fact that ―everybody is sleeping with vampires these days‖ (―Strange Love‖). When he finds out that some of his sexual partners have had sex with vampires and that for some of them, it was the best sex they ever had, his self-confidence is badly injured and consequently he starts having problems with erection. Insecure about his role of the most desired and most virile straight man in town, he starts using vampire blood, which, among other effects, improves humans‘ sex life.

Eventually, Jason becomes a prime suspect in a case of serial killings of women, who, in turns out, had had sex with vampires. The last victim is Jason‘s new girlfriend Amy, a ―V‖ addict and vampire drainer. Amy is found strangled in their bed after they had both consumed vampire blood.

The murdered women are not the only victims of human violence.

―Deviant lifestyle,‖ or rather fear of it, motivates symbolic, or verbal, violence, and also real hate crimes. In the first season, a group of Bon Temp men first 37

insult the openly gay cook Lafayette by refusing to eat his ―AIDS burgers‖

(episode ―Sparks Fly Out‖) and later burn down a vampire house, successfully murdering the vampire residents in an act of vigilante justice for the murders of local women they attribute to vampires. It turns out that the murderer of all

Bon Temp female fangbangers was Jason‘s best friend, a charming and popular

René, whose first victim was his own sister. Unlike the vigilante rednecks, René does not kill vampires to protect humans; he murders human participants in the

―deviant lifestyle.‖ Perceived murderers and parasites are not as threatening as passive receptors of vampiric penetration.

The character of Lafayette is introduced directly after Sookie, and their fist conversation addresses men‘s sexual anxieties. Lafayette explains Sookie that costumers are not scared of her, but of what is between her legs. ―I know every man, whether gay, straight, or George motherfucking Bush, is terrified of the pussy,‖ elaborates Lafayette (―Strange Love‖). When confronted by another waitress, Arlene, that not everybody is gay and wants to have sex with him,

Lafayette retorts: ―You would be surprised, Arlene, people you know‖ (ibid).

This claim is similar to how he describes the residents of Bon Temp in one of the on-line videos created to promote the series: ―there are folk in this town with secrets that will make a vampire blush‖ (―Interview with Lafayette

Reynolds‖). The campy Lafayette opens up multiple issues. Although Arlene might not be aware of this, ―gayness‖ is less marginal than she realizes, as it can include closeted gay men as well as men who only (occasionally) practice same-sex sex. Besides pointing out to Arlene‘s heteronormative assumption

that gayness is marginal, Lafayette also talks about the fear of insatiable desire that vagina and anus stand for in much misogynist and homophobic discourse.

The murdered women were victims of René‘s ―fear of the pussy,‖ to paraphrase Lafayette. Leo Bersani in ―Is the rectum the grave?‖ looks into historic parallels between homophobic constructions of gay AIDS victims as disease-spreading murderers and Victorian prostitutes contaminating innocent men. The construction of gay 1980‘s and female 1800‘s promiscuity that spreads disease is based on a fantasy of the insatiable organ. ―Promiscuity is the social correlative of a sexuality psychologically grounded in the menacing phenomenon of the nonclimactic climax,‖ explains Bersani (17). ―The realities of syphilis in the nineteenth century and of AIDS today ―legitimate‖ a fantasy of female sexuality as intrinsically diseased; and promiscuity in this fantasy, far from merely increasing the risk of infection, is the sign of infection. Women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction,‖ (18) comments Bersani. In True Blood the always ready receptive organ is the artery. The menace of the ―deviant lifestyle,‖ which ―children see and maybe want to imitate,‖ politicians warn against and religious leaders fight, is grounded in the anxieties of penetration-identified straight men.

Vampires and humans who have intimate relationships with them, like gays and lesbians, are discoursively constructed as threats to ―family values.‖

Regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, vampires and fangbangers share the position of the sexual other with gays and lesbians. Although Sookie is a straight woman in a relationship with a straight man, her character can be appropriated for queer viewing pleasures. True Blood offers a story of a fairy, 39

who is bothered by violently bigoted environment for participating in a sexual activity constructed as threatening and for becoming a member of a minority whose identity politics are contested as disturbing natural order.

Conclusion

The True Blood series is a commercial product targeted at the widest possible television audience. Despite the enormous growth in representations of gays and lesbian characters and issues on prime-time television, the medium has been resistant (mostly for commercial reasons) to placing characters other than straight into the center of narratives. True Blood was awarded for exceptional inclusiveness of gay and lesbian characters, but the main protagonists are straight and the gays and lesbians on the show are allocated fewer intimate scenes and less screen time. The discussion of gay viewer‘s investment into the series is therefore linked to identifying sources of queerness of True Blood, which go beyond explicit gay images.

The alternative reality world of True Blood is saturated by discourses of normativity and identity politics, and these are distributed towards characters regardless of their sexual orientation or ethnicity. Lafayette‘s assertion that

―there are folk in this town with secrets that will make a vampire blush‖ suggests that otherness operates in a continuum of norms. Norms governing sexual conduct are often transgressed regardless of the transgressor‘s life status, as the local prostitute and drug dealer Lafayette and the telepath Sookie very well know, yet, for members of a group defined by ―deviant lifestyle,‖ the transgression results in symbolic and physical violence.

Sookie Stackhouse is not just a waitress. Her story is a coming out narrative. After years of feeling like a one of a kind freak, the fairy learns about her body, sexuality and identity through encounters with similar creatures.

Supernatural beings, specifically vampires, whose presence is known to humans, share a number of traits differentiating them from the mainstream society. Consequently, they are constructed as the other and in religious and political discourse, identified as threats to American family values.

Vampires and authors of vampire fiction have traditionally been linked to homosexuality, and vampires were very often used to reflect on turbulent social changes, from revolutionary technology to economic changes and frustrating wars. The story of True Blood introduces vampires as the new minority in

American society, and the language of vampires, vampire supporters and vampire opponents is built around language used to speak about gays and lesbians. Vampires and humans who have sex with them are seen, like gay men, to threaten the sexual and moral health of the American population, which emphasizes the discoursive proximity between vampirism and homosexuality. In its modeling of the fiction world, the series integrates genres of television programming that refer to real life LGBT media events. The narrative of a new American minority fighting for equal rights in True Blood captures turbulent changes in American society, in which, under the growing visibility of LGBT people and their identity politics, the dominant heteronormative culture experiences an anxiety described as straight panic.

The coming-out narrative, challenging of norms of identity and sexual expression, context of gay authorship and tradition of using vampirism as queer metaphor, the rhetoric of straight panic and LGBT language are entries into gay viewing pleasures of the series, which, like vast majority of contemporary

popular culture, favors Caucasian heterosexuals for the main carriers of the narrative and bearers of erotic spectacle.

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Summary

Breathers and Suckers: Sources of queerness in True Blood is a textual analysis of the HBO series True Blood (2008 – 2011) and its marketing campaigns, informed by theories of queer reading to locate sources of queerness of the series in the use of language and discourses around sexuality as both an essence of vampire identity and threat to ―family values‖ of

American society. True Blood uses language that alludes to both defamatory and self-determining expressions used to speak about gays and lesbians, and the narrative of identity politics and equal rights is modelled on real life LGBT rights movement and media events likened to it.

The analysis also locates contextual sources of queerness in the intersections of English language vampire fiction and film and construction of modern homosexual identity, with special emphasis on two seminal texts, Bram

Stoker‘s Dracula and Anne Rice‘s Interview with the Vampire. The analysis is informed by a brief history of representations of gays and lesbians on American prime-time fiction TV and the concept of ―straight panic.‖ The thesis contextualises a successful product of popular culture within contemporary

American social and political debate on gender, sexual identity and equal rights.

Anotace

Breathers and Suckers: Sources of queerness in True Blood je textová analýza seriálu True Blood (Pravá krev) z produkce kabelové televize HBO

(2008 – 2011) a produktů marketingových kampaní, které seriál provázely.

Analýza vychází z teorie tzv. queer čtení (queer reading) a jejím cílem je lokalizovat queer zdroje seriálu v užití jazyka a diskurzů sexuality, které konstruují identitu upírů i moment ohrožení „rodinných hodnot― americké společnosti. True Blood používá jazyka, který odkazuje k dehonestujícím i přisvojeným výrazům užívaných k označení gayů a leseb, narativ politiky identit a rovných práv je modelován na skutečném hnutí za LGBT práva a mediálních událostech, které se k nim váží.

Analýza také lokalizuje queer zdroje v průsečíku anglicky psané literatury a filmu o upírech s konstrukcí moderní homosexuální identity se zvláštním důrazem na dva určující texty, Drakulu Brama Stokera a Interview s upírem Ann

Riceové. Analýzu doplňuje stručný přehled vývoje zobrazování gayů a leseb ve fikční americké televizní produkci a koncept „heterosexuální paniky‖. Práce zasazuje úspěšný produkt populární kultury do kontextu současné americké společenské a politické debaty o genderu, sexuální identitě a rovných právech.