Overview

Blood, Sweat & Queers is an anthology dedicated to queer vampiric love stories coedited by Margaret Hall, a scholar of vampire literature, and Contrarian Publishing’s Jamie Ryu.

Vampires in literature have always been an allegory for socially divergent identity. The three foundational texts of English-language vampiric literature (The Vampyre, Carmilla, and Dracula) contain varyingly obvious depictions of homoeroticism, featuring texts written by authors many historians believe to have been somewhere on the queer spectrum. Under the auspices of their influence, the vampire has come to represent subversive carnal desire itself, be it the unrelenting, hungering want of Count Orlok in Nosferatu, or the desperate yearning of Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt.

The ache at the core of every vampire, which can only be momentarily sated by the total consumption of another's essence, spits directly in the face of conservative conceptions of love and lust. There is nothing well-behaved or polite about a vampire's appetites, and throughout history, vampire fiction has been used as an outlet for the underserved and the repressed to access the gnawing need within them to connect.