Anne Rice’s own words on her vampires’ (lack of) sex

Transcript Transcribed by Hannah E.

Courtney: Hello, everybody, and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I’m here with my spouse, Royce. And together, we are The Ace Couple. And, wouldn’t you know it, we are once again talking about Anne Rice’s vampires. There has been — it has come to my attention — an entirely new wave of vampire discourse on the internet that is not only doing the thing I have seen for decades, where allosexual people are talking about how much sex all of Anne Rice’s vampires are having — which they’re not, sorry to break it to you. This one specifically feels very targeted at us, because the all-important phrase “Asexual representation” has entered the discourse in the form of, “People who think Anne Rice’s vampires are Asexual representation are stupid.” Seen a lot of that lately. So, let’s get into that.

Courtney: The thing is — and here’s what I want to do today. Those of you who have been listening for a while know that we have talked about several of the books in the series, starting to go through chronologically. I think — have we gotten up to Queen of the Damned at this point? No, we did Body Thief, didn’t we?

Royce: Yeah, I believe we’ve done four episodes.

Courtney: Okay. And then we also talked about the TV show and the positive and negative changes, because there were both. But, overall, at least the first season, we quite enjoyed. And I wasn’t sure how many people out there [laughing] cared about our vampire ramblings. So, I did actually reread Memnoch the Devil and we were thinking of doing an episode on it. But I was like, “Ahh, surely, by this point, people are tired of hearing us talk about vampires.” But we’ve actually gotten quite a bit of correspondence — emails from lots of people saying how much they appreciate our vampire episodes. So maybe we will do that Memnoch the Devil episode soon.

Courtney: But today, I want to talk about the author. I want to talk about Anne Rice. I want to talk about things that she has actually said. Because I have read these books and I’ve seen all of the phrases, I’ve seen all of the scenes, that to me is just so obvious they are not having human penetrative intercourse. It is not happening. And I’ve been baffled for ages that so many allosexual people are like, “’Well, if you read between the lines, they’re having a bunch of hot, horny, vampire sex, actually.” And I don’t know where that’s coming from. I genuinely — I don’t know how you can read the same words I am reading and come away with that.

Royce: In fact, you actually have to not read some of the words in the book to come to that conclusion.

Courtney: You have to ignore some of the words and substitute your own. And if you haven’t heard our previous episodes, you can go back, because I do pick out specific examples, specific passages from those books. But this new round of discourse that is specifically centered around discrediting anybody who feels that [laughs] there is any sort of Asexual representation or any sort of just identifying that Asexual people can do with these vampires having these deep, meaningful relationships without actually having sex, telling us we’re all ridiculous — the reasons being cited… Because here’s the thing: people are trying to say, like, “I know facts.” But these aren’t facts. I know the facts, actually. So, we’re gonna go through these one by one.

Courtney: People are claiming that Anne Rice wanted to write gay vampire sex, but she couldn’t because it was illegal. So she did everything she possibly could to write sex without literally writing sex, and that if these books weren’t written in the 1970s — which, this series is long, actually. I mean, the last one we did, Tale of the Body Thief — that one wasn’t written until the ’90s.

Royce: ’92, yes.

Courtney: And they’re saying, “Well, these books were published in the ’70s, so it was illegal for her to write sex, but she wanted to write gay sex. Trust me, that was her intention.” So if we’re talking about the author’s intention, we need to actually see what the author herself said. So that’s… I have had a folder saved in my desktop for ages that’s just called, “Anne Rice Receipts” [laughs] that are quotes that I have found directly from her, and we’re going to go through those today.

Royce: Yeah, before you get into that, it’s actually only the first book, Interview with the Vampire, that was published in the ’70s. That was in ’76. And two, possibly three, of the Sleeping Beauty Quartet books came out before The Vampire Lestat.

Courtney: Which were some of her erotic novels, no?

Royce: Yes.

Courtney: Which, I have not read her erotic work, so I don’t know if it was all straight eroticism. It might have been. But I need you to cite the law for me that says you can’t write about gay sex in the ’70s.

Royce: According to the Wiki page on The Sleeping Beauty Quartet, the books have vivid imageries of bisexuality, homosexuality, and some other things that fall well within the BDSM umbrella.

Courtney: So that is a thing I have said. Anne Rice was not a prude. She writes sex scenes. I shared a story where I tried reading one of the Lives of the Mayfair Witches books, and there was a sex scene that — unfortunately, I was listening to the audiobook, and my hands were full, so I couldn’t skip the scene, [laughs] and it was miserable for me, who is quite sex-repulsed. Like, she wrote raunchy stuff. She did.

Royce: And published it in the early- to mid-’80s.

Courtney: And published it in the early- to mid-’80s, yes! So, I don’t know where this general feeling… Like, a lot of queer media discourse just seems to pull out, “Well, if something didn’t exist, it was clearly just because it was illegal. It was clearly just homophobic.” And, like, people here are saying that, too. They’re like, “This isn’t Asexual representation. This is homophobia.” Which is also — like, we have homoromantic Asexuals in our community. We have people who are gay who still can and do feel represented by sexless relationships. So, that’s also a very important demographic of person that gets left out of these conversations. Not depicting graphic homosexual intercourse is not always homophobic.

Royce: Yeah. This is an overreaction to the homophobia that does exist, where gay relationships have been erased, but it’s being taken so consistently that it’s doing the exact same thing that the straight people are doing to gay people towards the Asexual community.

Courtney: Yes. And that’s why one of the big… Like, a big thesis of all these episodes on the vampires is that, when we were talking about the show adding the fact that, you know, Louis and Lestat had had sex now — while they were floating in the air, for some reason — a lot of people celebrated that as being like, “Yes! This is queerer than ever. This is objectively more queer.” And I’m just begging people to understand that the act of sex does not make something more queer. Something can still be queer without the presence of sex, because that underlying thought — that sex is what makes queerness, or sex is fundamental to queerness — is exactly what people use to discredit real-life Asexual people.

Royce: And one comment that we made when we were reviewing the TV show was that the show was more explicitly gay; it was less queer. Because by funneling in on homosexual relationships, it flattened out a wide variety of other queer expressions that were present in the book.

Courtney: Yeah. That’s interesting that you say that, because I don’t know that I’d say less queer. It was more gay, but it was more allonormative now.

Royce: What I meant by “less queer” was there was a… It felt like there was less diversity amongst queer identities.

Courtney: Yes. Yes.

Royce: And part of that may be because we’re going from a book series to film or a TV series, and part of that, you do have production and screen time and narratives and things like that.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: Sometimes, books just have a lot more room to show different identities.

Courtney: Yes. So, that is a good point, yes. Because if you have a story that is very reminiscent of a homoromantic Asexual experience, then someone who is Asexual, maybe even not homoromantic, can identify with the sexless nature of it, perhaps. Or there were obviously generations of gay readers who did identify with this, sex or no sex. So, yes, it did get very laser-focused on a very sexual, allonormative type of gay relationship, which was not the way it was in the books.

Courtney: And I want to use Anne Rice’s own words to show… Because now, people are like, “Well, Anne Rice approved all the changes in the show, so clearly it’s just because it’s the modern era, so now she can do what she always wanted to.” I want to use her own words from decades ago to show that, no, that wasn’t her original intention. Being the queer ally that she is, over time, as she started seeing more and more gay people identify with her characters and do these think pieces on how it is an allegory for homosexuality, she was delighted by it. She was like, “Yeah, I’ll take that. I’m glad they feel seen, but that wasn’t my original intention.” And so I don’t know where people got it like, “Oh yeah, she always wanted them to have sex.”

Royce: Plenty of authors are perfectly happy with people making their own headcanons and fanfictions.

Courtney: Yes! So let’s address a few of these things. I’m going to go down my bookmarks. And some of them — I’m glad I took notes, because some of these are old links that aren’t even around anymore.

Courtney: So, Anne Rice did have a period of time where she was quite active on Facebook. And it’s kind of funny, because I had a Facebook for a little bit of time, and I ended up deleting it for years before I ever came back, and now I haven’t used it in ages. But Anne Rice was probably the only, like, famous person [laughing] that I followed on Facebook for a good chunk of time. So I’d see her come on every day and make these little posts, and she loved engaging with her fans, and she’d call everyone, like, “Hello, people of the page,” [laughs] as in, like, her Facebook page. And she also famously responded to a lot of fan mail. Letters, emails — she responded. I don’t know how she did it, to be quite honest. And I’m not going to sit here and be like, “Well, I talked directly to Anne Rice,” because I didn’t. About a decade ago, I actually was in communication with someone who spoke to her every single day, someone who was very close to her. So, I’m not going to use, like, any of those conversations, because I have no evidence and I know people are going to call BS. So, I’m just going to stick to Anne Rice’s words, what we found.

Courtney: So she has said, in response to the question about, like, “Nicholas and Lestat: were they lovers or were they just friends?” — because she she didn’t depict them on the page having sex; I believe sharing a bed was mentioned. Pre-vampire, she said, “Yes, they were lovers.” And her exact words is: “Lestat is bisexual and always was,” followed up with the caveat, “All my vampires transcend gender in their orientation.” That was from a Facebook post of hers. And she’s extrapolated on that in other posts. So, we’re going to put a pin on the “transcending gender” thing.

Courtney: But there was an interview with Anne Rice in 2011. This was published on Vampire Daze and cross-posted to TrueBlood.net. I don’t know much about True Blood at all. I haven’t consumed that media at all. But Anne Rice being, like, one of the most famous vampire authors ever, she often got asked about new vampire media that came up. Like, people would ask her, “What do you think of Twilight?” So, in this interview, she got asked: “True Blood is set in your native Louisiana, and it really uses vampirism as a metaphor for outsiders, including the gay community. What are your thoughts on using vampirism as a metaphor for the disenfranchised?” Her response was: “It’s a given. The vampire is an outsider. He’s the perfect metaphor for those things.” But then she goes on to say, “I remember the year Interview with the Vampire was published. A young man came to me at Berkeley and told me he thought Interview with the Vampire was the longest sustained gay allegory in the English language. I was kind of amazed and honored that he was unpacking that from it, but it wasn’t a conscious thing.”

Courtney: So now, fast-forward to 2024. We have all these people saying, “Yes, she meant this to be a gay allegory, and the only reason she meant it to be a gay allegory was because she couldn’t literally legally write gay sex on the page.” No! Here she is saying, like, “Yes, I am in awe of my readers who took that away. I am happy that that is what they saw, but that wasn’t conscious on my part.”

Courtney: In the same interview, they said, “Back to True Blood: how do you feel about the show’s depictions of vampires as these uninhibited primal sexual beings?” Anne Rice responded, “I’m a fan of the show. I see it as a logical part of it all. Harris has expanded the sexuality that’s inherent in that idea. I didn’t think of that, but as my books went on, I involved my vampires in more sexuality, but I couldn’t go as far as Charlaine Harris did, because I had said that my vampires can’t have sex.” Hello! So, there you have it.

Courtney: And yes, she did involve her vampires in more sexuality as things went on. Because people will always say, like, “Well, her vampires can have sex. Because what about this instance? What about that? What about this other thing?” And every time I get a “What about,” I pull my book off the shelf, I look for that passage that that person is talking about, and I read it again, and I say, “No, you’re misremembering it! You’re adding your own reading between the lines, and that has been ingrained in your memory.” Because it’s right here! Or, rather, it’s not! It’s not here.

Courtney: I thought it was really funny, because I actually found this old Vampires-O-Rama Anne Rice FAQ. And this website makes me feel so nostalgic, because this is, like, the kind of website that every at least alternative queer woman I know during the, like, early 2000s would be looking up, like, witchcraft spells online. [laughs] This — like, Royce, look at this website.

Royce: I expected more art in the margins.

Courtney: There could be more art in the margins, but it’s, like, white and green text on a black page.

Royce: And it’s full screen width.

Courtney: It feels like home. [laughs] So, this is obviously an ancient website. And there’s a whole FAQ about just sort of the vampires. What are the intention? What’s the lore? What are the rules of this world? One of the questions: “You said many of the characters wanted to sleep with Lestat. Does that mean the vampires have sex?” Answer: “Nope. While Anne’s writing gets a little vague about this, Anne herself is not. When asked point-blank if her vampires could have sex, she said no. Once a human becomes a vampire, they are no longer capable of sex and, moreover, they’re not interested. Louis puts it best when he said that the pleasure from sex is but a pale shadow of the killing,” which was a quote we pointed out when we went through the very first book.

Courtney: But then, I love that it breaks down all the FAQs, too, because this is like every conversation you have with someone who’s just, like, desperate [laughing] to prove that the vampires do have sex. “But what about Marius and Pandora? Well, it’s true that at the end of Pandora, she and Marius got rather comfortable with each other. But if you read the text of the passage, you’ll see how Pandora lets the reader know that that was a purely symbolic act.”

Royce: Isn’t that the one where, when she is a human, she’s like, “Oh, sex sounds like a really good idea right now,” and Marius is like, “No, it’s not important, it’s irrelevant.” And then she, like, starts going at it anyway, and midway through the transformation, she’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. This doesn’t make sense.”

Courtney: [laughs] Purely symbolic. Yeah. I mean, a lot of these are from books we haven’t been through yet. If people continue liking them enough, maybe we’ll just keep working our way through the series. But yeah, these questions just keep going, and it’s really funny. “But — but what about Marius and Armand? Again, read the text carefully, particularly the passage with Marius, Armand and Bianca. Sex of a kind does occur, but it’s all variations on heavy petting.” So, even when they’re trying to have sex, they’re usually not super into it,and it’s not actually, like, penetrative. They’re, like, trying to improvise. But then it keeps going. It’s like, “But what about Vittorio? And again, read the text carefully. It’s a kind of sex, sure, but not the mortal kind.”

Courtney: So, it’s so funny that, now… Because people are also trying to say, like, “This is a new thing where people are now trying to retcon Interview with the Vampire and rewrite the history of the books to say that the vampires aren’t having sex, and clearly they were the whole time.” It’s like, no, look at this truly ancient website where… I don’t know who writes for Vampires-O-Rama, but I would be surprised, just statistically, if this is an Asexual person. And they’re also like, “No. Read the book. Read the passage.” Yeah, it actually says here, at the bottom of the page, “Anne Rice’s next novel, a Vampire Chronicle entitled Merrick, will be released October 17th, 2000.” So, this is, like, a ’90s era website.

Royce: It looks like one.

Courtney: It does! Like I said, I’m feeling nostalgic, because looking up things about vampires [laughing] is exactly what I did during that era. But, aside from the fact that it has long been known — and I just pulled a direct Anne Rice quote where she said, “I had said my vampires don’t have sex,” let’s dig more into the actual love and sexuality and what she means when she says “transcends gender.”

Courtney: And we have here a blog on FanPop by BendaImmortal entitled. “Anne Rice’s Vampires: Love and Sexuality.” I’ll be linking these in the show notes so you can read the entire thing. And this is not only just the author’s own thoughts, but using quotes from private correspondence with Anne Rice — because, like I said, she responded to lots of fan emails, she answered lots of questions, she enjoyed engaging with her fans. And we know that she approves of this blog. She didn’t ignore it. She didn’t say, “These weren’t my words.” This wasn’t made up. She posted in 2012, “Hello, people of the page. I woke up to this interesting article on my vampires and their sexuality, or lack thereof, by BendaImmortal from Fanpop. I found this a very substantive essay. It’s about love, kinds of love,” and she shared it to her friends, to her fans, to the people of the page.

Courtney: And this, being published in 2012 now, is again another example of we’ve always been having these same conversations. This isn’t a new conversation at all. Because this author of this blog had to preface everything by saying — just to try to avoid misunderstandings — specifically says, “I’m not homophobic or sexophobic. I am merely trying to figure out its role in the Vampire Chronicle universe and how Ricean vampires’ sexualities differ from human sexuality, as in, on what level it should be seen and how important or essential it is to the story and relationships.” Which, I do feel like that is such a concern, because that’s what’s happening now. People are calling Asexuals homophobic because we’re like, “Oh, actually, they didn’t have sex in the books.” They’re like, “Yeah, they did. It’s homophobic to think otherwise.” And it’s like, “But I feel really represented when they don’t have sex!” Like, “Yeah? Well, that’s homophobic.”

Royce: It’s almost like there are big pockets of the broader queer community that are acephobic.

Courtney: It’s almost like that. It’s almost like that. Now, this author goes on to explain that they’ve been a fan of The Vampire Chronicles since 2008, but before reading the books, had only seen the movies, which I guess, before then, that that would only be two movies, and The Queen of the Damned wasn’t particularly good, accurate. [laughs] And, let’s be fair, even the Interview with the Vampire first movie had its issues. But noting that they’d only seen the movies, they became very genuinely interested in the fandom and started entering the fandom. And they now say, “This was a huge mistake. I should have just taken the books and read them first.”

Courtney: Because until reading the books, they had primarily seen fanart. And, based on the fanart in the fandom, they came into the books with the assumption that most, if not all, of the vampire relationships are homosexual or at least bisexual. Quote: “As I read, I couldn’t let go of the images other fans had already given me. Eventually, I stopped thinking what everyone else says and looked into it purely myself, and then thought they’re not gay nor lovers, which I, however, had later become a bit unsure of in some relationships’ cases. No, the sexuality’s absence in a significant level was very clear to me. I thought the books hint to homosexuality but do not exactly include it within the vampires. But the love between the vampire characters in their relationships I believed was just love in its purest, but that I didn’t think was too clear. You see, I got sick of the confusion and for being laughed at for not seeing that ‘Lestat and Louis are lovers and gay’ and so on. So I wanted to try to make it clear to myself by emailing Anne Rice, asking her what is her meaning in the whole sexuality manner with her vampires.”

Courtney: And so here are, copy and pasted, Anne Rice’s responses to this blogger’s questions. One quote was, “My vampire characters do not have sexual relations with each other or with humans.” There’s no gray area there. Anne Rice shared this herself and called it a “very substantive essay.”

Courtney: “But they are obviously attracted to and capable of falling in love with people of any age and any gender. They are ‘out of nature’ once they become vampires, and they can love all people. Gender, age, etc., no longer matter.” So, there is falling in love. There is an inherent romance about it. There is not any acting upon that love sexually. That is what she says.

Courtney: Now, the “out of nature” thing is kind of contentious when it comes to analyzing any sort of Asexual representation in the media. Some Aces just specifically hate it. They’re like, “If the reason why this character doesn’t have sex, isn’t sexually attracted to people, is because they’re not human, then that is acephobic.” And I think it can be. I think, sometimes, it can be that way. And it is exhausting when, especially several years ago, so much of our representation were inhuman characters. It’s vampires, it’s aliens, it’s robots. But then there’s an entire community of people that are also trying to take the vampires away from us. So it’s like, okay, so we just got the aliens and the robots. Got it.

Royce: Yeah, I think this is… Like, there are some aspects of it that are just facts that if you’re trying to debate them, you’re wrong. Like, Anne Rice’s very explicit many comments over the years that sex was not happening. If you think it was, you’re just incorrect. Like, again, there’s no gray area. But words like “nature” coming from someone like Anne Rice — who went through periods of, like, deeply getting back into religion and things like that —

Courtney: A series of crises of faith.

Royce: — I think that nature — like, that is something that is a bit up to interpretation. Like, my personal read on that is, you could say “nature” as in “the order of society” or something like that. You could read it that way. And going into what vampires represent, no longer being able to be underneath the sun separates you heavily from the rest of society. Having to kill people in order to survive — that puts you outside of the laws that we know; it puts you into, like, a different section of morality. There is some very clear othering that is happening due to these biological changes that they go through. And then there’s also the fact that, in these series, vampires undergo both a change to their sexual orientation and their perception of themselves or their gender identity.

Courtney: Mhm. Yes, exactly.

Royce: And that’s one thing — I think we’ve talked about this before, saying that it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad read to say that there is a lot of homoromanticism in these books.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: But you kind of have to take that with an asterisk, too, if none of the vampires are men anymore.

Courtney: Yes. Also, that. Yes. Because Anne Rice was grappling with incredibly nuanced queer themes before she had the language to describe that, even.

Royce: I don’t really know if I have succinct language to describe a large group of genderfluid pansexuals.

Courtney: Well, this is interesting, because her next comment actually sort of addresses that. She says, “Many gay readers have seen them as gay, and seen the books as gay allegory.” Which, I’ll add my little asterisks here. We just saw that she’s “delighted by that but didn’t intend it”; that was her own words also. But she continues here and says, “Others have not seen this at all. I see them as transcending matters of gender or age. Lestat loves Louis. Louis loves Claudia. Armand loves Lestat. Lestat loves Gabrielle. There is no distinct difference in the quality of any of these loves. This has also been described as polymorphous sensuality.”

Royce: Okay.

Courtney: Okay!

Royce: That makes sense. I have not heard those two words next to each other.

Courtney: But yeah, using the word “sensuality,” also. That’s a word that lots of Aspec people can identify with, because some people do have a type of sensual desire that isn’t inherently sexual. And that’s hard to describe to so many Allo people, because they see sexuality and sensuality sort of as a bundle package deal, but it isn’t to all of us.

Royce: Yeah. A lot of allo readers were seeing romanticism and putting sexuality in between the lines.

Courtney: And also saying, “There’s no difference between all these loves. Like, these loves are all —” It’s not doing a relationship hierarchy, which is something that the Asexual community and Aromantic community often tries to fight against. Especially one who doesn’t want any sort of romantic relationship — they say, “Well, why are my deep, meaningful friendships seen as somehow lesser than this?” And in fact, there are some people who consider themselves to be Quoiromantic or Quoisexual, where they sort of say, “I can, or sometimes do, feel very deeply towards someone, but I don’t necessarily know what the difference is between romantic attraction or deep, meaningful friendships. It’s all just sort of meaningful love to me.” So you can’t tell me that we aren’t allowed to see ourselves represented because the author wanted this to be explicitly homosexual with lots of gay sex happening, when she herself says, “No, there’s no difference in these types of love. They transcend gender. They don’t have sex.” It’s been described as polymorphous sensuality. This is the most Asexual thing I’ve ever read! [laughs]

Courtney: She once again reiterates, “I see the vampires as deeply loving all sorts of people. Once they are made vampires, they transcend gender and sexual desire. Their loves have to do with the essence of the person.” It transcends sexual desire [laughs] and has to do with the essence of the person! This is so Asexual. It is so inherently Asexual.

Courtney: And the thing is, so many people say, like, “Vampires — just as a concept, as a blank slate, no matter who’s writing them, what the story is — vampires are inherently gay. Like, vampires are just gay. They’ve always been gay. The first vampire story was gay,” even though it was probably bi. Vampires are very often queer, yes. Vampires are very queer because they’ve always been an allegory for the other, for the ostracized, for someone who is outside of accepted society. So, yes, vampires are very queer. They are not one type of queer.

Royce: So, one more thought along those lines. I know that there are comments out there waiting with a little backpedal-y answer, like, “Okay, they weren’t literally having sex, but drinking blood is a metaphor for sex,” which is… it’s just kind of a basic read. It’s such a flattened take on what is — as we’ve talked through here, with some of Anne Rice confirming her intent — a nuanced aspect of fantasy literature. And I would go as far as to say that it indicates that you kind of missed the entire underlying point of the series. Because the text, in multiple cases, comments on sex as a lesser experience. It’s often bundled with several other desires or comforts left behind before undergoing this transformation and awakening new senses.

Royce: And I think that’s a good point to wrap around to this Asexual non-human/alien/robot representation discussion that we had earlier. It’s not as if the vampires of this world are flat or numb. Their senses shift. Their view of themselves changes. Their wants and needs shift. And much of the struggle with their newfound eternal life revolves around how to find and maintain happiness in this new life.

Courtney: I definitely agree with you. It is, I think, a very flattened reading. Because, even if we say yes to “Them drinking blood is the height of physical pleasure for a vampire, it’s the height of intimate closeness for a vampire,” those things can still be true without it being a literal substitution, one-to-one stand-in, for sex. And I would encourage anybody who has grasped on to this, “Well, this, in literature, as a trope, is a stand-in for sex” — I would encourage you to ask yourself why, in a world that is so queer and complex, and beyond vocabulary and definitions, why your impulse is, “Well, if they aren’t literally having sex, there must be a substitution for sex. That’s the only other way that these creatures can exist.” Because I would argue that’s an incredibly allonormative viewpoint — where, if they aren’t having sex, that must be a grave travesty, and there must be a perfect substitute for it. Why can’t they, like Anne Rice intended, transcend that entire concept? And what would it mean to you to challenge your own worldview, to ask what it would truly mean to transcend gender, to transcend sexual desire? Because these are ponderings that we in the Asexual community have had for years! Because, even outside of analyzing fiction, this is our experience so many times. Even gender as well — we’ve talked about a number of occasion how many people in the Asexual community are agender or otherwise nonbinary. There is very often a detachment from gender that is overrepresented in our community compared to the general population.

Courtney: To take a few more quotes from Anne Rice here in this blog post, she does start to break down a couple of specific examples of vampire relationships, and, again, just doubles down that sex has nothing to do with it, every time. She says here, “It is true that the relationship between Lestat and Marius is a father and son relationship; however, the relationship between Armand and Marius is a sensualized love affair type relationship.” I think that use of the word “type” to preface this thought is very interesting, because most allo folks are going to hear “love affair” and assume that sex is involved in a love affair. I wouldn’t think it necessarily has to be. It can be romantic alone, I think. But after repeatedly saying, “Sex has nothing to do with it” and saying, “Yeah, it is a love affair type relationship,” so she’s saying, to your understanding of current real world societal and relationship norms, this is the closest approximation. It’s not one-to-one because, again, they transcend all of this.

Courtney: But she continues on: “Gabrielle and Lestat is a mixed relationship, part mother/son, part love affair. Louis and Lestat is a love-hate relationship. Claudia and Louis is more of a love affair. Lestat and Claudia a father/daughter relationship. So I would say the opening up of possibilities is what is key. The vampire state opens the characters to all different types of loves, but it is always the essence of the character that most determines the nature of the love.” Again, the idea of opening up of possibilities — that is what I really want to impress on any future literary readings, especially of Anne Rice’s books. And she has said her vampires don’t have sex. Anytime the… Like, it’s almost become just common knowledge to general consumers of media that, well, drinking blood equals sex. And I think that’s so harmful to just assume that, every piece of media, that is going to be the author’s intent, that is what it has to be. It is in a narrow box. It can’t ever go anywhere else or mean anything different. Think about opening up the possibilities. That is what Anne Rice was trying to do with her relationships. And if our social reading on that is, like, “Well, they’re still basically having sex even if they aren’t having sex,” we’re narrowing the opening of those possibilities. We’re just shoving it right back in the same box and putting a big metaphor stamp on the box and calling it a day.

Courtney: She continues and says, “Armand is desperately in love with Lestat, but it has nothing to do with sex. Armand feels Marius failed him and Marius feels Armand failed him, and that part has nothing to do with sex. Marius and Pandora, that is a love affair, but again, sex has nothing to do with it. So they are all capable of loving people of their own gender and the other gender; gender doesn’t matter. It’s the essence. Lestat loves David Talbot as a lover, a friend, a mentor, a father, etc. — It goes on like that. The act of dominating and drinking blood can happen between any two characters, regardless of gender. They cannot be pinned down. They see all life as potentially beautiful and all forms of love as rewarding.”

Courtney: And I think the nature of her, in her own words in the same paragraph, saying three times, “Sex has nothing to do with it,” followed by also saying, “Oh, yeah, they can drink blood from any gender, their same or another one,” that doesn’t sound like a woman who, in her head, drinking blood is perfectly synonymous with sex in her world. It’s something else. It’s something transcendent. It’s something that, I think, is incredibly queer and can also be deeply relatable to a number of Asexual people.

Courtney: If you’d like to read the author’s own words, they do go on — or, I suppose, the author of the blog; we’re talking about a couple of authors here. The blogger here goes on to explain their own thoughts where they don’t believe that blood drinking is a raw alternative for human sex. You can read someone else’s thoughts other than ours, because we’ve talked about this even before this episode. And I’ll remind you that Anne Rice herself shared this, found it substantive and worth thinking about.

Courtney: I do think it’s interesting, and I do want to call it out here: the blogger, in sort of wrapping up final thoughts, one of these closing thoughts being, “It is okay to vision Lestat and Louis and Lestat and Nicky as lovers, and it is just as okay to vision them not to be lovers but something else. But it is not valid to vision any of the Ricean vampires practically gay, as in homosexuals in rawest level, as in the pure impossibility for them to be practically that, them being above sexuality and having no sexual relations with each other nor with humans. I once heard a more fitting term: ‘biromantic.’” There we go! Biromantic!

Courtney: And this is, of course, a lot of this — Anne Rice herself has used the word “bisexual” to describe especially Lestat, especially Lestat pre-vampirism. But I think, especially given the gender expansiveness of this, some folks with more modern terms might prefer to see this as panromantic or pansensual. Anne Rice herself used the word “sensual” — which is, I believe, something we talked about a lot in our very first episode on Interview with the Vampire. Because once you transform, it’s not only the blood that tastes so good, the kill that feels so good, it’s how beautiful the world becomes. It’s a very atmospheric, very sensual world for the vampires. Everything is heightened, except sexual desire.

Courtney: And I have had people argue with me that because everything is heightened, of course their sexual desire is also heightened. They’re just themselves, but even hornier now. And at this point, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m here. The only reason why we’re even pulling all of these Anne Rice quotes from across the years is because the current round of discourse is saying, “Anne Rice always intended this. The reason she couldn’t was because it was illegal.” And “illegal” is itself a very vague thing to say, given this time period, because I can’t find — and send it to me if it’s wrong, but, in the US, I cannot find literally a law against depicting gay sex in literature.

Courtney: I assume people are talking more about more generalized obscenity laws, which was also kind of hit-and-miss with a complicated history. Most of the main court cases involving obscenity laws in media in the US revolve around visual depictions — film, television. And I’m not trying to say that obscenity laws did not exist, but there were very much issues of someone getting sued on the grounds of “they broke obscenity laws,” and there are cases of people winning those cases because of First Amendment rights.

Courtney: But a lot of obscenity laws when they did get sort of boosted up to the Supreme Court — and again a lot of these were about visual, not written examples — would set kind of new precedences. And this did happen in the ’60s. This did happen in the ’70s. And there were very often clauses in obscenity laws that were like, “Well, it’s only considered pornography if there’s no literary or artistic merit to it,” which is obviously way too vague to be a law. I mean, there’s the very famous, like, “Pornography: I’ll know it when I see it” that a judge said. Like, that is way too vague and subjective to be a law, I think we can all agree. But I absolutely have found that, based on those literary or social merit clauses, usually, books could get away with a few more things than television and movie could, at least during those decades. For example, published in the United States in the year 1977: The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Lifestyle. That was published in 1977. Obviously, there was, and still is, rampant homophobia, so not everyone’s gonna be happy that books like that exist, but it was allowed to exist.

Royce: It’s also probably important to point out that a lot of obscenity laws and things of that nature are written and enforced at state or even more local levels.

Courtney: Mm.

Royce: And during the time when Anne Rice was writing these books in the ’70s and early- to mid-’80s, she lived in California.

Courtney: That’s true. I am not an expert in [laughing] California obscenity laws in the ’70s and ’80s. I don’t know those off the top of my head, believe it or not.

Royce: California just has a reputation for being a bit more permissive.

Courtney: It does have that reputation — except when it comes to, like, I don’t know, lead products. I was recently shopping for just a small wastebasket to put in my studio, and I found one that apparently had lead in it, and there was a little disclaimer that was like, “This product may expose you to lead, and this is known in the state of California to cause cancer.” I was like, what a weird way to word that. Only the state of California knows that. I know that they have to legally put that because of California laws. I get that. But what a weird way to phrase that, I thought.

Courtney: And, like, truly, if anyone does come out, like… Anytime we talk about Anne Rice’s vampires, we get heat, we get pushback. And this is pre-podcast, even. Just having conversations with people about the vampires. People get so defensive about “The vampires have a lot of sex, actually.” If anyone tries to pull out, like, a, “Oh, but this book in the ’70s that depicted something gay was prosecuted, this person did get sued, or this book got banned from a library,” I’m sure there are some examples out there that exist. But I’d remind you that that is also happening literally right now in the country, and nobody is saying right now that you aren’t allowed to write gay sex, you’re not allowed to — like, these books are getting published. Yes, certain jurisdictions are trying to pull them from libraries. The most banned book, three years in a row, according to the American Library Association, is called Gender Queer, written by an Asexual author. There are themes of Asexuality, there’s themes of genderqueerness, and there’s even themes of experimenting sexually before coming to understand your Asexuality. And that book has been challenged repeatedly across the country. But just like there are people who are trying to get these books pulled off of library shelves, there are people fighting that, too. There are people fighting to keep them on the shelves.

Courtney: So, no, I do not think it is legally accurate. I do not think it is actually honoring Anne Rice’s own words and own intentions to just be throwing around these arguments saying, “She wanted to write gay sex in this book but literally couldn’t because it was illegal.” And the fact is, like, yeah, a few people will say this and get a lot of attention for it, but I see so many other people, smaller accounts, just parroting that over and over and over again. And as soon as anyone Ace comes in and says, “Oh, actually, you know, this passage from this book says they don’t have sex,” or, “Actually, Anne Rice said this in this interview that they don’t have sex,” or, “Actually, I’m Asexual and I really resonated with the vampire, so I can see how there is an Ace reading” — those folks get dogpiled online by people saying, “No, that’s homophobic of you, because you don’t understand: this was literally illegal and Anne Rice did want to write the gay sex.” That’s not true. That’s not true. None of that is true.

Courtney: So, I hope you all enjoyed our little side tangent in our ongoing Vampire Chronicles series to talk about Anne Rice’s own statements. I suppose that means, next up, we will actually talk about Memnoch the Devil. There is quite a bit more sexuality in that book — although, I’d argue, not the vampires; other characters, which I think is really fascinating to parallel with the previous Tale of the Body Thief book, where for some reason, the fandom’s collective memory is just, “Lestat wanted to become a human for a day just so he could have sex again,” even though when he did have sex he hated it, and the entire book was mostly about grieving the loss of Claudia.

Royce: Yeah, it was basically, “The only good thing about being a human is being able to look at the sun.”

Courtney: Yeah! [laughs] Yep. He wasn’t actually very happy with the whole sex that happened. So I think it’s really interesting to parallel other immortal creatures in this world who have had sexual encounters that we learn about more in Memnoch the Devil. Plus, I have a really fun personal story about Memnoch the Devil. [laughs] Can’t wait to share that.

Courtney: But until then, if you, dear listeners, cannot get enough Asexual vampires in your life, I would like to direct your attention to today’s featured MarketplACE vendor. That is Shickzander Art, where you can find a comic about Asexual vampires and recovering from trauma. That description comes directly from the author, so there is, once again, I beg of you, no gray area here. These vampires are not only functionally Asexual, they are canonically, according to the author, Asexual. And the author, as well: Asexual, Aromantic, neurodivergent. We love to see it. The link to the webtoon and all the author’s socials is going to be in the description, so you can check it out. And, assuming we survive the fandom mob, we will see you all next time.