Gay Vampires: Bound in Blood

Perhaps someday a novelist will paint a sympathetic portrait of a gay vampire. David Thomas Lord’s Bound in Blood isn’t it. I must admit in my early childhood, when I saw the movie version of Dracula, while I shuddered in fright, I still found the Bela Lugosi version of Bram Stoker’s vampire attractive and disturbingly seductive. This Dracula was sophisticated, urbane and powerful: a “civilized” brute, if you will, an asset to any cocktail party were it not for his bloody predilections. The publication of Karl Heinrich Ulrich’s short story Manor in 1884 may be the first fictional introduction of a gay vampire. Most modern readers are more familiar with Anne Rice’s seemingly interminable series, “The Vampire Chronicles”. Rice does not blush at roiling homoerotic undercurrents in the adventures of handsome, virile male vampires, Louis and Lestat.

Less ambiguous in his sexual preference is Lord’s creation, Jean-Luc Courbet, in his novel, Bound in Blood. Courbet’s latest in a series of century’s old migrations lands him in New York City. With its unending shadowy piers and severe S & M clubs, Jean-Luc, now known as “Jack”, has found his hedonistic home in the city that “never sleeps”

Few women and few men can resist the suave, but animalistic charms of this gorgeous predator. Unfortunately, Jack is a merciless seducer and, though the ecstasy is portrayed as incredibly sweet, his lovers must pay a grave price for their final pleasure. (The lurid details will not be forthcoming here and only hard-core horror fans would appreciate this opus.) Life is not all fun and games for Jack, as he must always keep a watchful eye out for his vampire mother who everlastingly pursues him with a murderous vengeance. When he kills the lover of a macho cop, he finds that the cop may possess the secret to his destruction. I sense in Lord’s narrative a cautionary note, and I may be wrong in my intuition; it might be well for some of the more reckless thrill seekers in the gay community to beware the strangers they seek to bed. Besides AIDs, dangerous characters like Jack bring a new dimension to the term “unsafe sex.”

RECOMMENDED READING: Bound in Blood by David Thomas Lord, Kensington Books, 2001, ISBN 1-57566-764-9

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