Vampiric Devotions

queer imagination as a salvific tool

I am a devotional lover. So much of my life has been chasing the contact high of smelling the clothes left to me, or straining to remember the exact dimensions of a shoulder as my kisses memorized it, or closing my eyes until I can feel the exact texture of hair apparate under the phantom touch of my fingertips. There is no relationship in my life that is free from my relentless romanticism— each patch of skin on the backs of my friends’ hands is committed to memory every time we hold hands, the swirl-tracing of my thumb adding each detail into a meticulously up-kept catalogue that I sift through on my commute. Was that scar a little bit more to the left? Was the stick and poke from middle school a bit more raised than the rest of the skin?

It’s true that I met most of my close friends in an initial and ongoing dance of will-they won’t-they homoerotics that is admittedly one of my favorite spaces to navigate. Passing cigarette smoke back and forth between our mouths has always felt like my default introduction to friendship in the same way that for many it’s saying “I like your skirt.”¹ This casual air of romance leaves no collarbone unkissed in the same way that it leaves no questions answered. Will we hook up the next time we see each other? Are you jealous when I dance with someone else? Will this be the last time we kiss? I love the intensity and uncertainty and teasing that all exhale in a fog of shared breath.

Since I was a child, I had a striking, if not vaguely concerning, affinity for vampires. I would prematurely rip out my baby teeth in order to taste the blood, it’s mustardy taste more the reward for my pain than any coins left by the tooth fairy could ever be.

I came home from my first day of kindergarten declaring to my mom that I would never go back— when she asked why, I responded that none of the kids would play with me when I told them that I was a vampire. The way most pre-teens waited for a letter from hogwarts, I waited for the day I could sink my canines into a willing neck. These canines were later nonconsenually filed down when I got my braces off, on account of their ‘dangerous sharpness;’ while my orthodontist was worried about my smile looking more approachable, I was glad that it had hinted at my intentions.

I could go on about this obsession; dragging fake rats around my neighborhood on leashes made of Christmas ribbon, kissing the rings on the hand of a life-sized Dracula halloween decoration I insisted we kept up all year long, my constant watching of “The Little Vampire” and my childhood indignance when Twilight bastardized my vampiric experiences. When the remake of Nosferatu came out this past year, I gladly watched it in theaters four times, each time with someone on the friend-to-flame spectrum, each time kissing the person I left the movie with. When the film showed Count Orlok thinking of his writhing, forbidden love, beckoning “come to me,” I laughed in recognition. I’ve been there too, under the dark-red candles suspended above my bed, thinking about one of my dear, lifelong friends.

David Bowie in The Hunger (1983), in which he stars alongside Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in the hottest vampire throuple Hollywood has ever seen

Part of it feels like my queer inheritance. When I first read Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic essay, I felt like I was reading the words that I had failed to articulate in myself; that the tension between the irrationality and power of lust is an aspirational thing, something to be cherished and fed like a feral pet. My devotional tendencies, even when they lead to these gray-area experiences, is something that breaks beyond the monotony of socially-sanctioned sexual and gender dynamics. I live for the highs and lows of these emotional benders, knowing that the depths of desire and complexity are far more obscure and creative than I could ever imagine. In the words of my patron saint, “For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self respect we can require no less of ourselves.”²

My unabashed and bloodthirsty devotion is an orgasmic torture that bleeds into every facet of my understanding. The tributaries of time seem to blur and overlap and constantly re-write themselves– nothing becomes certain, and the future I’ve prepared for one day is rendered incomplete the next. While writing this essay, I’ve been listening to “Time/Space” by Alex G on repeat, wondering why this song seems to hint at so many of the bound-up feelings I experience as a result of my unassuaged entanglements. I think it’s because of this liminality, this timelessness that comes with the muddling of possibility. The dancing in and out of romance or sexuality honors the human experience by confirming what many of us know to be true– that we are a constantly shifting constellation of desires, dreams, and identities; that a fixed understanding of self is more an inside joke than a life preserver.

For the immortal vampire, when time stretches out in a long and borderless pool before you, there is nothing left to do but play with your food. This understanding of time has always felt intuitive to me, and at the same time has always offered a sense of restlessness. When we allow the full vastness of possibility and humanity seep through our skin, confronting how much of our realities are constructed by unintelligible cultural myths, we can sink into this senseless pool of time weighted down by feelings of despair, or we can find the people who want to splash around with us and play mermaids. Inevitably, wet bodies will become tangled up and some spit will be shared and you’ll realize that there are people and places eager to accept the nebulousness of being a consciousness toted around by a body of senses.

This is my understanding of queer imagination, and why I know queer ways of being have and will always be the only approach to life that inspire me to live it fully. Dizzy from the unending shapes of love, I can remember the inherit power that exists in every human not from a will to dominate but from an unending capacity for expansion.

So I lean in, in awe of the fires that constantly threaten to rip me apart. I leave surprised that I can walk across another path, find more love than before, and continue to expand like the sun through lust or loss or something in between. I have come to honor the revolutionary capabilities of this fiery chaos– knowing that the imaginative powers of my relationships translate directly to my imaginations of the future. So I make myself deranged and deluded with my ideations and longings, preferring to bask in the Venusian glow of shared humanity than to accept the designations that were determined by cultural narratives. I would rather be lovesick, I would rather dance in the waves of unchartable oceans. I grin to myself as I flip through the many coy faces of my loves, certain that strangers can see this faint glimmer in the pupils of my eyes as I walk around the city. Fire licks at my heels, time is rendered meaningless, and I am who I’ve always been– a supernatural collection of desire, an imagined creature made eternal by my love.

1. Stream “Quitting” by Eliza McLamb wherever you listen to music!

2. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” from Sister Outsider (1978)