The queer life of Bram Stoker
For the author of “Dracula”—sex was monstrous
He was a Victorian horror novelist with one hit — that one about vampires. Bram Stoker died in 1912, and was on the fast track to obscurity.
It wasn’t book readers who made him immortal, but moviegoers. A German film based on Dracula, re-titled Nosferatu in an effort to evade copyright, was released in 1922.
A phenomenon was born, and decades later, biographers went to find out who Stoker had been.
There were just a few facts.
Abraham Stoker was born in 1847, in Dublin. He’d been sickly as a boy, but pushed himself to be an athletic young man. He married at age 31, and had one child.
Beyond that was blanks and silences—until 1975, when Daniel Farson, a journalist who was Stoker’s grand-nephew, published a biography. It had some facts the family hadn’t planned on sharing.
The Stoker marriage had been — unusual?
Daniel Farson had never met Florence, but family lore had her as “an elegant, aloof woman, more interested in her position in society than she was in her son.” She was recalled as “cursed with her great beauty and the need to maintain it.”
She’d been socially prominent. She’d once dated Oscar Wilde! An unusual status for a woman to be able to claim.
There were no photos of Bram and Florence together. They were said to have ceased having marital relations at some early point.
The family thought Florence was “antisex.”
Stoker’s “Dracula” started to be called a major Victorian novel.
It became a favorite of English students as a case study in reading for sex. Many had thought Victorian stories were sexless, but maybe it was just disguised?—and Dracula, full of stalking and biting, chasing and draining, seemed a masterclass in erotic insinuation.
Many readers that felt in the novel had a homoerotic heart. In a 1984 paper, Christopher Craft found male thrill at being penetrated, and Dracula’s own “unfulfilled sexual ambition to fuse with a male…”
Stoker’s life was shaded in, bit by bit.
He’d been a big fan of the American poet Walt Whitman, and two letters from him were found in Whitman’s archive.
Scholars tried not to pay too much attention. Stoker’s letters to Whitman were “ignored or euphemized,” as Talia Schaffer puts it in a 1994 study, owing to their “passionate homoeroticism.”
The story seems to be that, in 1872, at age 25, Stoker read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in great excitement. On Valentine’s Day, he wrote a fan letter that was part love letter and part ‘coming out’ speech. He didn’t send it.
Then, four years later, he’d added a cover letter, and sent both letters to Whitman. The first letter is effusive. He writes:
“How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eye and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul. I don’t think you will laugh, Walt Whitman, nor despise me, but at all events I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.”
“My kind”—what would that mean?
Stoker added in in the second letter:
“I only hope that we may sometimes meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.”
Schaffer calls him a “closeted homosexual.”
But many others weren’t too keen on reading Bram Stoker as anything but heterosexual. The next biography of Stoker, published in 1996, by Barbara Belford, disregarded the queer possibility.
Daniel Farson had put together a case that Stoker not died of “exhaustion,” as was reported. He thought the clues pointed to syphilis.
Barbara Belford dismissed that too, and so Bram Stoker was back in the closet. She does observe some ‘queer’ edges in Dracula. She writes:
“In the vampire world gender roles are confusing: Dracula penetrates, but he — not the woman — receives the vital fluid, blood/semen.”
Stoker’s relationship with Oscar Wilde came in for more scrutiny.
The two had “socialized frequently,” as Talia Schaffer details, but that was the odd thing. Stoker left no references to Wilde. As Schaffer notes: “Stoker never mentions him, even in a twelve-page list of his famous acquaintances.”
Had it escaped Bram Stoker’s notice that he was friends with the most famous literary figure of his day?
The more the silence is examined, the more it seemed to conceal. Schaffer notes that Stoker began to write Dracula a month after Wilde was convicted of ‘gross indecency’.
Stoker then seemed like a man who had kept remarkably quiet about one subject—the one at the center of his plot. Schaffer writes: “His desire is imprisoned in cryptic texts; his private life undecipherable through thick layers of transference.”
Was Dracula a portrait of Oscar Wilde?
It’s an alluring interpretation of the vampire. By many recollections, Wilde did seem larger-than-life. Arthur Conan Doyle had written after meeting Wilde: “He towered above us all…”
Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes is likely inflected with Wilde. The playwright’s spirit seemed to just infuse his era. Wilde’s trial might have been an effort to destroy him, but became, paradoxically, a megaphone for his personality and homosexuality itself.
To scholars it did seem possible that Dracula had been a version of Wilde, and perhaps more of a ‘darker’ side not highlighted in own Wilde’s self-presentations. In a 1997 study on vampires, Nina Auerbach suggests: “Dracula was one particularly debased incarnation of the fallen Wilde, a monster of silence and exile…”
Does “Dracula” feel like a gay nightmare?
The novel starts with a young married clerk, Jonathan Harker, on a business trip to advise a foreign client. He finds himself in the home of an older man with a strangely seductive charm.
Dracula gets handsy. He “leans over” Harker, and starts to stroke him. With a “shudder,” Harker recoils, and appears to pass out. He wakes up in bed with his clothes folded beside him — a suggestion of a sexual encounter?
I’m reading along with the scholar Will Parshley. We next see Harker imprisoned in Dracula castle’s, as he has to make his way through a “dark, tunnel-like passage, through which came a deathly, sickly odour…”
An anal passage? Harker makes his way back to England, mysteriously ill. His wife nurses him back to health, as without her, she thinks, “he would have sunk down…”
As Parshley writes, heterosexual marriage in this presentation “helps to control, or at least veil, Harker’s homoerotic desires.”
Later biographers got more “queer-friendly.”
In 2016, David J. Ska, published Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. He evokes all the gender weirdness of the Victorian period. Stoker, and many boys, including Oscar Wilde, were raised to look like girls. Sons wore dresses and had long hair, presented as bizarre public hermaphrodites.
Ska doesn’t want to call Stoker as ‘homosexual’, terms, for reasons I don’t understand. He gets back into Stoker being just sorta into men. He writes:
“Men are routinely described in detail in Stoker’s stories and novels, with a typical emphasis on facial detail and clothing. But he has no interest in applied physiognomy when it comes to women, and he doesn’t even care what they wear.”
Stoker was married—to the actor Henry Irving?
Stoker had become entranced with Irving, who had an eerie, mesmeric hold over audiences. The two became friends and co-workers for years. Stoker leaves a record of comments that seem lovestruck.
Was it sexual? Talia Schaffer had offered:
“Precisely because Stoker was so open about his love for Irving, it seems likely that his love was never consummated; in other words, he could be open because he had nothing to hide.”
A likely timeline has Stoker learning he had syphilis around the time of Wilde’s trial.
Until that point, as in Stoker’s letter to Whitman, he might’ve flirted with being more open about belonging to a different “kind.”
He decided to get married to a woman who was as little interested in matrimony as he. Then Henry Irving became a shadow spouse, a man he enjoyed being around, with whom he could be publicly loving.
In late life, Stoker turned to authoritarian politics.
In a magazine article in 1908, “The Censorship of Fiction,” he’d advocated, bizarrely, for state censorship on the arts, particularly for sex! He writes:
“A close analysis will show that the only emotions which in the long run harm are those arising from sex impulses, and when we have realized this we have put a finger on the actual point of danger.”
As Daniel Farson had commented: “Coming from the author of Dracula these views seem incredible.”
But Stoker’s syphilis, which David J. Ska thinks is likely, might tie the story together. As his infection progressed, Stoker developed a horror of whatever had brought on such suffering.
Stoker’s journal was discovered only recently.
It didn’t say much. One entry was just the words: “The cryptic meaning of silence.”
The plot of Dracula does seem to mix concealed homosexuality and horror into one toxic brew. Does the reader feel the presence of syphilis?—the foreign agent entering the bloodstream.
But homosexuality is also a force for openness and truth in the closed crypt of Bram Stoker studies and fandom. Daniel Farson was gay, as was F. W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu.
Then “Dracula” becomes a text of sexual liberation.
He can stare at you, and telegraph what he wants. Dracula doesn’t care about your rules. He wants you.
In the right time and place, that can be fun? 🔶
