De ataúdes y armarios: la otredad y el legado del pánico homosexual en el cine de vampiros de la época del SIDA
Ángel-Amil Vázquez Pérez
Departamento de Literatura Comparada
Facultad de Humanidades, UPR RP
Recibido: 12/09/2025; Revisado: 03/11/2025; Aceptado: 11/11/2025
Abstract
This work serves as an examination of 20th century homophobia, conservatism, and illness anxieties as seen through the lens of the representation of the vampire in films released during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. By analyzing the queer coding of the vampires of Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987), and Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), this work explores the use of the “predatory homosexual” trope as a reflection of the fears at the core of AIDS paranoia.
Keywords: vampires, AIDS, homophobia, queer theory, conservatism
Resumen
Esta obra procura analizar la homofobia, el conservadurismo y el miedo a la enfermedad experimentados en el siglo XX, visto a través del lente de la representación del vampiro en películas estrenadas durante la crisis del SIDA de los años 80 y 90. Mediante el análisis de la codificación cuir de los vampiros en las obras de Tony Scott, The Hunger (1983), Kathryn Bigelow, Near Dark (1987), Joel Schumacher, The Lost Boys (1987), y Neil Jordan, Interview with the Vampire (1994), este trabajo explora el uso del tropo del “homosexual depredador” como reflejo de los miedos que subyacen en la paranoia del SIDA.
Palabras clave: vampiros, SIDA, homofobia, teoría cuir, conservadurismo
Introduction
On June 5, 1981, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published an article detailing unusual cases of a rare lung infection found in five previously healthy young men residing in Los Angeles, California. This mysterious sickness — seemingly an immunological disease accompanied by a slew of other infections — was the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, which would soon come to be known as the AIDS virus. All five of these men would, unfortunately, die soon after its publication (“Timeline of HIV and AIDS”, n.d.). Transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids, both sexual and intravenous, the disease was infamously seen by the general public as a form of punishment for sexual promiscuity and drug abuse. Because of this, despite its rising to the height of an epidemic at frightening speeds, the responses from American governmental and health institutions alike were largely dismissive in the early years of its development due to the negative public perception of the demographics majorly affected, particularly the LGBTQ+ community. For the first time in history, the love that dare not speak its name was brought to the forefront of public discourse, colloquially earning the disease such damning titles as “the gay virus” and “Wrath of God Syndrome” (Treichler, 1987, p. 52). The life essences of blood and semen seemingly polluted through even the slightest contact with the queer body, the homosexual morphing from mere social pariah to biological threat, ostensibly overnight. Crushed under the weight of their own “deviant” desires and forced to live out the remainder of their life as potential carriers of a seemingly incurable disease, they were cursed to walk the earth as a member of the new living dead; victims at the mercy of their own tainted blood. Yet, despite what the stereotypes would have us believe, it is nearly impossible to identify these individuals as such at first glance. To the homosexual, discretion and secrecy are often wielded as means of survival, the ability to blend into heteronormative society an essential skill in times of widespread paranoia and persecution; performing heterosexuality during the light of day and saving expressions of the true queer self for the cover of night. By revisiting vampire films released in the years of the AIDS Crisis — such as Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987), and Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) —, this work seeks to question societal fears of homosexuality and contagion by examining queer representations of the vampire released during the developmental peak of this epidemic, situating them firmly within the historical/cultural context of their production. To answer the question, what becomes of the vampire when the blood stops being the life?
The vampire, as canonized by Stoker, has long since occupied the public consciousness not only as a monster but as a sex symbol (Pikula, 2012). The mouth, already a primary site of erotic configuration, takes center stage in the vampiric narrative. Often described as “the kiss of death,” the threat posed by the vampire’s bite is not only transformational but intimate in nature; to fall prey to such a creature is to be subjected to a game of seduction. The vampire stalks its victims, finding pleasure not just in the act of killing but in the hunt itself; covetous of both the blood running through its victims’ veins and the very body that houses it. The vampire refuses categorization, presenting itself in a polymorphous manner and exhibiting sexual indiscriminacy in its hunting practices. This creature positions itself not only as a sexualized body but a queer one at that, operating outside of what Harry Benshoff (2020) refers to in The Monster and the Homosexual as “the binary definitions and proscriptions of patriarchal heterosexism” (p. 226). The horror of the vampire stems not simply from the fear of losing one’s life but rather from the queering implications of its seduction, the terror that comes with knowing that one could not only be bitten but “turned.” To have one’s body transgressed and forever changed through the exchange of “bad blood.”
In Seven Theses on Monster Theory, Jeffery Cohen (1996/2020) defines the monster as a creature that embodies specific cultural moments, claiming that while it can be tied to certain times, feelings, and places, it is not a stagnant body. Instead, it forms part of an endlessly shifting terrain of signification and displacement, constantly transforming and changing shape to represent the fears of each generation. A body made up of nothing more and nothing less than what Cohen coins “pure culture” (p. 38). The failure to contain HIV throughout the 1980s and early 1990s transforms this monstrous body into a vector of contagion, with widespread fears of blood and sexual inversion birthing a new wave of reactionary vampire cinema; one in which creatures of the night infect willfully and maliciously, condemning their victims to lives outside of the body politic and at the edge of queerness.
In the 1970s, film critic Robin Wood (1979/2020) once suggested that most, if not all, films in the horror genre can be broken down into a formula made up of three variables: normality, the Monster, and the relationship between the two, with normality defined as an alignment towards heterosexual patriarchal capitalist values (p.117). Wood’s theory is formed primarily around the Marcusian concept of surplus repression, a model of behavior that goes far beyond the repression said to be necessary to maintain society, veering instead towards a process wherein dominating structures condition people from infancy to take on specific cultural roles (the monogamous heterosexual) while oppressing others (the promiscuous homosexual/bisexual) (p. 109). To the heterosexualized public, the release of these sexual energies in the horror film is always a source of disgust; the text is constructed around the monster, and desire is signified by monstrosity, perversion, and excess alike. However, Wood affirms, “it is the horror film that responds in the most clear-cut and direct way, because central to it is the actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/the other, in the figure of the Monster” (pp. 113, 127). The vampire of the 80s and 90s, much like the AIDS patient, is envisioned then as both self and not-self, predator and victim, contaminator and contaminated.
Despite its precarious position within the timeline of the epidemic — having been released before both the death toll and moral panic surrounding the virus had reached their respective zeniths — one cannot help but read 1983’s The Hunger as a portent for the crippled state vampirism would soon take on and continue to shoulder for the remainder of the 1980s and early 1990s. Throughout these decades, the vampire became a sort of endangered species; gone were the days of the invulnerable creature of the night, replaced by monsters stricken down by their own outbreaks of “bad blood.” As Auerbach (1995) states in the seminal Our Vampires, Ourselves, the blood of Hammer horror movies was “no longer a token of forbidden vitality but a blight. Once the etymology of AIDS became clear... vampirism mutated from hideous appetite to nausea” (p. 175). Directed by Tony Scott (1983), this forgotten entry in the vampire canon showcases the beginning of this turn in the vampire’s representation — harkening back to the disease metaphors that had plagued early gothic representations of the monster, particularly the syphilitic fears of Stoker’s Dracula — shifting from the pinnacle of vivacity into the carrier of a hidden yet brutal illness.
In The Hunger, the transformations attributed to vampirism are seen, above all, as objects of scientific scrutiny, with much of the film taking place in sterile waiting rooms and research labs as the blood of our protagonist is quite literally put under the microscope. The film opens with a scene that reads like a bullet from the Moral Majority’s playbook: The Blaylocks, dressed in their finest leather, prowl a sprawling gothic nightclub with the intention of preying on its innocent, sexually liberated clientele. Scott’s sleek vampire couple play with their food, the young pair they bring home are treated to wandering hands and open mouths in the moments leading up to their respective ends; images of this fatal one-night stand are spliced between flashing cut away shots of red-tinged cages and enraged laboratory monkeys — the very same species to which we can trace the genus of HIV. As the ape rips its cellmate’s throat, so too do John and Miriam tear into their own victims. Scott’s vampires embody the anti-sex rhetoric of the AIDS era, obliging us to think of intercourse not as a venture without consequences but as an act of murder (Sontag, 1989, p. 126). The film’s potential for AIDS allegory is further complicated by the seduction of its protagonist, Dr. Sarah Roberts. During the early years of the epidemic, the scientific discourse surrounding HIV was, naturally, heavily focused on the spread of the virus between queer men, with little to no regard being shown towards the rates of transmission amongst women. In fact, it was initially believed that women were simply “inefficient” and “incompetent” transmitters, their bodies more attuned to functioning as rare receptacles rather than as active spreaders of disease (Treichler, 1987, p. 45). Miriam, however, in the long-standing tradition of sapphic vampires, does not obey these conceptions of gender, occupying the active sexual role through her wielding of the phallic vampire bite. Much like Christopher Craft’s (1984) red-lipped Dracula:
...this mouth equivocates, giving the lie to the easy separation of the masculine and the feminine…the vampire mouth fuses and confuses…the gender-based categories of the penetrating and the receptive…the body, having become an unreliable signifier, ceases to represent adequately the invisible truth of desire, which itself never deviates from respectable heterosexuality. Thus the confusion that threatens conventional definitions of gender when confronted by same sex eroticism becomes merely illusory. The body, quite simply, is mistaken. (pp. 109, 114)
Sarah responds to Miriam’s courtship like a woman bewitched, the blurring of these gendered lines resulting in a crisis of identity as Sarah gradually begins to lose her sense of self upon increased exposure to the older woman; the transformational qualities of the bite affecting both physical and psychological faculties in tandem. The vampires of The Hunger live on borrowed time. The degenerative effects of the disease may wait centuries to strike, but its punishment is made no less merciless because of it. “Humankind dies one way, we another,” Miriam whispers to her crumbling companion, “their end is final. Ours is not” (Scott, 1983, 00:44:51-00:45:14). Doomed to toss and turn in their coffins until the world turns to dust they exist in a state of suspended animation, neither alive nor dead. Miriam’s death does not guarantee our protagonist’s survival; with polluted blood running through her veins, Sarah will live the rest of her life as a carrier. The ticking time bomb of AIDS’ “hard death” may not reach her for many years yet, but as Sontag says: “it is only a matter of time, like any other death sentence” (1989, pp. 93, 99).
In a 1986 radio address to the nation, the then President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, expressed concerns regarding the state of the “American family,” declaring that this “fundamental unit of American life” had been under “virtual attack” in recent decades, citing its loss of integrity and failure to educate its youth as one of the biggest issues plaguing the country at the time; a message that comes only a year after the president’s first public speech acknowledging the severity of the AIDS crisis (Reagan, 1986; “Timeline of HIV and AIDS”, n.d.). This imaginary national family unit, of course, is an ideological construct. It is an emotional strawman that exists solely to be deployed onto just about any form of opposition that is deemed threatening to the “traditional beliefs” that make up the philosophies of the conservative powers, resting paradoxically as both the load bearing pillar of society and a structure that is always on the point of imminent collapse. For the Reagans and Pat Buchanan’s of the world, AIDS was, as Watney (1987/1997) notes, “the latest variation in the spectacle of the defensive ideological rearguard action which had been mounted on behalf of ‘the family’ for more than a century” (p. 43). Allowing for the targeted harassment of groups that had long since been considered a threat to the white-nationalist heterosexual paradigm (i.e., homosexuals, people of color, drug users, etc.) in the name of “public health” and “family values.”
We see this obsession with the family trickle down into the relationship dynamics of the decade’s vampires, as the predatory individualism once characteristic of the monster is abandoned in favor of creating more centralized, collective threats (Auerbach, 1995, p. 122). Now vulnerable to the outside world, the vampire of the late 1980s finds its strengths in numbers, transforming from a lone hunter into a certified pack animal. With the release of Katheryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, 1987 sees the premiere of not one but two vampire films centered on the dangers of falling in with these “false families.” Both films explore the journeys of naïve all-American teenage boys who — in pursuit of a girl — are found turned against their will, thrust away from their single parent households and into the arms of hostile vampire packs. These demonic broods function as direct counterpoints to the wholesome American families of their protagonists; Cola Nixon (1997) writes, “although Michael is lacking a father and Caleb a mother, the families they do have are nevertheless connotatively ‘good’ and function, not surprisingly, as one pole of a symbolic opposition” (p. 120). The vampire pack is ultimately presented not as an alternative to the family unit but rather as a gross parody of normative family life; with the titular lost boys being led by all-dominating father, Max, and the drifters of Near Dark being raised by the mother/father pairing of Diamondback and Jessie. Both films share distinctly conservative approaches to the matter of vampirism, the allusions to AIDS being particularly obvious both in the sexualized set-ups to their vampiric turnings and in their emphasis on concepts of purity and contamination. Where they diverge, however, is in the conflicts surrounding their protagonists’ respective transformations; the betrayal Caleb feels upon being bitten by the tomboyish Mae, though earth-shattering, does not carry the same imputation of shame and guilt that Michael experiences as a consequence of drinking David’s blood. As David Oscar Harvey (2011) states in “Calculating Risk”:
...unsafe heterosexual couplings are considered less risky (regarding HIV and the statistical likelihood of its transmission). Heterosex benefits from its status as a normative sexual behavior. [And] it is thus far less prone to critique…The psychological duress is potentially much greater for men engaging in unsafe [sex] with men, as our culture has emphatically characterized such behavior as irrational and deadly. (p. 157)
Living under the sign of vampirism has different connotations for our leading men. While Caleb is a victim of wicked women and standard promiscuity, Michael allows himself to be seduced by the lost boys’ way of life. When he drinks from the poisoned bottle, he does so with his eyes shut, not in pain but ecstasy, his spoiled identity one of his own making. But this transformation, though pleasurable in its genus, quickly devolves into a nightmare of regret and self-imprisonment as he fights back the effects of the blood while simultaneously attempting to conceal his newly degenerated state from both his mortal family and his vampiric family — a task that becomes neigh impossible as the physical markers of vampirism begin to shine through. “My own brother” shouts the 13-year-old Sam, “a goddamn shit-sucking vampire!” (Schumacher, 1987, 00:40:51-00:40:53).
In The Lost Boys and Near Dark, we see yet another paradigm-shift occur with the introduction of the concept of the “half-vampire.” These initiates, exemplified by protagonists Michael and Caleb, are characterized as living in an in-between state of mortality and vampirism, their turnings made incomplete due to a refusal to kill (Auerbach, 1995, p.168). In the same vein as AIDS, vampirism becomes an affliction of tiered classification, separating our fledgling heroes from those living with “full-blown” vampirism. This squeamishness towards violence is as much an act of self-punishment as it is a moral stand, however. By denying themselves the blood, they protect the lives of others and push themselves further towards sickness and torment. For Caleb, this is especially debilitating. While the pain of Michael’s transformation is primarily psychological, Caleb’s contraction of the disease nearly weakens him to the point of bedrest. Unable to travel on his own and unwilling to fend for himself, he is left completely at the mercy of his vampiric family, who oscillate between threatening to leave him for dead and hunting on his behalf. Caleb’s unauthorized turning and subsequent rejection of the vampire way invites these once-carefree drifters back under the condemning eyes of polite society, his presence a reintroduction of pure normality in an environment that has long since made its home in the rot of abjection.
Yet it is just as Caleb is beginning to come to terms with his newfound unlife that his salvation appears to him in the form of his father, who has, unbeknownst to him, spent the entirety of his disappearance trying to find him, crossing state lines and putting himself in unspeakable danger with the single-minded purpose of bringing his son back home.
The untouchable patriarch in Near Dark: is, like so many good characters of his era, a celebration of segregation. In his protective perfection, Caleb’s father needs no wife. In The Lost Boys…a single mother carelessly exposes her sons to evil, but a single father is an altogether different figure, one who not only guards his son, but knows how to cure him (Auerbach, 1995, p. 188).
And cure him, he does; utilizing his veterinarian knowledge to perform an at-home blood transfusion and replacing his son’s “bad blood” with his own, he flushes all traces of vampire poison out of his system. Free of the wasting disease of vampirism, Caleb weaponizes his newly restored humanity to destroy the false family, forcing them out into daylight and finishing them off with the incinerating rays of the sun. Mae, the sole survivor, is brought back to Caleb’s home, where he — now in his father’s position — transfuses her with his blood. With both their powers gone, the balance of heterosexual society is restored. Reinstated into their ‘proper’ roles, the sexually aggressive woman is expulsed of her deformed femininity and the passive male sees his agency reinstated.
Vampirism, like AIDS, consequently becomes a ‘lifestyle’ choice, where the vampire, like the homosexual, is potentially curable, and if not curable, then surely deserving of death. The ‘general public’ might have perceived itself as embattled, then, but its response, at least for Hollywood, was a righteously militant retrenchment against the demonic family that was threatening to pollute or infect American domestic purity and corrupt its sons (Auerbach, 1995, p. 127).
Similarly to that which permeates societal conceptions of the gay male body, the text constructed around the half-vampire is driven by an obsession with the strength of the boundaries that separate the self from the not-self; constantly fleeing sights of potential identity in order to construct barricades around these new oppositions (Treichler, 1987, p.65). For the vampires of The Lost Boys and Near Dark, vampirism is no longer a life sentence but a disease of voluntary self-annihilation; its rejection of the natural hegemony is an exercise in self-abasement. By deliberately associating with the Other, the contraction of this queering illness becomes a matter of choice. Abjection then is not only deserved but rightfully earned; the price to pay for daring to dip one’s toes outside the boundaries of normative society.
In 1991, the US Department of State put together an executive summary centered on the rising trends of infection and potential strategies of prevention in response to the growing threat of the AIDS crisis. According to the report, the department estimates that the number of full-blown cases of the virus will increase from 2 million to a cumulative total of more than 10 million within the next eight years. In 1994, only three years after the release of this document, the US would be registered as the nation with the highest number of official AIDS cases in the world, becoming the leading cause of death amongst Americans aged 25-44 (Quinn, 1995). It is in this same year, during what appeared to be the peak of the epidemic, that we see the release of yet another film about the dangers of “bad blood” by way of Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire. An adaptation of the 1976 neo-gothic phenomenon of the same name, this film follows the story of the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, who, upon crossing paths with a journalist outside of a nightclub, decides to sit down and chronicle his 200-year-long life story. By employing the device of the interview format, the story is told primarily through flashbacks and voiceover narration, a dual narrative structure that allows us not only to bear witness to his memories but also to be made privy to his interpretations of these events as he recollects them. Louis is far from an impartial narrator; however, the act of telling the boy his story is as much an avenue for emotional release as it is a purposeful indictment of vampirism and vampire-kind as a whole. It is, above all, a warning. Louis abhors his condition, viewing the loss of his humanity as the death knell of his immortal unlife. As Ian Clark (2022) states in “Infectious Queers,” these vampires, much like the AIDS-era queer male, are characterized as abject creatures who can only be satiated “through the consumption, corruption, and destruction of healthy bodies and heteronormative social boundaries” (pp. 28-29).
Louis’ first encounter with vampirism occurs at the lowest point of his life: having lost both his wife to childbirth and his daughter to illness within only a year of each other. Here, in the spirit of previous entries within AIDS-era vampire cinema, the family once again becomes the center of goodness. It is the loss of this stabilizing element that exposes Louis to Lestat’s attentions. Passively suicidal and alienated by his own patriarchal signifiers, he invites his end with open arms; a willing incubator for death-dealing contamination. Lestat appears to him as an angel of death, a predator who seeks to take advantage of Louis’ susceptible condition with the desire to possess his mind, body, and soul. Watney (1987/1997) writes that two streams of images constitute the shadow of the homosexual: firstly, as an invisible contagion and secondly, as a spectacle of erotic seduction, involving the unwilling yet inexorable transformation of an “innocent,” “vulnerable” partner (p. 23). By situating Lestat within this shadow, the film exemplifies the perceived dangers of the queer male, primarily his ability to “infect healthy bodies and corrode the heteronormative ideal” (Clark, 2022, p. 38). The danger of the vampire’s fertilizing bite was made all the greater for its queering potential. However, despite Lestat’s efforts, Louis does not respond well to the behaviors encouraged by the “dark gift.” Unwilling to revel in the power and debauchery afforded to him by his new powers, his increasing alienation finds him at odds with his maker’s vampiric joie de vivre. Louis — like the half-vampires of The Lost Boys and Near Dark — initially refuses to satiate his hunger, fearful of damning his soul even further through the act of killing. Unfortunately for him, however, vampirism in the world of Interview is not a reversible disease. The changes that occur in him upon the exchange of blood are beyond his control. Try as he might to starve out these new desires, his body no longer belongs to himself, now made a moving part in an endless chain of transmission.
In Interview, relationships between vampires are dysfunctional by design. Inhibitive to normative relationships, vampirism excludes one from the ordinary cultural pictures of companionship, as filial and romantic bonds only become available through the application of force; a fact that is made all the more insidious with the introduction of the vampire-child, Claudia. Unlike Louis, Claudia takes to vampirism like a duck to water; “capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child’s demanding” (Jordan, 1994, 00:46:27-00:46:32). Her innate killer instincts further problematize the films notions of queerness by heavily playing into the fears that permeate the discourse surrounding children of same-sex parents, her initiation into the vampiric “lifestyle” robbing her of the normative experiences essential for healthy child development. Forever stuck in the body of a little girl, Claudia’s growth is left literally stunted; barred from the rituals of marriage and procreation — biologically incapable of both childbirth and the creation of other vampires — her desire for adult connection is projected onto Louis, resulting in a relationship that invokes the taboos of pedophilia and incest. As the pièce de résistance of the film’s critique of queerness’ supposed corrupting influence, “their coupling [signifies] how queer vampirism forces unnatural relationship dynamics and aberrant behavior, prohibiting functional relationships and families” (Clark, 2022, p. 46).
The film does not leave its vampires’ transgressions unpunished, however, far from it. As the architect of their suffering, Lestat is subjected to extensive physical trauma. Poisoned by “dead blood” and burnt beyond the point of recognition, the moral judgements attached to vampirism become reflected through aesthetic changes; the rot at the core of his character rising to the surface with each disfigurement. Bearing a plethora of disabling, disfiguring, and humiliating symptoms, his once classically handsome face is left bearing the sore-filled, emaciated countenance of the late-stage AIDS patient (Sontag, 1989, p.85). Unable to control or take care of anything beyond the most basic functions and needs, Lestat is lowered to his basest form, and Interview revels in this humiliation; lingering shots of thinning hair and shaking hands serve to highlight the evidence of justice served, the degradation of his body a form of karmic atonement.
The vampires of the AIDS epidemic are husks of their former selves, the shine of immortality gradually losing its luster as the once-extraordinary powers of the blood saw themselves directed inwards to assault the very body that sought its nourishment; the sediment of life transformed into an agent of destruction. By entwining vampirism with stereotypes of queer predation, these films reinforce a construction of homosexuality that exists as a category, in the words of Watney (1987/1997), outside of the “correct” and “natural” uses of both the body and the social order that governs it (p. 51). As Lestat wastes away in the ruins of their old estate, reliving the peak of his vampiric glory days, Louis is returned to the same position in which he began: lost in his grief — this time mourning not only the loss of his loved ones but that of his very own humanity. The message could not be clearer: living under the sign of AIDS is a fate far crueler than death. For no one mourns the vampire but the vampire themself.
References
Auerbach, N. (1995). Our vampires, ourselves. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226056180.001.0001
Benshoff, H. (2020). The monster and the homosexual. In J.A. Weinstock (Ed.), The monster theory reader (pp. 226–240). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1997) https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvtv937f
Bigelow, K. (Director). (1987). Near Dark [Film]. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group.
Clark, I. (2022). Infectious queers: HIV/AIDS and the vampiric body in Interview with the Vampire (1994). Journal of Dracula Studies, 24(1), 28–58. https://doi.org/10.70013/n1p5h7g4
Cohen, J. J. (2020). Monster Culture (Seven Theses). In J.A. Weinstock (Ed.), The Monster Theory Reader (pp. 37–56). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1996) https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvtv937f
Craft, C. (1984). “Kiss me with those red lips”: Gender and inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Representations, 8, 107–133. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928560
Harvey, D. O. (2011). Calculating risk: Barebacking, the queer male subject, and the de/formation of identity politics. Discourse, 33(2), 156–183. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23346013
HIV.gov. (n.d.). A timeline of HIV and AIDS. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline
Jordan, N. (Director). (1994). Interview with the Vampire [Film]. Warner Brothers.
Nixon, N. (1997). When Hollywood sucks, or, hungry girls, lost boys, and vampirism in the age of Reagan. In J. Gordon & V. Hollinger (Eds.), Blood read: The vampire as metaphor in contemporary culture (pp. 115–128). University of Pennsylvania Press.
Pikula, T. (2012). Bram Stoker's Dracula and late-Victorian advertising tactics: Earnest men, virtuous ladies, and porn. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 55(3), 283–302. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/479930
Quinn T. C. (1995). The epidemiology of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in the 1990s. Emergency medicine clinics of North America, 13(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0733-8627(20)30369-2
Reagan, R. (1986, December 20). Radio Address to the Nation on Family Values [Radio broadcast transcript]. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, National Archives. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/radio-address-nation-family-values.
Sontag, S. (1989). AIDS and its metaphors. Straus and Giroux.
Scott, T. (Director). (1983). The Hunger [Film]. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Schumacher, J. (Director). (1987). The Lost Boys [Film]. Warner Brothers.
Treichler, P. A. (1987). AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification. October, 43, 31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3397564
United States Department of State (2017, September 7). The global AIDS disaster: Implications for the 1990s. Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. CIA. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/06547069 (Original work published 1991, July 1)
Watney, S. (1997). Policing desire: Pornography, AIDS and the media. A&C Black. (Original work published 1987)
Wood, R. (2020). An introduction to the American horror film. In J.A. Weinstock (Ed.), The Monster Theory Reader (pp.108–135). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979) https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvtv937f
![[in]genios](http://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/51c861c1e4b0fb70e38c0a8a/48d2f465-eaf4-4dbc-a7ce-9e75312d5b47/logo+final+%28blanco+y+rojo%29+crop.png?format=1500w)
