*Image taken from Yelp - I forgot to take one of my own! Too enthralled…*

Have you ever been to a joint Halloween/sex shop? Chances are, probably not - there is apparently only one in the world. That is at least what the store clerk inside of Nikki’s French Quarter Halloween Store told Ciena and me after we entered the eclectic business, intrigued by the “open 24 hours” and “adult superstore” signs placed underneath the large-lettered “Halloween.” We asked about the 24 hour sign, and the clerk, an intimidatingly cool elder goth with face tattoos and a black shroud about them, explained that “after a plague swept through the city a few years ago, I’m not sure if you heard about it, we are only open 18 hours a day.” Of course, they were referring to Covid – but how right it felt to hear it described as some medieval disaster. After chatting for a while about fright and drama and all the best things that the underbelly of this city has to offer, we learned that she was The Grand Maw, a horror drag performer named for her ripe age and her mouth that was toothless as it was full of metal, with a tongue that can lift 50 pounds. She went on, “of course, this is the only city where a store like this could survive.” She has lived in the subcultures of many cities, and said that perhaps San Francisco could sustain a horror sex store, but no, only New Orleans could keep a place like this alive. She explained that this city is the only place because of its history of haunting, aided by the blend Voodoo and Catholicism, and also of indulgence, aided by the French/Creole attitudes of openness to sex and wine and all things sensual. It makes complete sense, then, that Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire was birthed from this confluence of terror and debauchery.

It is a tale of sexuality and fear, of philosophy and humanity, exemplified by the main character and narrator Louis’ constant moral musings and visceral descriptions of desire. He speaks constantly of his “vampire eyes,” how everything is more vivid and visually tactile. In many ways, I have experienced this just being here in New Orleans – music at every street corner fills the ears while the brightly colored houses and rich greens of tropical plants feed the eyes with their fanciful delights.

A colorful and coordinated duo stroll by a band performing on the street - a combination of senses that is so befitting to New Orleans. I see through vampire’s eyes.

It is this focus on the senses, this utter sensuality, that makes New Orleans the perfect place not only for a vampire novel, but for a sexy vampire novel. A few friends from the class and I went into Faulkner House Books, and Simone asked the shopkeeper Peter what from IWTV struck him most. He thought for a moment, saying that he isn’t particularly captivated by fantasy novels like this, but then answered: Anne Rice made vampires sexy. Of course, this had been done before, but she popularized this trope. The widespread notion of the vampire was no longer just Nosferatu or Bela Lugosi, but Louis and Lestat and their woeful sex appeal. When Lestat, that erotically erratic first vampire, turns Louis, it is an ecstasy: “‘...he put his right arm around me and pulled me close to his chest. Never had I been this close to him before, and in the dim light I could see the magnificent radiance of his eye and the unnatural mask of his skin…I remember that the movement of his lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion…’” (19). It is marvelously homoerotic, and in that sense progressive for its time. However, it also plays with eroticized pedophilia, perhaps an attempt to further a sense of subversion that these other beings exist in. When talking about Claudia, the 5 year old child that Louis drinks from and Lestat turns into a vampire, Louis says: “She had a voice equal to her physical beauty, clear like a little silver bell. It was sensual. She was sensual” and later in that conversation Lestat reasserts: “’She’s our daughter’” (93). It is taboo, as well as sexuality, that is so heralded in Rice’s novel – however problematic, it affords us a view into the debauched reality of her New Orleans. All of the descriptions of the vampires include some sense of their surreal appearances, as seen with Lestat’s “unnatural mask” of skin, which Louis also maintains: “‘As you can see, my face is very white and has a smooth, highly reflective surface, rather like that of polished marble.’ ‘Yes,’ the boy nodded, and appeared flustered. ‘It’s very…beautiful, actually,’ said the boy.’” (47). It is a sense that they are not only beautiful because they are severe looking, but because of how inhuman they appear.

*A photograph I took the first time I came to New Orleans. The plastic breasts hung on every tourist shop tell me that sex doesn’t just sell in New Orleans — sex* is *New Orleans.*

This non-human, objectified beauty piqued my interest throughout the novel, but it was not until after we finished the book that I understood the idea of object-sexuality in relation to vampires. I have been highly interested in sex robots for some time now, not in an erotic fixation but in a theoretical and morbid fascination. I have followed one account on Instagram for a few months now, @km_amber, who is a “Doll Wife/Juggalette”. She is a multi-thousand dollar, hyper-realistic silicone sex doll, and her Instagram account is run by her very real human husband Vinny. On March 28, Vinny posted that Amber was “diagnosed” with an “advanced heart disease.” On May 21, 2023, at “age 28,” she was pronounced dead via Vinny’s personal Instagram account. It had been two days since I finished reading IWTV, and reading the news of her “death” I immediately thought of the failed killing of Lestat. What does it mean for an immortal non-human entity to “die,” especially when the primary physical characteristic of said being is their eternal youth and beauty? The death is not real, not lasting, but the plastic eternity is: artificiality is the only thing that lasts, and using this lens and understanding, I have come to see how New Orleans seems to champion artifice, particularly sexualized artifice, at every turn.

Ciena is writing a book that includes characters in a very specific subset of New Orleans subculture: the “real” vampires, some of whom are “sanguinarians” who engage in consensual blood drinking. Being a gothic-minded individual myself, she and I took a trip to the Vampire Boutique, a shop that sells overpriced (yet very fun) vampire wares. After perusing the boutique, we were directed to their sister business, the Vampire Café, where we drank from “blood bags” filled with a red-dyed cocktail. We sat outside, reading IWTV and chatting about our preteen emo years.

Later, we went to the Vampire conglomerate’s third location: the Vampire Speakeasy. She was told that the “real” vampires would sometimes hang around there, but when we arrived we saw the trifecta of the Vampire chain for what it was: a scheme playing to tourists’ desire for mediated gothic fun. However, I was not upset by its lack of “realness,” but instead marveled at the spectacle of it all. I imagined the magnificent Lestat coming through the door of the bar and carefully choosing a victim. I thought of the games he played with his victims. Louis describes one such scene: “There were women in the parlor…Lestat had his arm around one woman and was kissing her. She was very drunk and very beautiful…The woman on the settee with him was already teasing about his kisses, his coldness, his lack of desire for her.” (77) In the Vampire Speakeasy, among the tacky decorum, I could see Lestat laughing at the frivolity of it, at the childish desire for darkness that us mortal humans have and can never truly feel the way he feels it. He would love nothing more than to take the life of a young damsel who reveres the vampire for his sexuality, forgetting his true purpose of killing. He would watch her eyes grow sultry with desire and then wide with fear, striking just as she understands the severity of her errors. Would I be one such victim? Perhaps. As it was, I simply enjoyed the crafted artifice in this space of imagination.

But what of the “real” vampires? The sanguinarians? Are they more genuine than this tourist nightclub, or less? They fancy themselves real vampires because they choose to drink each other’s blood consensually – yet this, too, is an act of roleplaying. These levels of deception devolve into delusion; it all stems from a desire to be different from a broader society in order to find community in a truly unique subculture. Above all, it is a subculture specific to New Orleans. Anne Rice created the sexy vampire, and they became the city’s own sexy vampires. While the blood may not be of nutritional value, it is of sexual value. It is sadomasochistic, inherently related to BDSM. I am reminded of the Halloween sex store, of its multitude of bondage and fetish gear. One piece specifically stuck out in my mind: a black faux leather collar with the word “SLAVE” attached in silver letters. In any other setting, I would accept this at face value as referring to a sex slave, a common trope in fetish communities. However, the relationship in IWTV between actual enslaved people and the vampires was distressing and rather under-addressed.

Lestat sought out Louis for his wealth – a rich inheritance from his family’s sugar plantation. Lestat wanted to dress in the softest silks, sit in the most plush seats, and generally be surrounded by luxury. And he was. The book focuses so much on the opulence of the vampires’ lifestyle, but only touches upon the lives lost in order to maintain such a lifestyle. There is the obvious suffering of the vampires’ victims, but there is also the loss of blood of the enslaved in order to produce saccharine delights for the human Louis. Even before he was a vampire, he eked blood from undeserving victims in order to appease his taste for sweetness (literally, the sugar, but also a sweet life of comfort). Louis also often refers to himself as a slave of Lestat’s – again undermining the actual slavery that brought him to his current role as pseudo-slave.

This is not just an issue within the novel, however. Overt opulence has always covered up the atrocities against humanity committed at such plantations. When we visited the Whitney Plantation, we first discussed how most other plantations are used as event venues rather than museums. Weddings, proms, and other extravagant celebrations are staged at these sites of terror because they are beautiful. When these plantations were used for slavery, there was a harsh and purposeful contrast between the big house and the slave quarters. Now, however, only beauty remains in such spaces – a facade of virtue for willfully ignorant individuals to celebrate their meaningless lives on the soil fertilized by the bodies of those who were punished for being born. The Whitney refuses this glamorization and aims to educate on the horrors of the past. It has removed the furniture from the big house, stripping it down to its bare bones to dissuade visitors from being dazzled by the glitz in which the masters enjoyed their pompous existences. However, as our tour guide stated repeatedly, they have recently had to change their touring program in order to appease wider audiences. People were offended when they heard the traumas executed on this site, and so the museum has had to sanitize their tour in order to stay in business. The most meaningful and important aspect of such a tour is to hear and see and understand the misery and torment that occurred in the history of these spaces. Even the sculpture depicting the decapitated heads of the revolutionary enslaved men of the 1811 German Coast Uprising, one of the most powerful and devastating things I have ever seen, was tucked away into a far corner of the museum’s property.

*Statue honoring those executed - murdered - after the German Coast Uprising.*

While these are understandably difficult concepts to grapple with, they are absolutely essential to understand in order to grasp our current reality as much as our past. But, in these plantations as much as in IWTV, we see that when the allure of a place (The Whitney) or a person (Louis) comes from a history of others’ agony, it is only the final visual appeal of opulence that is centered. As such, I was enthralled by the book and its fancifully enticing plot, but never once did I feel true pity for Louis throughout his trials of loss and despondency: I knew that he had brought them all upon himself.

As a final note of the facade of beauty covering up a history of suffering, I refer to a seemingly unrelated yet entirely fascinating cultural history timeline. As I mentioned earlier, Ciena and I discussed our emo years during our talks of vampires. Our favorite band when we were both 13 was My Chemical Romance. The timeline goes like this: Gerard Way, the band’s frontrunner, worked at Cartoon Network in NYC, just blocks away from the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, he saw the towers fall. So distraught by this sight of tragedy, he decided to start a band and centralize suffering. But he was also theatrical, sexy, and they adopted that perfect trope that Anne Rice had popularized: the sexy vampire. So inspired and enthralled by MCR, Stephanie Meyers wrote her Twilight series in large part inspired by My Chemical Romance’s vampiric facade. Eventually, E.L. James wrote a smut fanfiction based off of Meyers’ own sexy vampire series. That fanfiction turned into the erotic romance novel series Fifty Shades of Grey. Today, sex and vampires and literature and music are so deeply intertwined, and it seems that we have Anne Rice to thank for this. Thus, it only seemed right that when Ciena and I went to a karaoke bar, we sang a song that was on Meyers’ inspiration playlist for Twilight: I’m (Not) Okay by My Chemical Romance. (INSERT VIDEO OF US SINGING) It was an homage to Rice as much as it was an homage to our own personal histories. The only incongruence, the only irony, is that I was okay. I was better than okay. Here, in this marvelous city, surrounded by spectacle and history, I had never been better.

Ciena and I singing I’m (Not) Okay by My Chemical Romance. Ironically, the pages of my IWTV book are all torn and frayed! I bought a cheap copy and it promptly unraveled.