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eternal youthfulness; and the way he spun around and posed onstage and in
publicity photographs with his cape spread out to the sides, all referenced Bella
Lugosi as Count Dracula.
Recently, Christopher Craft (1989) and Ellis Hanson (1991) have addressed
the relationship between vampirism and homoeroticism. In Dracula, the vampire’s
mouth confounds the easy distinction between the masculine and the feminine.
Thus,
luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness, but
delivering instead a piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses
what Dracula’s civilized nemesis, Van Helsing and his Crew of Light,
works so hard to separate—the gender-based categories of the penetrating
and the receptive…. Furthermore, this mouth, bespeaking the subversion
of the stable and lucid distinctions of gender, is the mouth of all vampires,
male and female.
(Craft 218)
And:
THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 149
To comprehend the vampire is to recognize that abjected space that gay
men are obliged to inhabit; that space unspeakable or unnameable, itself
defined as orifice, as a “dark continent” men dare not penetrate; that gap
bridged over or sutured together, where men cease to play dead and yet
cease to accept the normative sexual role. I am seen as the caped one, who
hovers over the dreaming body of Jonathan Harker and exclaims, “This
man belongs to me!” and “Yes, I too can love.” I dare to speak and sin and
walk abroad; and so like Lucy Westenra in her bed, Renfield in his cell,
Dracula in his castle, I inhabit the space of all vampires, caught between
our two twin redemptions: conversion and death.
(Hanson 325–326)
As unmarked transvestism, Liberace’s vampire image signaled that redemptive
space of conversion and death where dominant culture locates the homosexual. At
the same time, the vampire subverted gender distinctions.
Interestingly, it was Liberace’s subversion of gender codes and the ambiguity
of his sexuality that drew a flagrant review from the male British critic known by
the female name Cassandra, i.e. Asserter-of-Unheeded-Prophecies. About
Liberace, he/she wrote:
he is the summit of sex—Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that
He, She and It can ever want. I have spoken to sad but kindly men on this
newspaper who have met every celebrity arriving from the United States
for the past thirty years. They all say that this deadly, winking, sniggering,
snuggling, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-