Blood, Sweat & Queers Anthology

Blood, Sweat & Queers is an anthology dedicated to queer vampiric love stories.

Vampires in literature have always been an allegory for socially divergent identity. The three foundational texts of English-language vampiric literature (The Vampyre, Carmilla, and Dracula) contain varyingly obvious depictions of homoeroticism, featuring texts written by authors many historians believe to have been somewhere on the queer spectrum.

When you trace the vampire’s popularity in the United States alongside various civil rights movements, the correlation is clear. In the early 1930’s, Bela Lugosi’s depiction of Dracula allowed those disenfranchised by the Great Depression to escape, ever so briefly, into a compelling combination of extreme wealth and resolute desire. In 1976, less than a year before Anita Bryant’s "Save Our Children" crusade attempted to brand all queer people as deviants, Anne Rice ushered in a new kind of emotionally resonant vampire with Interview with the Vampire, which encouraged its readers to embrace the unknown with empathy, rather than cower in fear. By the late 1990’s, as gay rights were slowly enforced across the United States, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the personification of a Wholesome American Girl, fell in love with not one but two vampires who proved themselves, time and again, to be exemplary men with deep-seated sexual struggles. In the early 2000’s, vampire stories like Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood went positively mainstream alongside the legalization of gay marriage and the normalization of queer community within much of American society.

Now, as the queer community faces down vitriolic hate once more, it is almost guaranteed that the vampire will once again rise as a favored archetype to cope with the violence, both emotional and physical. More than ever, uplifting queer stories is of the utmost importance.

Country of Publication & Year Established

United States

Established in 2025