Vampire tales have become a real fetish on big and small screens. Will they keep their bite while celebrating tolerance in our multisexual society - Scotsman.com Living

Vampire tales have become a real fetish on big and small screens. Will they keep their bite while celebrating tolerance in our multisexual society - Scotsman.com Living

Vampire tales have become a real fetish on big and small screens. Will they keep their bite while celebrating tolerance in our multisexual societyBy Andrew Eaton
LAST weekend I went to a fetish club called Torture Garden. If this seems like an eccentric way to begin a feature about vampires, bear with me. Torture Garden began in London in 1990, and pitches itself as a night of "fantasy and transformation". Back then, the fetish scene was much more taboo than it is now, and a combination of tabloid scaremongering and overzealous policing resulted in nights being closed down.

Since then, Britain's sexual landscape has changed significantly. There is less homophobia (or, at the very least, homophobia is less socially acceptable), burlesque is everywhere, sadomasochism and fetishism are talked about more openly, and Torture Garden's Edinburgh debut did not attract any protests. Which is exactly as it should be. It was one of the friendliest, safest, most open-minded club nights I've been to.

Watching True Blood, the hit HBO vampire series that recently began on Channel 4, I keep thinking of Torture Garden. It's a show with a fascinating theme – what happens when mainstream society begins to absorb a minority it once viewed with suspicion and fear. For those not already addicted, True Blood is set in a parallel world where vampires have come out of the coffin, as it were, thanks to a synthetic drink called Tru-Blood which means they no longer need to feed on humans. After hiding from the world for centuries, they now walk openly among the living (only at night, obviously) and campaign for vampire rights in the media. They face hatred and bigotry, particularly from the religious, and much of the storyline is about the uneasy co-existence between vampires and humans.

True Blood is nuanced enough to remain ambiguous about what minority the vampires might represent. One obvious conclusion is that it's about being gay. There's a gay chef, Lafayette, who has to endure redneck ignorance just as the vampires do, and a punning road sign that says "God hates fangs". But Lafayette is also black; the series is set in the American Deep South, and there are frequent references to slavery, so it seems to be about racism too.

True Blood's main vampire, Bill Compton, wants to live an ordinary "mainstream" life. He dates a human called Sookie (X-Men's Anna Paquin, very amused that a vampire could have a name as boring as Bill) and even gives a history lecture at his local church (yes, he tells his astonished, ill-informed audience, vampires can look at crucifixes without bursting into flames).

Other vampires have no desire to conform and regard Bill as a sellout (these vampires hang out in a "vampire bar" which bears a passing resemblance to Torture Garden). The humans, meanwhile, fear the vampires but secretly envy them. The local drug dealer sells vampire blood, whose effects are a little like Viagra and LSD combined, and sex with a vampire is seen as a transgressive thrill – an image that plenty of gay people, and black people too, will find wearily familiar. Familiar, too, will be the vampires' resentment at the hypocrisy of a "mainstream" that is reluctant to accept them as they are, but happy to gawp at and exploit them.

In True Blood, though, no-one is immune to ignorance and hypocrisy. In one scene a black character, Tara, warns Sookie that vampires can hypnotise you. "Yeah, and black people are lazy and Jews have horns," Sookie scolds her, with a sarcastic and self-righteous tut. It later turns out vampires can hypnotise you.

Vampires, both scary and seductive, have long been used to symbolise all kinds of things that fascinate and frighten us simultaneously. George Romero's film Martin is really about drug addiction. Francis Ford Coppola's take on Dracula was a vampire movie for a world waking up to the reality of HIV. Numerous other films, from The Lost Boys to this year's Let The Right One In and the hugely successful Twilight, have used vampires as a metaphor for stories about adolescence. In The Lost Boys, teenage vampires run amok in a kind of nuclear family nightmare. The vampire in Let The Right One In is a fantasy protector figure for a misfit schoolboy whose life is being destroyed by bullies – a situation resolved by an act of sickening violence which the film, tellingly, doesn't judge.

Twilight, as has been widely observed, is really about teenage sexuality – and the fear of it. Kristen Stewart's small-town girl would, clearly, like to get intimate with Robert Pattinson's handsome vampire, but since his sexual urges are largely inseparable from his urge to suck all the blood from her body, their relationship must remain mostly chaste.

One obvious difference between the teenage Twilight and the more grown-up True Blood is that while the former is full of sexual tension, the latter is an orgy of actual sex. There's nudity and bondage and, in one memorable scene, an energetic romp in a car park which doesn't stop even when a jealous Tara throws rubbish all over the couple in question.

That this has all caused relatively little media hand-wringing says much about our more sexually liberated times. True Blood's plotline reminds me of a conversation I had once with Steven Thomson, director of the Glasgay! festival (currently in full swing). Thomson has worked hard, since he got the job, to make Glasgay! a broad, inclusive event. His way of doing that has been to brand it as a 'celebration of queer culture', exploring difference and transgressiveness in all its forms. If you are prepared to embrace queer culture, you are welcome, gay or straight. Torture Garden (which, it should be said, appears to draw a mostly heterosexual crowd) operates on a similar basis – you don't have to wear fetish gear or indulge in sadomasochistic play yourself, but you are welcome to come along if you respect its culture and its rules.

True Blood, too, feels like a celebration of queer culture, an exploration of what it means to be transgressive, and tolerant, in a multi-cultural, multi-sexual society. It takes the idea that vampires are really us further than I've ever seen it taken. Its popularity, I'd like to think, is a sign that we are more willing than ever to confront the monsters we create inside our heads. If everyone watches it, and gets it, it'll be another victory for liberal thinking. v

True Blood continues on Wednesday on Channel 4. The Twilight Saga: New Moon is released on 20 November