Please consider donating to

the Transgender Law Center here

I saw it Count-less times as a child on fuzzy VHS, before adulthood brought so many things into new and terrifyingly high-resolution focus; it is part of my DNA. If it had been overtly queer they might have said it groomed me, and though it wasn’t, maybe they would still say it was subliminal propaganda.

Of course, I mean that 1987 horror-comedy (though I always saw it more as horror-adventure), My Best Friend Is a Vampire, hereafter MBFIAV. Sure, it was scooped somewhat by Jim Carrey in Once Bitten (1985), but he didn’t bring an ounce of the heart that Robert Sean Leonard brings to bear as Jeremy Capello.

The rest of the charming cast features a surprise appearance by an affable and nurturing Kathy Bates, before her iconic turn as Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990) would hobble her with an entirely different on-screen reputation; that little-known, perennial favorite, a less comically-named Peter O’Toole, David Warner, who we sadly lost in 2022; and Rene Auberjonois (lost in 2019), just 7 years from cementing his own legacy as the indomitable Odo on Deep Space Nine (my other car is a Galaxy-class starship). Plus, Fannie Flagg, portraying Jeremy’s mother, actually wrote the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

The appearance of these queer and queer-adjacent camp legends help set a particular tone for the movie, but let’s talk about substance.

Sometimes a queer reading of a film seems superficial, like a candy coating that makes the delectable center even more appetizing; and sometimes it feels desperate and forced, like grasping at straws that can’t support the weight of your argument. Now and then, there are innumerable subconscious relationships to a work that compel us to identify with it, and the more I investigated my unconditional love of this movie, the more I uncovered the wealth of queer connections that made it feel like it was a personal call to me. As if that cheap black cassette tape in a clamshell case was a letter in an envelope privately addressed to me to say ‘someone out here in the wild yonder sees you, and it’s okay, just hang on.’

Often we make a queer reading in order to own the message of the narrative for ourselves, so it can apply to us as much as it does our straight counterparts, and often it is a stretch: many behaviors and story elements could be interpreted as easily in a heteronormative way, and were probably never intended with any deeper meaning by the filmmakers. Yet other stories are later revealed to have been purposefully and subversively allegorical. But MBFIAV features scenes that openly address queerness—teenage queerness, no less—with a notable lack of judgment and the promise of inevitable, dare I say logical, acceptance. Somehow this movie was released in 1987?? This seemed profound and miraculous to me as a young boy.

Context and Subtext

The 80s was a great time for queering culture, but an abysmal time to actually be gay. Much of our freedom had been lost, traded for pain and shame so powerful that our community is still trying to shake it off all these decades later. The rise of the evangelical right and the militarization of morality demonized us socially but also resulted in an ignorance of the AIDS crisis that killed thousands and nearly wiped out a generation of our community, setting us back politically and culturally. Though it isn’t the only path of infection, the panic of ignorance created a specific fear of blood. Bad blood. But this is a vampire movie, and vampires live on human blood, don’t they? In this allegory, pig’s blood is Jeremy’s prophylactic against the self-destructive consequences of giving into his new desires with reckless zeal. Sound familiar? If only it had been sheep’s blood, the analogy would be complete (lambskin condoms).

A common trope in the 80s and 90s, the nerd’s best friend somehow is a beefy blowhard, even a bit of a bully. It’s an unusual pairing common in popcorn fluff, an “unlikely animal friendship” of the pre-internet era. Ralph, the blowhard, is willing to stand up for Jeremy, to protect him, even while not fully understanding him. He also deals with the “guilt by association” that some of us lose straight friends to in adolescence.

Jeremy, the nerd, is old enough and close enough with his lewd best friend to understand the changes that adolescence has had on the average teen, but he’s undergoing a different set of changes that are difficult for others to understand, such as an aversion to common things almost universally beloved (garlic in your pizza, sunlight on your face) and an attraction to deviant behavior (the compulsion to bite others, finding pleasure in pain).

Sex and Gender

Unlike his lecherous friend though, Jeremy is still a virgin and has an uneasy relationship with the opposite sex. Even though the best-looking girl in school is interested in him, he only has eyes for boyish Darla Blake. I was once asked out by one of the most popular girls too, in middle school, and I turned her down much to the extreme confusion of everyone around me (all the Ralphs especially). All these years later, I’m not sure if her invitation was genuine or part of some inadequately planned prank that never came off. My last girlfriend was in the 7th grade, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for me to say yes. Being more popular than me, however, I worried she might have more experience with dating, and therefore more expectations of me that I knew I could not deliver on. Additionally, dating her would’ve increased my exposure to the echelon of kids whose scrutiny I was specifically trying to avoid.

No, the subject of Jeremy’s fantasies is Darla, who wears her hair short and dresses like Duckie from Pretty in Pink (1986). In my mind, she’s just a few years from comprehending her transgenderism, and perhaps Jeremy realizing his attraction to boys in parallel. And much like all the boys I had crushes on, if my interest even ever dawned on them, instead of being intrigued by this cute nerd who prefers her to the popular girl, Darla is initially very turned off, dismissive, and almost finds it unnatural that he should be so interested in her. I dreamed for years that perhaps the boy of my fantasies might initially react in the same way, but then slowly warm to the idea of accepting my ugly, inappropriate love.

In fact, the film begins with a dream sequence, a literal manifestation of Jeremy’s fear that giving into his desires might lead to emasculation. I went through a phase where I believed my attraction to boys meant that I wasn’t really a man, and I used to have recurring dreams about my own penis being cut off, usually by my own hand.

Jeremy, like many gay boys—at least before the advent of the internet—begins his sexual discovery via heteronormative avenues. As a kid, the overt sexuality of women in film was what first awakened my understanding of sensuality, and I began mirroring their behavior as the role I thought I’d eventually play in my own relationships. The porn I discovered at the time was entirely straight too, but with eye-opening guests of honor in the shape of shapely men.

Similarly, Jeremy’s first sexual experience, though interrupted, is with Nora, the exotic lady of the manor. But from my view, shaggy-headed and cross-legged on my parent’s shag carpet, Nora looks at Jeremy as though she sees into his soul, to who he really is inside. More profound than just a sexual overture, she “seduces” him to join her world where he would better belong.

Support Systems

Surprisingly, Jeremy has a lot of support in his life beyond his uncharacteristically protective friend Ralph.

First, he has Modoc: Modoc gives us the most explicit representation of a gay man in the film, plus the classic queer dynamic of an older man showing the younger the ropes. His license plate reads “NITEMAN” and always felt like a sly nod to the way so many queer people, including myself, have a lifelong love of the night: the shadows that felt like they protected us from dangerous visibility, even as we also hid in them; the unknown possibilities, in contrast to the restrictions we may have felt in the stark daylight. Of course, Modoc also gives us a transparent lecture on persecution, drawing parallels between vampires and other minorities.

Perhaps most surprising are Jeremy’s incredibly well-adjusted parents, who struggle privately until they come to terms with their son’s differences, instead of having a knee-jerk reaction that shames and vilifies him and drives a wedge between them (or a stake in his heart, if you will).

In the 1950s, there were a couple of films with titles so dramatically confessional that the titles themselves spawned countless parodies over the decades: I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. These movies were about someone’s personal struggle, alone, as a monster: despised, ostracized, hunted, tortured by experimentation. In the 1980s, however, we had a string of titles like My Stepmother is an Alien, My Mom’s a Werewolf, and, of course, My Best Friend is a Vampire. These comedies instead posed the question ‘what if someone you cared about was different.’ The distinction as seen in MBFIAV is that Jeremy doesn’t need to be cured. His parents and friends not only accept his presumed homosexuality, but his factual vampirism as well.

This is all in stark contrast to the fearfulness and superstition of the vampire hunters: misguided, misinformed, meant to be ridiculed and pitied. In the end, our “Van Helsing,” McCarthy (as in Joseph McCarthy and The Lavender Scare), is defeated not by death but by conversion into the club, and takes quite readily to the new sense of freedom, highlighting that homophobia is often overcompensation for one’s own “unnatural” desires. It is difficult to hate people when you actually know and understand them. Unlike Fright Night (1985), in this movie no one has to die, including the bad guy—even Nora somehow miraculously survives the inciting fire from the beginning.

Let’s put a stake in this…

As a dark queer, often feeling othered even within a community of Others, I cannot write about this movie and not mention Amelia Kinkade in an indescribably impressionable yet wordless appearance as a dancer in a punk bar. She would later bring the same alluring wild abandon to her role as Angela in Night of the Demons (1988), also to great effect on my searching queer mind. She epitomized the Power of the Other, a power I wanted so badly. Every time I wear eyeliner, I’m channeling her.

If the preceding isn’t enough to arouse in you an appreciation for My Best Friend Is a Vampire, I leave you with this: the vampire hunter’s assistant is named Grimsdyke. No doubt meant to elicit the image of holding back the deluge of grim beasts in the night, like a dam or dyke, but come on... This would be a great nickname for a dour lesbian, and we’ve all known one.

Some of my best friends in fact...