(This paper was written in early 2010. I love it madly, but decided not to try to publish it because of my own feelings on outing. Now that everyone discussed is out of the closet, I thought I'd share it. Forgive the footnotes if they're wonky!)

Blogging the Glass Closet:
Celebrity, New Media, and the Assumption of Unasserted Gay Identity

In March 2010, on the day that Ricky Martin announced that he is gay, celebrity/media blog Gawker.com ran an article entitled "10 People Who Need to Finally Come Out of the Closet."¹ The article makes light of Martin's announcement, making the assertion that his sexual identity was so well known as to be understood by the majority of the public, rendering his announcement overdue. It goes on to state that "he's not the only public figure still hiding -- unsuccessfully -- in the glass closet."² The position that Gawker asserts is that gay identity is a static truth that needs to be revealed, and that refusing to publicly acknowledge that identity in the face of the "general public"'s understanding of one's sexuality is disingenuous. "These people really need to come out because it is so painfully obvious to the world that they are gay," Gawker argues, "and if they finally announce it, we're probably going to be laughing at them." The article also discusses the reasons that these public figures owe their audiences an admission of homosexuality, citing the need for successful gay action heroes, gay journalists, and gay media moguls. Gawker simultaneously argues that the public figures are deluding themselves by not acknowledging that the public has "figured them out" and places the onus on them to perform a public duty, making the assertion of gay identity a political responsibility for these figures, most of whom are not active in the realm of politics. Gay identity in this discourse functions as an easily recognized inherent quality, a political stance, and a component of a mature and integrated persona.

This project is an attempt to synthesize a theory of the way in which new media, particularly gossip media, both reflect and construct notions of gay identity in their coverage of celebrities, and hold celebrities accountable for not conforming to the particular medium's standards of the presentation of a public identity.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that:

Foucault among other historians locates in about the nineteenth century a shift in European thought from viewing same-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital acts (acts to which, in that view, anyone might be liable who did not have their appetites in general under close control) to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of identity (so that one's personality structure might mark one as a homosexual, even, perhaps, in the absence of an genital activity at all. (Sedgwick 83)

A fundamental assumption of all the texts that are discussed in this paper is one that Sedgwick articulates, that homosexuality is what one is which can often be proven by outsiders observing what one does and how one acts. In this discourse, gay identity is real whether or not it is publicly asserted, but the lack of public assertion functions as a troubling factor, allowing the media to create a conversation on the way in which it feels it is silenced by the celebrities' refusal to articulate what the media sees as inherent and understood. Gay identity becomes the most important part of the way that the medium interacts with the public figure, with the implication that this is due to the frustration that the medium feels at the inability to categorize.

I will look at the specific ways in which this is argued in reference to three public figures primarily on three specific blogs. This discussion sometimes moves from an internet space to more mainstream media, but the freedom of the internet³ and the way in which blogs function allows for more pointed commentary than that in which traditional media can engage. First, I will look at CNN journalist Anderson Cooper's coverage on Gawker, then Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir's coverage on sports blog Deadspin.com (also owned by Gawker Media), and finally White Collar actor Matthew Bomer's coverage on gay news/media blog Queerty.com. The different venues offer different takes on the way in which they assert a gay identity for the subject, but all of them discuss homosexuality as a salient, if not the most salient, aspect of the way in which the celebrity interacts with the public and crafts his persona.

In this paper, I do not seek to make claims as to the truth of the assertions of any of the media outlets but rather to call attention to the ways in which the discussion itself can be read as function of a "colonizing" discourse, to use Judith Butler's terms (Butler 308). The ways in which homosexuality is read in these texts rely on a sense of homosexuality as something that can always be delineated and understood and have an underlying assumption that the taxonomic categorization of people into identity categories is both liberatory and desirable. Butler argues that "identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of the very oppression." She continues, "to propose that the invocation of identity is always a risk does not imply that resistance to it is always or only symptomatic of a self-inflicted homophobia" (308). In discussing how gay identity is framed in these texts, this paper's standpoint is that the resistance of the label of "gay" may have multiple personal and wider political rationales, but the personal choice to avoid a sexual identity label, as all three of these subjects do, is, I would argue, not the choice that needs to be investigated. Rather, it is the media's resistance to their refusal to identify that needs to be interrogated.

I also want to draw a distinction between the interaction of the media and public figures that I am discussing here and what is generally discussed in discourses of outing queer people for political purposes. In Queer in America, Michelangelo Signorile articulates his thought processes when deciding whether or not to out public figures:

Here were gay [media figures] faced with the most devastating crisis ever to affect their community, who rarely reported on the government's negligent response to AIDS. Of course, this helped preserve their closets... At the same time they gave space to homophobic entertainers... Doesn't that relationship imply collusion and hypocrisy, and aren't collusion and hypocrisy newsworthy? (Signorile 72).

Signorile's outing of public figures, both media and political, took place in the context of political urgency due to the AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Kirby Dick's 2009 film Outrage, which outed political figures, specifically targeted only politicians that regularly campaigned against gay rights, and detailed the anti-gay voting records of all of its subjects onscreen, although Signorile argues that "to out only for [reasons of political hypocrisy] is to make the revelation of homosexuality into a punishment" (77).
By contrast, none of the three public figures covered in this paper present themselves as heterosexual or campaign for anti-gay causes, and often align themselves with queer people or events (Anderson Cooper anchored CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast with Kathy Griffin and Lance Bass, both of whom have a connection to queerness in the public discourse⁴ ; Johnny Weir is frequently seen at gay rights fundraisers and gay-themed events⁵ .) The urgency that the media feels for them to assert a gay identity is not due to clear political harm they are causing to gay people, but rather to a sense that their ambiguity does a disservice to the community and makes people uncomfortable.

When I hit puberty, I was Jezebel. The world made it pretty clear that any black girl with big breasts must be up for anything. In high school, as I got older and fatter, I became Mammy, ready to lend a maternal ear to anyone. Then I went to college, started studying the media, and became Sapphire, perpetually angry about something. None of these things were me, but I realized that people wanted to be able to more easily categorize my existence, and they were just using the tools they had. I grew up going to predominantly white schools, watched mostly mainstream white TV, and lived in a white world. Outside of my home and church, everything I was exposed to was reductive when it came to race. And as a kid (and adult) who loved television, I became inured to the fact that I was rarely going to see anything that challenged those stereotypes.

This all changed when my brother had kids, and I realized that one of the things I wanted for them was to have no expectation that the stories they consumed would portray them as an amusing accessory for the main characters. My nieces are now twelve years old, and their environment is a lot like mine was. They never say it directly, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they want to listen to what their friends listen to, and watch what their friends watch, and still find a way to see themselves in what they’re consuming.

One of their favorite TV shows is Glee.  We have this thing where whenever we watch it, and the characters Sam and Mercedes (who are white and black, respectively) interact, I tend to say, "You know why [x happened]? Because they're in love."  We're big dorks, so they put up with me doing it.  But they're constantly talking about how it's their favorite couple on Glee, and they're more emotionally invested in it than I’ve seen them be about anything else on TV.

Here's the thing: the black girl on an average U.S. TV show rarely gets a romantic storyline. She's the best friend, and she hangs out in the background making snarky comments, and occasionally they introduce a prop boyfriend who exists to round out the couples.  So the fact that this one show, one that all my nieces’ friends watch, is making this an actual plotline is amazing.  There's a black girl in a love triangle involving two boys who think she's special and talented and worth fighting for, and that tells the audience that she is.

I know how dangerous it is to place your expectations of validation on media products, especially validation through heteronormative romantic success, which is a problematic concept in and of itself. But it’s still the primary way the media tells us that women characters are worthwhile.  I’m extremely ambivalent about this because, problematic or not, I believe that everyone deserves fantasies, and it’s a fantasy that black women are generally denied access to.  

I've noticed that in the past few years I've found myself having to explain to my girls why they never even see anyone on TV with curly hair.  They're aware that the media is telling them that they're not worthwhile and that they don't deserve fantasies starring people who look like them.  So this one storyline has been hugely important to them.  The magic box that sells them stories is actually saying, "Look, there's a big black girl and she doesn't have to look or be just like everyone else to get the same things everyone else has.  She's perfectly fine just the way she is."  And that's good for them.  Hell, that's good for me.

I want my girls to grow up watching a media landscape where people who look like them are considered both important and normal.  I want them to feel like the world actually sees and values them.  I want them to know that their stories are stories worth telling.  And being able to watch this one little storyline on a show they like is helping to communicate that to them.



My interests are mainly in the stories mainstream media sells and how we negotiate their portrayal versus our reality, but it’s extremely important to note that there are options out there that provide different voices.

The Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project is a San Francisco-based group that not only holds film festivals showcasing the work of queer women of color, but provides training to teach them how to tell their own stories.

Voices from the Gaps is a teaching resource from the University of Minnesota that provides essays and reviews of work done by women writers and artists of color. There are interviews with people like Sandra Cisneros and Zadie Smith, and a treasure trove of book reviews.

And, finally, one of my favorite blogs is The Crunk Feminist Collective, a group of writers who come out of the hip hop feminism movement and have insightful critiques on media and current events.

I am not avoiding work. But here's another link: TV Binge by Michael Newman in Flow.

I am guilty of TV bingeing. Newman discusses how serial television becomes better when you binge, because you can see the connections and the flow of the narrative better. But I think non-serialized television shows, like procedurals, also become better. Shows that I would think have no narrative continuity suddenly show themes and storylines that are impossible to follow if you watch once a week, because they are subtle.

My main example of this is Criminal Minds, which has done things like tell the story of one of the main character's drug addiction over two seasons without mentioning it explicitly until one episode in the end of the arc where we see the character at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. A lot of this is due to the acting, where the actor made subtle changes to his demeanor and the other characters reacted to those changes, also subtly, so that it is only clear upon a rewatch of the show as a binge that you even notice all the ways they communicate to the audience that something is wrong.

I've long been a fan of TV over movies, because of the possibility of telling a story over a long period of time, the ability to create character arcs that let the audience bond with the character over years, and the complexity of serialized shows that expect the audience to pay attention and keep up. (Not to mention that if you're an actress over the age of 30, television is going to have a lot more opportunities for you than movies will.) Binges show the best of TV, letting the audience understand the possibility of the medium.

Cable dramas are generally made as serials, so here are some major network shows that become better when you binge:

Dollhouse
Criminal Minds
Supernatural
ER
Veronica Mars
the first few seasons of Law and Order

Also, watch Rubicon. That's my tip for the day.

I watch a lot of buddy cop shows. Lately I've been watching NCIS:LA and Hawaii Five-0. It's interesting because they're fundamentally not buddy cop shows. Buddy cop shows involve two guys who depend on each other to the exclusion of everyone, except possibly their surly boss. There's generally a love interest of the week, who disappears quickly after her single episode storyline is over.

The difference here is that the new buddy cop shows are ensembles. It creates a weird dynamic because there's a double focus between the relationship between the two leads and the Greek chorus of the rest of the cast.

The trend of putting the two buddy cops in an ensemble mitigates the homoeroticism to a large extent, but it's still there in joking form. It's interesting because early buddy cop shows had no real mitigation of the homoeroticism, since homosexuality couldn't be spoken about, leaving open a queer option. Now the queer option is more clearly closed off, with the understanding on the audience's part that if they were gay, the show would state it. It makes me sad, because I'm always up for homoeroticism. (I guess I could just go watch The Eagle again.)

Whenever I'm sick, I watch the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand. I understand how weird that is, but the combination of love of apocalypse movies and sympathy with massive fictional influenza suffering is really comforting.

Also, the continuing appeal of Rob Lowe.

I have a whole rant about my love for Stephen King and popular fiction and it dovetails with my rant about my hatred of a lot of the lauding of literary fiction and my specific thing about Ian McEwan, but I'm sick, so it will come later.

So, a friend of mine recently mentioned that the best of all the episodes of Masters of Horror was Incident On and Off A Mountain Road, which is true. But it is not only the best of that series, it is one of the best horror movies I've seen. It plays with notions of horror vs. terror, the role of the feminine in horror movies, and the audience's expectation of what genre of movie they're watching. I just love it to death.

And it's on YouTube (behind an age filtering wall). Which is surprising to me, because YouTube is so easy to rip content from. It seems like Anchor Bay, the production company, would want to put recent material somewhere less prone to easy manipulation.

I’ve become obsessed with the PBS video archive, which I’ve had running in the background for a couple of days now. I’ve been sticking with the history and science stuff that I’m used to watching (Nova, Frontline, American Experience) but there’s so much there that I’m planning to delve into when I have the time.

I’m finding the whole idea of an online repository like this really interesting because of it’s non-commercial status. I think the fact that it can function as an actual educational repository is really fascinating. But beyond that, PBS’ position in terms of government funding has been so contentious throughout its life that I wonder if the ability to narrowcast will affect it at all. And I want to know about the copyright implications for classroom use, but that’s a whole other issue.

I also wonder how the PBS bigwigs are conceiving of this website: is it a library or is it streaming Netflix? Is there really a difference any more? Does the ability to “shop” for the videos in much the same way that one does on commercial streaming sites moves the material to more of an entertainment realm? Maybe I’m the only one who likes documentaries on the history of lobotomy or safe working conditions in obscure Georgia factories, but I think it could be interesting if PBS promoted the site as an entertainment site, especially with the impending Hulu subscription move.

The videos have been available on the websites of each of the shows for a while now, but putting everything together in a Hulu-like format encourages an interaction with the material that I hadn’t been expecting. If PBS can position itself like a for-profit network (interstitial ads, wide variety of programs) it may be easier for an audience to engage with it in the same way they do with those networks. Even with the added pleas for donations.

Throughout this semester, I kept meaning to make blog posts about my random media observations, so there will be an influx of seemingly random 500(or so)-word dissections of the stuff that has crossed my mind that I haven’t gotten around to talking about. Mostly TV, because that’s how I roll. First up, Doctor Who.

I have this obsession with immortal/long-lived characters, probably from a childhood spent bingeing on comic books and fantasy novels. I never had a time-travel fantasy as a kid, because I had an inkling that “black” and “woman” were not going to serve me well in most of the places that the characters I liked traveled to, but I still loved the concept. So Doctor Who and Highlander were go-to media products for me as a kid and teenager, and the New Doctor Who has been one of my favorite shows. Here’s the thing I find interesting in watching Doctor Who now that I didn’t as a kid: extended age, with all its attendant implications of wisdom and experience, is a white male domain. Yes, I get it, when you’re casting a UK/US show, your protagonist is a white guy. I’m not talking about the reasons for why this happens, I’m talking about the values it imparts to the show and how those casting strictures end up constructing a certain reading of those qualities.


On Highlander (the TV show), there was a character named Methos who was 5000 years old. He was a recurring character, and most of the storylines involving him used him to make a point about we poor benighted mortals and how we spent too much time on the wrong things, and how he’d lived, you see, so he could understand that our petty differences were insignificant. The casting was apparently race-blind, and they just happened to find a white guy who was the best for the part (in British Columbia. I know you’re shocked). The interesting thing here in terms of how whiteness is constructed is that it is an unmarked category. The character is placed in all kinds of situations across 5 millennia and he is always accepted without question, and rarely with a discussion of, “hey, what’s that white dude doing here?”

This works to normalize the idea of default whiteness, where of course a white man can enter any situation and not have to worry about his cultural position relative to his surroundings. The characters who occupy a different cultural position are guest stars, not POV characters, and they are not meant to be part of the fantasy role-playing for the audience. The show places the audience at the same level as the main characters (all but one of whom are white men, the last is a white woman), and says, “you could be here! If you found yourself in 9th century China as a white guy, everyone would think you were just one of the gang!” Highlander serves as just one more example of how one of the insidious parts of default whiteness in casting is that it frequently makes no sense and blinds the audience to the fact that the people who are not white are also protagonists in their own story that the current text is just not telling.

Doctor Who, which prompted this rant, is a slightly different case because there has been discussion about casting the character with a non-white actor. Oddsmakers were laying bets on Paterson Joseph before the last casting decision (and he would’ve been awesome.)


My problem with Doctor Who is not so much the default whiteness, because, at least in the new series, people talk about race! The black girl says, “oh hey, is it safe for me to be here?” like I expect I would say when transported to the past in Europe. Where the issue for me comes in is the buildup of a national mythological figure, who is presented as nearly omniscient, and is always embodied in a white male figure. And embodied in increasingly young white male figures as time goes on. It isn’t a problem with the actors. In fact, the most recent incarnation is a 26-year-old, and I find him more believable as a character his age (over 900) than previous actors. The issue is that it’s taken for granted that these characters will be believable, and the argument against a woman or a person of color among fans is frequently that they would not believe the character were it not a white man. It’s never stated directly that there’s an assumption of authority in that particular body, but it’s underlying in the outrage against other options (alongside the racism and misogyny.)

What I wonder is where I stand in terms of accepting the characters that don’t fit this paradigm. When reading about characters who aren’t white men who live long lives or are immortal, I have little problem accepting the character. But when watching these characters, I find myself thinking, “Is anyone going to treat them unfairly? Will someone call attention to their race/sex? Is it safe to be that person is that position?” The process of seeing the character makes them more embodied for me, and cuts off options for imagination. And reveals that the extent to which I’ve accepted the concept of whiteness and maleness enabling one to move in the world freely is really disturbing.

I am stupidly excited that my favorite show, Southland, got renewed by TNT, so I will have more than just thirteen episodes of excellence to revel in. I cannot explain well enough how great this show is, but here are a few highlights:
- It’s a gritty cop show that has a writing staff entirely made up of women.
- It’s one of the more feminist things I’ve seen on TV. Even with a cast made up of mostly men, it regularly passes the Bechdel test.
- Two of the main characters, the ones who get the most critical buzz and are central figures in the story, are a gay man and a black woman. And they carry guns and boss people around and have actual interior lives.
- It reflects that there are actual people of color in Los Angeles.
- This is on top of it just being a well-told story that doesn’t talk down to its audience.

But I’m not going to talk about that. I am going to make a long overdue post about the use of documentary techniques in the way the show is produced. One of the stylistic conceits is that none of the language is softened for broadcast. Rather, profanity is censored, but still easily understood. This is generally played as way to heighten the “realism” of the show, rather than prohibiting the use of language that people in the situation would not be expected to refrain from using. This remained purely an audio choice, without an analogue in the visual style, until the second episode of the second season, entitled “Butch and Sundance.”

Two of the main characters enter a crime scene where three people have been raped and murdered, and the camera follows a normal crime show style, shooting around corners to heighten suspense. This is where the style changes slightly. Normal crime shows never show the faces of the dead, shooting at angles that let the scenery or the other actors obscure the body. Southland has previously chosen to show bodies fully, sometimes lingering on faces or wounds to demonstrate the brutality of the murder. Southland chooses in this instance to show the victim fully, but blur her face, in a style reminiscent of true crime shows that follow police.



There are two things I’m interested in here. First, the mimicry of real life shows afforded by the use of blurring helps to ground the show in the vernacular of the true crime shows whose style it imitates. This, along with the bleeping of profanity and shooting on location, adds to the sense that the show is telling the inside story of what really happens.

The other effect of the images that I like is how the absence of detail increases the sense of something horrible having happened. In some scholarship on gothic novels and horror films, there’s a distinction made between horror and terror (I hate to link to Wikipedia, but it has the best rundown of the difference.) Horror is the display of scary/disturbing elements, whereas terror is the absence of the details of those elements, used to provoke the audience into feeling dread and anticipation. Most slasher films are horror, and something like “The Haunting of Hill House” is terror.

This isn’t quite the same as what’s happening with the choice to obscure the face, but it serves much of the same purpose, because it functions in a way that makes the audience imagine the terrible thing that has happened to the woman, rather than seeing it and being revulsed. In doing so, while still maintaining the style of true crime shows, the show manages to simultaneously preserve its realistic style and increase the drama and emotional reaction to the images.

video essay from Cristen B on Vimeo.

In trying to figure out how to approach doing a video essay, I found myself drawn to Shooting Down Pictures. The videos there, text analysis that acknowledged that the video itself is a text to be manipulated and referenced, used a style I found very approachable. My biggest problem in creating the essay was finding a subject with which I could actually work.

What I discovered was that my normal standards for subjects to do academic work on apparently apply in this new medium as well: something I love enough to know it well, and know well enough to see its problems. I chose Glee because, despite what I argue in the essay, I think it does a better job than most media (and high art) at showing that the world is not made up of straight, white, able-bodied, Christian people. I expected to find what I did find, that the show shortchanges many of its characters, but I also found that it does it in a consistent patterned way, which I doubt I would have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for visual cues. I had no idea the show had such a consistent style until I picked up patterns and realized that scenes were blocked in certain ways to communicate certain things across episodes, and that the breaks from that style meant the show was saying something different.

For example, I had not realized until I began pulling together clips across episodes that the show uses its minority characters as a Greek chorus to comment on the lives of the main characters, and only when separating those characters off by themselves does it allow them to comment on their own lives. The style changes, putting certain characters in different positions in the group, and having consistent choreography to communicate relationships, and I would not have noticed that without having to look for patterns. I actually felt hampered by the time constraints, because there was so much footage and it was hard to make a general argument about the show within a short amount of time. I wish I had another ten minutes to cover just the leitmotifs in choreography, because that’s something that can only be communicated visually.

The ability to use video to communicate my argument was also useful in studying this particular text because it is as much musical as it is visual, and I’m not sure that the text can be fully understood without being able to both see and hear it.

This weekend I’ve been watching all the episodes of The CW’s The Vampire Diaries. Hey, I’m stuck in bed with a cold and I ran out of episodes of Criminal Minds. There were a lot of things that struck me: that you apparently no longer need a Very Special Episode to show teenagers smoking, drinking, and having casual sex; the heroine who asks questions and fights back; that the show has decided that its seat of female power will be light-skinned black women; and the only barely subtextual incestuous vibe between the two male leads (really, I had no idea the titillation bar was set that high.)

But what really stuck out to me was that the show doesn’t function like Dawson’s Creek (Life Unexpected, also on The CW, is DC+10 years), and it doesn’t function like The OC or Gossip Girl. It functions like a Harlequin novel from 1975. And so does Twilight. And (sacrilege!) so did Buffy, on a couple of levels.

Quick rundown of the show: Two brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore, are vampires. In the 1860s, they loved the same woman. Currently Stefan has enrolled in high school because he’s found Elena, a teenager who looks just like the woman they lost. Hijinks ensue.

So, in the 80s, around the time that Janice Radway published Reading the Romance, there were about six books published telling us that romance novels were demeaning to women and portraying abusive heroes, and we were all going to hell in a handbasket. Obviously, I kind of disagree, if only because I think it can be dangerous to police fantasy spaces, especially women’s fantasy spaces. But what the arguments did articulate was a sense of what kind of narrative was being told in mainstream romance publishing at the time: the strong, brooding hero with a past and the heroine who needs to be rescued from her miserable life. It was a formula that had been working since about 1912. The problem with looking at those theories now is that romance novels don’t do that anymore. If you pick up your average Harlequin today, the hero and heroine probably have the same job, have similar goals, and no one needs to be rescued. So that fantasy had to go someplace. And I think one of the places it went was teenage vampire romances.

I’m sure I’m not saying anything new here. There are probably lots of arguments, mostly around Twilight, about the way in which these stories replicate the kind of stories we don’t explicitly tell anymore. But what I find interesting is why they’re sold to teenagers in this context when they’re no longer sold to adults in the same manner. The two main reasons I can come up with are that the stories depend upon two conceits: 1) that boys are an unknowable species, and 2) that it’s okay to play the damsel in distress because the story demands it. The first reason, and the key to the teen aspect as far as I can see, is the concept of boys as an entirely different species. These stories are aimed at teenage girls (and consumed by women of many different ages, but that’s a different post.) There’s an implication running throughout them that boys are strange and complicated, and if only he would just explain what he was doing in Venice in 1923 with the witch’s crystal then you could live happily ever after. The anxiety of not knowing why men do what they do, and the assumption that they do different things than women, is part of the ideology of the story.

The second is built into the narrative. The stories give the heroines (and the female viewers) the option of playacting weakness because of the strength of the heroes. In presenting the heroine with a hero who is supernaturally older and more powerful, it removes any need to be the decision-maker. The heroine can get away with dressing up in a petticoat and lounging on a fainting couch, because her boyfriend is two hundred years old. In Romance and the Erotics of Property, Jan Cohn discusses how, in Gothic novels, “the locus of dangerous male power is the villain. In the course of its development, the romance has taken that power, all that sexual and economic energy, and bestowed it on the hero. (Cohn 50)” By presenting a hero who is rich, old, and has to fight to keep himself from killing the heroine for her blood, the modern vampire story does that, too. The heroine has little power to resist, and so can’t be blamed if she doesn’t. There were many theorists sympathetic to romance novels who argued that the heroine conquered the hero with her submission to him, a notion that may not fly with grown women nowadays. It seems to be a story that can now only be widely accepted with a teenage heroine, possibly because of the heightened power differential.

I don’t know if I’m okay with this. I mean, I read Christopher Pike young adult horror novels from the age of nine, and in every one of those someone had sex shortly before being butchered. And then there was V.C. Andrews. It’s not like titillating material for teens is something new. But the trend of this kind of story is making me wonder what buttons it’s pushing for people. Twilight, both books and movies, broke records. The Vampire Diaries is The CW’s best performing show. Clearly the story is working on some level.