JOHN ALLEN WAKEFIELD'S DEAD (OR GAY IS BEAUTIFUL)

This is not a blog about vampires. I am not in to vampires. You could exterminate all the brutes tomorrow, and I wouldn't raise a finger in protest. My friend Rick, who understands that (and — wonderfully — the name of my blog), nevertheless says: "Let's have more on vampires."

I don't want to get into the habit of taking requests, especially from itinerant rock climbers, but it just so happens that I do have a couple more things to say about the undead.

(1) A bad vampire movie taught me that being gay is not only OK, but is kind of cool. I saw "The Hunger" in 1983, when I was 16. I had not seen many gay people on film, or in real life (that I was aware of), before then, and when I did they were always depicted negatively. Go figure.
Gay was not something you wanted to be. But that changed when I saw the ungodly glamorous Catherine Deneuve seduce Susan Sarandon in "The Hunger," against a backdrop of dim, rich rooms, piano music and fresh flowers. The wonderful thing was that Deneuve's character (Miriam Blaylock) didn't think about the gender of her victims —— blood is thicker than sexuality, apparently —— but the quality of their souls. And that's how I thought things should be. I simultaneously thought Gay is Beautiful and Gay Doesn't Matter, and that was an epiphany. Susan Sarandon's question —— "Are you making a pass at me, Mrs. Blaylock?" —— is like Dustin Hoffman's rhetorical query in "The Graduate": "Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson?" It's a moment of dawning, of consciousness, of the world being bigger than you had imagined.

(2) The guy who built my house in the 19th century looks like a vampire. He bears a resemblance to Grandpa on "The Munsters." And that freaked me out when I first moved in, especially because there were bats in the house, which itself looked like the setting for a bad horror movie (as Rick once pointed out). It was easy for me to imagine the undead Col. Wakefield (right) peering up from under my bed or chilling the basement air with his frosty vampire breath. Sometimes at night I would dwell on the fact that he died here, most likely in what is now my dining room, which is a shade of green (below) that I'm sure would anger him, and I would get too scared to go to the bathroom. When I re-watched "The Hunger" shortly after moving here, I was struck by the opening music: "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus. After that, to reassure myself when the colonel started roaming my brain, I would sing myself a reminder: "John Allen Wakefield's Dead." It doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely, but it calms the nerves.