Gay Dracula’s Closeted Author Bram Stoker

In a letter that apologizes for itself at length, twenty-four-year-old Bram Stoker wrote to fifty-two-year-old Walt Whitman in February 1872:

• “If I were before your face I would like to shake hands with you for I feel that I would like you—I would like to call you Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first I would be ashamed for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become a second nature to him; but I know I would not be long ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man and I would like to be one myself and so I would feel towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still.—but I have no wings. If you are going to read this letter any further I should tell you that I am not prepared to “give up all else” so far as words go. The only thing I am prepared to give up is prejudice—and before I knew you I had begun to throw overboard my cargo—but it is not all gone yet.”
• “You see I have called you by your name I have been more candid with you—have said more about myself to you than I have ever said to any one before—You will not be angry with me now if you have read so far you will not laugh at me for writing thus to you. It was with no small effort that I began to write and I feel reluctant to stop, but I must not tire you any more. If you ever would care to have more you can imagine, for you have a great heart, how much pleasure it would be to me to write more to you, how sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father and brother and wife to his soul. I don’t think you will laugh Walt Whitman, nor despise me, but at all events I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me in common with my kind.”

These soulful sentiments, penned almost twenty years before Stoker started drafting Dracula, inform its most homoerotic passage, in which Dracula rages at his so-called brides regarding Jonathan Harker:

“‘How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.’”

That Stoker’s coded language in his letter arose from his reading of William Michael Rossetti’s prudishly abridged Poems of Walt Whitman is remarkable. That it gives way to free expression in his most famous work of fiction is undeniable.